“Dr. Pham?” Parkowski asked.
Pham didn’t respond. He just stared out ahead towards the entrance to the pier.
Parkowski followed his eyes. She didn’t see anything at first. Everything appeared to be normal; Pham was just nodding off.
Then she saw them.
There were four, walking slowly side-by-side and almost in lockstep as they came from the shops near the pier’s entrance towards where Parkowski, Pham, and DePresti sat on the bench.
She initially thought all were males, but as they got a step closer, she realized that one of the four was a woman.
They were easy to pick out. Like Pham, they were severely overdressed for a casual spot such as Manhattan Beach. They all wore trench coats, two in tan and two in a dark gray, with wraparound sunglasses on their heads obscuring their features.
DePresti saw them too. Parkowski noticed his leg started twitching.
Just like when the dragon appeared in the Venus environment, Parkowski froze. She knew she needed to do something, to run, her lizard brain screamed for her to get away.
But she just sat there, rooted to the spot.
Pham just stared.
The four were about a quarter of a mile away from the two Aering engineers and the Space Force captain when they stopped. The one in the middle-left position raised his arm as they stood in the midst of the tourists, fishermen, and sightseers.
All of the trenchcoat-wearing individuals reached into their coats and pulled out matching metallic objects.
Parkowski couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Firearms.
They were short-barreled and had long, banana-shaped clips jutting out from the lower part of their receiver.
The four individuals fired indiscriminately into the crowd as Parkowski stood up and watched in horror.
An angler went down, his chest a puff of red as the strange assailants’ submachine guns tore into him. A teenager tried to run past the four but a quick burst took him to the pier’s wooden floor, motionless, dead. A woman screamed and put her hands up but was cut down. The shooters were firing seemingly at random at their victims, causing panic as well as death.
It was a massacre.
And it happened in the blink of an eye.
The junior Aering engineer started to react.
DePresti leaped to his feet, staring at the four shooters with his hand over his eyes, shielding them from the sun. “What the fuck—” he said under his breath.
“We need to go,” Parkowski yelled.
He nodded. “Hey, doc, time to go,” he said to Pham.
Pham didn’t respond. He was frozen to the spot, watching in disbelief as the four shooters cut down the crowd as they slowly marched forward.
Then Parkowski made a horrifying conclusion.
The four shooters weren’t firing indiscriminately.
They were coming straight for them.
All four of them had their eyes trained on Parkowski, DePresti, and Pham. They were only a hundred meters away now, leaving a trail of bloody bodies in their wake as they cut down the people on the pier one by one.
“Jake, we have to go,” she said loudly.
“They’re here for me,” the older man finally said. “You need to get out of here.”
He stood up and staggered a step backward, then forwards to the pier’s edge.
One of the shooters looked right at Pham.
He raised his submachine gun and fired a short burst.
Pham’s body jerked as if he had been shocked by an electrical current. He fell to his knees.
“No!” Parkowski yelled.
Another one of the shooters, the woman, fired a burst from her own weapon. Two of the men paused to reload.
Pham fell face-first onto the wooden pier. Blood seeped from his body and stained the deck red.
The shooters had momentarily paused their killing spree.
At least forty bodies littered the ground behind them. People ran off the beach towards the safety of the buildings, screaming, as they finally realized what was happening above them.
The other two reloaded and they fell back into a lockstep.
Parkowski and DePresti slowly backed up towards the aquarium at the pier’s end as the four shooters stepped towards them.
Parkowski knew what she had to do.
She made a break for the edge. DePresti followed her a split second later.
The four shooters opened fire but it was too late.
They were already in mid-air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Parkowski hit the water hard feet-first. She heard the submachine guns’ rounds cut through the air around her, but, mercifully, none struck her body. The killers weren’t as good at hitting a moving target as they were at gunning down innocent people on the pier.
Parkowski sank to the bottom, about seven to eight feet deep. As she opened her eyes, she saw a school of fish pass by in front of her through the murky water.
Dazed, Parkowski floated back up to the surface, but was snapped out of it by DePresti appearing out of nowhere.
He grabbed her arm and shoved her to the bottom.
Parkowski gave him an angry look — they needed to go up for air — but realized what was going on when she looked up and saw the streaks of the bullets, fired from the four shooters still up on the pier.
The saltwater slowed the projectiles. They fell harmlessly around DePresti and Parkowski and sank to the sand below.
She was shocked at how many bullets had been fired at them. There seemed to be hundreds, all around them.
DePresti took the lead again and started pulling her south, away from the pier.
Parkowski grabbed his hand, their brief scuba diving experience coming in handy now. She squeezed it, then pointed at her neck and chest with the other one.
DePresti nodded and pulled her slightly towards the shore, near where the large waves were breaking.
He pointed at the cresting wave above them, let go of her hand, and pushed off towards the surface. DePresti thrust his head out of the water for a second, getting a breath of fresh air, and then dove back down towards the bottom.
A hail of bullets followed him. The shooters on the pier had seen him.
Parkowski, almost out of breath now, waited a second, then two, and did the same.
She aimed for a spot far away from where DePresti had taken a breath. Parkowski closed her eyes and pushed the lower half of her face out of the cold Pacific, exhaled, then inhaled, and threw her body back towards the shallow ocean floor, opening her eyes back up on the way.
They didn’t fire at her, or if they did she didn’t notice, but she didn’t take any chances as she pushed her body flat against the sand next to her boyfriend.
DePresti grabbed her hand again and she gave it a squeeze.
He pointed in the direction away from the pier, south, and let go of her hand as he kicked off in that direction. Parkowski waited a second then followed him.
Her boyfriend went up for air after an excruciating thirty seconds, then dove back down. Parkowski did the same.
This time she looked around quickly. They were a decent distance away from the pier now; far enough that she couldn’t make out if the shooters were still there or not in her brief inspection.
She played it safe, diving back down to the bottom after filling her lungs with air.
DePresti wasn’t so cautious. He was about halfway between the surface and the sea floor, swimming quickly.
It was probably safe — she didn’t see any bullets enter the water. Parkowski swam up to join him.
They swam underwater for at least ten to fifteen minutes, coming up carefully for air then diving back down, as they hugged the Pacific coast going south towards Hermosa Beach.
Then, they swam back up to the surface, Parkowski first, and swam another five or six minutes in the same direction.