Another hand-rung siren wailed half a block away from behind the crowd, dragging everybody’s attention away from the school. “Please step away from the building!” a man yelled. He was a well-built man clad in bright-yellow pants and boots.
Some in the crowd audibly sighed; others gasped. There was scattered applause and relieved calls of “thank God.”
Behind him, a large group of firemen arrived on foot, moving quickly but clumsily as many of them were still scrambling into their uniforms. Some seemed puzzled about their duties, staring at the building mouth agape.
They dragged a giant hose behind them as a few of them hefted large, rusted equipment on a pair of bicycles.
The bikes tumbled to the ground after taking a sharp corner.
Behind them, a group of uniformed cops arrived, also on foot. Their winded leader lagged behind them, older and wearing a slightly different uniform, still struggling into a navy-blue jacket.
Shortly after, an argument broke out between the two factions. Cops against firemen, patrol officers against the police leader. The ugly mess seemed on the verge of bubbling into a brawl when the new group arrived.
They had emerged in uniform—also on foot. The dress suggested they were the National Guard, but nothing else about them did. There was a sloppiness to their motions, their handling of weaponry, their symmetry that seemed off-kilter. Hatfield stared, shaking his head. “No grid,” he said to himself. The absence of a grid meant the absence of central leadership. Nothing was in sync. Nothing worked.
Within minutes a member of the guard began screaming at the fire captain, and yet another heated confrontation emerged.
The crowd gawked as the murmurs returned. Soon many were screaming at the various government officials, urging them into the building. But this only sparked more shouting, more heated insults, more chaos.
Jess stared at the anarchy, mouth open, head shaking.
He heard a snip from a woman in front of him; her neck craned to watch the ineptitude unfold. “The kids are dying, and this is the best they can do?”
“There’s no grid,” Hatfield said.
“No grid? What does that mean?”
“There’s no infrastructure. It’s like a body with a scrambled brain. Everything’s still there, but it can’t function. It can’t work.”
A loud shatter of glass happened off to the side. The crowd had broken a window, easing themselves inside. The figure on the stairs shouted something, but his words were smothered by wails and cries.
Soon a momentum had overtaken the crowd, with all bodies headed toward the window and fighting inside. Hatfield spotted a trace of hope in his wife’s eyes as they followed. As they reached the window, they could hear the desperate screams of kids and the roar of flames. Their vision was masked by smoke.
One by one, people covered their faces with whatever was available—handkerchiefs, purses, their shirts—then ducked inside the window, mindful of the shards of glass at all sides of the opening.
The figure on the steps was louder now, voice hoarse and angry. But his words couldn’t rise above the crowd’s grunts of protest. And nobody was listening anyway.
Jess arched her body back into a gymnast’s pose, lightly scraping her forehead on a dangling shard as she limboed her way through. Her husband followed, his larger body demanding a bigger struggle to get inside. Hands covering his head, he angled through, enduring a bump on his knee and a rougher bump on his elbow.
His wife pulled her sweater over her mouth, stooped low to avoid smoke. Hatfield tried a similar move, yanking off his sweatshirt altogether and pressing it against his face.
Within a few steps, they were lost, their range of vision limited to fifteen, maybe twenty inches ahead of them. Things were clearer as they ducked low, but there was nothing to see but the feet of those ahead of them.
There was nothing to hear but coughs and the distant screams of children, gaining volume every second. With a tight grip on his wife’s hand as they edged forward, Hatfield felt that as long as they were following the screams, they were moving in the right direction. This was the closest he could come to guidance.
After moving through a hallway, the line ahead of them stalled. It seemed a dead-end was reached, with nobody able to push farther. His wife’s grip on his arm tightened.
Unable to see much beyond the body of the petite lady just in front of them, Hatfield arched his head, waving away smoke in an effort to clear his vision. But it didn’t work. In fact, the smoke seemed to intensify. There was more coughing, gasping, cries for help. A loud bang could be heard ahead of them. That sounded less lethal than the explosions, more like a fist meeting hollow steel. More pounding followed, and the line surged ahead with an almost violent force.
Not sure where things were going, the couple moved along with the group as the shouts, wails, and sobs in the distance intensified. Within seconds, Hatfield could see what had happened. Someone had pounded open the doors to the gymnasium, revealing an arena full of young people, their voices louder, more desperate, more frightened than ever.
The man from the steps tried once again to keep order, but things were spiraling out of control. Hatfield couldn’t yet see him, but he heard his garbled voice smothered by the frenzied crowd.
They found a tangled mass of bodies, some crouching—as they were probably instructed to do to avoid smoke inhalation—others leaping to their feet, caught in a mad scramble for their parents. Finding Tami and Justin would not be easy.
“Do them see them?” Jess asked, her voice shaky with desperation.
Hatfield shook his head, scanning the place more as the smoke began to clear.
The man from the steps was now close enough to make out. “Please!” he shouted, his hoarse words barely rising above the bedlam. “We ask that you remain in the gym until you are given the all-clear from the authorities! It has been determined that the streets have become unsafe! Please, I repeat—”
With a grunt, the voice thudded to the floor, probably steamrolled by the mass of motion. The order to stay put seemed to urge everyone into more anxiety, crazier shuffling around. Parents searched for their kids, often kneeling to check fallen bodies, wondering if the wounded child was theirs.
A gasp came from Hatfield’s side—from Jess, her tumbling body inadvertently dragging him the floor. They landed in an awkward embrace, her elbow crashing against his nose.
She had tripped over a body below that now tussled back to motion. “I’m so sorry!” Jess yelled to the man as he shoved himself back to his feet.
Turning to her husband, her mouth flew open when she saw his face. “My God, are you okay?”
Hatfield brought a hand to his face, finding blood gushing from his nose. “Didn’t even notice that till now,” he said.
“All that adrenaline,” she said. “You better stop that flow. It’s pretty heavy.” She pulled up his shirt, pressing it hard against the wound, the pain now arriving. “I think that was an elbow, honey. I am so, so—” Her gaze drifted to the crowd, eyes giant, face exploding with relief. “Justin!”
Hatfield turned, watching his son knife through bigger bodies, his face red and swollen. He yelled something that couldn’t be heard over the din. But he seemed to be saying, “I can’t find Tami!”
The couple sprang to their feet, pressing through the mass to envelop him in a hug.
“She was under the bleachers a while ago!” he went on. “But she wasn’t there when I checked!”
Jess’s hand came to her mouth as she scanned the crowd, positioning herself between her husband and her son. The guys did their best to shield her as they moved forward, but there was no order or design to the clash of people. They shoved, elbowed, kneed their way through and stumbled hard against other bodies, often landing in a pile.