Day of Wrath (8 page)

“A tragedy of national proportions appears to be unfolding across America at this moment,” the report echoed from the kitchen television. “We now have confirmed reports of three schools: one near Austin, a second in Bakersfield California, and a third near Portland Maine, that appear to be under attack. In a minute or so we should have a live helicopter feed from the school in Maine.”

She had Shelly out of her crib, the toddler fussing to be woken up so rudely, and, feeling her mother’s panic, started to cry. Kathy wasn’t sure what to do, but to stay here was not the answer. She returned to the kitchen. Holding Shelly, she used her free hand to call Bob. His laughing voice came on “Hey, busy at the moment, but leave a message and someday I’ll get back to you!”

“Bob, find Wendy and get the hell out of there now!” she screamed. She hung up, attention focused back to the television report.

“Just a moment, just a moment… we are getting a fourth report now from our affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, of an elementary school in Hickory, North Carolina: numerous gun shots, a police officer dead in front of the school.”

The reporter in the New York studio turned her gaze from the camera, the steady professional composure of a national level news anchor shattered as she turned to look off camera.
 

“Everyone in this studio, shut the hell up!” she yelled. “I want accurate reports only. I only want accurate reports coming out of here, now do your jobs!”

The reporter looked back to the camera, obviously shaken.

“My apologies, we are trying to sort this out as it comes in and to avoid panic."

A second reporter came on camera, a popular anchor of the station’s mid-afternoon news program, sitting down beside her and trying to appear calm. She gratefully acknowledged his presence. He was well known for having been a reporter who had gone in with the troops in the 2003 campaign into Iraq and had repeatedly been under fire. He deferentially held up a sheet of paper, offering to hand it to her, but she nodded for him to read the report.

“I’ve just been handed a copy of a report from our affiliate station in Billings, Montana, and I quote, “A siege is unfolding at an elementary school in the northwest section of that city. There appears to be a coordinated attack now underway against at least five of our nation’s elementary and middle schools. It is obviously a terrorist attack on our nation’s children. We promise to keep you abreast as the situation unfolds.
 

“We now have a feed from our affiliate in Portland with a news helicopter over…” he looked down at a note someone had handed to him, “…Chamberlain Middle School."

The few seconds that she took to watch triggered a sob of pure horror in Kathy. It was an aerial shot of the playground! The playground where Wendy took recess every day when the weather was good, a place of swings, of slides, and of monkey bars, where in winter snowball fights were forbidden but broke out anyway.

“Oh God, Wendy, my baby,” Kathy gasped.

The playground now looked like a war zone, which in fact it was. The camera swung across half a dozen small bodies sprawled in the yard, revealing red splotches, pools of blood, children crawling, a teacher crouching low and carrying a child. And then live, for all the nation to see, the teacher went limp, a puff, a mist of blood and clothing burst out of him, both he and the child going down. The camera began to zoom in but then pulled back, as if it were too horrific to be seen. The reaction was almost instinctive to not gaze too closely upon the horror, in the same way that cameras were finally turned away on 9/11 when, by the hundreds, bodies plunged down the faces of the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. But this time it was children who were dying.

Kathy's phone rang. Bob! She almost dropped Shelly who was kicking and squirming, while sliding the screen of the phone on.

No, it was not Bob's ring tone. It was her friend Mary Browning in Austin.

“My God, Kathy! Are you guys okay?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know!”

“I just saw on the news it was your school. What is going on?”

“I don’t know, I just saw it too.”

“They’re hitting a school in Austin. Not my son’s but I’m going to get him out now,” she cried, “They’re hitting every school in the country!”

“Mary, I can’t talk, I’m going to get Wendy and Bob.”

She clicked the phone off and ran out the door. She realized that she still had Shelly in her arms, who was kicking and sobbing.
 

She turned to her neighbor’s home. The Andersons? She didn’t know them well. They were an older couple, their kids were off to college and the mother Elizabeth apparently stayed at home, that was about all she knew of them. A car was in the driveway. She ran to the house, rang the doorbell, waited a few seconds, then abandoned social convention and tried the doorknob and burst in.
 

“Kathy? What in God’s name?”

Elizabeth stood at the top of stairs, hair disheveled, wearing yoga pants and a tee shirt, and was obviously confused. She most likely was enjoying the luxury of a nap while the world was going insane.

“Have you been watching the news?”

“No,” and there was a slight edge of annoyance to her voice, “I was sleeping.”

She descended the flight of stairs and was startled as Kathy stepped forward to try and hand off Shelly who was now worked up to a fever pitch of crying.

“Take Shelly. Please, I've got to go. I've got to get to the school!”

She literally shoved Shelly into Elizabeth’s arms so fiercely that the older woman actually did clutch the child.

“Kathy, what is going on? Calm down.”

“I can’t calm down! Watch Shelly, please, and turn on the news.”

She turned and ran out the door, leaving it open, jumping into the SUV. She fumbled with her pockets, then cursed foully. The keys. She ran back into the house, leaving her front door open and grabbed her purse, opening it. The keys were within, and also the Ruger that was identical to Bob’s. She pushed the weapon into her pocket and as she did so she heard Shelly screaming nearby. Kathy turned to see Elizabeth entering the doorway, eyes going wide at the sight of Kathy pocketing the small weapon.

“Merciful heavens, Kathy, are you going insane?” and Kathy could see the woman was actually afraid and even protectively clutching Shelly tight against her shoulder.

“The world is insane…” she cried, pointing at the blaring television. She shouldered her way past Elizabeth and jumped into the car. Seconds later she was tearing down the driveway and was nearly T-boned by Denise Kilgore, another mother, whose only child was in first grade at McAuliffe Elementary school several blocks away from Chamberlain. All across the neighborhood, dozens of parents were getting into cars, tearing down driveways and office parking lots, and flooring it to McAuliffe Elementary, Perry High School, Chamberlain Middle School… not just in Portland but also to Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, Maine, to Tecumseh High in Lafayette Indiana, to Jackson elementary in Salem, Oregon… to thousands of schools across the country. The panic was on, just as the caliph had prophesied to his followers.
 

A news report from a school in Toledo, Ohio, came on the abandoned television, which reported a lockdown and shooting with one person dead so far. A possible attack, another similar report, came out of Savannah, Georgia. Both were actually panic-stricken parents, pulling up in front of their child’s school and leaping out of their vehicles. Those two unfortunate people were both openly carrying guns and ignoring the shouted warning of panicky police officers who were racing to every school around the country, believing that they were arriving only seconds ahead of, or just behind, a potential attack. Both parents were shot dead in a fusillade of fire. It would take hours to sort out that they were not terrorists, only frightened parents, but their deaths added to the tally of schools reported as being under attack.

Inside Joshua Chamberlain Middle School

The door to Bob's classroom burst open and the terrorist, the barrel of his assault weapon poised low from the hip, stepped halfway into the room with a calm arrogance. He fired a shot to kill a child, the one already wounded in the arm and huddled in the corner of the room.
 

Bob leveled his palm-sized Ruger at him and fired from less than three feet away. Shaking, he missed. Missed completely.
 

His startled enemy actually stepped back. This was not supposed to be happening. The infidels were cowards, sheep. How could this be? He started to swing the muzzle of his rifle toward the side of the door, to fire through the flimsy plaster walls. Bob stepped forward, this time nearly pressing the muzzle of the Ruger into his opponent’s face and squeezed the trigger. The shot caught the man in the jaw, shattering it in a spray of blood and teeth.
 

With a strangled cry, the attacker fell back into the hallway cursing, and a rapid spray of gunfire invaded the classroom. Every remaining window in the classroom shattered. Children huddled in the corner, out of the way of the barrage. Bob could actually see shell casings ejecting out in the hallway but the murderer whom he was certain he had hit was not visible.
 

“Come on you pig, you son of a bitch. Come on in!” Bob taunted.

No response, only labored breathing, choking and spitting, then the sound of a magazine dropping.
 

It registered in his mind but he did not have the instinct to react swiftly. Something told him that if he reacted instantly he would catch his enemy reloading, reeling from the shock of being hit, and finish him. But he did not have the training, to instantly press his attack, and he remained frozen in place for several crucial seconds, pistol raised, as if expecting his enemy to foolishly step into his line of fire yet again.
 

His opponent was still out in the hallway, heavy, raspy breathing, gasping for air, gagging as if choking, and in that crucial moment hesitating as well in disbelief that he had actually been wounded by a damned infidel. He slammed in a loaded magazine and chambered a round, the sound of it loud and clear to Bob over the wailing of the fire alarm, the cries of the children, and the hissing of the sprinklers.
 

“Come on, you pig eater!” Bob screamed, trying to provoke him.

There was a grunted response, and a shout from down the hallway, sounding like a command from one of the other killers. Several seconds of silence followed. Bob waited tensely. Surely they had grenades of some kind and Bob was waiting for one to bounce into the room. He caught a glimpse out the window, hoping to see a reflection of who was in the hallway, but all of the windows had been blown out. He heard shooting outside, the sound of sirens now, and what must be a helicopter. Maybe that was help at last, a SWAT team or something?

Wendy? He couldn’t see her.

Don’t lose focus. Your death is on the other side of that open doorway. He actually had a reflective thought, amazed with how many thoughts struck him, that he knew what they meant about one’s life flashing before them in their final seconds. That realization was a warning. He fell to the floor and as he did so, the wall space where he had been standing a second earlier was stitched by half a dozen bullets, plasterboard exploding across the room. He caught Patty's gaze, her surviving children clustered in the corner of the room around her. He motioned for them to stay down on the floor. They were all pinned, their unseen killer obviously injured, recoiling, and deciding on his next course of action.

Down low on the floor Bob waited, pistol aimed to shoot upward if the murderer made a dash through the doorway. There was no gunfire for more than half a minute, and then a new eruption of staccato bursts. But not aimed toward the room he was in. He heard the doorway to the faculty lounge being shot open, a few shots from within that small room, a pause, then more shots, this time apparently from the classroom across the hall next to the faculty lounge.
 

The bastard was pushing on with his killing, not coming back for him. Bastard! He had faced someone armed but now retreated to kill in other rooms.

“Come on you pig eater. Come on!” he screamed, trying to lure him away from his mission.
 

Then there was a sudden change to the sound. A shotgun? Half a dozen explosive shots rang out, children screaming, trapped in the corners of the room across the hall, and dying.

God, what do I do? he silently prayed. Hold here, at least I've got this room secure, or try and get the bastard and finish him? If he gets me these kids die. What do I do? he begged God as the sound of weapons shifted yet again. They were pistol shots and someone, he recognized the voice of Olivia Wilson, a mild bespectacled reading teacher, begged for mercy for her kids. Her cries were suddenly cut off.

God, do I hold here or try and stop him?

The answer finally came from within: get these kids out, then try and take the killer on again.
 

“Get the kids out now,” he hissed to Patty, who finally nodded acknowledgement as he pointed to the shattered windows. Cop cars, half a dozen, were racing down the approach road to the school. He could see one of the vehicles being hit by fire, but at least that meant one of the murderer's attention was diverted.

“Patty, get the kids out now! I can’t go after him until you’re out of this room. I’ll hold the door here while you get them out!"