I just finished the book and I wanted to hear others’ thoughts on something I noticed.
During the active shooter scene, Marx first confronts the shooters in the lobby, and after stalling they go up to the second floor to Sam’s office. I read it as Ant comes down from the roof to the second floor and this is what incites the one shooter to fire ‘five rounds’, one hits Ant, three hit Marx, and the shooter kills himself with the last one.
But then when Sam finally goes back to the office, there is a ton of focus on the huge blood stain in the middle of the lobby floor where ‘Marx bled to death’ and Sam also notes a bullet hole in a wooden column. (But he also says something like, it could be mistaken for a knot in the wood to someone who didn’t know).
Marx and the ex-Mormon couple hear gunfire before they realize what’s happening. And before Marx originally goes downstairs.
So is the bullet hole from the first rounds before Marx got to the lobby? And no one was hit? And then when Marx was shot on the second floor did he make his way back downstairs and then bleed out there??
This really pulled me out of the story during Sam’s return-to-the-office scene. I mean I guess it’s more dramatic to have a big blood stain in the middle of the lobby… Curious if yall have any additional thoughts, and/or if it pulled you out of the reading experience like it did for me…
by the-bumbler
1 Comment
>So is the bullet hole from the first rounds before Marx got to the lobby? And no one was hit?
Yes.
“*Sam made his way through the space wearily, warily, like a character in a stealth game. In one of the wooden columns, a bullet hole: (5) fill hole.”*
After this explaination, each paragraph is the transition to a new space….
*”The worst of the damage was a series of grisly bloodstains on the floor where Marx had been shot. Marx’s blood had seeped through the polished concrete. The floor had been overdue for a refinishing, and the blood had been allowed to settle for too long. Sam tried cleaning it with a series of increasingly potent cleansers: water, Windex, iodine, Comet, bleach. The stain was too deep; the floor would need to be professionally refinished: (6) floors.*”
It’s not explained explicitly but it lays it out in the text and it wouldn’t make sense for the text to go back to the lobby again in the transitions.
“An untethered strip of police tape lent the room a festive feeling. Sam threw it in the trash.”
Followed by
“Sam went into Marx’s office.” when he arrives at his destination.