When the green and yellow flashes ended, Merritt found himself sitting on the floor—as planned—inside what looked to be a custodial storage room.
“You’re the last of us,” Emma whispered.
“Suppose we are in a school?” Hannah said. “You know… ’save the student’ and all that?”
“Good bet.” Merritt stood up.
Kent pointed at a calendar from Sept. 1977. The days were X-ed off through the 21, a Wednesday. A poster beside the calendar advertised the Homecoming game: “Go Riverview, Beat Central!” The game was scheduled for the 23rd.
Kent pointed at the poster. “Do we look like high school kids?”
Merritt sighed. “Maybe to the other people… Maybe we are teachers?”
“Either way, I don’t think we are meant to be in a closet.” Hannah started for the door.
“Careful,” Emma said.
With some care they cracked open the door and checked the hall, then hurried out of the closet. The halls were empty, but there was the sound of a lot of people in one direction, so they started that way.
They had gone only a few steps when a man in his forties came around the corner with a big stack of papers. “Where are you kids supposed to be?”
Before anyone answered, the man said, “Cafeteria… I don’t recognize you… Did you just transfer here?”
Emma nodded.
“From where?”
Merritt quickly answered. “Central…”
The man pointed toward the sound. “Hurry before they close the serving lines… Guess you’ve got a decision to make about who to cheer for, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” Hannah answered.
Reaching the cafeteria, Emma shook her head. “There’s like a thousand kids here… which one are we supposed to save?”
The words were barely out of her mouth when screaming and scrambling broke out all around them. One girl’s voice rose above the rest.
“He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
Merritt pushed in front of Emma and scanned the room. A boy stood not 20 feet away holding a gun and pointing one way then the other.
In the 10 seconds of chaos that followed, tables were knocked over, kids were running, cowering on the ground, and screaming. Around the boy with the gun, a small space emptied.
Kent had taken a couple steps toward the boy and Merritt watched as the boy spun the gun and pointed it at Kent, yelling, “I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot!”
Kent took another step toward him. “You don’t want to shoot me. You don’t even know me.”
“I’ll do it!”
Kent shook his head. “You haven't pulled the trigger once. You don’t want to shoot anyone, or else you would already have.”
The screams in the room were replaced by whimpers as kids and teachers either ducked down or ran out of the cafeteria.
“I’ll do it!”
“What do you want?” Kent said calmly, hands in his pockets, as he moved even closer. “Why are you doing this?”
The kid looked down, and Kent moved closer still. “Kid, something's got you really upset, but you didn’t come here to shoot anyone, did you?”
The kid looked up, and seemed, not angry, but terrified.
Kent pulled his right hand out of his pocket and held it out to the side, waving his fingers. “Look at my hand…”
The kid did, and Kent pulled his other hand out. Merritt was surprised to see a small container of pepper spray.
“Wrong hand.” Kent sprayed the boy with the gun in the face.
The gun dropped to the ground as the kid retreated, writhing and spewing.
Kent swept up the gun, released the magazine, letting it drop into his hand, shook his head, and dropped it to the ground. Then, he racked the weapon twice, and nothing happened: no rounds were ejected.
Kent locked open the slide and laid it on the ground beside the empty magazine.
Merritt looked around as a man in a tie approached Kent. He seemed angry and scared, but he was moving in quickly.
Kent pointed at the ground. “It wasn’t loaded. Empty magazine… You can pick it up… it’s safe…”
Kent was backing away fast.
The man in the tie called out. “You! Wait.”
Kent said to the other Time Travelers as he turned. “Run!”
All four of them ran, quickly getting lost in the mass of students already running. Students, teachers, and administrators were all running. Most away from the cafeteria, but a few toward it.
For a moment, they had to stop because of the crowd they had caught up to.
Kent looked over at Emma. “Pepper spray was genius! Seriously.”
Merritt was proud of his wife for thinking of that. “Absolutely a must-have from now on. When you pulled that out, I was… stoked!”
“Like Hannah’s medical bag,” Kent added as the crowd started moving again.
Many were running out of the building, so Merritt pointed and led the others outside.
“Where to?” Emma asked.
“Somewhere no one can see us and let’s hope we Translocate home,” Merritt said.
Merritt led everyone across a parking lot and into a grove of trees beyond it. They came to a concrete drainage ditch and hopped into it. Not too far away, they came to a road that crossed the ditch so they stopped running under the bridge.
Hannah grabbed Kent and pounded his chest. “You could’ve got killed! Kent! I was so scared! You could have gotten killed! I don’t want to need a medical bag to save my own husband!”
Kent wrapped her up in his arms. “It wasn’t even loaded.”
“You didn’t know that!” Hannah held him tight.
“ It wasn’t cocked… It wouldn’t shoot… I could see the hammer was forward.”
Merritt’s thoughts filled with memories from the version of him in the 1984 Moment that taught survival skills for the personal protection company. “Oh… A .45… Must have been a 1911… Single action… Hammer fired.”
Hannah relaxed. “Oh… yeah… must have been a 1911. I wasn’t trying and I could tell it was a .45 caliber… Too big to be a 9mm. You saw the hammer wasn’t cocked?”
Kent nodded. “I looked for that first off.”
Hannah relaxed a little more. “He could have cocked it. I was so afraid.”
“It wasn’t loaded.” Kent replied.
“You didn’t know that until you took it.”
Merritt suddenly realized the boy couldn’t have killed anyone. “Hey… If the gun wasn’t loaded, we’re not done… We didn’t actually save anyone…”
Emma shook her head. “No… we did…”
Hannah turned to her. “Who?”
Emma pointed. “The boy with the gun. We saved him… from some SWAT team…”
Merritt suddenly began to see yellow and green flashes of light. They were done with their second mission.
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