by Tom Barber
‘Which daughter?’
‘He was saying Ally. He said he couldn’t find her among the kids.’
‘There’s one man…left,’ Ledger got out. ‘Shot him in…the leg. Unless you …already got… him.’
Archer looked at him for a moment, realising there was a good chance his niece was still somewhere in the building with one of the armed men still alive.
‘I’ll find her,’ he said, transferring Ledger’s weight onto Jesse. ‘Go!’
FIFTY SEVEN
Sarah had been outside the burning office building off Washington Circle being attended to, when she’d become aware of increased activity around her. She was told an EMT paramedic had gone to see why a couple of his colleagues hadn’t returned from the building next door to find them tied to a pipe. She’d heard that the two EMTs were saying Sam Archer had been responsible, securing them to the pipe before taking off with the kid, apparently saying they had to get to Reagan Junior High.
As the police had called it in, they were told that reports of gunshots from the school were just being received at that moment.
Arriving in a Metro squad car twenty minutes later, an anxious Sarah and the officers with her pulled up just in time to see Harry Ledger being helped out of the building by the teenage boy she recognised as the one who’d been at her office earlier.
Looking around in panic, searching through the mass of parents, teachers and kids, Sarah couldn’t see any sign of her husband or their two girls anywhere.
As Ledger appeared, a stream of shouted orders to get down came from the officers in the parking lot; Jesse stopped, helping the wanted man to the concrete, officers moving forward to detain them both.
Sarah suddenly spotted Jack who appeared to be arguing with several officers, Maia standing beside another officer close by. But there was no sign of Ally.
‘Jack!’ she shouted, trying the car door which wouldn’t open. She hammered on the glass, stuck in the cop car, attracting the attention of one of the two officers who’d just got out of the vehicle, the man turning back and opening it for her.
As she shouted her husband’s name again, Maia saw her mother and pulled the officer over.
‘My other daughter is still inside!’ Jack was saying to the cops.
‘We’ll get her,’ they said. ‘But you can’t go back in there!’
Thirty feet away, the Metro ERT team were piling out of their van, getting ready to storm their second school of the day, more detailed reports now coming from parents who’d been in the auditorium. Finally hearing his wife shouting his name, Jack ran over and reached Sarah just as Maia got there.
‘Ally and Sam are still inside!’
‘They think he’s a suspect!’ she said, looking at the armed cops preparing to move in. ‘They’ll kill him!’
Inside the school, the fire alarm still sounding through the empty corridors, Archer moved out into the ground floor hallway, his senses on full alert.
Looking down, he saw a trail of blood going left from what remained of the front entrance, down the side corridor that led towards the pool.
One man left.
Making his way silently down the corridor, he suddenly jerked his rifle up and saw the man who he’d shot by the pool only a few minutes ago crawling up to the stairs, covered in burns. The guy was as tough as nails; despite being set on fire and taking rounds to the legs somehow he’d survived, but the significant blood smear he was leaving behind him on the floor indicated that wasn’t going to be the case for long.
Archer was just in time to see him reach into a black holdall sitting at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Don’t move!’ he shouted, lifting his rifle.
Turning his head and seeing Archer, the man slumped and went limp, blood pooling out from his mouth.
Running forward, his rifle trained on the man, Archer looked into the bag and saw it contained a transparent black box packed full with those dark, petroleum-filled balls that had annihilated Sarah’s office building earlier.
There were three lights on the timer on the top; two of them were red.
One was green.
Racing back the way he’d just come, Archer frantically started checking the classrooms as he passed, no sign of his niece or the remaining operative.
They could be anywhere in the building, and in seconds this place was going to be completely levelled.
‘Ally!’ he shouted. ‘Ally!’
In desperation, he ran to the space at the end of the corridor where the front doors used to be, in the hope she’d already run outside.
However, he quickly snapped back as he saw a Metro ERT team poised to make their assault on the building, active shooter policy. They still thought he was a suspect; if they found him in here with a gun, they’d kill him.
But if they came closer, they were all going to be killed in the blast.
Then he saw movement down the corridor and swung his rifle up.
Ally had just appeared from one of the side classrooms, stopping dead in her tracks when she saw her uncle pointing the weapon at her. Sprinting forward while slinging the rifle over his shoulder, Archer scooped her up and ran up two flights of stairs, smashing open the door to the roof.
He accidentally kicked a black antenna device placed just beyond the door as he ran towards the edge of the roof, but didn’t even notice it, the vision very clear in his head of what that bomb would do to this building and anyone in it.
Seeing there was no way of escape from where they were, he turned and ran back towards the door.
He and Ally were completely trapped.
‘He’s trying to help!’ Sarah shouted again from the car, Jack urgently telling the officers the same thing.
‘Go!’ the ERT Commander ordered, the team advancing towards the door.
Remembering how fast fire had roared through the office building, Archer sprinted back down the stairs to the 1st floor, Ally clinging onto him as he desperately tried to think of a way to survive.
They were going to be vaporised any second.
Then he thought of something.
Racing through the empty upper floor corridors, he smashed open a door at the end with his shoulder and sprinted through.
Outside by the ERT truck, the task force commander had heard the woman in the cop car shouting that Archer was trying to help. The messages on his radio, which had suddenly burst into life, were saying the same thing.
‘Commander?’ Sorenson’s voice suddenly came through over the radio as his team moved towards the school.
‘Sir, I hear you. Our radios haven’t been working.’
‘What’s your status?’
‘My team are executing their assault plan.’
‘Sam Archer isn’t the suspect! I repeat, Sam Archer is not the suspect!’
‘What? Then who is?’
On the ground floor of the school, the third light on the device clicked to red.
A split-second later the Kinetic Fireballs were blasted out into the building and fire immediately filled the corridors, the balls pinging off the walls and lockers, gaining speed and heat, the boomboomboom getting increasingly louder as the destructive force roared through the building.
Outside, the advancing line of ERT cops were taken off guard as the windows, doors and parts of the wall were blasted open, people further back ducking down as incendiary balls whizzed and hissed through the air, peppering cars and smashing windows.
‘Ally!’ Sarah screamed as everyone around her took cover.
Hearing the bomb go off a floor below, Archer ran into the upper viewing area of the pool with Ally on his hip.
The last operative was slumped against the wall, blood pooling around his wounded leg, the man Archer had drowned still lying face down in the water twenty feet from the man.
Seeing Archer and Ally, he lifted his pistol and started firing.
Archer didn’t slow as he ran down the benches, planting his right foot onto the metal railing, hearing the roar behind
him.
He jumped off the balcony just as the doors to the room were blasted open.
They hit the water and plunged down as the fire turned the room above them into a furnace, Archer keeping firm hold of Ally in case she tried to swim up. As he held his breath, he was relieved to see Ally was holding hers and gripped her tightly, swimming deeper, hearing and feeling the incredible destructive power of the fireballs as the explosions rocked the room above them, some of the balls hissing as they landed in the water, others smashing through the windows and bouncing off into the night.
Looking up he saw fire raging above him, a fierce orange against the blue of the water.
Death was just a few feet away, the noise muffled but still terrifying to watch from where they were.
Then he felt the water starting to get hotter and hotter.
The flames weren’t dissipating and he was running out of breath, his lungs already taxed from the drowning earlier. Ally began to fight him, desperately trying to get to the surface but Archer held her back, seeing the fire, knowing she’d be killed if she managed to break away from him.
Watching the intensity of the explosions start to lessen as the balls lost their force, he tried to stay calm and conserve his last reserves of oxygen, keeping his heart-rate down. Ally fought, thrashed and scratched, her uncle keeping her away from the air she craved but saving her life. He saw her panicking as she fought him, and knew they both only had seconds left. He started to swim for the surface, praying the fire was higher than he thought.
Then only a couple of feet before he made it, his larynx spasmed and closed again.
Unable to hold on any longer, Ally suddenly felt Archer’s grip cease and swam up, resurfacing to a burning, destroyed carcass of a room, smoke and fire everywhere. Gasping, she looked around in terror but couldn’t see the man who’d been shooting at them.
As she gulped in air, she saw Archer hadn’t come up with her.
Taking a couple of deep breaths, Ally ducked under the surface and saw her uncle drifting down, hitting the bottom of the pool.
His eyes were closed, his body, arms and legs unmoving apart from swaying with the movement of the water.
Swimming down, she grabbed hold of him and using all her strength, kicked hard, driving them both to the surface. Manoeuvring over to the shallow end, she tried to climb out but keeping hold of Archer was hard.
Standing, she pushed her uncle onto the steps, but wasn’t strong enough to get him out.
He lay there across the steps, unresponsive, the gun looped around his shoulder jammed horizontally across the narrow steps and holding him in place, his head hanging back, his body and legs limp as Ally held onto him.
‘Please wake up,’ she said, crying. ‘Please.’
The fire still burning around them, Archer lay there, motionless apart from the movement of the water, his eyes closed, his chest not moving.
Ally started to cry and took his hand, cold from the water.
‘Please wake up,’ she said again, squeezing his hand. ‘Please.’
He didn’t respond.
FIFTY EIGHT
It took fire crews over an hour to get the flames engulfing the school under control, the situation exacerbated by the chemicals in the science lab; when they finally got in, they were stunned by the level of destruction. Using a weapon designed to clear military bunkers on a school had had the inevitable devastating results. The FBI had been taking witness accounts from the adults present, all of them shaken to the core, realising how close they’d come to a major tragedy. Police officers had found NSA agents Thorne, Deerman, Riley and Tarketti gagged, bound and locked in two cars, one man in each trunk, the other in the back of the vehicle. They’d also found two Metro PD officers in a van in the parking lot.
The number killed over the last three days was high. Victims of the men’s rifle-work came to four; Marcia Barrera and Tyron Scrace, Nate Blake and the corrupt guard Jeff Cummings. In addition, four teenage boys had been shot at point blank range in Southeast, presumably because they’d got in the killers’ way. Almost every member of two of the most dangerous Southeast gangs in the city had also been killed, one gang in the Metro, the other in an office building off Washington Circle. Veach and his assistant Burnett had also been shot by Font, who’d suffered the same fate moments later.
Countless others had been injured in the rioting. It was now recognised that instead of being the perpetrator, Jeremy Somers had saved a lot of lives in the school that afternoon; overnight, he’d gone from a pariah to a hero. In response to everything that had happened, Rozio Weapons Systems was being liquidated along with all their assets, their remaining stock destroyed, their weaponry pulled from gun-stores right across the country.
The rioting and looting in Wards 7 and 8 was finally under control, the trouble fizzling out almost as quickly as it had started. Numerous arrests had been made, the police continuing to study CCTV footage and making further arrests on an almost hourly basis as a result. Sadly, for many, the outcome of the unrest was going to affect them for months to come, severely damaged neighbourhoods, a significant number of residents now without a home and numerous businesses destroyed. It was only when the media was finally able to report what had actually been happening that night that many people realised how their actions had only served to help the killers carry out their plan.
There was also a significant number who didn’t give a shit, particularly the ones who’d acquired new possessions.
Walking down the corridors of Georgetown University Hospital five days later, Jesse arrived at a private room, passing two men in suits who were just leaving. The pair looked at him for a long moment, but didn’t say anything as they passed; both looked pissed off about something.
Knocking on the door, Jesse walked in to see Harry Ledger propped up in bed, wired up to several machines and connected to a couple of drips, his wounds finally bandaged up.
‘Look who’s still breathing,’ Jesse said, walking forward. In one hand he had a plastic bag containing a bag of tortilla chips, the other a bouquet of flowers.
‘Tell me those aren’t for me,’ Ledger said, looking at the bouquet.
‘That’s what you do, right? Bring sick people, flowers.’
‘Not Brooklyn cops, kid. But I appreciate the thought.’
Jesse grinned and placed them on a table then sat down, opening up the bag of tortillas and offering Ledger one. ‘How’d it go?’
‘I’m in the clear.’
‘For real? They looked pretty pissed though.’
‘They’re adjusting to it. They fell for the set-up and I was their number one suspect, don’t forget. Plus a member of the Bureau shot me. Long as we called it even, I agreed not to sue.’
Ledger nodded at the television and smiled.
‘There’s someone else who can vouch for us.’
Jesse looked over and saw Angela being interviewed in a sit-down with NBC, a lead-in to the two hour special on the case which was going to focus on how a weapons company had manipulated the events of the past four days for their own ends and then look at lessons for the future concerning the way violence, active shooter events and the naming of killers was reported in the media. It also looked at how people had responded to the killings, the riots, the panic, the flashpoints.
By hurting each other, people had hurt themselves.
‘The FBI agent that Font shot is being treated in the next ward and he’s got a lot to say to back me up too,’ Ledger said. ‘Nice guy.’
‘You could be famous, man. Tell your story.’
‘Not really cut out to be a celebrity. Anyway, next thing will come along and they’ll forget all about me.’
Jesse smiled. ‘You look better than when I last saw you.’
Ledger nodded. ‘Not having every cop and Federal agent in ten States looking for me helps.’
‘You taking any sleeping meds?’
Ledger shook his head, smiling. ‘Don’t think I’m gonna need them anymore.’
>
‘Now you mention it, you still gonna be a cop?’ Jesse asked. ‘When you get out of here?’
He paused. ‘Before all this, I used to wonder if being a cop was what I really wanted. So, maybe?’
The special started, the pair sitting in silence, Ledger taking a tortilla chip with his uninjured arm and crunching on it.
I think it’s what you want, Jesse thought, glancing at Ledger and smiling, the pair settling in to watch the report.
*
At their house in Georgetown, Jack wiped his brow from the muggy heat, the two girls taking it in turns to go down the slide and into the small paddling pool he’d filled with water at the bottom.
Looking through the windows into the kitchen, he could see from the television they were showing the NBC special on the manhunt case, but he had no real desire to watch it. He’d had a taste of that world and that had been enough for a lifetime. He wanted to move on and forget it.
Sarah wheeled herself through the double doors and out onto the patio, a plastic bag on her lap, stopping to toss her car keys back on the counter in the kitchen.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, looking at the bag.
‘I found them in the back of the Honda,’ she said, the opening of the bag showing two wrapped presents. ‘Sam must have bought them for Ally and Maia.’
‘Girls,’ Jack called, the pair looking over, then seeing the presents. That got their attention.
‘These are from Sam,’ Sarah said as they ran over.
Ripping off the wrapping paper and opening the cardboard boxes inside, Ally and Maia smiled in delight as they showed their parents two substantial Super Soakers, before running into the house to fill them up.
Jack looked at Sarah, seeing she looked distinctly unimpressed.
‘They shoot water, honey,’ he said. ‘Not bullets.’
Shaking her head, she wheeled herself inside to get some plates. On the way, she glanced at the television and saw Angela Barrera’s report on the incident had begun. Watching the images, she saw there was no mention of Sam at all, which is what she knew he would have wanted. She thought of her brother and the number of people he and Ledger had saved. How they’d stopped the real perpetrators despite the relentless opposition and odds they’d faced.