to cloud my mind until I could take no more.
My eye opened with a snap and I aimed the pistol at the Squeaker’s face. He flinched back from me, still gabbling away, his whole face awrithe and twitching.
A wail of pain and fear was trying to rise from deep inside me. That wail wanted me to open my mouth wide and let the whole world hear it loud.
‘Best get moving, Markus,’ Karl said. ‘Times a wasting boy.’
“Shut up,” I screamed at my stupid big brother. “How can I ever think with you doing all the talking?”
The Squeaker went silent, like it was him I was yelling at. He’d seemed afraid before but now looked as though he could barely stand. He just sort of sagged as he stood there.
I stepped over Slash’s body through the door and dragged the Squeaker fully erect. I snatched his empty sawed-off and flung it back over my shoulder; it clashed and clattered miles away on the asphalt. I snickered as I reached out to clutch his shoulder.
“You’re my passport,” I said, my face stretched into a grin so tight it hurt, that same old war grin I’d always been powerless to turn off whenever the shit went down.
I spun my hostage around. One hand knotted between the shoulder of his shirt, the other hand jamming the pistol into his lower spine, I propelled the kid ahead of me toward the last two gunmen.
My vision was tinged with red; I wanted to go buck wild on them. But I was walking a tightrope here, and one misstep would spell disaster for the children.
The Squeaker finally awoke to the full extent of his current predicament, being the only barrier between his trigger-happy friends and psycho me. “Fellas,” he said, his squeaky voice gone even shriller. “Fellas. It’s me, Wayne. Don’t shoot, fellas.”
He got his reply at once: a grenade skittered out from that last classroom and banked off the wall to roll toward us spinning and clinking. Apparently his friends didn't like Wayne quite as much as he thought.
My heart skipped a beat and my eye bulged. I let go my hostage and leapt clumsily through an open doorway to my right.
Wayne remained behind, staring down in frozen fascination as the grenade bounced off his shoes. He childishly clapped both hands over his face.
In the split second before the grenade went off my gaze fell on the classroom’s other door, the one leading to the external world. It was open and I saw the empty playground out there, and the clear cloudless sky.
It seemed I had never seen a sky so lovely, or a shade of blue so beautiful. It drew me toward its cleanly expanse like a magnet, and a sigh escaped me as I raised a spread-fingered hand as though to touch that glorious blue: all I had to do was step out that door into the heavenly sunlight and I'd be out of this.
‘The hell with that,’ Karl said, and I began to turn my head back toward the hall doorway; toward the children.
The grenade exploded, rocking the floor under my feet and deafening me as a hot shockwave of air slapped my body. Simultaneously, the wall I leaned against rippled askew from its foundation, shoving me away to stagger several steps, almost tripping as I banged into the nearest row of desks.
I was back in the sagging doorway as soon as the blast was over, back on top of things again with my head squeaky straight. I looked all around at Wayne’s remains: the explosion had splashed parts of him against the walls, floor, and ceiling in a hellish Rorschach. The air fumed with the stink of compound B and shit. Bloody confetti fluttered to the floor – student artwork shredded off the walls’ bulletin boards and into meaninglessness.
I looked across the hall toward that last classroom as I braced my gun hand against the doorframe. The vision in my eye was foggy and I was feeling none too steady, but I had no trouble seeing the last two gunmen eagerly crowd the open doorway.
My first round smashed into the shoulder of the brown-haired little weasel carrying the.45 and the canvas bag. He whirled and lurched back into the classroom.
The other gunman was a bearded skinhead with a Biohazard patch embroidered on his denim vest. He pointed his M-16 at me and crooked back the trigger.
As I ducked back to cover inside the doorway, the skinhead's assault rifle rock-and-rolled on full auto, the small caliber rounds chewing up the doorframe and the hall with a riotous noise like a sewing machine on steroids. Chunks of paint and drywall peppered me as I cringed behind the load bearing doorframe joists, hunched over and hoping the rounds wouldn’t penetrate the 4-by-4s.
Then the chattering burst of fire stopped with the loud beautiful clack of the bolt holding open on an empty chamber: The skinhead had run out of bullets.
Too bad for him, I thought with glee, and swiveled around the corner in time to nail him in the back as he turned to run. He soared forward to face plant hard with the empty M-16 beneath him.
The only things existing now were the door to that classroom and the children’s sobs leaking from it. I was drenched in sweat as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on, I was breathing like a bellows as I left the cover of the doorframe and started slowly across the wide open kill-zone of that hallway, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and fall on Wayne’s entrails, the.38 extended stiff-armed to my front.
The skinhead lay face down atop his M-16, kicking rapidly at the floor with both steel toe boots alternately like he was trying to scamper horizontally through the linoleum and away from this whole fiasco. The entrance wound in his back wasn’t spurting or welling with blood – instead a red splotch slowly, quietly spread on his denim vest.
That meant his heart had stopped, and his horizontal shit-kicking two-step was no more than his cortical ganglia firing reflexively in denial of his own end. He wasn’t a threat so I put him from my mind as irrelevant – ‘No time, no time,’ a voice in the back of my throat wanted to moan.
Through the door I saw the weasel leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk. His right arm hung down limp from his smashed and bloody shoulder. The canvas bag and his.45 lay on the desk but his other hand was out of sight. I kept my pistol pointed at him as I passed through the doorway and stepped over the skinhead’s spasming corpse.
The children were crowded against the wall, sitting or on their knees, many of them with their hands behind their heads like they were under arrest. They squirmed and cried; snot and tears streaked most of their faces.
The school janitor, a small man with wavy black hair, lay on the floor in front of them. His mop was still clutched in his outstretched hand as he sprawled there, shot dead trying to defend them with it.
The teacher gaped at my mauled remnant of a face, and several of the children whimpered even harder when they saw me. Hell, I looked worse than the Bad Guy here, with half my head a gory ruin. But at least I was becoming numb now.
I held up my left hand to shield the bloody crater in my face from the children’s horrified view. I wrenched my single-eyed gaze away from all those staring little faces and turned toward the Weasel. Behind me, the dead skinhead’s steel toes stopped drumming against the floor.
The Weasel was a barely contained bundle of nervous energy, bandy-muscled and intense; fully alive – as alive as me or any of these children. His previously hidden hand was now revealed, holding up a grenade rigidly akimbo. The pin was pulled – only the pressure of his hand kept the spoon from flying away and the fuse from igniting.
He glared wildly at me, the bridge of his nose wrinkled rock hard like a marble bust. 'Think you're bad, motherfucker? You back off, right now, or all these kids get splashed.' He appeared on the edge of hysteria.
Someone outside was barking something into a megaphone – the cops, of course. But they were out there. It was a whole different world in here.
I limped robotic and stiff-legged toward this last threat, aiming dead-on at Weasel.
'Stop. Stop right there or I’ll do it, man, I’ll do it,” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he clutched the grenade like some sort of talisman guarding him from the reality of consequence.
I did stop, the muzzle of the.38 about a foot from his sweating face. I was wobbling badly on my feet now, and I had to finish this before I fell down for good. Weasel would honor his threat and drop the grenade or throw it any second now.
Without turning I mumbled to Teacher. 'Down, get them down.' My croaking voice didn’t sound human, even to me.
At first she made no reply. Then realization must have dawned in her distracted mind: “Lie down children, lie down now,” she said.
I could barely hear her voice through the growing roar in my ears. I sensed rather than heard all the kids stirring as they obeyed her.
