Page 40 of The Triangle

The bullets come pouring through the windows of Danny’s apartment like a herd of stampeding rhino. Like a flash flood. No test shot. No delicate precision. Indiscriminate. An assault. Meant to shock and immobilize. It’s not elegant or sophisticated. But it is effective.

The reflexive conditioning all three of us display is synchronized. It would be graceful if not for the fact that each of us tries, instinctively, to protect the other. Danny and I step to shield Christine. She tries powering past us to do the same. And the resulting action is an inept ballet, as the three of us inadvertently wrestle with each other to try to save the other two.

Much like the biblical account of Jacob wrestling the angel, it is a scene that in theory should be poetic and beautiful, but in practice is blunt and desperate.

It feels like we’re the goddamn Keystone Kops.

“What the fuck?” Danny shouts as the three of us take refuge in the toilet. “What did you do?” he says, slamming the door and pushing me against the wall.

There’s a moment where I almost yell back, but instead I take a breath, fill my body with air, and say, “I didn’t do nothing, man. It ain’t my house they’re shooting at.”

Danny starts to grab for my throat and I’m curious to know what he thinks he’ll do, exactly, but Christine intervenes, stepping between us and saying, “Stop! You both have big dicks! How the fuck do we get out of here?”

I don’t mean to smile, but I can’t help myself. Both because she’s right, we do, and also because I’ve missed this.

“Is there another way out?” Christine asks Danny.

“No. Just the stairs,” he says.

“You don’t have an escape route?” I ask him, somewhat surprised.

“Yeah. It’s called the fuckin’ stairs,” he snaps.

“Shame,” I say, drawing my pistol from inside my topcoat and reaching for the door handle.

“Wait!” Danny shouts. The sound of automatic weapons fire from the other room is like white noise in the background.

He pulls open the medicine chest, presses a release lever hidden inside, and the whole thing pops forward, revealing a small cache of firearms buried in the wall. I roll my eyes in spite of myself.

“Brilliant. And yet there’s no escape route…”

He ignores me, grabbing two pistols for himself and handing a shotgun to Christine. He doesn’t offer me any auxiliary form of protection. That’s fine. I wasn’t expecting it.

There is no further discussion. No conversation about improvised strategy or the best way to take flight. Like any act of muscle memory, the body knows how to react when conditions are familiar. And for the three of us, this something we’ve done a number of times before.

It’s like going for a swim.

With sharks.

Or taking a bike tour.

Off the side of a mountain.

And just like those, what we’re about to head into might be incredible and invigorating or it might very well kill us.

But of all the things we have in common, the most unifying is our shared lack of fear of death. We’ve never chatted about it aloud, but I know that our absence of dismay over dying is because the thing we share most—well above all else—is that we all came to accept, at a very early age, that death is an inevitability. A necessary payment for the privilege of living.

Eish, man, I don’t think any of us expected to live past the age of eighteen. So every day since then has just been a bonus.

In any case, what takes the place of a colloquy on how we get out of this is a brief look between us. We make eye contact for just long enough to confirm that we’re all still who we know each other to be, and once that’s done, Danny grabs at the door, flings it open, and we get ready to fokken shoot our way out.

We sprint through the apartment, toward the lone front door which stands as a poor and shameful excuse for an escape route, taking our individual postures of choice to try to avoid being shot. Danny crouches and moves swiftly, Christine favors staying close to the wall, I face the windows, the direction from whence hot metal is raining sideways, and move laterally.

I don’t so much try to avoid being shot as I dare the shots to hit me. I challenge them to try to take my life. Silently, I shout at them, Fok julle naaiers! The only thing that can kill Alec van den Berg is Alec van den Berg. I decided this long ago. And I’m not in the mood to die today.

When we arrive at the door and open it, it sets off the alarm. The wail of the siren is amplified by the wailing of another siren that also just went off. Not cops. Another alarm siren.

And as we step through the doorway, we discover, predictably, that a small platoon of large-ish okes is making its way up the stairs toward us.