AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It wasn’t my fault. She should have listened to me. She should have—she should have deleted that video as soon as I told her. She shouldn’t have been such a bitch. She was such a bitch!”
“Excuse me,” the mom said, “some of us are trying to work—”
“You need to calm down—” Auggie said at the same time.
Ambyr drew a knife from the purse. For a moment, Auggie struggled with the ridiculousness of it, the improbability. It was a big chef’s knife, maybe twelve inches, and the way she drew it out of the tiny purse made him think of a magic trick. He felt something rising inside him like a laugh. And then Ambyr slashed the air, and Auggie leaned back. The mom screamed. And Ambyr grabbed the baby carrier.
The movement must have jolted the infant awake because she—in a moment of engrained sexism, Auggie decided based on the baby’s pink onesie—began to wail.
The mom screamed and lunged at Ambyr. Ambyr gave another chopping blow with the chef’s knife, and the mom fell back. She screamed again, and this time there were words: “My baby!”
“Stay away from me!” Ambyr shouted, waving the knife at Auggie. Then she pointed the blade at the baby carrier. “Everyone stay away from me.”
Auggie held up his hands as he stood. His movements felt agonizing slow. He played this game with Lana sometimes called slow-motion, and it was exactly what it sounded like. They played it sometimes until Lana was giggling so hard she fell over; Theo usually had to leave the room halfway through because, of course, they always did it when he was trying to work. All of that flashed through his mind, and that weird not-laugh surged up inside him again, and he realized he was tasting the edge of terror.
“Everybody stay back,” Ambyr said, the point of the knife drifting back toward the infant. “Everybody stay where they are!”
In the background, something poppy and saccharine continued to play, but otherwise the restaurant had gone silent.
“This is a mistake,” Auggie said. “You’re making things worse for yourself.”
“My baby,” the mom said, still trying to push herself up. It seemed to be impossibly difficult for her, and Auggie knew what that felt like: when shock and fear turned you into a prisoner inside your own body. “Please. My baby.”
“Stay back!” Ambyr shouted again.
With another wary glance, she started to move backwards. No one else seemed to know what to do. An old man was trembling so hard that his tray, complete with two bowls of soup, looked like it was about to fall out of his hands. A middle-aged woman in a power suit with albatross-winged shoulder pads had her hand halfway inside a trash can, like she’d been paralyzed in the midst of throwing something away. Under one of the tables, a little boy was crying, his sobs cranking higher and higher with each second.
Auggie gave Ambyr a full beat, and then he started moving after her. “Ambyr, put the baby down. All you have to do is put the carrier down, turn, and run out that door, and nobody’s going to come after you.”
“You’re going to come after me! You said everybody was going to come after me! Well—well, fine! Come on!”
“Please don’t do this. You don’t want to do this.”
“Why couldn’t she just delete those videos? Why doesn’t anything ever work out for me?”
The last words pitched into a scream. Maybe she thought Auggie had come too close because the knife slashed out at him again—the blow erratic, verging on uncoordinated. Then she lurched back again, her chest heaving, toward one of the single-wide exit doors.
Auggie kept going. He couldn’t hear the poppy background music anymore. Something rushed in his ears. Something huge. Much, much bigger than he was.
“Stay back!” Ambyr said with another of those wild slashes. She bumped the door, still moving backwards, and forced it open. “If you follow me outside, I’m going to cut her up!”
Behind Auggie, a woman moaned, “No!”
Auggie held up his hands to show he wasn’t following. Ambyr stumbled through the door, pausing half a second because it fell shut behind her and caught on the baby carrier. Then she got it open once more and yanked the carrier free. The infant was still wailing, and maybe that was why Ambyr glanced down, some final, automatic reaction to a baby’s sound of distress. That was why she didn’t see the blow coming.
Theo must have been pressed to the side of the building, waiting for a clear shot, because as soon as the door began to close again, he kicked Ambyr hard enough to send her stumbling. She cried out, the sound muffled by the glass, glanced around. A Ford F-150 was trying to turn into a parking spot; the driver must not have noticed the fight between Theo and Ambyr. Ambyr turned toward the incoming vehicle and threw the baby carrier directly in front of it.
Theo dove toward the baby.
Ambyr ran.
Auggie shouldered open the door and ran after her.
A horn blared. Theo shouted. The baby was screaming. The Ford’s engine rumbled. The choking, humid heat of midday closed around Auggie, and on top of that, the heat pouring off the big truck felt like a hammer. He had a momentary impression of Theo crabbing backwards, on hands and knees as he hauled the baby carrier away from the truck, but the horn blatted again, and it didn’t seem to be rolling forward anymore. Then Auggie locked his gaze on Ambyr, who was tearing off down the parking lot, and put on the gas.
He was young. He was fit. He was wearing shoes designed for running—ok, designed for looking dope, but still, technically running shoes. And Ambyr was trying to sprint in four-inch heels. He was less than ten feet behind her by the time she stopped at a beat-up Impala.
Somehow, even though he didn’t feel like he had any breath in his lungs, he managed, “Ambyr, stop!”
