When you get lazy, you get beat every time…
“No,” Fallon said before the student closest to the door could open it. “Back to your seats.”
“But-”
“Back to your seats.”
The edge in Fallon’s voice had his students returning to their desks without further question. The hallway beyond filled with students spilling out of nearby classrooms, the heavy trampling of feet signaling the approach of those emerging from the two-story wing at the building’s head.
“Mr. Beechum?”
Fallon swung toward the windows again. They only opened inward at the very top, enough to provide ventilation but not escape.
“Mr. Beechum?”
Fallon didn’t answer. Mr. Beechum was gone.
“Trent,” Fallon said, the persona shed, cold eyes boring down on the boy who’d been his favorite, “give me your switchblade.”
“My wh-”
“Now, Trent.”
The voice not raised, just measured and certain.
“It’s a butterfly knife.”
Trent fished the butterfly knife out of his backpack, brought it up to Fallon and extended it toward him in a trembling hand. Fallon wished he could smile at him reassuringly, the way Mr. Beechum would.
Except Mr. Beechum was gone.
“Okay,” Fallon said, “everyone line up starting on this wall and wrapping around to the back of the room. Shoulder to shoulder. Very close. Out of sight from the door.”
“Why?” a girl asked, moving to obey.
Fallon didn’t answer. Beyond his classroom, the thick flow of students and their teacher escorts continued down the corridor, oblivious to whatever might be transpiring. Fallon hoped he was wrong, but knew he wasn’t. He had spent his life as Zaroff, the odds stacked heavily in his favor. But now suddenly he found himself as Rainsford.
When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.
Well, whoever had come in those vans was in for a big surprise, weren’t they?
The moments passed in silence broken only by the loud breathing of his students. Or maybe it wasn’t loud. Maybe Fallon just heard it that way.
The hallway emptied, a few stragglers passing the windowed door and then no one. A pause, then fresh footsteps crackling atop tile alone followed by the creaking echo of doors being thrust open, each growing louder.
Fallon snapped the butterfly knife’s blade into position.
A boy whimpered. Two girls began to sob, then a third.
Fallon pressed a single finger against his lips, signaling them to be quiet, ducked back so he was out of sight from the doorway.
The heavy footsteps drew closer. The knob rattled, door easing inward.
A student gasped.
A man lurched past Fallon, never seeing him. Fallon noted the high-end submachine gun he was steadying with a second hand in the last moment before he pounced. Arm wrapped around the man’s neck to silence him as he drew Trent’s butterfly knife on a sharp upward angle required to slice through bone and gristle, digging into the lungs and shredding them.
The man gurgled and rasped, fighting against Fallon as bloody froth poured from his mouth. Fallon snapped his neck for good measure, studying his face as he dragged him across the room before the horrified stares of his students.
The man was Arab; Fallon could tell that from sight, as well as smell. Smells were important to him. You spend enough time all over the world, in the various cesspits of humanity, and you begin to know men by their smells as much as anything. An Arab, all right, and in that moment Fallon realized everything he had been dispatched to Iraq to prevent had finally come to pass. The foreign stink come home.
Fallon was free to escape now. Two vans meant a dozen men at least, the other eleven likely scattered throughout the building. He could flee the building without so much as killing another, or, perhaps, just one. Maybe use one of their vans as his escape vehicle and leave them to whatever debacle they intended to perpetrate on the school and the world. It wasn’t his world anyway, not anymore.
Or was it?
He glanced at his students, bunched tighter together now, hugging each other as they stared at him in terror the way they would a monster, like the one Frankenstein had created. Or maybe General Zaroff, mad for the hunt.
Johnny got his gun, all right.
Flee and these students, his students, would inevitably end up in the gym with the others. Perhaps to be made an example of for disobeying. Terrorists like these were not very original, and that awareness sparked a memory in Fallon’s head of Chechnyan terrorists taking a school over in that particular godforsaken hostage situation. The students brought to the gymnasium, just like here. And then the gym was blown up while the whole world watched.
No, not very original, but effective all the same.
Fallon tried to imagine how he’d do it, how many men in the gym versus how many patrolling and securing the building. He settled on four in the gym, eight for the building.
Seven now.
Fallon stooped and began working the dead man’s jacket free.
“I need you all to stay here,” Fallon told his students. “Don’t make a sound and wait for me to come back for you.”
They looked at him as the stranger he had become even before he’d donned the terrorist’s jacket and bandana, squeezed his feet into the dead man’s work boots and slung his submachine gun from his shoulder. Enough to pass for the dead man from a reasonable distance, which was the best he could hope for. The 9/11 hijackers had never all met each other, but this kind of operation was different, requiring practice and synchronization. They would know the building as well as he did; every crawl space, every nook, every cranny. The difference, of course, was he knew the terrorists were here while they had no idea he was.
Wait for me to come back for you…
Why had he said that? Fallon wondered, once he was in the hallway, careful to leave the door open as all the others on the hallway were. It would be so easy for him to flee the building now before the inevitable appearance of the authorities on the scene. That was no longer an option for him, the challenge, the game, before him much too great to consider walking away from.
But was he Zaroff or was he Rainsford?
The building was eerily quiet, save for the din coming from the gymnasium area, where nearly 700 students were being crammed in even now. Fallon tried to remember all the details of the Chechnyan school seizing. Those terrorists had waited for the authorities to arrive, waited for them to mount their ill-fated raid, before triggering the explosives and killing hundreds. It would be the same way here, the strategy aimed at drawing the most attention possible. Round-the-clock coverage on the networks for days before the entire country paid witness to a mass murder in prime time.
Fallon made sure to conceal the considerable bulk of his shoulders within the terrorist’s shapeless, now bloodstained, jacket. He tied the dead man’s bandana low over his forehead, hoping it would conceal the differences in their faces and hair from the distance he required. He made sure the walkie-talkie, simple Radio Shack variety, was secured to his belt and started back up the corridor the way the dead terrorist would if he were retracing his steps.
At the head of the hallway, the office directly on his left and the science wing just down the hall to his right, Fallon glimpsed another of the terrorists rushing away from the main entrance with extra chains clanking. By now, all such doors would have been secured and wired with explosives, to detour both escape from within and attack from the outside. Fallon had a clear shot at the man but opted not to take it until he was sure no others were in the vicinity. Instead he made his footsteps just loud enough to be heard. Then swung about, gun leading, back to the stairwell up which number two had rushed.