Read Black Friday for Free Online Page B

Fall Break.
    The calendar in the district where Charles taught was a little fluky, though. He’d tried to explain to them that they would get out a day or more earlier than those other districts at the end of the school year, but that was months off and didn’t mean anything to the kids. Not much did other than the here and now.
    Probably it never occurred to any of them that he wanted out of there just as much as they did. The kids all thought that teachers liked school, and Charles knew that some did.
    He wasn’t one of them. He didn’t dislike it. There were lots worse jobs in the world, and he was well aware of that. And there were those rare times when one of the kids actually understood what he was trying to get across, and that was gratifying.
    For the most part, though, he was doing the same thing they were: putting in the time.
    As he started to eat, he picked up the book lying on the table, a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby . It was one of his favorite novels. The curriculum allowed him only a few authors of his picking each year, and, he usually opted for Hemingway or Fitzgerald, as they were accessible. Sometimes Faulkner or Henry James, if he was feeling in a particularly perverse mood and wanted to torture the kids.
    Today he just read the ending of Gatsby while he ate. He knew it pretty well by heart but always enjoyed letting his eyes travel over the words anyway. There was something so poignant about being a boat beating against the current. He suspected that was a good description of him as well.
    When he was finished, he set the book aside, went into the living room, and turned the TV on again.
    The first thing that came on was a commercial for a local gun store. They were having a big Black Friday sale, like every other business in town. Charles had never fired a gun in his life and hadn’t even held one in his hand, nor did he have any interest in them.
    He flipped through the channels. Football game. Football game. Football game. Commercial for a huge, daylong sale at the American Way Mall, with new specials every hour.
    That was a little interesting, he decided. At some point, he would need to buy Christmas presents for his family, so he might as well get started on that. Sure, it would be crowded, but he didn’t mind parking at the edge of the mall lot. The walk would do him good.
    He spent enough time alone here in his apartment. Being around a lot of people might be just the thing he needed to perk him up and bring him out of this gloomy mood.
    A little excitement would be a welcome thing, he told himself.
    * * *
    The SAM arced up from the brown, gray, and tan landscape below, trailing smoke as it tore through the hot air toward the chopper.
    Jamie Vasquez’s co-pilot yelled, “Incoming!” but Jamie was already leaning on the controls, sending the helicopter veering sharply down and to the left. Startled cries came from the troops she was ferrying.
    Jamie wasn’t surprised, though. Intel said that the Taliban wasn’t active in this area right now, but she was in her third tour in Afghanistan and had learned a long time ago that intel could be trusted only so far.
    She kept the chopper swooping hard to the left, hoping the surface-to-air missile wasn’t a heat-seeker. Most of them weren’t. In large part, the Taliban forces were still using weapons left over from the ill-fated Russian invasion more than thirty years earlier. Many of them weren’t very advanced.
    This missile didn’t appear to be changing course in response to her actions. In the pair of heartbeats Jamie had to spare as the SAM streaked toward the chopper, she recognized that and heaved a mental sigh of relief. Her reflexes had been fast enough to get them out of harm’s way.
    Then the missile barely clipped the chopper’s tail and detonated.
    The explosion jolted the helicopter as if a giant hand had tried to swat it out of the air. Men yelled curses as the