Chapter 1:
Tilden High School, Room 113: March 12, 9:42 AM
Richard shut his eyes and pressed the mushy tips of his thumbs into his ears as hard as he could to keep reality from penetrating his senses. He was in a closet, which was perfectly dark with the exception of the narrow strip of light at his feet. The silence around him was just as complete, interrupted only by the sound of his own breathing. But one of his senses was doing the work of all the rest put together. The tactile sense – his sense of touch – was sending waves of electricity through his entire body, all originating from the electronic bracelet around his wrist.
The smart watch on his wrist tracked how many he steps he took during the day and how well he slept at night. It also sent him notifications - A single, quick buzz, less than a second long - whenever a text message arrived on his phone. A longer buzz for a Facebook notification. A series of longer buzzes for a phone call.
What he felt now was nothing like a text or a call, or any other notification he had ever received. And it was the reason he was where he was now. In a closet. Praying that these would not be the last moments of his life.
Uninterrupted, the vibration had been going off for more than two minutes, as if the tiny electronic band was trying to give his wrist a massage. The real message it was sending had nothing to do with pressure points or relaxation. It was a notification sent from a mobile app Richard had installed the previous week. The app had one function, and one function only.: to alert anybody within one thousand yards that a deranged, homicidal individual was in the area. To anybody living in 21st century USA, its name said it all, requiring no further explanation:
Active Shooter.
Richard pressed his cheeks against his knees and forced his breathing into a deep, rhythmic pattern, blowing the air hard from his nostrils to drown out any stray sounds which might slip in from the outside. The closet was all there was, now, with its faint stench of Clorox mixing with the older, more natural smell of mold.
Richard glanced at his smart watch. It had now been almost three minutes since the alert had started. How much longer could it go on? Didn’t these situations usually only last a few minutes? Besides the buzzing, which everyone else in the room, and most everyone else in the high school, had received on their own smart-watches and phones and tablets and whatever other devices they had operating when the alert was triggered, only the sound of the AC filtered in through the gap under the door.
“Four minutes,” Richard whispered to himself. It had to be over by now. Whatever it was, the danger had probably moved on.
Richard pulled the band off his wrist and dropped it to the floor, between his feet, shutting his eyes again. A list of faces flipped by in the darkness behind his tightly sealed eyelids. The weird quiet kid from ceramics. The fatass from Bio who’s always talking about how easy it would be to burn down an office building. The spaz that got thrown out of school the prior year for setting a garbage can on fire in the bathroom. The nerdy, frail runt that the entire baseball team took turns picking on. Richard imagined those faces, and imagined them stalking the hallways – hallways which should be filled with over 1500 students at this time of day – but were now empty and silent.
He let his fingers slip from his ears. It was for just a split second, but it was the wrong split second. Somewhere beyond the closet door, a rapid series of deep, hollow thuds rang out, like somebody had hung an area rug from a patio railing and was now beating it mercilessly with a baseball bat in each hand. At least a dozen thuds filled the outside air, followed by muffled gasps and cries of the people just outside the closet door. Richard could not tell who the sounds of despair belonged to, and he didn’t dare crack the door to look. He reached up to the door handle, gripped it as hard as he could, and pulled until the muscles in his arm felt like steel wire.
