Hostile Intent Read Free Page A

know exactly what kind of gun, but it was one of those that you gripped with both hands and shot tons of bullets really fast.
    Charles went right after him. They struggled for a bit, but then the man hit Charles with the butt—at least, that’s what it looked like—and Charles went down hard.
    This man was quite different. He was funny looking and foreign looking and he was wearing mostly black clothes, like he was some kind of ninja without the sashes and pointed stars. He looked at the children, still standing dutifully in line, and said, “Okay, we go now.”
    As they walked toward the gym, several other men came out of the shadows. These men were also semi-ninjas, except their faces were covered by ski masks. The man with the rifle barked at them in some strange language—Rory could tell he was the Top Dog, because his face was uncovered and he was holding a cell phone in one hand, and had a pistol stuffed down the front of his pants—and they picked up Charles by the armpits and dragged him along.
    The first person Rory spotted upon entering the gym, because he was looking for her, was his sister. Emma was with the other eighth graders, sitting on the bottom bench of the stands. There were tears running down her face. But she was all right; she was alive.
    Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was not all right. He was hogtied, lying in the middle of the basketball court, right on the school logo. He was bleeding from his nose and one of his legs was bent back at an impossible angle. He was trying to scream, but there was a dirty, bloody rag stuffed in his mouth.
    Rory’s eyes drifted from the prone figure of the principal to the nets at either side of the gym. There was something weird hanging from each of them, something heavy and ominous with wires running out of it.
    He followed the wires and saw that they ran to one man, another stranger, who was off to the side, near the double fire doors. The wires ran into a doohickey connected to a laptop that was balancing on one of the footstools the cheerleaders used to practice with.
    It looked like the whole school was in the gym. Teachers, students, the custodial staff, even Mr. Hebert, the cook, whose family had been in the St. Louis area since it was a French Jesuit trading post and once had owned most of Creve Coeur, or so the story went.
    And then there were the strangers, about a dozen, all men, wearing ski masks, all of them armed.
    The teachers had already been tied up; the only teacher who wasn’t tied up was Charles, but he was still knocked out, and so he lay on one of the benches, unconscious.
    But that wasn’t the worst part. Several teachers had shotguns wired to their hands, which were bound in front of them, and both their index fingers taped to the triggers. Rory didn’t know much about physics yet, but he knew enough to realize that they had to hold their elbows up, the guns pointing directly at their faces. If they got tired, and the guns slipped a bit, the pressure on the triggers would blow their heads off.
    Nurse Haskell, he noticed, was having an especially hard time holding her gun up.
    Rory submitted without a fuss as one of the bad men—he had already begun to think of them as “cannibals”—roughly bound his hands behind his back with some of that white wire stuff the cops were using now instead of handcuffs and shoved him toward one of the rigged nets.
    The Top Dog stepped forward. “Listen to me!” he shouted. He also had a funny accent, but this one was more like what Mr. Nasir-Nassaad should have had but didn’t, weird and guttural and scary. “You are all prisoners of war.”
    Rory expected one of the teachers, maybe Mr. Treadway, who was widely regarded as the meanest man in the school, to say something back. Mr. Treadway was always going on about how America was the worst country in history, which made most people in Edwardsville plenty mad, and how the white man was the worst man in history, but since he taught social studies it was more or