“Taylor?!”
“Help me,” I heard him say, then I heard something dragging along the floor. The door opened. There he was. We ran toward each other, his arms enclosed me, and I buried my head in his chest. Then he stepped back, pulling me inside, and everyone else blocked the door again.
“Are you OK?” he asked me. “Are you hurt?” He looked me all over, trying to see if I had any marks on me. Noticing the bruise on my right cheek, he asked me what had happened. But I couldn’t respond. In pain, in terror, I burst into tears. All the tension that had built up inside me finally broke free. I felt ravaged.
Ravaged, because I still couldn’t believe this was happening. Ravaged, because seeing Taylor alive made me realize how much I could have lost…
“Easy… Easy, babe,” he said, holding me tight.
All eyes in the library were on us, and I wanted to look around and see who was in there, but I tried not to, because doing so would force me to take stock of how many of us hadn’t made it. Besides, two very important people were obviously still missing.
Taylor walked me to the far corner of the library where we could be alone and looked me in the eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at my bruise. I could feel it swelling by the second.
“I fell on the ground and someone kicked me… Taylor… Taylor, what’s happening? How can this be real?”
“We’ve got to get you out of here. We’ve got to get everyone out of here,” he said, pulling me in close again. He was so scared. “I can’t… I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “I thought… I thought…”
I looked him in the eye to let him know the same thought had crossed my mind.
“Taylor, Kate knows everything… She knew it was going to happen, and she tried to tell Julian where I was so he could come for me…”
A flash of insight lit Taylor’s eyes. “This morning…” he said, “Kate told me she had something important she needed to tell me and that she’d wait for me by the front door during second period…”
“Julian wanted her to hand us over to him. If she did, he said he’d let her live. He’s crazy, Taylor. He’s crazy, and he’ll kill us all.”
As I was saying this, someone walked up behind me. I turned around and saw it was Ellie. I cried out her name, relieved, as close to happy as a person could be given these hideous circumstances. As we embraced, I said, “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She was crying as she informed me, “Kami… I saw Chloe… She was lying on the ground… There was blood all around her.”
I felt a part of my heart being torn away.
Chloe and I had been friends since we were kids. We’d never been as close as Kate or Ellie and I had, but there had always been something special between us. She was the crazy girl, the one always tempting us to get in trouble…
As Ellie and I held each other, all I could do was pray to God to protect us, and to please bring this living nightmare to an end. Ellie looked over my shoulder and told me, “I don’t know how to tell you, but people are saying…” Her voice was filled with dread.
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the phrase. Taylor had a serious look on his face as he motioned for us to follow him back to the main room in the library. There weren’t many people there: I recognized one girl from my math class and some others I had passed in the hallways. They were all terrified, especially the middle schoolers. One tall kid stepped forward, frowning at us, but Taylor stopped him with an icy glare, asking, “What the hell is going on?”
The kid wasn’t daunted. Looking back at his friends, he took another step and said, “You heard the guy, right? You three are on the list.”
Taylor spread his arms to protect us. “You’d better not be insinuating what I think.” I’d never heard him sound more serious in my life. Two other kids stepped forward, flanking the tall one.
“Why should we have to pay for whatever you guys did?” the one on the right said. He was a little bigger than the other two.
“There are little kids here! Are you guys really selfish enough to risk our lives and theirs over something you did?” the one on the left said as everyone else watched the scene, entranced.
I had been scared of this when I’d heard Julian’s distorted voice over the loudspeaker. And now it was happening before my very eyes.
Fearless, Taylor stared the three of them down and said, “What are you suggesting? You want to drag us out of here and watch them kill us?”
As they faced off, I thought of all the things that might happen. Taylor was strong, but could he really take all three of these guys fighting for their lives? And what if the others jumped in? What would Ellie and I do? Thousands of scenarios shot through my mind, and all of them ended badly.
One of the guys told Taylor, “Sorry, dude. But I don’t feel like dying. This has to stop, and there’s only one way.”
Just then, we heard helicopters whirring overhead again, and as we looked up, a voice came over a megaphone. It came as a great relief: “This is the Carsville chief of police. Whoever the shooters are, drop your weapons and come out with your hands up. I repeat, drop your weapons and come out with your hands up.”
We all held our breath, listening to the choppers.
