“I’m unarmed!” he yelled, his voice cracking.
“Hands on your head!”
His fingers hadn’t even grazed his hair before two officers were upon him, each with an arm in their grip. They brought his wrists together behind his back and slapped a pair of handcuffs over them.
With a gentle, yet firm pull, they heaved Karl onto his feet and began patting him down. One of them signaled to the other officers, who watched from the vehicles on the curb.
“I’m not one of them,” he told the cop on his right. “I’m not one of the shooters.”
There was no response. Instead, he was brought over to the foremost SWAT vehicle. Just behind the driver’s door, which was wide open, stood a middle-aged man with deep creases on his cheeks that dominated the face beneath the helmet.
“Hostage?” he asked one of the officers leading Karl.
He replied with a nod.
The older man turned to Karl. “We’re just taking you into custody for your own safety,” he said.
Then he turned to the other officer, the one on Karl’s left.
“Put him in one of the vans until the scene is clear.”
“Yes, sir.”
Karl couldn’t help but notice that they’d left him in handcuffs. Maynard kept telling him that it was just a precaution, and no one could be too careful in a crisis like this, but the psychologist was dubious. Something felt wrong. More wrong than it already was, that is.
In all the movies he had ever seen, a hostage who had just been released was always shown drinking coffee or hot cocoa or something while sitting in the open door of a police van with some generic beige blanket thrown over his or her shoulders. It wasn’t like that at all, he realized. He was cuffed in a locked vehicle, throat dry and spine aching.
Maynard did his best to calm Karl down, but the I.I.’s dark witticism only added to the man’s stress. He bowed his head and let his palms envelope his eyes. A strong urge to cry overtook him, but he couldn’t. Even whimpering felt impossible.
When he looked up, he could see movement outside the window. A handful of officers were leading two hostages. About a minute later, another hostage followed. One of them was a little bloodied behind the ear, their clothes torn and askew. It looked like they had crawled through Hell itself in order to escape.
They were talking with disoriented expressions on their numb faces. Karl couldn’t make out anything from the movement of their lips, but they were pointing back at the lab with frantic energy. Perhaps they were warning of more survivors. Maybe they were worried about something they’d left behind. Who knew where the mind went to after an ordeal like this?
There’s so few of them, Karl thought with melancholy.
“There’s bound to be more,” Maynard said. “They can’t reasonably herd them all out at once, can they?”
What if there are no more? Karl said. What if they’re the only survivors?
“You can’t think like that. Not now.”
What other way is there to think?
“Be hopeful.”
Hopeful? Hopeful of what? That one person died instead of two? That five people died instead of a hundred? Seems like a pretty grim result to celebrate.
“We don’t know what the outcome is yet,” Maynard said.
Well, we sure as shit know some people aren’t going home today, Karl thought, his consciousness festering. There are kids without parents now—husbands without wives. What kind of monster could do something like this?
“It’s just like you said,” Maynard replied. “A monster.”
Karl kept his eyes trained on the front of the building, staring with such focus at the glass double-door that marked the entrance that his eyes started to water and itch. His face lightened when he noticed more movement, but this didn’t come from the lab.
Four armed officers stepped out from the other adjacent van and started making their way to where Karl waited. He looked around for any survivors being escorted, or gunmen in handcuffs, but it was just the officers. Their guns were drawn and held in a ready pose as they approached Karl’s van.
Sweat started to build up around the psychologist’s hairline. He knew something bad was going to happen, but he couldn’t imagine what it was.
The cops stopped just about two meters short of the vehicle. The barrels of their firearms pointed toward Karl like accusatory fingers. A lone man broke from the group and stepped up to the van’s passenger door. Karl could see it was the sergeant from before.
The scientist gave a little jump when the door was popped open. He could feel the perspiration coating his face. A handgun was held ready in the older officer’s hand.
“Dr. Karl Terrace, I am informing you at this time that you are now under arrest on suspicion of aiding terrorism,” the sergeant said. “Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law.”
Karl went to speak, but the air had been sucked from his lungs like he’d been slugged in the kidney. It took him a couple tries just to catch the air he needed to push the words out his mouth. When he finally managed, the sounds were weak and almost indistinguishable from the breeze around them.
“What for?” he asked. “What am I accused of doing?”
“According to the evidence at my disposal, including eyewitness accounts, you’re the guy who let them in. You’re being charged as an accomplice to the gunmen,” the sergeant explained.
Then he slammed the van door shut.
Judgement
It wasn’t like Karl was looking forward to the company he’d share in jail while awaiting his trial, but he found himself particularly upset that they put him away in a cell of his own, far from all the other ne’er-do-wells. Every now and then, when someone entered the block, or a call was made down to the holding cell, he could hear the others whoop and holler. He wondered if they even knew he was there.
As the accused accomplice of a terrorist organization, he was to be kept from
