Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  Normally, Montambault thought of the police as racist, trigger-happy, power-mad bullies just looking for an excuse to shoot innocent black men. He was a fervent supporter of Black Lives Matter. But right now he couldn’t wait for the cops to get here.

  The footsteps receded. Montambault could tell from the sound of them that the gunman had left the room and was headed back to the reception area where his allies had gathered their prisoners. So they weren’t here to just wantonly slaughter everyone they found, Montambault thought. Maybe he would have been better off letting himself be captured. They might be more likely to hurt him if they found him later and believed that he was trying to cause trouble for them. He supposed he could still surrender . . .

  No, he was too nervous to risk that. He would hide, he decided. His first instinct had been the correct one.

  Finally, desperate for air, he drew a deep breath. Steeling his nerves, he stepped out of the gap.

  From the corner of his right eye, he saw the man standing at the end of the aisle in that direction. As pure reflex jerked him into a turn in that direction, the thought flashed through his mind that there must have been two of them, and somehow he had missed that fact. One of them had suspected someone might be hiding in here and had pretended to make a report to someone else, then sent the second man away so anyone who was in here would hear him leaving.

  The ploy had worked. Thinking that he was alone and safe, Montambault had stepped out into the open, right into the sights of the gun that the man was pointing at him. Montambault stared in horror over the barrel of that pistol and saw the cold smile on the man’s face.

  The next instant, flame exploded from the gun muzzle.

  Montambault was already moving when the shot erupted, though. He threw himself back into the small area where he had been hiding a moment earlier. As he did so, he thought he felt something brush against his left ear and heard a high-pitched whine like a mosquito.

  That was the bullet passing by him, he realized. It had come that close to killing him. Panic gripped him as he heard rapid footsteps thudding closer to him and knew he had only seconds to live.

  That panic somehow allowed him to find more strength than he ever would have dreamed that he possessed. He grabbed hold of the shelves beside him and heaved. They weren’t attached to the wall, but fully loaded with books the way they were, he shouldn’t have been able to budge them.

  But with the power that his fear gave him, he tipped the shelves forward away from the wall, and once they were unbalanced, they went over with a huge crash, spilling books everywhere. Montambault heard a surprised cry from the gunman and knew that the man had been caught in the literary avalanche.

  The falling shelves hit the ones across the aisle and stopped, leaving a small, book-littered, triangular space underneath them. The pistol came sliding out of that space, and as Montambault saw it, he knew the man must have lost his grip on the gun when the toppling shelves and books knocked him off his feet. Curses from underneath the shelves told Montambault the man might be trapped under there.

  Montambault wasn’t going to overlook such an unexpected gift. He bent down and picked up the gun, the first time he had ever held a firearm in his life. He hadn’t even had any toy guns when he was a child. His parents would have been horrified at the idea.

  But even though he had no clue what sort of weapon he held, he knew which end of the gun the bullets came out of and how to make them fire. At least he hoped the gun didn’t have some kind of safety catch that was engaged. That seemed unlikely, considering that the man had fired it at him less than a minute earlier.

  Montambault knelt, held the gun in both hands, and shoved it into the mouth of the opening formed by the fallen shelves. He pulled the trigger three times as fast as he could, crying out in involuntary shock at the deafening sounds and the way the weapon jumped in his hands.

  He stood up and scrambled backward as he continued pointing the gun at the opening. He couldn’t hear anything because of the gun-thunder that had filled the room. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to hear anything again except the throbbing roar of blood inside his own head.

  As the gun’s barrel wavered wildly in front of him, though, he realized that his hearing was coming back. He heard shouts from somewhere else on the Special Collections floor.

  However, he didn’t hear any more cursing from underneath the fallen shelves, which made him wonder if he had killed the gunman. Ordinarily that thought would have horrified him, as would the idea that since he now held the weapon, he was the gunman.

  Right now, though, survival was the only thing in his mind. The man had friends close by. They would have heard the shots and the crash, and they would come to see what had happened.

  Montambault couldn’t be standing here in plain sight, gun in hand, when that happened.

  He turned and fled toward the storage closet that had been his goal before he was trapped and almost killed.

  As he yanked the door open, another thought occurred to him. He looked up. The ceiling was acoustic tile to make it quieter inside the library. That extended into the closet. There were air-conditioning and heating ducts up there above the ceiling, and he recalled seeing movies and TV shows where people got into those ducts by lifting out ceiling tiles and climbing into the enclosed spaces.

  That thought made a shiver go through him, but he knew he had only moments before the gunman’s friends found his body and started searching for whoever killed him. Montambault set the gun aside on a box of books in the storage room and started moving some of the other boxes, building a pyramid he could climb.

  He had never been one for physical labor. Where he found the strength to do such a thing so quickly, he didn’t know. Human beings were capable of incredible feats when it was a matter of life and death, or so he had read.

  When he had the boxes stacked high enough for him to be able to reach the ceiling, he pulled the closet door closed. Just enough light came under it for him to be able to see what he was doing as he picked up the gun and held it awkwardly while he climbed onto the boxes. Now he worried about shooting himself accidentally. But if he didn’t get out of here, he would wind up being shot anyway, he was sure of that, and it wouldn’t be any accident.

  He reached up, working almost blindly, and lifted one of the tiles. He moved it aside and then felt around. There had to be something sturdy enough up there to support his weight. After a few seconds that seemed much longer, his fingers brushed a board. He explored it by touch. It seemed strong, and it might be wide enough for him to lie on it.

  He put the gun in his pocket. He didn’t like that, but he didn’t have any choice. He had to have both hands free to pull himself up.

  Usually one thought of descending into darkness, but in this case, Montambault was climbing into darkness. The faint glow seeping under the closet door rose into the crawl space between floors but was swallowed up by the gloom almost immediately. The professor’s eyes had adjusted enough for him to see the broad plank and the looming bulk of the air duct next to which it ran. The board was there for the convenience of repairmen who had to work on those ducts, he supposed.

  His muscles trembled badly as he tried to lift himself. That brought back humiliating memories of being forced to attempt pull-ups in gym class when he was a boy. A bitter taste filled his mouth as that came back to him. That time was nearly forty years in the past. Why couldn’t he forget about it?

  A shout sounded somewhere not far away, muffled by the wall but clear enough for Montambault to hear it. The threat it represented was enough to galvanize his muscles yet again, but he sensed he was nearing the end of his strength and endurance. If he was going to escape, he had to do it now.

  With a last surge, he hoisted himself high enough to get a leg on the board. As he pulled himself higher, his head bumped painfully against something. One of the boards holding up the floor above, he imagined. He ignored the pain as he sprawled belly-down on the wide plank. His heart hammered, and he couldn�
��t seem to get his breath.

  But he was still in danger, and that awareness clamored in his brain. He had tried to stack the boxes of books so that they didn’t look too much like a stepladder to the ceiling, but with that tile set aside, leaving a plain opening, it was obvious what had happened. Montambault tried to calm his breathing and started feeling around for the tile he had moved out of the way.

  He found it, maneuvered it back into place, and pressed it down. As it dropped into position, the last of the light really was gone. Blackness closed in around him. Montambault shivered at its embrace.

  But he was safe now, he told himself. That was the only thing that mattered.

  After a moment, his brain began to race again. The gunman’s friends would know that someone else had been in there. That had to be, since the man was dead or at least wounded. And they would know that their quarry had gone somewhere. They would search the room thoroughly.

  They might even think to look in the ceiling.

  He had to get away from this spot, Montambault told himself. Had to put some distance between himself and those who wanted to kill him. He would have gladly just laid here and tried to recover from the ordeal he had been through, but if he did that, everything he had done might turn out to be for nothing.

  Whether he liked it or not, he had to move. He reached down to his pocket and carefully worked the pistol loose, being extra cautious to keep his finger away from the trigger and not let it catch on something else.

  Then, holding the gun in front of him, he began to crawl forward into the impenetrable shadows that awaited him.

  CHAPTER 28

  Jake wasn’t surprised to hear the bomb threat come out of the man’s mouth. He knew enough about the radical left movement to know they had always been bombers, going all the way back to the fifties and sixties. That was just part of their methodology. Champion free speech by shutting up everybody who doesn’t agree with you. Advocate for equal rights by taking other people’s rights away from them. Protest violence by blowing up a bunch of people and stuff.

  Cowards at heart, every damn one of them.

  But some of them were committed enough to their so-called cause to risk blowing themselves up, too. Jake couldn’t really wrap his brain around that idea. He had accepted the idea of possibly dying in battle when he signed up to be a soldier. It was part of the job description, after all.

  He didn’t think a willingness to die in an explosion excused the fact that you’d also be killing a bunch of innocent people, though. Martyr or not, you were still a freakin’ murderer, as far as Jake was concerned.

  Then he looked at the man with the gun standing near the escalator and thought, This guy is no martyr.

  He wasn’t sure what it was about the man, whose voice and face were perfectly sincere as he issued the threat. Most people would believe that he meant it, without a doubt. Something was off, though, and after a minute or so, Jake thought he knew what it was.

  His mind went back to a hot, dusty, empty street in a city on the other side of the world, where he and some of his fellow grunts had been clearing the buildings as they came to them, slowly forcing the insurgents to retreat and killing as many of the bastards as they could along the way. The patrol had been passing an alley mouth when a faint sound had warned Jake and sent him spinning in that direction with his rifle up and ready.

  Two insurgents stood there with rifles of their own, Russian-made weapons ready to spew death. Jake was maybe fifteen feet from them, plenty close enough to see their eyes.

  One man just looked scared, like he wished he was anywhere else in the world other than this dirty alley, pointing a gun at an American soldier pointing a rifle at him.

  The other guy, though . . . he was loving it. His life would never get better than this moment, standing there ready to deliver death to somebody he hated to the very depths of his being. Even if he died, it was still the best, most holy thing he could ever do. He was far beyond rational thought, so caught up in his primitive beliefs that it might as well have been the Middle Ages again and he was about to run screaming at the infidel with a curved saber in his hand instead of an automatic rifle.

  Jake shot him first, giving the son of a bitch the death he wanted, although Jake figured whatever was waiting on the other side, it was going to come as a pretty terrible surprise to the guy.

  Then he turned his attention to the second man, only to discover that he had dropped his rifle and was running away as fast as he could, arms swinging and knees pumping high as he tried to outrace a bullet.

  Jake let him go. His CO had chewed him out for that later, but he still believed he had done the right thing.

  And he had never forgotten the fires of fanaticism that burned in the eyes of the man he had killed. He had never stared into the abyss—and had it stare back at him—from that close before or since.

  This guy holding court on the lower level of the Burr Memorial Library didn’t have those same fires burning in his eyes. He would kill without compunction or even a second’s thought, he had proven that, but he didn’t want to die himself. He might rather die than be caught, but he wanted to get away. He figured he had something to live for.

  The bomb threat was an empty one, Jake decided.

  But that didn’t mean the guy wasn’t dangerous. He still had that gun, and he had allies who probably were just as willing to kill as he was, and there were a lot of innocent people on this campus who might die before this crisis was over. If Jake was going to succeed in stopping this somehow without a great loss of life, he would need to be very careful.

  The idea of just standing by, doing nothing, and hoping for the best never occurred to him.

  From elsewhere in the library came angry shouts as the leader’s allies ordered people to get down on the floor. They seemed to be doing as they were told. Jake didn’t hear any more shots. He tensed, getting ready to raise up high enough to get a good look around.

  Natalie must have felt that in his muscles where he was pressed against her. She clutched at him and whispered, “Jake, no! Whatever it is you’re thinking about doing, you’ll just get yourself hurt.”

  “You don’t think I should just lay here and let those guys keep hurting people, do you?”

  “I don’t want them to hurt you. Or me, for that matter. Let’s just do what they say and see what happens, okay?”

  The idea of that grated on Jake’s nerves, but he could see that Natalie was very frightened. He couldn’t blame her for that. She might teach criminal justice, but he didn’t suppose she had ever had much real-life experience with all the bad things that can happen in the world. Not to the extent that he’d had, anyway.

  He knew that evil could never be appeased. It just got worse and worse until everyone it touched was dead . . . unless someone took action to stop it.

  But for now, he would do what Natalie begged of him and wait. Maybe if he could play out the hand and get one of these guys alone . . .

  Then he would have a gun and one less enemy, and things would be different.

  * * *

  Fareed still hadn’t gotten down on the floor. As Pierce lifted his head again, just a little, he was shocked to see that not only had the Muslim student not followed orders, but as the gunman at the foot of the escalators finished his rant, Fareed started walking toward him. His hands were raised to about elbow level and held out slightly to his sides.

  The man saw him coming and raised the pistol again. Fareed called out quickly, “Do not shoot, brother! You and I are on the same side.”

  The gunman looked more amused than angered by that bold statement.

  “Is that so?” he asked. “How do you figure that . . . brother?”

  “We both believe that this materialistic American society is the source of everything that is wrong in the world,” Fareed declared. “We both would like to see it replaced.”

  “By a caliphate ruled by sharia law?”

  Fareed shrugged.

  “What would you pre
fer?” he asked. “A godless communist government? That argument is an endless one, and it can be resumed at another time. What is important now is that we both would like to see this country full of heathen capitalists and imperialists brought low, is that not true?”

  “It is,” the gunman admitted. “We agree on the need for change. What form that change ultimately takes can be settled later, as you say. But what is it you want from me right now?”

  “Let me join you in your righteous assault on this den of thieves and whoremongers,” Fareed said. “Let me help you destroy this land of . . . of Kardashians! Give me a gun!”

  The leader looked at him for a long moment, as if seriously considering the suggestion. Then he laughed abruptly.

  “Oh, hell no! You’re not getting a gun. What kind of idiot do you think I am? We may have some of the same enemies, but that doesn’t mean I trust you.” He pointed the pistol at Fareed, and his expression turned serious as he said, “Go back where you were and get down on the floor. I mean it.”

  Fareed swallowed hard and licked his lips. He began to back away.

  “You are making a mistake,” he said. “I will be a faithful ally to you and your cause.”

  “I have enough allies, here and in the other buildings and in the bombs we’ve planted all over campus.”

  The mention of the bombs made Pierce feel cold inside again. If that threat was real, several thousand people were in deadly danger right now. The idea of killing that many at once, right here on American soil, might have been outlandish once upon a time, but not now. Not anymore. It had happened before, and Pierce was confident that it could happen again.

  Pierce lowered his head and pressed his forehead against the carpet. Much of the library floor was tile, but the areas on which the love seats and armchairs sat was carpeted.