mg02.html

Down the Barrel of a Gun

Filename: mg02.html
© 1998 Meaghan Good
Length: 2,941

Genre: Fiction
Description: Toddy Hale's an ordinary girl leading an ordinary life at an ordinary school in an ordinary town. Then Madalyn Harris steps in with a shotgun and starts firing. And Toddy sacrifices slmost everything to keep her little sister from being murdered. This is the first time I've written something like this so bear with me people.

Down the Barrel of a Gun

"Okay. I am handing back your science tests," Mrs. Schofield announced. "I am proud to report that most of you did very well."
I took my test and passed the rest on. I glanced at my grade. A 94%. Not bad, not bad at all. Science is not my forte. Usually I get a B- or C+ average in that class. A 94 was just over an A minus--not bad at all.I scanned my answers. What do the spindle fibers pull to the opposite sides of the cell during mitosis? Dammit, I knew that! I had put cytoplasm. The right answer was chromosomes. Oh, well.
My name is Toddy Hale. Actually my real name is Zephronia Victorine, but please don’t tell anyone. I’m thirteen and in eighth grade at Pella Academy in Pella, Pennsylvania. I have longish, curly strawberry-blonde hair and eyes that are brown in some lights and hazel in others. I also have freckles and I am short.I hate both of those characteristics.
I live in one of the more well-to-do neighborhoods of Pella, a town of 32,000. My mother is CEO of Pella Real Estate and my father is a doctor. I guess their marriage is working out pretty good. They have five kids, plus me. I have three sisters and two brothers. All attend Pella Academy, which is a school for kindergarten through eighth grade.
Abbie is six, Brock is eight, Ashleigh is nine, Manross is eleven, and Naomi is twelve.
My three best friends are as follows: Miranda Stewart, Brandy O’Connell, and Kevin Hall. I know it’s weird, having a boy for a best friend. People say we’re going out, but Kevin and I are just friends. All three of them have Mrs. Schofield’s science class with me and we sat in a cluster in the back.
The lunch bell rang. We collected our junk and beat it. I caught Naomi in the hall with her friends.
"What did you get on your test?" Kevin asked me. "I got an eighty-nine."
"I got a ninety-four," I replied.
"Way to go!" Miranda and I exchanged high-fives. "I got a seventy-two."
"That’s too bad," Brandy said. She’s the scholar among us. "I got a hundred."
"What do you think of that poem we have to memorize for English?" Kevin asked.
"The Owl and the Pussycat?"
"Yeah."
"It’s all right, I guess. A bit babyish."
Kevin took his copy of The Owl and the Pussycat out of his pocket, deftly folded it into a paper airplane, and threw it in the air. "Would you look at that! Poetry in motion."
We were still laughing when we got our lunches. "What is this shit?" I asked of our food. "It looks like some combination of radioactive waste, nuked plastic, and latex."
"I think it’s scrambled eggs," Kevin said. "But you’re right. They do look rubbery." He gave the eggs an experimental poke with his fork.
"This bacon," Miranda said, "is actually eggshells and cardboard, melted together. Then they crimp the stuff a little with a curling iron while it’s still soft, fry them to a crisp, and paint them brown."
"And the black specks on the bacon are burnt lice," Brandy went on. We were playing the Gross-Out Game. It’s a great thing to play with cafeteria food.
"This bread," I chimed in, "Is corrugated cardboard, torn to shreds and dyed white, glued together and toasted in the oven. And this white stuff spread on the cardboard is not actually butter or cream cheese but pus from smallpox victims."
"And we wonder what’s that crap in the jars in the school bomb shelter!" Miranda laughed.
There was a sudden movement behind me. I turned around and found myself looking down the barrel of a gun.
She was shorter than I but stockier. Her hair was long and loose and dark brown, straight and not exactlyremarkable. Her eyes were brown and expressionless as she leveled the gun at me. Madalyn Harris.
Two weeks ago she had been expelled for bringing a machete to school. Now she was back, and carrying a loaded shotgun.
The entire cafeteria--kindergarten on up--all gasped as one. A second-grader in the corner screamed, and Madalyn leveled her gun at the boy. Then she calmly took the weapon and began to shoot.
She shot at random, circling the room with her aim. The blood. Blood was everywhere. No one at my table was touched as we all ducked underneath and we were too close anyway. I heard the screams andI heard the cries and I heard the panic.
This was not happening. This was not happening. I had read about the school shootings in the newspaper. I had shuddered to think of them, then turned to the comics and forgot they ever happened. Now look at me. Me and my family, me and my friends, caught in reality. This was not happening... oh, yes it was.
At the time I did not fear for myself. But I was afraid, terribly afraid. Abbie and the kindergartners were directly in front of Madalyn a hundred yards away. They were the most likely target. Abbie. My sister.
I reached out and grabbed Kevin’s hand. I felt Naomi take my arm. We huddled together like bats under the table. Naomi and I looked at each other and we were thinking of Abbie, of Ashleigh, of Manross, of Brock, caught in the carnage outside. We were safe for the moment. They were not.
"The hell with this," I shouted over the gunfire. "I’m getting Abbie."
"I’m going with you!" Naomi shouted back.
"Don’t!" Kevin cried. "You’ll get killed." He grabbed my hand and held tight.
"Well if she’s going to die I’ll just have to die with her." I wrenched free of Kevin’s hand. "If I don’t come back, tell my family I love them."
"You can’t do this," Kevin said desperately. "Come on, Toddy, you can’t just bring yourself out there to die..."
I pulled away. Naomi and I crept out from under the table.
The gunfire was endless. It had been going on for nearly ninety seconds now. I couldn't remember whether or not she'd stopped to reload.
As I slithered under the nearest table, I was vaguely aware of Brandy calling me back. A shot that seemed to be directly aimed for me and lodged in the sole of my shoe. Thank heaven for platform sneakers, I thought.
"Let’s split up," I told Naomi. "Get Brock." She nodded, white and shaking but in control.
I started out for the next table and then I was hit. The bullet hit in my arm but I felt no pain. Abruptly, I stood up and saw Naomi under a table not far away, screaming. Madalyn faced me with hate in her eyes."Go ahead," she said coldly. "Start running."
"Put down the gun," I said.
She took aim. I stood tall. "Maddy, put it down."
"You shut the fuck up, you bitch."
"Come on, put it down. This killing isn’t gonna solve anything."
She fired.
The shot went well over my head. She had deliberately missed. Clutching my injured arm which hurt very badly now, I looked over at the kindergarten corner. I saw my sister and there was blood on her face.
"Abbie!" I shouted, and started to leap over the table. But then I got shot again, this time in the leg. Madalyn was serious now. She shot to kill.
I sucked my breath through gritted teeth, making a hissing sound. Madalyn did not shoot at me again. She calmly reloaded her gun and aimed it at Abbie. "You move one step and she dies."
Well, that’s a chance I’ll just have to take. I vaulted over the table. Madalyn shot.
I heard a cry that was my own. I heard Abbie’s high-pitched shriek. The bullet just barely missed her. It lodged into the cork bulletin board instead. Clambering over the tables, dragging my useless leg behind me, I pulled myself over to Abbie. She was kneeling on the ground, whimpering. Madalyn took aim and fired at her head.
It did not reach Abbie. I pounced on my sister, slamming her to the ground. Abbie screamed and so did I.
The bullet lodged in my back, just above my rear end, in my spine. The worst thing about it was that I knew I had been hit but I felt nothing. I remember screaming and struggling to get off Abbie, but I could not move my legs.
It was terrible. Worse, much worse, than the pain of the bullet. As if half of me was no longer there. Blood trickled out of my back and my leg, but I felt nothing. It was if the area from my lower back down had been cut off. I turned a little to make sure it was still there and it was. But it was like an illusion. It was horrifying.
Pushing and pulling with my arms, I managed to drag my body off my sister who was unmistakably alive. Then I felt a pair of cold, hateful eyes boring holes into my back.
Madalyn was standing directly above me, and she had just loaded her weapon and was aiming it at me.Then suddenly she swung the barrel around to point at Abbie. "I think I’ll kill her first. Make you watch."
She stepped a little closer. In a desperate effort to stop her, I grabbed her foot.
She tripped and went sprawling on the ground. But it wasn’t enough. Unlike in the movies, Madalyn’s gun did not go skidding out of her hand across the linoleum. She clutched it tightly even as she lay on the ground. I somehow summoned the energy to drag myself on top of Abbie before Madalyn could get up.
"Go ahead," I said. "Kill me. Put me out of my misery. But you can’t get Abbie. Not Abbie, not her. Go ahead and kill me. I’m probably going to die anyway." Shoot me, torture me, kill me, chop me up and serve me as hamburger. See if I care.
It seemed an appropriate time to say a prayer. I was an Atheist but weren’t there a lot of stories of non-believers who suddenly became insanely religious on their deathbeds?
Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
I braced myself. She stared at me and for a split second I thought I saw something other than hate in her eyes. "Shit on your sister." And she turned away.
Naomi crawled over to me, dragging Brock. "Are you okay?"
"Okay?" I snapped. "I just got shot! Of course I’m not okay!"
"Where’d you get hit?"
"Right through my spine. I’m paralyzed."
She went white and almost dropped my brother, then shouted something that I could not here.
The police came in, suddenly, scores of them. They were followed by a troop of paramedics hauling stretchers. I got to watch the drama, albeit from a on-my-stomach point of view.
Fifteen police officers surrounded Madalyn and she found herself looking down the barrels of fifteen semi-automatic somethings. She looked at them with a mildly disgusted expression on her face, then threwdown her weapon. It was all over.
Immediately the police swarmed on her. I lay on my back and felt the blood and the spinal fluid, my life liquid, go trickling out of me. Death hovered nearby. Watching. Waiting. I didn’t care. Abbie was safe and that was all that mattered.
"Hasta la vista, world." My arms tightened around my sister. I melted into the floor and passed out.
"Will she be all right?" my mother’s voice said anxiously.
"It’s too early to say now, ma’am," someone replied. "She’s lost a lot of blood. And I don’t think she’ll everbe able to walk again."
"WAIT!" I wanted to shout. "I’m alive, very much alive! Only I seem to be frozen!" But I could not move.
"We’ll have to amputate her leg," the voice continued. "There’s a lot of gangrene and the infection could spread."
What leg? I struggled to open my eyes. They did open, finally, and I found myself staring blankly at my mother and a woman in a white coat. And they stared back at me.
I tried to talk but I couldn’t. It hurt too much and I felt as if I wasn’t really there, like my body was somewhere else. I couldn’t bear it anymore I shut my eyes and fell asleep.
"I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Hale. We’ve done all we could. It’s hard to tell, with kids..."
"She is such a heroine..."
Voices. Drifting lazily in and out of me. Snatches of sentences. Most were spoken in soft, worried, sad voices. Some I recognized. Tears. I heard crying, I heard whispers, but mostly it was sleep. Soft, beautiful,heavenly sleep.
The sudden reentry into consciousness startled me and it hurt. I found myself looking into a television camera and microphone. "Miss Hale. Do you have a statement?"
"Huh?"
"Leave her alone," a doctor said. The TV people backed off ever so slightly. The doctor motioned to the door. "Out." They left.
I felt Mom hugging me and I heard her crying.
"Come off it, Mom. I’m all right." I used my one good arm to pull the sheet off me. A sudden hand pushed it back.
"Miss, you don’t want to see this," someone said--I don’t know who they were.
"I’ll have to see it sometime." I yanked it off... and screamed.
My leg, below the knee, was gone. It had been shot in the calf and now all that was there was a stump.Had they amputated my leg as I slept? After the first scream I was silent, just staring speechlessly at my half a leg. It’s truly astonishing to look for a body part you expect to see and discover it is gone. Cautiously I reached out and touched the end of my stump. I poked it hard, but there was no feeling there.
I was scared to death.
Abbie began to cry. "It’s all my fault."
I dragged myself to the edge of the bed and tried to comfort her, but she was inconsolable. Suddenly I was struck by how beautiful she was, with those big brown eyes and the long shiny brown hair that fell down her back like a sheet.
Exhausted, I fell back against the pillows. "I’ll live."
"You’ll live," the doctor echoed. "Yes, you’ll make it."
"I won’t walk again, though."
"You won’t walk again."
"I won’t walk. I won’t run."
"That’s right."
"Shit happens."
How did I feel? Odd. Shocked, stunned, a little sad. I didn’t cry about it--I don’t cry easily. Generally I find that cussing has more weight than tears.
My life flashed before my eyes. I could see myself beforehand. Playing soccer. I was always a great forward. I remembered the game I played at age ten where I had scored the winning goal and sent my team to state. And volleyball. I didn’t serve that great but I could always be counted to volley well. Ice hockey in the winter, the bright orange puck gliding wherever I sent it. In track I was a good sprinter. And agreat long-distance swimmer.
No more of that. But I didn’t regret what I had done. I regretted that I had to do it. I regretted that it turned out this way. But I’d do it again if I could.
The details came. Sixteen kids were killed. One was only two, the son of a teacher. The oldest was fourteen. Another two children, not counting me, were both hospitalized in critical condition.
"Is she in jail?" I asked weakly, after the news was over and TV was off and darkness surrounded me.
"She’s in jail. She’s on trial for sixteen counts of capital murder and three counts of assault with battery. And if those other two kids die, then she’ll get more charges of murder," Mom said. "You’ll probably have to testify."
I didn’t want to testify. I had testified already. Not to the court but to the nation, on television. Besides, I wanted no part in condemning this kid. Because of her, I would never walk again. She had killed sixteen people and nearly killed Abbie and myself. But I could not hate her.
"If she is convicted, what sentence will she get?"
"Probably the death penalty. The state of Pennsylvania does give the death penalty to juveniles fourteen or over who are convicted of multiple counts of murder." Mom smiled. She thought I would be glad. But I wasn’t.
"Oh, Mom, they shouldn’t do that," I said in dismay.
She looked puzzled. "I should think you would want it. Why don’t you?"
Why didn’t I? I shrugged. "I don’t, okay? I don’t hate her."
I was deemed to be in good health and released. Things were never the same at school. Well, I suppose they were. I mean, seventeen kids died as a result of what happened. But the rest of us? We were still joking around at lunch, still complaining about access homework, still having a load of extracirriculars. We were still living.
Life went on.