Sublime Messages

First Interlude

A dark hallway stretched before the boy, closed doors on either side. He'd made it this far, and he knew the building well (had been in it three years, after all) and though he'd pulled the short straw, or really the short string, he was glad it'd been him. The others had been far more afraid. But he wasn't—not Harry Fagin. Olivia had squeezed his fingers as surreptitiously as possible so as not to alert their captors; it'd been quick, seeing as it'd been done in daylight (unlike the string pulling of the night before, which he and the other four had managed to do in the dark), and he'd been upset she'd even tried it. Fortunately, no one had noticed.

The people who'd taken them hostage all had guns. Big ones. Like, AR-15 big, and they were dressed in black. Black jeans or black leggings, black shirts, black coats or jackets, black hats, black boots or black tennis shoes, black on black on black. Some even appeared to have dyed their hair black or be wearing black facepaint (or maybe they were tattoos; it was difficult to tell, as Harry fortunately hadn't been that close to any of them. Not like—oh God. Not like that sophomore.

Harry paused in the greenish-black gloom, the rectangle of yellowing light from the window at the end of the hall the only thing he could see as his vision tunneled. His knees felt suddenly weak. That sophomore . . . his screams . . . Holy fuck, his screams! They'd echoed through the whole hellish building.

The senior's hands pressed against his ears. He didn't want to recall the image of that boy, dragged into the room with a mouth full of blood, sweat and tears pouring down his cheeks and mingling with the crimson drool running onto the floor. His sobbing and sobbing, how he dropped like a limbless being and curled into himself. And they'd not let anyone touch him, not to offer an arm or ask whether he was ok, nothing! And nobody—not a single student in that room—argued with them. They'd been too scared. Were still too scared. Two nights in, and already compassion had been replaced with self-preservation.

Who knew where the faculty was? The rumor, spelled out onto the carpet with barely moving fingers, was that all the teachers had been taken to the roof and shot, all of them. Harry might've believed it, but there hadn't been enough gunfire. There hadn't been any gunshots, in fact, or at least nothing they'd heard, nothing beyond those shots in the gym the morning it'd happened.

It'd begun and ended so fast, the takeover. Harry had been sitting in his second period trig class when someone, one of those black-clad people, had just walked into the room and told them all to stay where they were or he'd start shooting. He'd walked right in, just like that, and nobody had moved. It'd seemed like a prank or a drill, something out of a movie or a weird dream. But then a second person had come into the room, too, this one also with a gun, and she'd told them all to clear their desks, get their phones out, place them on the desktops and put their hands in their laps. The first person stood at the door, nearer the teacher, while the second went desk to desk and collected the devices, dropping them into a bag she carried. At one point a girl at the back of the room had tried to do something with her smart watch, but the woman pushed toward her and hit the girl hard on the side of the head with the butt of her gun, sending her to the ground, where she laid unresponsive. "I will fucking shoot the next person," the woman had said, and the twenty-one people in the room hadn't needed more persuasion.

The blinds had been pulled on the wall of windows. Every student had been asked to stand, and a third person (this one without a gun, at least, though how the hell many were there?) had patted each of them down, made sure there were no electronic anythings. Some of the students had been treated worse than others, having to remove shoes and jackets and even shirts, in a few cases, but Mr. Moeller, the trig teacher, had gotten it the worst. He'd been told to strip naked, and when he'd at first refused, the weaponlesss person had picked a kid at random (who'd happened to be Harry's friend, sitting right in front of him) and said they'd kill him if Moeller didn't listen.