Charlaine Harris: An Apple for the Creature

I could feel how wet the front of my T-shirt had become in a few seconds. Taking a big chance, I rolled over onto my side so I wasn’t putting any more pressure on Ms. Minter. I lay as close to the wounded woman as I could. She wasn’t dead yet. I could feel the life in her brain. Before I began my impersonation of a dead person, I opened my eyes a slit to look at myself. I was bloody enough to looked seriously wounded, perhaps even dead, as long as Brady didn’t try to locate an actual bullet hole.

I made myself go totally limp. I told myself over and over, as I heard the doors finally spring apart, that he could not tell I was alive as long as I thought “limp and lifeless.”

He won’t shoot me. He won’t shoot me. I begged God that Brady would not think a coup de grâce was necessary.

The school was eerily silent . . . to my ears, anyway. In my head, the panic of more than a hundred adults and children beat like an irregular drum. Clearest of all was the regret and terror of the woman in the closet only seven feet away from where I lay pretending to be dead. Sherry was almost incapable of coherent thought. I could totally understand that. At least I knew what was happening, but she was shut in that windowless tiny room, knowing that the man whose footsteps she could hear was there to kill her.

Then those footsteps were beside me. Brady was breathing harshly, rapidly; I could “hear” that he could not believe what he had done, that he knew that sometime in the future he would regret the deaths of the two women on the floor, that he was wondering where Sherry was, that bitch , she should be the one who was dead .

He screamed then, the sounded ripping from his throat as though he were being tortured. “Sherry,” he bellowed. “Where the hell are you? I’m gonna shoot you, you whore! I’m gonna spray your guts all over the walls!”

Behind the wooden door Sherry was holding her breath and praying as hard as I had that he couldn’t hear her breathe, couldn’t smell her skin, couldn’t see through the wall to where she was crouched among the cleaning products and rolls of toilet paper.

I couldn’t move so much as a fingertip. I couldn’t take a deep breath. Limp, I chanted to myself. Limp, limp, limp.

He kicked the wall about two feet away from my head, and then he cursed because he was wearing sneakers. It took every little sliver of will I could scrape together to keep myself from flinching.

I heard a siren . . . a lone siren. Though it sounded as sweet and welcome as a lover’s greeting, I was conscious of a certain amount of disappointment. I’d half expected six sirens, or a dozen. I guess I’d been watching too much television. This wasn’t Chicago or Dallas. This was Red Ditch. Some state troopers would be on their way, I was sure, but they wouldn’t be able to arrive on the site instantly.

Maybe by the time they got here, this would be all over. But I couldn’t imagine what the ending would be.

Brady stopped screaming threats and began trying doorknobs. Of course the one to the school office opened easily. He had a field day at Sherry’s desk, tossing papers, throwing the telephone, causing as much chaos as he could. Though I knew he was intent on that destruction, I still didn’t dare to move because the window overlooked the area where I lay. He might catch any slight movement of leg or arm.

Rachelle Minter was weaker now. I tried to imagine a plan that would save her; one that wouldn’t include me getting killed, as well. I simply couldn’t think of one. So I kept on playing possum.

The only thing I could do was worry. I spared a sharp moment of regret for Hunter. His day had been ruined, in the worst possible way. From now on, he’d remember his first-ever school party as an event of horror, and there was no way I could make that up to him.

I even had a second of sheer pique that the damn cupcakes were going to go to waste.

But mostly I worried about the children. If Brady started shooting into the rooms at random, sooner or later a child or a teacher would get killed. I had to think of a way to stop him.

Brady had resumed ranting and screaming, even when the siren abruptly cut off. I was so busy breathing shallowly and lying still that it took me a minute to dip inside his head, which was a virtual snake pit.

Brady had lost all his insulation; that was what I’d always called the civilizing influence that kept us from hitting other people when we were angry with them, stopped us from hawking and spitting on the floor of our grandmother’s house, advised us to make an attempt to get along with coworkers. Maybe Brady had never had a lot of this insulation anyway. His mental and emotional entanglement with Sherry had stripped all this insulation away and all the wires in Brady’s brain were hopping and sparking without any impulse control.

Brady was entirely human, but if I hadn’t known better I’d have called him a demon.

The demons I’d known had been much better behaved. My sort-of-godfather, Desmond Cataliades, was mostly demon, and he wore civilization like a coat.

With no warning, Brady kicked me. I didn’t know if he could sense an intruder in his head because he’d abandoned his semblance to a total human being, or if he simply felt like expressing his aggression. It was a huge effort to roll with the kick as if I weren’t in my body.

Then Brady fired the gun into the office, and again I had to hold on to my possum persona with all the determination I could muster. I came this close to yelling out loud as the glass of the window shattered and rained down on me and Ms. Minter. Now some of the blood smearing me was my own.

I’d always assumed that to save my own life I could endure just about anything. I was finding that wasn’t necessarily so. With Brady proving so completely unpredictable, I was fast approaching the jumping-up-and-screaming point.

If I’d been a genuine possum, my masquerade might have been easier.

He went past me again, screaming incoherently and slamming into every door he saw. I heard a door swing open, and I thought, Oh no! But the cleaning agent smell that wafted out told me bathroom , and I let out the breath I’d taken very slowly indeed.

The crazed man continued down the hall to the left of the office, and I heard not a sound from the teachers and kids trapped in those rooms. I opened one eye. Though my angle of vision prohibited me seeing very far down the right corridor, which I was facing, I could see that the teacher in the first room had taped construction paper over the window in her door. That was amazingly smart. In the room across the hall, apparently the kids had hidden out of sight of the window, and Brady said, “Where the hell are they?” He sounded merely puzzled. He sounded like a real person, for just a second.

I could get up and run out before he could catch me or shoot me, I thought. He had his back to me, his attention was definitely elsewhere, and if I scrambled up and leaped to the front doors I could be down the sidewalk and behind the cover of the cars before he could get to the doors and aim.

At least, I hoped I could.

And then I wondered about the lone police officer out in front of the school. I didn’t know what kind of person he (or she) might be. He might be so shaken by the seriousness of the event that he was ready to shoot whoever came out the doors, especially a bloody stranger running directly toward the patrol car.

While I was doing my best impersonation of a dead person and listening as intently as I could to both Brady’s physical actions and his mental chaos, I kept cudgeling myself to develop a plan. If I was out of his sight for a few seconds, should I move? Was staying right here the best policy? If I hid, where could that be?