The High Notes: A Novel(53)
“Stay low, stay out of sight if you can. Try to find cover and get out of the building if you’re able to. We have SWAT teams on the way,” they told him, and Clay hung up.
“I saw Pattie fall,” Iris said urgently to Clay. “I have to get back to her.” She was desperate to go to her.
“You can’t.” Clay grabbed her arm. “The shooter is still on the stage,” and he was still firing an automatic rifle into the crowd. “I want to get you out of here.” He pulled her in the direction of an exit he had seen people running toward, and she wouldn’t go.
“There are injured and dying people back there. We have to help them.” She tried to pull free of him, but Clay had a grip on her arm, and wouldn’t let her go.
“You’re not going back,” he said fiercely. “I’m getting you out of here.” He almost dragged her toward the exit, just as the SWAT teams arrived with bulletproof suits and shields, helmets and masks, carrying weapons of their own.
“Go, go, go, go!” one of them said to them, and Iris finally dashed to safety with Clay’s body shielding her. She realized with shaking legs that he could have been shot trying to save her, and if he hadn’t yanked her off the stage, she would be dead by now. She had never seen anything so horrible and terrifying. Once outside, they could still hear gunshots from inside the Garden, as several more people came through the same exit they had. Some of them were bleeding, and one man was carrying a young girl. She had a wound on her neck and another in her chest and Iris thought she looked dead. The man was crying as he laid her on the pavement and paramedics rushed toward her, and then shook their heads as the man lay on the ground holding her and sobbed.
It was over in another ten minutes. The marksmen from the SWAT team killed the gunman, and then teams of police and paramedics swarmed the building to assist the wounded, and lead others out. Iris rushed back in to find Pattie, she found her where she had seen her fall. She was lying facedown, and Iris gently turned her over. She was dead. Iris looked at her in shock and horror and then lay her down gently and went down the rows of seats, looking for people who needed help. Clay was in another row helping anyone he could. The auditorium was littered with bodies, and other people crying, calling out for help, and waving an arm to catch someone’s attention. Iris went from one person to the next, stepping over bodies of young people. She saw Clay in another aisle holding a woman who was covered with blood, and the band members were standing on the stage, and she didn’t see Boy among them. She saw that Star was crying, and as soon as she could hand over the person she was helping to the police, she ran to the steps at the edge of the stage, and dashed up them. The body of the gunman still lay on the stage, peppered with bullets. She asked Star first, “Where’s Boy?” She pointed to the wings and couldn’t speak. Iris ran in the direction she pointed and found Boy lying on the ground, drenched in blood, with two police paramedics, and a member of the SWAT team working on him. She could see that he had a wound on the side of his chest, and she knelt down next to them.
“Who are you?” one of the paramedics asked her.
“Iris Cooper. This was my concert, his too. He’s my friend.” They were packing the wound, and had run an IV line into his arm, and one of them had a defibrillator in his hand. All she could think was that she couldn’t lose him too. They put Boy on a gurney and rushed him outside, and Iris went with him. Clay saw her go and followed them out. They were loading Boy into an ambulance when he got to them.
There were emergency vehicles everywhere with sirens blaring. The news trucks had arrived by then, and there was a steady stream of blood-covered victims being removed from the building on stretchers and gurneys and in wheelchairs. Inside, they were covering the bodies with tarps. It looked like a sea of them to Iris when she glanced inside.
“Pattie…” she said to Clay. He had seen it happen, and he knew. She’d been shot in the chest, straight to the heart. The gunman had known what he was doing. She went back inside then to wait with Pattie so she could identify her, and Clay went to speak to the chief of police to see what they could do to help.
The police chief was grim, once he knew who Clay was. “We don’t know how he got in. Maybe through an underground passage he knew about. He couldn’t have gotten past the metal detectors with those weapons. We’ve got forty-two victims so far, and thirty-four critically injured at first count, and two dozen others who are injured but ambulatory,” the police chief said unhappily. It was a massive tragedy, and most of them young people.
“One of my singers was shot,” Clay said. He looked gray after what he’d just seen, and Iris had narrowly missed being shot. “What can we do to help?”
“Nothing,” the chief of police said. “Change this crazy sick world where people do things like this.” A reporter spotted Clay then, and interviewed him as the organizer of the event. “We’re devastated,” Clay said, visibly about to cry, and deeply moved by what he’d been seeing, so many young lives wasted, so many people dead.
None of the other members of the band had been hurt, and they left with Star to wait at the hospital where they’d been told the victims had been taken.
Clay and Iris left a short time later too, to wait with the others for news of Boy. They were told that he was in surgery when they got there, and two hours later, the surgeon came to see them all in the waiting room.