to a crossaisle she realized he had moved swiftly to the side and was ready for her. Three bullets went straight into her.
Teresa sucked in her breath in horror, yelled at her kids to throw themselves flat. She stood up. A bullet went singing past Doug's head and smashed into the window behind them.
Teresa forced herself up on to the hard surface of the table, then leapt across to the aisle. The man turned his rifle towards her, but she ducked down and crawled as fast as she could towards the salad bar.
The man who had fired at the intruder was lying there, facedown in a chaos of spilled ice and fruit.
Teresa snatched his gun, checked quickly that it was still loaded, then rolled into the shelter of a huge CocaCola vending machine.
People were screaming, and the place was full of smoke. When she looked she could no longer see the intruder. She changed position, presenting the weapon before her at every move. Her heart was pounding with fear.
When she saw the man again he had walked calmly to the table where she had been sitting with her firmly, and aimed his rifle at her cowering children. He began firing.
Teresa shot him, but not in time to save her family.
Teresa never did get the Oak Springs ExEx right.
On her last entry to the scenario she assumed the role of the gunman: he was a man with the name Sam McLeod, who had earlier in the day carried out an armed robbery on a gas station, shooting the clerk as he snatched the money. A month earlier he had crossed into West Virginia from the neighbouring state of Kentucky, where he was wanted for several other violent robberies. He had moved on into Virginia over the previous weekend. As a federal Most Wanted he had nothing to lose, and earlier in the day, before going to AI's Happy Burgabar, he had stolen several weapons from a gun dealer's store in Palmyra. These were in his pickup truck parked outside the restaurant.
In McLeod's guise, Teresa entered the ExEx at the point when he was parking the pickup truck. She loaded the semiautomatic with a fresh magazine, then climbed down from the pickup, slammed the door, and walked round the back to gain a clear view of anything that might be moving in the parking lot. Traffic went by on the highway beyond the lot, but the restaurant was in a cleared patch of forest and thick trees rose in every direction.
Satisfied that there was no one observing her from outside, McLeod shouldered her way through the door of the restaurant. Full of ease, with her rifle resting casually on her shoulder, she surveyed the customers and staff. A waitress was by the door, writing something on a pad of paper next to the cash register.
'Open it up, and let me have it,' she said, bringing the rifle to bear.
The waitress glanced up, and immediately ran away from her, yelling incoherently. After a few steps she collided with one of tables, which were heavy and made of metal and connected by a stout pillar to the floor. She sprawled across the floor. McLeod could have killed her then, but she had nothing against her.
She heard a shot, and turned in amazement towards the
sound. Someone shooting at
in one of the semicircular booths by the window, a young family was crowded in together, empty plates and glasses and screwed-up paper napkins scattered on the table in front of them. The young woman, the mother, was getting to her feet, trying to press down the heads of her children as she did so, getting them below the surface of the table. McLeod paused in her progress across the room, to stare her down. She seemed unafraid of her, concerned only with her children.
Teresa loosed a casual burst in her direction, then continued across to the salad bar, where the man with the toy pistol was still standing, apparently paralysed by fear.
Teresa decided to spare them all any more concern on her account. She reached over, removed the handgun from Salad Bar Man, checked to see that it was still loaded, then shoved the muzzle in her own mouth and pulled the trigger. She died within seconds.
Later, Teresa was taken through video recordings of the ExEx scenarios about the Oak Springs shootings, shown where she had gone wrong in her decisions, how she could have acted, what further options were open to her.
[In July 1958, Sam Wilkins McLeod, a former inmate of Kentucky State Penitentiary, who had recently become a fugitive from the same institution, went berserk with a semiautomatic rifle in a hamburger bar on Route 64, killing seven people, including one child. A young woman on the scene called Samantha Karen jessup tried to tackle him, but she was killed by one of McLeod's bullets. She was not related to the child who died.]
CHAPTER 10
W hen she had finished clearing up the restaurant and kitchen after breakfast, and Mrs Simons had gone upstairs to her room, Amy went through to the hotel office and discovered that a fax message had arrived overnight. She tore it off and read it.
Her first reaction was to run upstairs and show Nick, but he was still in bed asleep, and she knew he didn't like being woken early.
Instead, she decided to deal with it herself and let him see it later. Within half an hour she had drafted her reply. She faxed lt to the number in Taiwan, confirming that the White Dragon Hotel in Bulverton had reserved four bedrooms with double beds for single occupancy halfboard, from the Monday evening of the following week, for a minimum period of two weeks with an option to extend indefinitely. She quoted the prices. At the bottom of the letter she enquired as politely as she could as to their proposed manner of payment.
Thirty minutes later she was making a photocopy of the original fax for her files, and rimming the bookings software that Nick had installed seriously underused in recent months when a faxed response came through.
lt told her, in formal but roundabout English, that an account had been opened at the branch of Midland Bank in
