Day of Wrath

by William R. Forstchen

  Thoughts started to race and his mind, on the edge of panic, finally latched onto one: Where is Wendy? Is she already in the lunch room, or is it math class? God, what time is it? Where is she? Where is my daughter?

  A bell started to ring, loud, insistent, piercing. Was it the lunch bell, or the alert for lockdown?

  Now a flurry of shots thundered down the hallway. Screams. Margaret turned and actually managed to lock the door to the faculty lounge.

  “Get away from the door!” Bob commanded, holding his pistol up and chambering a round, but still not sure where to go.

  Margaret’s gaze fixed on the small pistol in his right hand. More gunfire sounded from down the corridor, echoing like firecrackers. Screaming, more screaming, children’s screams.

  “You can’t have a gun, Petersen. I’ll report you for this!”

  “Shut the hell up, bitch and clear the door!” he snapped, grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her bulky frame to one side. He unlocked the door and opened it. Whatever instincts were still working for him, he knew he had to do something, at least for his daughter.

  He took a deep breath. At last some flash of clarity settled in. His instincts as a father and a protector overrode everything else.

  He stepped into the corridor. The alarm for lockdown was sounding, reverberating, making it hard to think. On the far side of the main office complex was the wing for the gym, dining hall, library, science labs, his own IT office, and more classrooms. Behind him doors to classrooms were opening up. In spite of the drills held at the start of the year before the students arrived, a fair number of teachers were reacting in the opening moments with curiosity rather than as they had been trained to do.

  Surely this could not be real? they were asking themselves and each other. A mistake? Bob heard someone shouting that question. Was this all a mistake or for real? Another shouted that some damn idiot of an administrator had gone over the edge and decided to pull an actual “real” drill with firecrackers included. If so, heads would roll after this one.

  Bob glanced back in the opposite direction of the gunfire. Where was Wendy’s fourth period classroom? Was she in the lunch room or still in math? The door to her math classroom was a few feet down the corridor and across from the faculty lunch room. The door was closed, lights off. My God, had they gone for lunch and she was on the other side of the building with the murderers between him and his daughter?

  Suddenly an explosion of shots rang out and glass shattered. He whipped his head around toward the office complex and saw the large glass window of the front office break apart, broken glass cascading down, screams coming from within.

  He caught a glimpse of the principal, Mr. Carl, gentle soul, who insisted on wearing a bow-tie which Bob thought made him look rather nerdy. Kids might say behind his back that he was somewhat “dorky” but they all knew he had a loving heart. He was stepping out into the junction of the main corridor with the office complex.

  How many times had Bob argued about this moment, what to do if a gunman hit their school? Carl always replied that they would follow policy as they had been trained to do. According to his training, Carl was to be in his office calling the police and sounding the alarm. But he must have been down in the lunch room.

  A group of children appeared at the end of the hallway, a class that had been heading to the lunch room, and in those first seconds their teacher turned them back. Carl shouted for them to run for their classroom. A split second later several bullets exited his back and he sagged. The man was using his body to shield the terrified children even as he died. The group was running toward Bob. More shots resounded.

  God in heaven, it was Wendy’s class! They were being led by their teacher Patty Carlson, a first-year teacher, still fired up with idealism about her profession. But there was no three-credit course at the state university to train her for this moment; all of the other courses she had been required to take were now meaningless.

  There was much he had to process in the next few seconds. Carl was down, several children he had tried to shield were collapsing. Was that Wendy? The bright pink designer scarf she was so proud of, a birthday present from her mother, was around her neck. The scarf made her stand out and it filled him with terror that it would draw the attention of the killers as well. She was at the back of the line of panicked children running toward him. He saw a dark form at the end of the corridor, bulky, dressed in black. The man's shoulder weapon was raised. He aimed straight at the backs of the fleeing children.

  Flashes, an explosion of rounds. Children at the end of the fleeing group dropped, one after the other, shot in the back. There was an instant of silence, then the sound of a magazine dropping.

  I should charge him and shoot, the thought screamed at him. An instructor, when he took training, talked about “muscle memory”: of learning to react by instinct. The horror and confusion of it all was so overwhelming that he simply had not raised his pistol yet, all attention was focused on Wendy as he instinctively started toward her to pull her to safety, wherever that might be.

  He caught a glimpse of Wendy. She was down, but then coming back up, knocked over by the child directly behind her who had been shot. Her math teacher turned back to grab her, shepherding her children, physically placing herself at the end of the line to shield them, pushing them toward her classroom.

  The gunman slapped another magazine in, started to aim it down the corridor and then, as if distracted, turned to his left, and popped round after round at a range of but a few feet into a terrified group of children who were streaming out of the gym, trying to flee to their classrooms for lockdown as their teacher had trained them to do.

  Wendy was up, shoved forward by Patty. Bob grabbed her by the arm, placing his body between her and the killer before the gunman's attention returned to them, and together they bolted into the perceived safety of her classroom, slamming the door shut behind them and locking it.

  More shots rang out in the hallway, then screaming, then a distinctive cry, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar!” and that focused Bob at last.

  This was not some random shooting, some cowardly son-of-a-bitch lone shooter, or even a team of two or three psychotics. With their triumphal cries he knew with absolute certainty that this was not the lone, crazed, sick shooter of the American scenario, the American nightmare ever since Columbine. It was Russia, 2004. This was the Chechnya scenario, the Beslan school massacre of 2004. The worst nightmare of all his nightmares as a teacher.

  The Beslan school massacre in the southern Russia province of Chechnya, was a deliberately designed mass murder, the perfect storm of a terrorist mentality that viewed infidel children as tools to terrorize the enemy before sending all of them to hell.

  A handful of Islamic murderers who claimed they were fighters for an independent state seized the school in the Russian province on the first day of classes, which by Russian tradition was a time of celebration, proud parents taking their children to school and bringing small gifts of flowers and fruit to the teachers. But rather than a school opening with ceremonies and children singing traditional folk and patriotic songs, the day began with armed terrorists storming and seizing control of the building.

  First they herded the male teachers and older male students to a back room and systematically cut their throats to eliminate any chance of resistance.

  It was an attack designed to terrorize a nation and the next step transcended anything even the Nazis had done to cower a population. Girls as young as ten were dragged to the roof of the building, over which news helicopters were hovering and reporting on the attack. Several terrorists held a child down as one of their fellow “freedom fighters” raped the child and then while raping her, cut her throat. The Russian government, which still controlled its mass media, immediately shut the media links down with the concern that, whether it was right or wrong, the sight of this depravity might trigger a frenzied counter-response. The intent of the terrorists was to arouse a religious war bet
ween Orthodox and Muslim, and to instill panic across the entire nation.

  Children caught up as pawns in that nightmare hell were then herded into a gym for what became a standoff of several days. The hostages were trapped in sweltering heat with no food or water so that many turned to drinking their own urine to slake their thirst. In the final conclusion of the horror, when security forces stormed the building, the terrorists, with a final cry of Allahu akbar, detonated explosives ringing the roof of the gym, collapsing the structure. Over three hundred innocent victims died.

  It was a nightmare scenario that had lingered with Bob across the years. He had warned of it, and with the shouts of triumph out in the hallway, he knew it had indeed come to his school outside of Portland, Maine.

  He scanned the classroom. Children were sobbing, one girl was screaming hysterically, cradling a shattered arm as a young boy, who seemed so calm, was wrapping a belt around her upper arm to make a tourniquet. A kid with some boy scout training, he thought.

  Another explosion of shots, rapid fire, echoed and there was more screaming out in the hallway. He looked about, still clutching Wendy to his side. The Ruger was in his right hand, still unused. Six shots of a lightweight pistol against what they were carrying? It might have worked against some damn crazed bastard like the one who had shot up the school in Connecticut, but now?

  There was more gunfire; the main lights in the hallway flickered off, a fire alarm began to shriek, and seconds later sprinklers in the hallway came on. Emergency lights switched on and flashed, adding to the terror and confusion.

  Clear, clear your thoughts, he kept repeating to himself.

  A glimpse out the window of the classroom door revealed a child lying in the hallway, twitching spasmodically. Another child started to get up and then the back of her head just exploded.

  “God in heaven, where are You?” he cried.

  More shots went off in the corridor; it sounded like one of the killers was coming closer. He stepped away from the door, checking the room.

  The windows. The classroom faced west to the open playing yard and ball field. There were children out there in gym clothes, a teacher, one of the coaches, herding them together. God, don’t bring them back in, run the other way!

  He went to a window. The upper part was standard safety glass and a small hand crank controlled a lower window that could not open more than a foot wide.

  More gunfire reverberated in the hallway, then screams. The gunfire sounded as if it were receding, then was followed by a long rapid burst. My God, they’re beginning to move room to room!

  The decision was near instant.

  “Out the windows!” he shouted.

  Patty, standing in the corner, surrounded by nearly a score of trembling children stared at him wide-eyed.

  “We’re supposed to lie down, Bob.”

  “Out, get out!” he screamed, trying to pick Wendy up with one arm and force her into the narrow escape of the crank-opened window. She was kicking in panic, refusing.

  He pulled her back, set her down, pocketed the pistol, then picked up a student desk and slammed it against the plate glass window. It recoiled back in his hand but the window cracked. The children flinched.

  “Damn it, break!”

  He hit it again, slamming the desk in, and the window finally shattered, safety glass breaking apart, a few fragments still clinging to the frame.

  Wendy ran to him and clung to his neck.

  “Wendy, get out and run! Run and don’t stop. Don’t look back, just run for the woods over there on the far side of the field!”

  “Daddy?”

  “Go!”

  He struggled to break her grasp around his neck and then to his horror saw that the coach out in the field, with safety only a hundred yards away, had actually rounded his students up into a group and was standing in the play yard, hesitating, looking toward the building as if some part of it would still give safety. A long burst of fire erupted, and the children outside began to drop. The group broke apart, running in panic. As they scattered, several ran to the parking lot but were cut down, collapsing into small bloody heaps. One tried to get up and was hit yet again, the shot demonstrating the utter lack of mercy. Wendy saw it all, twisting, writhing to get out of his grip, screaming that she did not want to go outside.

  The months of training were now making it all so easy for the holy warriors of the caliph. Two were to first hit the main entrance, kill the staff in the central office area and any ridiculous security man who might have a pistol locked away in his office. One of the two would then hold the entrance while the second covered the back entry, shooting down any who tried to flee that way, and keeping their prey pent up in the building. The emergency exits out of the gym and dining hall were then easily blocked by hanging several fake IEDs on the doors and announcing that as long as they stayed put, no one would be hurt. That if any tried to open the doors, they would all be blown apart.

  The third would then methodically begin to work his way down the two main classroom corridors, the wings of the building that contained five hundred and thirty-eight students and thirty-seven staff and teachers. Once the classrooms were wiped out, attention would then be focused on those cowering in the gym and dining hall for the second stage of their plan.

  All of the information they needed in laying out the plan for this school had been garnered from the school district’s website, from photographs of the interior posted by students, by a new math teacher proudly showing off her classroom, and by photographs and video clips of school plays, festivals, and sporting events. How these Americans loved to film and post their children’s sporting events and provide so many details for a trained eye planning to kill them all! There were even blueprints and photographs of the newly-built classrooms from sixteen years ago, showing the design and layout of their new school.

  After seizing the main office complex they knocked out the electricity and activated the fire alarms, setting off sprinklers to add to the confusion.

  With that done, the work now commenced of moving from classroom to classroom.

  A local police car pulled up to the curb in less than four minutes, summoned by the frightened call of the principal's secretary, who did as she was drilled to do: get that call out immediately. And then she died.

  The officer clambered out of his vehicle and saw old Charlie sprawled out on the walkway. There had been intense debate in the years since Columbine, renewed after Newtown, as to how the first officer on the scene of a school shooting should react. Wait for backup or charge straight in? The argument had shifted to rushing the building, since most of the killers, at the sight of a police officer, often shot themselves and ended the madness. The local police chief told his personnel that they’d have to make their best judgment call when they arrived on the scene. As for himself, if he knew children were about to die at the hands of some damn lunatic, he would go in and to hell with waiting for backup. Every second meant a life saved or lost.

  So the first officer there, hearing the gunshots and screaming, knew he had to go in. The call from the secretary had not been clear, just a scream that there was a “shooter in the building,” then the sound of gunfire was followed by the signal cutting off and the near-hysterical 911 dispatcher shouting the news onto the police circuit. So he moved forward, the jihadist waiting for him chuckling at how amateurish the man was. The jihadist switched his weapon from full auto to single shot and put a well-aimed round into the man’s head, dropping him next to the foolish old security guard.

  The sight of the two dead bodies would give the next approaching officer reason to pause. In order for the plan to work well, to achieve all that they wished to achieve, they needed the next hour free of interference.

  The leader of the three holy warriors clicked on the phone he was carrying, no more need for security regarding that, selected the website to the local news station, and smiled as he saw that their regular programming had been interrupted. They were already reporting “an in
cident that appears to be unfolding at Joshua Chamberlain Middle School.” It truly was going according to plan.

  Bob clutched Wendy, watching as the children outside scattered across the playground area, while out in the hallway he could clearly hear the gunfire erupting in a classroom across the corridor and one doorway down from the faculty lounge area.

  He heard loud screams, prayers, begging, relentless shooting, and repeated cries of “Allahu akbar!”

  If they were following a pattern, this room would be next. He hugged Wendy fiercely and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Wendy, you've got to run. You've got to run as fast as you’ve ever run. Go to the woods across the field. Now run!”

  He tried to force her slender body through the shattered window. She began to kick and struggle, slicing her knee open on the edge of the shattered glass in the window frame.

  “Daddy, no! I want to stay with you.”

  He forcefully pulled her loose from her deathlike grip around his neck.

  “I love you. Tell Mommy and Shelly I love them. Now RUN!”

  He threw her out the window so that she landed sprawling, scrambling to her hands and knees, sobbing, a look on her face as if he had brutally rejected her. She actually started to try to climb back in.

  “Damn you Wendy! Listen to me! I am ordering you to run. Do it!”

  He tried to force an angry gaze as if furious with her, to frighten her even more than the horror of what was around her. She looked at him, shocked, and stepped back, then winced as the sound of gunfire echoed around her.

  “Run!”

  She turned away and finally began to stagger across the play yard.

  “I love you, sweetie,” he whispered, then turned back to face the others in the room.