We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [203]
Behind what?
The cafeteria worker—less attuned to the School Shooting format than the students, who had been through whole preparatory assemblies and got into character right away—had been easing along the walls as if feeling for one of those secret passageways in murder mysteries, moving slowly, attracting minimum attention. The cinder block unavailing, he now crouched into a fetal ball, holding the basketball between the archer and his head. Kevin was doubtless annoyed at having allowed any obstacle to remain in the gym however small, and the ineffectual protection just drew fire. Shsh-phoot. The ball was skewered.
“Kevin!” cried his English teacher, triangulating Mouse behind her body into the corner farthest from the alcove. “Please stop! Please, please stop!”
“Maleficence,” Kevin hissed distinctly from overhead; Joshua said later that it was weird how you could hear this relatively quiet word above the din. For the duration, it was all that Kevin said. Thereafter, Kevin fixed his staunchest ally on the Gladstone faculty steadily in his sight and put an arrow straight between her eyes.
As she fell, Mouse was exposed in the corner, and though he began to crouch in the shelter of her body, he took another shaft that pierced a lung. That would teach him to share the secrets of computer viruses with mere cyber-dilettantes who were really much more interested in archery.
But Mouse, in Joshua’s view, had the right idea; so far, Lukronsky’s scrabbling up all the thin blue sit-up mats and trying to fashion some kind of shield wasn’t working nearly as well as it would have in the movies, and already two arrows had whizzed within inches of his head. Scooting over to Mouse’s corner while Kevin was occupied with reaming Soweto Washington’s powerful thighs, Joshua built himself an impromptu lean-to in the corner constructed of the blue foam rubber, Dana Rocco, Laura Woolford, and the groaning, half-conscious body of Mouse Ferguson. It was from this stuffy tent that he observed the denouement, peering from under Laura’s armpit as Mouse’s breath bubbled. It was hot, suffused with the rank fumes of fearful sweat and another, more disturbing smell that was nauseously cloying.
Giving up on safe haven, Greer Ulanov had marched right up to the wall that dropped from the alcove’s railing, standing twenty feet immediately below their malevolent Cupid. She had finally found a bête noir more odious than Kenneth Starr.
“I hate you, you stupid creep!” she screeched. “I hope you fry! I hope they shoot you full of poison and I get to watch you die!” It was a rapid conversion. Only the month before, she’d written an impassioned essay denouncing capital punishment.
Leaning over the railing, Kevin shot straight down, striking Greer through the foot. The arrow went through to the wooden floor, and pinned her where she stood. As she blanched and struggled to pull the arrow from the floor, he pinned her second foot as well. He could afford the fun; he must still have had fifty, sixty arrows in reserve.
By this time, the other injured had all crawled to the far wall, where they flopped like voodoo dolls stuck with pins. Most bunched on the floor, trying to present the smallest targets possible. But Ziggy Randolph, yet unscathed, now strode to the very middle of the gym, where he presented himself with chest blown out, heels together, toes pronated. Dark and finefeatured, he was a striking boy with a commanding presence, though tritely effeminate in manner; I have never been sure if homosexuals’ limp-wristed gestures are innate, or studied.
“Khatchadourian!” Ziggy’s voice resonated over the sound of sobbing. “Listen to me! You don’t have to do this! Just put the bow on the floor, and let’s talk. A lot of these guys’ll be all right, if we just get some medics right away!”
It’s worth inserting a reminder here that after Michael Carneal shot up that prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, a devout Heath High School senior,