The Last Mass Shooting

The Last Mass Shooting

By

Robert Reilly

May 19th. "Something feels profoundly different about this one," said the reporter, staring solemnly into the camera…"

May 18th. Wearing his WASP uniform of loafers, khakis, and a white buttondown shirt, Earl Ripe Junior, the tall, blonde, knock-kneed nineteen-year-old, whose long ruddy face was still covered in acne, walked into the auditorium through its main double doors as the twelfth-grade horn band took to the stage.

Strolling awkwardly down the auditorium center aisle, carrying his trombone case in his right hand, numerous teachers, students, and parents nudged each other and said things like, "Isn't he suspended," and "What's Earl Junior doing here?"

Ignoring the side-looks and gossipy whispers, Earl made his way to the front of the performance hall and then disappeared through a side door leading backstage.

Mr. Baily, the balding, mild-mannered, middle-aged music teacher was the first to be murdered. Exiting the backstage restroom, he almost tripped over Earl, who was kneeling down in the darkened corridor, taking something mechanical out of the trombone case.

"Earl, what are you doing here?" asked Mr. Baily, sounding confused.

Earl did not answer. Instead, he tilted the matt-black sixteen-inch barrel up at the teacher's chest and squeezed off two rounds.

*

No one heard the gunshots. A cymbal-stand crashing to the stage floor while the band was blowing practice scales masked the pair of high-velocity pops.

Emerging from the darkened stairwell, stage-left, leveling the barrel of the long gun at the band, Earl shouted, "Where are you, Buchannan," then he murdered the Callahan twins. Both had just been accepted to Yale to study history and economics. Their Eastman tubas and their bodies hit the stage with loud brassy clonks, like four out-of-time quarter notes.

A stunned, sickening silence settled over the audience. Then Earl looked down the sights of the gun, squeezed the trigger, and killed a trumpet player and two French horn players - Lucy Hamilton, Hunter Graham, and Lyndon Fitzgerald.

Lucy would no longer be taking a gap year - scuba diving in the Seychelle Islands and then going on to Madagascar to teach poverty-stricken grade-schoolers to read.

The sudden deaths of Hunter Graham and Lyndon Fitzgerald would unexpectedly be making two students on the waitlists of Dartmouth and Brown extremely happy.

The entire audience jumped up and ran for the doors. An animal panic swept through the auditorium like the flames of a wind-fueled forest fire as Earl shot Johnny Wiggins. Three bullets passed right through Johnny's Selmar 72 Paris sax, his chest, and the back of his chair.

Johnny was wide awake and fully aware of what was happening as he died. His very last thought was, Oh no, my horn. It took dad three years to pay it off.

Johnny was a rare bird at Conant, the son of the head of maintenance, a kind, handsome 'free-ride kid' who had been voted most popular in his class and had recently turned down a full scholarship to play football at Penn State so he could accept another full scholarship to play tenor sax at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. He was a gifted young man.

*

Immediately after murdering Johnny, Earl shot three more trumpet players, two trombone players, and the band's drummer before turning the gun on the terrified mob blocking the auditorium entrance.

*

In November of the previous year, Earl Ripe Senior had left home for a compulsory twenty-year vacation at a federally owned sleepover camp after being found guilty of running a multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme.

In the wake of the trial and the very public sentencing faze, not surprisingly, Earl Junior became sullen and withdrawn. The news of his father's conviction went around the hallowed hallways of Conant Academy like a virulent strain of swine flu in a submarine.

It was the embarrassment of the thing that hurt Earl Junior the most. At a place like Conant, you could be a lackluster student and a sub-par athlete, but if your old man was a well-known Wall Street warrior with a massive personal fortune, schoolwork and scoring goals didn't really matter. What gave certain students unlimited credibility was their families' ability to donate generously to every capital campaign and make huge annual gifts to the schools' colossal endowment fund.

But once the whole, horrible truth was laid bare, what little money remained was divided up between the lawyers and those hoodwinked into investing in Ripe Securities. A handful of which were high-profile Conant parents and alumni.

Around the time Earl Junior was becoming a prep-school pariah, his mother, Belinda Babcock-Ripe was discovering that her credit cards, all but one of them, were being declined while checking out at Bergdorf's.

A week after that mortifying fiasco, she received a letter in the mail informing her that her spa and country club memberships were being been revoked, which prompted the circumference of her well-heeled social circle to constrict to the point where entry was now impossible.

Next to go was the Palm Beach house and the apartment in Tribeca. They went on the market to settle various debts. Then both the Range Rover and the S-Class Mercedes were repossessed by the dealers. Belinda had no idea they were lease vehicles. And on top of all of that, the poor woman had to suffer the indignity of moving out of the East Hampton house and into a four-bedroom 'McMansion' in a Medford housing development and driving around in a five-year-old Subaru Outback bought for Earl Junior.

*

After refusing to go to school, Earl locked himself in his new bedroom and became submerged in online video games where carjacking, gun-battles with gangsters, and killing invading hordes of Nazi Vampires temporarily alleviated some of the social pressures crushing him, despite none of them being of his own making.

*

For his nineteenth birthday, Earl begged his depressed mother for a rifle and a membership to the local gun club. "It'll help me make new friends," he said, "and it’ll get me out the house."

After a few initial objections, the guilt-ridden, lonely, heartbroken Belinda folded under pressure. After all, she just wanted to make her kid happy. So on the day of his birthday, she took her only child to a strip-mall sporting goods store, helped him fill out a background check, and then a week later, returned to the store and bought him what he wanted, a semiautomatic long-gun, two 30-round magazines, a pair of shatterproof glasses, hearing protection, a stack of zombie targets, several boxes of ammo and co-signed a membership to the local Rod & Gun Club.

*

Although Rutherford Buchannan was not on stage that day - he just happened to be at the dentist after losing a filling the night before - he had been the catalyst causing the incident resulting in Earl's suspension.

Rutherford Buchannan, great-grandson and one of the many heirs to the Rutherford Oil & Gas empire, had told Earl Junior during band practice, loudly and with considerable malice, "You better get a lot better on that trombone now your trust fund's all gone. After graduation, you should audition for one of those cruise-ship bands; they have accommodations included in the pay."

Rumor had it that the Buchannan's had lost a ton of money in Earl senior's Ponzi scheme.

The other students laughed. The gentle Mr. Baily tried to take charge but failed. The only one who spoke up with any authority was Johnny Wiggins.

"Hey, Buchannan! Give the kid a break. What his old man did had nothing to do with him."

Rutherford Buchannan sneered at Johnny's reprimand but wisely decided to quit the cruelty. Even a big man on campus like Buchannan knew not to cross Wiggins.

"Buchannan, you ever talk to me like that again," said Earl, tearing up, "I'll kill you and your entire family."

It was that threat, witnessed by a member of faculty and a dozen students that got Earl Ripe suspended.

*

Firing indiscriminately into the crowd, Earl jumped down off the stage and began walking towards the auditorium doors, where the mass of shrieking, bleeding, terrified students, parents, and teachers was being butchered in broad daylight instead of enjoying an end of year concert.

Martha Eisenhower and her ten-year-old son, Teddy, died clinging to each other as bullets blasted through their bodies. Oscar Keenan, the 8th-grade son of the school librarian was shot as he slipped on the blood spurting from Martha Eisenhower's gaping chest wound and died trying to get back to his feet. Eli Greenburg, the first Jew to ever attend Conant, who, after graduating from Harvard, volunteered for Vietnam and led a platoon of tough working-class kids through two tours of duty, died protecting a young mother and her infant child with his own body.

Earl would have kept on killing if it had not have been for Wayne Wiggins, who before accepting the head of maintenance job at Conant had spent twenty years in the United States Marine Corps and had lived through numerous combat deployments in a handful of third-world hell-hole war zones.

Carrying an arm full of paper supplies into the boy's groundfloor restroom, Wayne initially thought the distinct miniature explosions and the woeful wailing was a PTSD flashback brought on by random snare drum hits coming from the auditorium. But after realizing what was actually happening - the nightmare of nightmares - Wayne dropped the paper towels and sprinted towards the crisis, the way he had been trained to – to run towards the guns.

*

Reaching the body-clogged doorway, Wayne looked past the clawing hands and terrified faces and into the auditorium where the rhythmic banging of semiautomatic gunfire and screaming was echoing around the high ceilinged room.

Propelled by a rush of adrenaline-driven strength, Wayne leaped over bullet-riddled bodies, dozens of them, spilling out into the hallway like terrified animals breaking through a barricade at an abattoir.

Earl Junior clicked a new magazine into place, lowered the barrel towards those crawling out into the hallway, slid his finger through the trigger guard, and then was slammed to the ground by Wayne.

It was the first time in Earl Juniors' life, he had ever been hit or felt any real physical pain.

*

May 19th. "Something feels profoundly different about this one." said the reporter, staring solemnly into the camera with the marble columns and Ivy-covered façade of Conant Academy filling the shot behind her. "The gunman, a suspended senior, rumored to be the son of disgraced financier Earl Ripe the second, was tackled by a janitor before the carnage could continue. The fact that a crime like this could happen here at a place like Conant Academy, an elite training ground for future captains of industry and world leaders is beyond anyone's understanding. A spokeswoman from the National Rifle Association said stricter gun controls will never stop this sort of thing from happening again. But in the only country where this does happen again and again, with gut-wrenching regularity, a groundswell of Republican-led firearms reform is finally getting the traction that's eluded it for decades. Among the twenty-three dead are Thomas and Maria Callahan, twin son and daughter of Congressman Jerry Callahan from Texas. Lucy Hamilton, daughter of Congressman Ryan Hamilton from Kentucky. Hunter Graham, grandson of Senator Diana Elman-Graham from Wyoming, and Lyndon Fitzgerald, son of Supreme Court Judge Jefferson Fitzgerald of Florida. Others among the murdered are Martha Eisenhower, head of Homeland Security, and her ten-year-old son, Teddy, and Eli Greenburg retired chairman of the Federal Reserve. And so as tragic as it seems, it appears that the only way to permanently alter the law and the status quo is to have the status quo permanently alter those who make the law."