Now
Tears moisten my burned skin, and I picture small drops of rain on a parched desert. They don’t roll down my face, they smear, a sheen against my cheeks. I reach my hand to wipe it away, and I feel my face crinkle, and the pain is sharp and infinite.
I so want a painkiller. I so want to press the button.
But I have to wait.
I have to see my dad.
Detective Perez gazes at me, yellow legal pad in hand, sheets filled with details of death.
“Do you want a painkiller?” she asks.
Oh, God, yes.
“No,” I say. “There’s more I need to tell you.”
Yesterday
They were there.
Max’s parents. Mr. Scronce. And what looked like the rest of the town.
My breath caught in my throat.
The sheriff stood in front, one hand clutching his service revolver, the other, his chest. His face was sheet white. This oak of a man swayed, looking ready to topple. Blood seeped from his shirt and dribbled onto the floor. Dirk had been wrong. He hadn’t hit the bulletproof vest. He’d hit flesh.
The sheriff had escaped and stood here by sheer force of will.
Behind him were adults, maybe 60 or more, row after row, crammed into the hallway, filling it up all the way to the back. So many adults, so little space. More continued to spill inside, insects flooding out of a hole and coming here. All along, we’d wanted to call them here, to attract them with a school bell when we were ready, but they’d beaten us to it.
Of course they did. Adults always knew better.
They’d survived the battle in the streets and were dotted with wounds, sores and slices, blood and pus. A few used sticks as crutches. They were winded, and their breathing was like the dull roar of an approaching tornado. I’d seen images of Civil War soldiers with the barest of first aid. These were worse.
The humid scent of their sickness filled the hallway. And their fear.
Strange, I thought, since they easily outnumbered us.
But what was worse were their eyes. They bored into us, seemingly unblinking.
They, too, held knives and shovels, rods and grilling forks, household items turned into weapons. Some were bent from use. Others were stained. All well-worn.
Mr. Scronce’s shellacked hair was askew, his lip swollen, an eye bruised. Part of his ear was missing, and jagged scratches ran along his face. Had he even made it to the inn? It was clear he’d taken an awful journey parallel to ours. And who, I thought, were his victims? Students from his class?
His last words to me had been to get out of his house. He saw me and there was something that flickered in his eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was anticipation or regret.
Max’s parents weren’t far behind. Two professionals who commuted by ferry to Seattle every day, Max’s mother was a far cry from her usual salon-cut hair and manicured nails—broken, I saw now. Max’s father, with all the facial elements that once mirrored his son was puffy and bloated. They looked nothing alike. Not anymore.
They were quiet parents, never really interested when I stopped by, or maybe I was an extension of Max and anything Max-like had to be punished with apathy.
Max brushed against me, and I saw his jaw clenching in tight little pulses. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. If he wanted to run, he didn’t show any signs of it.
Theo was by my side, but the empty look in his eyes told me he was somewhere far from here. I wanted to comfort him, but honestly, I needed someone to comfort me.
No one spoke. No one dared, I guess. What was there to say?
There was no going back. Not just for us, I realized. But for them, too.
But I felt something in that hallway, I’m sure of it. The tiniest bit of yearning and sorrow. A collective wish to be able to go back in time and choose differently. I wondered what would’ve happened if we’d went to hug them? To say, I forgive you?
I’ll never know.
In front of us, they stood, our executioners, black cloaks replaced by tattered clothes and muddy shoes. We couldn’t run. We couldn’t hide. We had no direction to go but forward. Through them.
We would die. I would die. All of us.
But I wasn’t scared.
I was terrified.
Some terror is so potent it wipes everything else away.
Dirk and the sheriff faced each other, guns in hand. The moment was ripe, electric and it seemed to stretch forever. How long could we stare down each other? How long before someone set off the spark? Was there even a way out of this?
Max reached to me and held my hand. Mine was slick with moisture, but his was bone dry, and it took everything I had not to turn and run.
The sheriff coughed and when he wiped his mouth, it was smeared with a spittle of blood. He whispered to Dirk. I didn’t hear much of what they said until the sheriff gasped, “This ends. Now.”
“Sounds good to me,” Dirk replied.
Then all hell broke loose.
I don’t know who drew first, but Dirk fired first, that was for sure. Up close, almost point-blank, the rifle went off, the recoil slamming into his shoulder.
I don’t want to remember what the sheriff’s face looked like.
I don’t want to remember most of it.
The sheriff’s body fell backward and the adults surged forward.
The dull roar became so loud I actually heard nothing. All was silent in that maelstrom of motion.
We clashed. Like those big battlefield scenes in movies with actors wielding swords on horseback and two armies meet. That’s what I’d like to say it looked like. Valiant, heroic deeds of swashbuckling glory accompanied by a soundtrack of brass and drums. Something inspiring, something cool. Where was Carmina Burana – O Fortuna now?
But I can’t.
It was nothing like it.
The adults swarmed us. They spilled forward, a force unto themselves, as if we were nothing—air or paper or whispers—and though we fought, it was a massacre.
We realized late—too late—that we’d left most of our weapons in the shop room. We’d clamored so fast out of there that we left them behind.
We paid the price for our haste.
Everything was stroboscopic, an image of a knife in someone’s hand one second, impaled in flesh the next, snapshots of horror, gnashing teeth and contorted faces and I learned first-hand how fragile the human body is and how easy it was to wound, maim or kill.
There was no use trying to run the gauntlet to the exits. Better to what—I didn’t know.
I purposely keep what happened in that hallway compartmentalized in my mind. It simply didn’t happen to me. It happened to a girl who looked like me, with my name and birthday and exact likes and dislikes, but it wasn’t me. Somehow, not-me fought her way not forward, but backward.
No, I wasn’t capable of what not-me did. I could never crawl, feigning death, while others died above me, around me, on me. I could never scamper under a body and hide. I could never watch, frozen, while my peers were slaughtered.
I was a coward. I know this now. We all want to be a hero, but what happens in that moment when it’s proven that you are nothing like how you wished to be?
Around me, the students who had survived so well in the shop room until we arrived dropped. That’s the sterile way to describe it.
No, that doesn’t do it justice.
The truth?
I watched as the girl who played the flute was impaled with a grilling fork while another adult took her now useless metal wire and strung it around the girl’s neck. But that wasn’t enough. The adult—one of my neighbors—then used the girl’s body as a shield. The adult moved forward with her body protecting him. I watched as students, high from the heat of battle, crazed with trying to survive, stabbed at the girl in a frenzy.
The adults may have strung her up, but it was us who killed her.
They didn’t mean to. Surrounded by madness, they had no choice. It was every person for himself.
Dirk tried to rally. After he used his bullets, he picked up a metal pipe, wielding it like an angry god, creating circles of space around him, flailing against skulls and bone, and the adults fell like chaffed wheat in his wake.
I knew Dirk in school as a bully, a brute, but when under pressure, he didn’t break. Not like I did. Who was worse? Him or me? It was because of him that I was able to fall back toward the shop room. At least there were weapons there.
That’s what I tell myself.
The truth is that the shop room was away.
Away from death.
And away, away, I did the one redeeming thing and grabbed Theo by his shoulder and together we fled.