Sean Slater - The survivor

He closed his eyes, attempting to suppress the frantic blur, and flinched when a door slammed shut.

To the south-east, where the gym was located, a gaggle of paramedics exited the building. They came in twos, each pair rolling a gurney. On the gurneys were victims, some as young as thirteen.

The paramedics hurried in different directions to many waiting ambulances that were parked all over the school’s front lawn. Striker watched one girl being loaded up. She was about fifteen. Dripping with a redness that managed to seep through the medics’ blankets. Her eyes were out of focus, her face slack and without colour, as if there were no more blood in her body to redden her cheeks. The rear door of the ambulance closed and it accelerated away.

‘That should be it,’ a nearby voice said.

Striker turned and spotted a row of men snaking out of the building. It was a parade of combat boots and ballistic helmets and heavy weaponry — MP5 machine guns, sniper rifles, and close-quarter combat shotguns. The Emergency Response Team. All wore black padded uniforms, covered with dark grey, reinforced-ceramic plates. The lead, Zulu Five-One, was Tyrone Takuto, a Eurasian cop Striker knew well. Takuto had a distant look in his eyes, detectable even behind the protective goggles.

Striker met his stare. ‘Any more kids in there?’

‘Just bodies.’ Takuto spoke with machine-like precision, without emotion. ‘All the injured have been evacuated and all the uninjured are being staged in the gym. Dogmen are running the halls right now, giving it a final clear — just to be sure we got every one of them.’ He glanced back at the school. ‘There’s a lot of bodies in there still

… a lot of bodies.’

Felicia stepped forward, and for the first time, she looked shaken. ‘How bad is it?’

Takuto just kept looking at the school. ‘Things like this make you fear sleeping,’ he murmured.

Striker understood him completely. Night terrors.

‘How many?’ he asked.

‘Last I heard we had eleven confirmed dead, over thirty wounded.’

Striker scanned the line of ERT members. Each one of them looked exhausted, like they’d just been on a ten-day mission, not a two-hour school clearing.

‘What else you find in there?’ he asked.

‘Just carnage. Pretty much what you’d expect.’

‘Any traps, any explosives?’

‘IEDs? No, none.’

‘Not even a homemade rig?’

‘None yet. But the dogs are still searching.’

Striker thought this over. No booby traps. Unusual. IEDs — or Improvised Explosive Devices — were the norm nowadays. And that was mainly because of an Active Shooter’s intent. Terror wasn’t the only goal here: inflicting the maximum number of casualties was a high priority. The more carnage, the more coverage. The better the headlines.

The media spotlight was everything.

Striker watched Takuto tell his boys to take five, then strip off his ballistic helmet and goggles. He used his forearm to mop the sweat from his brow, then sat down on a kerb and leaned back against the cream stucco of the school’s outer wall. Striker was about to ask him more questions when Takuto looked across the parking lot and sneered.

‘Look at that prick.’

Striker glanced back and spotted Deputy Chief Laroche in the White Whale. The man was brushing his hair back over his head and checking out his teeth in the mirror. It wasn’t until the three media vans pulled up — one for BCTV, the other two Global — that Laroche finally lumbered out of the vehicle.

The mob of reporters rushed towards the school, microphones and video cameras ready. They reached the yellow crime scene tape and stopped hard, bunching together, almost crawling over one another. There was excitement in their faces, a palpable buzz in the air. Children had been slaughtered in the safety of their school.

Story of the Century.

Without thinking, Striker neared the mass. Watched the reporters fixing their make-up. Positioning themselves for the cameras. Making sure they got their best angle.

Moments later, Deputy Chief Laroche strutted in from the north. He marched stoically up to the crime scene tape, his pressed hat held gently in both hands, rim down — just the way Striker was sure he’d practised in front of the mirror a hundred times. The lineless perfection of Laroche’s hair told anyone who cared to notice that he never wore the damn hat. It was just a necessary prop, a part of the intended image.

Striker listened to the beginning of the speech, the Deputy’s voice dripping with cosmetic grief, his words laced with heavy pre-planned pauses, and Striker wondered if the man had taken the same long pauses while sucking back his Starbucks sandwich in the car.

‘I was on scene in minutes,’ the Deputy said.

And when one of the reporters asked him if he’d ever faced an Active Shooter before, Laroche looked him in the eye, offered a steely expression, and reminded the group of his wartime experience, being carefully vague so as to never really explain what he did during the war, and adding at the last moment: ‘There were children, dammit, children — how couldn’t we respond?’

It was too much for Striker to take, and he knew he had to do one of two things — expose the man for the fraud he was and make a scene in front of the media, or remove himself from the situation. Common sense and compassion told him that the last thing the families needed at this time was a police drama. So he gritted his teeth and turned away. With a heavy heart, he marched through the school’s front doorway and stepped back into the carnage that this day’s insanity had wrought.

An hour later, Striker finished helping the paramedics check the last of the unresponsive bodies. Then he made his way to the boys’ changing room. It was just after twelve noon. He stood alone at one of the sinks, looked around. Everything in the room felt too small — the green lockers, the yellow benches, the white hand-dryers on the wall.

His body shivered uncontrollably. His suit jacket was gone, left behind somewhere in the chaos — he’d draped it over one of the exposed children — and his shirt was so saturated with blood it looked more red than white, sticking to his skin wherever it was stained.

The blood wasn’t his, and that pained him, filled him with a strange revulsion. More bodies had been discovered, some by the dogs, some by police. Some of the wounded, in an effort to hide from the gunmen, had hidden themselves from help as well, and it had been their demise.

Striker had done his best to save them all — the wounded, the dying — and to his credit, his actions might have saved a few lives. He understood that. Deep in his heart, he understood that. But more of the wounded had died than been saved.

A lot more.

Felicia’s earlier words now haunted him: ‘We should go back.’

And he wondered if she had been right. After all, what had they gained by pursuing Red Mask?

The horrors of the cafeteria still filled his mind. The heat of the gun as it kicked in his hands; the hot smell of gunsmoke; the shrill cries of the teenagers.

They would be with him forever.

It made him think of Courtney. Again. Word had come in through the student grapevine. She’d been seen by friends at the mall, but it was Metrotown, not Oakridge. She was safe and unhurt, and by the sounds of things completely unaware of the school shootings.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

With trembling hands, he reached down and snatched the BlackBerry from his belt. The screen was smeared with sticky redness. He wiped it on his trousers. During the past half-hour, he had called her ten times, but she had yet to return his call. And he was getting mad. He dialled her number yet again, and this time it rang through to voicemail: