Chapter Seventeen Kami
Chapter Seventeen
Kami
They didn’t take long. Taylor had been right. It was the same guys I’d seen close to the stairs. I could tell by their voices. And he was right about something else, too: As soon as danger was near, our classmates didn’t hesitate to rat us out.
“Open the door!” the two guys yelled, first pushing, then shooting, causing everyone gathered in the library to scream. No one tried to stop them, and as soon as the doors opened, everyone started yelling.
“They’re over there!”
“The ones from the list! Kamila Hamilton, Ellie Webber, and Taylor Di Bianco! They’re right there!”
How could they do this to us? I grabbed Ellie’s hand and looked at Taylor, horrified.
“Run. I’ll distract them,” he said. We both shook our heads, and I told him, “No.”
“I said go!” he ordered us. And before I could refuse again, Taylor had stood up and taken off. I looked at Ellie, unsure what he was up to and with no idea what to do. That was when I heard one of the guys say, “You take that side, and I’ll take this one.”
Shit. They were going to split up. Suddenly, Taylor took off running away from the door to the other side of the library. “There he is!” one shouted just as I called out his name, terrified that something would happen to him.
“Come on!” Ellie said, pulling me behind her. “This is our only chance!”
We ran desperately toward the door, our only possibility for escaping the massacre, but then the three guys who had been fighting with Taylor before got in our way.
We were dead, I thought. But something I would never have expected happened.
The five others who were with us, girls and guys both, jumped on them, catching them by surprise and giving us just enough time to get out.
“Run!” a girl yelled after me. Little did she know that would be her death sentence.
I didn’t look back. Ellie didn’t let me. We sprinted down the hall, running for our lives, in desperate hope of escape. And then the worst happened.
We were at the end of the hall, about to turn the corner, and my legs were just about to give out when a slew of bullets came whizzing past me, so I threw myself on the ground, covering my head.
Then I heard a voice behind me shout, No!
and I waited for the pain, waited to feel what so many other students had already experienced at the hands of those sick bastards, waited to feel the warm blood seep through my clothes as my eyes closed and I lost consciousness. But none of that happened.
Instead, everything turned to slow motion.
You see that in movies, the way a traumatic or near-death experience slows things down and a person can see everything happening all at once, perceiving every single detail, even as so many emotions blend together.
In slow motion, I saw my best friend falling.
I wanted to go to her, hold her in my arms, and tell her everything would be OK, but I snapped out of it when I heard a familiar voice.
“Kami, run!” Taylor shouted, and everything sped back up to warp speed.
I struggled to get up, but was spurred on by rage and pain, so I ran. When I turned the corner, I saw him.
There he was.
Thiago.
“Kam!”
His voice pronouncing my name, and just finding him alive, all but paralyzed me.
I don’t know how I reached him, I don’t even know how my legs were still moving, all I know is suddenly he was holding me in his arms, his body wrapped around me, protecting me.
Then we were no longer in the hallway, he’d pulled me somewhere small and dark, a dusty broom closet.
I was in Thiago’s arms… Finally, I was back in his arms.
“Kamila,” he said, his hands on my cheeks, his eyes taking me in.
I was blinking, almost as though my tears hoped to wash away that image of Ellie on the ground…
Then I saw him, I really saw him, the love of my life, the only person with whom I could imagine regaining some semblance of normalcy after all that violence, desperation, blood, and death.
“She got shot,” I managed to say after several seconds in silence.
Looking back, I realize I must have been in a state of shock.
I remember him whispering tender, sweet nothings in my ear, but I don’t remember what he said.
At some point I came back to reality and found myself there in that dark, ugly place, that refuge where I felt the full weight of sadness, death, and despair.
Thiago asked me who had been shot. His voice was soft, but his eyes were scared.
“Ellie,” I told him. “It was Julian. Julian’s the one doing this.”
I had seen him when Ellie and I were running. It was him shooting at us, not the others. Julian had emerged from his hiding place and shot my best friend without a second thought.
He could have shot me, too, but he hadn’t. He’d said over the PA system that he wanted to wait. That what he wanted was to see me suffer, watching all the people I most loved disappear.
I heard Thiago trying to soothe me, inhaled his familiar scent, felt his warmth, and I emerged from my trance. I opened my eyes, pulled away, stared at him, and said his name: “Thiago?”
“Yeah, babe, it’s me.” His eyes were watering, full of emotion. “I was so scared, I was so scared you were gone.”
“I’m here,” I interrupted him, trying to pull myself together, trying to suppress my fear and sorrow, trying not to think of the dead, and instead focusing on the fact that he was with me.
The one person I could get through this with—if only, if only I had known what was coming, if only I had known how long I would have to wait for another chance like this one.
“Thiago, we’ve got to get out of here. They’re going to kill us all.”
Had Taylor managed to escape? I didn’t know. Had one of the guys in the library gotten to him? Had Julian?
“Taylor helped us,” I said, hearing a change in Thiago’s breathing. “We were in the library, these guys wanted to hand us over, they thought that way they could save themselves. It was horrible. And Taylor told us to run. And then Ellie— I don’t know if he made it out. I only looked back once.”
“Taylor’s alive?” Thiago asked.
“He was. A minute ago he was. Now…”
I fell silent. Not just because Thiago covered my mouth with his massive hand, but because I, too, heard voices outside. Thiago lowered his hand but gestured for me to remain silent.
“I want them alive, you hear me? I want those three alive and kicking,” Julian commanded, and I shuddered at the sound of his voice.
I remembered the last time we’d talked before I learned that he was stalking me, before I learned that our friendship, his whole persona, everything, was a lie… He was sick, he was crazy—but what he said next pushed me over the edge.
“We can’t find the kid, Jules,” one of his goons said.
“Well, he’s got to be somewhere. Find him, dammit! He’s seven fucking years old. He can’t have gone far!”
Thiago held me tight, pushed me against the wall and pressed his hand to my lips so I wouldn’t scream. My little brother. My poor little brother. Cameron.
Once they were gone, Thiago held my face in his hands. “Listen,” he said, “your brother’s fine. He’s safe.”
“You saw him?” My voice was quivering and I wanted to cry, but the tears didn’t come. This moment was too critical; I had to block off all my fears if I wanted to make it out alive. There would be time enough later to break down and cry. For now, I needed to get a grip.
“Yeah,” Thiago said. “He’s hiding.”
“Hiding? Where?” I couldn’t believe it. I thought he’d made it out. The poor little kid, he was still inside, and it was a death trap for anyone I loved or cared about. “Take me to see him,” I went on. “I need to see him.”
I tried to open the door, but Thiago grabbed my hand and said, “Kam, he’s safe. I promise you. Now focus. I’m going to get us out of here. We’ll go out through the roof. Once we’re there, the helicopters will see us and they’ll rescue us.”
Taylor had said the same thing to Ellie and me. Get to the roof. But how?
I asked him, and he responded, “There’s a skylight in the cafeteria. It’s big enough to squeeze through. And your brother’s there, in the kitchen. He’s hiding. They won’t see him.”
“Take me to him,” I said. I needed out, now. I needed to see with my own eyes that my brother was all right, that he was alive.
“We need a ladder first,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
He looked so tired. So tired, and so afraid.
“There’s one ladder in the utility room. If we can get there and take it to the cafeteria—”
“We can get out,” I finished for him.
“That’s right,” he confirmed.
Our eyes met. I looked into those beautiful green eyes, eyes that had once made me tremble but now felt soothing because I knew with him, I was safe, I knew he would help me escape this hell.
All the emotions inside me surged together.
“Thiago,” I said. But there were no more words to express what I was feeling.
I saw something in his eyes: not just terror, but love, promises that couldn’t be spoken now. And that’s when it happened.
Our lips met, and it was nothing like any other kiss we’d shared before.
This kiss was special because I knew it might be our last. My back was against the wall, his hands sought me out desperately; it was as if he needed to feel every inch of me, treasure the heat of my body, remind himself that I was his.
For that brief moment, there was nothing in the world but the two of us. The horror outside ceased to exist.
His hands touched my face, tracing my every feature. His mouth drank my tears, and we kissed until we ran out of breath. I knew then it was him—my heart belonged to him alone.
“I love you,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that, OK?”
I blinked to see him more clearly. “Promise we’ll make it out alive—promise me when it’s over, we’ll be together.
Promise you’ll take me with you wherever you go, that you’ll follow me anywhere.
Promise there won’t be a day where we don’t say I love you, that we’ll never be apart.
Promise me that you’ll put us first, before everything else, and I promise you I’ll do the same.
I know life is short. And whatever’s left of it, I want to spend it with you. ”
His eyes told me everything and nothing. Why was he holding back? Why was he hesitating?
His lips parted, and he uttered the magic words. The only words I needed to gather the courage to open that door and face whatever lay out there.
“I promise.”
I knew it now: I was strong enough to continue.
He smoothed my hair, tucked a lock of it behind my ear, and kissed the tip of my nose.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
I nodded, and we opened the door and stepped into hell.