Chapter Fifteen Kami
Chapter Fifteen
Kami
I was shaking.
My whole body was trembling, and there was nothing I could do to calm down.
I had seen the bodies of my classmates. I’d seen them murdered in cold blood. My school had become a living hell… And the carnage was my fault.
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.
I’m going to kill everyone you love.
I’m going to kill everyone you love.
I’m going to kill everyone you love.
I couldn’t stop hearing those words over and over in my head, and each time I felt reality closing its grip around my throat. I felt my stomach turn and the overwhelming urge to vomit.
I rested my hands on the floor and tried to breathe.
I was alone.
And there was no one I could ask for help.
Would my classmates hand me over?
Would they do it, knowing that would mean certain death?
Of course they would. Who wouldn’t, knowing that this entire nightmare was my fault?
But it’s not YOUR fault! a voice in my head shouted.
You were nice to him! You were his friend! He was the one who betrayed your trust! He was the one who invaded your privacy! He was the one who manipulated your little brother to steal your things!
I took a deep breath and looked down the hall.
The two killers had turned the corner heading toward the cafeteria. Julian had to be in the principal’s office to use the PA system, which meant for the moment, I was out of danger…
Was this my chance?
Going to look for my brother would be impossible with those two murderers roving the halls.
All I could do was pray that Cameron had gotten away or found somewhere to hide.
He had a talent for that—when I played hide-and-seek with him, I could almost never find him—and I prayed he’d found somewhere safe until I could come for him.
I had no idea where to go, but I needed to move: there, under the stairs, I was exposed with nowhere to run to if anyone saw me.
Terrified, walking softly, I headed toward the library.
I tried not to think, tried not to look at the dead bodies along the way, but I couldn’t help it; I needed to know if I’d lost any of my friends, to make sure Taylor wasn’t lying there, or Thiago, or Ellie…
It felt like miles from the stairs to the library, walking past the classrooms and feeling my heart pounding out of control.
I don’t know how I did it, how I even managed to move with that fear that had seeped into every fiber of my being, dense and overwhelming.
And every ounce of adrenaline in my body was pumping through my veins to keep my feet on the move.
When I arrived at the library, I tried to push the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
Hearing muffled voices, I knew there were students inside.
“Let me in, please!” I said as loudly as I could, given the circumstances.
I heard murmurs, bodies moving, and for the first time since this nightmare had begun, I felt a slight sense of relief.
“Kami?!”
“Taylor?!”
“Help me,” I heard him say, then I heard something dragging along the floor. The door opened. There he was. We ran toward each other, his arms enclosed me, and I buried my head in his chest. Then he stepped back, pulling me inside, and everyone else blocked the door again.
“Are you OK?” he asked me. “Are you hurt?” He looked me all over, trying to see if I had any marks on me.
Noticing the bruise on my right cheek, he asked me what had happened.
But I couldn’t respond. In pain, in terror, I burst into tears.
All the tension that had built up inside me finally broke free. I felt ravaged.
Ravaged, because I still couldn’t believe this was happening. Ravaged, because seeing Taylor alive made me realize how much I could have lost…
“Easy… Easy, babe,” he said, holding me tight.
All eyes in the library were on us, and I wanted to look around and see who was in there, but I tried not to, because doing so would force me to take stock of how many of us hadn’t made it. Besides, two very important people were obviously still missing.
Taylor walked me to the far corner of the library where we could be alone and looked me in the eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at my bruise. I could feel it swelling by the second.
“I fell on the ground and someone kicked me… Taylor… Taylor, what’s happening? How can this be real?”
“We’ve got to get you out of here. We’ve got to get everyone out of here,” he said, pulling me in close again. He was so scared. “I can’t… I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “I thought… I thought…”
I looked him in the eye to let him know the same thought had crossed my mind.
“Taylor, Kate knows everything… She knew it was going to happen, and she tried to tell Julian where I was so he could come for me…”
A flash of insight lit Taylor’s eyes. “This morning…” he said, “Kate told me she had something important she needed to tell me and that she’d wait for me by the front door during second period…”
“Julian wanted her to hand us over to him. If she did, he said he’d let her live. He’s crazy, Taylor. He’s crazy, and he’ll kill us all.”
As I was saying this, someone walked up behind me. I turned around and saw it was Ellie. I cried out her name, relieved, as close to happy as a person could be given these hideous circumstances. As we embraced, I said, “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She was crying as she informed me, “Kami… I saw Chloe… She was lying on the ground… There was blood all around her.”
I felt a part of my heart being torn away.
Chloe and I had been friends since we were kids. We’d never been as close as Kate or Ellie and I had, but there had always been something special between us. She was the crazy girl, the one always tempting us to get in trouble…
As Ellie and I held each other, all I could do was pray to God to protect us, and to please bring this living nightmare to an end. Ellie looked over my shoulder and told me, “I don’t know how to tell you, but people are saying…” Her voice was filled with dread.
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the phrase.
Taylor had a serious look on his face as he motioned for us to follow him back to the main room in the library.
There weren’t many people there: I recognized one girl from my math class and some others I had passed in the hallways.
They were all terrified, especially the middle schoolers.
One tall kid stepped forward, frowning at us, but Taylor stopped him with an icy glare, asking, “What the hell is going on?”
The kid wasn’t daunted. Looking back at his friends, he took another step and said, “You heard the guy, right? You three are on the list.”
Taylor spread his arms to protect us. “You’d better not be insinuating what I think.” I’d never heard him sound more serious in my life. Two other kids stepped forward, flanking the tall one.
“Why should we have to pay for whatever you guys did?” the one on the right said. He was a little bigger than the other two.
“There are little kids here! Are you guys really selfish enough to risk our lives and theirs over something you did?” the one on the left said as everyone else watched the scene, entranced.
I had been scared of this when I’d heard Julian’s distorted voice over the loudspeaker. And now it was happening before my very eyes.
Fearless, Taylor stared the three of them down and said, “What are you suggesting? You want to drag us out of here and watch them kill us?”
As they faced off, I thought of all the things that might happen. Taylor was strong, but could he really take all three of these guys fighting for their lives? And what if the others jumped in? What would Ellie and I do? Thousands of scenarios shot through my mind, and all of them ended badly.
One of the guys told Taylor, “Sorry, dude. But I don’t feel like dying. This has to stop, and there’s only one way.”
Just then, we heard helicopters whirring overhead again, and as we looked up, a voice came over a megaphone.
It came as a great relief: “This is the Carsville chief of police. Whoever the shooters are, drop your weapons and come out with your hands up. I repeat, drop your weapons and come out with your hands up.”
We all held our breath, listening to the choppers.
If only we could reach the roof…
“Do they honestly think these bastards are just going to walk out with their hands in the air?” Ellie asked in shock.
“They won’t give up until they’ve done what they came here to do,” the most muscular of the three guys, the one who had just told Taylor he wanted to hand us over, shouted.
“Listen, shithead,” Taylor said—I cringed because provoking those guys when we were at a clear disadvantage was probably the worst strategy—“if you threaten me again, I swear to God those will be the last words you ever say.”
This was getting out of hand. The three guys were trying to surround him. We had to get out of there. We needed to leave the library before a fight broke out, or before the shouting got loud enough to alert the killers to our location. Ellie gripped my hand.
Out of nowhere, a girl yelled, “Stop it! Can’t you hear what you’re saying? What proof is there that they’re actually going to let us go if we turn them in? Do you think you can trust a bunch of murderers? The best thing we can do is wait here and let the police do their jobs!”
The room fell silent as everyone thought about what to do.
“It’ll be too late by the time the police come inside,” the tallest of the three boys said.
“You don’t know that! You’re not a cop!” the girl responded.
“You don’t know anything. An hour ago, I heard you saying how lucky we were to follow Taylor in here, that we’d found a good hideout.
You were grateful to be alive, and now you want to hand him and his friends over and just let them die? !”
“Shut up!”
“Stop it!” Taylor shouted, and before we knew it, they were at each other’s throats. Taylor didn’t throw the first punch, but he dodged it in time to hit that asshole square on the cheek. Then the tall guy jumped in, and suddenly it was three against one, with the rest of us watching helplessly.
And then things got even worse, because we heard gunshots.
We stopped and held our breath, afraid of what would come next.
We all ran away from the door and hid as best we could. I didn’t know who I was more scared of: Julian and his friends with the guns, or my classmates, who followed us with their eyes, ready to sacrifice us.
How could they?
Taylor grabbed Ellie and me by the wrists and dragged us past row after row of shelves, past the study rooms, past the computers, past the newly installed audiovisual area. When we reached the far wall, we got down on our hands and knees.
“We can’t stay here,” Taylor said, looking at the two of us very sternly.
“We can’t leave, though; what if the killers see us?” Ellie replied in terror.
“Trust me, the other kids won’t hesitate to hand us over. They’re scared; there’s nothing they won’t do if they think it’ll help them make it out alive,” Taylor replied.
I couldn’t believe what people were capable of when they felt overrun by fear. Our friends, our classmates, the people we’d shared notes with and gone to games with, were now ready to throw us to the dogs.
“How, then?” I asked. “Where are we going to go?”
Taylor thought a moment, then said the same thing I’d been thinking: “We need to make it to the roof. Once we’re there, the helicopters can pick us up. There are skylights in several rooms. That might even be where the cops are thinking of coming in.”
“How are we going to get to the roof, though?” I asked.
The three of us looked at each other and shook our heads. Taylor repeated that we had to escape the library first and find a better hiding place.
“Taylor,” I told him, “I can’t leave without my brother. I have to find him… I don’t know if he made it out on his own, if he’s hiding somewhere, or if he’s…”
I burst into sobs; I couldn’t finish the phrase, and Taylor tried to console me: “Thiago knows Cam’s here, and he usually hangs out in the teachers’ lounge at the elementary school in the mornings. He wouldn’t abandon your brother. I promise you that. Cameron’s safe.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, but it was true. Thiago was almost always in the other wing. Had he found my brother? Had he known where Cam would be? Had the killers stayed away from the elementary school?
Ellie pulled me out of these thoughts, asking, “What’s the plan, then?”
Taylor peeked around the corner of a shelf. “There’s no reasoning with them. And there’s no way out except the same door we came in through.”
“But what if the killers are just waiting for us outside?” I asked.
I could see the fear in his eyes, and his mind working at top speed, asking himself how we could escape not just our classmates, but the killers, too.
He concluded, “Look, they’ll come for us sooner or later.
It’s just a matter of time until they reach the library.
When they do, that’s our one chance. I know it sounds terrifying, but we’re going to have to push past the other kids and run like hell. ”