Chapter Fourteen Thiago
Chapter Fourteen
Thiago
The second I heard the shots, only one person came to mind—her. No one else.
Of course, I remembered my brother next, followed by my students, the teachers, the friends I’d started to make there.
But at first, the only thing I could picture was her: her blond hair splayed on the ground, a pool of blood around her, that beautiful, vibrant face suddenly lifeless.
That same cold aura my sister’s body had when her life was stolen from her after a series of reckless errors.
I knew I would move heaven and earth to find her. I needed her. I needed her alive. I needed that horrible fear to vanish from my mind or I’d never breathe easy again.
I was aching inside, tortured at the realization that the last time we’d seen each other, I’d treated her so coldly.
Especially after the night we had shared.
I’d done it to keep the peace with my brother, and it was the hardest choice I could ever have imagined.
My back was against the wall: it was my family or the girl I loved.
Our future together had barely just begun the night before.
As the older brother, I’d had to make choices starting young that I’d never have made if circumstances had been different.
And when I saw the pain and disappointment in Taylor’s eyes, I knew this wasn’t just a typical spat.
There was hatred there, resentment, and I couldn’t let that fester.
I wasn’t going to pull my family even further apart, not after everything we had suffered.
Still: The mind is one thing, and the heart is another.
There were four of us in the teachers’ lounge when the shooting started: me, Maggie, another teacher from the elementary school, and a high school teacher who’d just come in to say he was heading out—his son had gotten sick at daycare.
The elementary kids were about to arrive—they started an hour later than the older kids. I realized later the only good thing about the whole crazy situation was that the assholes responsible for this bloodbath didn’t get a chance to murder any elementary kids.
“Did you hear that?” Maggie asked.
Both of us jumped. I knew that sound. And even though Maggie was my ex, I still felt the urge to protect her. I edged toward the door and heard it again. It sounded like gunshots.
“Call 9-1-1,” I told Maggie. But she was too scared to move. Her eyes were empty, the color had drained from her face. Grabbing the phone myself, I shouted to the other three: “Get to the exit. Now! I’ll catch up.”
As they walked out cautiously, and I heard my heart pounding in my ears, I prayed for someone to pick up. Soon I heard the words “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“There’s an active shooting at Carsville High.”
“Tell me your name, sir.”
“This is Thiago Di Bianco, I’m a coach here. We’re in the east wing, where the elementary school is, but the shooting is coming from the high school side. Make sure none of the younger kids try to come inside.” I looked at my watch and saw it was quarter to nine. Had any of them arrived yet?
“Sir, the patrol cars are on their way. Are you wounded?”
“No, but—”
That’s when I heard it—the screaming. It sounded like the other teachers, my friends—and Maggie.
“Sir?”
I dropped the phone and quickly scanned the room.
On one end of the teachers’ lounge was a door that led to the younger children’s classrooms, a hallway with bathrooms where the children’s arts and crafts projects were displayed.
No sooner had I slipped out of the lounge when I heard a voice that made me freeze.
Before I could think straight, I hid behind a door, struck with the fear that I might die at the hands of a lunatic.
“Come on! I know you’re here!”
It was a voice I didn’t recognize. I had to get out of there. If they came through I’d be discovered and killed. I was terrified, but my fear of death vanished when I saw a little pair of blue eyes looking back at me.
“Thiago?”
I didn’t hesitate.
I didn’t care if I got shot in the back. I didn’t care what happened.
They weren’t getting him.
Never in my life had I run that way. As I reached Cameron Hamilton, the door to the teachers’ lounge opened, making me an easy target.
I heard the shot at the same time as I threw myself across the hallway. It whistled past my left ear and struck a window at the far end of a classroom. I closed the door as fast as I could, dragging a desk in front to block it off. Then I picked Cameron up and took off toward the main hall.
He barely spoke a word. If he hadn’t been hanging on to me so tight, I’d have thought he was wounded or worse.
I had to run past the bodies of people who had been my colleagues, including the woman who had been my friend and lover. They’d been shot, and their bodies were lying contorted in pools of blood.
“Don’t look,” I told Cameron, squeezing him tight as I reached the vestibule. I ducked down, trying to cover the boy with my body as much as I could. I was so afraid, so full of adrenaline, that I wanted to vomit.
Blood.
Screams.
Fear.
This was hell on earth…and I had no idea what to do.
I let my survival instincts guide me, the way I had in the past, the way we all do in situations like these.
Except this time, it was different—this was huge compared to anything I’d been through before.
I thought of the pain I’d felt when I lost my sister, and I told myself if I could make sure even one person didn’t have to go through that, it would be worth it, even if I had to risk my life.
There were too many lives on the line for me to be afraid now…
In Cameron’s eyes, I saw horror mixed with blind trust. I was all he had right now. And there was no way I was going to let him down.
I hadn’t managed to save Lucy, but I would save little Cam. There was evil in the world, and he was learning about it today, but I wasn’t going to let it take him away.
I ran to the cafeteria. I needed a weapon, I kept telling myself, something I could put in my pocket that wasn’t a pencil or pen, something I could reach for if these murderers caught me with my guard down. The sound of shots was becoming more distant, which gave me some momentary relief.
“Where are we going, Thiago?” Cameron asked, so scared I could barely hear him.
“We’re going to hide in the cafeteria. Everything will be fine.”
The halls were empty—no killers, no bodies, no signs of life or death.
Now that I think about it, I should have done something different. It would have been better to try and hide among the carnage. Because for three armed psychos, those empty rooms and halls were like a blank canvas, a sign of defeat.
The cafeteria was empty, too. I was confused. Where were they?
We walked behind the counter into the kitchens.
There was nothing on the stainless-steel counters.
This was where Ms. Puck, one of the cooks, usually stood.
She was a tall and imposing woman older than my mother who had been nice to me ever since I’d started working there.
She always gave me a second piece of chocolate cake when I asked.
I was relieved not to find her now, hoping that her shift hadn’t started yet.
I put Cameron down and told him to stay by the door while I went in the back where the loading docks stood to receive daily deliveries for the hundreds of students at Carsville.
I felt so relieved when I saw the door because it meant a way out of this nightmare.
All I wanted was to get Cameron to safety so I could go find Kam and my brother, make sure they were OK, too, and bring them back here to escape.
I pushed and pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t move an inch.
“They’re locked,” I heard a soft voice say.
I turned and found Cameron with his eyes full of tears.
“How do you know?”
Cam looked around, unsure what to say, squeezing a little stuffed dinosaur he’d been carrying the whole time without my noticing. He gazed up at me with a pleading expression, as if he needed me to tell him it wasn’t his fault.
“He forced me,” he responded as I came closer. “He forced me to help him…”
“Who forced you, Cameron?”
“Momo,” he responded with terror in his eyes.
“Momo isn’t real.”
“He is, too, real! And he forced me! He forced me to lock it…”
I could feel the blood drain from my face.
“Did you see him, Cam?”
“Yeah. And he looked just like he does on the internet.”
Dammit. He must have had on a mask. “Why didn’t you tell your mother or Kami?”
“Because he said if I told anyone he’d hurt Juana!”
Juana…that damned iguana. Whoever was behind this was a sick bastard.
“It’s OK,” I said, hugging him tight and trying to calm him down. “It’s OK, little guy… But I need you to listen to me very, very closely. If you and Momo are both in here, then there must be one door that’s still open. Which doors did you lock?”
Cameron thought for a few seconds and said, “Just two. The gym and the cafeteria…”
In my mind, I drew a map of the school, trying to figure out which door was likeliest to be open.
The auditorium, maybe? That was nowhere near the kitchen.
I tried to ignore the horror, my hatred for Julian—because it was Julian.
Who else could it be? I felt guilty. I should have taken him more seriously, I should have done more to convince the police that he wasn’t just some teenage runaway…
Maybe I should have killed him when I had the chance.
But none of that mattered now. I needed to focus.
Cameron and I looked up when we heard the sound of helicopters overhead. And then I saw it: the skylight. It was big enough to fit through. We just needed to be careful climbing up, and it would lead us to the roof.
“Cam, over here!” I said, standing directly under it.
I just needed a ladder and something to break it with. But where in the hell would I get a hammer?
Cam must have known what I was thinking, because he said, “It’s too high.”
“Fuck!”
I looked all around. The windows were reinforced glass, they’d be almost impossible to shatter, and they only opened a few inches. Unless the police showed up with battering rams, that option was out. As I looked back at Cam, I heard a terrifying voice come over the PA.
“Attention, students. Despite what you might think, my intention isn’t to kill you. Not all of you, anyway. You’ll be allowed to leave, one by one, if you help me fulfill today’s mission, a mission I’ve been planning for months, a mission to rid you of the scum who walk among you.”
I shivered with recognition. It was distorted, but I’d recognize it anywhere.
I couldn’t help clenching my fists. When I saw the fear on Cam’s face, I realized that this was the same voice, speaking through some kind of masking device, that had threatened him and forced him to do things he’d never have done otherwise.
“Relax, buddy,” I told him, and we looked up again, listening to the words of the madman.
“I’ll make it very easy on you. Just bring me the people on the list I’m about to read out, and after that, you can go. Let me repeat: If you bring me these losers, you can leave, one by one, without a scratch on you.”
He then began to name off not random students, but basketball players, cheerleaders… I shuddered as I heard the guys from my team called out, their girlfriends, the popular kids, the elite…
“Danny Walker, Harry Lionel, Ellie Webber, Aaron Martin, Victoria Tribecky, Amanda Church, Victor Di Viani, Marissa Digeronimo, Chloe Harrison…”
And the names went on, until he had reached twenty students.
He paused, and I tensed up as he spoke again: “And now, for the final three. The stars of the show. You all know them, you’ve all wanted to be them, we’ve all fallen at their feet.
How can you resist the two brothers who look like they stepped out of a fricking Hollywood film?
You know who I mean, right, girls? The ones you all slobber over like bitches in heat.
I’m talking about the Di Bianco brothers.
And finally, the person who ruined my life as soon as I laid eyes on her… ”
Cam was staring at me with terror in his eyes. And I, too, was shaking as I guessed which name would come next.
“She’s the girl you all love and hate, the girl who doesn’t have to do anything to light up the room…the girl who played with my heart, who trapped me with her eyes and her smile, and who threw me out like a broken toy…”
“You son of a bitch,” I murmured under my breath.
“I heard what you said about me, Kamila: ‘You guys see him as some kind of danger, but for me, he’s just a pathetic loser who had to lie to me and lie to himself to make friends. He’s a creep, a liar. He’s a pathetic asshole, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life alone.’”
What the…? Those were the same words Kam had said the day she’d been walking to school, the day Taylor and I had gotten angry with her for not watching her back because Julian was still out there… He’d been listening to her somehow…following her.
“But who’s going to be alone now, Kamila? You. Because I’m going to kill everyone you love right in front of your eyes. And then I’ll finish you off. Because you don’t deserve to live after what you did to me. If I can’t have you, then no one can.”
Cam was holding on to my leg tight, and I was so stunned I couldn’t even find the words to calm him down.
“If you want this to stop, bring me the people on my list… especially Kamila.”
The PA system screeched, echoing all around me, and that was the last thing I heard before the cafeteria door flew open.