Cody stood there for a moment, his eyes and his gun directly on Reed’s lifeless body. “Everybody all right?” he asked, knowing at the time it was about the stupidest possible question he could have asked; daring to take his eyes away from the now-dead shooter, he glanced around quickly, noticing that several people were down.

“I’m hurt,” Darrin groaned from under the Wicca table. “Elise is hurt bad.”

“I’m hurt too,” Milo replied from under the GLBT table.

“I’m here, Cody,” he heard Jan yell from behind the safety of the door frame. “Is it safe to come in?”

Cody took another quick glance around the room, taking in the scene a little more thoroughly. There didn’t seem to be any more active shooters. “I think so,” he replied, “but be careful.”

Jan took a quick peek around the door, just to be on the safe side, then came into the room. “Under this table,” he told her as she took in the scene.

She took another quick glance around the room, this time looking for more victims. Even that was enough to tell her that several people were hurt, but that the ones under the Wicca table looked in the worst shape. “Cody,” she said loudly. “Is he dead?”

“I think so.”

“Help me with triage,” she said, going over to the Wicca table and pulling it out so she could get to Darrin and Elise, both crumpled on the floor. We’ve got several hurt.”

“Just a second,” he replied, going over to Reed’s body, still holding the chief’s .38 on him. He reached out a foot and kicked at the body, not lightly – and there was no reaction. It seemed unlikely that there would be one ever again, but he took the risk knowing there were other things that needed to be done, so he settled for using his foot to push the gun away from Reed’s limp hand.

Jan was still evaluating Darrin and Elise, so Cody hurried over to the GLBT table and pulled it out, finding Milo bleeding moderately. He took another glance, and saw Logan covering Nancy; the arm of his shirt was soaked in blood. “Logan, you’re hurt too,” he said.

“I am?” Logan replied.

“Yes, your arm is bleeding,” Nancy told him.

“Anybody else?” Cody said loudly. There were no replies; people were starting to pick themselves up off the floor. This was bad, Cody thought, but it could have been worse. He pulled the radio from his pocket, thumbed the send button and called, “Central, 278 at the shooting scene in the Community Services Building at the school. Scene is secure, shooter is down, many injuries, extent unknown. Need backup and ambulance.”

“Roger that, 278,” came the reply in his earpiece. “We have several reports on it already. Backup and ambulance on the way.”

*   *   *

Students on almost any college campus in the country today are heavily wired, with computers, phones, and any combination of the two. Reed was still shooting when people were already dialing 911 on their cell phones, so several calls hit the two on-duty operators at once. Most of the calls were frantic, with few facts other than there was shooting going on, and that people had been hurt.

Even before the call center operators had cleared the first call, word of the shooting was on the air. “Hawthorne PD, mass shooting reported at the college,” she called. “All available units respond Priority One.”

Things were slow in the newsroom of the Hawthorne Reporter, what with it being a Saturday morning. The paper had already gone to press for the day, and Don Kimball, the one reporter left in the building, was hoping to get home soon and watch some college football on TV. Being a big Notre Dame fan, he caught all the games he could.

The scanner in the newsroom was running all the time, and this time of the day there usually wasn’t much on it but routine reports of traffic stops and the like. But his ears and his brain picked out the call center operator’s requests for units to respond at the college. It was tempting to race for his car to see what was going on, but he held back a little, scarcely able to believe his ears. Better wait for confirmation, he thought.

A few seconds went by, no more than half a minute, before he heard Cody’s call to the center. He heard the “scene is secure” part of it but somehow it didn’t register. He also heard “shooters down” instead of what Cody had said, but clearly heard, “many injuries, extent unknown.” If there were many injuries, it stood to reason that there could be some dead.

“Shit,” he said out loud, even though the only person left in the room to hear it was Marge Griffin, who handled obituaries and social notes; she was getting set to leave for the day, too. “Marge, did you hear that?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d been working in that newsroom before Don had been born, and though she wasn’t a reporter as such, she knew the drill. “You’d better get over there. I’ll stay here and call some more people in.”

“Right, I’ll grab a Nikon and get out of here.” But, before Don left, he turned to his keyboard, brought up his email program, and batted off a brief e-mail to the wire service: Flash. Mass shooting reported at Southern Michigan University, Hawthorne, MI. Several injured or presumed dead. Details to follow. Kimball, Hawthorne Reporter.

*   *   *

Hawthorne Police Chief Charles Bascomb was out on the golf course when the first calls came over the police frequency. It was a lousy day for golf; cold and wet and threatening more rain, but he’d felt like he needed some time to relax from the hassles of his job.

Any good police chief, and he was one, is never truly off duty, so he carried a tactical radio with him, much like the one Cody had in his pocket. In his case, though, he didn’t have an earplug, but just listened to the radio through its small tinny speaker. When the call came through, he knew automatically that he wasn’t going to be finishing his game. It may have been just as well, since his tee shot here on the seventh hole had gone somewhere way out into the rough.

“Shit,” he said to his golfing buddy, a long-time friend. “That sounds bad.”

Like Kimball, he waited a few seconds after the first call from Central, unwilling to believe his ears. Cody’s call reporting several injured put an end to that. “You better go,” his friend said.

“No shit,” Bascomb replied, rushing toward the golf cart. In an instant it was racing directly across the course toward the clubhouse. Jesus, he thought. This could be one hell of a mess. He pulled the radio from his pocket, thumbed the send button and called, “141 responding to the scene.”

*   *   *

Cody took another glance around the room. The shooter was still down and likely wasn’t going anywhere. Jan was working on Elise; of the two who had been under the Wicca table, she was clearly by far the worst hurt. “Cody,” she called, “I’m going to need some help with this one!”

“Right,” he said as he thumbed the radio send button again and said, “Central, 278. At least four injuries, one critical. Need the ambulance here as soon as possible.”

Jan had nothing whatsoever to work on Elise with but her bare hands. The sterile field was awful, and she had no protection against blood-borne pathogens, but she tried to get some pressure on Elise’s main wounds, those to the chest. “Sucking chest wound,” she reported. “Cody, please, help!”

Both Jack and Vixen were up by now; Jack was still unaware that he’d been lightly wounded himself. “Can we help?” he said.

“There’s not much we can do but get some pressure on the wounds,” Jan replied quickly. “I need a couple hands here now!”

“What can I do?” Laura said from beside her.

“She’s hit in the thigh,” Jan said. “Find something to put pressure on that wound, too. Something clean if you can find it.”

Laura didn’t hesitate one instant. She pulled off the T-shirt she had been wearing; it was better than nothing. She didn’t pause for one instant to consider that she wasn’t wearing a bra; right at the moment it didn’t matter. That bared the top of her chastity belt, too, of course, but at the time neither she nor anyone else noticed the ding in the waistband.

Jack and Vixen headed for Milo under the GLBT table. He had a bloody but not terribly deep wound on his back, and seeing what Laura had done, Vixen pulled off her sweat shirt to try to put pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding. Like Laura, Vixen wasn’t wearing a bra either.

“I need some more hands over here!” Jan called.

“Go help, I can take care of this,” Vixen told Jack, who hurried over to join the crowd surrounding Darrin and Elise.

“What do you need?” he asked as soon as he got there.

“Get him away a little so Cody and I have room to work on this girl,” Jan said in a flat order. “Then get some pressure on his wound.”

“OK, I can do that,” Jack replied, bending over to drag the wounded man away a little bit. “I’m not hurting that bad,” Darrin told him. “Take care of Elise.”

“Not much I can do, and you look worse than you think you are,” Jack said. Unlike Laura and Vixen, he didn’t take his shirt off, but scrunched up Darrin’s shirt in two places to make a wad that could be used to staunch the bleeding a little.

By now, to Logan, the realization was starting to sink in that he’d been shot. “It hurts, but it’s not real painful,” he told Nancy.

“You’re bleeding pretty bad,” she replied, starting to unbutton her blouse so she could wrap it around his arm. She at least had a bra on, and she was soon winding the blouse tightly over the small entry and exit holes in his arm.

Less than two minutes had passed since the shooting ceased, but no one was paying attention to the time. “Come on guys,” Cody said to himself in a low voice. “We need some help here now!”

*   *   *

The word was spreading in other ways, too. The shooting had barely stopped before several students had made posts on social networking sites.

A couple of students even managed to get photos with their phones – although the only photo that showed anything was one of Summer holding a wad of tissues against Alan’s wound. Head wounds usually bleed copiously, and so it was with Alan; there was blood all over his face and his shirt. Most of the news posted so far was, at best, incomplete, only reporting that there had been shots fired and people hurt.

While usually such posts only went to friends and interested onlookers, the gravity of the news meant that it was forwarded and forwarded again, sometimes with comments, sometimes without. Of course the electronic rumor managed to grow as it was passed along; much as Kimball had made his initial mistake, one shooter became more than one, and a number of people, how many unknown, were probably dead.

*   *   *

Kimball wasn’t the only one to mishear Cody’s call from the Community Services Center; the duty sergeant in the police station, John Claxton, also took it as being multiple shooters. While he believed Cody’s report of injuries, he also took it to mean that there were multiple shooters. With Chief Bascomb off duty, he was in charge of the shift, and in a major scene like this he was expected to be there as incident commander.

“Crap,” he said to an officer who was in the back of the station filling out a routine report. “I better get out there. You stay here and watch the store.” He grabbed the keys to a patrol car, ran out of the building, and started driving toward the university.

As soon as he was moving, his car all lit up and siren wailing, he had a moment to think. “All units responding to the college, this is 194,” he called. “There are possibly more shooters inside the building. Do not enter the building until the situation clarifies. Repeat, do not enter the building. Ambulance units, stay clear of the building until otherwise notified.”

*   *   *

“Holy shit,” the desk man at the regional wire service agency said seconds later as he glanced at the brief e-mail. “Where the hell is Hawthorne, Michigan?”

“Not too far from Notre Dame,” a nearby sports reporter said. “They’re notorious for being a state school that doesn’t have a football team.”

“Shit,” the deskman said again. “Another damn mass shooting.” He didn’t look up from his computer screen, but pulled up a search engine on another tab. “Four, five, Twitter reports, more coming,” he said at first glance. “This looks like the real deal,” he added as he put the flash report from Kimball on the wire. In an instant the report was on computer screens all over a multi-state area, and in a few seconds, after the national desk had seen the report, all over the country.

*   *   *

Jared Sharp, a video production major at Southern, was in the middle of the crowd streaming through the doors of the building, and he’d been one of the first to exit the room where the shooting had occurred. Now, with his heart thumping, he was just glad that he was alive and safe. Someone needed to know about this.

He’d briefly worked as an intern at a TV station in South Bend, the nearest one to the campus. Things hadn’t worked out well there, and he hadn’t been there long, but the thought crossed his mind that he might get back in the station manager’s good graces a little by spreading the word. He pulled out his cell phone; he didn’t have the TV station on autodial, but happened to remember the number.

It didn’t take him long to get through to the newsroom. “We’ve got a mass shooting here at SMU,” he reported. “I know there’s some people hurt, maybe killed. I barely got out of the room.”

“A mass shooting?” Kristy Baumgartner, the reporter on the phone at the TV station said. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, there were a whole lot of shots fired, and I saw some people get hit. I saw Cody Archer running toward the shooting carrying a gun.”

“Cody Archer? Who’s he?”

“He’s a student here. I didn’t know he had a gun. Like I said, there’s people hurt, maybe killed.”

“Right, hang on a second,” the reporter replied. She put Jared on hold and said to the news director at a nearby desk, “Mass shooting reported at SMU in Hawthorne.”

“We just got a flash from network on it,” the news director nodded. “Sounds like it could be real.”

“This kid says someone named Cody Archer was involved, but no details except several hurt, maybe killed.”

“Better get out there,” the news director said. “This looks like one of those deals. Take Truck Two and a couple of cameramen. Get there as quick as you can, and get the uplink working. We may want to feed directly to network.”

*   *   *

Two police cars had already pulled up on the street outside the Community Services Center when Claxton got there, but after the sergeant’s call a couple of minutes before, they were standing behind their cars in tactical gear, but without any idea of what to do. Claxton looked around to see students milling around outside the building; some were still making their way out, some hurrying. “Get those kids back, away from the building,” he yelled at the officers. “One shooter is reported down but there may be others.”

The officers went to work, using a couple of bull horns. “Everybody get away from the building,” one officer yelled. “We don’t know if there are more shooters inside. Get back, off the street, away from the building. I want this area cleared now!”

Some students, hearing mostly the “more shooters” part of the announcement, took off running toward nearby buildings. Others moved away more lackadaisically, and it took the urging of several of the officers to keep them moving.

One officer noticed a pair of kids moving toward them. The guy was holding a wad of tissue up to his head, and it looked pretty bloody. “Kid, did you get hit?” he asked.

“Just grazed me but I’m bleeding like a stuck pig,” Alan replied. “I’m pretty much OK, though.”

“You need to get that looked at,” the officer said, and yelled over at Claxton. “Got a WIA here,” he said. “Doesn’t look real bad.”

“Take him up the street, I’ll have an ambulance meet them,” the sergeant replied, then thought a little more about it – if the kid had been hit he presumably knew something of what had gone on inside. “Better yet, I’ll take him.”

Claxton hustled over to the two kids. The guy looked bloody, but not real bad; a girl was clinging to him for dear life. “What happened in there?” he asked.

“Some old bum pulled a gun and started shooting up the place,” Alan reported. “We rushed for the door. Summer was right ahead of me and heard a bullet go past her ear. I got grazed, but we saw a couple people at the Wicca table were hit pretty bad before we got out of there.”

“Wicca table?”

“It’s Activities Day,” Summer explained. “Organizations on campus set up tables to talk to people who might be interested.”

“Do you know what happened after that?” Claxton asked.

“Not really,” Alan told him. “We saw Cody running toward the room carrying a gun, and we heard three louder shots.”

“Cody? Cody Archer?”

“Yeah, but we don’t know what happened.”

*   *   *

Don Kimball was driving toward the campus as quickly as he dared, which was well over the speed limit. Right now, with every cop in town heading toward the college, it was unlikely that he’d get pulled over.

Partway to the scene, he saw flashing red and blue lights a block or two behind him. Better not risk my luck, he said, pulling to the side to let the patrol car pass. He could see the officer in the car and thought it might be Sergeant Claxton, who he knew slightly from getting police reports for a while.

He was still a couple blocks away from the college when his cell phone rang. “We got a phone call from the wire service,” Marge reported. “They want any fresh information as soon as possible.”

“Nothing yet, I ain’t there yet,” he replied. “I’ll let you know as quick as I can.”

“Good. I’ve managed to get hold of a couple other people; they’re on the way, but it’ll be a few minutes before they can get there.”

In another minute or two Kimball had reached the scene. Knowing that the street in front of the college was likely to be busy for a while, he pulled up a side street and parked, pointing away from the scene. It was a little trick he’d learned working for a country weekly years before, that getting away from a fire or a scene like this could often be harder than getting there in the first place.

He scrambled out of the car, grabbed a notebook, an electronic tablet, and his camera, then ran toward a cluster of police officers and patrol cars parked on the street in front of the Community Services Building. As he got closer, he saw Sergeant Claxton talking with a couple of students, one of whom was covered with blood and was holding a wad of tissue paper up to his head. Looks like the kid was hit, he thought; he might know something about what happened inside. He ran up to the kids and the sergeant and asked, “What do we have?”

“One shooter for sure,” Claxton told him as Kimball followed him along. “Don’t know about others. Several hurt, we do know that. Until we know more and we have more officers here we’re not going in to see.”

In only a few seconds they reached an ambulance sitting outside the direct view of the Community Services Center. “Got a kid hit here,” Claxton said to the ambulance crew. “Doesn’t look real bad.”

“We better take a look,” one of the EMTs said.

“Good enough, I got to get back,” the sergeant replied, then turned to rush back toward the patrol cars.

“Let’s see,” one of the EMTs said, and asked Alan to sit down on the step of the ambulance. He did, and the EMT took the wad of tissue away from his head, and Kimball quickly raised his Nikon and snapped several shots. “Right, not too bad,” he said. “Going to need some stitches, though.”

“I didn’t think it was very bad,” Alan said.

“We better get you to the ER, but let’s get a little better bandaging on it before we do,” the EMT replied.

“Hey,” Kimball broke in. “What happened in there?”

“Some old bum pulled a gun and started shooting up the place,” Alan told him. “We rushed for the door. I got grazed, but we saw a couple people at the Wicca table were hit pretty bad before we got out of there.”

“Wicca table?”

“It’s Activities Day,” Alan told him, much like Summer had told Claxton a minute before. “It’s so organizations on campus can to talk to people who might be interested.”

“Do you know what happened after that?” Kimball asked.

“We saw Cody running toward the room carrying a gun, and we heard three louder shots and none after that. We don’t know what happened for sure.”

“Who’s this Cody?”

“Cody Archer. He’s our landlord.”

“Do you know if anyone was killed?”

“Don’t know,” Alan replied. “There was still shooting going on when we got out of there, but I saw two or three people get hit.”

Kimball asked Alan about a few more details and got his name; by the time he was done, Alan was getting into the ambulance, with Summer climbing in behind him. Kimball thanked him, and as he walked away he pulled out his cell phone and called the Reporter. By now, the editor Bob Phillips was there. “What have you got?” Phillips asked.

“I just talked to a kid who was inside the room when the shooting broke out,” he replied. “A guy who he described as ‘an old bum’ apparently shot up a table at some sort of student organization day. Apparently it was table for the campus Wiccan organization.”

“I didn’t know they had one.”

“I didn’t either. Anyway, the guy said at least two or three people were hit, no idea how many more. He also said a guy by the name of Cody Archer was running toward the room carrying a gun.”

“Did he say if this Archer was involved?”

“I’m not clear on that and I don’t think the kid was either. The kid says he heard three louder shots, and none after that, so maybe this Archer guy got the shooter.”

“Or, maybe not,” Phillips replied. “Stay loose and keep your ears open. Let me know what happens as quick as you can. The wire service is bugging us for details every fifteen seconds.”

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