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We manage to make it down several aisles, venturing toward the stock room and the loading docks, before the gunman pauses to reload.
We are hovering behind the deli counter, a mere five steps from the stock room entrance, when I spot a woman and a young toddler hiding behind a cardboard display adjacent to where we are crouched.
Something about the boy reminds me of Sophie. It’s the pajamas, I eventually realize. She was obsessed with a pair exactly like the ones he is wearing when she was that age. They have little trains on them, and if my memory serves me correctly, the little trains glow.
The thought stops me in my tracks. I glance from the boy to his mother, who is in shock, wild-eyed, and probably unmovable. “Over here,” I say, motioning with my pistoled hand.
Panic registers in her eyes as they fix on mine. Almost imperceptibly, she shakes her head.
I tell her with my eyes and my mouth, with my entire body to send the boy in my direction.
Her eyes flit from one side of the store to the other. Shots ring out like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“You have to move,” I call out to her. “Or you are going to die.”
Hayley clutches my sweater in her fist. The fire ceases momentarily. I feel her pulse reverberate in my ears. “Mom, come on.”
The gunfire resumes. Closer this time, too close. I realize he wasn’t just reloading, he was on the move. “Go,” I instruct Hayley, eyeing the back door. “Now.”
“I can’t,” she cries.
“It’s sixteen steps,” I tell her. “You can.”
She clutches me tighter, pulling my shirt so that it’s half hanging off of me.
“Go.” I listen as between rounds the thick rubber soles of the gunman’s boots squeak as they move along the tile floor. “I’ll be right behind you.”
In the oval mirror fixed in the corner of the ceiling, I spot the top of the gunman’s capped head. With a shove and a reassuring nod, I shove Hayley toward the exit. Then I turn and motion to the woman one last time.
Sensing that it’s her final chance, as people tend to do when faced with death, she peels away at the little boy’s grip on her. I watch her lips move as she tells him to run to me. He does as she says.
But then he stops.
His eyes are like the rest of his little body. Frozen.
I wave with both hands, trying to get him to move.
Amid the chaos and the sound of rounds being shot off, I feel the boots closing in on us.
Darting from behind the meat market counter, it takes me three strides to reach the kid. Scooping him in my arms, I make a beeline back to the cover of the counter. We crouch, huddled together. The boy weeps silently.
Until he doesn’t.
You can barely just make out his cries over the sound of bullets spraying. Over and over, he screams just one word: Mommy. Just beyond the chaos and the carnage, my brain registers what is about to happen.
Cupping my hand over his mouth, I glance toward the display where he and his mother had been hiding.
Looking back at me, I see eyes that mirror my own. The woman, sensing her child is about to be killed, lets out the most guttural cry I have ever heard, the kind that lodges itself into your brain and never leaves.
She has the gunman’s attention. As he trains his gun on her, I fling the boy aside.
In my periphery, I watch as she makes the worst and most natural mistake possible. She attempts to flee in the direction of her child.
A flurry of gun shots ring out, some of which are my own.
I manage a hit to the groin, disappointing, but I do have a screaming toddler clinging to me, digging tiny fingernails into my bare leg.
Just as the gunman steadies his gun on me, and I know we are goners, someone attempts to tackle him from behind, knocking him off balance.
