Authors: William R. Forstchen
11:43 a.m., near Portland, Maine
Kathy looked up from her pad. She had been trying to connect to her friend Mary in Austin, Texas, texting her, while her attention remained glued to the television where the murders along Interstate 35 near Mary’s neighborhood were continuing and the ticker along the bottom of the television reported a second shooting incident in Syracuse. Apparently an accomplice of yesterday's school shooter had been cornered in the parking lot of a shopping mall.
Kathy heard a siren, a police car racing past on the state highway, one block over from her home. Seconds later a second police car followed.
It sent a chill down her spine. What was going on?
A third police car, seconds later.
Fear. Her heart constricted, beating faster. Surely this was not all interrelated in some way? She and Bob had shared whispered conversations often enough after Wendy was asleep as to the possibility that some horror could indeed happen here and what was their drill, their response? They had talked about it scores of times but were those fears and whispered conversations now triggering her into an overreaction?
She texted Bob again, “Turn on the news now!” He had not responded so far.
11:44 a.m., Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, Portland, Maine
He had made the mistake of setting the remote control back down on the table, a gesture of long habit when watching a program with Kathy who on their second date had accused him of being a typical male because he hogged the television remote control.
Margaret Redding snatched it back, switched the channel back to the program she had been watching, clutched the remote and glared at him defiantly, all but begging him to try and make a physical grab for it. She had already announced that she was filing a complaint of harassment, that to even try and touch her to get the remote would be a career-ender for certain and she was egging him on to do so. There was a flicker of a smile of the self-righteous professional victim who sensed that she just might have one hell of an excellent case if she could push him just one step further. At the very least, in a few more minutes she would waddle out of the lounge, crying, head to the principal’s office and then take the rest of the day off due to the fear and anxiety he had created by his aggressive, dominant behavior.
“What the hell?” It was Vince Rossingnol, the quiet, introspective English literature teacher, who, as always, studiously avoided involvement in any confrontation with Margaret.
Bob thought Vince was standing up and stepping in at last to the confrontation with the “tyrant," as all whispered when she was not present, of the faculty lounge. It’d be a two-to-one vote as to who controlled the television and a witness that he had not physically touched Margaret. Vince standing up might be a crucial point to argue after school when, yet again, he was summoned to the office to answer Margaret’s accusations.
But Vince was not facing them at all; he was at the window, splitting open a couple of the dust-covered blinds and looking out to the front of the school. A blue sedan had pulled up directly by the walkway entrance, in a no parking or standing zone. Three men were piling out, dressed in black, reaching into the back seats, and pulling out satchels to sling over their shoulders. One of them stood straight up. He was holding a rifle aloft in one hand.
“What in hell are those sons of bitches doing?” Vince cried, his voice rising and cracking.
Margaret turned her wrath away from Bob to begin chiding Vince for his inappropriate use of language on school grounds, a definite violation as well, then went silent.
“Are those guns? They aren’t allowed to do that!” she cried.
Bob turned away from the television to look out the window.
“Merciful God in heaven, it’s happening!” he gasped.
The three men rushed toward the front entrance. The way the wing of the main building was angled toward the parking lot and main entrance, Bob could see the front entrance, which was less than a hundred feet away.
Charlie, their elderly security and resource officer, was actually exiting the front door, his only weapon a taser and pepper spray, both of them still latched and buttoned securely to his belt.
In these first seconds Bob simply could not react. Though the analogy was something from before his time, he remembered reading how some folks described such a moment of frightful shock as being like an old record that kept skipping and playing the same line over and over: this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real…
It became very real when the leader of the group slowed, raised a pistol and calmly put a 9mm hollow point bullet into Charlie’s head from twenty feet away, the old man collapsing like a broken doll.
“Jesus Christ this is it!” Bob cried but it took several seconds for him to reach into his pocket for his Ruger.
Margaret started to scream, backing up against the wall, ironically still clutching the television remote control. Vince turned back from the window, gasping, and began to sag against the window frame, sobbing, already in a state of shock at the sight of the back of Charlie’s head exploding from the impact of the round.
Bob had played this scenario out in his mind hundreds of times. Nearly every day that he walked down the corridor to his office and classroom area he’d ask himself, "What do I do if…? What do I do?" But he had never played this one out in his mind: What do I do if I am in the faculty lounge, it's lunchtime and not one, but three, gunmen storm the building, burdened down with multiple weapons, and blow the brains out of our kind, elderly security guard on the front lawn of the school as their opening move?
Thoughts started to race and his mind, on the edge of panic, finally latched onto one: Where is Wendy? Is she already in the lunch room, or is it math class? God, what time is it? Where is she? Where is my daughter?
A bell started to ring, loud, insistent, piercing. Was it the lunch bell, or the alert for lockdown?
Now a flurry of shots thundered down the hallway. Screams. Margaret turned and actually managed to lock the door to the faculty lounge.
“Get away from the door!” Bob commanded, holding his pistol up and chambering a round, but still not sure where to go.
Margaret’s gaze fixed on the small pistol in his right hand. More gunfire sounded from down the corridor, echoing like firecrackers. Screaming, more screaming,
children’s
screams.
“You can’t have a gun, Petersen. I’ll report you for this!”
“Shut the hell up, bitch and clear the door!” he snapped, grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her bulky frame to one side. He unlocked the door and opened it. Whatever instincts were still working for him, he knew he had to do something, at least for his daughter.
He took a deep breath. At last some flash of clarity settled in. His instincts as a father and a protector overrode everything else.
He stepped into the corridor. The alarm for lockdown was sounding, reverberating, making it hard to think. On the far side of the main office complex was the wing for the gym, dining hall, library, science labs, his own IT office, and more classrooms. Behind him doors to classrooms were opening up. In spite of the drills held at the start of the year before the students arrived, a fair number of teachers were reacting in the opening moments with curiosity rather than as they had been trained to do.
Surely this could not be real? they were asking themselves and each other. A mistake? Bob heard someone shouting that question. Was this all a mistake or for real? Another shouted that some damn idiot of an administrator had gone over the edge and decided to pull an actual “real” drill with firecrackers included. If so, heads would roll after this one.
Bob glanced back in the opposite direction of the gunfire. Where was Wendy’s fourth period classroom? Was she in the lunch room or still in math? The door to her math classroom was a few feet down the corridor and across from the faculty lunch room. The door was closed, lights off. My God, had they gone for lunch and she was on the other side of the building with the murderers between him and his daughter?
Suddenly an explosion of shots rang out and glass shattered. He whipped his head around toward the office complex and saw the large glass window of the front office break apart, broken glass cascading down, screams coming from within.
He caught a glimpse of the principal, Mr. Carl, gentle soul, who insisted on wearing a bow-tie which Bob thought made him look rather nerdy. Kids might say behind his back that he was somewhat “dorky” but they all knew he had a loving heart. He was stepping out into the junction of the main corridor with the office complex.
How many times had Bob argued about this moment, what to do if a gunman hit their school? Carl always replied that they would follow policy as they had been trained to do. According to his training, Carl was to be in his office calling the police and sounding the alarm. But he must have been down in the lunch room.
A group of children appeared at the end of the hallway, a class that had been heading to the lunch room, and in those first seconds their teacher turned them back. Carl shouted for them to run for their classroom. A split second later several bullets exited his back and he sagged. The man was using his body to shield the terrified children even as he died. The group was running toward Bob. More shots resounded.
God in heaven, it was Wendy’s class! They were being led by their teacher Patty Carlson, a first-year teacher, still fired up with idealism about her profession. But there was no three-credit course at the state university to train her for this moment; all of the other courses she had been required to take were now meaningless.
There was much he had to process in the next few seconds. Carl was down, several children he had tried to shield were collapsing. Was that Wendy? The bright pink designer scarf she was so proud of, a birthday present from her mother, was around her neck. The scarf made her stand out and it filled him with terror that it would draw the attention of the killers as well. She was at the back of the line of panicked children running toward him. He saw a dark form at the end of the corridor, bulky, dressed in black. The man's shoulder weapon was raised. He aimed straight at the backs of the fleeing children.
Flashes, an explosion of rounds. Children at the end of the fleeing group dropped, one after the other, shot in the back. There was an instant of silence, then the sound of a magazine dropping.
I should charge him and shoot, the thought screamed at him. An instructor, when he took training, talked about “muscle memory”: of learning to react by instinct. The horror and confusion of it all was so overwhelming that he simply had not raised his pistol yet, all attention was focused on Wendy as he instinctively started toward her to pull her to safety, wherever that might be.
He caught a glimpse of Wendy. She was down, but then coming back up, knocked over by the child directly behind her who had been shot. Her math teacher turned back to grab her, shepherding her children, physically placing herself at the end of the line to shield them, pushing them toward her classroom.
The gunman slapped another magazine in, started to aim it down the corridor and then, as if distracted, turned to his left, and popped round after round at a range of but a few feet into a terrified group of children who were streaming out of the gym, trying to flee to their classrooms for lockdown as their teacher had trained them to do.
Wendy was up, shoved forward by Patty. Bob grabbed her by the arm, placing his body between her and the killer before the gunman's attention returned to them, and together they bolted into the perceived safety of her classroom, slamming the door shut behind them and locking it.
More shots rang out in the hallway, then screaming, then a distinctive cry, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar!” and that focused Bob at last.
This was not some random shooting, some cowardly son-of-a-bitch lone shooter, or even a team of two or three psychotics. With their triumphal cries he knew with absolute certainty that this was not the lone, crazed, sick shooter of the American scenario, the American nightmare ever since Columbine. It was Russia, 2004. This was the Chechnya scenario, the Beslan school massacre of 2004. The worst nightmare of all his nightmares as a teacher.
The Beslan school massacre in the southern Russia province of Chechnya, was a deliberately designed mass murder, the perfect storm of a terrorist mentality that viewed infidel children as tools to terrorize the enemy before sending all of them to hell.
A handful of Islamic murderers who claimed they were fighters for an independent state seized the school in the Russian province on the first day of classes, which by Russian tradition was a time of celebration, proud parents taking their children to school and bringing small gifts of flowers and fruit to the teachers. But rather than a school opening with ceremonies and children singing traditional folk and patriotic songs, the day began with armed terrorists storming and seizing control of the building.
First they herded the male teachers and older male students to a back room and systematically cut their throats to eliminate any chance of resistance.