Dani fought her way through the door leading to the staircase as a stream of students filed out, knocking on another to and fro, and stepping on one another as they desperately tried to make their way to safety. The problem was they had no real idea where that safety could be found. They just knew they were running from something.
There was no calming them. Dani tried to reassure them as they filed by that it would all be over soon. They just needed to slow down and help one another out. Some listened and pulled the fallen off the floor, but most couldn’t control their fear and gave in to their flight instinct.
Dani climbed the stairs against the tide, holding her gun high and finger off the trigger. Reaching the second floor, she stepped out into the corridor that led to the walkway overlooking the atrium. A young man wearing a sleeveless, blood-soaked Wayne Drake T-shirt cowered on the floor and wept fiercely. With her eyes down the hall, Dani knelt beside him. “Have you been shot? Are you okay?”
The young man nodded. “I ain’t been shot. I just…they knocked me to the ground.” He lifted his head and spread his bloody lips apart so Dani could see his chipped tooth. “I got stepped on pretty good.”
Dani gave him a fake grin. “You’ll live. Tell me what happened.”
The kid looked down the hallway. “Two fellas went that way. Bigass guns. I ain’t never seen nothing like it before. I know AR-15s, I know AKs. This is something new altogether.”
“Two. That’s all you saw?”
Nodding, the kid said, “That’s all I saw, but I heard some people talking after the gunshots went off. I can’t say if it’s true or not.”
“If what’s true?”
“The talk is that there’s a bunch of them at the end of the hall, in the student council room.”
“How many’s a bunch?”
The kid shrugged. “Can’t say, but they were in the middle of a meeting when everything started.”
Dani patted him on the shoulder. “All right, get out of the building. Encourage as many folks as you can to do the same. Don’t cause a panic. Just tell them there’s nothing left to see in here. You got it?”
The kid nodded, and Dani helped him to his feet.
She turned down the hallway and slowly moved toward the student council room, turning back once to watch the kid enter the stairwell, his backpack scraping the doorframe as he hastily squeezed through the opening.
Fifteen seconds passed before the door to the stairway reopened, and the kid shouted, “Gray Rise, cunt!”
Dani turned back to see the chip-toothed grin of the kid staring back at her, the butt of an assault rifle perched against his shoulder.
“We’re taking back America, so bitches like you can suck a dick…”
She fired her weapon and hit the kid in his mouth. After watching him fall to the ground, she rushed to him and pulled his rifle out of his twitching hand. Whispering, she said, “Looks like you won’t be taking back shit today.”
She looped her arm through the strap of the rifle and threw it over her shoulder, once again slowly making her way down the corridor to take on a roomful of shitheads hell-bent on taking back America.