An Apple for the Creature

could. Though I knew he was intent on that destruction, I still didn’t dare to move because the window overlooked the area where I lay. He might catch any slight movement of leg or arm.

Rachelle Minter was weaker now. I tried to imagine a plan that would save her; one that wouldn’t include me getting killed, as well. I simply couldn’t think of one. So I kept on playing possum.

The only thing I could do was worry. I spared a sharp moment of regret for Hunter. His day had been ruined, in the worst possible way. From now on, he’d remember his first-ever school party as an event of horror, and there was no way I could make that up to him.

I even had a second of sheer pique that the damn cupcakes were going to go to waste.

But mostly I worried about the children. If Brady started shooting into the rooms at random, sooner or later a child or a teacher would get killed. I had to think of a way to stop him.

Brady had resumed ranting and screaming, even when the siren abruptly cut off. I was so busy breathing shallowly and lying still that it took me a minute to dip inside his head, which was a virtual snake pit.

Brady had lost all his insulation; that was what I’d always called the civilizing influence that kept us from hitting other people when we were angry with them, stopped us from hawking and spitting on the floor of our grandmother’s house, advised us to make an attempt to get along with coworkers. Maybe Brady had never had a lot of this insulation anyway. His mental and emotional entanglement with Sherry had stripped all this insulation away and all the wires in Brady’s brain were hopping and sparking without any impulse control.

Brady was entirely human, but if I hadn’t known better I’d have called him a demon.

The demons I’d known had been much better behaved. My sort-of-godfather, Desmond Cataliades, was mostly demon, and he wore civilization like a coat.

With no warning, Brady kicked me. I didn’t know if he could sense an intruder in his head because he’d abandoned his semblance to a total human being, or if he simply felt like expressing his aggression. It was a huge effort to roll with the kick as if I weren’t in my body.

Then Brady fired the gun into the office, and again I had to hold on to my possum persona with all the determination I could muster. I came this close to yelling out loud as the glass of the window shattered and rained down on me and Ms. Minter. Now some of the blood smearing me was my own.

I’d always assumed that to save my own life I could endure just about anything. I was finding that wasn’t necessarily so. With Brady proving so completely unpredictable, I was fast approaching the jumping-up-and- screaming point.

If I’d been a genuine possum, my masquerade might have been easier.

He went past me again, screaming incoherently and slamming into every door he saw. I heard a door swing open, and I thought, Oh no! But the cleaning agent smell that wafted out told me bathroom, and I let out the breath I’d taken very slowly indeed.

The crazed man continued down the hall to the left of the office, and I heard not a sound from the teachers and kids trapped in those rooms. I opened one eye. Though my angle of vision prohibited me seeing very far down the right corridor, which I was facing, I could see that the teacher in the first room had taped construction paper over the window in her door. That was amazingly smart. In the room across the hall, apparently the kids had hidden out of sight of the window, and Brady said, “Where the hell are they?” He sounded merely puzzled. He sounded like a real person, for just a second.

I could get up and run out before he could catch me or shoot me, I thought. He had his back to me, his attention was definitely elsewhere, and if I scrambled up and leaped to the front doors I could be down the sidewalk and behind the cover of the cars before he could get to the doors and aim.

At least, I hoped I could.

And then I wondered about the lone police officer out in front of the school. I didn’t know what kind of person he (or she) might be. He might be so shaken by the seriousness of the event that he was ready to shoot whoever came out the doors, especially a bloody stranger running directly toward the patrol car.

While I was doing my best impersonation of a dead person and listening as intently as I could to both Brady’s physical actions and his mental chaos, I kept cudgeling myself to develop a plan. If I was out of his sight for a few seconds, should I move? Was staying right here the best policy? If I hid, where could that be?

Then I did something I should have done before. I reached out for Hunter.

Hunter? You okay?

There was a long moment of silence. Aunt Sookie? Did he shoot you? We heard a gun.

He didn’t shoot me. I’m all messed up to look at, but I’m not hurt.

Who got hurt?

Ms. Minter is hurt, but I think she’s going to be okay, I told him. I hoped I wasn’t lying. She was still alive, anyway.

My cell phone is in my purse, honey, I told him. If Ms. Yarnell doesn’t have one, make sure she uses mine to call 911. There’s a police car outside, but only one.

Ms. Yarnell’s been talking to ’em.

Great! Tell her . . . I began, but then I stopped. There was no way Hunter could relay messages without revealing his secret to all his peers.

Crap.

Tell her you need to borrow the phone to talk to your aunt, Hunter. Hold it to your ear. I’ll be talking to you this way, but they’ll think it’s coming over the phone.

In a minute, he was back on the line—the telepathy line. I think she knows, he said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. What do you want me to tell her?

Tell her Ms. Minter is down, but she’s alive. I’m lying on the floor beside her. Ms. Javitts is locked in the janitor’s closet. The bad man is named Brady, he was Ms. Javitts’s boyfriend.

Why are you lying on the floor, Aunt Sookie?

I sighed, but I kept it in. This was not the best means of communication, but at least we were communicating. I’m pretending to be hurt, I explained.

You’re playing possum.

Yeah, exactly, I said, relieved.

Ms. Yarnell says she needs a straight shot at him.

I puzzled over that. Was Ms. Yarnell telling me she needed a direct field of vision to our attacker, or that she needed no one in between because she meant to literally shoot him? (I put off worrying about an armed kindergarten teacher until later.)

I’d been thinking so hard I’d forgotten to listen for Brady. His feet were right beside me all of a sudden. I closed down everything inside. I was afraid he was going to kick me again, and the anticipation of the pain was almost as bad.

He needed to move three steps back to be in a direct line of sight from the door of the Pony Room. There was no way I could make that happen without moving. I tensed my muscles in preparation.

“No, Aunt Sookie!” screamed a voice down the hall.

Oh, God, no. Brady, shocked, stepped away from my prone form and turned to look down the hall in the direction of Hunter’s voice.

Now! I said.

“Now!” Hunter said to Ms. Yarnell.

I heard a commotion in the hall. What the hell was the witch doing? I couldn’t let Brady get close to the kids! I rolled from my left side to my stomach. Brady’s back was to me, but he was about to start down the hall. I lunged across the intervening distance and grabbed his nearest ankle, the left. The minute my hands wrapped around it, I made up my mind he wasn’t going anywhere unless he dragged me behind him.

Several things happened then; the front door eased open behind me. I caught a flicker of movement and a glimpse of khaki. But I had to reserve my attention for the man with the gun.

Brady looked down at me and shook his head, as though flies were buzzing around his face. I finally saw him clearly. He was a mess; he hadn’t shaved in days and hadn’t bathed, either. The plaid western shirt was torn, his jeans spattered with old paint. His sneakers were very worn. But they were able to cause damage when he kicked me, and he was making up his mind to do that again. He balanced on the foot I had pinned, and brought his right foot back to get some momentum. I yanked at his ankle and he had to put the foot back down to catch his