The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1)(93)

I thought I’d be calm.

I thought I’d be clear-headed.

I thought I’d be okay.

I thought wrong.

CRACK!

Alex shoves me to the ground. I can feel him over me, his body on top of mine, his chest up against my back. His ragged breathing is so loud in my ear.

“Sarah! Oh my god. Sarah. Sarah, no, no, no!” The petrified shrieking cuts me down to the bone. I know the voice… “Oh, shit. Shit, please! Don’t fucking…just…”

CRACK!

“We need to move,” Alex pants. “I need you to run, Silver. I need you to run toward that stairwell, up, up, up and through the science block. Do not stop. Do not look back. I’ll be right behind you. Can you do that for me?”

“I don’t know!”

“You can, Silver. I know you can. You’re brave, and you’re fucking fast. Come on. We have to get out of here, right now.”

I scrunch my eyes closed, trying to grab hold on the terror lashing around in the pit of my stomach. It takes every scrap of willpower I possess, but I manage to calm myself. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

I nod beneath him.

“All right. One…two…THREE!” Alex has me by the back of my shirt. He lifts me up off the floor and onto my feet, and then his palm is against my back, shoving me forward so quickly I can barely get my legs to move fast enough. I hurtle toward the stairwell, jumping over two girls who are hunkered down, covering their heads with their backpacks.

“Up! Let’s go, let’s go!” Alex hisses. His hand is gone from my back. He told me not to stop. He told me not to hesitate, but I do…

Then he’s right behind me, the girls, Alicia and Sophia, being herded along by his side, their faces stained with eyeliner.

“RUN!” Alex’s roar echoes down the hallway. A strangled scream comes right after, cut off by the loud, terrible report of another gunshot.

My lungs are burning. My legs are burning. I take the stairs three at a time, tripping, struggling to stay on my feet. There are footsteps behind me, screaming and shouting—

I take a turn in the stairwell, surging up the second flight of stairs.

“He’s coming. He’s fucking coming!” Alicia yells.

“Faster, Silver. Go faster!” Alex hollers.

There’s a skidding, a thud, but I keep going forward, keep trying to pull air into my lungs. The door to the first science lab crashes against the wall as I hurl myself through it. The lab is empty. Deserted. I run for the interconnecting door, flying through that, into the next lab and then through the next again.

My backpack snags on something. I rip it from my shoulders, dropping it, still running…

Out of the last science lab, I nearly fall down the stairs that lead toward the music rooms. Oh god, where’s Max? Where the fuck is my brother? Through the chaos whipping through my head, for a second I don’t even have the sense to realize that Max is at his school. He’s not here. He’s not here…

Everything is noise, and color, and panic.

Blood on my tongue.

My pulse racing in my ears.

I’m going to fucking throw up…

“Left! Left, Silver! Through the door!” Alex shoulders the music room door open, grabbing me and yanking me after him. Alicia and Sophia cling to each other as we race for the sound booth. A second later, Alex has that door open, and he's pushing us all inside.

His fingers dig painfully into my shoulders again. His face is ashen. “Close it after yourself. Lock the door. Do not open it for anyone, you hear me? I don’t care who it is. You lock that fucking door, and you do not open it.”

“ALEX, NO!”

It's too late. He's ripped himself free, and he's elbowed me inside. The door slams closed, the sound ringing in my ears like yet another gunshot. “Lock it, Silver! Do it! Right fucking now!”

I don’t want to. I want him inside the booth, next to me, holding me in his arms, but I’m too numb. I do what he told me to. I lock the door.

“Good girl. Good girl,” Alex pants. “Stay inside. Stay safe. I’ll be back.”





32





ALEX





Raleigh’s an old school. Its systems are outdated. There should be automatic locks on all of the classroom doors, preventing them from opening before the code has been cleared and the all-safe has been announced, but they don’t. There are no fucking safety measures in place, which means the place is wide fucking open right now.

I stave off the immediate urge to go back, grab Silver, smash a window and get the fuck out of here. I saw the guy with the gun in the main hallway, though. When I covered Silver with my body, shielding her from the horror of what was happening ten feet away, I saw the guy, standing there with a bleak look on his face and the array of weapons he had strapped to his body. He wasn’t planning on emptying one clip and then calling it a day. No, he came to school this morning planning on taking down as many people as possible, and he came armed to do so. There would have been no sneaking into a classroom and bolting out of one of the windows. He would have killed us first.

A rattle of gunshots in the main hall confirms this; the shots come from a semi-automatic. A cold wash of dread settles over my limbs as I creep down the stairs from the music rooms, heading back toward the hallway. I nearly have a fucking heart attack when someone bursts around the crashes right into me.