Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  I tried not to concentrate on that and forced myself to breathe, using the technique that I learned years ago from some therapist trying to teach me anger control to keep me from attacking Jacob when he tried to get me to boil over. Each breath deeper than the one before it, counting backward.

  I wasn’t going to get through this if I stayed panicked.

  I had to release all the fear. I psyched myself up. Just another Jackass stunt to me, that’s all this was going to be. Shit, I had been doing that all my life. I had been in worse situations than this. I had stuck my frickin’ head into a pit bull’s cage, for Christ’s sake, and lived through that.

  This was cake.

  I was feeling better, breathing better now, but my heart was not slowing down one bit.

  I knock.

  No response.

  I knock again.

  The door edges open. A crack, slowly widening.

  “Get in.” An arm comes out and pulls me.

  I am inside.

  It is dark. The blinds are drawn; the lights are off. My eyes take a second to adjust.

  There are tables, some adjoining each other, others separated, and other circular tables pushed into the corners, with two chairs each. I had never been in the faculty lounge before and didn’t know exactly what to expect. Now, in the gray darkness of filtered daylight, I spot about a dozen adults, all with their heads on the tables.

  At first I thought they were all dead. But then I see they are moving; not very much, just enough for me to see that they are alive, like some weird adult version of recess.

  Freaky. Not just freaky, horror movie freaky.

  It startles me, and I counterbalance by reminding myself that it could have been worse . . . far worse. There could have been a massacre in there. At least they were all alive.

  And then I feel the cold steel pressed against my temple. I can make out the outline of a pistol in his hands but can’t turn my head.

  “Get down on your knees.” A very hoarse Burn sounding totally different in person. Completely out of reach, I remember thinking. Also, his energy is electric, like he’s on fire, which makes me recoil for an instant.

  He lowers the gun.

  I try to look him in the eyes, searching for some element of recognition. He is having none of that. Doesn’t even acknowledge that he knows me.

  He is totally gone.

  I squat.

  He squats down with me. I look over and see that he is wearing a belt that is rigged with explosives. At least that’s what it looks like to me. It’s even got a metal box above the belt with a red switch on it. If I’m right, he’s got enough explosives on him to take down the entire school. Even if I’m wrong, at the very least, the people in this room will be vaporized if that thing goes off. It occurs to me that I am now one of the people in the room. So if this wasn’t feeling like Massachusetts before, well, I am most definitely back at the strip mall again.

  “Don’t try anything stupid, Crashinsky. Do you understand?”

  I nod, like that wasn’t going to be a problem, knowing however that given my personal history, there was no way for me to obey that particular command.

  He gets back up, pulling me up by the arm, and I feel a shock of electricity when he touches me, and for an instant every single muscle in my body clenches. I wonder if he notices.

  “There’s a table over there,” he says, motioning to me. “That’s where you sit. Take it. Now.”

  I stand slowly and he shoves me over to give me a head start.

  “Easy, David, easy,” I tell him.

  He pushes me again, harder. “Don’t FUCKING tell me what to do.”

  When we reach his chosen destination, he pushes me into the chair. “Put your head down,” he tells me, “like the others.”

  Then he goes over to the front of the room where he has set up his base of operations. There, he has sectioned off a series of desks with three chairs and three different laptops. He starts tapping on the laptop in the center for a while in silence.

  Oddly, I am not feeling any fear. However, my chest is still doing the drumroll thing, like the feeling that I used to have on the ADD medications when I was younger, only more intense, reminding me of the way my body reacted when I got the news about Roxanne. I recognize that I am picking up Burn’s energy. The room is filled with it. I will not be able to take it for very much longer.

  I try to sit still, but that’s not going to happen. Counting to ten, then backward from ten.

  Not going to happen.

  I pick my head up defiantly, determined not to put up with his bullshit any longer.

  “Steven, I’m fucking warning you.”

  I momentarily lower my head again as my eyes adjust fully to the darkness. There are nine others in the room with me. Over there is poor Mrs. Terrigano, sixty-four years old and old-lady frail, all gray haired and frazzled. She’s beyond harmless, always talking about her favorite saints and their powers, always offering to help students with their assignments. What could she possibly have done to this kid that would make her a target? I don’t think anyone has heard her raise her voice above a whisper in the four years I’ve been a student at Meadows.

  Behind her Joanne Muchnick, the health teacher, Mrs. Muchnick, all into chaperoning the dances and the school events, always checking for alcohol and never finding it because we always found ways to outsmart her. Also Mrs. Dickenson, Mr. Connelly, Grace Towers, Ms. Kaushal, and some people I don’t know.

  These people were not the villains of Meadows High School. Except for Connelly, they were all women, and except for Connelly, the most harmless group you could ever have met. None of this made any sense at all to me.

  My eyes go back to Connelly. He is bruised up pretty bad. His face shows streaks of blood. He is staring back at me and shakes his head as if trying to beg me not to try anything or even to say anything.

  I can’t believe all these adults are sitting there just taking it from this psycho kid. It hits me at that moment that I’m really going to have to save them all.

  I pick my head up more slowly, straining to see what Burn is doing in the front of the room with the laptops.

  I also see the guitar cases, now open, and immediately figure out what they were for.

  No music for us today. Instead he’s got assault weapons, two of them, positioned within easy reach of each of his hands, one to his left, another to his right. As any kid who has ever played video games can tell you, one was an AK-47, the unforgiving Russian killing machine, the other an M-16, good old-fashioned American machine-gun technology. These, however, were no video-game props. We’re talking the real thing, motherfucking military weapons.

  “Why are you doing this?” I yell out.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Him, not looking up, getting busier, working on the left-side laptop now, typing away. “Not now,” he yells.

  He puts on a headset and starts talking into it, saying things like, “keep them away” and “let her go” and “it is what it is” and “do you want to die?”

  Then . . .

  “Mr. Ferguson, there are no exceptions. I don’t care if she has to go, she can wait. . . .” He shouts into the device. “Do you want to see your daughter again?”

  With that, Burn comes across to one of the desks and shoves the headset at the face of a heavy woman I have never seen before. I can’t tell in this light how old she is; could be twenty, could be forty. “Tell your father to do what I ask,” he demands.

  She does, following instructions perfectly.

  I wish that I had that capability.

  Then Burn runs back to his base station and hits some keys on the right-side laptop. Less than three seconds later, there is a distant explosion.

  I sit there, trying my hardest to be patient, to follow along like everyone else. And it works for a while. But not long enough, because a few minutes later, my run instinct is back, full force, and when it hits, I’m suddenly not in control, feeling claustrophobic to the point of panic. I jus
t don’t understand how all of the adults are still sitting there like everything’s normal, just another day at high school.

  It was a mistake for me to have entered the room. A big mistake.

  I had to get out. I needed to get out.

  I stand up.

  As soon as Burn sees me standing, he steps across to the desks, drawing the pistol on me. I get the feeling that he knows what I am thinking.

  “Sit the FUCK down.”

  I calculate the possible paths of escape. The door, too far away, and the windows, four sets, shades drawn; another door in the back of the room, by the cabinets and the sink, and no other way out. And of course there is the gun, and the madman behind it.

  Suppose it starts with me? Suppose I am the first to go down?

  Only he is staring directly at me for the first time and I think that this is finally my opportunity to connect, which was what I was instinctively trying to do from the moment that I entered the room.

  I breathe, determined to ignore the warning signals from my overactive pulsebeat.

  “David,” I said, calm as can be. “None of this makes any sense.” Looking back at him. Staring into him, just like poker night.

  And he knows. He fucking knows.

  “Do you really want to do this?” he practically laughs, actually inviting me in. “Bring it on, Crash.”

  And the electric buzz that I felt as soon as I entered the room is back in full as he steps toward me, and I understood that if I was going to get out of this alive, if I was really going to save the school, then I had to go to a place even worse than the faculty lounge, which until that moment I thought was ground zero. But it wasn’t ground zero at all, because ground zero for me was being inside the head of David Burnett. Just like the poker game, except without the benefit of weed, not only without the benefit of weed, without the benefit of my friends to support me or anyone else for that matter. Without the benefit of knowing his cards this time.

  And without all those things, I was no match for David Burnett. Not the David Burnett who was staring back at me, who was, as I said, too far gone to reach, well, not exactly to reach, but I had the distinct feeling that wherever he was, whatever he was experiencing, he would, in fact he could, pull me into it like a whirlpool where there was no escape.

  All I could feel was panic. Not his. Mine. It was too hot in there.

  I looked away. I had no choice.

  And he knew it.

  “Sit the fuck down, Crash.” He laughed almost triumphantly.

  But I wasn’t done yet, because there was still something else. Cassandra, Roxanne’s friend from the funeral, pops into my mind. She told me that in case Burn ever came after me, to tell him something. I just couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Sit the fuck down, Crash.”

  He continues to step forward, raising the pistol again. I stumble backward, still thinking. What did Cassandra say? It was about a dog and a fox. How did it go?

  “We can end this, David. It’s not too late. Let me help you,” I tell him, even though we all know that it probably is too late for him. Think, Crash, what did she say? A fox is not a dog.

  Meantime, the gun is pointed directly at my head, and I can’t look beyond it because I can’t connect with him again. I just can’t do it.

  “It was already too late when my father was killed.” He was coming closer, the gun inches from my forehead.

  Now I remember.

  “Roxanne said that you can’t make a fox into a dog no matter how hard you try. A fox is always a fox. And in the end, you have to let them go.”

  Spectacular. I remember every word. It was the magic incantation that would get him to come off the ledge. I am moving forward now, confident that the words will diffuse his anger, snap him to his senses.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Burn asks.

  Immediately I think, maybe I got it wrong. Even if it sounded right. No, I had it right. It was just that it didn’t mean to Burn what Roxanne thought it would have meant to Burn.

  And in that exact second, my cell phone goes off; only it sounds to me, and actually feels, like it’s Burn’s gun going off; the sound is so penetrating that we both jump back from it.

  I look down at the display.

  No way.

  Caroline Prescott.

  What am I going to tell her, “Can’t talk, Mom, I’m in the middle of a siege”?

  I flip it open. And all of us hear my mom in the tinniest voice ever, squawking, “Steven? I just heard from your sister. What’s going on?”

  David is standing behind me now.

  “Mom,” I rush to talk, in a hushed whisper, which wouldn’t have mattered, because Burn and everyone else could hear me anyways. “I’m in the faculty lounge with nine teachers and David Burnett. He has totally lost it.”

  With that, Burn grabs the phone. My mom’s tinny voice is still chattering away. It is almost comical, I mean, it would be, if we weren’t all in such a dangerous situation. This could be sitcom funny.

  As her voice fades in the distance, I hear her say, “Put him on the phone.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Crashinsky . . .” Then there is this pause. “Ms. Prescott,” he corrects himself. She had to be kidding with the name change thing right now. “Yes. Steven is here with me.” He raises the phone to his ear, and we can no longer hear her tinny, tiny mom voice. “Jamie’s not in school anymore,” he tells her. Then silence for like ten seconds.

  “I released her,” he tells Caroline, sounding as if he was trying to win brownie points with her, and I actually start believing that maybe my mom could talk him out of whatever he was planning. Christina couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t do it, but again, Roxanne at the strip mall, Felicia at her wedding, neither of them had anything on Caroline Prescott.

  Not so much this time, however. Because after another break of silence, he now starts yelling into the phone:

  “Don’t FUCKING tell me about my mother and my sister.” And with that, he hurls my cell phone at the far wall, where it cracks into multiple pieces.

  Then he turns to me. “Tell your mother not to call again.”

  And me thinking, OK, brainiac, you just broke my cell, how is she going to call anyways?

  “Sit down, Steven,” he says, pushing me back into my chair with absolutely no resistance. I am played out. I get disapproving head nods from my fellow captives.

  Then Burn goes back to his base station and starts banging on the center laptop. This goes on for a while. More orders into the headset. Feels like hours. Even though it is just after 11:00 A.M., to me it’s midnight, every second a minute, every minute an hour. My heart is still pounding like a bass drum.

  More time passes. The beats regulate. I notice the buzz in the room has started to fade.

  So even though everything could be over in a millisecond, I have this feeling that we, he and I, are not done yet. Because despite Burn having this breakdown, he is moving in a very calculated manner, beginning to look more normal, maybe getting control of himself a little.

  I get the feeling the electricity in him has subsided, so I chance it, testing my impression, finally yelling across to him, “Why don’t you give me your list of demands, and I will bring them to whoever you want?”

  And he yells back, “It’s not time yet.” Never looking away from his laptops.

  And I ask when and he says, “Later.”

  And I ask if I could help him, with the list, thinking I’m making progress.

  At least until he slams the lid down on the center laptop.

  “FUCK. FUCK. FUCKFUCK.” Burn goes into a tailspin, grabs the AK-47.

  I may have miscalculated again.

  “Your friends,” he yells across to me, “are trying to leave the building.”

  “Can’t be,” I tell him. “My friends are not at school today.”

  “Don’t get technical with me.” He goes to the door. Checking the weapon.

  Opening the door, then firing multiple rounds i
nto the hallway.

  AMAZINGLY LOUD. Ear-shatteringly loud.

  I am completely stunned by the power of the weapon. I have heard the controlled sounds coming from the video-game guns, even paintball guns, and Airsoft. Whatever. This was a whole new sound, loud and sharp, loud enough and sharp enough to get inside you and shake you even after the echo fades. Plus you could feel the vibration. My sound threshold has been blown to bits and my core so rattled that I feel my whole body shake in sync with the shots being fired.

  Also, watching him fire the gun, it registered that he had experience with the weapon. He was totally comfortable with it and was prepared for the kickback. We all knew from video games that the AK-47 packed a wallop of a kickback as compared to the M-16, which was faster and provided less of a kick. But, watching Burn, you could see how he counterbalanced when firing. You could not be prepared for the force of the real thing just by playing video games. No doubt about it, Burn had been practicing with the weapon and knew what he was doing. If he was aiming for anything, well, he probably hit it.

  Which meant that there could be dead people in the hall.

  And if so, the siege had just escalated, and Burn would know that immediately. Because once the first person dies, he’s a murderer, and then there’s no way out for him except to ultimately hit the switch on his belt. Which, of course, will definitely dust me.

  And then, after the gun blast, silence, which isn’t silent at all, because our ears are ringing from the sound.

  Well, silence, except that there is a uniform gasp in the faculty lounge. Actually, a gasp and multiple screams as everyone in the room simultaneously drops to the floor in reaction. I’m not sure who the screamers were, maybe Mrs. Terrigano or even Connelly. The shrieks seem to come from that part of the room, but I am not looking at that part of the room. I am looking at Burn, not anyone else.

  I taste the metallic dry taste in the back of my throat that I remember tasting when Burn pointed a gun at me on that winter night in Massachusetts. I now recognize the taste as the taste of fear.

  The drumroll beat in my chest is back in full force.