Malorie hears a sudden obscenity from the other side of the locked door. Two people are fighting in the hall. It’s a man and a woman. And it’s not difficult to put visual images with the sounds they make. Clawing, scratching. Fingers in eyes and fingers down throats and the cracking of a bone and the tearing of what sounds like a throat.

Bare-handed?

Malorie doesn’t move. A body slams against the wood door and slides to the tiled floor. Whoever’s won the fight, he or she is panting just outside.

Malorie listens. She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She knows there’s no stopping the panic. She wants to hear farther up the hall, past the breathing, to the screams of the people who live here, to the exact things they say, to the exact location of her kids. She remembers giving birth in the attic of a home, a place much smaller than this. She recalls a cry from below: Don tore the drapes down!

Who tore them down here?

In the hall, the breathing has stopped. But the distant sounds of fists on wood, fists on fists, and the last vestiges of sanity are getting louder.

Malorie unlocks the classroom door. She opens it.

There is no immediate movement in the hall. No one erupts toward her. No one speaks at all. Whoever won the fight, they are gone now. Howls erupt from deeper in the building. Muffled death knells, last words and wishes. There is the smacking of fists, the cracking of wood. There is yelling and gibberish, doors slamming open and doors slamming closed. Children cry out. The music from the office continues.

Malorie steps over the body at the open door’s threshold. She steps into the hall, keeping to the wall. An alarm sounds. The front door to the school is open. The rhythmic throbbing is so at odds with the classical music that for a confused second Malorie feels like she’s already lost her mind.

Her kids are somewhere in this furor.

Shaking, she tries to close her eyes a third time, behind her already closed lids, behind the fold wrapped tight to her head, closing her mind to the idea of what this all must look like.

She slides along the brick wall. She does not call out to Tom or Olympia though it’s all she wants to do. She breathes in, she holds it, breathes out. The bricks prickle her bare shoulders and arms, tugging at the fabric of the white tank top she wears. The alarm gets louder as she approaches the end of this hall, approaches the very place from which redheaded Annette came rushing with a large knife in hand. People scream ahead. Someone is close. Heavy, clumsy boots on the floor, the grunt of someone not used to this much effort.

Malorie goes still.