Up ahead was Sam’s old elementary school. Back before I went in, sometimes I was so beat when I got off at dawn after working a double shift that I’d be hallucinating from sleep deprivation as I walked Sam to school.
But I never missed walking him once, even though sometimes my tired legs had a hard time keeping up. The sun rising, strolling with my boy whilst knowing I’d survived everything life had thrown at us when so many of my homies hadn’t? It was magic, man.
And whenever we got to his school and stopped at the entrance, Sam always let me squat down and give him a hug and a kiss. Every day I’d dreaded the time my son would be too old to let his daddy kiss him in public. Every day I’d known he was getting older, every day needing me a little less. I can admit now that scared the hell out of me.
The day of my homecoming, that crisp early morning air was wasted on me. I had no appreciation for the morning sun spilling onto my face like liquid gold. Whatever magic I’d ever felt was gone, as I strolled along examining the exposed wreckage of my life.
I was walking past the main gate in the cyclone fence. The playground was empty, and the wind seemed to mock me as it moaned through the childless swings. From out of sight in the direction of Stagger Bay Center, I heard gunfire; multiple pistol shots that made me stop and stand in place, jolted by a rush of adrenaline as I tried to see where the unseen shooter was.
The gunfire didn’t end; instead the pistol was joined by other weapons. I could identify the spaced booms of a shotgun, and even the stutter of what had to be something fully automatic. I couldn’t tell you what went through my mind as I listened to that invisible fire fight, other than there was no sense of relief when the shooting finished up with some sort of drastic explosion.
I had to squint against the early morning sun when that battered blue step-van lurched around the corner a few blocks down in the direction of the shooting, its stereo system blasting out Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin.’ The van slalomed a bit from side to side and then accelerated right toward me. I was disconcerted, both at how fast it was coming on, and at how many sirens I now heard, all closing rapidly.
A black and white skidded howling around the same corner, right on the van’s ass. The cop in the passenger seat leaned out his window and started shooting, the noise of his pistol fire slapping through the air like the cracking of a whip. The spang of rounds hitting metal proved that at least some of his shots were on target.
My jaw dropped open, hung and dangled that way as a grenade arced out the side door of the van and bounced a few times on the asphalt. It exploded as the cop car drove over it, shredding the front tire and lifting that corner of the roller on a loud BOOM-ball of fireworks.
The cop car’s rear end fishtailed as the front wheel landed and bounced, and its shattered front rim ground along the street, smoking tatters of rubber flapping as sparks and chunks of asphalt flew. One tire jounced up over the curb and that was all she wrote: the cop car flopped onto its side and slid to rest along the playground fence with a skirling clash, its siren still wailing like a grieving widow. The cop who’d been leaning out the passenger window was pretty much smeared in half beneath the car, but the driver commenced an aimless squirming as she hung suspended in her seat harness.
I’d scampered for cover and hit the deck on my belly when the grenade exploded. Old reflexes die hard; it took me right back to the streets of Oakland where we always took a noise like that personal and we always sought full prone when firefights blazed. I lay still as a statue in the tall grass by the schoolyard, watching the step-van lean forward on its shocks as it scuffed to a halt in the middle of the street.
Spencer Davis still blasted from their system, Steve Winwood singing ‘So glad we made it. So glad we made it.’ These boys had the bass turned up a little high for the mix – too much distortion.
A tall kid with big ears hopped out the van with a revolver in one hand and a grenade in the other. He trotted back to the overturned black-and-white, staring in a hungry fashion at the crushed pulp of cop extending rag-doll-like from beneath the car.
He aimed his pistol at the driver, who strained to free herself from her seat belt. The woman stopped struggling and looked at him as she became fully aware of her fate.
I saw her face clearly for eternal endless moments before Big Ears grinned and fired three times like it meant nothing, starring the safety glass into whiteness and obscuring her face forever from my sight. Her dimmed silhouette sagged all slow motion boneless in her harness as the gunman yanked the pin from the grenade with his teeth and dropped it in her open window.
Gild the lily why don’t you, motherfucker?
Big Ears was loping back to the van even as the grenade went off, shattering every window in the black-and-white with a roar. The roof of the car bulged as if the Hulk had tried to punch his way out, and a cloud of safety glass chunks expanded in all directions to shower the ground like a short lived hailstorm, or like the geyser of water splashing back down after a diver did a cannonball. The siren finally shut the fuck up.
Three other men stooped out the open van door, whooping and laughing as they leaned from the dark interior to admire their friend’s handiwork. They all had heavy weapons in their hands; they all appeared high as kites.
A good-looking black kid high-fived Big Ears as he clambered back inside. “Way to go, Slash. Next level, bro,” the kid said in a squeaky voice.
Rage filled me to trembling but I didn’t move other than the shaking. They’d shot her in the face and laughed.
The patch of grass I lay in was too far away for me to have helped, and I know there wasn’t a thing I could have done for her anyway. But the shame still welled up.
Something died within my breast like a slug dissolving in salt as I just lay there like a coward in the tall grass and said and did nothing. I hid in weeping fury and waited for them to drive their van anywhere but here, out of my life.
The van’s engine got louder as the driver tried to take off and be gone, but the transmission only stuttered and clashed as he wrenched the gearshift into drive. Maybe the dead passenger cop’s rounds had hit something vital after all.
The van abruptly died with a prehistoric gargle, and the other sirens were much closer now. The van’s occupants had a short, loud, lively argument, and then they piled out to stand for a moment in the street. All four gunmen ran through the schoolyard gate and toward the nearest exit.
A man stepped out the door to confront them as they approached. One of the gunmen shot him without even breaking stride. The man went down and the gunmen went into the building.
Every hair on my body stood on end, like I was being pierced by a million porcupine quills. My mind was blank as I bounded to my feet, huffed to the schoolyard gate, and paused in a frenzy of indecision. I rocked back and forth, from side to side like an ADD case; my dangling empty hands kneaded the air like creatures separate from me.
They had uncontested access to the children and they were proven mad-dog killers who laughed as they did it. The cops were too far away.
Somebody had to do something. Somebody had to do something right now.
And I was the only one there.
I heard men’s voices inside, raised in anger, followed by another gunshot. Like I was fired from the same gun, I found myself trundling toward the school, faster than I’d moved in years.
As I approached I saw children’s faces pressed against the multi-paned windows, their silent mouths moving excitedly. A gaggle of office staff stood outside the double doors of the main entrance at the far end of the building, staring past me at what was left of the cop car.
My mind raced like a redlining hotrod engine as I ran, but the head gasket wouldn’t quite blow. The morning sun was bright but the cold blue sky stared down uncaring at the foolish, balding ex-convict scurrying across the playground, just one more nonentity in his cheap prison-issue release clothing. It seemed an eternity that I ran and planned (and prayed, I’ll confess to you and you only), but I finally reached the exit.
The man slumped against the wall wore a wrinkled white shirt and loosened tie, with the harried, haunted look of school principals everywhere. He held what little was left of his right bicep, trying to put direct pressure where the bullet had torn a fist-sized hunk of brachial artery out of him. His life’s blood was spewing down off his fingertips to pool on the ground next to where he sat splay-legged – he was gone and he knew it.
“Please,” he said to me, eyes aflutter.
His bloody hand gently stroked my trembling leg as I surveyed the closed door. The exit was at one end of the school’s long central hall, opening into an inset vestibule. This was as close to Thermopylae as I was ever going to get.
Inside, all the classrooms opened off the hallway – but each room also had its own separate exit to the outside. Through the door and from around the corners of the building, I heard a couple doors slam, some raised voices both childish and adult.
I sucked in a deep breath and bellowed at the top of my lungs, “Get the children outside right now. There are men with guns in the hall. Get the children outside right now. There are men with guns in the hall-”
I continued shouting the alarm even as, after a few seconds delay, pandemonium erupted within the building. More and more classroom doors slammed open around both corners of the building; the children’s yells become clear as more and more of them streamed out the side exits and into the open.
I heard angry shouts on the other side of the door, getting nearer. Someone kicked the door open from inside, hard, and I shut right up. I took an involuntary step back and froze as the door slammed against the vestibule wall, revealing two of the gunmen: Slash and the handsome black kid. Part of me took satisfaction in successfully making them divide their forces, but the pleasure was short lived: now I was unarmed at gun point with the two, and they did not look happy at all.
Slash was in front, brandishing his revolver. The black kid with the squeaky voice stood slightly behind him and to my left, holding the exit door open with his foot, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.
Slash's face was flushed and his slitted eyes were dancing. Both of them were so high, their eyes was glazed over to the point I couldn’t even tell you what color they were.
I was paralyzed in place. I knew I should initiate and close the gap. But I’ll tell you what: When a murder weapon’s already smoking muzzle is parked inches away from your nose, that gaping train-tunnel-sized black hole is strangely fascinating.
I pretty much figured I was a dead man here, but I clenched my fists at my sides so they wouldn't see them shake – if she could be brave about it, so could I. I started to turn my head away even as Slash stuck his.38 snub-nose up to my head and squeezed the trigger.
That pistol shot crashed like thunder. The round blew through the edge of my face, spewing my left eye right out the socket.
My head snapped around as the round entered and exited, and I grunted at that sledgehammer impact. There was a roaring in my head as if a heavenly choir of warrior angels shouted all at once in a sustained bass howl of fury. The left half of my vision went black, throbbing and threaded with strands of agony.
I looked at the vestibule wall with my blurred teary mono-vision: red goo dripped down it. Little splinters of white bone were sticking out the stucco, and I thought: those are pieces of my skull. I wondered if the goo was my brains for just a second before immediately chiding myself: how could I even be thinking if such was the case?
Then the roaring passed and I swiveled my ruined head back around to regard my killers with my one remaining eye. They looked surprised as me that I was still alive. I have no idea what kind of expression was on my mug but they didn’t like it one bit: the color bleached instantly from their faces, and they both gasped and recoiled from me as though a pair of giant hands had grabbed them by the scruffs of their necks and jerked them backward hard.
It occurred to me that I was a man who’d been doing a thousand pushups a day for the last several years, that these turds had put themselves within arm’s reach, and this was the only shot I’d ever get to avenge my own murder. I heard a whoop of rage come from somewhere and I had just enough time to realize I was the one making it as I dipped my shoulder and backhanded Slash in the side of his neck with all my strength.
I felt something crunch in his cervical vertebrae and he rocketed sideways to slam into the wall, his eyes twin stunned zeroes. I reached out one hand as he bounced back toward me, snagged his shirt, and reeled him in like a big fish.
The black kid was just waking up enough to release the door, and he leveled his sawed-off now to let go at me with both barrels. I dragged Slash in close and huddled behind him as the sawed-off bellowed its leaden message. I felt the impact of buckshot thudding into my human shield even as my free hand stripped the dying man's pistol.
I straightened and flung my burden toward the punk with the now-empty shotgun, then aimed my newly acquired.38 at him. The Squeaker staggered back into the hallway as his friend’s corpse crashed wetly against him and slid to the floor, where it propped the exit door open. The Squeaker looked down in disgust at the welter Slash left sliding down the front of his clothes.
Squeaker started to waggle his useless weapon, but then seemed to catch himself. “Don’t shoot me, man. I’ll put the gun down, okay? Only don’t shoot, please.”
Another gunman, a little guy with brown hair, stuck his head out a doorway farther down the hall and goggled in our direction with an unhappy expression on his weasel-ish face.
“Shit,” the little man said, and ducked back into the classroom.
I heard Karl’s voice right behind me, just like every time when we were kids and I was first through the mark’s door with him pulling drag: ‘Don’t blow it, Markus. Cut loose your wolf and show them some heart, brother.’
I slowly turned to look over my shoulder. There was no one there.
The vision in my remaining eye blurred as I faced back forward toward my doom, and there was a buzzing in whatever was left of my head. The pain from my wound was peeking through the initial shock in a ripple of agony, a coy hint of fun times to come.
I was fucked up here, how bad I didn’t know, didn’t
A shuddering rippled through me, as if I were in the throes of hypothermia. I grunted as the pain welled up like an overflowing toilet and the black kid continued babbling in terror; he yapped like a kicked lap dog as the pain rose to cloud my mind until I could take no more.
My eye opened with a snap and I aimed the pistol at the Squeaker’s face. He flinched back from me, still gabbling away, his whole face awrithe and twitching.
A wail of pain and fear was trying to rise from deep inside me. That wail wanted me to open my mouth wide and let the whole world hear it loud.
‘Best get moving, Markus,’ Karl said. ‘Times a wasting boy.’
“Shut up,” I screamed at my stupid big brother. “How can I ever think with you doing all the talking?”
The Squeaker went silent, like it was him I was yelling at. He’d seemed afraid before but now looked as though he could barely stand. He just sort of sagged as he stood there.
I stepped over Slash’s body through the door and dragged the Squeaker fully erect. I snatched his empty sawed-off and flung it back over my shoulder; it clashed and clattered miles away on the asphalt. I snickered as I reached out to clutch his shoulder.
“You’re my passport,” I said, my face stretched into a grin so tight it hurt, that same old war grin I’d always been powerless to turn off whenever the shit went down.
I spun my hostage around. One hand knotted between the shoulder of his shirt, the other hand jamming the pistol into his lower spine, I propelled the kid ahead of me toward the last two gunmen.
My vision was tinged with red; I wanted to go buck wild on them. But I was walking a tightrope here, and one misstep would spell disaster for the children.
The Squeaker finally awoke to the full extent of his current predicament, being the only barrier between his trigger-happy friends and psycho me. “Fellas,” he said, his squeaky voice gone even shriller. “Fellas. It’s me, Wayne. Don’t shoot, fellas.”
He got his reply at once: a grenade skittered out from that last classroom and banked off the wall to roll toward us spinning and clinking. Apparently his friends didn't like Wayne quite as much as he thought.
My heart skipped a beat and my eye bulged. I let go my hostage and leapt clumsily through an open doorway to my right.
Wayne remained behind, staring down in frozen fascination as the grenade bounced off his shoes. He childishly clapped both hands over his face.
In the split second before the grenade went off my gaze fell on the classroom’s other door, the one leading to the external world. It was open and I saw the empty playground out there, and the clear cloudless sky.
It seemed I had never seen a sky so lovely, or a shade of blue so beautiful. It drew me toward its cleanly expanse like a magnet, and a sigh escaped me as I raised a spread-fingered hand as though to touch that glorious blue: all I had to do was step out that door into the heavenly sunlight and I'd be out of this.
‘The hell with that,’ Karl said, and I began to turn my head back toward the hall doorway; toward the children.
The grenade exploded, rocking the floor under my feet and deafening me as a hot shockwave of air slapped my body. Simultaneously, the wall I leaned against rippled askew from its foundation, shoving me away to stagger several steps, almost tripping as I banged into the nearest row of desks.
I was back in the sagging doorway as soon as the blast was over, back on top of things again with my head squeaky straight. I looked all around at Wayne’s remains: the explosion had splashed parts of him against the walls, floor, and ceiling in a hellish Rorschach. The air fumed with the stink of compound B and shit. Bloody confetti fluttered to the floor – student artwork shredded off the walls’ bulletin boards and into meaninglessness.
I looked across the hall toward that last classroom as I braced my gun hand against the doorframe. The vision in my eye was foggy and I was feeling none too steady, but I had no trouble seeing the last two gunmen eagerly crowd the open doorway.
My first round smashed into the shoulder of the brown-haired little weasel carrying the.45 and the canvas bag. He whirled and lurched back into the classroom.
The other gunman was a bearded skinhead with a Biohazard patch embroidered on his denim vest. He pointed his M-16 at me and crooked back the trigger.
As I ducked back to cover inside the doorway, the skinhead's assault rifle rock-and-rolled on full auto, the small caliber rounds chewing up the doorframe and the hall with a riotous noise like a sewing machine on steroids. Chunks of paint and drywall peppered me as I cringed behind the load bearing doorframe joists, hunched over and hoping the rounds wouldn’t penetrate the 4-by-4s.
Then the chattering burst of fire stopped with the loud beautiful clack of the bolt holding open on an empty chamber: The skinhead had run out of bullets.
Too bad for him, I thought with glee, and swiveled around the corner in time to nail him in the back as he turned to run. He soared forward to face plant hard with the empty M-16 beneath him.
The only things existing now were the door to that classroom and the children’s sobs leaking from it. I was drenched in sweat as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on, I was breathing like a bellows as I left the cover of the doorframe and started slowly across the wide open kill-zone of that hallway, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and fall on Wayne’s entrails, the.38 extended stiff-armed to my front.
The skinhead lay face down atop his M-16, kicking rapidly at the floor with both steel toe boots alternately like he was trying to scamper horizontally through the linoleum and away from this whole fiasco. The entrance wound in his back wasn’t spurting or welling with blood – instead a red splotch slowly, quietly spread on his denim vest.
That meant his heart had stopped, and his horizontal shit-kicking two-step was no more than his cortical ganglia firing reflexively in denial of his own end. He wasn’t a threat so I put him from my mind as irrelevant – ‘No time, no time,’ a voice in the back of my throat wanted to moan.
Through the door I saw the weasel leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk. His right arm hung down limp from his smashed and bloody shoulder. The canvas bag and his.45 lay on the desk but his other hand was out of sight. I kept my pistol pointed at him as I passed through the doorway and stepped over the skinhead’s spasming corpse.
The children were crowded against the wall, sitting or on their knees, many of them with their hands behind their heads like they were under arrest. They squirmed and cried; snot and tears streaked most of their faces.
The school janitor, a small man with wavy black hair, lay on the floor in front of them. His mop was still clutched in his outstretched hand as he sprawled there, shot dead trying to defend them with it.
The teacher gaped at my mauled remnant of a face, and several of the children whimpered even harder when they saw me. Hell, I looked worse than the Bad Guy here, with half my head a gory ruin. But at least I was becoming numb now.
I held up my left hand to shield the bloody crater in my face from the children’s horrified view. I wrenched my single-eyed gaze away from all those staring little faces and turned toward the Weasel. Behind me, the dead skinhead’s steel toes stopped drumming against the floor.
The Weasel was a barely contained bundle of nervous energy, bandy-muscled and intense; fully alive – as alive as me or any of these children. His previously hidden hand was now revealed, holding up a grenade rigidly akimbo. The pin was pulled – only the pressure of his hand kept the spoon from flying away and the fuse from igniting.
He glared wildly at me, the bridge of his nose wrinkled rock hard like a marble bust. "Think you're bad, motherfucker? You back off, right now, or all these kids get splashed." He appeared on the edge of hysteria.
Someone outside was barking something into a megaphone – the cops, of course. But they were out there. It was a whole different world in here.
I limped robotic and stiff-legged toward this last threat, aiming dead-on at Weasel.
"Stop. Stop right there or I’ll do it, man, I’ll do it,” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he clutched the grenade like some sort of talisman guarding him from the reality of consequence.
I did stop, the muzzle of the.38 about a foot from his sweating face. I was wobbling badly on my feet now, and I had to finish this before I fell down for good. Weasel would honor his threat and drop the grenade or throw it any second now.
Without turning I mumbled to Teacher. "Down, get them down." My croaking voice didn’t sound human, even to me.
At first she made no reply. Then realization must have dawned in her distracted mind: “Lie down children, lie down now,” she said.
I could barely hear her voice through the growing roar in my ears. I sensed rather than heard all the kids stirring as they obeyed her.
“What -?” Weasel began, staring at me in incomprehension as I carefully shot him, right between the eyes.
Blood and brains squirted out the back of his head, his eyeballs bulged onto his cheeks from over-pressure, and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. His grip loosened as he fell brain dead, and the spoon flew off his grenade with a tinkle.
I toppled forward atop him, fumbling for the grenade as if it were a loose inflated ovoid in some kind of team sport championship game. I grabbed it with my numb fingers and pulled it in tight to my stomach and landed heavily on my side, body curved to maybe shape the blast a little bit away from the children.
Time slowed way down as I lay there and waited forever. When I finally realized the main charge wasn’t going to detonate, an epiphany sputtered and fizzled through my sodden brain: This is what it comes down to, I thought – a freaking hang fire, that’s all it was.
I lay there for a moment on my side, stunned for the second time since the start of this whole thing by the mere fact of my continued survival. Then the last scraps of my strength gave way, and I lost my grip on the grenade and rolled onto my back.
The cops were coming into the building now, baying at each other like hounds as they cleared the rooms in turn and by the numbers. Outside, ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ finally ended and the DJ began spieling an excited monolog about the hostage situation at the school. This whole fracas had lasted less than three or four minutes from beginning to end.
Despite the growing cold seeping into my bones, I was mentally spry enough to wonder if they’d get an ambulance to me in time. To tell the truth I was getting pretty tuckered, and a dirt nap didn’t sound like that unpleasant of a prospect. I looked up at the darkening ceiling for a while and then I managed to peer around at the hysterical children, all of them unharmed as far as I could see.
My eye lit on the wall clock, and I tracked the second hand as it swept round the dial. I seemed to be riding an eternal present here. How strange to lie here counting each new ‘now’ as it came into existence with every second ticked off by that ratcheting clock hand, surprised each time that I was still there to see it.
I was still wondering what was going to happen next even as everything faded to black.