of his arm and hoisted him to his feet. Danny’s nose and knees were scratched, but apart from that he seemed to be unhurt.
‘Are you OK?’ Frank shouted, still deafened.
‘My back hurts.’
‘What?’
‘My back hurts!’
Frank turned him around and around but he couldn’t see any sign of injury. No blood, no rips in his jacket. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here.’ He took hold of Danny’s hand and pulled him along the street as fast as he could run until they reached their car. He wrenched open the door, bundled Danny into the back seat, and then seized his cellphone.
‘Emergency? You’re going to have to send everything you’ve got – fire, police, ambulance, everything. A bomb’s gone off at The Cedars school on Franklin Avenue . . . That’s right . . . No, no. It’s a bomb for sure. People have been killed, I’ve seen them. Children. I don’t know how many.’
‘Can you give me your name, sir?’
‘Frank. Frank Bell. I was just taking my son to school and
‘OK, sir, please try to stay calm. Are you at a safe distance from the school now?’
‘Yes, yes I am, I think. Me and my son.’
‘Stay well away until the emergency services arrive. There could be a secondary device. Warn others to stay away, too.’
‘A secondary device? You mean
‘Just stay well away, sir, but make yourself known to the police when they reach you.’
‘Got you, yes.’
Danny was white. ‘Was that a bomb? Was that really a bomb?’
Frank nodded. He was shaking so much that he could hardly speak. ‘How do you feel now? Does your back still hurt?’
Danny grimaced and nodded. ‘My knees are bleeding.’
Frank reached into the glovebox and found him a Kleenex. He looked back toward The Cedars and saw a thick cloud of gray dust rolling out of the school parking lot and across the street. People were staggering out of it with their hands held out in front of them, like zombies.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I have to go back to help. You stay here and call Mommy. Tell her what’s happened; tell her we’re both OK.’
Danny said, ‘You have blood on your face.’
‘What?’ He touched his forehead and it felt wet. He pulled down his sun visor to look at himself in the mirror. There was a small cut just below his hairline and the blood was sliding down toward his nose. He tugged out another Kleenex and dabbed at it, staring at himself as he did so. Apart from that single minor injury, he looked completely normal. Thin-faced, pale, bespectacled. How could he look so normal when he had just witnessed a bomb going off, and all those children killed?
‘Call Mommy, OK?’ he said, handing Danny his cellphone. ‘She’s going to see this on TV and I want her to know that we’re safe.’
Wednesday, September 22, 9:41 A.M.
Frank jogged back toward the school. The dust was settling now and gradually the outline of the church building was reappearing. It looked from the street as if the entire front of the library had been demolished, as well as half of the front portico, and every single window was broken. Teachers and children were emerging from the side entrance, most of them bloodied and smothered in dust, all of them walking in a strange hypnotized shuffle, like hermits let out of a cave. Some of them were screaming a high, monotonous scream.
Several people were already sitting on the sidewalk, their faces scorched, their clothing ripped, their eyes staring in shock. A middle-aged woman came limping toward him, holding up her left arm. She wore a brown floral dress and her ginger hair was sticking up in the air as if she had been electrocuted. She had no left hand, only a stump with a white bone sticking out.
‘I’m all right,’ she reassured him as she approached. ‘Don’t worry about me. See to the children.’
‘Here, sit down,’ he told her, and eased her on to the grass with her back against the wheel of a parked car. He yanked off his red and yellow necktie and twisted it around her forearm, knotting it tight. ‘Just stay here, ma’am; you’re going to be OK. The paramedics will be here in a couple of minutes.’
‘It doesn’t hurt, you know,’ she said, looking at her wrist and turning it this way and that, as if it were quite a novelty. ‘It doesn’t hurt in the slightest.’
The wrought-iron school gates were still standing but they had been strangely twisted, as if he was looking at them through rippling water. Beside the gates, Mr Lomax’s security booth was leaning at an angle, and all the glass had been blown out of the windows. Mr Lomax himself was sitting on his revolving chair, his beige uniform in black tatters, like crow’s feathers. There was a large black lump by his left eye, and as Frank moved cautiously closer he realized that it was the head of a claw hammer. The shaft of the hammer had penetrated Mr Lomax’s eye socket and it was only the hammer head that had prevented it from going clean through his skull and out the other side.
Frank stood by the security booth, breathless, swimmy-headed, feeling completely helpless. Teachers and children were still milling around outside the side entrance, and he desperately wanted to do something to help them, but he couldn’t think what. As for the children lying in the parking lot, they were beyond anything but burial – and prayers.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Oh shit.’ He turned away and his eyes suddenly became crowded with tears.
A girl appeared, close beside him. Her cropped brown hair was ashen with dust, and her jeans and her buttermilk-colored blouse were finely spattered with blood. She was wearing only one sandal.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. She reached out and gently touched his shoulder as if she were trying to make sure that he was real.
‘What?’ he said, frowning at her. He was still half deaf.
She leaned closer, holding his shoulder more firmly. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. ‘You’re not hurt, are you?’ She had a husky voice, like a heavy smoker.
‘I have this ringing in my ears. But otherwise, no, I’m fine.’
‘It was a bomb,’ she said.
‘I know. But I don’t know what to do. I called 911 but they said I had to keep away.’ He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with his fingers, leaving wet gray smears down his cheeks. ‘Something about a . . . secondary something. Device, bomb.’
‘You didn’t have a child here, did you?’ she asked him.
‘My son, he goes here. But we were held up in traffic. Otherwise . . . Jesus. But all those other kids. Oh, God. All those other kids . . .’
‘I’ve lost somebody,’ the girl told him. She said it in such a flat tone of voice that he blinked and focused on her more closely. Her irises were rinsed-out blue, almost colorless, and he had the strangest feeling that he had seen her before. More than that – that he actually
‘I’m so sorry. Not your child, I hope?’
‘No, not a child. Somebody closer than that.’
He looked around. He could hear sirens whooping and racing toward them in the warm morning air. ‘Listen, why don’t you sit down?’ he suggested.
‘I’m OK. I just wanted to make sure that
‘Sure, I’m OK.’
Around the devastated school an unnatural quiet had descended. The yucca leaves were rustling down; the dust was settling. The children had stopped screaming and, although some of them were still sobbing, they were very muted, as if they were afraid to make too much noise.
Wednesday, September 22, 9:44 A.M.
A police car slewed to a halt in front of the school, quickly followed by another, and another. Then two fire trucks came up the street, their lights flashing and their horns blaring like enraged elephants. Next came an ambulance, and two more squad cars, and another ambulance, and another fire truck, and three TV vans. In the
