The noise is deafening and the recoil of the gun thrusts Issie back against the counter. Grabbing her by the waist, I make sure she doesn’t fall over.
“I mean it. Next one is in your head, psycho pixie guy!” she yells.
“Just do it!” Austin’s reaching for her. “Give me the gun, I’ll do it. Issie!”
But she hesitates, and as she does Frank stands up, wipes off the front of his long leather coat. The bullet didn’t hit him, at least not anywhere critical. He says, “The clock is ticking. Time is running out. Tick. Tock. Tick.”
“What?” Astley starts for him again but he leaps out the now-broken window and rushes off.
I stare at the door blankly. “I should chase him.”
“No.” Astley shakes his head. “He was just toying with us. They do that. Try to make us afraid. It makes the death better.”
“N-nice,” Austin says. “Oh crap. I better go erase the video. We have a video camera up there.”
He points to a blinking red light on the ceiling and leaps over the counter, rushing off to the back wall and a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, yelling at us to watch the register.
Issie plops the gun on the counter.
“Where did you get that?” I ask. “And awesome job, by the way.”
“My mom. She bought it off some guy behind the library.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
We stand there for a second. I try to let everything that happened sink in. Some woman with mall hair comes to the door, peeks in, and backs right back out. Astley has grabbed a broom and is sweeping at the glass and gummies on the floor.
“That’s kind of sexy, man doing domestic duties,” Issie whispers. She turns and looks at me full-on. “I can’t believe I fired a gun!”
“I can’t believe you had a gun and didn’t tell me.”
“I know! My mom made me promise not to tell anyone. It’s completely illegal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Plus, she’s made me bring it to school.”
Grabbing a dust pan so Astley can sweep the glass into it, I throw her a look, and she lifts her hands into the air in mock surrender. “I know! I know! I still should have told you, but did I or did I not rock back there? I missed his head, though. I was aiming for his head.”
Astley has this terrified look on his face. “Have you ever shot a gun before?”
“No.” Issie starts picking up fallen cans. “But I remembered how to get the safety off and everything. Go me.”
The door slams open again and we all stop midcleanup, but it’s just Nick, albeit Nick looking frantic and energized. He’s so focused he doesn’t even ask what we’re doing and we’re all so stunned we don’t even ask how he found us.
“I saw the truck outside. I’ve been monitoring the police dispatches on my laptop,” he says. “There’s been another tiger sighting outside some woman’s house on Elm Street by the river. I guess it happened last night. The state police came.”
My stomach pits into something hard and I dump the glass from the dustpan into a trash can behind the counter, beneath the lottery tickets. “Did they find her?”
“No.”
I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I hand Issie the dustpan for a second so I can fix my coat and I explain that to him. “It’s like if they find her we know she’s safe and out of the woods, but then you know—”
“They might put her down because she’s an animal.” He grimaces.
“Exactly.” I shudder. “We should go look near there. I’ll check the river through town. I’ll start at the harbor park where the boats get put in and work up to the library and the jail. Can you go up past the dam? In the more wooded areas?”
He nods. “Of course.”
Austin tells him what happened as I check with Astley and Issie that this is an okay plan, which it is, and Astley will come look too as soon as he’s cleaned up and gets gun-toting Issie home. Nick and I actually walk out together and he tells me that Cassidy and Dev are running a training again early this evening. Two in one day may seem like a lot, but it’s essential.
“It’s nice to be on the same team,” I blurt when we get to Gram’s truck.
He nods and does this little half-smile thing. “Yeah. I figure there are bigger things going on here than our romantic issues and, um, my ego.”
“And my ego.”
“More my ego.” He laughs. He runs a hand through his perpetually messed-up hair.
“I think so too,” I quickly correct myself. “I think we need to focus on saving the world, getting things safe, you know?”
“I know.” He looks around.
“But maybe after this, maybe we can figure things out again. Make it so you can talk to me?” I hate how my voice lifts up at the end of that. I sound so weak.
“Maybe. Yeah.” He shakes his head. “But we are talking now, Zara.”
“Oh. True.” But it isn’t the same. I wave good-bye and then I open up the door, turn on the truck, and drive away.
I drive past the Y, and the tow-truck place where the guy puts anti-government stuff on his signs, the old school that’s now a daycare center, and the lawyers’ offices. I look for pixies and a tiger grandmother the entire time. It’s late in the day. We aren’t as active in the daytime because, like most predators, we like night. Still, I look for them and her, for signs of the apocalypse. And the signs are hard to see. You could fool yourself into thinking this is just any regular smallish Maine town in the winter. Houses line up in spaced-out rows along the three main streets. Sidewalks are shoveled or plowed. It looks so normal. Cold but normal.
Slush kicks up beneath my tires. The wipers slowly move back and forth across my windshield, pushing the snowflakes off the truck and back into the air, free for another second before they fall to the ground.
I stop at the red light, watch an oil truck slide through the intersection, think about my grandmother out there attacking pixies, out of her head with grief because of Mrs. Nix’s death. The tip said that they saw her by the river, and they weren’t wrong. As I drive into the harbor parking lot, she comes into view, prowling back and forth in a straight line by the metal docks. One lobsterman in a heavy gray coat and hat is stalled out in a dinghy that floats halfway between the land and a lobster boat. The little white boat bobs as he frantically tries to restart the outboard engine. The poor man probably thinks he’s had so much coffee brandy that he’s hallucinating a tiger.