That’s the Ticket! Pt. 5 (Final Episode)

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 1

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 2

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 3

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 4

Glenn was violently brought back to reality when someone tackled him. A few other valiant movie goers decided to jump onto the pile of bodies, probably seeking their own personal moment of heroism. Glenn felt like he was suffocating.

Despite an elbow smashing his face, he managed to say “He had a gun”

Someone close to him heard the words and cried for the mob to let up. The message spread slowly and Glenn felt a little relief. Then came confirmation, “Holy shit! Guy DID have a gun!” This informant had rolled the corpse over, exposing the firearm.

A few people in the mob offered apologies to Glenn. There were even a few shouts of “He’s a hero!” and “He saved our lives!”

Glenn’s mind went back to Heather. Surely she was somewhere in the menagerie of bodies. He even called out, “Heather!” A few Heathers even answered, but none where the one he was interested in.

The mall was shut down and a few people, including Glenn, were held for questioning about the event. Glenn sent off a few more messages to Heather, the last being –I hope you are safe-

As the police were wrapping up their investigation, their radios went crazy. A shooting had taken place at the Somerset Mall, across town. There were murmurs of it being a tandem crime. It happened at the movie theater at the same time the premier of the same film was about to be shown.

*          *          *          *          *

As Heather and her boyfriend filed into the screening room she took on last glance at her phone. “I hope you’re safe???” she read aloud. “Well that’s fucking creepy. I guess he figured out what happened and now he’s pissed”

“If that nerd-loser is threatening you, I’ll kick his …” her boyfriend’s words were cut short by screams. The crowd started to stampede. It quickly was made clear as to why. At first, the bursts of noises were thought to be fireworks going off, maybe even some pyrotechnics in honor of the big premier. Then the crowd grew wise and cries of “Gun!” rang out.

Heather got pushed over. She cried out to her boyfriend but he had already shoved his way through the crowd and was well ahead of her heading towards the exit. She first felt her legs and hands get trampled, then her torso. It became difficult to breathe. She couldn’t get up. She went into panic. She felt as if she was in the ocean and a wave had knocked her over and was holding her under water. After some excruciating time and a few unfortunate stomps, she cried the last tears of her short life.

Her boyfriend thought he was going to get out unscathed. Little did he know, he was pushing his way right towards the shooter. When he was confident he would finally escape, he came face to face with the deranged gunman. The man was expressionless. He uttered the words “pretty boy” before foiling the escape plans and claiming one more victim.

*          *          *          *          *

Glenn never spoke to Heather again. After a few days of trying to call and message her to no avail, he gave up. He fathomed that she must have been traumatized by the events at the theater and wanted to move on with her life. He still believed that their meeting was impeded by the averted tragedy. He had never learned of her fate. He shunned the news because he didn’t want to see his face anymore. He was considered a national hero and reluctantly did a media tour around the country. He only took up the offer as a way to see the country.

The pinnacle of Glenn’s rewards was a private screening of the movie he so dearly wanted to see. The whole cast showed up. It was a red carpet event. When the invitation was extended, he thought of asking Heather to accompany him. Although he decided against it, he did fantasize about walking the red carpet, hand in hand with her.

 

The End.

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 4

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 1

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 2

That’s the Ticket! Pt. 3

A half hour past and Glenn hadn’t received a reply. She must be busy getting herself ready, he justified. She is probably finishing up and almost ready to leave or on her way even. The crowd was getting large and Glenn was getting nervous that they might have difficulty finding one another. He sent off another message with his exact location to make sure that didn’t happen.

Glenn was too preoccupied to notice a strange man pacing nervously about ten feet from him. The man was inappropriately dressed for the balmy summer evening. His baggy Cleveland Browns jacket caught Glenn’s attention. His father was from Cleveland and a die-hard Browns fan. The man’s behavior made Glenn pay attention to him.

Besides pacing, the man looked as though he was talking to himself, like he was psyching himself up. Glenn found the look on the man’s face unsettling as well. Glenn was so focused on the man that he had stopped looking at his phone impulsively every other second.

In fact, he had been so focused on the man that he hadn’t noticed the lobby of the movie theater fill to a shoulder to shoulder crowd that spilled into the mall itself. The man’s strange energy was a magnet for Glenn’s attention. Not even the freaks in cosplay could peal it away. His heartbeat increased and his palms were sweaty.

The man took a deep breath with his eyes closed and flung his jacket open. Glenn was given instant justification for his fight or flight response to the man. Tucked into the man’s pants was a firearm, a rifle of sorts. Glenn didn’t know what kind but it looked real.

In an instant, Glenn’s world was only this man and himself in a tunnel. He heard nothing. There was only a dark void in his peripheral vision. Immediately behind the man stood a no-smoking sign on a pole with a heavy metal base.

Without even thinking, as the man reached for the weapon, Glenn sprung from his seat and grabbed the sign. He held it like a baseball bat with the heavy metal base in the air. Remembering his days of junior high baseball, he stepped into a swing. The man didn’t see it coming. The base smashed in his cranium. The bone split open with a sickening crack. Blood splashed the crowd. The man fell dead upon his weapon, hiding it from the mass of people that was now horrified and starting to come online as to what happened.

Glenn stood there, chest heaving, with the bloody sign in his hands. As he dropped it to the floor he heard voices in the crowd calling out to apprehend him.

To be continued…

 

Greener Grass

Rodrigo lived in a poor neighborhood in the small city of Sorocaba in Brazil. His father was a street vendor, he sold popcorn and his mother was a housekeeper. Rodrigo was never satisfied with his lot in life. He wanted more. He dreamed of one day moving to the United States.

Stan lived in an upper middle class neighborhood in New Jersey. He worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. His life consisted of a commute, work, sleep, a minuscule amount of time reserved for eating and little else. He had no family. He wanted to live more but he never turned down the firm when it needed him. He dreamed of one day moving to a tropical location and having daily adventures.

A step in Rodrigo´s dream came true at the U.S consulate in São Paulo. He was awarded his B-2 visitor visa. He could only stay six months and was not eligible to work, but as his grandmother used to say, “those are man´s laws and not God´s laws.” It was this convenient reasoning that he and his family used to skirt a lot of rules.  

Stan was called to H.R. one Friday afternoon and was given news that he wanted to hear for a long time. “Due to the negative financial climate in our great nation, we are going to have to lay you off.” With that news came a fat severance package. He immediately booked a trip to Rio de Janeiro. He was going to test the waters for a longer term move with this prolonged vacation.

After three months, Rodrigo found that the US wasn´t all he thought it would be. First of all, he arrived in the Boston metro area in December and it was already colder than his freezer back home. Secondly, he had to work. Work hard. Hard work was an even more foreign concept to him than the awful microwave dinners he was subsiding on. Lastly, he missed his friends and family.

In the same period of time, Stan was having a similar experience in Brazil. First, it was HOT. He sweated through three shirts a day. He also wasn´t learning Portuguese as fast as he thought he would. This isolated him. Lastly, he couldn´t get over how nothing worked properly. There were always lines to nowhere. Everywhere he went the system was always down and he found the workers to be unhelpful or incompetent. There was unavoidable corruption at every level of daily life.

Rodrigo decided he needed to pray. Nothing else was working and he figured it wouldn´t hurt. He walked to the nearest Catholic Church and to his surprise, they were having a mass in Portuguese. He took off his down coat and took a seat.

After repeating some sentences in a lifeless droning fashion and transitioning between kneeling, standing and sitting for what felt like fifty times minimum, Rodrigo felt better. That feeling went away quickly when he heard screams and shots. Rodrigo took five bullets from a self-proclaimed patriot who was tired of people praying to his God, in his country and in another language.

Stan realized that he was spending so much time dealing with bureaucracy of trying to get his affairs in order that he had taken very little time to go to the beach and live life. This was specifically why he chose to move to Brazil in the first place. He got his things together and went off to Copacabana Beach.

Stan sat in a chair in the sand under the sun with a delicious cold beer in his hand. He felt that he could get used to this. He watched beautiful women in bikinis walk by while he slowly rounded the corner from buzzed to drunk.

One lovely lady stopped to make small talk. It was a ruse to distract him. Her boyfriend came from the side with a knife and demanded all of Stan´s belongings. Stan refused. The thief plunged the knife into Stan´s heart with such precision he barely felt a thing. The murderous thief laughed with his girlfriend about how stupid the gringo was as they surveyed their booty while walking away from the scene.