The floor was covered in blood and there were bodies, but I couldn’t make out their faces. The scariest part was when I noticed two more guys with guns walking the other way down the hall.
I heard Ellie say, “Oh my God” from behind me.
I turned back and pulled her along with me.
Just Julian there was horrible enough. Now there were two others. And who knew if there were more?
How could this be happening?
When had Julian turned into such a monster?
A thought occurred to me, slowly, and with it an intense urge to vomit and a feeling of guilt, of responsibility. I don’t know how to explain it, but all I could see in my head was the last time Julian had come to school. The way we’d beaten him up. The way I was happy to jump in.
I know it’s not the same thing. I know there was nothing that could compare to the horror being unleashed now, or all the fucked-up things he’d been doing ever since he got to town: his lies, his blackmail, the way he’d frightened poor little Cam, the way he’d abused Kami.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe he was hurting. But nothing in the world could justify this.
“Where are we going?!” Ellie asked, but there was no time to answer. All I could think of was finding the closest exit. I prayed to God we wouldn’t run into some other psycho, and I was reassured to hear the gunshots fading away as we ran farther and farther from the main door. The thing was, we’d run away from the only exit. At the back of the building, a group of students had gathered. They seemed desperate, not knowing where to turn.
“We’re trapped!”
“We’re going to die!”
I scanned the crowd, but Kami and my brother were nowhereto be found.
“Shit!” I yelled. Everyone looked at me, and several people shouted, “Where should we go, Taylor?”
They wanted me to help them. They were begging me. I didn’t know who half of them were, but for some reason, they’d decided I could save them. I couldn’t take responsibility for all of them. I already had Ellie on my hands. And the more of us there were, the fewer chances we had to make it out alive.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I…”
“Please,” they shouted, “let us go with you…”
Ellie whispered to me, “Come on, Taylor, you can’t abandon them.”
Think, Taylor, think, goddammit!
“To the library,” I said. “We’re going to the library.”
The fire alarms stopped, and so did the gunshots, and an eerie silence ensued. There was whimpering, sobs, shouts. But someone was hunting us, and we needed to keep cool. I silenced the people around me, cursing as I counted them. One, two, three, four… Seven in total. Ellie and me—that made nine. Where the hell was I going to hide nine people?
We made it to the library, and to my surprise, there was no one in there. “Hurry, find whatever you can to block the door,” I told them, and we all got to work.
“Will this work?” a younger kid—maybe fourteen—asked, handing me a broomstick.
“Sure,” I said, sticking it through the handles on the door. “But it’s not enough. Hey, you!” I called to a senior whose name I didn’t remember but who was in good shape. “Help me push this bookshelf over.”
Everyone else pitched in, and after we got the shelf blocking the door, we pushed a desk behind it, just in case.
“That’ll stop them, right?” a dark-skinned girl asked, hervoice small. She barely came up to my chest and looked like she was trying hard not to cry.
“Yeah,” I lied to reassure her, “it’ll definitely stop them.” Then, I told everyone to get down so nobody would see them through the windows.
Then I ran to the phone. I remembered how angry I used to get when kids were trying to study and the librarian seemed oblivious, talking loudly with her boyfriend on the landline. But now, that phone was a lifeline. We had to let the outside world know what was going on. Immediately.
Remembering bitterly how our idiot of a principal had forbidden us from bringing our cell phones to class, I dialed 911. The line was busy.
“Shit!”
