The Space Between Words

by Michele Phoenix

  The next sounds were closer. Well inside the concert hall.

  And they were not firecrackers.

  Three long bursts roared over the heavy metal. On my phone’s screen, I saw members of the band fumble. Their faces blanched as they lowered their instruments and stared aghast toward the back of the room. There seemed to be a moment of absolute silence. Then a single female’s voice shrieking into the deafening panic.

  More shots exploded, and I saw two bodies projected forward. The crowd surged away from the fallen forms and jolted as another shot rang out.

  “Sortez! Sortez par la scène!” a woman shielding two teenagers screamed over her shoulder as she pushed them toward the stage and away from the gunfire.

  Then, in an almost simultaneous, spontaneous reaction, the spectators dropped to the ground.

  I’m going to die. The thought flashed across my mind right before it slowed to stunned disbelief. The rounds were coming faster than I could count—long bursts that seemed to travel from one side of the room to the other. I wanted to get up and run. I wanted to dig through the floor to safety. I wanted to breathe, but even that seemed impossible in the unfolding horror.

  A man screamed, “Non! J’vous en prie—pas ma femme!” Please. Not my wife. Three shots in quick succession. Someone wailed.

  I felt my body turn cold as my mind began to comprehend the full horror of what I was witnessing. There was someone lying across my legs. A stranger behind me breathed fast and loud, swearing under his breath as more shots rang out. I lay motionless, staring at the shoulder of the woman in front of me. She was facing the other way and visibly shaking.

  “Cachez-vous!” one man yelled from the balcony, his scream cut short by shots fired in that direction.

  Hide? I thought, looking around for an escape. I was near the front of the hall, where metal barriers kept the crowd from accessing the stage. With a side wall at my back and the killers firing from the room’s main entrance, where could I possibly . . . ?

  Vonda. I moved just enough to steal a glance toward the balcony, but Vonda wasn’t where I’d left her. There was movement by the door on the far side, and I could see crouching forms pushing through it. Vonda.

  The shooters sounded closer now. I could hear them loading their weapons and speaking to each other in what sounded like perfect French.

  “Ça, c’est pour la Syrie.” The voice sounded young and casual. This is for Syria.

  Another shot. “Mon Dieu,” someone wailed. My God. Sobs mingled with screams as terrified spectators used short breaks between bursts of gunfire to try to escape the concert hall.

  I couldn’t breathe. I still held my phone, frozen in the act of documenting happy mayhem as the world fell off its axis and tumbled into terror. It took all the effort I could muster to bring it into view. I reached up with my other hand to swipe the phone on, then hit the dictation button in the messaging application. “Patrick,” I whispered. “I’m at the concert—”

  “Non!” The hissed order came from the man lying behind me. An arm reached around me and a hand gripped my wrist, pushing the phone out of sight. “They kill you if they see you,” a gruff voice whispered in heavily accented English. I couldn’t turn to look at him. I didn’t need to. The urgency in his words was persuasion enough.

  I couldn’t see beyond the woman prone in front of me, but my peripheral vision registered two figures rising from the ground. I lifted my head as they took off running for the stage, wanting to scream at them to stay down. Stay out of sight. The shots that stopped them came from the middle of the room. The first victim fell sideways over the barriers between the floor and the stage. The other fell forward as the side of his head exploded.

  I took a breath, desperate to scream and let some horror out, but the same hand that had gripped my arm earlier dug deeper.

  My vision seemed to darken. The room tilted. A heavy pulse pounded in my ears. More bursts of gunfire rang out and seemed to last forever. I looked down at the people lying beyond my feet. A blond man with blood seeping through his shirt from his abdomen. A woman nearby, her horrified gaze on him, her mouth open in silent sobs—love and survival battling in her eyes.

  My body began to shake as my breathing accelerated. I couldn’t get enough oxygen. I was suffocating—drowning. I pushed up off the floor. I had to move. I had to run. I had to get out before . . . before . . .

  Another muzzle flash. Up there. Off to the right. Then another on the other side of the room. Aimed toward . . . aimed toward me.

  The arm reached across me and pulled me back down to the floor. I struggled against its weight. “I can’t . . . I—please,” I begged, straining against the torture of immobility.

  “No,” the man barked English. “You stay! You stay!” He forced me back and held me down. Several spectators clambered onto the stage and took off running for the wings. A long burst of gunfire. A middle-aged man crumpled without sound, but the rest of them got away.

  “I can’t,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, tugging at the arm that held me down. “I need to—I don’t want to die—” I glanced down at the blond man at my feet and felt bile rising in my throat. He lay immobile, dark blood now saturating his shirt.

  “I will help you,” the voice behind me said. “When it’s the right time, I will help you run. Okay?”

  I nodded. There was something about the urgency and weight of his voice. I believed him.

  With eyes half-closed, I watched a shooter calmly making his way around the room, ignoring some who lunged away from him and shooting others point-blank. A woman crouching behind a large speaker whispered into her phone, tears streaming from terror-stricken eyes. He saw the light of her screen, raised his rifle, and ended her life.

  Another burst of gunfire traveled across the room, hitting wood, walls, and human flesh all around. The sound of agony was overwhelming, the silence just as strident as the screams.

  “When I tell you,” the man behind me said. “That’s when we run.”

  Shrieks erupted from the space behind the bar. Voices begged. Glass shattered.

  “Regarde moi, fils de pute!” one of the shooters yelled. Look at me. He was standing on the bar, aiming his gun behind it. I could see the shooter closest to me moving toward the back of the room.

  “Tu sais ce qui se passe en Syrie?” My mind struggled to translate what I was hearing over the roar of terror in my ears. You know what’s happening in Syria?

  There was an unintelligible answer.

  The second shooter joined him and said something. They laughed—they laughed like twelve-year-olds. A third terrorist came into view. I heard him say something, but couldn’t make it out. Four shots. More laughs and a high five. The taller of the three motioned with his gun toward the stairs that led to the balcony. One of them took off in that direction while the other two inserted fresh clips into their rifles. I saw people rushing toward the door in the balcony above the room. Hushed, urgent voices. They knew the shooter was coming.

  Vonda.

  “They’re getting away up there!” the men below yelled at his comrades.

  “Now!” the man behind me hissed.

  “Wha—?”

  He was on his feet, dragging me up by the arm and shoving me toward the barriers between us and the stage. “Go now!” he spat. “Go!” Then we were running. I could see others running too—risking their lives in a flight toward the exits.

  There was nothing in my mind but the desperate need to move, to get out, to escape. The man pushed me over the barriers hindering our access to the stage. There were bodies in the pit. Blood-drenched and shattered. I couldn’t falter. I couldn’t hesitate. I took two more steps, feeling bone and flesh under my feet, then reached the stage. The man heaved me up as if I weighed nothing. Bullets sprayed into the wood to our right, so we dodged left.

  It took an eternity to reach the wings. The stage was small, but my terror made it feel immense. Behind me, the man yelled, “Go—go—go!” More bullets lodged i
n the wood beneath our feet as we careened into the wings.

  Without thinking, I followed those who had made it there before me to a door toward the back, the elation of impending freedom mixing with the horror still quaking in my body.

  I stopped so suddenly that the stranger ran into me, propelling me forward into two others.

  The door was open, but there was nowhere to go. No exit into the Parisian streets. It was a closed space—a dressing room. And it was already so packed with terrified strangers that there was no space left for more.

  I heard a low moan—like a wounded animal begging for mercy. Then I realized the sound was coming from me.

  Another series of shots rang out—perhaps the longest yet.

  The stranger didn’t hesitate. He pushed me farther to the back of the stage and pulled me down next to him behind a pile of sound equipment cases. I cowered against the back wall, curled into a tight ball, and felt death crawling toward me like an inescapable tide. A violent shaking began at my core and spread outward.

  That’s when the tears started. When the shock began to wear off and the certainty of death set in.

  SEVENTEEN

  “AMÉRICAINE?” THE STRANGER ASKED.

  My tears had ended. There was no room for them—the terror was too deep. Too numbing. My body ached with tension. We’d sat behind the pile of equipment for what felt like hours. It was probably only minutes.

  “Yes,” I answered, my voice unsteady. “American.”

  He ventured out from behind our protective barrier, crawling far enough to get a look at the other side of the stage. His jaw was set when he returned.

  He seemed to search for the English words. “The exit,” he finally said. “It’s on the other side.”

  “On the other side of the stage?” Despair gnawed at my courage. “But . . . how can we get there?”

  He shrugged. It was such a French gesture that it almost elicited a smile from me. Then the enormity of the risk set in. We could either wait in the dead end of the wings and hope that no one would come looking, or we could try to escape across the stage, exposed to the killers, and find the emergency exit on the other side.

  From the sounds reaching us, I could only imagine the horror still playing out in the Bataclan’s concert hall. Mingling with the screams and agonizing groans, the distinct voices of the terrorists spoke to each other between bursts of gunfire—one of them tense, while the others sounded calm and measured. There were fragments of sentences I understood. Something that sounded like, “Tell this to your president” and “Now you know what it feels like.”

  The pleas of victims. “I beg you. Please.”

  “Allahu Akbar.” Softly spoken. Followed by two shots and a laugh from somewhere in the room.

  A protracted, high-pitched scream broke through the stupor in my mind. A shiver crawled down my spine as my lungs spasmed over constricted breath. The stranger leaned out from behind our precarious shelter and froze. I leaned out too.

  A young man moved into my line of sight, crawling from the stage toward the door of the dressing room where dozens of people waited for death or deliverance. He used only his arms to drag his limp body. There was blood spatter on his face, a look of disbelief and terror in his gaze. I heard steps following him. He looked forward, into the shadows of the wings, and saw me cowering behind the sound equipment.

  “Aidez-moi,” he mouthed as his eyes shifted to my rescuer. Help me. “Aidez . . .”

  A shadow stepped into sight, outlined by the lights still streaming from the stage. The young man looked back—slowly, agonizingly. “Non,” he begged. His eyes skimmed over me as he turned forward again and tried to crawl farther with his arms, the lower part of his body lifeless.

  I heard a metallic click. He inched a bit farther. “Aidez-moi,” he begged of no one in particular, his voice hoarse and breaking.

  Another metallic sound. Metal against metal. An arm came out in front of me and pushed me farther into the darkness. Two quick shots and the sound of a slumping body.

  I began to scream, but the stranger covered my mouth before any sound escaped. He backed me against the wall and brought his face within an inch of mine. “No,” he hissed, his eyes fierce with fear, his hand still on my mouth. He brought a finger to his lips and motioned for me to be quiet, but my body was no longer responding to my mind’s commands. Sounds of disbelief and horror rose from my chest like vomit, desperate to escape, frantic to be heard.

  A spasm arched my back and seized my lungs. My rescuer’s gaze softened as he moved his hand over my nose. I kicked and tore at his fingers, craving oxygen. “Stop,” he whispered, tears in his eyes. “Stop. Please.”

  Darkness crept its way into my terror. It softened the sharpness of my desperation. Consciousness diminished. Rigid muscles grew limp. My legs stopped kicking. I looked into the stranger’s eyes as my body struggled to breathe and my mind surrendered to the darkness.

  When I came to, he was still beside me. I could hear my pulse beating in my ears and breath returning to my tortured lungs. There was no color in his face. “I’m sorry,” he said when I stirred, shaking his head. “I hurt you . . .” He glanced toward the landing, where the boy’s body still lay. “I had to. If the terrorist had heard us . . .”

  He leaned against the wall beside me, a pallor to his face that hadn’t been there before. Something in his expression scared me—something fragile. I sat up and turned toward him. His breathing seemed labored. Sweat stains ringed the collar and armpits of the gray T-shirt he wore.

  “I need to know your name,” I whispered.

  “Quoi?”

  “I need to know your name.” His face swam out of focus as my eyes filled with tears. Tears of terror. Tears of shock. Tears of gratitude. “Before we . . .” I glanced at the stage. “Before we go out there,” I said, hiccupping on a sob. “I need to know your name.”

  “Bernard,” he said, his voice gruff.

  “Jessica.”

  He nodded, perhaps understanding my need for a semblance of humanity in the evil permeating the concert hall. He winced and dropped his head back against the wall.

  “Bernard, are you okay?” I kneeled in front of him. “Bernard . . .”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head as if to clear it. “Yes,” he said, wincing as he shifted his position. “Yes. I think maybe I got a bit hurt. When we . . .” He jutted his chin toward the stage. “When we were running.”

  That’s when I saw the blood seeping around from the back of his shirt. I felt myself blanch. “Bernard . . .”

  “C’est juste une égratinure,” he said, smiling bravely. “Just a—how you say it?—a scratch.”

  I moved to his other side and helped him lean forward from the wall. I couldn’t tell whether the bullet had penetrated his body or just skimmed it, but from the amount of fresh blood coming from the wound halfway down his rib cage, I suspected the injury was serious.

  “It’s more than a scratch . . .” A new wave of fear washed over me.

  “We need to get out,” he said. I saw courage and determination come over his face like a mask. He took a deep breath and rose to a kneeling position. Then he put out his hand for me to help him to his feet. I wanted to curl into a corner, cover my ears, and surrender to the shock that muddied the edges of my consciousness, but a visceral survival instinct drove me to do everything to escape.

  We edged forward together. From our position, I could see across the expanse between where we sat and the wings on the other side. Discarded instruments still lay where they’d been dropped. The monitors still hummed. The exit was close and unimaginably far. I tried not to picture myself being shot—dying—in the distance between cornered and free.

  A burst of bullets slammed into the back wall as more spectators tried to escape onto the stage. I didn’t stop to wonder how many had died this time. It was no use. The carnage, I knew, was already beyond measure.

  “We wait until they’re shooting again,” Bernard said beside m
e. I looked into his grizzled face. Into the kindness and resignation of his gaze. “More than one. When more than one of them are shooting at . . . at someone else. That’s when we run. Yes?”

  I nodded, trying not to imagine those whose deaths would distract the killers while we attempted to escape.

  We crept closer to the light coming off the stage. There was no gunman in my line of vision, so I inched farther yet. The smell of gunpowder was overwhelming. I could see bodies. Pools of blood.

  Bernard leaned in behind me as we surveilled what we could from our vantage point. At the back of the room, behind the sound station, four people stood and ran in a crouch toward the main entrance. Two men and two women. Utterly silent. Bullets hit the edge of the balcony as they ran beneath it and rushed toward the lobby. A burst of gunfire hit the pillars from another angle.

  “Two shooters,” Bernard hissed. “Two shooters. Go—go—go!”

  I ran. I ran and tried not to scream and kept moving past corpses sprawled across the stage, and when I stepped into blood and stumbled to my knees, my legs kept pumping, sending me slowed and crawling toward the safety ahead. I felt the bullets flying around me more than I heard them. I was still four feet from the wings when Bernard’s hands gripped me by the shoulders and pulled me to my feet. I felt his chest behind me the moment before he propelled me forward with a guttural cry.

  Then I fell hard on the floor inside the wings and looked over my shoulder to Bernard, my protector. The stranger who had rescued me. He lay on the stage, his face turned toward the exit, but his eyes stared blankly. Blood poured from a wound just below his collarbone and from his shattered shin. “Bernard!” I screamed. Then I screamed his name again. I waited a moment—an eternity—for him to move, desperate for a sign of life. There was none. I pushed myself up, crying out in pain, and I ran.

  Through the metal exit door stained with bloody handprints. Over the wounded and dying in the alley beyond. I ran—screaming—until the pain in my abdomen halted my flight.