We knew he had a gun now. Any thing he wanted he would get, and we knew it. He had moved on now to the next door, and the next. From the sounds of it he was testing all the doors. After a few clicks of the locked doors he would move on to the next. I silently prayed that everyone had remembered to lock the doors. From the loud, pounding angry steps of the man, I didn’t think any one had forgotten.

Then he came back to our door. We saw the looming shadow once more arrive at the door, the one thing between our life, and almost certain death. We heard the sirens then. You would think that would be a sign of hope right? Wrong. If we could hear it- he could too. And he did, at that moment the man knew that the police had arrived and he also knew that they would be in soon, and find him all the way up on the third floor. He began to pace then. His foot steps became loud and eerie, as he walked back and forth, with each step he took away from him we breathed a sigh of relief but with each step he took closer we inhaled quickly and wished for him to turn.

One time he came a little to close to the door and kicked it, a girl in the back row of our huddle, Nicole, who had been quiet until this point, screamed. I am not just talking a little whimper, a loud high pitched scream that awakened the dead. My heart at that point was going a thousand beats a second.

After that was a blur of memories. I remember hearing the loudest bang I had ever heard, then the sound of the door, that weighed as much as me, hitting the floor. A man stepped in. He was wearing a gray t-shirt with a black biker vest, and black jeans. His hair was long and unruly and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a VERY long time.

I will never forget the gleam in his eyes. The golden sparkle, that was like the triumphant look in a lion’s eye after catching a huge deer by himself for the first time. He was the hunter, we were the hunted, and we were dead. He looked right at me. Reading my mind and feeling the earth quake my heart was causing.

He told us not to move. And gave us a glare that said if you move a muscle I got a gun right here that will blow your head off, just like your beloved principals. He started toward us, which made us all flinch in unison as if a bully was about to strike us. You could see the enjoyment on his face, from making us all scared. Then he reached a big, lumpy, sweaty arm out ward, which was dodged by several fellow class mates, and grabbed our teacher by her long sandy blond hair. And he drug her to the door way. Have you ever seen your teacher being pulled by the hair by a big, scary man? You will never know what it feels like, and I will probably not be able to explain it to you, but that feeling was the absolute worst. It felt like having the one person you thought could do any thing, your hero being dragged like a vulnerable doll out of a room.

At the door way he yelled in a deep low voice, “If you are in the next room you had best open this door or this here teacher will suffer the same fate as your principal, in case you hadn’t heard he has been relived from his position.” At this point he laughed a deep scary laugh. Like the evil man in the cartoons always practicing his evil laugh. But in our story the man didn’t choke, you couldn’t laugh and change the channel. All you could do is sit and quiver in fear at the sound of this evil, deep, rumbling laughter.