The shooter is yelling, and I can’t make out what he’s saying because each shot he takes is deafening. He looks like Mr Whitmire, my history teacher, but it can’t be. He’s not wearing his old blue sweater with the leather elbow patches that he must’ve gotten from Teachers R Us, boring us all to death as he drones on and on about the Gettysburg Address. He’s wearing old khaki jeans and a dirty bandana around his forehead like he’s fucking Rambo or something. He’s covered in guns and bands of ammo, and he looks ridiculous. It can’t be him.
Why would he do this to us?
Time feels weird. Speeding up and slowing down at random. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense anymore. So I just hold Callie, my arms clutching around her in panic, and try to just breathe in and outwhile I still can, because these might bemy last breaths, and I never really thought about how good it is to breathe before, but now...
I WANT TO GO HOME.
More screams. More sprays of machine gun fire.
I’m scared I’ll get my head blown off if I peer out to have a look, but I need to try to see what the hell is going on. Not thinking straight will probably kill me, but I do know with total certainty that I need to get us both out of hereright now.
Slowly, slowly, I stretch my neck, ready to pull it back in fast.
Bloody handprints all over the windows from people trying to escape. Our guidance counsellor, Mr Williams, is just a few feet away from me, riddled with bullets and weakly gurgling blood. We spoke the other day about career paths available if I wanted to do an Art degree. Now he’s dying over there, alone and afraid, his severed arm lying a few inches away from his left hip. Lacey Bordeaux, the captain of Callie’s cheerleading squad, is holding sloppy meat to her stomach, and I nearly throw up when it hits me that those are her guts. They slip through her clutching, shaking hands, and she starts to wail for her mother, over and over,Mom, I want my Mama! I want to yell at her to shut up or he’ll come over and finish what he started, and then he proves me right by cleaving right across her with another hail of bullets. She looks like a bloodied mess, like raw meat. I want my mom. I want to see my mom one last time.
Callie’s still dead. I don’t want to leave her. But I think I have to. I have a tiny chance of surviving, and this is it.
Can I take her with me? Maybe if I lift her into my arms like we do sometimes when we’re messing around… But I’ll have to run, and I don’t think I’ll get very far if I’m carrying her, and I don’t want to have her be a fucking human shield to save my ass. I don’t want any more bullets anywhere near her, one was too many…but I can’t leave her here where he can get her again, Ican’t…
But I have to.
There’s a bunch of people making a run for it towards the door closest to me, about ten feet away. The shooter is at the other end of the room, but from that distance, he wouldn’t even have to move, just lift the gun and pull the trigger. The bullets would reach us, no problem. But he’s distracted. He mows down a huddle of people nearer to the fire exit across the other side, happily shouting nonsense as he murders them. His mad eyes scour the crowd, and he hones in on someone to his left, someone writhing on the ground. I can’t quite see who it is. He’s bald. Maybe Mr Abshire, our Vice Principal? The gunman stands on the guy’s jaw and spits on him.
“How’s this for ‘unprofessional conduct’, you slimyfuck,” he shouts maniacally before pulling the trigger at Mr A’s head, point blank range, yelling with joy at the geyser of blood spattering his face, and it’s like something out of Scarface.
HOLY SHIT.
I look back at my girlfriend, the girl I love so much, and I know this is it. Throat clenching in agony, I push her further under the table and cover her with my tux jacket, hiding her as best I can. I can’t protect her, but I’ll be damned if he’ll shoot her any more than he already has.
If I’m gonna go, it has to be now.
My heart is pounding and my limbs are stiff with terror. I can hardly move.
Callie, saving my seat in the cafeteria with an adorable smile. Her cute giggle as I showed her my latest caricatures of the teachers sketched on paper napkins. Breakfast beignets on her birthday, sat out on the cafe patio while a live jazz band played, sugar all over our fingers, laughing as we licked each other’s instead of our own. Kissing her goodnight on her doorstep after every date until her mom or dad would open thedoor and make her go inside, and their amused eye rolls and comments about ‘lovebirds’.
All gone, in a split second.
I want to give her one last kiss, but she’s so drenched with blood, her head such a mess of chewed up bone and flesh (she only has one eye left, oh GOD), I don’t think I can.
I will regret this.
So I squeeze her hand, the one with the silver star ring on her pinkie finger. I gave it to her for Valentine’s Day this year. Our very last one. I squeeze her hand again, and for the first time ever, she doesn’t squeeze mine back. “Bye, Cal,” I whisper. I wish I could think of something cooler or more meaningful to say.
But there’s no time.No time.
I can barely even feel my legs as I scramble to my feet and make a run for it. I nearly get knocked over several times between the table and the door by the few remaining people who can still walk. It’s everyone for themselves, and people are getting pulled and shoved in the desperate, mad scramble, and I’m no better. There’s no time for good manners, not a single hero among us. Our primal instinct to survive has been engaged, and that reduces us to mindless, terrified beasts.
Just outside the door, when I finally squeeze my way out between other runners, is Rashon Prudhomme. He’s on the track team with me. He’s my friend. He helped me with a flat on my dad’s car once when he passed me broken down on the side of the road. He’s sweating, his face tinged a weird gray color, and he’s clutching his mangled leg, bleeding out. It’s sprayed up the white wall next to him. There’s an artery in legs, isn’t there?
I don’t stop to help him or comfort him. I don’t hold his hand. I don’t even give him a backward glance. I let him lie there, leave him to die alone, because the M-16 behind mesounds closer than it did a few seconds ago and I have to get away.
I can’t even remember how I got here, time fracturing once again in the panic, but I’m running down the halls. They’re filled with gray, acrid smoke, and my stomach drops as I see through stinging eyes that the main exit is on fire, the frame blown to rubble as though a bomb hit it. The roar of the fire alarm is fading, sputtering, just another piece of confusion in the nightmare. There’s no way anyone can use it to get out without the roaring wall of flames burning them alive. There was a loud bang earlier, before the shooting began, but we all thought it was Evan Desjardin’s piece of shit Chevy backfiring again, like it always does. It’s a Nolan High institution: every morning, Evan’s car backfires, and every morning we all mime shooting a gun, trying to sync the action up with the ground shaking boom. Just because it was funny.
There’s so much blood on my shirt and pants, and it’s slick and slimy and sticking to me and starting to congeal. I’m never gonna get my deposit back now. Shit. Why do I care? Why is that even a thought in my head?I will do anything, I just want to make it out alive.
Tamika Jourdain and Niesha Dubreauil are crying and trying to fit themselves into Tamika’s tall sports locker in the main corridor, the one she and the rest of the lacrosse team store their equipment in. Even with the lacrosse sticks thrown out - giving away their position even if they did manage to get in - the locker is much too small, too narrow. The door would barely close with just one of them in, let alone both, but they’re not giving up and keep trying to pull the door shut all the way. It ain’t gonna happen. They’ve lost their minds.
Gunfire, behind me.
