Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  He whirled around and started for the main entrance doors at a fast trot. He hadn’t reached them when two guys suddenly got in front of him.

  “Get out of the way!” Granderson yelled at them as he waved the hand holding the walkie-talkie. “Damn it, get out—”

  Somewhere behind him, two shots blasted, so loud they seemed to shake the whole big building. Granderson stopped short, his feet skidding a little underneath him, and turned his head to stare in that direction. People were screaming down on the lower level, so it seemed pretty obvious that was where the shooting came from. Someone shouted, but Granderson couldn’t make out the words.

  He heard a man behind him say, “Nobody’s going anywhere, cop.”

  That made him twist back toward the entrance. He was in time to see one of the men who had blocked his path a few seconds earlier lunging at him. The man had a gun in his hand. Granderson dropped the walkie-talkie and grabbed for his stun gun, but he had no chance to pull the weapon from its holster. The man crashed the pistol against his head and knocked him backward off his feet.

  Granderson had been hit hard enough to knock the wind out of him and slid a few feet on the polished floor. Horrible pain filled his head. He was disoriented and for a few heartbeats couldn’t have said where he was or what was going on. All he knew was that he was hurt and stunned.

  Then a kick thudded into his ribs, bringing him even more pain but jolting him back to a sort of clarity at the same time. As he started to curl up around the agony in his side, he felt someone jerk the stun gun out of the holster. He was unarmed now, and in the shape he was in, utterly useless, too.

  That knowledge was a bitter taste filling his mouth.

  One of the men looming above him said, “Stay down, cop, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Fury flooded through Granderson, for a moment overwhelming the pain and confusion he felt. Nobody could talk to him like that, especially one of those smart-ass college kids. He was as good as any of them, if only they would see that. Unarmed or not, he started trying to struggle to his feet.

  “I told you, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  Granderson saw a hand holding a gun slashing toward his head again. He dived at a pair of legs in front of him. Shoulders rammed against knees, and that knocked the guy off balance enough that the gun smashed down on Granderson’s back instead of his head. It still hurt like hell, but it didn’t put him out. He grabbed hold of the legs and heaved.

  With a startled yelp, the man went over backward. Granderson scrambled ahead and tried to get on top of him. He figured the other guy probably had a gun, too, but maybe he wouldn’t risk using it for fear of hitting his friend. Granderson was fighting mostly on instinct, but he was thinking clearly enough to realize that much, anyway.

  He got a hand on the gun and tried to tug it free. He didn’t know what else might be going on in the library—trouble, no doubt about that—but he couldn’t deal with anything else right now. He had his hands full wrestling with this one man, hoping to get the gun away so he would have a chance to deal with the other one.

  That clout on the head had weakened him, though, and left him not operating at peak efficiency. The man he was grappling with lifted a knee into his belly, assuring that he couldn’t get any air into his body to replace the air he’d lost when he hit the floor. Gasping, Granderson desperately clung to the gun with one hand and the man’s wrist with the other. He tried to wrench the weapon free, tried so hard that he sobbed with the effort.

  Then another terrific impact struck the back of his head. He didn’t have time to wonder if he had been shot or merely pistol-whipped again. He didn’t try to figure out what was going on here in the library or even venture a guess whether he was going to live or if he was already dead . . .

  He just plummeted into blackness that seemed never-ending.

  * * *

  Pierce Conners bolted to his feet when he heard the shots. He was close enough to them that his ears rang from the thunderous reports. He jerked his head from side to side as he looked around, searching for the shooter.

  He supposed that after all the horrible mass shootings of the past few years, anybody who spent time at a school or anywhere else large crowds gathered had to feel a little shiver of apprehension now and then. You couldn’t help but wonder, at any moment, if somebody was drawing a bead on you. Would you even know what was going on, or would you just go on to . . . whatever was on the other side . . . without ever knowing what had happened?

  Would everything just be over in less than the blink of an eye, like somebody turning off a switch?

  Elsewhere on the library’s lower level, people started to scream. A few ran here and there, aimlessly because they didn’t know who they were running from or where they were running to. Most people hunkered down right where they were, though, hoping and praying that they wouldn’t wind up as targets for whoever was doing the shooting.

  Jenny was one of the screamers. Clark lunged toward her, wrapped his arms around her, and cried, “I’ll protect you!”

  She screamed again, started hitting at him, and yelled, “Get off of me!”

  Margery dived to the floor and tried to crawl under the table between the chairs and sofas. It wasn’t big enough to conceal all of her, but it would provide some cover, which was better than nothing, Pierce supposed.

  Fareed was on his feet, too, looking around frantically like Pierce was. In the past, he had talked about how he wished he could strike back at the Great Satan, America, for the glory of Islam and the Prophet, but right now he just looked scared.

  “Where is he?” Fareed asked.

  Pierce knew he was talking about the shooter.

  “There!” he said, pointing as he suddenly caught sight of a man standing at the foot of the escalators with a pistol in his hand, pointing toward the ceiling. The gunman was white, fairly young, and average-looking. Nothing about him shouted “mass shooter.” Pierce was far enough away that he couldn’t make out all the details, but this guy didn’t seem to have the creepy vibe that a lot of spree killers put out.

  No question but that he was the one doing the shooting, though. He proved that by sending another round into the ceiling and shouting, “Everyone down on the floor!”

  Margery reached out from under the table and caught hold of Pierce’s ankle.

  “You heard him!” she said. “He’ll shoot anybody standing up! Get down here!”

  Over on one of the sofas, Jenny and Clark were still wrestling around. Jenny appeared to be panicking, but whether she was terrified of the shooter or of Clark, Pierce couldn’t say. They slipped off the sofa, landed on the floor with a thud, and sprawled next to the table. At least they were out of the line of fire, if Clark could keep Jenny there.

  Margery tugged at Pierce’s ankle and urged, “Come on!”

  Pierce looked over at Fareed, who glared defiantly and said, “I grovel to no American!”

  “Do what you want, man,” Pierce said. He dropped to his knees and then fell forward onto his belly. Instinctively, he raised his hands and clasped them over the back of his head . . . as if that would protect him from a bullet.

  “Shut up and get down on the floor!”

  That was a different voice, coming from a different direction. Pierce was curious enough that he lifted his head a little to look. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered black guy who also held a pistol. The man lashed out with it and hit a male student who tried to scurry away from him. The student cried out in pain and went down. The second gunman grabbed another guy by the shirt collar and slung him down, then shoved a girl off her feet. He swung the pistol back and forth, menacing everyone around him as he ordered again, “On the floor!”

  More shouts from elsewhere in the library. There were several of the gunmen, Pierce realized. They had just been waiting for the signal to begin their attack. As scared as he was, it wasn’t easy to think straight, but he forced his brain to work as he tried to figure out what was going on here.

&n
bsp; Evidently, the gunmen’s objective wasn’t mass murder. If all they wanted to do was pile up bodies, they would have continued shooting once they started. That seemed obvious to Pierce.

  They didn’t mind killing, though, and that was demonstrated a moment later when a student rushed the man at the bottom of the escalator, yelling curses. The gunman leveled his pistol and pulled the trigger. The man charging at him stumbled, clapped a hand to his chest, and pitched forward. He didn’t move again as Pierce watched, horrified at what he had just seen.

  More people were screaming now. Several voices yelled for them to shut up. Pierce couldn’t tell if those voices belonged to the gunmen issuing orders or frightened people begging for calm so they wouldn’t get shot. Maybe both were true.

  The only thing Pierce knew for sure as he looked down again at the floor only a couple of inches from his eyes was that this day, no matter how it had started, now stood a good chance of being the last day of his life.

  CHAPTER 25

  Old habits died hard. When Jake heard the shots, his first instinct was to hunt cover, the second to return fire.

  But he didn’t have anything to shoot back with, and in that split second when his brain began to process what was going on, he realized that he was more concerned with Natalie’s safety than with his own.

  He lunged across the table, slid on the papers, knocked books and laptop aside, and grabbed her. The impact toppled her chair over. She cried out in surprise. Jake twisted as they went down so that he hit the floor first and she landed on top of him, instead of the other way around. His weight falling on her might have seriously injured her.

  As soon as they were down, though, he rolled so he was on top, on hands and knees, shielding her body with his own.

  “Stay down,” he told her through clenched teeth. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Jake! What—”

  “Shhh. Don’t say anything.” He didn’t want her drawing attention to herself, or him, either. He wasn’t sure what was going on here, but getting on the radar of a hostile with a gun was never a good thing.

  Jake looked around as best he could without raising his head too much. His senses were working overtime right now, attuned to everything that was happening around him. He heard shouting and screaming from other parts of the library’s lower floor and realized that the man who had come down the escalator and started shooting wasn’t alone.

  He was the only one Jake could see from where he was, though, as he peered past a table leg and through a gap in the furniture toward the shooter. The man was around Jake’s age, maybe a little older, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Six-one, around one-seventy. Wiry. Brown hair. Good-looking in a cocky way. He seemed very self-composed, which was good, Jake thought. Wild-eyed panic would mean more shooting. This guy looked like he wouldn’t pull the trigger unless he had a good reason.

  One of the students gave him a good reason by yelling and charging him. The gunman calmly shot him down, accurately enough to put the guy on the floor with one round.

  Jake’s jaw tightened even more. That was a cold-blooded execution he had just witnessed. He had no doubt that the guy would kill him just as efficiently and ruthlessly if he tried anything stupid.

  That meant when he made his move, it had to be a smart one, Jake told himself.

  His only weapon was the folding knife in his pocket. That wouldn’t do him much good against three, maybe more, guns. He assumed that this guy’s allies were armed at least as well as he was. The guy had a Glock 17 9mm, from the looks of it. He had fired three rounds. That meant he could still have fourteen or fifteen shots, depending on whether there had been one in the chamber when he loaded a full magazine. And Jake wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the guy had at least half a dozen loaded magazines in his pockets, just waiting for him to switch them out if he needed to.

  So there was a lot of firepower in here, at least relatively speaking because Kelton College, like a lot of private colleges and universities, was a so-called Gun Free Zone. That whole concept was one of the stupidest things Jake had ever heard of, a glaring neon sign of an invitation for evil to march right in and have its way, unchecked, but that was the situation and wishing it was different was pointless. More than likely, nobody in the building was carrying. Even the campus cops who worked for Frank McRainey just carried stun guns, nothing lethal.

  Which meant that if Jake was going to fight back successfully against these bastards, he needed to get his hands on one of their guns.

  “Quiet down!” the gunman yelled. “Everybody just shut up!”

  He had to repeat the order several times at the top of his lungs before the racket began to die away. The screaming gradually stopped, but when it did, Jake could still hear people sobbing and whimpering. Somewhere not too far away, somebody said an obscenity over and over again in a terrified whisper.

  It grew quiet enough in the library for the gunman to be heard all over the big room as he said, “All right, now you all know that we mean business. We’re not terrorists or fanatics, if that’s what you’re thinking. We didn’t come here today to hurt anybody, but as you’ve seen, we’ll do whatever is necessary in order to achieve our objective. Our group is large, spread out all over the campus, and committed to our cause. We’re not only willing to kill in order to do what’s right, we’re also willing to die ourselves if that’s what it takes to make America wake up.”

  Under his breath, Jake said to Natalie, “I thought he claimed he wasn’t a terrorist or a fanatic. Sounds like it to me.”

  She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing hard. He knew she must be scared out of her wits.

  “I’m sure you’re all wondering what it is we want,” the gunman went on.

  He was well-spoken, Jake thought. Probably smart and well-educated, too, although you couldn’t really tell that by the way somebody talked. In the service, he had run across guys who sounded like they didn’t have enough brain cells to rub together, yet who were actually some of the most intelligent people he had ever met. However, his instincts told him this man was no dummy . . . and that made him even more dangerous in the long run.

  “It’s really very simple. The only way anyone leaves this campus today without more bloodshed is if one hundred million dollars is transferred into an offshore bank account, the number of which I’ll provide to the authorities in due time. That’s a one with eight zeroes after it, for those of you who believe math is racist.” The man chuckled, of all things. “And I know there are some of you in here right now who believe that. Trust me, I can see your point. Racism really is systemic in this country.

  “Which brings me to my next point. We’re not demanding that the government pay that hundred million dollars. No. It needs to come from the families of students here at Kelton College. There are approximately three thousand students enrolled here. That means—and again, I’ll help out the math-challenged among you—that each of their families would have to come up with less than thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  He smirked, waved his free hand, and the gun in his other hand never wavered as he went on, “Most of the families you come from are one-percenters. Old money. Dirty money. Money made on the backs of the common people, wrung out of them along with their sweat and blood!” He didn’t sound quite so self-controlled now as he heated up. “Seriously, are you going to try to tell me that your parents can’t just sit down and write a check for that much and never miss it? You know I’m right!”

  The guy might be a killer, but what he said was true, Jake thought. A semester’s tuition, housing, and other expenses could easily add up to that much or more. A lot of parents paid it, again and again, so their darling little snowflakes could get degrees in intersectional feminism or gender studies. Although this day and age, it would have to be gender-fluid studies.

  “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” the gunman went on. “Some of your families can’t afford that much. They really can’t. You’re here on scholar
ships or have managed some other way. And I believe you. I know there are students here at Kelton who don’t fit in, who don’t come from stereotypical filthy rich families. You’ve probably felt oppressed because of it, too.”

  In that moment, Jake had a ray of insight into the gunman’s personality. He had to come from that sort of background. He was speaking from experience. Jake could hear it in his voice.

  “So I’m not asking your families to pay. I don’t want to ruin anyone.”

  It was I now, not we. That told Jake this guy really was the mastermind of the plan, not just a mouthpiece.

  “And I’m sure there are some students who don’t happen to be on campus right now. They’ll know to stay away, too, because, hell, there have to be at least a dozen phones in here sending all this out to the rest of the world, right? It’s breaking news across the country. That’s fine. Nobody’s going to shoot you because you’re using a phone. We want the rest of the country, the rest of the world, to know what’s going on here today!”

  He had to pace back and forth a little. His emotions were high, his nerves were taut. Jake could tell that.

  “Now, we all know that if somebody’s kid was lucky enough to be somewhere else today, they’re not going to come up with the money to save somebody else’s kid, am I right? They don’t care that all of you might die. They don’t care about anybody but themselves and their families. They’ve proven that over and over again by supporting cuts in taxes and social programs that have ripped the safety net out from under countless people and let thousands die, just so they can pack a few bucks into their bank accounts! They’re heartless bastards!” He jabbed the index finger of his free hand against the air in front of him, several times. “You know it’s true! You know it!”

  With a visible effort, he controlled himself and went on in a calmer tone, “So I’m not even going to ask those people to help save you. It wouldn’t do any good. Just wasted effort to ask them to have a heart and help out those less fortunate than them. So what does that leave us?