One Breath Away. Heather Gudenkauf
“No one has seen anything?” I ask in disbelief. “We don’t know why he’s in the school, what he wants?”
“From the calls we’ve got from within the school, here’s what we know.” McKinney pulls off a leather glove and ticks the points off on his fingers.
“We’ve got one gunman. We’ve got three gunmen. We’ve got a man with a machete, we’ve got someone—can’t tell if it’s a male or female—with a bomb. We’ve got shit, that’s what we’ve got.” McKinney runs his hands over his mouth and his icy mustache crunches beneath his fingers.
“We just wait it out, then? We don’t go in?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“We do just what we’re doing right now, containing the scene and falling back. If we can communicate with the suspect we can get those kids and teachers out safely. It’s this weather I’m worried about,” McKinney says, looking up at the iron-gray sky. I do the same and instantly my vision becomes blurred as snowflakes fill my eyes. “Interstates and highways all over the state are already closed. I’ve called in all the off-duty and reserve officers and dispatchers, and asked Sheriff Hester to bring in his off-duty folks. I’ve got them covering each corner of the building.”
I look to where he’s pointing and see the sheriff’s deputies walking around with M4s slung across their backs. “You think we’re going to need a tac team?” I ask. A tactical—or tac team, as we call it—is a group of officers that comes from all over the state and are specially trained to respond to situations like this.
“Looks that way,” McKinney says. “But if it keeps snowing like this, we’re not getting one. We’re the tac team.”
I see movement through one of the main office windows and place a hand on McKinney’s arm. “Look,” I say, peering through the veil of snow and touching my sidearm like a talisman.
Augie
The cold from the floor is seeping through my pants and it feels as if we have been sitting here forever, but it’s only been like half an hour. All I can think about is that after all that’s happened, I’m not going to be able to see my mom. We’re supposed to get on a plane to Arizona tomorrow and spend the week there.
I wonder what she looks like now. The last time I saw her, her hands were all bandaged up, her hair was all frizzled and her face was bright red like she’d taken a walk in the desert without her hat. Her eyelashes were gone and the nurses had rubbed a thick, shiny lotion all over her arms. P.J. and I talk to her every night, but usually for just a minute or two. She’s too tired or drugged-up from pain medication to talk for very long, but mostly I think she just sounds sad. I know she feels terrible that P.J. and I had to go away, especially to Broken Branch, which she always told us she spent the first seventeen years of her life hoping to leave.
From somewhere outside the classroom we hear banging and a crashing sound and I’m sure he is coming our way. Next to me Beth covers her ears with her hands and begins rocking back and forth and I put my arm around her shoulders. I don’t know what’s going on with Beth. She is the tomboy of our class, the one to go four-wheeling and deer hunting, and now she’s just a mess.
“I’m getting out of here,” Noah says. He stands up and moves toward the windows.
“Sit down, Noah,” Mr. Ellery says strictly.
“No way,” Noah answers, trying to make his voice tough, like he’s some sort of badass. But the words come out so squeaky that I almost feel sorry for him.
“Noah, sit down. If someone’s out there he’ll go right on by us if we’re quiet. The door’s locked. He can’t get in.”
“Like a fricking gun can’t shoot its way through this door,” Noah snaps back, and tries to open a window that leads out to the teacher’s parking lot. Another crash echoes through the hallways and there’s the tinkle of breaking glass and far-off shouts and Noah drops to the floor. If I wasn’t just as scared as he was I would have made a crack about it. For a minute the only sound is everyone’s heavy breathing and Beth’s teeth chattering together.
“Who do you think it is?” Drew whispers in my ear. I shake my head. I can’t speak. Beth pulls on my sleeve and I look over at her.
My dad, she mouths at me, and then covers her face with her hands.
Mrs. Oliver
Mrs. Oliver kept turning around in her seat to see how her children were doing. Most were holding it together, sitting quietly, but she was especially worried about Lucy Shelton, who had some autistic tendencies and didn’t adapt well to changes in her schedule. The buses were due to arrive at one-twenty, two hours earlier than usual, marking the beginning of their spring vacation. It didn’t appear as if their captor was anywhere near done with them and one-twenty was drawing closer.
She was also concerned about Wesley, who had a bladder the size of a thimble. The closest bathrooms were just outside the doorway but it was highly doubtful that he would allow the children to leave the room. Each time she twisted in her seat to check on her charges the man snapped at her to face front. Now I know how Bobby Latham felt, she thought wryly. Bobby had the most severe case of attention deficit disorder that she had ever encountered in her forty-three years of teaching and she had seen a lot. Bobby, face the front, she repeated over and over until she finally gave up and gave him a seat in the back of the room where he could stand, turn around, do cartwheels if he had to, just as long as he didn’t distract the other students in class. This was long before ADHD medication such as Ritalin and Strattera were being prescribed like candy. Oh, she had come to appreciate the effect the medications had on her students with attention concerns, but she didn’t like the way some teachers and parents felt as if it was the perfect panacea. Drug the kid and move on. It wasn’t like that. Students like Bobby needed to learn strategies that helped them focus, tips to be more organized. The medicine just slowed down their brains long enough for their teachers to help give them those real-life skills.
Mrs. Oliver took a deep breath, trying to slow down her own brain. She often used such relaxation techniques with her students, before spelling tests or before they began the dreaded Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now she was beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the strategy she had so emphatically pressed upon her students. She felt panic blooming in her chest, felt her heart pounding so hard that she thought the beads embroidered on her jumper were going to burst from her chest. She tried combining her deep breathing with thoughts of Cal. Cal always had a calming effect on her.
Surprisingly, Mrs. Oliver wasn’t always Mrs. Oliver as most had come to believe. For the first seventeen years of her life, of course, she was Evelyn Schnickle. Then she became Mrs. George Ford.
George was just her height, was handsome and funny and had the most beautiful green eyes. He was the first boy Evelyn had ever kissed and she decided the minute that his lips touched hers that this would be the man she would marry. They were married the weekend after they graduated high school on a rainy June afternoon. At the reception George teased her that the only reason she married him was to shed her last name. And while she agreed that Evelyn Ford sounded so much better than Evelyn Schnickle, that was certainly not the reason she married him and she glanced daringly downward, causing poor George to blush. Two months after George and Evelyn were married, George was sent off to Vietnam and Evelyn lived with George’s parents in Cedar Falls and enrolled in the teacher’s college there. Three months later, two uniformed soldiers showed up on the doorstep with the message that her new husband had died at Plei Mei along with one third of his battalion. Upon hearing the terrible news, Evelyn threw up all over one of the soldier’s shiny black shoes, which she tried to clean up with the elder Mrs. Ford’s favorite afghan. So after a mere five months of marriage, at the tender age of eighteen, Evelyn was a widow. And pregnant.
Evelyn didn’t know how to be a widow; she hadn’t even had time to figure out how to be a wife. She cried, in private, of course, for the loss of George. She couldn’t sleep thinking about him dying all alone in a steamy jungle.