Tara and Stephen curled around one another, tight as a couple of new born puppies seeking comfort. Stephen’s hand at her waist pulled her closer still, and she forced herself to stay calm as he trembled. She put her mind elsewhere, separating her awareness from her physical self. After a few moments the screams and shaking became distant, and she was left in an all-encompassing dark with Stephen pressed protectively against her. She wondered, vaguely, if they were dead.
“Of course not,” a woman’s voice said, quite clearly. She sounded amused, and Irish. It was music to her ears.
“Mum?” Tara whispered. “Is that you?”
“Shhh, child,” said the voice, before it faded away. “Be brave.”
After a while, Tara realized the explosions and screams had stopped. Instead, it was eerily silence, a traumatized quiet that was nonetheless normal. It was the quiet of the real world, rather than where the voice had come from.
There followed a minute or two that followed in which Tara could hear only her breathing, strangely magnified. Slowly, carefully, she unwound herself from Stephen’s death grip on her waist and crawled out from underneath the desk.
Student desks, flimsy affairs no better than plywood, were scattered as though by a giant’s hand. There were a few whimpers, and someone was crying. An no wonder: a portion of the wall had caved in, and the sister was nowhere to be seen. Which, she supposed, was her answer.
Tara and Stephen worked their way through the classroom, righting desks and pulling kids from beneath them. Stephen rescued an inhaler and returned it to the crying kid, while Tara got one of the bigger boys to help her unwedge the stuck door, as something had fallen against it.
“We need to get to the gym,” Stephen said quietly, the classroom first aid kit in his hands. “That’s what we’re supposed to do in an emergency.”
“Let’s just hope the gym is still there,” Tara said, just as quiet. Then she stuck her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and elicited a piercing whistle. “Line up, you lot. We’re getting out of here.”
“Who died and made you leader?” Another of the big kids, big enough to apparently not require a neck. He muscled through the other students and stepped close, his hands in meaty fists.
Tara cocked a brow. “Have any better ideas?”
“Yeah. I should be in charge.”
“And, as leader, you would…”
His brow furrowed. “Take…everyone…to the…gym?”
Tara blew the hair from her eyes. “You’re a natural. Let’s get going, shall we?”
Inhaler kid tapped on the big kid’s shoulder, who had the grace to look chagrined, if only for a moment. “That’s Tara,” Inhaler kid told him. “The last kid that messed with her was Bobby Garcia. He never came back to school.”
Tara grinned at the bigger boy, who blinked. She hadn’t seriously hurt Bobby Garcia, but she’d made him afraid to ever try it again. Back home in Ireland, Tara would have been known as a Nutter. “It’s handy to have a reputation,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here.”
Stephen handed her backpack over, and she shouldered it. Then she poked her head out.
The lockers on the opposite side of the wall had been tossed up and down the hall, their contents spilled all over the floor. It was one of these lockers that had wedged the classroom door shut. “If you find anything useful, pick it up,” she told the other students, clambering over the first fallen locker.
It was an obstacle course, getting through the gauntlet blocking their path. Tara and Stephen opened the doors to classrooms along the way, checking for survivors. A trail of other students had formed at the end of the corridor, so she led her gaggle the same way.
She vaulted the final locker and reached down to give Stephen a boost, who was at least long-legged. The kid who’d helped her unstick the door—Jason?—assisted the others in their group to Tara’s position, who pulled them up and then steadied them on the way down.
Once they were all over the block, she hopped down and hurried after the other groups heading toward the gym. She saw one nun, the sister who’d nearly struck Stephen with a ruler, in a sling and looking rather the worse for wear. But she was directing people, motioning them all on down the hallway. She gave Tara a small nod as her small group moved past.
“Well done, Miss Fitzpatrick,” she said, keeping them going. “Is that the last of you?”
“I think so,” Tara answered. “We checked all the classrooms on the way in.”
“And your teacher? Sister Joan, isn’t it?”
“Gone,” she said.
The older woman’s face crumpled a moment, before sternness smoothed it once more, and turned her expression to stone. “Very well. Off with you, then.”
Another hallway, this one packed full. It reminded Tara forcefully of that horribly dark, crammed subway tunnel where her mother had died. The crowd moved slowly, with hardly a sound. Shell shocked, she imagined.
She looked over her shoulder as she felt a plucking at her coat, and saw Stephen. She reached to take his hand, and felt immediately better.
If the corridor contained chilling quiet other than the cattle-like shuffling of feet, the gym was the exact opposite. The harsh buzz of activity echoed to the rafters, made worse by everyone trying to talk over everyone else. Its resemblance to the Gardens after the first attacks gave Tara’s stomach a nauseating twinge.
“Where do we go?” Stephen wondered, looking around. “This is a mess.”
“You’re not kidding.” Tara spotted a line of folding tables behind which various, harried members of the faculty were stationed. Students crowded around these tables waiting impatiently for their turns so their parents might be called. Tara debated whether Miss Bette would even bother with her charges. “Come on,” she told Stephen darkly, turning away to move past the tables and into the gym.
But a teacher with a clipboard stopped them, looking weary. “Miss Fitzpatrick. Mister Mitchell.” He pointed toward one of the tables. “Please see Vice Principal Rosen.”
So much for slipping away unnoticed. She sighed and pulled Stephen over to the table, and waited with a poor show of patience. The noise in the gym hurt her ears, and it wasn’t long before she’d acquired a pressure headache. “Do you still have the first aid kit from the classroom?” she asked Stephen.
He nodded. “In my backpack.”
“Good. We might need it.”
Finally, it was their turn. The vice principal checked his notes. “Ah, more of our foster care students. Which home?”
“Bette Weiss.” Tara cocked her head, trying to read his papers upside down.
His business-like mien softened to something resembling sympathy, and he shifted in his seat. “You may as well join the others, then. That part of the city is pretty well destroyed. The home no longer exists.”
Shock resonated through Tara as she realized what this meant. Miss Bette, and that horrible place, was gone. She and Stephen shared a look that bordered on relief. If that made Tara a bad person, so be it. She had learned it from the best.
“So you’ll have to wait until Social Services can place you elsewhere,” he concluded.
Not bloody likely. “So we’ll just settle ourselves in the gym, then?” Tara asked, endeavoring to remain casual.
“That would be for the best,” he agreed.
Tara nodded her thanks and deep into the crowded gym. They found seats at the end, in the bleachers for the opposing team’s supporters, and dropped their heavy bags at their feet.
“Now what?” Stephen wanted to know, looking as frustrated as she felt. “If people think we’re going to be willingly separated and go through all this again at another home, I don’t want to wait around for the inevitable.”
“Neither do I,” Tara agreed. “That’s why we’ll leave tonight, when anyone who’s still here is asleep.”
His hunched shoulders relaxed. Then he grinned. “How is it you always have a plan in less than a minute of something happening?”
She shrugge
d. “I’ve had to learn to be resourceful.”
“Hey,” someone said, and they turned before anything more could be said. It was Inhaler Kid, looking nervous. “I want to go with you.”
Tara scowled. “Who says we’re going anywhere?”
The poor kid looked like he was about to pee his pants. Tara knew she had a reputation as a fighter, but just how out of proportion were the rumors? She hadn’t killed Bobby Garcia, for chrissake, no matter how tempted she’d been. She’d just given him serious reconsideration regarding his career as a wannabe gangster. Some kids just had to try to take down the toughest kid in the school yard, to prove themselves. Bobby, for instance, had proved himself an idiot as well as a poseur.
“Um…” Inhaler Kid stammered. “Everyone?”
“What?!”
Stephen held up a hand, forestalling Tara’s inevitable loss of temper. “What she means to say is, what you mean, ‘everyone’?”
Inhaler Kid settled down a bit. “Look, there are a lot of kids from homes here. And other kids without family now who don’t want to be placed, and who can blame them?”
Tara couldn’t argue with that. “Go on.”
“And some of us thought, why not strike out on our own? It couldn’t be any worse than foster care.”
“All well and good,” she agreed. “But where do I come in?”
Inhaler Kid shoved his glasses up his nose. “Some of us…well, we were in the classroom when you…” His watery eyes shifted between her and Stephen. “When you reacted,” he concluded. “I can help,” he added quickly. “We really just don’t want to go back, okay? And everyone knows you stand up for kids who can’t. You’re not afraid of anything.”
It wasn’t true, of course. She was just really, really angry. All the time, it seemed. Sometimes it made her too tired to be afraid.
Tara and Stephen looked at one another. Stephen nodded slightly. “Okay,” she said finally.
He brightened. “Really?”
“But everyone has to pull their weight,” Tara insisted. “And we can’t be seen meeting beforehand.”
He nodded eagerly. “I can help with that.”