By the time he reached Byron Middle School, the building stood darkly silhouetted against a distant bank of angry storm clouds. The snow wasn’t letting up and, judging from what he saw on the horizon, might not for a while to come. Nate’s next observation had to do with the cars out front. Many were parked haphazardly, in pretty much the same way their terrified owners had left them earlier in the day. But cars was all he saw. Not a truck among them. At least the folks who had made it to the school realized they wouldn’t get much further. The buses were gone too and Nate couldn’t help feeling a prick of disappointment. Expectation and anticipation were two different, yet related emotions. He’d known they would be gone, but even so, the letdown was hard to deny.
His knee was also starting to act up again, helped in no small amount by the cold. The numbness that had settled back in shortly after parting company with Jessie had gradually crept along each of his appendages. His nose and cheeks had taken most of the beating, buffeted almost constantly by the glacial wind. Little by little, the once simple act of putting one foot in front of the other was becoming harder than passing a breathalyzer on New Year’s Eve.
Nate reached the front door and found it locked.
Really?
Who locked a school in an exclusion zone? Every moment he spent outside was definitely more dangerous than standing between four solid walls. He needed somewhere relatively warm so he could eat, drink and be merry, as they said—if by merry they meant sleep. Knocking on doors in the neighborhood or, worse than that, breaking into someone’s vacant home was the last thing Nate wanted to do. He had recently been on the receiving end of just such an act and had come inches away from killing at least one of the thieves. The idea of turning any further toward that dark side was out of the question. If a window needed to be broken, it would belong to the school district.
He swung around to the side entrance, tried the door and hit another dead end.
Strike two!
For reasons unknown, when the school had been built back in the late eighties, the county architect had laid out the structure in the shape of the letter H. That meant five entry points if you counted the one out front and courtyards on both the east and west sides. So far, he had struck out on the first two. That left three more.
Nate was on his way to the door at the end of the western wing when something in the courtyard caught his eye. The make and model was not clear, but the fact that it was a pickup truck was obvious, even though the thing was covered in about eighteen inches of snow. The driver’s side door was open too, ever so slightly, and the truck seemed to be leaning forward. The hint of tire tracks led from the road to the truck’s location, which immediately lit up the cop part of Nate’s brain. Not because he thought a crime was necessarily in progress. If someone wanted to snatch boxes of number two pencils and reams of lined paper, they could be his guest. It told him the truck had arrived after the storm had already been raging for most of the night. In the few hours since they’d been abandoned, the cars in the parking lot had collected no more than six to eight inches.
This beauty could be his ticket out of here.
He drew closer and noticed the now amorphous shape of several sets of footprints in and around the truck. Nate batted around some of the snow near the driver’s side door and pulled it open. Using the light from his phone, he first noticed the steering wheel, emblazoned with the Chevy symbol. Next to come into view was a charging cord for an iPad, which trailed out from the USB port in the center console. The iPad itself was gone. But he did see something else. In a spot where the upholstery had once been beige now sat a deep crimson bloodstain. The flesh along the back of Nate’s neck was beginning to tingle something fierce. He closed the door and withdrew his pistol as he circled around the vehicle. The fuel cap was dangling by the truck’s side.
Has someone syphoned the gas?
The snow was deep around the truck, enveloping it in a sort of cocoon which, undisturbed, would last through the coldest months. Up near the front, he knocked loose powder from the passenger door and saw holes, bullet holes. Other signs of a gun battle soon came out from hiding: two in the side window and another in the front right tire. The thing was flat now and Nate couldn’t help feeling some of the air go out of him as well. There was no longer any room for doubt, this was Lauren’s truck, the one those thugs had stolen earlier. It had also become clear that more than one of Nate’s rounds had landed, in turn wounding the driver and puncturing the front tire. But how could a man keep driving with a hole in his side and one in his front tire? The answer, he supposed, was easy enough: adrenaline. The miracle drug―technically a hormone―that our bodies produced had the capacity to push us to nearly unbelievable feats of strength and endurance. Maybe other, synthetic drugs had also been at play. As far as Nate was concerned, you had to be morally dead, mentally unhinged or on something to start stealing only hours into a major power outage. Maybe a touch of all three.
The vague outline of foot traffic, only partly filled in, led from the truck to an inner courtroom door Nate hadn’t seen. The door looked like it had been kicked open. On a hunch, he brushed at the snow on the ground next to the boot prints and saw splotches of blood.
With his pistol in one hand and the flashlight from his phone in the other, Nate headed inside.
Chapter 24
Nate’s footfalls echoed on that hard, industrial flooring common to just about every civic building in the country. The school was dark. His hands were in the closest approximation to the Harries technique he could muster. Harries normally meant wrapping the weak hand with the flashlight under the hand holding the gun. It had been around since the 70s, but Nate was sure no one had ever used the technique with a cell phone light.
Pools of shadow vanished as he swung from left to right. He was in a corridor and coming to a t-intersection. Even looking forward, he couldn’t help seeing the trail of blood. Nate drew on his training as he slowly and methodically made his way past classrooms and lockers.
At the end of this blood trail was the thief who had stolen from them. Eagerly, he followed it down a flight of stairs. The droplets were large and bulbous, thickening around the outer edges. A slight film forming over the top. That told him the thug who had come this way had done so more than a few hours ago.
Nate passed more classrooms along with a teacher’s lounge, all of them eerily silent and devoid of life. Planting his feet, he aimed the light at the floor up ahead. The trail of blood led to a nearby room with a set of double doors, both of which stood ajar.
Heel to toe, Nate crept along in that direction, lowering the light as he drew closer. When he was a few feet away, he used a maneuver called cutting the corner. This meant angling into the room while at the same time limiting his own exposure to enemy fire. The blood led into a wide-open space that swallowed up most of the diffuse light from his phone. He noticed painted lines over the wooden floor. This wasn’t a cafeteria. It was a gym.
On the bleachers in the distance lay a figure in a grey winter jacket and dark baggy pants. Pooling beneath him was a dull liquid that looked from here like motor oil, but Nate knew better. The figure moved ever so slightly. This was no corpse he had stumbled upon. Corpses couldn’t shoot back, but even wounded men could be dangerous.
Nate put up his pistol, unslung his shotgun and pushed into the gymnasium’s ink-black darkness. You can’t hold a flashlight and use a shotgun at the same time, so Nate slid the phone into one of the front pockets of his jacket and pulled the zipper as tight as it would go, synching it in place. Where he turned, so too would the light, no matter how feeble it was at illuminating such a wide-open space.