by Ninie Hammon
Jack concentrated, drew a diagram of the room in his head. It was shoe-box shaped. The door was at the front of the room. To the right of the door was a wall with bulletin boards and blackboards. The teacher’s desk sat on the far wall by the windows. To the left of the door, storage units and supply closets lined the hallway-side wall; a sink unit and bookshelves formed the back wall of the room. Desks ran in rows, four, maybe six across, facing the blackboards. On the window wall, Jack could see that the shades had been lowered.
There was activity in the room. Besides the cries of the children, he could hear the sounds of desks scooting across the floor, or falling on it. He tried to picture what was going on inside, but the sounds didn’t produce an image. Why were they moving desks? To shove them in front of the door, barricade it shut? If that happened, the tactical approach would change. Absent gunfire, it would become a hostage situation, and the hostage negotiation specialists would be called.
But Jack’s gut told him the shooter didn’t intend to take the children hostage. He intended to kill them.
* * * * * * *
As the children began to appear out of the tangle of desks in the back corner of the room, they obediently lined up in terrified rows in front of the man in the baseball cap, who grinned at them amicably. Bishop stood and moved toward the front of the room along the wall of windows. A plan was forming in his head, not a particularly good one, but the only one he had. He hoped to get slightly behind the shooter, who stood next to the hall side wall with his back to the partially opened door. Soon as the man glanced the other way, Bishop would jump him.
You old fool. You can’t move fast enough to get out of the way of a golf cart. You think you can cross the whole width of this room and land on that man before he turns and shoots you?’
No, Bishop didn’t have much hope that he could. But he had to do something, wouldn’t stand by and do nothing while the creature of wasps massacred these children. And make no mistake about it, the creature was calling the shots. Oh, Dumas wasn’t totally a puppet. If he exerted enough force of will—or was crazy enough—he could act on his own. But the black cloud/mist/wasp creature settled around the outside of his head was the mirror image of a creature on the inside, and wasn’t no easy thing a’tall to defy what that cloud wanted you to do.
“Now, who wants to be the first one with a bullet in the brain?” the man beneath the swarm of wasps asked in an exaggerated stage whisper. His face remained pleasant, but a small stream of drool now escaped from the right side of his mouth and edged down his chin.
The terrified children whimpered and stared at him. The little blond boy on the far end—Dr. Hamilton, the dentist’s little boy—wet himself, but didn’t know it. If the children had been younger, there’d have been no controlling them; they’d have run screaming in every direction no matter what anybody said. Maybe the creature of wasps would have tried to mow them all down, but some of them might have escaped. Not these children. At age ten, they were old enough and well-behaved enough to do as they were told. They were sheep being led to the slaughter.
“You need to tell me now,” the creature rumbled at Bishop, and Bishop thought he heard something like concern in its voice.
“You there, fatso,” Dumas said to the chubby little girl who had told Bishop she didn’t want to die, “how about you show the others how to hold your breath—permanently.”
“Mommy,” the child cried. “I want my mommy.”
Bishop took another step backward. He had now backed up almost to Miss Lund’s desk—oh, that precious girl—and tensed his old muscles to lunge.
“Next time your mommy sees you, you’re going to be zipped up in a body bag.” The man laughed, an ugly, shrill sound like the cry of a seagull.
Something outside the shattered door caught Bishop’s attention. He cut his eyes in that direction, didn’t turn his whole head. Crouched there behind an open locker door on the other side of the hallway was a police officer.
CHAPTER 5
He saw me!
Jack was certain the old man—must be a janitor—had spotted him. Would he give away Jack’s position? The locker unit on the east side stood directly across from the classroom door, so Jack wasn’t crouched behind a locker unit and an open door—only the open locker door, which offered zero real protection. If the shooter stepped to the doorway and started firing, Jack would literally be a sitting duck.
But shooters were notoriously bad shots. Contrary to the myth created by cop shows and cowboy movies, it was seriously difficult to deliver a mortal wound to a moving target, and Jack would definitely be moving. Jack would have a chance and that’s all he asked. Because if the shooter showed himself, Jack would shoot, too. And Jack wouldn’t miss.
Nothing about the janitor’s countenance changed. Either he hadn’t actually seen Jack, or he’d had the presence of mind not to let the shooter know Jack was there. Then the old man spoke. He had a booming, James Earl Jones voice and he had the volume turned up loud; Jack had no trouble hearing him above the crying children.
“You children hush now and do what the man says,” the janitor said. “Mrs. Waznuski, get them bunched up right here in the middle of the room. Close together nice and tight.”
He gestured as he spoke and Jack realized the old man was getting all the children in one spot and telling Jack where they were! Letting him know they were all in a tight group in the area where the desks were located. Apparently, the desks had been moved.
Then the janitor turned toward the wall that backed on the hallway, angled his body to face a spot a little way past the partially open door and spoke again in the same loud voice.
“That where you want ’em, boss?” the old man asked.
The shooter was standing against the wall behind the door.
* * *
It seemed to Bishop that the man in the cap turned toward him in slow motion.
“I don’t recall asking for any help,” the shooter said. There was a razor edge of restrained rage in the words and he swung the rifle back in Bishop’s direction. At that moment, Bishop understood that the number of heartbeats he had left was not a two-digit number. Apparently, the wasp creature had come to the same conclusion, because it instantly came apart, lost the form it had assumed and merely swarmed in a whirling cyclone around the man’s head, shrieking with a thousand voices at once, “No!”
“My mama always did say my big mouth was gonna get me in trouble one of these days.” Though his insides were trembling like Jell-o hit with a fork and his heart was thumping so hard his vision pulsed, Bishop’s voice was firm, didn’t shake. He was glad of that. A man had ought to die with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed.
Did that cop get what he was trying to tell him? Does he know where that monster’s standin’?
Bishop knew he’d never find out the answer to either question, and watched in fascinated horror as the wasps swirled around the man’s head so fast they were a blur of motion that totally obscured his features.
The man in the Reds ball cap lifted his rifle, pointed it at Bishop’s chest.
“Looks like you ain’t gone find out what you come here to find out,” Bishop said to the creature.
“No!” the monster shrieked in the man’s face. “You fool, don’t shoo—!”
That was the last sound Bishop Washington ever heard.
* * *
If this had been a training exercise, Tactical Training Officer Jack Carpenter could have spent an entire afternoon going over in great detail how everything he was about to do was wrong.
After all, he was only guessing where the shooter was. Guessing where the children were. Guessing none of them would be in the line of fire.
“Guessing will get you killed,” he’d said at least a thousand times.
And he’d be exposing himself to close-range, lethal fire. He’d be so near the shooter the man wouldn’t even have to aim—just point the shotgun in his direction and pull the trigger. You didn’t have to be a crac
k shot to hit a man with a shotgun blast from ten feet away. If he was wrong about where the shooter was standing, didn’t drop him with the first shot, there’d be no second chance.
All of that passed through Jack’s mind between one eye blink and the next, and none of it mattered. He had three, maybe four seconds and then kids were going to start dying.
Even before the old man’s body crashed into the teacher’s desk, Jack was moving. He shoved the locker door out of his way, exploded out of a crouch, launched himself across the hallway, and dived through the partially open door into the room, turning his body in the air, lifting his rifle as he flew. Jack’s eyes were fixed on the hallway side wall of the classroom before his body ever cleared the doorway. His rifle was already aimed at that spot even before the man in the baseball cap came into view.
The janitor had given his life to draw Jack a picture, and the reality was exactly as he’d painted it. Shooter in front of the supply closets on the hallway side wall. Check. Children bunched together in the center of the room, out of the line of fire. Check. Jack pulled the trigger three times. Fired three rounds so close together it almost sounded like one shot. Two rounds in the chest, the biggest target, then one shot to the head.
The first round caught the man dead center of the chest and likely plowed a hole right through him and out the other side. Obviously, the man wasn’t wearing body armor. The second was lower, left side. The third planted a red splotch in his forehead above his right eye. He’d been swinging his rifle back toward the children after shooting the janitor, and reflexively pulled the trigger. The round blasted a hole in the floor less than a foot in front of a little girl in pigtails who probably didn’t even realize she was sucking her thumb.
Jack’s body hit the floor and slid toward the dead janitor. He hadn’t even stopped sliding when Purvis appeared in the doorway half a step behind him, back to the shattered door, then spun around it, rifle pointed where Jack had fired. When he saw the gunman on the floor, he rushed to him, rifle aimed at the crumpled figure, and kicked away the shotgun the man had dropped as he fell.
“One shooter down. Repeat, one shooter down,” Jack gasped into his mic as he sat up. “Still checking for additional shooters.”
“Copy, one shooter down.”
He knew Ramirez and Peterson had moved on to the classroom down the hall where the lock had also been blown out of the door.
Paco appeared in the doorway and gave him a thumbs-up. “Clear,” he said. “Classroom’s empty.” He held up a hand with a pale blue streak across the palm. “Fresh paint.”
While Peterson covered the door—this building was hours away from being declared “safe,” Ramirez grabbed the cloth off a table under the window and covered the body of a blonde woman whose face had been blown away. The teacher. There was nothing left in the room to cover the dead janitor.
Jack set his rifle on the floor and rose. Though Purvis kept his own rifle trained on the body, he stepped away from the man on the floor. Until a paramedic or the coroner said so, you never assumed a suspect was dead—even one missing most of the right side of his brain. Jack had shot the man, and black-humor law enforcement etiquette was clear. You bag it, you pack it. So it would be Jack’s job to turn the body over, cuff the shooter’s hands behind his back and secure the weapons and ammo belts.
Jack stepped to the shooter, stood for a moment looking down at him. A distinct unwashed-body/dirty clothes stink, mixed with the copper smell of blood, wafted up from the body. Then Jack turned to examine the children.
They were clustered together, white from terror, some crying, some catatonic, all with a look on their faces he’d seen before, a look of vacant, hollow-eyed shock occasioned by horror way beyond a child’s capacity to process. He’d seen it on children’s faces in Kosovo and Somalia and Rwanda. An older woman who must have been the teacher’s aide stood in the center of them like Mother Goose and they clung to her skirt for comfort. She gazed at Jack with such profound wonder and gratitude, he was suddenly embarrassed.
He turned aside and keyed the mic on his shoulder.
“No children injured,” he said into it.
Despite the dispatcher’s professional control, Jack could hear the joy and relief in the woman’s response.
“Copy that, no children injured.”
What happened next always replayed in Jack’s memory in a series of snapshots, black and white with harsh relief and dark puddles of shadows.
Click-click.
The look of surprise on Purvis’s face when they both heard a sound behind Jack, behind the shooter lying on the floor.
Click-click.
The room blurred from the speed of Jack drawing his handgun from its holster, turning and pointing it with both hands in the direction of the noise—all in one motion.
Click-click.
A little girl with long, chestnut-colored curls standing in the now open door of the storage closet behind the shooter, a red smudge of blood blossoming in the middle of the Minnie Mouse face of her tee shirt.
Click-click.
Her huge pale blue eyes locked on Jack’s with a look that wasn’t fear. Surprise, maybe even…compassion?
Then Miranda Burke’s eyes closed and she collapsed in a heap on top of the body of the shooter on the floor in front of her.
CHAPTER 6
He had heard the knocking for some time—a few minutes? A few days?—but ignored it. Daniel Burke had stopped pacing. Now, he sat quietly on the couch in the family room, his phone in his hand. He set the timer on it for five minutes. Every time the buzzer sounded, he called Emily. He heard the ring, ring, ring echoing off damp rock walls of dark chambers deep in his soul. She didn’t pick up; he left no messages. When her voicemail kicked in, he listened to the carefree sound of her voice. Then he hung up, started the timer again and stared into a vast nothingness that had opened up on the floor in front of him.
The banging on the door got louder. Someone was standing on the porch, calling his name.
“Pastor Burke, open the door!”
It was Clarice Shutterbaum from next door. He might even have ignored her knock on a normal day, a day in which everything he believed was true hadn’t come loose and floated out to sea.
“Pastor Burke!”
He looked up, startled. Clarice had obviously gone around to the deck, to the door beside the puddle of vomit he’d spewed out. When she found it unlocked, she walked right in. He was so surprised by such audacious rudeness he merely stared at her in wonder.
“I know I shouldn’t have come in here like this, but you wouldn’t answer the door and I could see your car in the driveway, so I knew you were home.”
He felt rage rising in him, flickering the pure blue of a gas flame. It wasn’t anger at Clarice, but she was a convenient target. He got to his feet and glared down at her. Though he had an open, friendly face and warm brown eyes, at six feet tall he was almost a foot taller than his chubby neighbor, and the sudden tension in her as she looked up at him was satisfying. She even took a tentative step back.
“If I’d wanted to talk to you, Clarice, chances are I’d have answered the door. A reasonable person would take that to mean they weren’t wanted and should go away!”
He took her elbow and started to give her a bum’s rush to the front door.
“Pastor, wait.” She shook off his grasp and kept at him, determined as a rat terrier.
“Your little girl, Andi—she goes to Carlisle doesn’t she?” All the air whooshed out of Daniel so fast he was surprised there was no accompanying wind sound.
“What about Andi?”
“Didn’t you hear the sirens?”
He had heard sirens, but he’d ignored them.
“What do the sirens have to do with Andi?”
“Pastor, there’s been a shooting at her school. It’s all over the news. They’re saying thirty or forty kids have been shot, dead kids and teachers laying everywhere.”
Daniel let go of her elbow and rushed pa
st her to the door, without ever forming a clear intent to do anything.
“They’re telling parents to stay away, not to go congregating down at the school.”
He left the front door standing open and burst into a run toward his car.
“You can’t do anything. You’ll only get in the way.”
He slammed the car door, dragged the keys out of his pocket and started the engine.
“Last I heard there was still shooting! You shouldn’t go down there, Pastor. You—”
He didn’t hear the rest. He slammed the transmission into reverse, tore out of the driveway and peeled rubber as he squalled down the street.
* * * * * * *
She couldn’t hear no gunfire, a block away and tucked in behind a hedge like she and the children were. Bishop had been pestering her for years, saying she’d ought to get hearing aids. But the children could hear gunshots. Or said they could.
Then they all jumped at the same time, so they must have been able to hear something.
“That’s a shotgun,” said a freckle-faced boy of about eleven, awe tingeing his speech. “The other one was an automatic, but that’s a shotgun.”
“Are there two of them, then?” a scrawny black boy asked.
Theresa knew how many there were. She’d seen it. They was only one.
“How do you know ith a shotgun?” asked the strong-willed little redhead. “Maybe ith a bomb.”
“It’s a shotgun,” the boy persisted. “My daddy uses one to kill the gophers on my grampa’s farm. I can tell by the sound.”