by D Haltinner
Audrey’s face tensed as a little anger came to the surface. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here.”
“You two are starting to scare me,” Nelle said, stepping toward the door. “I think I should give you two a little privacy.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” Audrey said. “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes. Just promise me that you’ll stay on the north side of campus.”
“Yeah, okay,” Nelle said. She looked at the liquor bottle still sitting on Audrey’s desk. “Sure, see you later.”
Audrey nodded.
Nelle stepped out the door without hesitation, closing it behind her.
Audrey sighed.
“I don’t want to see anything happen to you,” Darren said.
“Nothing will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you and I will be together, and I know you won't let anything happen to me.”
Darren stepped toward Audrey and put his hands out as she slipped into them. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to stop it though.”
“We’ll try.”
“I know.”
Audrey squeezed herself against him. “There are people relying on us, and though they don’t even know it, we have to be thinking about them. There’s too much at stake to turn selfish.”
Darren sighed. “I know, but I don’t know what I’d do if you were hurt.”
“Don’t think about it. The only thing you can do to keep me safe is to stop the thing in the void, and to do that you’ll need my help.”
“But what if we can’t stop it?”
“We should at least get them off campus.”
“And how would we do that?”
“We already said we’d call in a bomb threat.”
“You meant it?”
“If that’s what it takes to clear the place out, then yeah, I mean it.”
“Think they’ll clear the campus though?”
Audrey nodded. “They’ll have to if we don’t tell them a specific building.”
“It might work, but that would bring the police in.”
“So? We’ll be below ground while they look around.”
“Maybe it will work, but what if they don't clear everyone out?”
“We’ll deal with it then if we need to.”
Darren sighed. “Alright, we’ll try it.”
“Should we use this phone?” Audrey asked, looking over to the phone on the desk.
“They’ll track it back to you. I think it’d be best to go across the street to a payphone.”
“A payphone? I can’t even remember the last time I saw a payphone.”
“I’m sure there’s one at the gas station or the convenience store on the other end of the block.”
“Maybe. Are you still going to call?”
“I’d rather,” Darren said. “Anything to keep your involvement to a minimum since calling in bomb threats isn’t exactly an acceptable form of recreation.”
“I suppose we don’t have time to waste.”
“No we don’t.”
“Less than eight hours.”
“I know.”
“You think we can do it?”
“We don’t have a choice if you don’t want to leave town.”
Audrey shook her head.
“Then we need to do it,” Darren said. “Let’s go before I change my mind and drag you out of town.”
Audrey laughed, unaware that Darren was actually considering it.
Darren tucked the bottle of liquor back into his backpack-half empty after his unsuccessful attempt to knock Audrey out-threw on his jacket, and helped Audrey into her own. The pair left the room and headed downstairs. Darren found himself avoiding the glances of the other people, and when he thought about why his unconscious mind didn’t want to see their faces, the only answer he could come up with was that he was afraid.
Afraid to see the faces of the people who were entrusting their lives into his hands, and not even knowing it. If Darren and Audrey failed, there was no telling what would happen to the other students, and it felt awkward to be holding the fates of so many in his own hands.
They stepped outside into the cold air and went east toward Washington Street. Darren kept his face down at the path in front of him as they walked until they reached the street. When a break in commuter traffic came, they jogged across the street and turned toward the gas station at the corner with Riverside Road.
“There,” Audrey said, pulling her hand out of the depths of her pocket just long enough to point to a payphone standing at the far end of the gas station’s lot.
They hurried toward the phone, trying to hide as much of their bodies into their jackets as they could.
“Wait here,” Darren said with a cloud of steam pouring out of his mouth. They were still across the lot from the phone. “I don’t want you on any of the gas station’s cameras in case they can see that far.”
“What about you though?”
Darren pulled the collar of his jacket up until it reached his chin. “I’ll try to hide my face, but all we can really do is hope I'm out of the camera’s view or that they can’t tell who I am.”
“Okay,” Audrey said, shivering in her own jacket. “But be quick.”
Darren leaned in, gave Audrey a quick kiss on the cheek, and then hunched his shoulders and ducked his chin as he headed toward the phone.
People came and went from the building, paying for gas or purchasing their morning coffee. No one looked toward Darren as he walked along the far reaches of the lot toward the phone, nor did he look up toward any of them.
Darren lifted the receiver when he reached the phone and put it to his ear. He kept his hand on his sleeve when he dialed 911, but planned on wiping down the receiver after he was done so as not to leave prints on it either.
The phone rang once, and was answered by a bored sounding woman. “911, what’s your emergency?”
Darren cleared his throat and tried to talk as deep as he could. “There’s a bomb on campus.”
“Is this UW-Redfern or the Redfern Technical College?” The voice didn’t sound worried.
“UW.”
“And where might this bomb be?”
“I told you, on campus.”
“You can’t be any more specific?”
“Look lady, I’m warning you so you can save lives,” Darren said. “I don’t want to see people hurt, I’m only trying to send a message here.”
“Who are you trying to send a message to?”
Darren felt himself growing flustered. “That doesn’t matter yet,” he said. “Just get those people off campus.”
The woman on the phone sighed. “I know you’re afraid of failing whatever test it is you forgot to study for, but that doesn’t mean you have to waste everyone else’s time too.”
Darren found himself speechless for a second. He never expected this kind of response to a bomb threat. “What?”
“We get calls just like yours almost every Monday,” the woman said. “Not a single one has ever been a real threat, and I don’t think yours is either.”
“It is too!” Darren’s voice went back to its usual tone, but he didn’t notice.
“I sincerely doubt that sir. Next time, learn your lesson and skip the boozing if you have a test coming up, okay?”
“If you don’t clear out the campus, the lives of all those people will be on your hands!”
“Good for me, now quit wasting our time and practice your excuses to try and convince your professor to let you take the test another time.”
“Listen here, you don’t-”
The phone clicked in Darren’s ear as the operator hung up on him.
Darren looked at the phone in his hand, trying to figure out how the call backfired on him so fast. The operator should have been scrambling to get police to start emptying out the campus, but instead, she blew him off. He wanted to call her back and try to convince her that his threat was real, but what could he say
to make her believe him? It was a lie, because the truth was too much for anyone to believe.
Darren used the sleeve of his jacket to wipe off any fingerprints or saliva on the phone-just in case they do send an officer to at least look into the fake threat-and hung up before turning around and rushing back to Audrey.
“How’d it go?” Audrey asked when Darren got close enough.
“Not well.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn't believe me.”
“What?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How could they not believe you? Don’t they have to believe you?”
“I guess not.”
Audrey shook her head. “I thought for sure it would have worked.”
“I did too,” Darren said. “I don’t know what else we can do. I think we’re stuck with everyone staying on campus.”
Audrey’s mouth tensed into a tight line. Darren hadn’t seen her perma-smile in what felt like such a long time, and it looked unnatural to see her without it.
“There’s one other thing we can do to get everyone off campus,” Audrey said. “Or at least as far north as possible.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember Columbine?”
“The shooting rampage? Of course.”
“I think it’s about time we go on our own shooting spree.”
Chapter 57
“What?” Darren yelled.
“I think we need to take those revolvers we found, and make everyone leave campus, whether they want to or not,” Audrey said.
Darren wasn’t even sure what to say. He stood with his mouth hanging open and ice forming on the surface of his teeth, trying to understand the full meaning of what Audrey said.
“You think we should shoot people?” he asked.
“No, no,” Audrey said. “I think we need to make people think that we are going to.”
“Where are you going with this?”
Audrey sighed. “I think that if we pop into the buildings, fire a couple of shots into the floor and tell people to get out, they will. And without complaint.”
“I suppose they would, but doesn’t that seem overly violent?”
“We’re not going to shoot anyone, just scare them.”
“And cause a panic!”
Audrey shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever it takes to get people as far away as possible.”
“Let me get this straight,” Darren said. “You want to walk into a building, fire a couple of random shots, and start screaming for everyone to get out, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What if the campus police show up? They would make it rather difficult to get out of the building and to the next one.”
“Ahh, but you forgot about the other route we have at our disposal.”
Darren nodded. “The tunnels.”
“Exactly,” Audrey said. “We get one building emptied out and then use the tunnel to go to the next and repeat the process.”
“I hate to say this, but that might work.”
“I think it will.”
“We also thought a bomb threat would work through.”
“I think this approach is much more direct though, don’t you?”
“I’d say.”
“We could clear out half the campus in just a matter of minutes.”
A truck rumbled by the sidewalk spewing black smoke that made Audrey cough for a second. She had a point. It was very direct approach and it had a very high chance of being successful. There would be no need to even point a gun at a single person, just the sight of the revolver in each of our hands would send the entire building fleeing.”
“It could work,” Darren said. “But what about afterwards?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’ll have hundreds of people who will have our faces engrained in their memories. The police will find us for sure.”
“We can hide our faces.”
“With what?”
“We’ll buy ski masks, or pantyhose or something.”
“You don’t think the police would check the vicinity of stores for recent purchases of those products?”
“I didn’t think of that,” Audrey said. “But if we don’t succeed in stopping the void, I don’t think we’ll have much to worry about.”
“If we’re going to go to a drastic step like going on a shooting spree, I think we should at least have a little hope of succeeding.”
“Aren’t we doing this in case we don’t succeed though?”
“Yes, but only as a backup. I’d still like to think we have a chance to stop this.”
Audrey nodded, and then turned to watch a blue sedan drive by. “I think I have an idea of where to get something to disguise us.”
“What’s that?”
“Come on.”
Audrey checked the road for traffic and at the first break in cars, she dragged Darren kitty-corner across the street, back to the block that the campus was strewn across. She picked up the pace on the stretch of sidewalk, leading Darren back toward the parking lot used by the students living in the dorms.
“What are we doing?” Darren asked when Audrey reached the lot and began to look into the back windows of the cars.
“Just help me look,” Audrey said, weaving her way between stalls.
“Look for what?”
“Anything we can use.”
“Use? For what?”
Audrey stopped along side of an old red Pontiac, peering in through the back window as paint and rust flaked off in her hands. “That.”
Darren came to her side and looked into the back of the car through a swirl of scratched and oiled smears. Inside, on the back seat, laid a laundry bag full of clothes in random colors that blended together into a ball of cloth.
“Someone’s dirty laundry?”
Audrey tried the door handle, found it locked, and tried the one on the front door without success. She stood up on her tip toes, looking over the top of the cars in every direction. “We’re going to have to break the window.”
“What?” Darren yelled. We lowered his voice when be spoke again. “You want us to break into someone else’s car and steal their dirty laundry?”
“We need something to disguise ourselves.”
“But breaking in to get it?”
“It’s a whole lot less than going on a shooting rampage.”
Darren hesitated with his eyes locked onto Audrey’s. “You do have a point.”
“It’s only dirty clothes, not a radio or their CD collection,” Audrey said.
“I suppose not.”
Audrey looked toward the roads surrounding the lot. “With the morning traffic around us, I don’t think anyone will notice the sound of a window breaking.”
It was rather noisy with two intersections of cars accelerating toward campus. “Probably not.”
“I bet I can find a big rock to throw at it,” Audrey sad, turning around in a circle while she checked the ground. “You’ll have to throw it though, I don’t think I can throw hard enough.”
“You better be ready to run just in case,” Darren said as he tried to judge how well people driving by could see them. No one was out walking through the parking lot, and all the students wandering to class were on the other side of the dorms beside them. Perhaps they could get away with this. They were low on time.
Audrey walked toward the front of the car with her face down, stopping just in front of the bumper where she bent down, coming up with a piece of old cement that had broken off the parking lot’s surface. “This aught to work.”
“Let’s hope so.”
Audrey handed the piece of cement to Darren and stood back.
Darren tested the weight of the cold and crumbling chunk in his hand, and without pausing to allow his mind a second thought, hurled it at the window.
The cement chuck bounced off the glass with a clink and fell to the ground, leaving a small chip in the window where it struck.
>
“I think you need to throw it a bit harder,” Audrey said.
“Yeah,” Darren said. “He had the urge to make a smart remark back to her, and had she been Rachel, he would have.
Darren bent down and picked up the chunk again. He stepped back from the window a little further, gripped the piece of cement as hard as he could, and pitched the piece toward the window.
The glass shattered inward, stray pieces crumbling across the ground at Darren’s feet. It wasn’t as loud as he was expecting, but he still acted as fast as he could and reached in through the window-careful to avoid the glass still stuck in the door-grabbed the mesh laundry bag and pulled it through the window. Fragments of glass fell onto those already on the ground as the bag came through the opening without any interference.
“Go,” Darren said.
Audrey moved away, toward the dormitories as fast as she could without breaking into a jog. Darren matched her speed with the bag in his hand, trying to keep his eyes in front of him so as not to look suspicious just in case someone saw him break the window or heard the shattering glass.
Once they made it between the northern dorms, Audrey stopped and moved up to the side of one building between a pair of windows, waving Darren over.
“I think we’re safe,” she said when Darren pulled up beside her.
Darren dropped the bag and pulled it open. “I hope this was worth it.”
“Just give me a t-shirt, I’ll cut holes in it to see out of.”
Darren fumbled through a mix of jeans, bras, and shirts of various styles and thicknesses. He pulled out a small black shirt and handed it to Audrey. “Will this work?”
Audrey held it out in front of her. “This should be fine,” she said. “I can use a stapler to close up the neck and sleeves if we can find one.”
Darren found a larger shirt that looked like it had seen better days and kicked the bag out of the way. “Toss them in the backpack and let’s get out of here,” he said. “If we’re going to empty out this campus, we don’t have much time.”
Audrey opened the backpack when Darren turned around and through in the pair of shirts, zipping it back up. “Okay, they’re in.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
The pair walked to the front of the dorms where students were moving south or west toward the buildings scattered across the area. Darren hadn’t even thought about his own classes that he was missing, but nor did they matter now anyway. Everyone else was allowed to go about their daily lives, and he didn’t even think that they were going to be able to stop what was in the void. They were resorting to scaring everyone as far away from the void as they could, because they didn’t know what else to even try to do.