Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  That made lying here and waiting to die a little more comfortable, he supposed.

  When Fareed had backed all the way to the conversation area, he got down on his hands and knees and then stretched out all the way on his stomach. He was about four feet from Pierce. He looked over and glared.

  “Don’t judge me,” he whispered. “You should have been just as willing as I was to join forces with them. Your people are as oppressed as mine.”

  “My father owns two Fortune 500 companies,” Pierce replied, keeping his voice equally low. He was a little angry now, on top of being scared. “He’s as much a one-percenter as anybody else that guy was raving about. When you count my trust fund and everything else I’ll inherit, I suppose I will be, too. So don’t go thinking I’m opposed to the same things he is.”

  Fareed sneered.

  “You are no true black man. If you were, you would embrace the Islamic faith and turn against your decadent Western culture. I always knew you were a fake!”

  On the other side of the table and underneath it, Jenny, Clark, and Margery were looking at them. Margery stared at Pierce and said, “Uncle Tom.”

  “How do you even know about that?” Pierce asked as he struggled to control the irritation he felt.

  “I’ve studied history. Evidently that’s more than you can say.”

  “Yeah, you’re just a . . . what is it?” Jenny said.

  “Uncle Tom,” Clark supplied. “It’s from a book or something, I think. Means a black guy who sucks up to the white oppressors.”

  “I don’t—” Pierce stopped short. This was a ridiculous conversation to be having in angry whispers, especially while madmen with guns were stalking around and threatening to blow everybody to hell—the ones they didn’t shoot first, that is. He shook his head and didn’t look at the others.

  Probably they were every bit as scared as he was. Maybe they were just trying to distract themselves from that fear.

  That made him wonder if there was anybody in here who wasn’t scared. Maybe even somebody who was planning on fighting back against the terrorists, because that was the only thing it made sense to call them. The guy who had charged the gunman and gotten himself killed for it had just panicked, Pierce thought. He’d never had a chance. But somebody who knew what they were doing . . .

  Were there any campus police in the library right now? There should have been, Pierce knew. Had they been taken prisoner, too? Had they been killed? And what could campus cops, who didn’t even carry guns, accomplish against a bunch of well-armed fanatics, anyway? Who could even hope to stop them?

  Then suddenly, for some reason, he thought about Jake Rivers.

  CHAPTER 29

  Cal Granderson heard somebody yelling, and his first thought was that his grandmother was trying to wake him up so he could go to school. He wanted to pull the covers tighter and put the pillow over his head in the hope that she would go away and let him sleep. Then he realized that it wasn’t her voice, made raspy and screechy by decades of smoking weed, that he heard. It was some guy shouting, “Get down, get down!”

  That sounded like something Grandma might have said, all right, but it wasn’t her.

  The other thing that made Granderson realize he wasn’t back in his dingy bedroom was that his head hurt like hell. Way worse than a hangover. More like his head was busted somehow.

  The left side of his face was pressed against something hard and cold. He forced his eyes open. The lids fluttered some, and even when he was able to hold them open, he couldn’t see anything at first except a vague, grayish blur.

  After a while—he couldn’t tell how long, but the yelling was still going on, for whatever that was worth—his vision cleared some and he could tell what he was looking at, at such close range.

  It was a floor tile.

  Granderson knew a floor tile when he saw one. He had run a buffer over enough of them, during a stint working as a janitor a few years ago, before he’d decided to be a cop. There was something vaguely familiar about this one, and after a while he was able to force his thoughts through the pain that was clogging them up and recognize it as one of the tiles from the library floors.

  That was enough to bring it all flooding back to him: the guys in groundskeeper’s coveralls waving guns around, the fight, the blows to his head . . .

  He hadn’t been shot, after all. Just knocked cold. And now he was awake again.

  The bastards would be sor—

  Nope. He couldn’t move. He wasn’t going to be able to make anyone sorry they had crossed paths with Cal Granderson. Not yet.

  He closed his eyes. The shouting wasn’t far away, but it wasn’t right over him. He was convinced the phony groundskeepers were the ones doing the yelling. Maybe they believed he was dead or at least still unconscious. There was no good reason to let them know otherwise. He could only hope they didn’t have somebody watching him who had seen him open his eyes.

  When nothing happened—when he didn’t get hit again or kicked or anything like that—he knew nobody had noticed. He tried to keep his breathing steady and under control, too. That wasn’t easy to do with his head hurting as badly as it did.

  Think like a cop, he told himself. Think like a cop. What did the gunmen want? They weren’t here to rob somebody, or they would have done that and gone already. They weren’t spree killers, or surely they would have put some bullets in him. If they had been Middle Eastern, his first hunch would have been that they were terrorists—but then he felt ashamed of himself for allowing that thought to cross his mind now. He didn’t want to be Islam-ophobic.

  Yelling but not shooting . . . that probably meant they were taking prisoners and rounding them up. Hostages. So, not a simple robbery, Granderson told himself, but rather, robbery on a large scale. A truly epic scale. Take over a whole college campus. Demand an astronomical amount of ransom. Yeah, that made sense.

  Granderson’s right arm was stretched out in front of him. That was the way he had fallen when one of the bastards knocked him out. But his left arm was doubled underneath him, so they couldn’t see that hand. He forced himself to try to move his fingers. He had to find out if his nerves and muscles still worked at all, or if he was paralyzed, perhaps permanently.

  His teeth clenched as he made the effort but his fingers didn’t move.

  Sternly, he warned himself not to let his disappointment and anger show on his face. He kept his eyes closed and his expression blank, as it would be if he were still out cold. After a minute, he tried again. Tried so hard he felt a bead of sweat pop out on his forehead, despite the cold floor on which he was lying.

  This time the little finger of his left hand twitched.

  Now it was a challenge not to show his excitement at what he had just felt. He renewed his efforts and bent the little finger, then the others on the hand. As he flexed them, he felt sensation nibbling its way down his arm and into his hand. After a minute, he was able to tighten the muscles all the way up into his shoulder.

  That was more like it. It might take a while, but he was confident that he would be able to get up and fight again. He had to be patient, though, and not try to rush things. If he made his move before he was ready, he might wind up just getting himself killed.

  Luckily, from the sound of things and what he had been able to figure out about what was going on, he thought he had some time before all hell broke loose. The gunmen who had taken over the library—and maybe more of the campus, too, for all he knew—would have to make their demands known and wait for an official response from the authorities.

  All those on the outside—Chief McRainey, the Greenleaf cops who had been too good to hire him, the state police, probably even the FBI—they would all be freaking out about now. What they didn’t know was that they had a secret weapon on the inside, a secret weapon named Cal Granderson.

  He had to smile a little at the thought, but not so much that anybody would notice.

  * * *

  McRainey woke up in the back of an a
mbulance. Somebody said, “All right, let’s get him to the hospital.”

  “Wait just a damned minute!” McRainey tried to sit up but found that he couldn’t. He lifted his head enough to look down and see that he had been strapped down on a gurney. “Let me off this thing!”

  One of the EMTs who had been tending to him earlier was sitting beside him on a bench. He put a hand on McRainey’s shoulder and said, “Take it easy, Chief. You passed out again, so we need to take you to the hospital and get you checked out thoroughly.”

  “I’m fine, blast it,” McRainey insisted. “I just lost some blood and got banged around a little. And I’m old, damn it. I don’t bounce back quite as fast as I used to. But I don’t need to go to the hospital. We’ve got a crisis here on campus!”

  “There are people here to deal with it—”

  “That’s my job!”

  “And ours is to make sure you don’t die,” the EMT said. McRainey recognized the calm, reasonable tone the man was using. He had used it himself on irrational suspects, many times in the past.

  So he had to let them know that he wasn’t irrational. The other EMT was standing at the back of the ambulance, just outside the vehicle’s open door. McRainey looked back and forth between the two men and said, “Listen, I know you’ve got a job to do. But you cleaned the wound on my hand and bandaged it, didn’t you?”

  “We did,” the man beside him said.

  “So I’m not in any danger of bleeding to death.”

  “You’ve already lost too much blood. You could be in shock.”

  “Do I sound like I’m in shock?”

  “Well . . . no,” the EMT admitted. He looked at the machines mounted above and behind McRainey, which were beeping away. McRainey realized he was attached to them, and he had an IV in, too, running fluid into him. “And your vitals are relatively stable. But you need stitches, and I’m sure the ER doc will start you on IV antibiotics, too.”

  “There’s no reason all of that can’t be done later, right? I’m in no danger of dropping dead?”

  McRainey stared intently at the EMT until the man shrugged.

  “No more than anybody else your age, I guess,” he said with obvious reluctance. “But you really need an MRI and a CAT scan to make sure there aren’t any hidden injuries.”

  “They can do that later, too.” With a curt nod, McRainey indicated the strap across his chest. “Now unfasten that.”

  The two EMTs looked at each other again, as they had done in the groundskeepers’ shed. Then the one next to McRainey said, “Hell with it,” and reached for the strap’s fasteners. “You’ll make my life miserable if I don’t, won’t you, Chief?”

  “Count on it,” McRainey said.

  “Assuming, of course, that you live.”

  “I will. I’m a stubborn old coot.”

  The strap fell free. McRainey sat up. His head spun for a few seconds, causing him to grab hold of the rail on the side of the gurney with one hand, but the feeling quickly passed.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to pass out again,” he told the concerned-looking young man beside him.

  “It’s not my responsibility if you do. You’re gonna have to sign some paperwork.”

  “Later,” McRainey said. He swung his legs off the other side of the gurney and stood up. The machines had started beeping faster, but no alarms were going off. He held out the wrist where the IV was attached. “Unhook me.”

  A couple of minutes later, McRainey stepped out the back of the ambulance and saw that it was parked in front of the groundskeepers’ shed, as he expected. The street was alive with flashing lights. In addition to the ambulance, two Greenleaf PD patrol cars were there, along with a fire truck and a state trooper’s cruiser. Yellow crime scene tape was strung up all around the shed.

  “Hey, Frank!”

  McRainey looked around. A short, stocky man in the brown and tan uniform of the Greenleaf Police Department trotted toward him. McRainey recognized him as Steve Hartwell, the chief of the local department.

  “I thought they were taking you to the hospital,” Hartwell said a little breathlessly as he came up. Like McRainey, he was in late middle age. Mostly bald, he had a broad, friendly, freckled face that usually looked a little sunburned no matter what the season. Right now that face wore a look of grave concern.

  “I’ll be all right,” McRainey said. He waved the bandaged hand in front of him. “Just a scratch.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it, but I have to admit, I’m glad you’re still here. You know this campus better than just about anybody.”

  “Damn right I do.” McRainey looked around the street again. “Feds not here yet?”

  “They’re on their way from Dallas. They’ve probably flown into Bergstrom by now and are driving out here in SUVs. The governor has requested assistance from Homeland Security, too, but I haven’t heard when they’ll get here.”

  “What’s the situation on campus?”

  Hartwell looked extremely weary now.

  “Not good. We’ve had reports of shots fired in six different buildings: the library, the administration building, the student union, and three instructional buildings.”

  “None of the dorms?”

  Hartwell shook his head and said, “No, I suppose they figured there wouldn’t be enough students in the dorms in the middle of the day. They hit the places where they could corral the greatest number of hostages.”

  “That’s the way it sounds to me, too,” McRainey said. “Have you blocked off access to those six buildings?”

  “I know my job, Frank,” Hartwell replied, a little testily now. “Perimeters have been established around all of them. That meant spreading my department pretty thin, but we managed, at least so far. That’s not all. Your man Bagley told me you were worried about bombs being planted around the campus by phony groundskeepers.”

  “Yeah, that’s why they killed poor Charlie Hodges and all his crew.” McRainey inclined his head toward the shed as he spoke. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “Well, when I heard that, I sent officers scattering all over campus to look for places that had been dug up recently.” Hartwell’s face was haggard as he went on, “We found more than a dozen of them. I put guards on all of the locations, just in case. Had to use some of your men to do it. I hope you don’t mind me taking command like that.”

  “No, I’m glad you did,” McRainey said. “Who’s in charge right now doesn’t really matter, I guess. As soon as the FBI gets here, they’ll take over. They always do.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, we don’t have any bomb detection equipment, but the Austin PD does, and so do the Texas Rangers. Austin’s sending a couple of bomb squad officers. They ought to be here soon, and so should the Rangers. This whole thing’s really about to blow up, Frank.” Hartwell grimaced. “That was a bad choice of words, wasn’t it?”

  “There’s nothing good to say about something like this. What about the media?”

  “I’ve been keeping them back, but it’s not easy. They’re like a bunch of rabid vultures.”

  McRainey wasn’t sure if vultures could get rabies, but he knew what Hartwell meant, and he couldn’t disagree.

  “Are you in contact with the leader of this bunch?”

  “Not yet,” Hartwell said. “You think he’s going to want to talk to us? He already gave his demands in that little speech he made in the library, the one that’s all over the Internet.”

  “He’ll be in touch,” McRainey said. “Guys like that are always full of themselves. He’ll want to put on a show. He’s playing to the whole world, and he knows it.” McRainey rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. “That might be as important to him as the money. You never know with these lunatics.”

  Hartwell drew in a deep breath and asked, “What do you think the Feds will do? Will they give him the money and let him go?”

  “There are several thousand lives at stake. The students and faculty and staff inside those buildings, a
nd probably a bunch of us out here if bombs start going off. Do you see any way to stop them?”

  Hartwell’s freckles stood out even more than usual because his face was drained of color. He shook his head and said, “Seems to me like the only way is if some of those hostages are able to get the upper hand. But even if they do that, there’s still a chance that madman will set off the bombs.”

  “Unless somebody stops him,” McRainey said.

  He wondered suddenly where Jake Rivers was right now.

  CHAPTER 30

  Even though Natalie had asked him to keep his head down and not draw attention to himself, Jake had managed to sneak enough looks around over the past half hour to have a pretty good idea how many gunmen there were on the lower level and where they were located.

  For one thing, the leader had left his position by the escalators and swaggered around arrogantly, checking with his lackeys. With the hostages terrified into being quiet, it wasn’t hard to track the movements of the gunmen. Jake heard the leader having conversations with several of them, although he couldn’t make out the words.

  There were three men down here in addition to the leader, Jake decided: one by the elevator that was there for handicapped accessibility, in the back of the big room; one by the reference desk at the front of the room; and one by the little break area where there were vending machines with soft drinks and snacks. Students weren’t allowed to take food or drinks out into the main room, but there were several tables and chairs in the alcove with the machines where they could sit and get away from their work for a while.

  These four, including the leader roaming around, could cover the entire lower level of the library. This was where most of the students currently in the building would have been when the gunmen took over. There probably hadn’t been many people at all on the third and fourth floors. Two, or at most three, terrorists would have been necessary to control those floors. And then, if the leader was smart, he would have all the hostages brought down here and gathered in one place.

  So that meant ten or twelve of the bastards here in the library. Jake had no idea how many other buildings had been targeted, or how many members of the gang had been assigned to each building. How many total were on campus? Forty? Fifty?