“Hunter, you know already I have to work on Saturday. That’s the tough part of being the boss, sort of. I have to fill in when other people can’t be there.” Because of a family wedding, two of our regular servers were going to be out on Merlotte’s busiest day. “That’s one reason I’m so glad I can be here now,” I said. I wondered if I should stop at the office to explain that I had permission to take Hunter out the front door, but Ms. Minter and Ms. Javitts were having such an earnest conversation that I didn’t want to interrupt them.
In fact, they looked so worried that I felt a flash of concern, myself. But I didn’t want to involve Hunter in my anxiety, and I quickly blocked off my thoughts as I pushed open one of the front doors. “Who’s going to be at you-all’s cookout? Your daddy and Erin, I know. What about your great-uncle?”
Hunter told me about the few relatives and two distant cousins his own age who’d said they’d come grill hot dogs, too. They’d meet at the little Red Ditch park to play kickball and fly kites and throw Frisbees. He was describing his new dragon kite as I unlocked the car door and lifted out the box full of goody bags.
I’d bought the plastic bags stamped with horses (feeling proud that they fit in with the Pony Room theme!) at Wal-Mart, and I’d filled each one with candy, a tiny top, a harmonica, and a sheet of stickers on the advice of Halleigh Bellefleur, a schoolteacher friend. Maybe the twirl you had to give a top was too much for such little kids? Maybe I should have gotten something else? Oh, well, too late now. Hunter seemed pleased, which had been my goal. I let him carry the box, which he promptly tilted to one side.
“Whoops, we dropped one,” I said, bending over to pick it up. “You think you can count them again for me? Make sure we have them all?”
“One, two—” Hunter began, and suddenly our heads snapped to look in the direction of the turn into the parking lot. The screeching tires and the racing motor of an oncoming truck were telling both of us that something was wrong.
The pickup swerved into the parking lot and stopped with a spray of gravel in front of the school. We both squatted down, instinctively concealing ourselves. Luckily, there was a van parked between my car and the pickup, so Hunter and I had extra coverage. In Hunter’s mind the van provided an impenetrable wall, and he felt much safer. I was not so optimistic, simply because I was larger and therefore more visible.
Maybe I was also more realistic.
If I canted myself at a strange angle I could see the driver’s door of the pickup. It hadn’t opened. I could glimpse the man behind the wheel. He appeared to be talking to himself, though maybe he had a cell phone in his farthest hand. He was wearing a Red Ditch Oil & Lube baseball cap and a plaid western-style shirt.
I glanced sideways at my nephew, torn between trying to absorb this new development and wanting to protect him. Hunter’s eyes were wide and his face looked much older than a kindergartner’s should. I could feel his fear beating against my own mind.
The pickup had parked in the BUSES ONLY area, designated by an unmistakable sign and yellow stripes on the pavement. That was lawless enough to rile any middle-class citizen, but that wasn’t what had raised the hair on the back of my neck and made Hunter’s face go dead white.
The man in the truck was batshit crazy.
I slapped my pocket, but I knew where my cell phone was—in my purse. In the Pony Room. All I’d brought out with me was my car key.
There were fields all around the school, except here in the front, on the west side. Small houses lined the two-lane street leading from Main to the school, but of the six or so dwellings, three were clearly empty right now, the occupants at work, if the lack of vehicles was a reliable indication. One of the others had a For Sale sign in front, and two were too far away for me to assess. If I took off for one of them, I might simply be wasting valuable time.
Damn. I had to go back into the school.
Was Hunter safer out here or inside? I could ease him back into the car, tell him to stay down. I had a mental montage of the sheriff’s deputies showing up, bullets flying, Hunter hit by accident.
Okay, he had to come with me.
The people in the school had to be warned, especially Sherry Javitts. This man was surely the enraged Brady.
Sometimes I hated my telepathy. You’d think I could have gotten some talent that was useful for offense. I couldn’t stop an armed man by thinking at him. But there was a defensive way it could be helpful.
Hunter, here’s what we’re going to do, I said silently. You’re going to walk into the school with me like we don’t have a care in the world, and once we’re inside you’re going to run like a rabbit, right to the Pony Room. You’re going to tell Ms. Yarnell to lock the door, a silly man is here. “Silly” seemed inadequate, but “crazy” and “violent” and “probably armed” seemed too heavy for Hunter. I took a deep breath. You and your friends are going to lie down on the floor, where no one looking through the door window can see you. Lie flat like pancakes, you hear?
His head jerked once. You come, too, he pleaded.
I’ve got to warn the other people, I said. I’ve got to try. You get to the room, you stay down, and you don’t move, no matter what. Ms. Yarnell will take care of you all. Sabrina Yarnell was capable of taking care of a roomful of children with both hands tied behind her back, but she couldn’t stop bullets. At least, I didn’t think so.
We were still squatting beside the open car door. Now, in the slowest way possible, Hunter and I stood up. I took another deep breath as I shut the car door.
Slow and easy, I reminded Hunter, and I smiled at him. It wasn’t a good effort, but he smiled back in a very small way. We began strolling down the sidewalk to the front doors. I hoped, with the box of goody bags under my left arm, we made a convincingly casual scene. I put my free hand on Hunter’s shoulder and squeezed gently. He looked up at me, no longer able to sustain even a neutral expression. Fear looked out of his dark eyes, and I had to work hard to force away my mental image of what I’d like to do to the man who’d ruined Hunter’s happiness. With the box propped against one hip, I opened one of the old front doors. We stepped inside, and it fell shut behind us. I knelt, handed the box to Hunter. I told him, Scoot, darlin’. I’ll see you in a minute or two. Now, run!
The minute he started down the hall to the Pony Room, I stood and whirled around to look back through the window in the right front door. The crazy man was getting out of the truck, his mouth moving as he talked to himself. I knew he had a gun. I knew it, right from his head.
I spun back around to see Sherry Javitts blotting her face, the principal standing in the doorway of her own office. They were both staring out the office window at me, alerted by my odd actions and body language to the fact that something was very wrong.
“He’s out there with a gun,” I said as I pulled open the office door. “Call nine-one-one right now! Can we lock the doors?”
Without a word the principal hit a button and an almighty racket sounded throughout the school. “Lockdown alarm,” she explained, grabbing a set of keys from right inside her office and hurrying to the entrance to shoot the deadbolt that secured the double doors. She stooped to push the floor bolt that held the left door in place. Once it was pushed down, she reached for the right one; but it didn’t work.
Sherry was still gaping at me.
“Call the police,” I said, biting back the word idiot. She picked up the phone. As she punched in numbers, her thoughts weren’t coherent enough to decipher even if I’d had the time or inclination.
I didn’t have to look outside to track Brady’s progress. The turmoil in the man’s brain got closer and closer until his chaos was beating inside my own head in time with his footsteps. He reached the front doors and began pounding on them.
Though they were bowing in, the doors held under Brady’s initial assault. Ms. Minter spun on her heel and began running down the left-wing hall to lock the back doors leading to the playground. Sherry was staring at the way the doors were jumping. The phone was still in her hand. Someone on the other end was yelling.
“You need to hide,” I said urgently. “If the doors give in, you have to be out of sight.”
“But he might shoot someone else,” she said. “He just wants me.”
I didn’t have time to figure out whether that was an incredibly brave thought or simply shock-induced honesty. “He doesn’t have to get anyone,” I said. “The cops will be here soon.”
“Hardly any cops in Red Ditch,” Sherry said, “as he’s been reminding me every day for months.” I could tell from her thoughts that Sherry was resolving to sacrifice herself. She felt surprisingly good about that; she would regain her pride and finally accomplish something big. A tinge of fatalism and self-righteousness colored this decision. If I’ve learned anything from years of hearing other people’s most personal reflections, it’s that we never do anything for only one reason.
I didn’t want anyone to die today.
I spied a janitor’s closet across from the school office. (I deduced this from the fact that a sign on the outside read JANITOR.) I grabbed the secretary’s arm and hustled her over to it, opened the door, and shoved her inside. When Rachelle Minter came running back, presumably having locked the playground doors in both wings, I said, “Sherry’s in there. Lock it,” and she did it instantly. Then she stood and gasped for breath. The principal was not a runner, but she was a damn quick thinker.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do. We’d locked the doors, we’d called the police, we’d hidden the target of the violence from the dealer of the violence.
It was like waiting for a tornado to touch down.
The principal and I stood side by side, our gazes fixed on the old doors with the ominous gap between them and the missing right-hand floor latch. Each time Brady crashed into the doors they spread a little farther apart before they rebounded into place. Though there was more play between the two doors than there should have been, the broken floor bolt would be the deciding factor.
“Maintenance guy didn’t fix it,” Ms. Minter gasped. “But who knew someone would try to kick the doors in?”
Abruptly, I wondered what the hell we were doing standing there. We weren’t armed, and our mere presence would hardly be enough to deter Brady from whatever plan was in his crazy head. So far, he was absolutely bent on gaining entrance and finding Sherry.
“We better get out of the way!” I was surprised at how calmly I spoke, because my heart was racing like a motor on high. The unknown Brady had a lot of stamina. With every blow the doors bowed in more, rebounded more slowly. I grabbed Ms. Minter’s hand and began to urge her back into the office.
I should have been concentrating; or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, since Brady was moved by nothing more than rage and impulse. He hit the doors as hard as he could. Simultaneously, he fired twice through the gap between them. The boom of the gunfire was magnified in the little lobby. Even as I flinched, I felt a yank on my hand and I staggered.
Ms. Minter folded to the floor, still holding on to me.
Caught off balance, I sprawled to the floor with her, landing partly across her legs. I knew she’d been hit. There was shock and pain caroming from corner to corner in her brain. In a second, I could see the blood soaking her pantsuit. Her eyes were terrified.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, it hurts.” Then she passed out.
I lay as still as though I were paralyzed. Had I been hit, too? I didn’t think so, but I was so stunned I couldn’t move.
I was facedown on the green linoleum, sprawled across poor Rachelle Minter’s legs. She’d landed on her right side. I could feel the wetness as her blood pooled underneath me. Brady had continued his assault on the front doors after he’d fired. I could feel the surge of triumph in the gunman’s brain. He was pretty sure we’d gone down, but I didn’t think he could see us at the moment, and he didn’t know if we were dead or not.
I could feel how wet the front of my T-shirt had become in a few seconds. Taking a big chance, I rolled over onto my side so I wasn’t putting any more pressure on Ms. Minter. I lay as close to the wounded woman as I could. She wasn’t dead yet. I could feel the life in her brain. Before I began my impersonation of a dead person, I opened my eyes a slit to look at myself. I was bloody enough to looked seriously wounded, perhaps even dead, as long as Brady didn’t try to locate an actual bullet hole.
I made myself go totally limp. I told myself over and over, as I heard the doors finally spring apart, that he could not tell I was alive as long as I thought “limp and lifeless.”
He won’t shoot me. He won’t shoot me. I begged God that Brady would not think a coup de grace was necessary.
The school was eerily silent . . . to my ears, anyway. In my head, the panic of more than a hundred adults and children beat like an irregular drum. Clearest of all was the regret and terror of the woman in the closet only seven feet away from where I lay pretending to be dead. Sherry was almost incapable of coherent thought. I could totally understand that. At least I knew what was happening, but she was shut in that windowless tiny room, knowing that the man whose footsteps she could hear was there to kill her.
Then those footsteps were beside me. Brady was breathing harshly, rapidly; I could “hear” that he could not believe what he had done, that he knew that sometime in the future he would regret the deaths of the two women on the floor, that he was wondering where Sherry was, that bitch, she should be the one who was dead.
He screamed then, the sounded ripping from his throat as though he were being tortured. “Sherry,” he bellowed. “Where the hell are you? I’m gonna shoot you, you whore! I’m gonna spray your guts all over the walls!”
Behind the wooden door Sherry was holding her breath and praying as hard as I had that he couldn’t hear her breathe, couldn’t smell her skin, couldn’t see through the wall to where she was crouched among the cleaning products and rolls of toilet paper.
I couldn’t move so much as a fingertip. I couldn’t take a deep breath. Limp, I chanted to myself. Limp, limp, limp.
He kicked the wall about two feet away from my head, and then he cursed because he was wearing sneakers. It took every little sliver of will I could scrape together to keep myself from flinching.
I heard a siren . . . a lone siren. Though it sounded as sweet and welcome as a lover’s greeting, I was conscious of a certain amount of disappointment. I’d half expected six sirens, or a dozen. I guess I’d been watching too much television. This wasn’t Chicago or Dallas. This was Red Ditch. Some state troopers would be on their way, I was sure, but they wouldn’t be able to arrive on the site instantly.
Maybe by the time they got here, this would be all over. But I couldn’t imagine what the ending would be.
Brady stopped screaming threats and began trying doorknobs. Of course the one to the school office opened easily. He had a field day at Sherry’s desk, tossing papers, throwing the telephone, causing as much chaos as he could. Though I knew he was intent on that destruction, I still didn’t dare to move because the window overlooked the area where I lay. He might catch any slight movement of leg or arm.
Rachelle Minter was weaker now. I tried to imagine a plan that would save her; one that wouldn’t include me getting killed, as well. I simply couldn’t think of one. So I kept on playing possum.
The only thing I could do was worry. I spared a sharp moment of regret for Hunter. His day had been ruined, in the worst possible way. From now on, he’d remember his first-ever school party as an event of horror, and there was no way I could make that up to him.
I even had a second of sheer pique that the damn cupcakes were going to go to waste.
But mostly I worried about the children. If Brady started shooting into the rooms at random, sooner or later a child or a teacher would get killed. I had to think of a way to stop him.
Brady had resumed ranting and screaming, even when the siren abruptly cut off. I was so busy breathing shallowly and lying still that it took me a minute to dip inside his head, which was a virtual snake pit.
Brady had lost all his insulation; that was what I’d always called the civilizing influence that kept us from hitting other people when we were angry with them, stopped us from hawking and spitting on the floor of our grandmother’s house, advised us to make an attempt to get along with coworkers. Maybe Brady had never had a lot of this insulation anyway. His mental and emotional entanglement with Sherry had stripped all this insulation away and all the wires in Brady’s brain were hopping and sparking without any impulse control.
Brady was entirely human, but if I hadn’t known better I’d have called him a demon.
The demons I’d known had been much better behaved. My sort-of-godfather, Desmond Cataliades, was mostly demon, and he wore civilization like a coat.
With no warning, Brady kicked me. I didn’t know if he could sense an intruder in his head because he’d abandoned his semblance to a total human being, or if he simply felt like expressing his aggression. It was a huge effort to roll with the kick as if I weren’t in my body.
Then Brady fired the gun into the office, and again I had to hold on to my possum persona with all the determination I could muster. I came this close to yelling out loud as the glass of the window shattered and rained down on me and Ms. Minter. Now some of the blood smearing me was my own.