by Liz Crowe
He tried Kieran again. This time his friend answered on the first ring. “We’re in the gym,” he said, his voice even breathier than before. “There are two of them in here, and both have guns. Big guns. Not shot guns. Semi-automatics.”
“Okay. All right. I’m gonna come in through the locker rooms. I still have my key. I’ll get them, Kieran, I promise you that.”
“No! I mean, they’re just kids, Terry. Let me handle it in here. I think there’s another one out roaming the halls and tossing smoke bombs.” He coughed. “The building’s full of smoke.”
“Why are you in the gym? Who’s in there with you?”
“Assembly,” Kieran whispered. “Honor roll kids, talking about their responsibilities during graduation.”
A scream broke through their conversation. Then a blat of gunfire. Then silence.
“Mother fucker!” He wrenched the steering wheel to the left and drove across the large front lawn of the school, barely getting the truck stopped before he jumped out, gun pulled and ready, wishing for his fellow Operators but knowing this was up to him now.
A third unfriendly, he remembered Kieran saying. Someone else roaming the halls, perhaps heading down the wide music wing and hearing the kids in the choir room with Mariah. His Mariah.
Ignoring the locals—something he’d gotten used to doing in the godforsaken desert—he snuck around the athletic entrance, pondering his next move. Torn between wanting to take down the unfriendlies and running to get Mariah the hell out of the building, he used his key and ran silently down the steps to the locker rooms, underneath the big gym. He could her the murmur of voices above him, but no gunfire, no screams. He crept up the tunnel flight of stairs that opened into the northwest corner of the gym and waited, counting his breaths, feeling his steady, calm pulse.
“We can work this out,” he heard Kieran say.
“Oh we’ll work it out all right, Principal Love,” someone replied, a sneer of disgust in his voice.
Terry risked a peek around the corner to get his bearings and sort out the configuration of the players. Kieran was in the middle of the gym floor with two other teachers and a handful of kids. The gunmen, two of them, stood facing them. The bleachers behind were filled—forty or maybe fifty kids all together. He ducked back into the dark tunnel hallway. He could get off two shots fast and take those punks down one by one.
“They’re just kids,” Kieran had said.
Fuck that. They took up arms and stormed their own school with malice and ill intent. He was gonna frack the little assholes. One hit to the forehead each. They’d never know what hit ‘em. He counted to ten to steady himself.
When he hit five he heard someone yell, “Hey! This shitwad’s texting.”
“No, no,” some other kid, presumably the shitwad in question, bleated. “No, I’m not. I promise. Please don’t…please!”
Several screams and gunshots sounded all at once. Terry rounded the corner in a crouched and ready stance, his eyes seeing but his brain not even half-believing. Just then, the main gym doors blew open, revealing the locals.
Kieran lay on the floor, but not where he’d been sitting before. He must have run at the gunman and taken a full frontal hit. He was crumpled on the floor in front of the bleachers full of screaming, crying kids.
Terry frowned, took aim and squeezed the trigger at the precise moment both of the punk ass, gun-toting kids’ heads exploded forward. Someone else had nailed them from behind. Shaking, he ran past the melee and into the hall, down towards the music wing. At one point, the smoke forced him to crawl on his belly, but he didn’t care. He had to get to her.
When he reached the hallway alongside the theater that housed the band and choir rooms, he bolted down the short flight of steps, seeing the open choir door before he got to it, knowing what that meant.
“Everybody, show me your faces,” a voice inside the room was saying. Whimpering and movement followed. Terry stood once again with his back to the wall, listening around the corner to some snot-nosed, spoiled brat punk threaten a bunch of his peers—and Mariah. He closed his eyes for a second, then rounded the corner.
“If you don’t drop that gun and fall on your face right now I will blow your mother fucking brains all over this room,” he bellowed, moving closer, holding the Beretta level with the kid’s head. He spotted Mariah standing in front of the group with both arms out, as if she could protect the entire room from that punk’s weapon. An impressive weapon, he noted, as it dropped to the floor the way he knew it would. He snagged it and shoved his knee into the punk’s back, then into his neck good and hard once he’d collapsed to the floor.
“Your buddies are dead, asshole. Stay still, or you’ll be joining them in hell, get me?” He ground down. The kid sniveled, and nodded. Terry motioned for Mariah to get the kids out. “Go down the side hall, get them onto the lawn. Now. We don’t know who’s left.” He grabbed her arm. “Stay outside with them. If you never do another god damned thing I tell you to, do that, please.”
She nodded and helped shoo the frantic kids out and down the hall. He yanked the kid up by his arm and shoved him up against the wall as he looked around for something to secure his wrists.
Duct tape.
Perfect.
He wrapped the shooter’s wrists tight and tugged him out and down to the main hall, now clearing thanks to open doors at either end of the building.
“Kieran,” he yelled, wanting to hear his friend’s voice so badly he could barely stand it. An EMT crew dashed past him. A quick glance through the open doors revealed cops, firefighters, and a news crew, naturally. And a ton of anxious faces held back at the barricades. “Oh hell, Kieran,” he muttered under his breath as he shoved the kid into the gym and motioned for a cop.
“Holy shit, is that you Terry?” The officer who approached him was someone he knew, but at that moment, Terry’s eyes were on the tall, redheaded man splayed out on his back, being attended to by four paramedics. The floor underneath him was crimson with blood. The room was awash with uniforms, but it had been cleared of kids. Two blue tarps had been tossed over the assailants. Five more blue tarps covered other bodies, people he likely knew, had worked with or coached. His jaw ached from clenching it.
He shoved the duct-taped kid at the cop. “Here. This one had the music room held hostage.” He holstered his gun and dropped to his knees as close to Kieran as he could get. “Oh God, my friend, I’m sorry I didn’t have my phone on me. Shit. God damn it. Kieran, open your eyes.” Tears blurred his vision as the EMTs lifted his friend’s body onto a stretcher, popped it up and ran out of the gym, one of them holding an IV bag aloft, another one straddling him on the gurney, giving continual chest compressions.
Terry stood amidst a familiar sort of carnage—odors of smoke, spent ammunition and blood up in his nose. When he spotted Mariah at the open gym doors, he ran for her, furious at her for not doing what he said, but never happier to see anyone in his entire life.
She leapt into his arms, sobbing against his neck. He soothed as best he could, while he kept an eye on the team transporting his friend’s bloody, lifeless body down the hall of the high school to the waiting ambulance outside.
She pulled away from him, tears running down her dark, beautiful face. “I love you, Terry. I love you so much. Please forgive me. Please, ask me again, ask me right now.”
He blinked and sucked in a breath. “I love you too, Mariah,” he said, brushing at her tears with his thumbs, his heart thudding in his chest. “But I need to go with him right now. Come with me? He’s my friend and his family is gonna need me…need us. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, taking his hand and running with him out into the hot, muggy, April air. As they jumped into his truck the heavens broke open with a flash of lightning and an ear-splitting clap of thunder. The rain hit the windshield hard and fast, but he focused ahead and they made it to the hospital right behind the ambulance.
“Wait,” Mariah said, grabbing his hand and putting
it to her face. “Terry, listen to me.”
He turned to her, his neck stiff, jaw still clenched. She blinked fast and kept his hand pressed to her chest. “I love you. I want to marry you. I want us to be together. Please tell me I’m not too late.” Tears streamed down her face. He leaned over the console, pulling her to meet him halfway. “Please,” she whispered, her lips mere inches from his.
He kissed her then, going deep, needing to feel it, wanting her to feel it. She grabbed his shirt, closing her fists in the fabric. When he broke from her, he was dizzy, but not just from lust, not this time. “You’re sure?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
Reaching into the console he found the ring box and pulled it out, grabbed her shaking hand and slid the small but tasteful diamond set in platinum onto her finger. They both stared at it a few seconds, then at each other. She smiled, and the sight of it filled all the holes in his soul, overflowing them once more with hope.
“I love you,” he whispered, trying it out again. She smiled.
“I love you too.”
A car screeched in next to them in the emergency room parking lot. He saw Dominic jump out, his eyes wild with panic. A van pulled in next. “We need to go to them now,” he said, touching her full lips.
“Okay. I’ll stay with you. As long as you need me to.”
As they walked into the ER, he clutched at her hand. He hated hospitals.
“I want to get married in June,” she whispered, calming him in an instant. “That work for you?”
He smiled and put her knuckles to his lips. “I want to have a baby next May. That work for you?”
She looked down, biting her lip, then back up at him. “Yeah. That works for me.”
“Good, now let’s go. I need to make sure my friend’s all right.”
She nodded. And at that moment, a small, but crucial portion of Terry O’Leary’s life finally slid into place.
The End
Want to know more about the Love family from Marking Mariah?
There’s an entire series about them that includes the dramatic events at Lucasville High School. Each book can be read as a stand-alone novel, but a recommended reading order is:
Love Garage
Safe Love (the Love Brothers Novella)
Coach Love
Love Brewing
Family Love
About The Author
Amazon best-selling author, mom of three, Realtor, beer blogger, brewery marketing expert, and soccer fan, Liz Crowe is a Kentucky native and graduate of the University of Louisville currently living in Ann Arbor. She has decades of experience in sales and fund raising, plus an eight-year stint as a three-continent, ex-pat trailing spouse.
With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, in successful real estate offices and at times in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are unique and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete casts of characters that will delight, frustrate and linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.
Don’t ever ask her for anything “like a Budweiser” or risk bodily injury.
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Recommendations/endorsements:
“Liz Crowe has an uncanny ability to reach into the heart and soul of her characters and make her stories come to life in gritty realism that hits all the emotions.”
–International Best Selling Author Desiree Holt
Liz Crowe writes intense true-to-life stories that make you feel. Whether it’s anxiety, love, fear, hate, bliss, or loss woven into her plot lines, you will feel it deep down to your very soul.
—Audrey Carlan, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author
“I’ve learned to expect the unexpected with any Liz Crowe novel—along with 3-dimensional characters and well-written, realistic plots.”
—USA Today best-selling author AM Hargrove
“Liz Crowe is my drug of choice for unconventional romance that pushes the envelope of my comfort zone.”
—Best Selling Author of the Enigma Series, Ditter Kellan