Hands were pulling on my shoulders, tugging me back through the doors to the band room. Tearing me away from the warm body of my girlfriend. I attempted to protest, weakly trying to shove the grabbing hands away, but they were persistent. Eventually, I was forced to let go of her body. It landed with a thud on the ground.
I was screaming, crying, shaking in an emotion pain. For moments at a time, I was unable to breathe. I had never felt such awful, terrible pain in my life. I didn’t know that my heart could be ripped up through my throat without it actually happening. I couldn’t walk. The hands caught me as I stumbled backwards into the room while soothing voices came through my head, soft and fast.
At one point, it felt like my heart had stopped. I gasped for air, willing my heart to continue pumping. The world went fuzzy for a while, sending me into an eerie silent world full of shadows. Then I was on the ground, gasping, as the shadows hovering over morphed into real people. My band director was there, with Afton, Devon, Maddy, and a few others. A light was flashed across my eyes.
“He’s alive,” said Afton, heaving a sigh of relief. Her bright eyes, turned green by her contact lenses, were heavy with tears.
“Andrew,” I moaned, “Get Andrew. He’s hurt.” All of them but Afton immediately jumped from their circle around me to where Andrew had collapsed on the floor. I couldn’t meet Afton’s eyes, not then. Instead, I looked around the band room, taking in all the suffering. Small groups of people were clustered at different points throughout the place, some crying, and some rocking back and forth in silence. Ryan and his girlfriend, Emily, were alone in a corner. Emily had a coating of blood spattered across her back. I wondered who she had watched die.
“Trey.”
Afton was still sitting next to me, studying me as I observed the room. She was relatively clean. The only disturbance on her pale face was a thin scratch that had long since stopped bleeding.
“I’m so sorry. About Elise,” she whispered, “About everything that’s happened to you with this. We’ve been hearing stories from a lot of people about what you’ve been doing. It’s amazing, re—”
“I am the reason that so many of my friends are dead!” I yelled, sitting up suddenly. “Elise, Lily, Chris, Peter, Elle, Katie, Tillman—they’re all gone! And they can’t come back.” My voice broke with those last words. Fresh tears leaked from my eyes.
Afton pulled my into a hug, running her fingers through my hair. “You know what, though?” she asked, “You know what? You made it out alive. You brought Andrew out with you. You’re the first two people to ever get away from the M.A. You should be proud.”
I wouldn’t be swayed. “We aren’t out. Not really, not yet. And we are never going to get out of here.” My voice became softer and softer until I was sure she could not hear me. “We are all going to die in this room.”
“Trey, you need to listen to me,” said Afton. “If you keep talking like that, everyone is going to panic. Sure, we are all thinking it, but if you, of all people, say it out loud, we are going to have an even bigger crisis at hand. These people in here look up to you, they really do.”
I didn’t care. I was being selfish, and I knew it, but I was in desperate need of time to mourn.
So I sat in silence for a good while, praying. I prayed for everyone that died that day, prayed they would all go to heaven. I prayed for myself, too. Myself, Andrew, Afton, and everybody in our band room. Maybe, just maybe, we could all survive.
Suddenly, I felt hopeful again. A small glimmer of hope was poking through the awful tragedy that was taking place outside.
There was the church, right on the other side of the school. There was a good chance that no guards would have been sent there, since all of the students and faculty were stuck on the field at the fair.
Maybe, just maybe, we could get out of here. Most of the band kids parked in the church parking lot. If we were fast, we could get there and out of town. It was a stretch, but we could do it if we hurried. I didn’t want to consider the alternative possibility.
I stood up and made my way to the center of the room. Everyone looked up at me with confused and dazed looks.
I took a deep breath and began to speak.
No more than twenty minutes later, we were on the move. I was carrying Andrew in a fireman’s hold at the front of the pack as we made our way through the dark hallways. We didn’t talk much, usually only to mutter “this way” or to suggest stopping at a vending machine. There were multiple ones with food in the school, but they were dispersed widely throughout the place. The ones nearest the band room had been broken into already and raided. We ended up not getting any sustenance in the end.
The trek to the exit nearest the church took us a grand total of ten minutes. We had at least ten wounded kids to deal with, not including Andrew. Besides them, we had about twenty or so others.
Mr. Isaacs was on his phone, talking hurriedly into it. I figured it was his wife, until he hung up and told us that he had gotten a police squadron to escort us away from the school.
We were going to survive.
We were really going to get out of the hell hole of death.
When we got outside, we were swarmed by SWAT team members and medics. I stayed back with Andrew as the others got treated and stuffed into police vans. I waved goodbye to Afton and Devon through the window of their van as they drove away. They said another van would be there in no more than five minutes.
I carefully lowered Andrew to the ground when my friends were long gone. He smiled at me, and I at him. Mr. Isaacs was standing a few feet away, and then a medic was shoving me out of the way to help Andrew. They rolled him onto a gurney and stuck an I.V. in him. Then she lifted up his shirt to check his wound.
I nearly passed out. I thought that I would be prepared to see this, after all of the horrible things I had seen that day. But the wound was ugly. It was inflamed around the point where the bullet had entered his body, and that hole was still pumping blood. Around the wound, though, were red streaks going across his stomach and chest. The medic realized it at the moment I did.
“Blood poisoning.” We said it at the same time and met each other’s eyes. This was bad. He could still die from this. I felt his forehead. It was blistering hot.
“We need to get him medicine, now,” I said. The medic nodded and fumbled in her bag. She pulled out a syringe full of liquid and jabbed it into the infected area.
“What are you giving him?” I asked. I hated feeling so helpless.
“Antibiotics,” said the medic. She pulled out another syringe and inserted it into the same spot. “And this sucker is vancomycin, which should help the actual sepsis.” I had no idea what that meant, but I accepted it. We could all still survive this.
A few minutes later another van pulled up. The police and medics loaded us into it and we started driving. I looked out the window and couldn’t help be thankful that we were leaving all of the horrors behind. The sun was just beginning to rise into the sky over the mountains. It was beautiful. A bird was flying towards the school, away from the sun.
“Oh God,” murmured Mr. Isaacs, “Please, no.”
The bird was moving quickly towards us, and now that it was so close, I could see that I was wrong. The object was much too shiny to be a bird, too shiny to be anything but a plane. As it flew over the school, something fell towards the ground, and then another something, and another one after that.
First I heard the explosions, then I saw them, and then I felt the van fly through the air. I put my head in between my knees and grabbed ahold of Andrew.
We landed with a loud thud, and then the front of the vehicle exploded.
When I regained consciousness, the first thing I noticed was that there was no sound in the world. Not a bird, not a crackle from a fire.
The second thing I noticed was the burning pain in both of my legs and in my right arm. I opened my eyes and saw that the van had blown apart, sending the passengers flying. I still had ahold of Andrew.
I raised my hand to my ears, and it came away bloody. I snapped my fingers, but to no avail. I was deaf.
I was about twenty feet away from where the car had exploded. The back of my head hurt. Everything hurt. Then I remembered that my best friend was lying only a foot away from where I had landed. I attempted to sit up, but my legs were clearly broken and it was too painful. I rolled onto my stomach and army crawled the painful distance to Andrew.
At first I tried to shake him awake. Then I yelled a wordless stream of sound into his ear, desperate for my friend to wake up. After a few minutes it became clear that he wasn’t going to.
I was in too much shock to fully appreciate his death. I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. The world was slowly dissolving into nothing.
I looked up and saw a pair of planes flying across the sky. They dropped what I assumed were nuclear bombs, the same kind that had destroyed the other cities. I saw the clouds of fire fly up through the sky as the planes got away, and then I felt the shockwave. I looked down and saw that my skin had caught on fire, but I couldn’t feel it. The flame was beautiful, a mixture of oranges and reds and everything else.
So this is it, I thought. This is how I die.
This is the end.
The fire reached my eyes, and the world slipped away into darkness.