The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes. Anthony Sadler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ letting light in through the cracks and seams in the metal.

      Alek is back—where did Alek go? He disappeared with the machine gun, but he’s back now, collecting ammunition and putting weapons in a bag.

      Did that all really just happen?

      Alek tried to kill a man. While Spencer was trying to choke him. Alek held the machine gun right up to the terrorist’s temple so that the bullet would have opened his head up and passed right into Spencer. Anthony had been trying to help subdue the terrorist when one of his friends almost killed the other. But the gun didn’t go off. Anthony doesn’t know why.

      NO ONE WILL BELIEVE IT. Anthony’s not sure he believes it. It doesn’t feel real; it feels like he slipped into a video game character, his own thoughts not wholly relevant here, as if he were mostly a spectator of even his own actions. It is so quiet, and so calm, it is not yet possible to comprehend the fact that his life has just changed forever.

      He takes out his phone and begins filming. He needs proof. For his friends; for himself.

      He is not thinking about evidence. What he’s doing doesn’t feel like thinking at all really, it’s more like reacting.

      He’d been reacting a moment ago when they were all tying the terrorist up and he heard a noise behind him. A groan? He turned, registered three distinct things all at once—a man in a soaked shirt, blood geysering across the aisle, and the man’s eyes moving toward the ceiling as if something important had gotten stuck up there.

      Then the neck slackened, the chin collapsed into the chest, and the man rotated forward out of the seat.

      Anthony watched it in high resolution and perfect detail, as if he were able to slow down motion just by observing it. He had a superpower.

      Then this: a pool of blood crept from under the man toward the chairs.

      Look at the blood. It was bright and pulsing, and a lesson from his human anatomy class bubbled up and presented itself to Anthony—bright because it’s oxygenated, so that’s arterial blood—blood meant for the man’s brain was seeping into the carpet instead, which meant he was even worse off than he looked.

      Anthony took off running. He crashed through the train door into the first car and yelled. Too loud? His body was charged through with a new force he couldn’t wholly control. “Do any of you speak English?”

      “Me,” “I do,” “Yes,” ten people responded, a dozen, all different accents.

      “Do any of you have a towel?”

      Silence, confusion. Fuck you guys, at the same moment he decided a towel wasn’t enough anyway. Back to the train car, back to Spencer on the ground, Spencer still tightening knots, and telling him there was a man bleeding out right behind him. Spencer wiped the blood from his face, crawled over to Mark, took off his shirt to use as a bandage. “I’m just gonna—I’ll just try to plug the hole.” Spencer reached forward to Mark’s neck, and just like that, the bleeding stopped.

      Spencer hasn’t moved since. Anthony stands above him, standing guard, looking down as Spencer remains unmoving, on his hands and knees, shirtless, bloodied, fingers in a man’s neck, the image so absurd it’s almost humorous.

      When did that all happen? A minute ago? An hour?

      Anthony isn’t forming memories properly. His sense of time is distorted; the hardware in his brain that makes memory has been co-opted to dump so much adrenaline that his digestive tract has shut down; he won’t sleep for four days, and his sense of time has become plastic.

      And where’s Alek?

      To Anthony, his friend Alek seems only partially present; here, gone, back, no longer a whole person, just wisps and flashes across Anthony’s vision. He’s there cutting open Mark’s shirt, then gone. Walking away with the machine gun, then back. Alek is like a person in an old tintype photograph who fled midway through exposure, leaving behind just a blurred, ghostly residue on Anthony’s memory.

      That’s another reason none of this feels real: none of it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that it’s so calm on board.

      It doesn’t make sense that Alek keeps disappearing.

      Mostly, it doesn’t make sense that Spencer got out of his seat so fast it was like he charged the terrorist before the terrorist even showed up.

      Anthony has to ask Spencer about that. He feels it as an urgent, corporeal need. Spencer, how did you know? But Spencer is busy talking to Mark, the man with the bullet wound, who’s started groaning again.

      “I’m sorry, bud,” Spencer says. “If I move, you die.”

      Mark doesn’t seem concerned with the hole in his neck. The woman next to him—his wife, Anthony assumes—is getting more agitated; she thinks Mark might have another problem, maybe he was shot twice, or there’s an exit wound. Alek finally decides to accommodate her.

      Alek is here again.

      Alek takes the scissors from the first-aid kit Anthony didn’t realize he was holding.

      Alek cuts the man’s shirt and does a blood sweep, running his hand up and down the man’s back, looking for a wound. It’s strangely intimate. The three of them all try to keep a man alive with their bare hands on his body.

      There is no blood on the man’s back.

      Alek is gone again.

      Even Mark is calm. “Guys, my arm hurts,” he says. He says it evenly. He has an arterial bleed, and is only alive because Spencer is plugging it with his fingers, but Mark doesn’t seem to know or care all that much about the fact that he’s dying.

      “I can’t move you,” Spencer says. “I’ll lose the hole.”

      “Just let me shift a little, my arm’s really sore.”

      “Yeah. We’re not worried about your arm right now.”

      No one seems to have any sense of how serious any of this is. Mark is unbothered that his head is inches from the terrorist who shot him. They’re lying right next to each other, right there on the carpet. Neither of them cares. The terrorist is unconscious, and Mark is close behind.

      They wait.

      They ride the train for thirty more minutes.

      Anthony knows police in France will want to talk to them. He knows newspaper reporters in France will probably want to as well. Through the fog lifting in his mind he understands that they’ve just encountered a terrorist. We just frigging stopped a terrorist. Spencer and Alek are off-duty US service members. Anthony knows that will matter. Anthony knows that will make this a big story in France.

      The train curls into the station, and when he presses his face up to the window he can see the French National Police standing on guard next to SWAT-type vehicles. Still, he does not know what will follow. That they will become celebrities, not just in France but in America too. That they will be on the cover of People magazine, that the CEO of Columbia Sportswear will give them his private jet for a week and that Anthony will ride it home, that his arrival will be captured by cameramen in helicopters overhead, that plainclothes СКАЧАТЬ