The Survivor by Sean Slater Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

 
    Ten
    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