‘Help me. My arm – I can’t feel my arm!’
Deafening screams, screams so loud they threatened to break eardrums. As the mass pressed back from the exit doors, several people stumbled – one elderly man went down under a column of feet. He screamed as his leg bone snapped. Only through sheer strength, superhuman strength, it seemed, did two young men, maybe grandsons, manage to pry apart the crowd and get the man to his feet. He was pale and soon unconscious.
Two more shots, very close to the exit doors now.
The crowd surged away from the doors and toward the windows. Everyone was insane now, possessed with fury and panic. Slugging each other, trying to move back, thinking maybe, if anybody was thinking at all, that if they were not in the front line the bodies in front of them would take the bullets and the gunman would run out of ammunition or be shot by the police before he could kill more.
And moving relentlessly toward the only escape: windows.
Ardel heard a loud snap in her shoulder and her vision filled with yellow light, and pain, horrific pain, shot from her jaw to the base of her spine. A scream, lost amid the other screams. She couldn’t even turn to look. Her head was sandwiched between one man’s shoulder and another’s chest.
‘Ardie!’ Sally called.
But Ardel had no idea where her friend was.
The voice on the PA – it wasn’t the author’s: he was long gone – cried, ‘Get away from the door. He’s almost here!’
A series of crashes, breaking glass, behind her and the mob surged in that direction, Ardel with them. Not that she had any choice: her feet were off the ground. Finally Ardel could turn her head and she saw attendees throwing chairs through the windows. Then silhouettes of desperate people climbing to the window frames, some cutting hands and arms on jutting shards of glass. They hesitated, then jumped.
She recalled looking out of the window earlier. It was three stories above the shoreline – you’d have to leap far out to hit the water, and even then it seemed there were rocks and concrete abutments just below the surface, some bristling with rebar steel rods.
People were looking down and screaming, perhaps seeing their friends and family hit the rocks.
‘No! I’m not jumping!’ Ardel shouted to no one in particular. And tried to use her good arm to scrabble in the other direction. She’d take her chance with the gunman.
But she had no say in the matter, no say at all. The writhing mass pressed closer and closer to the windows, where some people were hesitating and others pushing the reluctant ones down and climbing on their backs or chests or bellies to launch themselves into the questionable safety of the stony shoreline below.
‘No, no, no!’ Ardel gasped, as the cluster around her mounted the fallen bodies and made it to the sill. She couldn’t look down, couldn’t steady herself, couldn’t even find a safe place to land, if there was such a place.
‘Stop it!’ she shouted to the crowd.
But then she was tumbling through space, curiously grateful, in those two or three seconds of free fall, to be out of the constrictor grasp of the surging crowd.
Then a jarring, breath-wrenching thud.
But she wasn’t badly injured. She’d landed on top of the man who’d jumped just before her. He lay, unconscious, on the outcrop of rock, the right side of his face torn open, jaw and cheek and arm shattered. She’d even landed more or less on her feet, and slid back on her butt, avoiding what would have been a catastrophic, torturous collision of her shattered shoulder and the cracked rock.
A massive spray of pungent salt water flared over Ardel and those around her, sprawled and sitting and crawling on the stone, cold as ice.
Screams from the victims, roaring from the water.
She rose, unsteadily, looking around, clutching her shoulder.
By now the police would be swarming the hall, and the gunman shot or arrested. She’d just stay here and—
‘Ah!’ Ardel barked a scream as one of the falling patrons landed directly behind her, propelling her off the rock. She stumbled forward and fell into the raging water.
A wave was now receding, pulling her in the undertow, fast, away from the shore.
She inhaled at the pain and got only water. Retching, coughing, looking back for help, looking back to see how far she was from shore. Fifteen feet, then twenty, more. The chill stole her breath and her body began to shut down.
She glanced at her useless right arm, floating limp in the water.
Not that it mattered: even if it had worked perfectly fine, there was nothing she could do. Ardel Hopkins couldn’t swim a stroke.
CHAPTER 32
Antioch March had returned from the Bay View Center and was sitting in his Honda parked about five blocks away from the venue, near the Sardine Factory, the wonderful restaurant featured in Play Misty For Me, the harrowing movie by Clint Eastwood. It was one of March’s favorite flicks, about a beautiful woman obsessed with a radio disk jockey. Psychotically obsessed.
It was really about the Get, of course.
Anything to seize what she desired.
He stretched and reflected on the plan he’d just put into place. It’d gone quite well.
Forty minutes earlier he’d carted a Monterey Bay Aquarium shopping bag along Cannery Row, then slipped behind a restaurant near the Bay View Center. He’d changed into his ‘uniform’, militia chic, he joked to himself – camo, bandana, gloves, mask, boots. Then, ten minutes after the self-help author had started his reading, time for rampage.
He’d slipped out from the hiding spot and, firing his Glock, walked closer to the Bay View Center, aiming in the direction of people but not actually at them. Everyone scattered. Everyone screamed.