Chapter 10: Less Information, More Fear

Why this chapter changed:

Chapter 10 tells the same attack as Chapter 9, this time through Olivia's eyes. So when I rebuilt the mechanics of the ambush, her chapter changed with it.

But the revision gave me an opportunity to do more than simply make her version match Cameron's. I wanted Olivia's experience of the attack to feel more immediate and frightening. To put her inside a situation she doesn't fully see, while the danger gets progressively closer.

Cameron knows what an attack like this means. Olivia doesn't. That difference became much more important in the revised version.

Below is Olivia's original version of the ambush.

***

“Fuck,” the driver mutters.

The word barely registers, but Olivia watches his hands anyway, the way they tighten on the wheel as he throws the Escalade into reverse. The engine revs, the car rolling back before stopping so abruptly her stomach lurches, like something cuts the motion off inside her

She turns her head and sees a white van sitting too close on the right, its side panel filling the window, blank and featureless, nothing but white metal where the street should be. The driver swears again and slams the car into drive. The engine surges and then stops, the motion strangled before it becomes movement.

Another van. This one on the left, close enough that she can see rain streaking down its door in uneven lines.

Her breath catches as she looks forward and sees the railroad crossing arm lowered in front of them, red lights blinking with a patience that feels almost mocking, as if the world has decided to wait them out.

Then the Escalade lurches forward.

The air is knocked out of her lungs, her body snapping against the seatbelt as if something has punched her square in the chest. Her head jerks forward, teeth clacking together so hard she tastes metal. Pain spikes along her jaw, radiating outward in sharp, bright threads. Somewhere behind her something screams, steel on steel, a shriek so loud it doesn’t sound like noise so much as pressure, like the world itself is tearing instead of breaking.

Someone shouts her name. Or maybe they shout something else. It doesn’t land as language. It slides past her without meaning.

The train horn sounds in the distance, not close yet, but loud enough to reach her, long and low and wrong, cutting through the chaos until it becomes the only thing she can hear beneath the pounding of her pulse.

The car lurches again, harder, and her body slides sideways into Vega as he twists toward her, instinct taking over, one arm coming up and bracing across her chest, his shoulder turning inward and invading her space as if he’s trying to become a barrier instead of a person.

Her breath lodges high in her throat.

They’re being pushed.

Toward the tracks.

The car vibrates under her, engine idling too loud in the quiet. Her shoulders are tight, breath shallow, her body already braced without her telling it to be.

“Cover me,” the blonde man in the front seat says. She’s not sure to who, but a moment later Vega shifts his weight and gives a low grunt of confirmation. 

Click.

The sound is unmistakable. A safety coming off. Her stomach drops, a quick hollowing sensation, heat rushing up her chest. She turns her head just enough to see a gun in his hands.

Her fingers curl into her palm. She knows what that means. It’s about to escalate.

The door handle clicks. The man in the grey suit opens his door and steps out into the rain, cold air spilling into the car before the door shuts again. He moves to the front, his posture sharpening as if he’s listening to something she can’t hear. Watching him, her fear did something useful for once, locking onto him instead of scattering all at once.

He lifts his gun and fires one shot, and she flinches, the sound cuts through everything else.

The pushing from the rear stops.

The sudden absence of forward motion makes her stomach drop. The train horn sounds again, closer now, close enough that it vibrates through her bones, through the seat, through Vega’s arm pressed tight against her.

It doesn’t feel like a warning. It feels like an arrival.

The first gunshots are so loud they don’t sound real. They’re just explosions of sound that flatten the world into noise.

The rear window explodes inward and Olivia screams, glass spraying across the seatbacks, stinging her cheek and neck, the sound so loud she feels it inside her skull. The car jerks once more and then stops dead, and she sees blood bloom across the windshield, spreading in a fine mist.  The driver slumps forward over the wheel as if someone has simply unplugged him. The horn blares under his weight.

If he would just sit up, it would stop.

Her eyes track the blood on the windshield again. Then she can’t stop looking at the blood, but she feels oddly far away from her own body,  breathing as if it belongs to someone else trapped inside her chest.

More shots crack, louder, closer. Her hands rise to her ears.

Vega grunts.

It’s a short, strangled sound that cuts off mid-breath as his weight collapses into her. He folds forward, his body locking between her and the door, his body pressed hard into her chest, his arm still braced across her. She expects him to move. He doesn’t.

He’s just bracing, she thinks. He’s just bracing.

But she knows. She just doesn’t let herself know.

Sound thins abruptly, as if someone has reached inside her head and turned a dial, leaving only pressure and the distant scream of the car horn.

She catches glimpses of grey moving between the vehicles, and it’s wrong somehow. Not fast enough to explain how he’s there, but also somehow not slow enough to track. He’s there and then somewhere else. She can’t track how. She loses him between blinks.

She feels the gunshots now as dull, concussive thuds jolting through Vega’s body into hers, each impact knocking the air out of her lungs in short bursts.

She tries to scream and can’t find enough breath. Her hands claw at his jacket, fingers slipping on something warm and slick she refuses to identify.

She closes her eyes and it takes her a second to realize she’s counting in her head. She doesn’t stop because the sounds she hears are worse.

Movement flickers at the edges of her awareness, doors opening, shouts, more gunfire, but it all feels distant and unreal, like she’s underwater and the world is happening above the surface without her.

Even when the shots stop, her ears keep bracing, waiting for the next crack that never comes.

Vega is heavy. Impossibly heavy.

She can’t move him. She can barely move at all. Her legs are numb, her hands shaking so badly they won’t close properly, and the space around her has collapsed into the shape of his body and the seat and the terrible certainty that if another bullet comes through that door, it won’t stop with him.

At some point she realizes the agent on her other side has gone still too.

Her mind fixates on small, stupid things because anything else would shatter her. Not yet. Later, maybe, when she’s safely somewhere else, if she ever is again, if she’s alive after this. Instead she thinks about the smell of rain-soaked fabric. The rhythmic sound of rain landing on the car roof. The way the leather seats feel under her fingers.  The tinny sound of the horn keeps honking and for a second her mind snags on it stupidly, wondering why it hasn’t stopped yet before she remembers the blood across the windshield and the driver slumped over the wheel.

She doesn’t hear the door open over the noise, but cold air rushes in, making her gasp. A shape fills the opening but she doesn’t look at his face. She can’t. Her vision is tunneling, edges dark and wavering, but she registers movement, hands gripping Vega’s shoulder and hauling him back just enough to clear space.

This is it, she thinks. This is where I get shot.

Blonde hair. Grey suit jacket.

“Out,” a voice says.

She freezes.

The train is almost on them now, the sound so loud it drowns out the car horn, the ground shuddering beneath the tires, the Escalade vibrating as if it might still be dragged onto the tracks by sheer proximity. Hands grip her under the arms, and she’s pulled free of the seat in a way that scrapes skin and jolts nerves, leaving her dizzy with the sudden absence of weight pinning her down.

Her feet hit the ground and buckle immediately. Concrete jars up her legs, too hard, too fast, her balance lagging behind her body. She remains upright because of the hand steadying her.

The ground hums beneath her, a deep vibration surging up through her legs, into her hips, her spine.

The cold assaults her skin and rain blurs everything. The air smells wrong. Metallic and scorched, like pennies and smoke. It burns her lungs when she breathes in.

There’s too much to see, she doesn’t know where to look.

The van. Still there. Its side panel torn open with dark, irregular bullet holes, metal warped inward. Steam curls from the holes in thin, ghostly plumes, rain hissing where it hits hot steel. Blood streaks the paint, thinning as it falls, dissolving into the puddles on the ground, like paint left out in the rain. A watercolor painting crying. She saw something like it once in a museum in Tallinn. Blue bleeding into red. She remembers thinking it was dramatic.

She wonders, absurdly, if the artist had meant it to look like this. If the artist had ever seen real blood.

Her eyes keep moving. A body is caught in the open door.

Half in, half out, one foot on the pavement, the rest twisted awkwardly inside the van as if he’d stumbled trying to get out and got stuck. His eyes are open, wide in surprise. Blood runs from his mouth and nose, before it’s washed away by the rain.

Her eyes drift. Then drift again, because everywhere she looks there’s bodies.

A body on the ground, twisted where it fell. Another a few feet away, face turned toward the sky, rain spilling down his face like tears. She looks away instinctively and finds another body. And another, their bodies lying at wrong angles, blood pooling under them.

The Escalades line the street like stalled animals. Windows blown open and inside men who were alive in the conference room with her minutes ago are slumped forward or sideways against seats. The man with the tie pin who was standing at the door, his head slumped back, eyes unseeing. The bald man who had stood behind her, now slumped forward his head resting on the seat in front of him. Mark pitched to the side, his head resting against the agent next to him, the man with the tattoo on his wrist. Her brain tries to make it look like sleep until she sees his eyes still open.

No one moves. Rain slides down windshields in steady sheets.

She turns slowly, disoriented by how much there is to take in. Bodies on the ground between vehicles. Near the van. Blood everywhere she looks, streaked across white paint, pooled dark in the cracks of the concrete, thinned by rain until it spreads and connects, making it hard to tell where one body ends and another begins.

She wishes she could unsee the bodies.

She stands there, turning her head in small, helpless movements, taking it piece by piece, because her mind can’t hold it all at once.

She looks back at the car she had just been in. Vega’s body now tilted forward occupying the space she had just been in. Blood drips down his hand, the cuff of his white dress shirt stained red.

There’s no movement. Just rain.

She feels the air moving before she fully understands why, a sudden pressure shift, wind ripping past her as the train tears past. The wind tears at her hair and clothes, the vibration rattles her teeth, the ground shuddering so hard it feels like it might come apart beneath her. Behind her, the Escalade shakes. Water in a puddle shakes so hard it resembles a shattered mirror, the reflection of the sky distorted by it.

She doesn’t know how long it lasts.
Seconds.
Forever.

The man in grey pivots, the movement so fast she barely registers him moving.  A shot cracks, then the sound of something hitting the ground. A gun skitters across the asphalt and comes to rest inches from her feet.  She stares at it without understanding what it means or how it suddenly appeared there. Her eyes lift, look at the man in grey, then return to the gun. She wants to look away but her mind insists it matters so she continues to stare at it.

Before her mind can catch up to it, she’s moving again, half-carried, half-dragged toward another vehicle, her legs moving without consulting her, taking instructions from hands that aren’t hers. Her shoes slipping on wet pavement, her breath coming in broken, uneven pulls she can’t control. Later she won’t remember how far they go, only that the ground keeps tilting beneath her.

“That one. Move.”

A door to one of the white vans opens. He doesn’t push her. He turns her toward it and waits for her legs to obey. They don’t.

Her knees buckle as she tries to step up. His hand tightens at her elbow before she can fall.

She tries again but her foot misses the floorboard. She’s outside. Without a coat. This would be such a stupid way to die. He adjusts her, lifting just enough to guide her inside. She sits down into the cold bucket seat. Her hands fumble uselessly at the seatbelt. They don’t seem to belong to her. The strap slips through her fingers twice.

He reaches across her, draws it over her shoulder, clicks it into place. He shuts the door and she flinches at the sound. He walks around the front of the car and she tracks him until he’s inside.

He gets in, buckles his seat belt and puts the van in drive. Only when the vehicle lurches forward and the railroad crossing starts to disappear behind them does something shift inside her. Vega isn’t beside her anymore. The weight pinning her into the seat is gone. The horn is gone too.

The absence of both feels wrong enough that her mind keeps trying to put them back.

She thinks of the bodies in the rain. The fact that the vehicle is moving and she is inside it.

Her mind edges toward what that means and recoils.

She presses her forehead to the window and shakes as the city rushes past like nothing has happened at all. The tires screech. The van fishtails once.

They disappear down the road.

***

What changed:

• In the original Olivia witnesses the attack. In the revised version, Olivia experiences the attack. I gave Olivia less information so the reader would feel more fear.

• In the original, Olivia has enough visual information to process what's happening. She watches Cameron move, notices how impossibly fast he is, follows the action. In the revision, Vega throws her down and shields her, so the reader loses visual orientation at essentially the same moment Olivia does. Now she has to construct what's happening from sound, impact, movement, Cameron's reactions, and fragments of information.

• Sound replaces sight. Pinned beneath Vega as he shields her, and ultimately takes the bullet that would have killed her, Olivia experiences much of the revised attack through what she can hear rather than what she can see. The less she knows, the more disorienting the violence becomes.

• The train becomes something Olivia can't identify. When the train strikes the Humvee across the tracks, Olivia has no visual reference for what has happened. She only experiences the enormous impact and initially interprets it as some kind of explosion or bomb.

• The threat becomes personal. Trapped beneath Vega, Olivia hears gunshots followed by “clear,” as they men move through the convoy killing survivors. Then she hears one say, “Check the front,” and she knows they’re approaching her and she believes she is going to die. That immediate, conscious fear of death isn’t present in the original version.

Now that you've read the original…
Which version put you more inside Olivia's experience? The version where you could see the attack with her, or the version where you knew only as much as she did?