by Willow Rose
She still wanted to survive. But the guards waited by the entrance and exits of the school. They would catch her and kill her if she tried to escape.
The first time they had sent them into the trains, Olivia hadn’t known what was in the bags. She had been instructed to go one stop and then place the bag under her seat, poke a hole in it, then get out of the car and into another one, the only one that wasn’t attacked. Then as they rode one more stop, she was told to get out and walk away like nothing happened. Don’t look back, they had told them. Just keep walking till you reach the stairs. But Olivia had stopped and turned to look. That was when she had seen them. Hundreds of people that had fallen out of the car that she had been in first, and crawled across the platform, gasping for air, some screaming in pain, others squirming until they took their final breath. Three of them had been girls she knew from the house. They had been in the first car at the end of the train and didn’t make it out in time. Olivia had stopped for just a second and stared at them, then realized that she had done this, that what had been in those bags had caused this. Her stopping had cost her a beating when they got back to the truck because she almost exposed herself, they said. Olivia hadn’t cared. She thought she deserved a beating for what she had done.
Now, she was up the stairs and looking down the hallway at all the smiling faces. Olivia realized it was August, and school was back in session. She had been gone all summer, and school had started back up without her. The thought made her tear up.
I am never going back to school. I am never going to be with my friends. I am never going to see my parents or my siblings again. I will die here, squirming on the floor like a worm until I can’t breathe anymore — like they did on that train and like they did in that church.
“No, I will not. I will make it out, somehow,” she told herself, shaking her head.
She then walked inside a classroom and placed the bag underneath a chair. She was instructed to wait until right before class started. A couple of kids looked at her strangely, probably wondering if she was a new student. She looked down, then placed her foot against the bag to make sure it was still in place. She felt the pencil in her hand. It was amazing how heavy such a little pencil could feel when it held the power of life and death.
Chapter 58
What does it matter if I’m dead anyway?
Olivia stared at the pencil in her hand and felt the pointy end of it with her finger. Still more kids were coming into the class and putting their backpacks down. Two boys were goofing around and fighting for fun. Three girls were watching, giggling at their stupidity, hoping one of them would look their way.
Olivia looked at the clock on the wall. There were still ten minutes until class started. She spotted a girl sitting a couple of desks down, on her phone.
Heart hammering in her chest, Olivia made a decision, one she feared she would end up regretting.
“Can I borrow your phone for a second?”
The girl looked up at her. She was wearing black lipstick, and her eyes blazed in anger.
“No. Why would I loan my phone to someone I don’t even know?”
Olivia leaned over her desk, then said with a low voice. “Because if you don’t, we’re all going to die.”
Now she had her attention. The girl looked up at her, eyes wide, mouth gaping.
“What did you just say? Is this some kind of joke?”
“Listen to me,” Olivia said. “I’m trying to save your life here, but I need you not to panic, okay?”
The girl scrutinized her for a long time. Olivia was certain she could hear the clock on the wall ticking loudly in her head. She had no time to spare. She didn’t know what the response time was around here. Would they be able to make it in time?
“Just let me borrow the phone, please,” Olivia said with the calmest voice possible. Sweat was springing from her forehead, and her palms felt clammy.
“Please.”
The girl swallowed, and Olivia could tell she knew this was serious. She looked down at the phone for a second before finally handing it over to Olivia.
Relieved, Olivia grabbed it, then dialed.
“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”
“There’s going to be a gas attack on a school,” Olivia said, keeping her voice low, hoping that the other students wouldn’t hear her and panic. If they started to run, the girls in the other classrooms would poke their bags prematurely as they had been instructed to. People would die.
“What school are we talking about?” the dispatcher said. Olivia could hear her tapping on a keyboard. Olivia found it difficult to calm her pounding heart.
“I…I don’t know…” Olivia said, then looked at the girl with the black lipstick. She seemed to understand and pointed at the emblem on her shirt.
“Our Savior’s Catholic school,” Olivia said, her voice trembling. “It’s the same as what happened on the trains and at the church. The gas is in bags. But you must hurry. It’s gonna happen in six, no wait, only five minutes. Please, hurry.”
Chapter 59
“What’s going on?”
Matt saw the officers begin to run. Carter looked up from his desk too. A sergeant came to them.
“Sarin gas attack on a school. Someone called it in. Apparently, the attackers are still inside, and it hasn’t happened yet.”
Matt rose to his feet, then looked at Carter.
“I’ll drive,” Matt said and grabbed his gun. They stormed to the cruiser and took off, sirens blasting, following the nine other patrol cars that were leaving at the same time.
“We need the entire perimeter sealed off,” Matt said. “If the attackers are still inside, then they’ll come out at some point, trying to get away, and there will be someone waiting for them. We need to get them.”
Over the radio, they learned that firefighters and paramedics were almost there, but they were told to stay back in case the terrorists were armed. If they were to stop this, then they had to play their cards right. They also learned that JTTF were on their way, but coming up behind them, so Miami-Dade police were to intervene if possible once they got there.
“Leaving the tough work to us normal cops,” Carter grumbled under his breath. “As usual.”
“We’re talking ten terrorists, armed with Sarin gas, inside the school,” the radio informed. “One of them called dispatch. She’s on the top floor. She’s just a young girl. She informed dispatch that there were seven young girls who were forced to do this. And three adults.”
“They’re using young girls?” Matt asked, startled.
It suddenly made sense. He had been going through the files from the two previous attacks and seen that there had been at least three young girls in each place that were unaccounted for. They had been in the age range from ten to seventeen. And so far, no one had looked for them, and they hadn’t been able to ID them yet. Some were Hispanic looking while others were assumed to come from Eastern Europe. Only one girl had been ID’ed as being American, and her parents had been notified. They had told the police that she had run away from home two years earlier. How she ended up in a Catholic Church on a Sunday morning in Miami had been a puzzle until now.
“They’re using trafficked girls,” Matt mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“To do their dirty work,” he said.
“The terrorists?”
Matt nodded as Carter drove up in front of the school and parked behind the many other patrol cars. They each grabbed a vest and put it on. They were going to be there with the first responders, and Matt felt anxious. It was almost eight o’clock. They had thirty seconds to get in there, identify the terrorists, and stop them before they pierced those bags like they had at the Metrorail and the church.
The responders leading the charge suited up in hazmat suits and put on gas masks. Matt waited outside, gun clutched between his hands, while the men in suits stormed inside and the screaming began.
Chapter 60
As the first scream resound
ed, all in the classroom turned to look at Olivia. She had explained the situation to them and told them to remain calm, that the police were on their way.
“Why can’t we just run?” a girl said, her entire torso shaking in desperation.
“Yeah, I want to get out of here,” a boy standing next to her said, his eyes flickering in fear.
“Don’t,” Olivia said. “The police have just entered the building; that’s why they were screaming downstairs. But as they did, the bags were most likely poked, and the gas has started to seep out. If you run out in the hallway or down the stairs, you’ll run right into it, and then you’ll be exposed.”
The kids stared at her, eyes brimming with terror. More screams were coming from downstairs, and it made another wave of fear go through the classroom.
“They’ll come for us,” Olivia said. “But until they do, we keep the door closed and stay in here.”
More screams made a boy rise from his seat. “I can’t stand this. I can’t stay in here!”
Before Olivia could stop him, he ran for the door, opened it, and stormed out into the hallway. Olivia slammed the door shut behind him, crying helplessly.
Barely had she backed away from the door before it opened, and a man made his way inside. Seeing his face made Olivia’s blood freeze. He was one of them; he was one of the men that had brought her there.
He took one glance at Olivia, then at the bag on the floor beneath the chair.
“We’ve been compromised. You know what to do next,” he said. “Poke the bag.”
Olivia stared sat him, her hands beginning to shake. In his hand, he was holding a gun, and as the other kids in the class saw that, they screamed and backed up.
Olivia stared at him defiantly, blocking his way to the bag.
“It must be done,” he said and lifted the gun to her forehead, then clicked the hammer back. “You know this.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. If he shot her, then so be it. She wasn’t going to risk all these children’s lives.
“DO IT!”
She opened her eyes and stared into his, determined. Then she opened her mouth and said:
“No.”
The man trembled in anger and pressed the barrel of the gun against Olivia’s skin. She prepared herself, readied herself to pay the ultimate price.
She didn’t see the chair as it flew through the air until it was too late. It slammed into the man’s back and knocked him to the floor. Olivia glanced toward where it had come from and spotted the girl with the black lipstick holding it, panting agitatedly.
Next thing she knew, she was on top of him, her hands gripping over his and over the gun. Olivia didn’t know where she got her strength, but it just happened. The man let go with one hand, and Olivia pulled the gun out of his grip, but as she almost had it, he gave it a push, so it flew across the room. He then punched Olivia in the stomach and blew out all the air from her lungs. Olivia panted, and the man managed to squirm away. It was too late when Olivia realized that he had a pencil in his hand, and she couldn’t stop him before he poked a hole in the bag, and the green liquid slowly seeped out onto the classroom floor.
Chapter 61
Olivia lunged at the man, but it was too late. A shot blasted through the air and whizzed above her head. The bullet hit the man in the forehead, and he fell to the floor, instantly dead. Behind her stood the girl with the black lipstick, gun between her hands, shaking. She let it go, and it dropped to the floor.
Screams of panic soon filled the classroom, and Olivia stared at the leaking gas, panting and agitated.
“Get away from it,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Go to the windows and open them!”
Someone lifted a chair and threw it through the window. The window was pushed out of its frame, and soon the boy crawled out. He stood on a ledge, screaming his heart out.
“Help! Help us!”
A girl crawled out after him but slipped. Her hands gripped for the ledge, and she was now hanging there, screaming. There were two windows in the classroom. Olivia ran to the other, the one that faced the other side of the building and spotted the firefighters below. She pulled the blinds off, then pushed the window open. She yelled at them to come to the other side of the building. They did and entered the school courtyard below. The firefighters spotted the kids on the ledge and soon backed a ladder-truck up in the courtyard. The girl dangling outside the window let go of the ledge with a scream and jumped into the arms of a firefighter on the ladder below who took her to safety. Seeing this, the two others soon followed.
“Hurry,” Olivia said and looked back at the gas at the other end of the room. Luckily, the hole in the bag wasn’t very big, and it was coming out very slowly. She couldn’t even feel it in her eyes yet, and she knew of several other girls who had survived that. As soon as it pinched the eyes, that was when you should run; she had learned from them.
Run, if you can.
Olivia turned to the others, then pointed at the window. “Get out there, and they’ll take you down. It’s the only way to survive this. If you stay here, you’ll die. We can’t wait for the police and paramedics to come up here. We need to go now.”
One after another, Olivia helped them crawl outside, and they were soon crawling down the ladder. When it was the girl with the black lipstick’s turn, she stopped.
“You go first,” she said.
“No, no, it’s all my fault; I’ll go last.”
The girl looked into her eyes. “No. You go first.”
“I don’t want to,” Olivia said.
“Listen,” the girl said. “Once we get down there, they’ll start looking for you. You saved us. I don’t want the police to get their hands on you; you hear me? There are only three of us left, and we all agree you should go now, so you’ll have time to get away. Please, just go.”
Olivia sighed deeply. “Thank you.”
“I’m Emma, by the way,” the girl said and hugged her.
“I’m Olivia.”
Olivia gave Emma one last glance of gratefulness, then slid her body out of the window and stood on the ledge, looking down. The area was now crawling with cops, and her legs were shaking badly. Right before she let the firefighter help her onto the ladder, she spotted a set of eyes belonging to someone standing behind the crowd and looking into them made her scream.
Chapter 62
I stared at my burner phone when the breaking news sign filled the screen. I had been sitting in our guest cottage on the bed with Sydney ever since she told me that the police were pressuring her to turn me in. Neither of us had a solution to the problem, though, and now we were sitting in silence when the phone vibrated.
BREAKING NEWS: SCHOOL ATTACKED WITH SARIN GAS IN DOWNTOWN MIAMI.
“What the heck?” I asked and looked up at Sydney. “Another one?”
I turned my phone to show her. She had turned hers off completely in anger because of the email. She had told me she wasn’t going to do it, that her sister came before her career at any time, but I sensed it was tough for her to make that choice, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to put her in that position. I didn’t want her to have to make the choice.
You’ll never work in the business again, had been her agent’s words.
I pressed the link, and it led me to a TV station’s live feed from the scene. A chopper flew above the school and filmed as the chaos unfolded beneath. I watched as students came out of the school screaming, some falling to the ground, and the paramedics were rushing to them. My heart cried when I saw the panic and chaos as the chopper continued to the other side of the school building, where kids were standing on the ledge, reminding me of the horrific scenes from nine-eleven.
Luckily, the kids were being rescued by the firefighters. But as the chopper paused above them, lingering as close as it could get, I saw something that just about made my heart stop.
I saw her. I saw Olivia.
I was so surprised; I burst out in almost a shriek.
“Olivia?”
My voice cracked, and Sydney looked at me. “It’s her,” I said. “It’s her; look. She’s on the ledge.”
Sydney looked over my shoulder and saw her too, just as she was helped down by a firefighter.
“She’s going to make it,” I almost cried while Olivia crawled down the long ladder. “It’s my Olivia, Syd; it’s her. We’ve found her!”
“I can’t believe it,” Sydney said, tearing up as well. “It really is her.”
“But…how? What is she doing at a Catholic high school?” Sydney asked.
“I…I don’t know,” I said, almost laughing when I saw Olivia put her feet on the ground. She was soon greeted by a flock of students, and I lost track of her as she blended in.
“Where is she? She disappeared,” I said.
Then the chopper suddenly took off. It moved away, then took a turn and returned to the main entrance.
I shook the phone in my hand in frustration.
“No! Stay there. Stay on these students. I need to see where she’s going!” I yelled at the phone in my hand, but it didn’t help. The cameras were now on the front side of the building where more students were carried out. They were lying on the grassy area outside of the school, making it look like a warzone. I gasped and clasped my mouth.
“Do you think she was exposed to the gas?” I asked. “She was in there, just like those other kids.”
Sydney grabbed my hand and made me look her in the eyes.
“Eva Rae, no. We saw her. It was her. She was fine. She got down. Eva Rae, listen to me. This is good news. She’s alive, and she’s here. She’s in this town. We found her, okay? We found her.”
Chapter 63
Matt ran around the building. The first responders were still working on the inside, trying to get all the victims out, and everything was total chaos. His job was to make sure none of the terrorists escaped and to help the victims as they came out.
