Free Soft Target by Stephen Hunter Page A

was in the rear of the room—“but we have to go on tippy-toes.”
    “I don’t like tippy-toes,” said Larry. “It’s for babies.”
    Lavelva was the day care service coordinator, afternoon shift, second floor. She had seventeen unruly kids, three through eight, under her charge. This was her first day! Goddamn!
    She wasn’t sure what was going on. She was trapped in the day care center, a large room full of beat-up toys and pissed-on dolls, on the second floor. About an hour ago, she’d heard the shooting—loud sharp cracks, echoing eerily along the walls, the nooks and crannies of the mall, very frightening—and herded her kids to the back of the room and told them to them lie down. She went to the doorway and watched as the crowded corridor outside seemed to drain itself in a couple of minutes. People ran crazily, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting, they have machine guns.” She knew there was no way she could get seventeen kids through that mob and that the kids would be knocked down, separated, even hurt. Where was her supervisor? Mrs. Watney, head of mall day care, didn’t answer her calls or her texts. Maybe she’d raced out the door too. She tried her mom; couldn’t get through. She tried her brother Ralphie installing carpets,even though he’d told her never to call while he was on the job. It didn’t matter; couldn’t get through. She tried 911. No response. She was alone.
    Lavelva knew two things immediately: the first was that she’d be much better holding the children here until someone in authority—a cop, a fireman, someone—came with instructions, and second that if there were men with guns around, she had to have a weapon. In her universe, inner-city Minneapolis, Twenty-Eighth and Washington, it was a tough life and all the young men carried. She’d seen them lying on the streets, bled out, eyes blank. That was the world. There was no other. All the newspapers were always jabbering about the tragedy of it, blah blah and blah, but words like
tragedy
held little meaning for Lavelva; hers was a more practical turn of mind, and it had to do with dealing with what was instead of dreaming about what could be.
    She herded the kids back to the rear of the room and sent Linda in to do peepee and the other one. Suzanne, Mindy, Jessica, and Marsha went too. In fact all the girls went.
    “Everybody gets a turn. No shoving. Stand in line. Make Miss Lavelva proud,” she instructed, knowing these passive little white girls would do exactly that. She couldn’t go with them, of course; policy was that no childcare coordinator could be alone in a bathroom with a child of either sex. But perhaps, on a day such as today, the rules had gone out the window. Still, it was better to obey policy, no matter what was happening outside. Here in the second-floor Mall Service Childcare Center, policies would be obeyed.
    Well, all but one.
    She said to the boys, “You all line up against the wall. We’re still going to play Hide from the monster. You lie down, you be quiet. You don’t let no monster spot you. This is going to be a long game, so best get used to it. I don’t want crying or whining. Y’all have to be brave little boys today, you hear?”
    They nodded. The redheaded one, CHARLES 3-5, said, “What’s brave?”
    “Like a big old football player. Ain’t scared of nothing.”
    “I am scared,” said Charles. “It’s different now.”
    “Yes it is,” said Lavelva. “It is very different. But Charles, you are so feisty I want you to be the leader, okay? You be the bravest.”
    “Yes, Miss Lavelva,” said Charles.
    Lavelva turned, went to her desk, or rather
the
desk, as it was generic to the center, owned by none of the coordinators. She saw nothing that could be altered to be dangerous, no letter openers, no files, no spikes for spearing paper notices, nothing. Not even a ruler. Obviously, with nimble-fingered little brutes around, thought had been exercised on keeping the