The pounding in Durham’s ears began to subside just ever so slightly enough to hear the radio call ordering all officers to the elementary school immediately. Durham called in to Dispatch that he had just had an officer-involved shooting and to roll emergency services to his location. It was while he listened to the deputy chief order him to leave the scene and head immediately to the elementary school that Durham noticed the two suspects he had just shot in fact did not have body armor.
— | — | —
Chapter 7
Billy felt his cargo short’s pocket, assuring the .38 was still there before he got out of the truck.
“Stay here, Cat,” he said to his daughter.
She was already out of the truck and closing the door. “Not on your life,” she said firmly without a hint of sarcasm.
He grimaced and nodded slightly, still at least making an effort to imply he was in charge of her. She always had been a good girl, intelligent but strong-willed.
The scene at the elementary school was surreal. There were more than a dozen bodies lying akimbo across the parking lot and all the way into the school. Most of the bodies were adults but a few were smaller. A trail of shoes, backpacks, books and hoodies, abandoned by their former owners littered the grounds. They seemed to have been thrown away in a hurry.
“Let’s go find your brother. Try to get ahold of 911 but stay right by me,” Billy said firmly, looking directly into his daughters big blue eyes.
As they made their way from the truck across the parking lot, they passed a body of a young nurse, hay colored hair matted to her head in blood. It looked as if a wild animal had clawed out her throat. Years of being a first responder at car accidents told him without stopping that she was way past anyone’s help. Her face was already turning blue and lifeless as the blood ebbed away from her body.
The pair entered the school walkway. The metal and glass front door was propped open by a pile of a half dozen backpacks. They were heavy with books and obviously belonged to students, as at least half of the backpacks in the pile were comic book and cartoon-character themed.
“I can’t get anyone,” Cat whispered, her voice the embodiment of frustration.
Billy was a head on a swivel, scanning in all directions as he walked, keeping Cat next to him. Once in the doorway they found the hallway full of more backpacks, books, papers, coats, hats, gloves and shoes. The cast-off items ran wall-to-wall with only a thin walkway between the piles. It was if the school was having a going out of business sale on student accessories.
They had made it twenty feet into the hallway when they heard footsteps. The sound of small feet running down another unseen hallway just out of view, to their left and around the corner grew closer. Cat grabbed her father’s right arm and held tight. The last time she had done that was a few years ago when they had gone to a haunted trail at Halloween and a person with a bladeless chainsaw had popped out.
The footsteps grew louder and Billy could make out by the sound that it was just one pair. He put his right hand, still with Cat holding onto his arm, inside the cargo shorts’ pocket and fumbled for the handle of the old .38.
Just then, a little boy with a blue shirt, not any older than six, burst around the corner and straight at Billy. All three let out an involuntary scream and the little boy skittered around them, hell bent for the open front door. He never stopped but in the brief second of shared scream, Billy noticed two things about him.
Number 1: The little boy had pissed himself. The unmistakable dark stain on his crotch and upper legs had been there even before he had ran into Billy and Cat.
Number 2: The little boy had no interest in sticking around and kept looking behind him the whole way out the door.
“Daddy, let’s go back outside and wait for the cops,” Cat hissed.
Billy shook his head and was about to explain how they needed to go on ahead, get her brother and then go when they heard more footsteps.
From down the hallway the little boy with the wet pants had just erupted from came the echoes of what sounded like a softball team coming toward them. Billy grabbed Cat and pushed her up against the lockers and out of the way.
With the footsteps getting louder and closer, Billy looked at his daughter and instinctively put his finger to his lips in the universal gesture to be quiet. There would be no screams this time.
The first one around the corner was a tall lanky kid about eight years old with a torn face and blood on his shirt. It looked as if he had caught his lip in a paper shredder and nearly ripped it off. He did not seem to notice Billy and Cat only fifteen feet away, but turned sharply at the open door and ran out of the school, following the same path that the wet pants kids had. Only seconds later a half dozen more young kids, both male and female ran by, determined to follow the leader of the pack like lemmings.
Each of them had the same type of wounds, some very severe. Billy could make out lacerations, bruises, bloody clothing, matted and torn hair, and even what looked to be a compound fracture with a bone protruding on the arm of the girl bringing up the rear of the pack. They left a trail of dripping blood and sweat smeared on the industrial tile floor. None of the pack looked back at them, but simply continued on their way out the door.
Cat looked at her dad while making her mouth up to form words to questions that would not come out. Billy shook his head to keep her quiet, grabbed her arm and moved down the hallway the pack of damaged kids had just run from.
They passed classrooms that were empty of students. Some looked ready for class with the lights on bright and assignments written on white boards. Coffee cups still rested on teacher’s desks, ready for the morning.
Other rooms were explosions of disarray with desks thrown everywhere, blood on the walls, pee and saliva on the floors and clumps of hair. In one room, there looked to be a trio of small bodies, torn and bloody, in a pile near the back of the classroom by a hamster cage on top of a small bookcase. Billy checked briefly for vital signs but it was clear all three children were dead.
They navigated through the first hallway, resisting the urge to stop and render further assistance or find out more about what had happened. It was just a month earlier that they had been there at Wyatt’s open house night and both seen his homeroom and met his teacher so it was with this knowledge that Billy pushed on.
“Isn’t this Wyatt’s class?” Billy asked as they approached the end of the hallway.
“I think so,” Cat replied.
He put out his hand, pushing her back behind him as he peeked around the corner. The room was not as bad as some they had seen already. A few chairs were pushed away and one small table was overturned but there was no blood or bodies.
Thank heavens no blood or bodies.
“Daddy.”
He turned from the classroom entryway and looked at Cat. She was in a stare-down with a little girl a few feet down the hallway who looked to be about nine or ten years old. Her brown pigtails were bloody and she had ugly dark purple rings around her throat as if something had been choking her.
Billy pulled Cat past him and edged her sideways into the open classroom.
“Hey there, little miss ma’am. Are you ok?” he said, stooping over to get more on her level.
The little girl did not answer and showed no sign that she heard Billy, much less cared about what he was saying.
“What’s your name? Mine is Billy, Billy Harris. My son Wyatt goes to school here, have you seen him?”
When he said his son’s name, it looked almost as if the little girl had a moment of recognition and she jerked her head ever so slightly. Billy reasoned to himself that she was in shock.
“Daddy, what’s wrong with her neck?” Cat asked from behind him.
“Do you know Wyatt? Wyatt Harris?” he asked again, in the same lilting voice that every parent had learned to use to seem non-threatening. He took a step towards the girl.
She erupted into a leap, to rival the best lions in National Geographic nature films, right at Billy. Her arms outstretched as far as they could reach, fingers stabbing outward.
Billy sidestepped and caught her midsection with his left knee, more by accident than anything else. This crumpled the child briefly and he immediately felt bad about it. As he pivoted to check on the girl now splayed out on the ground, she sprang up at him again, pulling at his t-shirt collar, trying to bite him like an angry shark just pulled into the boat.
Billy craned his neck back as far as he could and arched his back to keep his throat from the snapping jaws of the bloody and bruised little girl. He had grown up getting in plenty of childhood fights and with the fire department once had to pull a schizophrenic pyromaniac out of his own blaze, but none of those incidents had prepared him for this.
He grabbed the girl around the waist, half pulled, and then pushed, her body away from his, yet her grip still held vice-like on his shirt, pulling her ever closer to his face and throat. He could see into her eyes and there was no longer any white in them. Only a reddish-brown hue made up the deranged eyeballs looking back at him from behind the blood-soaked pigtails.
Billy stiff-armed the deranged child as best he could with his left arm while he cocked his right into a fist and, wincing while he did so, slugged the little girl in his best imitation of a superman-punch. He made contact with the girl’s cheek just under her left eye, and even though he was sure at the last minute he pulled the punch a little, he still felt the thin bone just under her skin crack when he made contact.
The little girl shook her head, grunted and then resumed her attack with scarcely less than a moment’s pause. Billy had half-decided to go for the .38, weighing heavy in his cargo pocket, when he saw Cat’s hands on the little girls pigtails from behind.
“What is wrong with her?” Cat asked, pulling the little girls head almost straight back by the pigtails, like a cowboy reining in a horse.
Billy took advantage of the momentary shift in weight to leverage the child off him, prying her hands off his shirt with his own. He kicked the girl away and Cat dropped her flat on her face on the hard tile below with a sickening wet thud. She lay there motionless.
“What is wrong with her?” Cat asked again with blood on her face and shocked tears hot in her eyes.
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out,” with that notion he registered the sounds of footsteps running down the hallway towards them.
Exchanging looks, he grabbed Cat and pushed her back into Wyatt’s wrecked classroom, slamming and bolting the door behind them.
««—»»
Sergeant Durham was in a flat run down the hallway of the elementary school. He had arrived just ahead of a county deputy sheriff and entered the school through the front door. The deputy followed his department protocol and remained at the front of the school to wait for backup to arrive. Durham, who was having protocol withdrawals of his own that day, could not contain himself and ran into the school. He only paused long enough to unhitch his shotgun and tell Spud, still handcuffed in the back of the car, to stay put.
Just before he arrived, Dispatch advised that the department was ‘communications code red,’ which meant the network was having issues and to try to maintain contact through cellphones and landlines as much as possible. With that in mind, backup did not seem very likely. Nevertheless, he still called into Dispatch and let them know he had arrived on-scene.
The scene he witnessed amazed him. The bodies, the piles of book bags, shoes and jackets were almost too much to process and he fought the urge to slow down and take it all in. He swallowed hard, pushing it down inside to avoid clouding his mind.
He ran down the hallway to the sounds of yelling, crashing, and a door slamming.
When Durham rounded the corner, he saw a young girl in pigtails lying face down on the tile. Her leg was twitching and she moaned softly. He laid the shotgun down beside her, took a knee, and rolled her over.
“GS5 to Dispatch, be advised I am 23 here and have multiple causalities. Send Rescue I am holding my position here with…”
The classroom door opening up next to him cut his transmission off. A man in his mid-thirties, wearing deck shoes, cargo shorts, and a torn t-shirt stood in the doorway.
“She’s schizoid officer…don’t fool with her,” cargo-short man said through the three-day beard strewn across a face that was tanned darker than leather.
Durham immediately concluded both that the stranger was not a teacher and stuck out in this situation like a sore thumb.
“Stay where you are, don’t come any closer,” Durham ordered with a hand outstretched.
“No, really, she is smooth crazy as hell—she attacked us,” the stranger said.
“Listen to him,” said an unseen young female over the stranger’s shoulder.
Durham looked down at the pigtailed girl below him as he turned her over. One hand cradled her head and the other was still on the mic of his radio. The girl had a broken nose, split lips, at least one broken tooth, and bruises all over the bottom of her face. Her hair was matted and sticky with thick drying blood. Her throat was purple and swollen. Whoever had done this was a monster.