What We Need (Wishbone Tattoos #2)

Prologue

NOLAN HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR PROM FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

T he song keeps playing.

Underneath all the screaming and rattling gunfire. Under the vague sound of a fire alarm somewhere. While a room full of people I grew up with sob and beg and stampede and die and try to understand what’s happening, the music carries on like nothing’s happening.

The Power of Love from Back to the Future .

I watched that movie just the other day, or maybe last month, with my family.

Family movie night, first Sunday of every month.

Dad’s choice that time. I’ll never see Marty McFly again.

Never see my family again. My seat in the living room will be empty from now on.

Is the DJ dead, too? Is that why it won’t stop?

I can’t think straight. I don’t know what to do. What the fuck do I do ?

Whoever’s doing this is diagonally across from the table I’m hiding under right now, across the other side of the gymnasium.

Callie and the rest of the Prom committee spent ages hanging the decorations here for tonight.

He’s shot the mirror balls to shit, raining broken shards on everything like he’s adding insult to injury.

The debris of streamers and balloons and eighties movie posters are sprayed with thick, livid blood.

I never realized blood has a smell, but it does, coppery and harsh and relentless.

And it’s all over me.

Somebody PLEASE help us…

My arms tighten around Callie, cradled in my arms. Well…what’s left of her.

A few minutes ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, we were just taking a break between dances for a glass of cheap, neon orange punch, and then, without any warning…

Her head…

It… burst.

Her blood splashed onto my face. Into my eyes.

Into my mouth .

I spit out as much as I could, but I can still taste it, and I can’t bear to think about that. I can’t make much sense of my own thoughts right now, slow and claggy as the run of my girlfriend’s blood, but I for sure want to avoid that one.

Her brains. They’re splattered all over my lap. I need to get them back into her head so she’ll be OK. So she can wake up, and I can get us out of here. But I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m just a dumb kid, I can’t…I can’t…

Callie’s dead.

But I was just dancing with her seconds ago…

She’s so still. So heavy and limp.

But people can…can live with brain injuries…maybe she…

She’s.Dead.

I hold onto her even tighter as I rock back and forth, unable to do anything else.

My blood smeared eyes stare blankly at the paper tablecloth hanging over the edge of this table, my heart racing with horror.

I feel like I’ll fall through the floor if I let her go, crash through six feet under.

I’m headed there anyway. She can’t be dead .

We’re supposed to go to Luke Dennings’ after party tonight.

I hooked us up with one of his lockable bedrooms so we could finally make love for the first time, lose our V cards to each other the way we planned.

She asked me to make sure we got one, so I did.

We’ve been together since the end of sophomore year, and I love her.

I love her. We were voted Cutest Couple in our yearbook, and we fucking are.

We were .

We’re going to Louisiana State after we graduate this summer. Going to separate colleges was unthinkable. Not even an option. She’s going to do Actuarial Science, and I’m doing Studio Art.

The pink corsage thing I got to match her pink dress is torn and limp and bloody on her wrist. She was one of the first he hit. She barely had time to register the sound of the first shots…

Maybe she didn’t suffer. Please, God, please don’t let her have suffered.

The shooter is yelling, and I can’t make out what he’s saying because each shot he takes is deafening.

He looks like Mr Whitmire, my history teacher, but it can’t be.

He’s not wearing his old blue sweater with the leather elbow patches that he must’ve gotten from Teachers R Us, boring us all to death as he drones on and on about the Gettysburg Address.

He’s wearing old khaki jeans and a dirty bandana around his forehead like he’s fucking Rambo or something.

He’s covered in guns and bands of ammo, and he looks ridiculous. It can’t be him.

Why would he do this to us?

Time feels weird. Speeding up and slowing down at random.

It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense anymore.

So I just hold Callie, my arms clutching around her in panic, and try to just breathe in and out while I still can , because these might be my last breaths, and I never really thought about how good it is to breathe before, but now. ..

I WANT TO GO HOME .

More screams. More sprays of machine gun fire.

I’m scared I’ll get my head blown off if I peer out to have a look, but I need to try to see what the hell is going on. Not thinking straight will probably kill me, but I do know with total certainty that I need to get us both out of here right now .

Slowly, slowly, I stretch my neck, ready to pull it back in fast .

Bloody handprints all over the windows from people trying to escape.

Our guidance counsellor, Mr Williams, is just a few feet away from me, riddled with bullets and weakly gurgling blood.

We spoke the other day about career paths available if I wanted to do an Art degree.

Now he’s dying over there, alone and afraid, his severed arm lying a few inches away from his left hip.

Lacey Bordeaux, the captain of Callie’s cheerleading squad, is holding sloppy meat to her stomach, and I nearly throw up when it hits me that those are her guts.

They slip through her clutching, shaking hands, and she starts to wail for her mother, over and over, Mom, I want my Mama!

I want to yell at her to shut up or he’ll come over and finish what he started, and then he proves me right by cleaving right across her with another hail of bullets.

She looks like a bloodied mess, like raw meat.

I want my mom. I want to see my mom one last time.

Callie’s still dead. I don’t want to leave her. But I think I have to. I have a tiny chance of surviving, and this is it.

Can I take her with me? Maybe if I lift her into my arms like we do sometimes when we’re messing around…

But I’ll have to run, and I don’t think I’ll get very far if I’m carrying her, and I don’t want to have her be a fucking human shield to save my ass.

I don’t want any more bullets anywhere near her, one was too many…

but I can’t leave her here where he can get her again, I can’t …

But I have to.

There’s a bunch of people making a run for it towards the door closest to me, about ten feet away.

The shooter is at the other end of the room, but from that distance, he wouldn’t even have to move, just lift the gun and pull the trigger.

The bullets would reach us, no problem. But he’s distracted.

He mows down a huddle of people nearer to the fire exit across the other side, happily shouting nonsense as he murders them.

His mad eyes scour the crowd, and he hones in on someone to his left, someone writhing on the ground.

I can’t quite see who it is. He’s bald.

Maybe Mr Abshire, our Vice Principal? The gunman stands on the guy’s jaw and spits on him.

“How’s this for ‘unprofessional conduct’, you slimy fuck ,” he shouts maniacally before pulling the trigger at Mr A’s head, point blank range, yelling with joy at the geyser of blood spattering his face, and it’s like something out of Scarface.

HOLY SHIT .

I look back at my girlfriend, the girl I love so much, and I know this is it. Throat clenching in agony, I push her further under the table and cover her with my tux jacket, hiding her as best I can. I can’t protect her, but I’ll be damned if he’ll shoot her any more than he already has.

If I’m gonna go, it has to be now.

My heart is pounding and my limbs are stiff with terror. I can hardly move.

Callie, saving my seat in the cafeteria with an adorable smile.

Her cute giggle as I showed her my latest caricatures of the teachers sketched on paper napkins.

Breakfast beignets on her birthday, sat out on the cafe patio while a live jazz band played, sugar all over our fingers, laughing as we licked each other’s instead of our own.

Kissing her goodnight on her doorstep after every date until her mom or dad would open the door and make her go inside, and their amused eye rolls and comments about ‘lovebirds’.

All gone, in a split second.

I want to give her one last kiss, but she’s so drenched with blood, her head such a mess of chewed up bone and flesh (she only has one eye left, oh GOD), I don’t think I can.

I will regret this.

So I squeeze her hand, the one with the silver star ring on her pinkie finger.

I gave it to her for Valentine’s Day this year.

Our very last one. I squeeze her hand again, and for the first time ever, she doesn’t squeeze mine back.

“Bye, Cal,” I whisper. I wish I could think of something cooler or more meaningful to say.

But there’s no time. No time .

I can barely even feel my legs as I scramble to my feet and make a run for it.

I nearly get knocked over several times between the table and the door by the few remaining people who can still walk.

It’s everyone for themselves, and people are getting pulled and shoved in the desperate, mad scramble, and I’m no better.

There’s no time for good manners, not a single hero among us.

Our primal instinct to survive has been engaged, and that reduces us to mindless, terrified beasts.