Thankfully, his gamble paid off as the students began to run in panic, several girls screaming in alarm as their dash turned into a small mob running for their lives. Several of the students, afraid for their safety, had gotten up from where they’d been sitting, abandoning everything they’d been holding.
“Run. Shooters. Run,” Taylor kept yelling to keep the crowd panicking.
Coming up to where one group had abandoned their items, Taylor reached down and scooped up two backpacks before turning and heading towards the building they’d been running parallel to. As soon as he pushed through the door, he slowed to a brisk walk, and handed one of the backpacks to Whitaker, swinging the other over his own shoulder.
“What are we doing?” Whitaker whispered to him as they passed students, most of who were looking out the windows at the scattering people.
“Getting us a way out.”
“How, they’re already setting up a perimeter.”
Taylor pulled her down a side hall and out through another exit, walking quickly away from the scene he’d created. The further they got the fewer kids they saw running around until it was mostly students milling about and trying to figure out what all the noise across campus was about.
“They were setting up a perimeter to block off the street exits from the school. They probably already have those covered by now. By the time we could have walked to one of the side pedestrian gates, someone would have gotten the idea to cover those as well. Now they’re going to start having students running up to the police on the perimeter with stories of an active shooter on the loose. Knowing witness statements and the game of telephone that happens, they’re probably hearing stories about students shot, lying dead on the quad. The beat cops who were chasing us are going to have to do a one-eighty on their procedures, twisting themselves in knots. Someone’s calling HRT right now and everyone on the perimeter is switching to containing rather than catching two people on a bike. As word spreads, more kids will start making tracks to get off campus, and the perimeter is still soft. Eventually, a sergeant or lieutenant will show up and remember the pedestrian gates, but that will be ten minutes from now. These things always turn into a cluster fuck.”
They didn’t break stride as Taylor explained it all, crossing over the circular drive that bordered the campus and closing in on a gate in the side of one of the walls. As Taylor predicted, there were a bunch of kids walking through the gate, casting worried glances over their shoulder. Taylor didn’t need to know German to get the gist of what they were talking about.
They did see a patrol car in the middle of the street, but it was a block away from them. There was no way the single officer could pick out two people from the throng of students leaving, and rubberneckers showing up to find out what all the commotion was about.
“You have us all figured out, don’t you?” Whitaker said.
“Sure, but not because you’re cops. The reaction would have been different if it had been army units, but just as predictable. Everyone has their procedures to follow, and those procedures are never very good at adapting to rapidly changing situations. Police forces have a lot less training than the military, relying mostly on 'on the job' training, which leaves for a lot of weak points if you know where to look.”
“Of course, now we don’t have wheels.”
“True. We need a place to hole up for a while, and it needs to be away from here. They’ll start their search from the last place they saw us, so we just need to stay ahead of them.”
Taylor led them several more blocks away from the campus until he saw another parking garage, this one next to an office building. Walking into it, he started staring hard at the cars until he found the one he wanted. Most of the cars he’d passed were newer luxury models, just what you would expect from people working in a fancy office in the middle of a major city. The car he stopped at was fifteen years old at best, with a paint job that had seen better days. Places like this needed working stiffs, too, as janitors and service laborers. He felt a pang of guilt as he smashed the driver's rear side window in and reached around to unlock the driver's side door.
Whoever owned this car wasn’t the kind of person who’d easily replace it. He knew he was making someone's life hard, but there weren’t a lot of options. To his surprise, Whitaker didn’t say anything, just getting in when he opened her door. He took his gloves off and had the car hot-wired in two minutes. Putting his gloves back on, he drove out of the garage and headed for the outskirts of town in under five minutes.
“We need to look at that video.”
“Look in the backpacks.”
Whitaker pulled the one Taylor had dropped on the back seat next to the one she’d been carrying and opened them. She just smirked at him when she pulled a laptop out of one of them.
“Because students are likely to have a tablet or laptop on them, right?”
“Yep. Of course, they’ll have passwords.”
“I should be able to get around that.” She set the laptop down and stared at Taylor.
“What?” He asked after a few minutes, her unwavering gaze unsettling him.
“I just forgot what it was like, working with you.”
While Taylor drove, Whitaker opened the laptop briefly and then closed it, putting it back in the bag. She spent the rest of the trip digging through a stranger's backpack, looking
