For a moment Hank’s entire body clenched, and he didn’t know if he was still breathing.
And then he thought, A.B.C.
An NYPD officer had visited the hospital a few months earlier and told them what to do in the event of an active shooter. A.B.C. Avoid. Barricade. Confront. In order of preference. Avoidance is best, barricades should be built if necessary, and confrontation, preferably by a large group, was only to be used as a last resort.
By the time the third and fourth shots were fired in rapid succession, Hank had reasoned that they sounded far enough away, near the street entrance to the ER, for him to evacuate the patients in the back rooms.
Dozens of frightened people in blue paper gowns raced toward the emergency exits, while doctors and nurses frantically pushed wheelchairs and gurneys behind them. A fifth and sixth bang reverberated through the room, and arms instinctively flew up to protect heads and faces, despite the fact that the noise was still coming from behind a set of closed double doors.
Hank was moving as quickly as he could while rolling the IV pole of a woman who didn’t have time to disconnect the tubes flowing from the dangling bag of medicine into the veins in her wrist.
Seven, then eight.
He secured the woman behind the exit doors, along with a young boy dressed in all black, eyes blinking and twitching from both the current terror and the high concentration of methamphetamine in his system that had brought him here in the first place. Hank sealed them both behind the doors, then turned around and ran toward the noise.
But he had missed the worst of it, arriving only in time to witness the fallout.
The bodies on the ground, trembling and bleeding, were being lifted to the nearest beds. The people helping the victims were shouting. A security guard was collecting the attacker’s weapon off the floor, where it must have fallen when the guards finally got a clean shot, killing the assailant. It was a small handgun, and Hank realized he had been expecting an assault rifle.
When he crouched down to press his hands onto the wound of a victim to stanch the blood flow, he couldn’t help but steal a two-second glance at the face of the man responsible for such horror.
A face that Hank instantly recognized.
Nina
Two days had passed since Deborah Caine rushed out of her office to alert her staff to the shooting at New York Memorial Hospital.
Nina and a few reporters had spent that morning discussing the latest news out of North Korea, where all boxes were now required to be turned over to the government. Anyone who hadn’t yet opened their box was no longer allowed to look inside, and every new box received by those turning twenty-two was to be handed over to officials unopened.
It was the first of such mandates to be enacted.
Back in March and April, the governments of the world had been too concerned with confirming the veracity of the strings, with keeping the global economy from spiraling, to realize that they weren’t entirely powerless. They couldn’t control the boxes’ arrival. But perhaps they could control how people used them.
That spring, several nations within the European Union had quietly sent some additional troops to their most contentious borders, anticipating that frightened short-stringer migrants might seek out those countries with greater access to health care, to some final fragment of hope. The U.S. Border Patrol was said to be equally on guard. But this North Korean ruling was something new, beyond politics as usual. The directive was rumored to be the result of bubbling unrest and a fear among the supreme leader’s circle that a few impassioned short-stringers with nothing left to lose might foment an insurrection.
“Obviously it’s an extreme tactic, but maybe they’re on to something,” said one of the writers. “If everybody stops looking inside their boxes, then life can go back to normal.”
“Except for the ones who already looked,” said Nina. “It’s too late for them.”
“Well, I guess all we can do is hope the short-stringers here don’t become a threat.”
Nina was surprised by the ominous comment. “Why would they become a threat?”
Before the writer could answer, Deborah appeared in front of their desks, a strained look on her face. “There’s a report of shots fired at New York Memorial,” she said. “Multiple casualties.”
Forty-eight hours later, the final number of fatalities, excluding the shooter himself, had settled at five, the victims ranging in age from twenty-three to fifty-one. Five short-stringers who may not have even known they were short-stringers, or who had come to the hospital looking for help, unaware that the very fate they were hoping to avoid was waiting for them just behind the ER doors. A fate that arrived in the form of a gun-bearing fellow short-stringer identified as Jonathan Clarke of Queens, New York.