Stephen Hunter - Soft target

A few hands came up.

“I’m going to take you back there”-the lavatory was in the rear of the room-“but we have to go on tippy-toes.”

“I don’t like tippy-toes,” said Larry. “It’s for babies.”

Lavelva was the day care service coordinator, afternoon shift, second floor. She had seventeen unruly kids, three through eight, under her charge. This was her first day! Goddamn!

She wasn’t sure what was going on. She was trapped in the day care center, a large room full of beat-up toys and pissed-on dolls, on the second floor. About an hour ago, she’d heard the shooting-loud sharp cracks, echoing eerily along the walls, the nooks and crannies of the mall, very frightening-and herded her kids to the back of the room and told them to them lie down. She went to the doorway and watched as the crowded corridor outside seemed to drain itself in a couple of minutes. People ran crazily, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting, they have machine guns.” She knew there was no way she could get seventeen kids through that mob and that the kids would be knocked down, separated, even hurt. Where was her supervisor? Mrs. Watney, head of mall day care, didn’t answer her calls or her texts. Maybe she’d raced out the door too. She tried her mom; couldn’t get through. She tried her brother Ralphie installing carpets, even though he’d told her never to call while he was on the job. It didn’t matter; couldn’t get through. She tried 911. No response. She was alone.

Lavelva knew two things immediately: the first was that she’d be much better holding the children here until someone in authority-a cop, a fireman, someone-came with instructions, and second that if there were men with guns around, she had to have a weapon. In her universe, inner-city Minneapolis, Twenty-Eighth and Washington, it was a tough life and all the young men carried. She’d seen them lying on the streets, bled out, eyes blank. That was the world. There was no other. All the newspapers were always jabbering about the tragedy of it, blah blah and blah, but words like tragedy held little meaning for Lavelva; hers was a more practical turn of mind, and it had to do with dealing with what was instead of dreaming about what could be.

She herded the kids back to the rear of the room and sent Linda in to do peepee and the other one. Suzanne, Mindy, Jessica, and Marsha went too. In fact all the girls went.

“Everybody gets a turn. No shoving. Stand in line. Make Miss Lavelva proud,” she instructed, knowing these passive little white girls would do exactly that. She couldn’t go with them, of course; policy was that no childcare coordinator could be alone in a bathroom with a child of either sex. But perhaps, on a day such as today, the rules had gone out the window. Still, it was better to obey policy, no matter what was happening outside. Here in the second-floor Mall Service Childcare Center, policies would be obeyed.

Well, all but one.

She said to the boys, “You all line up against the wall. We’re still going to play Hide from the monster. You lie down, you be quiet. You don’t let no monster spot you. This is going to be a long game, so best get used to it. I don’t want crying or whining. Y’all have to be brave little boys today, you hear?”

They nodded. The redheaded one, CHARLES 3–5, said, “What’s brave?”

“Like a big old football player. Ain’t scared of nothing.”

“I am scared,” said Charles. “It’s different now.”

“Yes it is,” said Lavelva. “It is very different. But Charles, you are so feisty I want you to be the leader, okay? You be the bravest.”

“Yes, Miss Lavelva,” said Charles.

Lavelva turned, went to her desk, or rather the desk, as it was generic to the center, owned by none of the coordinators. She saw nothing that could be altered to be dangerous, no letter openers, no files, no spikes for spearing paper notices, nothing. Not even a ruler. Obviously, with nimble-fingered little brutes around, thought had been exercised on keeping the space free of dangerous implements.

Then she saw the daily schedule notebook, a three-ring binder volume. She opened it, realized that a steel or at least metal slat ran up its spine. She pulled apart the three rings, and dumped the papers out, then used her strength to rip the slat from the spine of the book. It tore messily, taking some cardboard binding with it, but it was eleven inches of sharp steel, albeit flawed by three rings, which she snapped shut. She slipped it into her jeans, in the small of her back. Then she turned back to the boys.

CHARLES 3–5 was standing and pointing.

“I see a monster,” he said.

She turned, and through the glass block wall that divided the center from the pedestrian corridor, she saw the shadow of a gunman.

There were six of them, but the manager, Mrs. Renfels, had broken down: all women, all terrified, except for Molly, who was more concerned for her mother and her sister Sally than she was for herself. Even tough little Rose, the assistant manager, had quieted down as apprehension gripped her.

“You won’t find out soon,” Ray told Molly. “You have to worry about Molly first. You have to commit yourself to staying put, locking down, waiting them out. That is how you win.” There was no privacy, as all of them were jammed in the rear storeroom, under racks of bustiers and negligees and all the scanties of the male imagination that now seemed quite alien to their world.

“I have to know,” she said, trying to quell the anxiety. Sally was impossibly cute at fifteen, with smart, vivid eyes, a thin girl’s body, and grace just easing into a woman’s radiance, and Mom was still feisty even if she had never quite adjusted to American ways. It sickened Molly that the two most vulnerable members of her family were in the greatest danger. The last she’d spoken to them on her cell, they had in fact been on the first floor where the roundup had taken place. But if they’d been luckily in the outer ring, they might have made it to an exit. She wanted to call, but she was terrified that if they were in the mob of hostages Ray had described, the ringing cell might have attracted attention.

“I wish they’d turn that goddamn music off,” Milt’s wife said. “If I hear ‘Jingle Bells’ one more time I will puke.”

“Not on me, please,” said the blonde, the one who clearly considered herself a hot number.

“Why is this happening?” Mrs. Renfels asked, her first words since the crisis had begun.

“It’s because we should have used the atom bomb on them after nine-eleven,” said the hot blonde, obviously the sort used to issuing opinions and by her beauty banishing responses. “If we’d have burned them all, this wouldn’t be going on.”

“You can’t kill a billion people because, what, thirteen men are crazy assholes,” responded Milt’s wife.

“Oh yes you can. You push a button and they are in flames.”

“That is the craziest-”

“All right, all right,” said Ray. “I am not trying to be a boss or take over or anything, but it’s better if you don’t get in squabbles until this thing is over. You may have to work together and you have to see the person beside you as a family member. You can fight all you want when you’re advising on the set of the TV movie or something.”

“He’s right,” said Rose. “Just keep a cork in it, it’s better for all of us.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” said Mrs. Renfels. “You’re young, you’re in this for yourself. I have three kids. If something happens to me-oh, why is this happening?”

“Ma’am,” said Ray, “I don’t mean to tell you how to think, but I am a former marine and I have been in some fights. If you’ll allow me, I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is why. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.”