COME ON. COME ON.
Z ducked low to get under a fallen beam and hurried down the hall, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the homecoming queen was following. Of all the people he could have found, it just figured it was her. People like Homecoming Girl, who thought they were better than he was, were the reason he had come to school today.
“Kaitlin, I found help!” he called, hurrying toward the caved-in section of the room where she’d been standing when the first bomb went off. Now her legs were pinned under a gray-and-black steel air-conditioning unit that had fallen through the ceiling.
Because of him.
He shook off the churning panic as he knelt down next to Kaitlin and took her hand in his. It was small. Cold. Weak. So like his mother’s.
“Kaitlin, I brought help. We’re going to get you free and out of this place. Right?”
“I told you to leave,” Kaitlin said tightly. “You have to get out.”
“You told me to find help.” Z looked back at Diana with a look that he hoped would make her understand that she might think it was okay to kick him around, but she couldn’t do that to Kaitlin. She needed help.
Homecoming Princess stepped forward. The floor creaked beneath her feet, and she came to a dead stop.
“The floor held my weight. You’ll be fine.” If not, he didn’t care. The only person who mattered was Kaitlin.
To prove his point, he stood up and walked toward the side of the air conditioner that had smashed onto a desk. The broken wood beneath held that side a foot or two off the ground. The floor around it was cracked—but it still held his weight. “See. It’s fine. I’m going to wedge a board under here and lift the air conditioner enough for you to pull Kaitlin out.”
Homecoming Girl didn’t move.
“Don’t be stupid, Z,” Kaitlin said quietly. “It’s not going to work. You need to get out of here.”
Her eyes were glassy. The freckles on her face looked darker than ever against her pale skin. For someone so small, she had a huge voice and a stubborn streak a mile wide. She believed anything was possible. For her to say this wasn’t . . .
He wasn’t going to accept that.
“We can do this, Kaitlin,” he said, yanking a two-by-four out of a pile of debris. “Right?”
He looked over at Miss Princess, waiting for her to agree. But she was just standing there staring at Kaitlin. Her eyes wide. Her mouth slightly open.
“Right?” he asked again.
Slowly, the blonde shook her head and took a step back. “No. Listen to Kaitlin. You can’t move her.”
“We have to,” he insisted. She had to be okay. She just had to be.
“I get that you want to, but if we move her right now, she’ll die.”
The words slapped his heart.
“Look,” the girl said. “At best, her bones are simply broken, but if it’s more than that . . .” She took a deep breath and once again glanced down at Kaitlin before quickly looking away. “If she has other injuries, she could lose a lot of blood the minute we move her. We don’t have anything to stop the bleeding. This is bad, but that would be far worse. And she’s probably in shock.” There had to be other options other than having her legs crushed or bleeding out. There had to.
“Z,” Kaitlin whispered.
He squelched the panic and forced himself to give an encouraging smile as he walked back and knelt at her side. “I’m here. And I’m going to get you out of this. You’re going to be okay.”
How many times had he told his mother it would all be okay?
“I know you want to help, Z.” Kaitlin closed her eyes tight. Her voice sounded thin. The pain was wearing her down. “But you have to listen to her.”
Kaitlin’s face looked even paler. Ghostlike.
“I’m not going to give up,” he said. “You can’t either. You have to keep fighting.”
“Z . . .”
“Promise me you’ll keep fighting, and so will I.”
He smoothed her hair, stood up, and stalked over the cracked floor toward the shattered windows, wanting to smash something. To smash it all. But that would scare Kaitlin. He had to—
“Z?” Homecoming Chick’s voice made him jump. He hadn’t heard her sneak up behind him. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
People liked saying that crap. As if they really thought someone would believe them.
“My name’s Diana, by the way. Diana Sanford.”
Of course it was. He should have known that’s who she was. Senator Sanford’s sainted daughter. No wonder she thought she was the authority on all things. “I’m getting Kaitlin out of here.”
“Kaitlin needs paramedics or the fire department or people more skilled than we are if she’s going to get through this.”
“Well, where the hell are they?” he yelled while Diana looked down at the phone in her hand as if it were magically going to give her the answer. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing any firefighters bursting through the doors.” He grabbed an overturned chair by the legs and swung it toward the window.
The chair and the glass shattered. Z leaned his head out and yelled, “Hey! We’re up here. There’s a girl who needs help right now!”
Dozens of emergency vehicles were in the parking lots, as were people in uniform. They were all looking in the direction of the school.
No one was rushing toward the building. A couple of firefighters took a step or two toward the edge of the asphalt, but no one came any farther.
“Hello?” he screamed. “What the hell are you waiting for? You need to move! A girl is going to die!”
“Z, you’re not helping,” Diana said as he pulled his head back into the room.
“Like you are?”
“I’m trying to. There’s a reason no one is coming in.”
“Like what?” he yelled.
“Like they think there’s another bomb!”
Kaitlin moaned, and Z’s heart tightened.
Quietly, Diana said, “Fire responders must have been ordered to stay out of the building until the bomb squad or robots or whatever determine if there’s another bomb. If there is, they won’t come in. They can’t; otherwise they’ll put us in even greater danger than we are now.”
Which meant they were on their own.
If that’s the way they wanted it—fine. Screw them. Screw them all.