Chapter SeventeenKami
They didn’t take long. Taylor had been right. It was the same guys I’d seen close to the stairs. I could tell by their voices. And he was right about something else, too: As soon as danger was near, our classmates didn’t hesitate to rat us out.
“Open the door!” the two guys yelled, first pushing, then shooting, causing everyone gathered in the library to scream. No one tried to stop them, and as soon as the doors opened, everyone started yelling.
“They’re over there!”
“The ones from the list! Kamila Hamilton, Ellie Webber, and Taylor Di Bianco! They’re right there!”
How could they do this to us? I grabbed Ellie’s hand and looked at Taylor, horrified.
“Run. I’ll distract them,” he said. We both shook our heads, and I told him, “No.”
“I said go!” he ordered us. And before I could refuse again, Taylor had stood up and taken off. I looked at Ellie, unsure what he was up to and with no idea what to do. That was when I heard one of the guys say, “You take that side, and I’ll take this one.”
Shit. They were going to split up. Suddenly, Taylor took off running away from the door to the other side of the library. “There he is!” one shouted just as I called out his name, terrified that something would happen to him.
“Come on!” Ellie said, pulling me behind her. “This is our only chance!”
We ran desperately toward the door, our only possibility for escaping the massacre, but then the three guys who had been fighting with Taylor before got in our way. We were dead, I thought. But something I would never have expected happened. The five others who were with us, girls and guys both, jumped on them, catching them by surprise and giving us just enough time to get out. “Run!” a girl yelled after me. Little did she know that would be her death sentence.
I didn’t look back. Ellie didn’t let me. We sprinted down the hall, running for our lives, in desperate hope of escape. And then the worst happened.
We were at the end of the hall, about to turn the corner, and my legs were just about to give out when a slew of bullets came whizzing past me, so I threw myself on the ground, covering my head. Then I heard a voice behind me shout,No!and I waited for the pain, waited to feel what so many other students had already experienced at the hands of those sick bastards, waited to feel the warm blood seep through my clothes as my eyes closed and I lost consciousness. But none of that happened.
Instead, everything turned to slow motion. You see that in movies, the way a traumatic or near-death experience slows things down and a person can see everything happening all at once, perceiving every single detail, even as so many emotions blend together. In slow motion, I saw my best friend falling. I wanted to go to her, hold her in my arms, and tell her everything would be OK, but I snapped out of it when I heard a familiar voice.
“Kami, run!” Taylor shouted, and everything sped back up to warp speed.
I struggled to get up, but was spurred on by rage and pain, so I ran. When I turned the corner, I saw him.
There he was.
Thiago.
“Kam!”
His voice pronouncing my name, and just finding him alive, all but paralyzed me.
I don’t know how I reached him, I don’t even know how my legs were still moving, all I know is suddenly he was holding me in his arms, his body wrapped around me, protecting me. Then we were no longer in the hallway, he’d pulled me somewhere small and dark, a dusty broom closet. I was in Thiago’s arms… Finally, I was back in his arms.
“Kamila,” he said, his hands on my cheeks, his eyes taking me in. I was blinking, almost as though my tears hoped to wash away that image of Ellie on the ground… Then I saw him, I really saw him, the love of my life, the only person with whom I could imagine regaining some semblance of normalcy after all that violence, desperation, blood, and death.
“She got shot,” I managed to say after several seconds in silence.
Looking back, I realize I must have been in a state of shock. I remember him whispering tender, sweet nothings in my ear, but I don’t remember what he said. At some point I came back to reality and found myself there in that dark, ugly place, that refuge where I felt the full weight of sadness, death, and despair.
Thiago asked me who had been shot. His voice was soft, but his eyes were scared.
“Ellie,” I told him. “It was Julian. Julian’s the one doing this.”
I had seen him when Ellie and I were running. It was him shooting at us, not the others. Julian had emerged from his hiding place and shot my best friend without a second thought.
He could have shot me, too, but he hadn’t. He’d said over the PA system that he wanted to wait. That what he wanted was to see me suffer, watching all the people I most loved disappear.
I heard Thiago trying to soothe me, inhaled his familiar scent, felt his warmth, and I emerged from my trance. I opened my eyes, pulled away, stared at him, and said his name: “Thiago?”
“Yeah, babe, it’s me.” His eyes were watering, full of emotion. “I was so scared, I was so scared you were gone.”
