Chapter 17
Jojo could hear the rumble of the snowmaking machine, feel the snow on her face, and see the body of the dead little girl in the snow.
And she understood that the sound slicing through the machine rumble was the voice of her niece screaming.
She frantically yanked her own goggles and helmet off and looked around desperately.
With an understanding born of dozens of firefights, hours of training, without even putting it into words in her own head, she saw the bloody gore of the wound in the child’s chest and was frantically trying to see where?—
Crack.
It wasn’t loud, but she could hear it above the rumble of the snow machine, above the shrieking of her niece.
It was a gunshot. Her eyes snapped in the direction of the sound, and far above, up the slope, she could just make out a dark shadow falling out of a ski lift chair, a black ski jacket gobbled up by the swirling whiteness in the air.
At the sight, Jojo’s frantic desperation was replaced by battlefield calm.
She was no longer helpless. Now she knew what to do.
Yanking off her right mitten, she reached down into the pocket of her ski jacket and pulled out her cell phone.
With her other arm, she grabbed Miriam, pulled her sideways, and crushed her to her chest so the little girl was no longer staring at the bloody body in the snow, but she was still screaming.
Jojo punched the button on the side of the phone. The emergency red stop sign appeared on the face. She tapped it with her thumb, and before she even got the phone to her ear, she heard, “Pennsylvania State Police 911, what is your emergency?”
For a second, she couldn’t find her voice, and then she was yelling to be heard above Miriam’s screams. “I’m calling to report an active shooter at the Royal Oaks Ski Resort. Multiple casualties. Repeat. Shooter is right now firing at the ski lifts. Do you copy?”
The dispatcher hesitated, then repeated, “An active shooter at the Royal Oaks Ski?—”
Jojo interrupted, not yelling now. “This is no prank call. This is Jojo Kaufmann, and you need to roll everything you’ve got.”
Without letting go of Miriam, Jojo dropped the phone back into her pocket, grabbed the sled and shoved Miriam down on top of it.
Then she leaned over and grabbed both sides of the sled, and began pushing it in front of her, running as fast as she could.
When the sled threatened to pull out of her hands, she leapt on top of the little girl and began paddling as if she were paddling in a canoe, shoving with her feet, going as fast down the slope as possible toward the crowd of people gathered at the bottom. Trident loped along beside her.
The pounding of Jojo’s own heart obscured the sound of Miriam’s screams, so they seemed to be coming from a long way off, filtered through some vast open hall where the sound was gobbled up by the expanse.
Jojo’s heart had stopped registering individual beats and was just humming. She had to get down to the bottom.
Had to get down to the bottom.
That’s all she could think. All she could do.
The door at the end of the hall in a nightmare, the one you run toward but can never reach. The bottom of the ski slope was that door, and Jojo couldn’t seem to get to it, pushing and straining as hard as she could. She just couldn’t get there.
Time telescoped then, and she lost a chunk of it somewhere.
One second, she was struggling and straining, shoving at the sled, trying to get her screaming niece down to the bottom, and the next second she was there.
The sled was nowhere to be seen, and she was dragging the screaming child by the hand, shoving people out of her way, moving through the questioning crowd toward the man at the bottom of the slope who was in charge of the ski lift.
She paused only once, taking Miriam by the shoulders and pushing her into the arms of an Amish woman she didn’t know, demanding, pleading, “Take care of her” in Deitsch.
The Royal Oaks Ski Resort employee who had been assigned the task of helping the newbies onto the ski lift chairs had just helped an Amish couple into a chair when Jojo arrived.
Without a word, Jojo grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her back out of the seat, her husband coming along with her. Then she turned to the employee.
“Nobody else gets on the lifts, do you hear me? Nobody!” She yelled the orders at him like he was a recruit, and she was a drill sergeant, her deep voice growling from her throat.
He just looked at her. “What in the hell are you talking about, lady? What’s wrong with you?”
“Now isn’t the time to argue.” She whirled then toward the man who was operating the ski lift.
Ordinarily, he would have been working at the control board inside the small hut that sat at the point where the lift chairs coming down made a wide turn and became the chairs going up.
He was outside tonight, though, standing beside a gray metal panel with colored, labeled knobs and buttons.
She scanned them and spotted a green button beneath the word “start,” a yellow knob labeled “slow,” a red button labeled “stop” and a red knob labeled “fast.”
There was no time to explain to him either.
She was certain that at the bottom of the slope it was impossible to hear the sound of the gunshots that were dropping people out of the lift chairs.
How could she convince him she wasn’t crazy …
and while she tried, people on the ski lift would be getting shot.
“And you have to speed up the lift. Get the people on it to the top as fast as you can. Then hold them there. Tell the guy on the other end that he’s not to put anybody on the lift coming back down. Do you understand me?”
The man was extremely uncomfortable, obviously did not deal well with confrontation. He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. And she did sound crazy, probably looked crazy, too.
The empty chair that had been occupied by the Amish couple headed back up the slope and the Royal Oaks employee started to help the couple into the next chair coming around.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said, nobody gets on the lifts.” She turned back to the lift operator. “And you—speed it up.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what your problem is, ma’am but if you keep interfering with the operation of this lift, I’m going to call security and have you escorted off the property.”
Jojo took a deep breath, then called Trident.
“Trident, sit.”
The dog sat. Then she pointed at the man at the controls of the ski lift. “Hold!” The dog instantly stood and approached the man, growling at him.
Jojo faced the lift operator. “We’re done here. You’ve got two choices. Either do what I told you to do, or I will command my dog to rip your leg off. Decide fast.”
The man had gone totally white at the sight of Trident, his fangs bared, growling.
“What in the world are you?—?”
“Do it!”
The man asked no more questions. Since no one had been getting on the chairs that had passed while Jojo was screaming at the lift operator, they all were empty. The ski lift operator turned the red “fast” knob and the empty chairs jerked forward, moving faster and faster.
“Now get on whatever device you have to communicate with the top and tell them to take people off the chairs and keep them up there.”
The man pulled a walkie talkie off his belt and spoke into it. “Dan I’ve got … a situation here. I need you to hold everybody at the top, don’t let anybody start back down.”
“I’ve got a ‘situation,’ too,” came the voice from the unit in his hand. “Some of the chairs, the empty chairs, have … looks like red paint on them, or …”
“Nobody comes back down, do you hear me? Nobody comes back down!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll hold everybody at the top.”
He turned back to Jojo as if to ask if she was satisfied now.
She looked at Trident. “Guard,” she commanded. The dog had been standing, now he sat but never took his eyes off the lift operator.
“I told him to hold you where you are but not hurt you … unless you move. Move, and he’ll attack.”
Without another word, Jojo turned and raced toward the ski lodge to find the controls that operated the lights and the snow-blowing machines.