Fighting the urge to throw up, she let herself be pulled down the hall. The shooter paused at the one door they hadn’t opened yet. Izzy turned the knob, but it was locked. She looked at him, and he cocked the hammer and shot the doorknob clean off the door. Even with her hands belatedly covering them, Izzy felt her ears ringing. When she stepped inside, she saw a pale woman cowering in the corner of the lab, her mouth rounded in a scream.
Sound came back in fits and starts. She could hear herself trying to calm the woman down. “I’m Izzy,” she said.
“Joy.” Her gaze darted to the shooter.
Izzy tried to redirect the woman’s attention. “Are you hurt?”
“I just had … I had …” She swallowed. “I was in the recovery room.”
“He wants us to go to the waiting room, but I need help carrying the doctor, who’s been wounded. You feel strong enough to help me, Joy?”
Joy nodded, and they backtracked. Izzy was well aware of the gun pointed at her. “Make it fast,” the shooter said.
In the procedure room Joy froze, staring at the dead nurse. Dammit. Izzy had forgotten to warn her.
“Oh my God. Oh my God oh my God oh my—” She turned away from the body and gasped. “Dr. Ward?”
He was conscious now, but clearly in pain. “Miz Joy,” he managed.
“This is not a goddamn ice cream social,” the shooter yelled. His anger lit a fuse in Izzy. She scrambled around the room, opening drawers and grabbing as much gauze and tape as she could and shoving it into her scrubs top, which ballooned out with the items where it was tucked into the waistband of her pants.
She got to her knees and looped the doctor’s arm around her neck, then caught Joy’s eye to get her assistance. Joy looped the doctor’s other arm around her neck. Together they got him upright and began to drag him down the hall, his leg leaving a trail of blood.
As they approached the waiting room, Dr. Ward looked past the reception desk and saw the body of the clinic owner. “Vonita,” he moaned, just as the shooter grabbed Izzy by her braid. Tears sprang to her eyes and she lost her grip on Dr. Ward, so that Joy had to bear the bulk of his weight. They tumbled to the floor, the doctor landing on his bad leg. His makeshift tourniquet popped free of its knot, and blood began to run freely.
Izzy immediately knelt to fix the tourniquet, but the shooter wouldn’t let her. “You’re not finished,” he said. “I want all of them where I can see them.”
“Joy,” Izzy cried out, “tie that tubing!” As she spoke, she crawled to Bex, the lady who’d been shot near the reception desk. The young woman she had ordered to apply pressure to the wound was still there, pressing down on the injury to slow the flow of blood.
Izzy looked up at the gunman. “I can’t move her.”
“I’m not the one who cares if she dies.”
Gritting her teeth, Izzy dragged Bex, apologizing for causing her pain. The young woman watched her struggle for a moment. When Izzy stared at her in disbelief, she scrambled to help.
They positioned Bex beside the doctor on the waiting room floor. “Okay, start again with the pressure,” Izzy told the woman. She was young, but it was clear that she was wearing a blond wig, and not a particularly good one. Chemo? Izzy wondered, and on the heels of that came a wash of empathy.
She immediately turned her attention to the doctor again. Joy had wrapped the tubing around his leg and was holding it in place with her hand. Izzy ripped off the bloody pants leg of his scrubs and began to twist it into a rope.
“You’re. Not. Finished,” the shooter growled. “Check the rest of the rooms!”
Izzy’s hands stilled as the pistol nudged her between the shoulder blades.
Lifting her palms in surrender, she sent a silent plea to Joy to keep her vigil over the doctor and got to her feet again. With sharp, angry strides she walked to the bathroom that she had gone into earlier to be sick. She flung the door wide. “Empty,” she announced.
The shooter didn’t come to verify her claim. He couldn’t, without turning his back on his hostages. Instead he stood at a distance with the gun, bouncing his aim between Izzy and the others.
She yanked open a supply closet, the only other door in the waiting room. On one side was a pile of boxes, and a stack of cleaning supplies. On the other side hung three long white lab coats and a barricade made of a vacuum, a mop, and a bucket. From where she was standing, Izzy could also see two faces, pinched and pale, blinking up at her. One, an older woman, held a finger to her lips.
Izzy turned, blocking that side of the closet with her own body. “Empty. Happy now?” she said, and she slammed the doors shut. She folded her arms, mustering courage she didn’t feel. “Now can I go back to doing my job?”
—
FOR A MINUTE WREN WAS sure she was a goner. When that closet door opened, she had turned to stone. She stared up at the woman, who clearly noticed them, but didn’t give away their hiding place. She stayed utterly frozen until they were plunged into darkness again, and then felt Olive’s fingers gripping hers, papery and powdery, the way old ladies’ hands always were. Wren’s phone vibrated and she lifted it in the darkness.
Still safe?
Yes, she texted back to her father.
Where r u?
In a closet
Alone?
No, she wrote. With Olive. She didn’t explain who Olive was. It was enough that her father realized she wasn’t sitting here alone and terrified.
Can you see Bex?
No.
Don’t move, her father wrote. Don’t speak. Listen and tell me what u hear.
Wren tried, but with the closet doors closed, it was all muffled. There were shots, she wrote after a moment. Aunt Bex fell down. I think it went into her chest.
Which side?
Wren blinked. She tried to think; where had the red spread? She moved her hand over her own chest, mapping the memory. Right.
She realized, as she typed it, that her father was feeding her hope. The right side of your chest didn’t hold your heart. There was a chance that her aunt was still fighting.
People were crying, Wren typed. A lady wearing scrubs opened the closet door and she saw us but she made sure he didn’t.
A warning popped up on her screen. You only have 10% battery left. Would you like to go into Save mode?
Yes, Wren thought. Yes, I very much would.
Dad, she typed, I’m sorry.
It had been her decision to get birth control. Her decision to keep that little tidbit of information from her father. Her decision to ask her aunt to bring her here secretly. She waited for her father to absolve her, to say that it was all right, that it wasn’t her fault.
Tell me what else is happening, he wrote.
Wren felt something sink inside her. What if she got out of here, and things were never the same between the two of them? What if she had broken everything with one mistake?
She was going to live, she decided, if only to prove to her father that she could grow up and still be his little girl.
Wren started typing. The woman who saw us had blood all over her clothes.
Was she hurt?
I don’t think so, Wren wrote. But other people are.
Did you hear the shooter say anything? Did he mention any names? When was the last time you heard the gun go off? How many injured did you see before you went into hiding?
Her father’s questions rolled in like thunderclouds, fast and thick. Wren closed her eyes and pressed the power button to darken the screen and save some of the limited juice she had left. She thought, instead, of all the questions he wasn’t asking her.
Why are you in a women’s health center in the middle of the school day?
Why is your aunt with you?
Why didn’t you tell me?
Her earliest memory was when she was four years old, when she still had a mother and a normal nuclear family. She was at nursery school, and a boy on the playground kissed her smack on the lips underneath the jungle gym that looked like a pirate ship and announced that he wanted to make babies with her. Wren had drawn back her fist and punched him right in the mouth.
Her parents were called to school. Her mother was mortified and kept saying that Wren didn’t have a violent bone in her body, which made her wonder if other people had violent bones, and if they were tucked in among the ribs or pressed down under the foot when you stamped it. “Wren,” her mother said, “what did you do?”