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Back Run, Hide, Fight Back Save as PDF
Chapters (62)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. Map
  5. Newspaper Extract
  6. Survive
  7. One Hundred Miles
  8. So Many and So Fast
  9. Start to Die
  10. Fish in a Barrel
  11. Because of the Blood
  12. Can’t be Real
  13. Waiting to Die
  14. Panic
  15. None of Them
  16. Trapped
  17. Video Game
  18. Like Her Life Depends on It
  19. Before He Sees Us
  20. It’s Your Lucky Day
  21. Just a Shell
  22. The World’s Best Reality Show
  23. How Long
  24. No Matter What Happens
  25. The One Who Decides
  26. What You Need to Do
  27. One Last Time
  28. The Biggest Secret Ever
  29. What They Want Me to Believe
  30. Who He Really Is
  31. People Like You
  32. I Believe She Is Saying
  33. Wake Up
  34. We Told You What Would Happen
  35. Slowly, Slowly
  36. Everything Is Under Control
  37. Come with Me
  38. The Last Thing They’d Expect
  39. They Can’t Shoot All of Us
  40. Go Down Swinging
  41. Not Running Away
  42. If You’re Going to Lie
  43. Every Rattle and Click
  44. Infinitesimal
  45. No Safe Place
  46. I Didn’t Know
  47. Straight to the Source
  48. Nothing but the Breathing
  49. Anything Other Than Killing
  50. You Honestly Believed
  51. Three Inches Away
  52. Not Anymore
  53. Refusing to Crack
  54. On the Trigger
  55. Over
  56. All Too Much
  57. Together, We Can Make a Difference
  58. A Note From the Author
  59. Other Mysteries by April Henry
  60. Honors for April Henry
  61. About the Author
  62. Newsletter Sign-up

She’s only a dozen feet away. But something is stretched across the exits. Cable bike locks, black rubber-coated braided steel, now link together the silver handles of each pair of doors. She pushes on the nearest door anyway. It opens an inch before the cable catches it.

In the door glass, she sees people running from other exits through the parking lot into the gathering dusk.

Miranda’s trapped. She and all the people behind her. There’re only two ways out of this hall. One is through the locked doors. The other is through the food court, where the shooting started. Where the few remaining people are frantically trying to leave before they die.

And any minute, one of those men will come running down the escalator and finish what they started.

Video Game

VIDEO GAME

3:58 P.M.

It’s like a video game. That’s what Cole Bond tells himself as he runs along the edge of the food court, sheltered by the overhang, past the bodies that lie crumpled on the linoleum floor.

That lady in the blouse who got shot first, she wasn’t real. None of this is real. It’s just an excellent animation. Maybe on one of these 3-D TV sets they have now. If he wanted, he could press the pause button. And if he turned around, his own couch would be at his back. He could get up and go to the fridge in the garage and get another beer.

He tries to tell himself that these bodies never existed outside the game. They never had real lives that got cut short. The coppery smell hanging in the air, that’s just his imagination.

When Cole’s feet slip in blood, it becomes harder to deny reality.

But he has to. Because if he acknowledges that all this is here and now and real, if he acknowledges what just happened with his two older brothers, then something inside Cole will break.

Ahead of him, a girl in one of those Muslim headscarves is trying to pull down Culpeppers’s metal security shutter. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.

Cole can’t do anything for the lifeless bodies on the floor, but maybe he can stop this surreal horror from happening to more people.

Like Her Life Depends on It

LIKE HER LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

3:59 P.M.

Miranda has to get out of here. To get to any of the other exits, she is going to have to cut back through the food court. But there’re fewer and fewer people left alive out there, and those few are even more obvious targets. She ventures back to where the hall meets the food court. In front of LA Nails, sheltered by the overhang, she tries to figure out what to do. How to stay alive.