Solitude Creek

‘Listen! There’s a guy with a gun. Outside. Coming this way!’ He pulled the door shut but it swung open, thanks to the taped-down locks.

People were rising to their feet.

Another shot, two more. More screams from outside.

‘Jesus Lord,’ Ardel whispered.

‘Ardie, what’s going on?’

One man was on his feet, a big guy. Former military, it seemed. He, too, looked out. ‘There he is! He’s coming this way. He’s got an automatic!’

Cries of ‘No!’, ‘Jesus!’, ‘Call nine one one!’

Several people ran for the emergency exit. ‘No, not that way!’ someone called. ‘He’s out there. I think he’s shooting people outside.’

‘Get back!’

A brilliant security light came on. No! Ardel thought. All the easier to see his target.

The author didn’t say, ‘Stay calm,’ or anything else. He leaped up and pushed some attendees out of the way, running for the lobby. A dozen people raced after him. They jammed the doorway. One woman screamed and fell back, clutching a horribly twisted arm.

Another shot from the direction of the lobby. Most of those who’d run that way returned to the main hall.

Ardel, crying, grabbed Sally’s hand and they tried to move away from the exit doors. But it was impossible. They were trapped in a sweating knot of people, muscle to muscle.

‘Calm down! Get back!’ Ardel cried, her voice choking. Sally was sobbing too, as were dozens of others.

‘Where’re the police?’

‘Get back, get off me …’

‘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.