Once when she was much younger, she’d been trapped under a diving raft on Otter Lake, the back of her swimsuit strap snagged on something she couldn’t see, couldn’t reach back to release herself from. She’d struggled desperately. Seconds seemed too few and at the same time endless. Her mind took in everything, including the useless details of her situation-the soft green light of the water; the bubbles gathered along the bottom of the raft, like frog eggs; the velvet algae on the raft chain-but understood almost nothing in a useful way. The lake pressed around her, against her, isolated her, entombed her.
That’s how she feels now, as if she’s underwater, struggling to fight her way out of an airless tomb, moving too slowly, unable to think clearly, to breathe, to release herself from the terror that has gripped her.
She’s alone. Uly’s no longer beside her. Where he’s gone, she cannot say. Her cell phone is in her hand-how did it get there? — and her thumb is pressing the power button.
She stumbles away from the chained front entrance, out of the shadow of the portico, and into sunlight. Without really thinking, she turns and sprints for the doors at the south end of the building. Her feet seem mired in mud, dragging like dead things. Through the windows of the classrooms, she sees students milling about, settling gradually into their desks for homeroom, oblivious. The south doors appear suddenly in front of her. She grasps the handles and yanks. These, too, are chained and locked.
Gallagher, she understands, has trapped everyone inside.
Think, Annie, she tells herself. Think.
She remembers the entrance for the school kitchen, where deliveries are made, which is never used by the students or faculty. She spins and heads north.
The cell phone plays a twinkling tune to let her know it’s powered on now and she punches in 911 as she races along.
Tamarack County Emergency Services.
Annie knows that voice, a woman’s voice, but a face doesn’t come to her.
This is Annie O’Connor, she cries into the phone. I’m at the high school. Darrell Gallagher has a gun. He’s going to kill people.
Have you seen the gun, Annie?
No, but I know he has it. He’s locked the doors and trapped everybody inside.
Officers are on their way, Annie. Are you in the school?
No, I’m outside.
Stay there and don’t go in.
But she’s already at the kitchen service entry and she pushes inside, snapping her phone closed as she goes.
The moment she enters she hears from somewhere in the distant interior four rapid cracks- bam bam bam bam — like a fist smacking against lockers in the hallways. She runs through the kitchen. Morning sunlight glances off stainless-steel countertops and sinks and commercial-size stoves. Two women in hairnets are frozen in the act of pulling big mixing bowls from the cabinets. They stand as if posed, heavy women with arms uplifted, glittering silver bowls cupped in their fleshy hands. It reminds her of a painting, some Renaissance thing about a pagan offering she should know because she studied it-didn’t she? — in her humanities class.
Get out! Annie yells as she passes them. He has a gun! He’s shooting in the school!
She doesn’t wait to see if they respond.
Three more cracks in rapid succession echo down the empty hallway as Annie enters. She looks left, a clear view all the way to the main doors where light floods through the windows and down the polished tiles until it hits an obstruction, a dark oblong, lying crossways on the floor, that breaks the stream of light and begins a flow of its own, a dark and glistening stream. She thinks of a deer her father hit years ago when she was with him in the Bronco and she remembers how the animal lay across the road in just this way, bleeding, dying, then dead as she stood there with her father, watching helplessly as what neither of them could stop transpired.
Screams ricochet off walls at the other end of the hall.
Bam-bam. Bam-bam.
Two doors down, Iris Surma, the librarian, sticks her head out.
Darrell Gallagher has a gun! Annie cries in her mind. But does she speak it? She’s not sure.
The librarian replies, her words like wood blocks that Annie gathers in her head and slowly puts together to construct their meaning: We can’t get out. The doors are locked.
Annie points back the way she’s come. Through the kitchen. The service door is open.
Iris Surma beckons behind her. Hurry! Eight students rush out and make a beeline for the cafeteria. Ms. Surma pauses and motions frantically for Annie to come with them. To Annie, it seems like a scene from an old movie where people stand on a pier waving to a boat that has already sailed.
Annie turns away from the librarian, turns toward the body on the floor.
It’s Lyle Argus, she discovers, one of the two security people in the school. He lies on his side, his arms outstretched toward the chain on the door. He stares beyond the reach of his empty hands, and Annie, who believes absolutely in heaven, wonders, as she kneels beside him, what those sightless eyes see now.
Bam-bam. The shots sound as if they’re coming from the second floor. Bam-bam-bam-bam. The north stairwell disgorges students and several teachers, who stumble into the hallway. They rush toward the main entrance and Annie lifts her hands to stop them. It’s locked! Go through the cafeteria to the kitchen door!
Some hear and swing in that direction, but many of them continue past Annie, leaping over the body of Lyle Argus in their hurry to reach the chained entry where they bunch like driven cattle. Annie’s cell phone bleats and she realizes it’s still in her hand. The call, she sees, is coming from Cara’s phone.
Cara?
Annie, I’m shot, she says, her voice barely audible.
Where are you?
South stairwell.
I’m coming.
Behind her as she rises, those grouped at the chained entrance kick uselessly at the doors.
Her legs move as they do when she runs in the mornings with her father, without her thinking of them or even feeling them, really. She passes an open classroom where Mr. Henning, who teaches geography, sits on the floor with his back against the wall, cradling a student’s head in his lap. In the middle of Mr. Henning’s blue shirt is a huge red continent, like one of those he teaches about, but it’s a continent whose shape she doesn’t recognize. Mr. Henning looks at her as she passes, and he is crying.
A long trail of blood on the hallway floor leads to the girls’ bathroom and disappears under the door. Annie leaps over the blood and races on.
She approaches a corner and sees three black spiders crawling across the wall ahead. Nearer, she realizes they’re bullet holes that radiate cracks across the surrounding white plaster. She turns the corner and her legs carry her down another hallway, past closed gray lockers, past closed classrooms where the sound of desks scraping across floors tell her barricades are being erected. More gunshots-so many it sounds like corn being popped-and she reckons them to be coming from the direction of the main doors. She tries not to think of her classmates who’ve crowded there, desperately hoping to escape.
She rounds another corner and is at the south stairwell.
Cara lies at the bottom of the stairs, her face a bloodless white. She still clutches her cell phone in her hand. Her long legs, so graceful on the ball field and beautiful to watch, are sprawled under her, limp and twisted. She stares at Annie out of eyes that seemed to have turned into two dark tunnels. Annie glides to her and kneels.
Can’t feel, Cara whispers.
Annie lifts the bottom of Cara’s soggy sweater and sees the blood welling up. There is so much she can’t see the hole the bullet has made. The blood comes from somewhere deep inside her friend and pours out so quickly that it is dark purple. It runs onto the polished floor and begins to snake away.
Annie…
Hush.
She wipes at the mess and locates the wound, to the right of Cara’s navel. She presses her hand there, but bruise-colored blood continues to slip under her palm and feed the snake on the floor. Annie lifts her hand away, and in the next moment she has taken off the Reebok she wears on her right foot, has yanked off her white cotton sock and folded it into a compress that she lays over the wound as she presses again.
