Trigger Warning

by William W. Johnstone

  “Two guys like us, eh?” Granderson sneered. “Doesn’t make us friends.”

  “Damn right. Come on.”

  Jake figured he and Granderson would go down the stairwell, but as he turned in that direction, his gaze happened to land on the small elevator tucked into a corner. The library was an old building that had been remodeled numerous times over the years, so he figured the elevator had been added at some point to make it ADA-compliant.

  The really interesting thing about it, though, was that the downward-pointing arrow on the panel above the doors was lit. That meant the elevator was descending from an upper floor.

  The implications of that burst through Jake’s brain like an explosion. He snapped, “Come on!” at Granderson and broke into a run toward the elevator.

  If the campus cop wondered what was going on, he didn’t hang back to ask questions. He just charged after Jake, who lunged forward to stab a finger against the elevator button.

  Just in time, too. Another second and the elevator would have been past ground level. But Jake had been able to catch it, and with a little ding, the light above the doors came on. They started to slide open.

  A man inside was already desperately pushing a button to close them again. The doors came to a jerky stop when they were only half open. That gap was wide enough for Jake to look into the small, enclosed space and see two men standing there, a tall, rangy black guy and a shorter, stockier white guy with a brush of red hair and a close-cropped beard. Both were armed.

  Reactions on both sides were almost instantaneous. They had to be, because the doors had started to slide closed again. Jake and Granderson crouched and poured lead into the cubicle. The men in the elevator returned the fire. The roar of shots was too loud for Jake to hear anything except that, but he felt the disturbance in the air as slugs whipped past his ears. More than once, a hot breath blew against his cheek.

  Then he stuck a foot out at the last second to stop the doors from closing and prevent the elevator from continuing its descent. The echoes of the gun-thunder died away into a hollow silence. Jake kept his pistol leveled at the opening. He had kept count of his rounds and knew he had two shots left.

  “Push the button again, Granderson, so the door will open,” he told the campus cop.

  “I’d . . . like to,” Granderson said in a strained voice, “but I don’t think . . .”

  Jake threw a quick look at his ally. Granderson had gone down to one knee. He had a forearm propped on that knee as he leaned forward. The gun was in that hand. The other hand was on the floor to help brace him. Bloodstains spread on his shirtfront in a couple of different places.

  “Damn it,” Jake grated. “How bad—”

  Granderson was breathing hard. He pointed his gun at the elevator doors and said, “You just . . . open ’em up. I’ll be . . . ready.”

  Jake kept his foot in place and stretched to the side to push the button again. The doors began to open. As they did, he stepped back hurriedly and brought his pistol to bear, too.

  There was no need for that. The two guys in the elevator were both dead, shot to pieces.

  “They have to be Foster’s men from the second floor,” Jake said. “They were the only ones left upstairs. When I saw that the elevator was on its way down, I knew it must be them. He was trying to get them to rally with him on the lower level. He’s going to make his last stand down there.”

  “Give me . . . a hand. Foster must’ve heard . . . all the shooting. If I take the elevator . . . on down . . . he’ll be waiting to see . . . if it’s his guys or somebody else . . . who gets out.”

  “You’ll run right into a swarm of bullets if you do that,” Jake protested.

  “Won’t matter. Blood’s already leaking . . . into my lungs and guts. I won’t make it. But I can distract him . . . and anybody he’s got left on his side . . . while you hit them . . . from the other direction.”

  “Blast it, you just want to make some show-off play and be the hero—”

  “Why . . . shouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you’re such an asshole!” Jake burst out.

  “Yeah? Well, so are you, Rivers!”

  They stared at each other for a second, then both men laughed.

  “You gonna . . . help me or not?” Granderson demanded.

  “Yeah, yeah, hang on.” Jake took Granderson’s arm and helped him onto the elevator. He had to use his foot to push aside one of the bloody corpses as he did so. Granderson propped himself up against the car’s back wall.

  Then he nodded to Jake and said, “When you hear the shooting . . . you’ll know.”

  “Yeah. Good luck, Granderson.”

  “Don’t need it anymore . . . as long as I can keep breathing . . . long enough to get down there. Push the button for me . . . will you?”

  Jake thumbed the lower-level button on the control panel and stepped back as the doors closed. His last sight of Granderson was of the campus cop grinning as he hunched forward a little with blood soaking the front of his uniform shirt.

  * * *

  Foster left one of his men, a guy called Alec, watching the hostages and told the other one, Reese, to come with him as he headed for the elevator to meet Lamar and Tanner.

  Before they got there, a storm of gunfire broke somewhere up on the first floor, with at least two dozen shots being fired in ten seconds. Foster stopped short and tensed, then stared at the elevator. Above the doors, the down arrow was still lit. It had been on its way to the lower level but must have stopped for some reason on the first floor.

  Whoever was to blame for everything else going wrong had stopped the elevator, too. Foster was sure of it. And that couldn’t be anybody else except Jake Rivers.

  Why hadn’t he had Rivers killed when he had the chance? Was that one mistake going to ruin everything?

  Foster heard the faint rumble as the elevator began to descend again.

  He made a curt gesture to indicate that he and Reese should split up. Foster went left, Reese to the right, as they approached the elevator. Foster held his gun ready in front of him in a two-handed grip as he said quietly, “Be ready when that elevator opens. It might be two of our guys in there . . . or it might not.”

  “I’m ready, Matthias,” Reese said, but he sounded tense and worried. As the long day had gone on and more and more things went wrong, the worry and uncertainty had spread through Foster’s group. Foster had to give them credit, though: as far as he knew, none of them had deserted him.

  A faint thunk sounded as the elevator came to a stop at the bottom of the shaft. The doors slid back...

  Even though Foster was ready, he still jumped back slightly as a bloody, grinning apparition lurched toward them. The thing held a gun that spat fire at them as he stumbled forward. Foster barely had time to recognize the blood-sodden clothing as the uniform of a campus security officer before he was returning the fire, along with Reese. Their bullets pounded into the campus cop and threw him back across the elevator car to hang against the rear wall.

  There was no way the guy could still be alive, but Foster would have sworn that his grin widened even more, just for a second, and his eyes burned even brighter with hate and something else . . .

  Triumph?

  Another shot blasted somewhere behind them, and Reese pitched forward with half of his head gone. Foster whirled around and saw Jake Rivers at the bottom of the escalators. He threw himself aside as Rivers fired again. The shot went wide because of Foster’s quick reaction.

  “Stop him!” Foster yelled at Alec, who was staring openmouthed at Rivers. “Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  Foster had drilled the men enough that they were obedient, almost like a military unit. Alec clapped his mouth shut and brought up his gun, and Jake Rivers shot him in the chest, knocking him back toward the hostages with arms and legs flailing. His body landed on some girl with purple hair who started screaming and panicking, and a second later chaos had that area firmly in its grip as the panic spread.

&n
bsp; Foster didn’t care. His options had suddenly narrowed down to one—but he wasn’t out of options. He dashed toward the stacks, deliberately taking a path that would carry him in front of the hostages so Rivers couldn’t shoot at him without a miss striking the innocents. Just as Foster expected, Rivers held his fire and came after him on foot.

  Once he reached the stacks with their narrow, claustrophobic aisles, Foster would either get the drop on Rivers and kill the meddling bastard once and for all . . . or he would push the button on the detonator and set off those charges of C4.

  Either way, Jake Rivers was going to die in the next few minutes.

  The only question was how many others were going to die with him.

  CHAPTER 43

  As Jake ran after Foster, he glanced toward the elevator. Cal Granderson sat at the back of the car, having slid down it leaving a bloody smear on the wall. His legs were extended out in front of him. His feet just reached the track where the doors ran and kept them from closing. Jake caught a glimpse of the young man’s face, which seemed strangely at peace considering the state of his bullet-riddled body below.

  Jake didn’t have time for anything else. He had to deal with Matthias Foster. Every instinct in Jake’s body was screaming at him that the threat wasn’t over. In fact, the worst might still be to come.

  Jake reached the spot where Foster had disappeared into the stacks. He paused long enough to glance over his shoulder. Some of the hostages had realized there was no longer anything stopping them from getting out of here. They stampeded toward the escalators, and the others began to follow them, tentatively at first and then in more of a rush.

  A shot cracked and a bullet whined off a metal shelf only a foot or so from Jake’s head. He had taken his attention off the enemy for too long. He couldn’t afford to do that. Crouching, he caught a flicker of movement at the far end of the long, narrow aisle and snapped a shot that way in return.

  Then, instead of charging along that aisle, he darted two over and headed down that one. He moved as quietly as possible, not wanting Foster to be able to track him by sound. Foster would be doing the same thing, he knew. Keeping quiet and trying to get the drop on him.

  But maybe Foster didn’t have the patience for that, because he called, “Rivers, you hear me?”

  Jake stopped in his tracks but didn’t say anything.

  “I know you’re there, you big son of a bitch. It’s not like you’d give up after coming this far and killing so many people.” Foster laughed. “Just how many have you killed today, Jake? You think you’re the hero and I’m the bad guy, but I’ll bet you’ve got a hell of a lot more blood on your hands than I do!”

  Foster was wrong about one thing: Jake didn’t think of himself as a hero. Just a guy who could recognize when something needed to be done and who possessed the resolve to do it. He wasn’t really thinking about what Foster was yammering about, though. He just tried to home in on the voice. It sounded like it came from a couple of aisles over.

  Jake looked at the shelves beside him. They were ten feet tall, so that a member of the library staff had to bring one of the rolling ladders and climb on it to retrieve volumes on the top shelves. The ceiling was twenty feet tall, though, so there was a ten-foot gap between it and the top of the shelves.

  Jake tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and pushed in some books in several places. That didn’t make any noise, and neither did he as he used the handholds and footholds he had created and started to climb.

  “Well, all that’s going to change,” Foster went on. “It won’t be long now before the big body count will belong to me. I can’t blow up the whole campus, I might as well admit that now, but you know what, Jake? I can call you Jake, can’t I, since we’re about to be blown to atoms together? I can blow this library sky-high. The detonator is right here in my hand, Jake. All I have to do is push it.”

  Jake froze where he was. He didn’t want to give away what he was trying to do, so he dropped back to the floor, landing lightly, and called, “Don’t do it, Foster.”

  That brought another laugh from the terrorist. Or madman. Pretty much the same thing.

  “Now you talk to me! You don’t want to be blown up, do you?”

  “I don’t really give a damn about that,” Jake said. “I just don’t want you to die thinking that you’re some sort of infamous mass murderer. You and me are the only ones left in this building. You blow it up, and we’re the only ones you’ll kill.”

  That was a bluff, at least as far as he knew. Pierce and Montambault were still upstairs with the other hostages he had freed earlier. He supposed it was possible someone had been watching from a window and had seen the others fleeing, leading them to come downstairs and get out, too, but Jake had no way of knowing that. He’d had his own hands too full to keep up with anything else.

  “What?” Foster snapped. “You’re lying!”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know who else you might’ve killed earlier, but blowing up this library won’t get any more victims except a couple of nobodies . . . you and me, pal.”

  As he said that, Jake wondered about Natalie. Was she still alive, or had she succumbed to her wound? Was she upstairs, or already in custody? Jake hoped she survived. Not so much for her sake, although he had a hunch he’d always have a soft spot for her, but because she might be the only one left who could tell the authorities any details about Matthias Foster and his crazy, evil plan. That might help keep someone else from doing something similar in the future.

  Foster was muttering something. Jake could make out a few vile obscenities, but the rest was an incoherent jumble.

  Finally, Foster called, “Don’t try to talk me into surrendering. I’ll never be taken alive. Victory or death!”

  “Colonel Travis at the Alamo,” Jake said. “Don’t dirty up the words of a noble man, Foster.” He paused. “If you don’t want to be taken alive, forget about blowing anything up. Put that detonator aside, step out, and face me. Just the two of us.”

  Foster laughed.

  “Head to head? Mano a mano? Just like the showdown in every bad book ever written and every bad movie ever made? So that you’ll have the chance to deliver some classic badass line like Yippee-ki-yay—”

  “Screw it,” Jake muttered. He swarmed back up the shelves, flung a leg on the top, powered up, leaped to the next one, sure now from the conversation where Foster was, and dropped on top of the nutjob while Foster was trying to dig that detonator out of his pocket.

  He hoped the jolt wouldn’t make it go off.

  Foster screeched curses, hammered fists at Jake’s head, and tried to ram a knee into his groin. Jake was taller and heavier, but Foster battled with the strength of a madman and the cramped quarters didn’t help, either. Foster chopped a glancing sidehand blow across Jake’s throat, and while it wasn’t powerful enough to crush his windpipe, for a couple of seconds Jake couldn’t breathe. Foster pulled back and managed to jerk something from his pocket.

  Jake tackled him, and as they both crashed to the floor, the little box slipped from Foster’s fingers and bounced and slid away. He tried to scramble after it, but Jake grabbed him and swung him to the side, crashing him into the shelves. Foster kicked at him, caught him under the chin. That rocked Jake’s head back and made the world go black for an instant.

  Foster got loose, went after the detonator. Jake snagged an ankle and upended him again. Foster’s hand hit the detonator and sent it skidding underneath one of the heavy shelving units. Foster screamed in frustration.

  Since he couldn’t get the detonator, he scrambled to his feet and ran.

  Jake caught up with him in the study area with its comfortable furniture, where he and Natalie had met earlier that day, even though it seemed like days had passed since then. A diving tackle brought both of them crashing down on the carpet.

  Foster fought like a wildcat. He was strong, wiry, and had blinding speed. Jake was extremely fast, especially for such a bi
g man, but Foster was even quicker. He got a hand on Jake’s face and gouged at his eyes enough that Jake was blinded momentarily. He came up on his knees, pawing at his eyes with the back of his left hand.

  Foster leaped to his feet and clawed at the pistol he had stuck behind his belt earlier. Jake’s vision cleared enough for him to see that. He reached for the gun at the small of his back, drawing faster than he ever had. Sometimes real life just played out like a book or movie.

  Final shoot-out.

  The shots crashed together. Jake felt the impact against his chest and went over backward. As he fell, he watched through eyes gone hazy again as Foster stumbled back and forth, trying to stop the blood that fountained from his bullet-torn throat. He couldn’t do it, of course, and after a second the gory stream slowed as his heart began slowing to its inevitable stop. He fell forward, and the blood began to form a slowly spreading pool under him.

  Jake lay there, mostly numb. He was only vaguely aware of the tactically armored, heavily armed figures that began to swarm around him a few moments later. He heard some sort of erratic thumping, like the sound of distant drums, and wondered if that was his heartbeat.

  Then that went away, and so did he.

  * * *

  The death toll of innocents that day at Kelton College was sixteen. It could have been much higher. Easily could have been.

  Twenty-three terrorists were killed. Five were taken into custody, including Dr. Natalie Burke, who was expected to recover—under heavy guard, of course.

  Walt Graham and Theresa Vega questioned all the surviving members of the group and eventually were convinced that they’d gotten them all. Nobody else was lurking out there, waiting to wreak bloody havoc on Kelton College.

  The campus was closed for two weeks to allow repairs to be made and all explosive devices to be removed. Getting rid of the bombs didn’t take nearly as long as cleaning up the blood and the bullet holes.