Chương 123: Littleton Monsters (04/20/1999)

DATE: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 LOCATION: Littleton, Colorado | Columbine High School LOCAL TIME: 11: 14 AM MST A high school hallway smells exactly the same no matter what timeline you are in. Floor wax, cheap aerosol deodorant, and the frantic, vibrating hum of adolescent anxiety. I leaned against the brick wall near the west wing entrance, wearing the drab, unremarkable polyester uniform of a substitute School Resource Officer.

At twenty-three years old, I looked just young enough to blend into the background, and just bored enough to be completely ignored by the hundreds of students moving past me toward the cafeteria. But I wasn't bored. My heart rate was resting at a perfectly flat fifty-five beats per minute. I was a coiled spring, waiting for a clock I had been watching for ten years to strike zero.

"Dick," I murmured, my lips barely moving. The bone-conduction earpiece pressed against my skull relayed my voice to the servers sitting safe in the San Diego Arcology.

"Status on the external grid."

"The perimeter is contained, Boss," Richard Marcinko's gravelly voice rumbled in my ear. Three time zones away, the old SEAL was sitting inside his 34-foot Airstream Excella trailer, wearing an Aegis-1 VR rig. As a digital ghost inside the Silver Chord, his avatar was floating directly above the school's blueprints, pulling in real-time surveillance.

"My Red Cell guys triggered the 'software glitch' at the Denver FAA routing center. All local news helicopters are temporarily grounded. And we're currently flooding the local police dispatch relays with heavy static interference. Nobody gets a camera on this."

"Good," I whispered.

"We don't give them an audience." I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second. I wasn't in Colorado anymore. I was back on Stage 12 in Burbank. I was nine years old, wearing Kevlar and a domino mask, walking through the taped outlines of a soundstage set. I ran the geometry in my head. Three steps to the fire extinguisher. Seven steps to the choke point. Strip the weapon. Sweep the leg. I opened my eyes. 11: 17 AM. Through the glass of the double doors at the end of the hall, I saw them.

Two figures wearing long black trench coats, carrying heavy, sagging duffel bags. They weren't hardened terrorists. They weren't trained operators. They were just two angry, broken kids who had convinced themselves that inflicting maximum pain was the only way to make the world remember their names. In my original timeline, their faces were plastered across every magazine cover and television screen on Earth. They birthed a horrific psychological contagion that poisoned the next three decades.

Today, they were going to die in absolute, suffocating obscurity.

"Target acquisition," Marcinko's voice dropped into a flat, tactical cadence.

"Two hostiles, entering the west wing. Heart rates are spiking. They're hot, Chad." I pushed off the wall. I didn't reach for the 9mm sidearm holstered on my hip. A gunfight creates noise, and noise creates legends. I reached up and pulled the red fire alarm lever on the wall. RIIIIIING. The chaotic, deafening screech of the alarm shattered the hallway. Students immediately stopped, confused for a second, before the training kicked in.

The corridor flooded with bodies moving away from the west wing, pushing past me in a frantic wave. I moved against the current. I didn't run; I glided. The two boys pushed through the double doors, dropping the heavy duffel bags containing the propane bombs. They pulled two pump-action shotguns and a TEC-9 from beneath their coats. They looked around, their eyes wide, pumped full of adrenaline and manufactured rage. They were looking for the screaming victims they had played out in their heads.

Instead, they saw an empty corridor filling rapidly with panic. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. I hit the glass casing of the emergency panel with my elbow, shattering it instantly. I pulled the heavy, red CO2 fire extinguisher from its cradle. I didn't throw it. I pulled the pin and squeezed the trigger, sweeping the nozzle in a wide, aggressive arc. A massive, freezing cloud of thick white chemical smoke exploded down the hallway. The boys panicked.

The script in their heads hadn't accounted for blindness. The taller one fired blindly into the white haze, the deafening roar of the shotgun tearing through a row of metal lockers. I stepped into the smoke. I let the sensory deprivation swallow me. This wasn't a high school hallway anymore; this was the kill house at Fort Bragg. I appeared out of the fog directly behind the first shooter. He didn't even have time to turn his head.

I clamped my left hand down on the receiver of his shotgun, pinning the pump action so it couldn't cycle, and violently wrenched the weapon upward and out of his grip. In the same fluid motion, I tossed the weapon, sending it sliding down the linoleum floor, far out of reach. Before his brain could process that he was disarmed, I swept my right leg hard against the back of his knees. He collapsed backward. I rode his momentum down to the floor, driving my knee gently but immovably into his chest, pinning his arms.

He gasped, the wind knocked completely out of him. The second shooter spun around, aiming his weapon at the swirling smoke where his partner had just disappeared. I stood up from the pinned boy, the white fog parting around my shoulders. I held my hands out, empty, palms facing forward. I wasn't holding a fighting stance. I was standing between the weapon and the terrified student on the floor.

"It's over, Eric," I said, my voice cutting through the ringing alarm. It was the exact same flat, resonant tone I had used a hundred times on the Burbank soundstage.

"Nobody else gets hurt today." His hands were shaking violently. The gun wavered. He looked at me, his eyes wide and panicked. The illusion of his power was evaporating, but the raw, unburned adrenaline was making him twitch. He took a jerky step backward, his knuckles white around the grip. The weapon's barrel trembled, tracing erratic figure-eights in the dissipating fog.

"They need to know!" he screamed, his voice cracking, sounding exactly like the desperate teenager he was.

"They need to see us!"

"They won't," I said, taking a slow, measured step forward to close the gap he'd just made.

"The cameras are off. The news isn't coming. There is no audience, Eric. It's just us."

"Stay back!" he yelled. His finger convulsed against the trigger guard. A half-ounce of pressure was all it would take, just a nervous spasm.

"You want to be a monster," I continued, keeping my eyes locked dead on his, projecting the absolute zero of a man who had cleared the rooftops of Mogadishu, "because you think monsters get respect. But look at me." I didn't blink. I let him see the void.

"I've fought real monsters," I whispered, stripping away the cinematic bravado for a heavy, exhausted truth.

"And they always lose." I walked right up to the barrel of his weapon. He flinched, his breath hitching in his throat, but he didn't fire. I placed my bare hand on the hot metal of the barrel and slowly, firmly, pushed it down toward the floor.

"Don't do this," I said softly, the tactical aggression dissolving into a heavy, tragic pity.

"Just be a kid who had a bad day. We can fix a bad day." The contagion broke. The realization of what he was actually standing in the middle of—the mundane, deafening reality of a high school hallway, devoid of glory—crushed him. The adrenaline left him in a sudden, sickening rush. The gun slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the linoleum. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the floor, pulling his knees to his chest and sobbing into his hands. I let out a slow, controlled breath.

I knelt beside him. I didn't reach for handcuffs. I wrapped an arm around his shaking shoulders, holding him securely against the cold floor.

"Dick," I whispered into the comms.

"Targets neutralized. Weapons secured. The bombs are still in the bags by the door."

"Copy that, Boss," Marcinko replied, the digital tension leaving his voice.

"Local SWAT has breached the east wing. They will be at your location in ninety seconds. Get out of there." I pulled a pair of heavy, unmarked zip-ties from my pocket and secured both boys' wrists. I gathered the weapons, placing them in a neat pile away from the bags. When the SWAT team rounded the corner, rifles raised and tactical lights cutting through the dissipating white smoke, they found the two would-be killers sitting quietly against the lockers, already subdued.

"Resource Officer!" the SWAT leader barked, lowering his weapon.

"Are there any casualties?"

"Zero casualties, sir," I reported, standing up and giving a crisp, professional nod.

"The perimeter is secure." In the ensuing chaos—the bomb squad clearing the bags, the paramedics checking the boys—I simply took a step back. I faded into the periphery of the flashing red and blue lights. I walked out a side emergency exit, melting into the chaotic crowd of evacuated students in the parking lot, and then slipped into the tree line. I pulled the earpiece out and tossed the cheap uniform jacket into a nearby dumpster. There would be no magazine covers.

There would be no manifestos published on the evening news. To the world, April 20, 1999, would be remembered as a strange, highly localized police brief about two troubled kids who were arrested before anything bad happened. The timeline was clean. The contagion was dead. I walked toward my rental car, checking my watch. I had a flight to catch back to San Francisco. The board was clear, but the real war was just getting started.