Day of Wrath by William R. Forstchen Read Free Book Online Page B

further. At the very least, in a few more minutes she would waddle out of the lounge, crying, head to the principal’s office and then take the rest of the day off due to the fear and anxiety he had created by his aggressive, dominant behavior.
    “What the hell?” It was Vince Rossingnol, the quiet, introspective English literature teacher, who, as always, studiously avoided involvement in any confrontation with Margaret.
    Bob thought Vince was standing up and stepping in at last to the confrontation with the “tyrant," as all whispered when she was not present, of the faculty lounge. It’d be a two-to-one vote as to who controlled the television and a witness that he had not physically touched Margaret. Vince standing up might be a crucial point to argue after school when, yet again, he was summoned to the office to answer Margaret’s accusations.  
    But Vince was not facing them at all; he was at the window, splitting open a couple of the dust-covered blinds and looking out to the front of the school. A blue sedan had pulled up directly by the walkway entrance, in a no parking or standing zone. Three men were piling out, dressed in black, reaching into the back seats, and pulling out satchels to sling over their shoulders. One of them stood straight up. He was holding a rifle aloft in one hand.
    “What in hell are those sons of bitches doing?” Vince cried, his voice rising and cracking.
    Margaret turned her wrath away from Bob to begin chiding Vince for his inappropriate use of language on school grounds, a definite violation as well, then went silent.
    “Are those guns? They aren’t allowed to do that!” she cried.
    Bob turned away from the television to look out the window.  
    “Merciful God in heaven, it’s happening!” he gasped.
    The three men rushed toward the front entrance. The way the wing of the main building was angled toward the parking lot and main entrance, Bob could see the front entrance, which was less than a hundred feet away.  
    Charlie, their elderly security and resource officer, was actually exiting the front door, his only weapon a taser and pepper spray, both of them still latched and buttoned securely to his belt.  
    In these first seconds Bob simply could not react. Though the analogy was something from before his time, he remembered reading how some folks described such a moment of frightful shock as being like an old record that kept skipping and playing the same line over and over: this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real…
    It became very real when the leader of the group slowed, raised a pistol and calmly put a 9mm hollow point bullet into Charlie’s head from twenty feet away, the old man collapsing like a broken doll.
    “Jesus Christ this is it!” Bob cried but it took several seconds for him to reach into his pocket for his Ruger.  
    Margaret started to scream, backing up against the wall, ironically still clutching the television remote control. Vince turned back from the window, gasping, and began to sag against the window frame, sobbing, already in a state of shock at the sight of the back of Charlie’s head exploding from the impact of the round.
    Bob had played this scenario out in his mind hundreds of times. Nearly every day that he walked down the corridor to his office and classroom area he’d ask himself, "What do I do if…? What do I do?" But he had never played this one out in his mind: What do I do if I am in the faculty lounge, it's lunchtime and not one, but three, gunmen storm the building, burdened down with multiple weapons, and blow the brains out of our kind, elderly security guard on the front lawn of the school as their opening move?  
    Thoughts started to race and his mind, on the edge of panic, finally latched onto one: Where is Wendy? Is she already in the lunch room, or is it math class? God, what time is it? Where is she? Where is my daughter?  
    A bell started to ring, loud, insistent, piercing. Was it the lunch