Wow, it's been a while! Sorry about that, I took a bit of a break on life as a whole and spent a bit of time doing some spontaneous traveling so I'm sorry for abandoning without notice but I'm back!
Finn's chapter is up next!
Chapter 15
Until We Fall
(Brittney Pierce – Part II)
Her hair was soaking wet.
Her hair was soaking wet courtesy of the steady drip of whatever substance it was that she was laying beneath, falling at a uniform pace like a harassing metronome hell bent on driving her absolutely insane.
But still, she couldn't seem to bring herself to move, to lift her head up from within her crossed arms to look; not once.
The gunshots had stopped several minutes ago, but in its wake, it had left behind something much worse; something that Brittney was even more terrified than she had been the barrel of a gun… She could hear the screams, the pounding of scrambling footsteps as her fortunate classmates darted across the cafeteria in a bid to capitalize on Jacob and Suzy's suddenly departure…
But Brittney had found herself blinded by her terror, deafened by a portrait of chaos that she couldn't bring herself to face; so she didn't, occupying her eyes on an image that didn't delve beyond the inside of her own eyelids.
It has been minutes that felt like hours since Santana had been shot dead, but still, Brittney couldn't bring herself to face the world quite yet although she wasn't so sure exactly what it was that she was afraid to see considering she had already seen the absolute portrait of her greatest nightmare coming true before her very eyes.
She could only guess that it was just easier for her to believe that she had simply made the entire thing up when she didn't have to actually face it.
But by the graces of her terrified classmates, this blissful naivety was getting more and more difficult to succumb to as the noise gradually swelled to near deafening levels within her eardrums.
She forced her eyes to open slowly; her veil of security no longer effective now that she had allowed such external distraction to infiltrate her fragile mind… However, when the first thing that Brittney's eyes focused on upon falling open once more was Santana's motionless body, blood pooling beneath her open skull, Brittney couldn't help but think that maybe, just maybe, she had been better off where she was.
Maybe I'll be better off wherever Santana is.
Subconsciously, she wiped her shaking hand across the top of her head, her fingers weaving through her hair so that the moisture that had been torturously collecting through the keratin fibers collected against her palm… Upon her observation, the thin white, liquid sheath layering her palm combined with the overwhelming smell of dairy told her that she had found recluse hiding beneath an overturned milk carton this entire time.
Her body felt numb, weak, impossibly heavy so that she knew in an instant that she wouldn't be able to move even if she tried… It was a thought confirmed only when her flaccid muscles instinctually moved to pull herself out from beneath the table, achieving mere inches of wiggle-room before her body was pitched forward; falling like an overturned tree towards the ground below.
She fell directly on top of Santana's body in a motion that she could only rationalize through her subconscious desire never to leave the young Latina's side…
Her body was cold to the touch, motionless beneath Brittney's head as the blonde buried her face deep into the girl's shoulder and sobbed desperately, allowing for her tears to be soaked by the spongy cotton of Santana's Cheerio's uniform.
She could only relish in her past now; the sheer amount of times that the two had found themselves in this very position – curled up securely within each other's bodies – albeit under distinctly different circumstances…
Brittney took advantage of her time she had while she had it, knowing for certain that would no longer last forever - the distinct lack of a heartbeat beneath Brittney's ear would make absolutely certain of that – but still, when a set of hands wrapped themselves around Brittney's shoulders and began to tug her away from Santana's body, she couldn't help but think that she hadn't been given enough time to mourn, enough time to grieve.
She wasn't ready to say goodbye; not now, not ever.
"No!" She shrieked, her voice emitting painfully through even her own ears as she struggled in earnest against this mysterious figure, trying desperately to save her, unable to know that in actuality, he was only making things worse.
She thrashed her body instinctually away from his grasp, her muscular shoulders jerking every which way as she dug her fingernails deep into Santana's skin, clawing at her in an effort to physically latch their bodies together so that she would never have to let her go.
And sure, Brittney S. Pierce was a strong girl, but whoever was holding onto her, well he was stronger… He got her up and to her feet with little to no extra effort involved.
"Come on Brittney, it will be okay, come on." Her ministrations paused only upon her identification of the familiarity behind the voice whispering gently inside of her ear. Her guard lowered instinctively as she performed an about face in an effort to identify her captor; flipping her body so that all at once, she found herself chest-to-chest with Mike Chang.
And suddenly, she found herself struck with the remembrance that she was not the only person that had lost a best friend today.
His eyes looked dead, impossibly saddened and yet somehow – Brittney couldn't understand how – still rigorously determined to fight, to save a life that no longer had anything left to live for as he gripped her upper arms firmly and steered her body towards the back wall of windows that the plethora of remaining students were currently clawing to climb through.
"We won't do them any good sitting here waiting to get ourselves killed." Brittney couldn't help but notice that it sounded much more as if he was trying to convince himself rather than her, but she tried to allow his words to motivate her as much as possible as her feet slowly began to shuffle towards the direction that Mike was guiding her…
He had a point - as much as she didn't want to believe it.
The approached the rabid crowds surrounding the windows cautiously watching with horrified shock as students pushed, clawed, bit, kicked, did absolutely anything that they could to ensure that they would be the next ones to escape…
But Brittney simply waited her turn in patience, her body screaming at her to rush forth, but her mind telling her to stay put, to not leave Santana, to not leave anybody behind…
She watched as one of her fellow Cheerio's, with clearly opposite intentions as herself, dove headfirst over a group of her fellow peers, performing an impressive pirouette in mid air that left her body expelling from the window before her in a twisted ball; her exposed skin slicing like ribbons against the jagged edges of the shattered window.
Blood dripped from the razor-sharp glass in rivers, catching a glare against the sunlight that made it seem as if it were positively glowing.
"Come on!" Mike shuffled his friend carefully forward, shielding her protectively as he pushed his way through the treacherous crowds in an effort to guide Brittney towards the broken pane, allowing her to use his cupped hands as a makeshift stepstool to hoist herself up and onto the windowsill.
She moved with a tedious caution; eyeing the sharp edges of the broken glass nervously as she guided her legs forward first, using the careful precision that more than ten years of dancing had graced her with to guide her motions.
"Hurry up!" From somewhere behind her, she heard the inpatient shouts of a young kid that Brittney didn't recognize as he ran forward, clearly frustrated by the slowness of her concerted motions as he nudged her harshly in an effort to stop her from blocking one of the only handful of exits currently acting as a saving grace for all of the kids that had been lucky enough to have escaped a bullet.
She jerked forwards with the momentum enacted upon her by the boy's rough shove, her hand shooting outwards instinctively in an effort to support herself, leaving her hissing with pain as one of the serrated glass edges embedded itself straight into her palm.
With a hiss of pain, her body reacted naturally, her hand withdrawing abruptly from the site as she hugged it close into her chest, leaving her balance thrown off in its entirety so that she stumbled forwards and straight out of the window, gravity plunging the three or four feet onto the hard pavement below.
She landed on her back with a thud that knocked the wind straight out of her chest, allowing her eyes to close momentarily as her mind scrambled to sort through the plethora of stimuli currently racing through it, centered painfully on the dull throb radiating outward from the gash in the center of her palm.
"What the fuck is your problem, man!" From her position against the pavement, she could merely hear Mike's distinct voice, presumably directed towards the boy that had just pushed her out of a window… "We're all trying to get out of here, wait your fucking turn!"
"Mike…" Brittney muttered; muting her feeble attempt at yelling. "No…" She tried to stop him, tried to get him to calm down, but her voice barely rose above a whisper so that it was only a matter of time before the familiar echo of a clenched fist hitting the bony face of a jaw line confirmed what she'd already known; he hadn't heard her, he hadn't acknowledged her plea for him to identify with the one thing that this entire school truly needed right now – a sense of unity.
She opened her eyes slowly; exposing herself to the sunlight so that the accompanying sense of relief hit her like a school bus; her senses overloading as they struggled to take in all of the sights, all of the sounds, all of the smells of an outside world that she wasn't certain she would ever have the opportunity to see again.
At first, everything was blurry, and it took her a couple of seconds to realize that this was simply because of the angle by which the sun had been striking the smooth sheath of tears layered across her eyes… But slowly, her breathing began to slow, her heart quieted against her ribs and her eyes adjusted upwards, reminding her painfully of just how quickly even the bluest of skies outside could turn to grey.
"Brittney! Brittney, are you okay?" She turned her head slowly, eyes narrowing upwards where they focused upon Mike's frame just as he was bounding out from beyond the broken window pane himself, rushing towards her.
He grabbed at her shoulders in an effort to guide her to her feet – pulling her in a manner that left her unable to help but to notice the fresh bruising forming across the knuckles of his right hand.
"Yeah," She insisted, pushing herself out of his grip, pausing only briefly to wipe away at some of the dirt littering her Cheerio's uniform. "Yeah, I'm fine… it's just a little cut on my hand, that's all."
Mike eyed her only briefly… If anything, the gash across her palm could be described as anything but little, but they couldn't linger on that topic of debate, not right now… It was a fact that she had been banking on.
"Okay, come on!" He grabbed her by the wrist of her uninjured hand, pulling so strongly that Brittney could feel an uncomfortable tug stretching out the joint of her shoulder, forcing her to follow Mike as he broke out into a run towards the entrance of the semi-enclosed courtyard that they had found themselves inside of upon throwing their bodies out of the cafeteria windows…
Her feet were forced to move in double time just to keep up with Mike's longer legs, and even though the endurance granted to her by her years of dancing provided her with muscular support, she couldn't help but to grow tired as she sprinted towards the entranceway separating the courtyard from the true outside directly at the opposite end of the school…
A poor architectural design, now that she thought about it.
The closer that she got to freedom however, the less she actually found herself noticing the distant throbbing of her leg muscles… Behind her, a brief array of gunshots exploded, forcing her to stumble slightly, tears stinging harshly at her eyes as she began to hyperventilate in her fear, but still… she never stopped running.
Mike had a white-knuckled grip against her arm, refusing to slow down or let go, so that Brittney was certain that by the time this journey was over, she would have dislocated her shoulder, but she couldn't focus too much on the pain… there was so much else, there was too much else…
Her lungs heaved, screaming in pain as her panic combined with the physical exertion of her abrupt sprint left her body unable to compensate against the shear amount of oxygen that her actions required… Her hand was throbbing, a clear cut trail of blood dripping behind her, her legs were burning… everything hurt.
She wasn't going to make it; she wasn't going to survive this, she knew it… She was mere inches from safety, yet seconds from collapsing in her exhaustion… She could practically feel freedom, practically taste it… but she was going to lose it, ruin everything on a pure technicality.
She was five steps away, four steps, three steps, two…
"Don't move, don't move, don't move!" The screaming orders were harsh, gruff and painful in volume as she felt a strong arm wrap around her upper chest, pinning her arms down to her side and rendering her completely immobile as she was thrown against the brick wall that she knew outlined the gym's exterior. "Keep your hands where I can see them! Keep them above your head; hold them where I can see them!"
Through her peripherals, she managed to catch a glimpse of her captor; the flash of a rifle, similar to that which she'd seen Suzy holding mere moments ago, silhouetted against the brick…
"No, please don't kill me!" Her eyes widened with fear, swimming with tears as she collapsed to her knees, curling herself into as tight a ball as humanly possible. "Please don't shoot me, please!" Her breathing expelled from her lungs in sharp, frantic bursts that made it feel as if her heart were going to explode from her chest… She thought that she was going to be saved; she thought that she was going to be rescued…
"Keep your hands up! Leave them up!" Her arms trembled as she raised them as high as she possibly could from her position on the ground, her injured hand throbbing painfully as she felt the dripping blood succumb to gravity, dripping steadily down the length of her raised arm…
"The boy is clear!" From beside her, she heard a familiar groan; Mike muttering in protest as he was lifted to his feet and pushed forwards… Brittney's heart swelled with fear; Mike was gone, Mike had been taken and now, she was never going to see him again…
"No, Mike!" Brittney lunged towards her friend, but before she'd had the opportunity to reach him, she was grabbed once more pressed even firmer into the wall.
"It's okay, it's okay… you can go with him soon," He told her, his voice much softer, much more gentle than it had been when he'd pinned her down mere moments ago. "This is just protocol; we have to check everybody that comes out of the school."
She swiveled in an about face, confused by his statement, realization only dawning upon her when she saw the S.W.A.T. logo emblazoned across the bullet-proof shield clutched between the hand that he wasn't currently using to pat her down for weaponry, trying to ensure that she wasn't a rogue shooter attempting to sneak out of the school amidst the rest.
"The girl's clear too!" He shouted into the clearing, giving Brittney a slight push over towards his partner just across the way, currently beckoning towards her with a frantic wave of his hand, indicating that she should move, and she should move quickly…
With but one final turn around the back of her shoulder, Brittney moved slowly at first before her legs gradually began to pick up their pace until she was bursting in a sprint, her legs feeling like gelatin from physical exertion combined with the adrenaline pouring into her system.
She ran to the officer, his arms outstretched to intercept the girl as she approached him, grabbing her quickly before she was once against thrown against a brick wall with an overwhelming force that left her wondering just how much more manhandling she could deal with…
"Alright honey, this is what I want you to do." His harsh, guided motions didn't reciprocate alongside his soothing voice. "I want you to keep your body pressed up as close against the wall as you can, follow it to the other side and there will be another officer waiting for you as soon as you get there."
Brittney nods frantically, subconsciously pressing her back as deep into the brick as she possibly could until she could feel the stone slicing cuts deep along the length of the small of her back, marking her movements.
Mere paces ahead of herself, she quickly located Mike as well as a handful of others that she recognized from being in the cafeteria with her… They were all moving at a mere snail's pace and she couldn't help but to be grateful for that; she was certain that she didn't have the means by which to move any faster, even if she had to.
A flash of gunfire sends her to the ground faster that the SWAT members surrounding her could even give her the instruction to do so…
Her stomach presses into the ground so hard that she can feel the sharp grass prickling against her stomach. She finds herself swallowing steeply in the agony that each residual gunshot brings her as officers swoop down seemingly from the air, guns poised and ready to shoot should they be provoked to do so. Tears leak from her eyes as she throws her arms up and over her head, trying to give herself as much protection as was possible in the openness of the quad, her fingers clutching at her hair until she was positively ripping out the stands with a sharp pain that she barely even noticed.
The instant that the loud popping sounds cease, the officers find themselves no longer willing to waste anymore time moving slowly… Brittney feels a gloved hand grabbing at her shoulder, clutching her by the sleeve of her Cheerio's uniform as he pulls her up with enough force to support the entirety of her body weight in his one limb.
"Move!" He orders her sharply, keeping his instructions swift and to the point as he points towards the direction of students already running in a cluster in front of her, "Run!"
She doesn't wait to follow the order and instead bolts, tears blocking her vision as the wind whips frantically across her face and her breathing pushes upwards and from her lungs in a series of harsh grunts that physically pain her chest.
She follows the massive crowd of her fleeing classmates, the blood pumping heavily inside of her ears, her muscles screaming at her as she inhales heavily yet still can't seem to suck in any productive form of oxygen… And then, just like that, she finds herself turning a corner, and it's all over…
"Here, in here, in here…" She approaches yet another set of strategically aligned officers as they shuffle her immediately into a school bus that is blocking her vision of her surroundings although she knows for a fact that she has successfully managed to reach the school's front entrance…
Her feet carry themselves up the brief stair path that leads into the bus, her eyes scanning about the rows of seats, her natural fight-or-flight response still charged enough to allow her to register her surroundings with a pinpoint accuracy… She spots Mike within seconds, and doesn't hesitate before she rushes to his side and sits herself beside him…
He doesn't say a word, and she doesn't either; instead, he wraps his arm across her upper back and pulls her into his shoulder where she finds herself instinctively resisting the motion only briefly before she feels her body relaxing in its depleting adrenaline source so that her muscles begin to relax and her mind to process the events had just emanated around her long enough to allow her to bury her face into Mike's muscular arm, and release herself in the form of racking sobs that have her body trembling, her eyes burning with pain, and the bus silencing in her guttural, choked noises.
The bus is no more than half full before it pulls away from the school within a minute of Brittney loading herself onto it. She can hear the thumping of a hand against the back window even over the sounds of her own cries; an officer producing the natural indicating motion to announce to the bus driver that it was safe for him to move, and although she knows this motion is one that indicates her ultimate safety, she can't help but to flinch with each dull thud, her voice marking it with a particularly retched sob as she perceives the noise to resemble the tone of firing bullets, although she knows there is barely a similarity between them at all.
James Taylor Middle School was directly down the road, situated at the opposite end of the street… It was a fifteen minute walk at most, but with the sidewalks sanctioned off as a makeshift emergency room, and the roads quarantined strictly to emergence vehicles only, the line of buses transporting students lucky enough to have escaped to their safe haven had to go the long way, performing an impressive circle around the radius of destruction.
Through her tear-filled eyes, she forced herself to stare beyond the natural barricade produced by Mike's body and out the window… She couldn't help but feel as if she were taking a trip through the set of a war movie rather than driving along an actual street…
EMT's aligned the sidewalks, bloody gauze pads and medical tape splayed like the confetti that she'd always seen littering Time's Square on New Year's Eve on her television…
There were students bleeding, screaming for a friend that they had lost track of in the chaos, sobbing for medical attention, sprinting for safety in every which direction without a glance back…
The bus entry leading up to the middle school that they were to be picked up at by their parents had been blocked off a mile in either direction, barricaded by police in an effort to ease the amounts of traffic of arriving students, but in the distance, Brittney could see the impossible traffic jam leading into the parent's entrance at the opposite end of the school, she could hear the screams of panicked parents trying desperately to push and shove their way to the front of the line to find information on their children, the wails of car horns, the screaming pleas that they made with police officers to let them through the barricades…
They're shuffled in an even assembly line into the school's back entrance; thousands of kids trying to squeeze themselves through two meager double doors into a gymnasium that was designed to hold a couple hundred rather than a couple thousand…
She could feel the floors creak beneath her feet as she pressed forwards, clutching onto Mike's arm the entirety of the time as she struggled to breathe against the overwhelming feeling of suffocation that came with being packed like a sardine into a gymnasium that was over capacity and beyond.
She finds herself immediately surrounded by people still embracing the idea that they had made it as if that made them think that they were one of the lucky ones or something… In reality, that idea only made Brittney feel the exact opposite way.
A female police officer with a megaphone attached to an amplifier was standing atop a simply table littered with a series of papers that appeared to be attendance sheets as her coworkers flipped through them with an impossible quickness in search of the names parents were screaming at them, trying to confirm whether or not they had been accounted for.
"If your child has been claimed and checked off, please exit the gymnasium as quickly as possible!" The woman was screaming, but the sobs of concerned parents searching desperately for their child next to the wails of traumatized teens as they embraced family members and friends in stranglehold hugs made it impossible to hear her unless you were standing directly next to her. "If you are still looking to locate your child please direct yourself to one of the tables of officers or the lists of the accounted for written on the wall opposite the bleachers!"
Brittney turned curiously towards said wall, forgetting her initial goal of finding her own mother and father where lined up against the drywall were what seemed like hundreds of sheets of computer paper, taped with no organization like a makeshift memorial and littered with the frantic scribbling of nearly illegible handwriting…
A handful of volunteer workers and police officers were making rounds back and forth along the wall, constantly updating the list with new names so that parents who were standing guard in their inability to find their child's name the first time pounced with tears in their eyes, hoping to get luckier in their second, third, fourth attempts…
Parents pushed past each other, throwing elbows, pulling hair and climbing over each other to get to the lists as their wide eyes scanned the names in search for the most familiar one, looking to confirm their teen's fate at the hands of what had only moments ago been a blank white page…
The papers were organized into several specific sections, Brittney quickly realized, the first being the one that was most crowded; the list of kids who had been taken away from the school safe, who had been confirmed as being brought into this gymnasium, who had been uninjured, now only waiting to be retrieved by their parents.
The crowd thinned out dramatically as Brittney's eyes scanned down the row towards the second section of names, the kids who have been confirmed injured, the kids who have already been taken to Lima Memorial Hospital for treatment… Crowding the lists were parents whose faces have grown so pale that you could practically see through their skin, their eyes sunk inwards, their hands shaking as they dragged their fingers across the list in search of the appropriate name…
That particular cluster of people, Brittney couldn't help but think, was a dead end for all hope; either way, it was lose-lose… If your child was on the list, they were injured to an extent that nobody could be certain of, if they weren't on the list, they were probably dead…
There was no list indicative of the kids that have since been confirmed dead, but Brittney wondered if that was a more private entity… She was morbidly curious; she wondered how many people had been killed at the hands of Jacob and Suzy today, if there had been more than the impossible amount that she had watched fall within the bloodbath that had become of their cafeteria…
Probably, she can't help but think.
There was a relatively large crowd of parents standing on their own accord, and unlike the others, they stood so still and so silent that they gave off the impression that they weren't so much as breathing… These were the parents that had not found their child's name, nor heard from them anywhere… they were the ones left to fear the worse, ones who were left to imagine the horrors that came alongside the idea that either their child was dead, or else still trapped inside of the abysmal death trap that had become of their school…
She wondered how many people remained still unaccounted for, wondered how many people were still inside of that school… there were an awful amount of parents standing there, Brittney couldn't' help but notice, she couldn't seem to count them fast enough…
Her mind began to wonder; suddenly, she was wondering how much even the police knew… they hadn't had an opportunity to approach the school's interior yet, Jacob and Suzy had still been shooting when she'd left… she wondered if it was all over, she wondered how many more questions she could fit into her skull before it positively exploded…
Had emergency officials managed to gather enough evidence to be able to inform the nervously awaiting parents of David Karofsky that their son's head had been blown off at the hands of Jacob Ben-Israel only after Jacob had tormented him for several minutes… Did they know that Mercedes was dead, that Matt had been killed simply so that Jacob could make a point, that Quinn had stood up to death nobly, that Puck had sacrificed himself trying to save her…?
Did they know that she had practically had to be pried from Santana's body?
"Mrs. Lopez?" As if on a perfect cue in an external confirmation of her inquiry, she hears a police officer calling for the woman amidst the crowd that she hadn't even noticed in her first initial sweep… Her pulse surges with an exceptional force that has her still-bleeding hand throbbing with a particularly sharp pain, forcing her to revert back to the wound that she'd somehow managed to forget about all together…
She ignores the impossible agony radiating up her arm and stands herself onto her tip-toes in an effort to catch a glimpse of Santana's mother who she spots just as the older woman is pulled to the side by a police officer with a clipboard held tightly between his hands…
Brittney doesn't need to see the board to know that this is the list of kids who have since been confirmed dead, and all at once all of her questions have been answered; they did know.
Brittney has never noticed just how short Santana's mother was before, but suddenly, she seemed impossibly small as she shuffles slowly towards the officer who lifts a gentle hand of comfort and places it firmly against her shoulder as he begins to speak…
She couldn't hear what he had to say but she didn't have to… As if she were watching a silent movie, she watches as Mrs. Lopez collapses to the ground below her, the officer that had been left the duty of delivering the bad news unable to do anything but watch the grieving mother as her wails of pure agony render the chaotic gym silent…
Observers back away gently although their eyes are glued to the grieving mother before them so that they quickly find themselves forming a large circle around the woman, giving her as much privacy as was humanly possible to mourn the loss of her daughter inside of an impossibly packed gymnasium…
And all that Brittney can do is watch as slowly, one by one, heads begin to bow, lips begin to race, muttering in quiet prayer to enact some hope along to the rest, who had lost so much in the blink of an eye.