Gaul began to narrate the progression, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. Dryden looked away from the slideshow and just listened.
“The security team is young and inexperienced. Unlike real prison guards, they’ve never actually encountered resistance from detainees. They have shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds, nonlethal at a distance but devastating at point-blank range. They enter the cell with their attention on Rachel and her mother. They pay almost no attention to the prisoners in adjoining units. Eleven thirty-one and nine seconds: The leftmost guard loses his weapon to prisoner seven through the bars. Within the next four seconds the situation falls completely apart; at the end of that time frame, two men are down and the rest are shooting. One man is still grabbing for Rachel. Eleven thirty-one and fifteen seconds: Rachel is being forcibly pulled from Rebecca’s arms, while the officer’s weapon is coming up to level on the woman’s face. Rachel is looking directly into her mother’s eyes at sixteen seconds, when the shotgun discharges into Rebecca’s forehead from less than six inches away.”
In her chair, Holly seemed almost to have shrunk. Her hands gripped her forearms, everything drawn inward as if she were sitting somewhere very cold.
“The shooter is himself struck fatally in the next frame,” Gaul said. “The rest withdraw. Rachel stays with her mother’s body while other prisoners use the dropped shotguns to compromise the locks on their cells. What happens next is crucial.”
Dryden looked at the screen again. Three security men were down. Rebecca was slumped forward, her face mercifully out of view to the camera. Both Audrey and Sandra had entered that cell by then and were holding Rachel, turning her away from Rebecca’s body.
“The two of them sit with the girl for over three minutes,” Gaul said, “while the other surviving prisoners—four in all—finish freeing themselves and gather the weapons. These four trade gunfire with security teams in the hallway, men who are now firing live ammo, and over the course of the three minutes, those women are dropped one by one. By eleven thirty-four and twenty-eight seconds, the only prisoners alive are Audrey and Sandra and Rachel. The two women make no move toward the remaining shotguns, though some still have shells in them. They continue to sit with Rachel, calming her and speaking continuously into her ear. They do this even as security advances in the corridor.”
The slideshow ended. It reset to the black-text-on-white frame it had begun with, and stayed there.
“What follows is later reported as a gas-line explosion on base,” Gaul said. “Maybe you remember seeing it on the news. Sixty-seven dead, burned to the point of requiring dental ID. But there is no explosion. No one is burned. What happens instead is that, without warning, the man leading the security advance in the hallway suddenly turns and opens fire into his own ranks. As they fall back in confusion, he fires his last shell into his own head. Seconds later another officer appears to suffer the same inexplicable breakdown. Like the first man, he fires on his own people until he has only one shot left and then uses it on himself. By this point the chaos is absolute. No one is thinking about the prisoners in the containment room. Everyone’s focus is on getting away. The violence spreads outside the building within the next minute. Footage from over a hundred cameras on base will later show how it unfolds. How the effect only ever touches one man at a time, jumping from one to the next at an interval of two to three seconds. It passes like a wave from Building Sixteen to the nearest gate out of the Fort Detrick campus, a quarter mile away. All sentries in its path are killed. All personnel at the outer gate are killed. This entire time, cameras in the holding block show Audrey and Sandra still sitting there with Rachel. Arms around her. Speaking into her ear. Talking her through it. Lip-reading analysis would later show them saying the word shoot several dozen times.”
Gaul had been staring at the text screen on the monitor. Now he turned back to Dryden.
“When it was over, four minutes later,” Gaul said, “there was no one to stop the three of them from taking a vehicle and simply driving away. Footage shows Rachel catatonic as Sandra carries her from the building. Brain-locked, I imagine, at what she’d seen in the cell, and what the two women had then made her do. Around the time they buzzed the gate open on their way out, Rachel did probably the only thing that was of her own free will. She made Holly write a third message, hiding in her office like everyone else on base.”
Dryden turned to Holly. The last sheet of notebook paper was just visible, crushed and twisted in one hand. She released it and handed it to him without looking up. Dryden saw what it said even before he’d smoothed the page.
Your fault.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN