Monday, Monday: A Novel (2 page)

Clarity took hold slowly. The boy lay dead before her. She heard the sound again ring down from the sky, plunking itself into the clear heat of the day. Someone began, horribly, to scream, and a man yelled something about the tower. A woman fell to the ground not far from Shelly. Birds flew from the trees and cement exploded upward. Shelly tried to stand again, but her legs wouldn’t support her and she sat back on her knees. She had suffered dreams like this—her limbs refusing to move, the atmosphere as thick as water and weighting her down.

Crawl
, she told herself.
To the hedge.

She tried to look at the tower, but the sun was too intense. She pawed at the ground, breathing hard and coughing with nausea, but her wounded arm just hung there. She heard herself wail. The hedge was only knee-high and wouldn’t protect her even if she could reach it, yet it was the only vertical shape the world offered. Everything else was flat ground. Things flew about her. There was the thud of impact on flesh and bone. Not hers, she thought.
Not me this time.
A whimper and cry. The hot concrete seared her palm when she tried to pull herself forward, dragging her mangled arm. Blood seeped into the porous stone beneath her. The frayed bra held her breast to her body and kept the lump of flesh from dropping like Jell-O. She whispered for someone to help her and methodically lifted her palm, then methodically set it down, pulling her knees forward, watching her blood bubble into the ground.

*   *   *

The sound instantly struck Wyatt Calvert as out of place, blasting over the stentorian voice of his professor and bouncing through the plaza outside. “Destruction of Kiev,” he was writing in his notebook, “—Mongols, 1240.” He looked up as the sound repeated. It reminded him of deer hunting and the concussion of rifle shots in a canyon. A student with a crew cut who was near the window stood up and looked out over the crown of an oak tree, and the professor paused from his lecture.

“There’s something happening on the mall,” the student said.

A girl got up and looked out. “I think it’s something to do with the Drama Department.”

Wyatt made his way through the rows of desks to the windows. The panes were dirty, the view partly cluttered by a tangle of branches. Fumbling with a lock, he shoved a window open and pulled hard at the frame until it jerked upward, creating an open rectangle of raw heat and admitting the buzz of insects and the sudden flutter of wings, and then the blast again, louder now, and its echo. Stone gargoyles in the overhang a few feet above blocked the noon sun. Below, a dozen people in the bright square of the plaza had an odd disruption in their movements, a hesitation. Some had come to a standstill and were looking around. A boy with a laundry bag ran diagonally across, shouting over his shoulder. At the steps to the lower part of the mall a plump girl in red pedal pushers lay on her back, her hands clutching her stomach, her legs lifting and sinking at the knees in a languid gesture as if to escape the scalding concrete. In the center of the plaza a guy in a plaid shirt and black trousers lay motionless, half on his side, his arm thrown out and a book on the ground beside him. Close to him a girl in a skirt dragged herself laboriously toward the hedgerow with the use of one arm, leaving a trail of gore and moving like a wounded beetle.

“Christ,” Wyatt said. “Somebody’s shooting people.”

He didn’t move for a second or two, his eyes fixed on the spectacle. A man climbing the steps from the lower part of the plaza toppled backward, followed by the blast of sound again. Thick in the shoulders and heavy, he lay faceup on the steps, as if tobogganing on his back, headfirst, down, the soles of his shoes pointing upward near the girl in the pedal pushers.

Wyatt swung his gaze to the tower and searched the rows of windows up to the top. The gold hands of the tower clock marked the time at 11:51. On the high, walled deck below it, a figure appeared and then eerily vanished. A second later it popped into view again, aiming a glinting rifle down at the East Mall. Smoke puffed out of the barrel as the sound blasted. From below came a muted noise and a muffled, lingering shout. The figure on the deck disappeared again and then reappeared a second later. Wyatt saw the white bloom, but didn’t hear the blast this time. The window beside him exploded.

“Get down!” the professor yelled. “Away from the windows! Down!”

Only a few of the students complied at first; then everyone moved at once, crouching beside their desks and crowding against the wall.

“They’re shooting at you, Calvert!” someone yelled at Wyatt. “Get out of the way!”

For a second, he squatted under the windows in the shattered glass scattered over the floor. Then he started crawling.

“Stay down, Calvert!” the professor ordered, but Wyatt kept moving. When he reached the door, he stood up and ran through the hallway, shouting for students to stay in the building and away from the windows. “Someone’s shooting from the tower!” he shouted. Students turned and stared at him, not believing. He knocked into an underclassman, who snapped, “Hey, watch it!” In a room at the end of the hall he found a group of students gathered around a map that hung from the chalkboard. “Has Jack Stone left already?” he asked them, breathing hard.

“I think he’s in Wood’s office,” a lanky girl in a brown jumper replied.

“Someone in the tower’s shooting people on the plaza,” Wyatt called over his shoulder as he started for the professor’s office.

“Is this the experiment in psychology?” the girl called after him. “The one where they see if we’ll go help?”

“Don’t go outside!” he shouted back.

He passed the underclassman he had knocked into a moment ago, and the guy cleared out of his way now, backing against the wall and joking, “Shooter in the tower! I bet! Everyone run hide!” A scatter of laughter followed. But as Wyatt rounded the corner, word was spreading and a sense of alarm rising, voices escalating.

The office he was headed to was on the far side of the building. Rushing in, out of breath, he found his cousin Jack talking with the professor.

“Where’s Delia?” Wyatt said. “Where were you going to meet her?”

“On the plaza. Why?”

“There’s somebody in the tower shooting people on the plaza. Where was she coming from?”

Jack was already on his feet. “She would have parked on the Drag.”

The professor picked up the phone. “What do I tell the police?”

“At least four people shot on the plaza, at least one guy with a rifle up in the tower.”

Jack started down the hall, now crowded with students. Wyatt was close on his heels. “Go outside the other way or you’ll walk right into it!” Wyatt shouted over the noise.

“I’m going the way she would come,” Jack said.

But at that moment Delia appeared before them, wide-eyed, running up the stairs, her black hair clinging to her damp forehead. Jack swept her into his arms. “Thank God,” he said. “Go to Wood’s office. He’s calling the police. Stay in the office with him. And stay there if he leaves.”

“Where are you going? Jack?”

Jack had already started down. “Go to Wood’s office and wait for me.”

“And call Elaine at work at Sears,” Wyatt told her as he passed her. “Tell her not to come near campus.”

Two boys pushed by, heading down, yelling about a “shoot-out.” Wyatt warned them to go back up, but they shoved past him. Running a step behind Jack, almost on top of him, Wyatt thought of the bodies on the plaza—how easily the man had dropped backward on the stone steps without even trying to break his fall.

A group of new freshmen touring the campus had crowded into the lobby, and a woman was trying to corral them into a classroom. Wyatt and Jack pressed through and exited to a covered area that adjoined the plaza. Half a dozen underclassmen stood there guessing about how many gunmen were up in the tower. One of the girls said this must be the start of a revolution or a student uprising. A stout boy in Bermuda shorts said Cubans were attacking. A thinner one with limp blond hair peered up at the tower from under an archway. “I think it’s only one guy, and he’s gone around to the other side of the tower.”

“Move back from there,” Jack told him. “Whoever’s up there can see you. Have you heard more than one shot at a time?”

“Nope,” the limp-haired boy said.

“It’s hard to tell, because of the echoes,” one of the others said.

The sky, Wyatt saw, was clear blue. A low wall with stone balusters ran the length of the plaza, broken midway by the steps that led to the lower walkways. At the top of the steps the black shoes of the dead man jutted upward. A girl with a halo of blond curls bent over the girl in red pedal pushers, who was lying on her back. The blond girl called for help, her voice carrying the flat, repetitive tone of diminishing expectations: “Can somebody help us? She’s been shot. Can somebody help us?” A receptionist from the dean’s office hid behind an oak tree near the wall, her face against the trunk.

“I swear my dad could shoot that guy from right here,” the limp-haired boy announced. “He’s shot wild turkey that far.”

Wyatt had been in the tower many times; he knew the view. It was open, clear to the horizon. Austin spread like a puddle. Pedestrians were the size of bugs. To the south, the capitol dome looked small; to the west, storefronts lined the Drag. To the east and north were dormitories, classroom buildings. “What’s his range?” he asked.

“Five hundred yards with a high-powered rifle from up there,” Jack said, squatting to tighten the laces on his sneakers. His hair was cropped short; he had lost part of an ear in Vietnam, and the flesh that remained was flanked by a patch of bald scarring. “I’m going out there to get that girl off the steps.” He stood up.

“I’m going with you,” Wyatt said.

“Keep moving in a zigzag,” Jack told him. “Hug the wall. Don’t stop and think; just move. We’ll carry her down the steps. Be careful; those shoes won’t have traction.”

“There’s another girl,” Wyatt said. “In the center. You can’t see her from here; I saw her from the window. She was trying to crawl to the hedge.”

The tower bells had begun to chime, and the limp-haired boy in the archway leaned out to look up. Wyatt saw him drop and thought he had slipped. But it wasn’t a usual way to fall—on his back, with his legs turned under. There was a hole in his forehead, just over his eye.

“God!” the boy in Bermuda shorts screamed, pressing his hands over his ears and staring down at the body. “Oh God! Gary’s been shot!”

Jack and Wyatt gripped the lifeless body under the arms and dragged it toward the door. A lump of bloody skull and silky hair lay on the ground. The girl tried to help; the boy in shorts bent over and vomited, then raised his head and screamed, “He shot Gary! He shot Gary!”

Looking at the plaza, Wyatt saw that the blond girl who’d been calling for help was gone. The girl in the pedal pushers still lay at the top of the steps, near the dead man tobogganing backward. A tall man wearing a coat and tie strolled into the open from the far side of the plaza, and Wyatt waved his arms at him and shouted, pointing toward the tower. But the bells drowned out his voice. The man’s face splintered. Part of it flew away. His arms rose in the air.

*   *   *

Shelly heard the gunshot whistling through the melodic notes, followed instantly by a boom as loud as a cannon. The man in the black suit entered the edge of her vision, and she saw his face explode. Empty sky hung where his jaw had been. He stayed upright and teetered there. A guy climbed over the wall and pulled him to safety, shoving him over the balusters into someone’s reaching hands.

She lay still, breathing shallow wisps of air. The spectacle of her arm grilling on the hot cement was grotesque, so she tried to keep her eyes closed. Occasionally she opened them to a slit, admitting a view of a thin, bright, topsy-turvy rectangular world partly obscured by her shattered arm. She was lying in a puddle of blood. With the hand that was operable, she tried to hold her breast in place while still appearing lifeless. She was barely shy of the hedge and could force herself to crawl the last few feet, but the shooter in the tower might be looking at her through his scope, searching for movement or breath. For the blink of an eye, even. She had forgotten what it was like to lie so still, but a fragment of a childhood memory came flapping haphazardly into the horror of the present. She had played dead with a neighbor boy in a field in back of his home, a trick to attract the buzzards so that the boy, lying flat on his back beside her with his BB gun pointed into the air, could shoot at them when they circled. “Don’t move,” he had told her. “They have good eyesight. Don’t blink. Close your eyes.”

The shots were coming now from a different side of the tower and sounded slight and harmless. Shelly’s jaw was beginning to pump, rattling her teeth together. She remembered one of her high school teachers talking about the symptoms of shock but couldn’t remember what they were. Rapid breathing or slowed breathing—she had forgotten which. Rapid pulse or slow. The only obvious thing about her pulse was that it was pumping the blood out of her arm. She had stopped her frenzied panting. Afraid of passing out and bleeding to death without knowing, she thought she would stop playing dead if she felt any sense of darkness, and would try, once more, to drag herself toward the hedge. She wouldn’t be able to wedge herself beneath it; she would need to get through the opening and crawl across the grassy square to the stone base of the flagpole to find protection.

If she had to, she would try to stand up and run.

The concrete baked her side and her ruined arm, and she wanted to cradle her face and protect her cheek from the heat, but she had locked her hand around her breast to stop the bleeding. From her awkward vantage she saw two men run toward the girl at the top of the steps; they leaned and scooped her up and carried her down, out of sight, her legs, in bright red pedal pushers, dangling over their arms. They left behind her textbooks and her sandal. On the steps, the soles of a man’s shoes pointed up, like the ears of a curious rabbit.

Shelly summoned the voice of her childhood neighbor demanding that she close her eyes. She imagined the piercing, weightless gaze of buzzards circling, and heard the popping of guns, and realized some of the firing now was coming from ground level. Moving her head just slightly and peering from half-closed eyes, she saw someone shove a barrel out of a window of the history building and fire up at the tower.