Innocent Blood Read Free Page B

at it, staring at himself as he did so. Apart from that single minor injury, he looked completely normal. Thin-faced, pale, bespectacled. How could he look so normal when he had just witnessed a bomb going off, and all those children killed?
    â€˜Call Mommy, OK?’ he said, handing Danny his cellphone. ‘She’s going to see this on TV and I want her to know that we’re safe.’
    Wednesday, September 22, 9:41 A.M .
    Frank jogged back toward the school. The dust was settling now and gradually the outline of the church building was reappearing. It looked from the street as if the entire front of the library had been demolished, as well as half of the front portico, and every single window was broken. Teachers and children were emerging from the side entrance, most of them bloodied and smothered in dust, all of them walking in a strange hypnotized shuffle, like hermits let out of a cave. Some of them were screaming a high, monotonous scream.
    Several people were already sitting on the sidewalk, their faces scorched, their clothing ripped, their eyes staring in shock. A middle-aged woman came limping toward him, holding up her left arm. She wore a brown floral dress and her ginger hair was sticking up in the air as if she had been electrocuted. She had no left hand, only a stump with a white bone sticking out.
    â€˜I’m all right,’ she reassured him as she approached. ‘Don’t worry about me. See to the children.’
    â€˜Here, sit down,’ he told her, and eased her on to the grass with her back against the wheel of a parked car. He yanked off his red and yellow necktie and twisted it around her forearm, knotting it tight. ‘Just stay here, ma’am; you’re going to be OK. The paramedics will be here in a couple of minutes.’
    â€˜It doesn’t hurt, you know,’ she said, looking at her wrist and turning it this way and that, as if it were quite a novelty. ‘It doesn’t hurt in the slightest.’
    The wrought-iron school gates were still standing but they had been strangely twisted, as if he was looking at them through rippling water. Beside the gates, Mr Lomax’s security booth was leaning at an angle, and all the glass had been blown out of the windows. Mr Lomax himself was sitting on his revolving chair, his beige uniform in black tatters, like crow’s feathers. There was a large black lump by his left eye, and as Frank moved cautiously closer he realized that it was the head of a claw hammer. The shaft of the hammer had penetrated Mr Lomax’s eye socket and it was only the hammer head that had prevented it from going clean through his skull and out the other side.
    Frank stood by the security booth, breathless, swimmy-headed, feeling completely helpless. Teachers and children were still milling around outside the side entrance, and he desperately wanted to do something to help them, but he couldn’t think what. As for the children lying in the parking lot, they were beyond anything but burial – and prayers.
    â€˜Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Oh shit.’ He turned away and his eyes suddenly became crowded with tears.
    A girl appeared, close beside him. Her cropped brown hair was ashen with dust, and her jeans and her buttermilk-colored blouse were finely spattered with blood. She was wearing only one sandal.
    â€˜Are you OK?’ she asked him. She reached out and gently touched his shoulder as if she were trying to make sure that he was real.
    â€˜What?’ he said, frowning at her. He was still half deaf.
    She leaned closer, holding his shoulder more firmly. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him. ‘You’re not hurt, are you?’ She had a husky voice, like a heavy smoker.
    â€˜I have this ringing in my ears. But otherwise, no, I’m fine.’
    â€˜It was a bomb,’ she said.
    â€˜I know. But I don’t know what to do. I called 911 but they said I had to keep away.’ He cleared his