"Are you all right?" Wyn had run for years, but she had never moved as fast as she did then, brushing glass from her student (hers! how dare anyone touch him?) and blotting the blood on his hands with her scarf despite his protests that she'd ruin it. She comforted him in the Castilian she'd learned traveling with her parents.
Smoke and screams poured in the window. Beyond the square, a black column of smoke rose: the gate-control shack. Again, the building shook. Bomb or an earthquake?
The door opened, slamming against the wall with such force that two people cried out. Apologizing to the boy she held, Wyn strode toward the university rentacops. Real police muscle stood behind them.
"Taxpayer. ." An imperious flare of her eyebrows drew a snicker from one student and made the rentacop correct himself. "Professor. ."
"Ms. Baker," she identified herself crisply. In her world, everyone was a Taxpayer, and so many people were professors or had some such tide that it was vulgar to use any of them.
"Begging your pardon, but we. ."
"We've had a bombing. We're evacuating the building and moving our own forces in," said the policeman behind University Security, such as it was. He snapped up the dark visor of his helmet long enough that she knew it for a salute, then pushed it down over his eyes again. His riot shield and stick hung over arms and belt.
"My students?"
"All right, any Taxpayers here. . well see you out of the budding."
"All my students, officer."
It was hard to stare down a black visor. She managed.
"Where you want'm to go, lady?" asked the cop.
"To their homes, of course."
A bark of laughter told her what the man thought of that.
"Then I will assume personal responsibility for them," she announced. She turned to face the students. "We are being evacuated," she told them. "I will see that you get home safely."
She walked between the policemen and her students out the door and to the stairs. Down and down and down the spiral stairs of the emergency exit they went. The Taxpayer students, fit from their exercise classes in garish health clubs, pressed at her heels. The Citizens, less fit and less well-fed, panted. In the half-light, their eyes started and bulged with fear.
But I said I would assume personal responsibility, Wyn thought.
Troops-she could not think of them as security or police-waited at the vaulted ground floor and the great arched double doors, forming a cordon of flesh and armor. Flanked by security, the Taxpayer students were led quickly off in one direction.
"Se?ora," whispered the boy whose face she had wiped when glass had struck him, "you get the girls to safety. My friends and I. ."
This was no time for a lecture about the backwardness of "women and children first."
"We all will leave safely," she told him. She edged up to the helmeted man.
"Do you have an escort for us?" she demanded.
"Will someone tell me why this overgrown pain in the ass thinks she's a privileged character?" he muttered at the rentacop. "All I see is another prof. Taller than most; snottier than any. Give me one good reason why. ."
The man's eyes popped again. "Guest faculty. Professor Winthrop Baker from Harvard."
"Big. . fuckin'. . deal. Got an attitude out to there."
The rentacop hissed, drew him slightly to one side. As clearly as if she had a mike turned on them, Wyn overheard. "My God, do you know who her brother is?"
Her brother, Putnam, or as he liked to be called, "Put amp; Call" Baker, who managed her family's money and a good chunk of her university's.
The helmeted man shook his head. "Jeez. Just this once. . just this once."
"Fire! Look!"
Adrenaline spiked, leaving Wyn calm and observant. She threw out her arms in a warding gesture, as if she could shield her students. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it, Santayana had said. You can tell and tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much. Well, she was a Harvard woman, and these were her students, and no one was going to tell her she wasn't going to protect them.
Least of all a rentacop charged with getting them all out safely.
Amps and instruments twanged as musicians raced to shut down their equipment and escape. A blue tide of security, bearing the university president in its wake, flowed out from patrol cruisers onto the green. Bullhorns blared and interrupted each other. The president's eyes bulged. His cheeks puffed as he tried to make himself understood. Beads of sweat stood out on his bald head.
The building rocked from another blast. Across the green, flame shot from windows, licking the pink marble Facade black. From the roof a man jumped. There was fire equipment nearby, but none in place to catch him. Wyn heard the crack as his bones broke. Behind her, a student dropped retching to his knees.
"Someone hold his head," she ordered in an undertone. She had to watch. Police cruisers landed, the whir of their airpads shrieking, then quieting as they touched down. More blue and armor marched onto the green, wielding nightsticks with a passionless precision that made her mink of martial arts and weapons practice. Two techs stood by a cruiser, hoses at the ready.
A civilian in bright clothing-"Target!" screamed some damn fool and hurled a bottle that a policeman deflected with a blow from his shield-climbed to the roof of the cruiser and began to read.
"We got to get out of here," muttered one of Wyn's students.
"May they leave?" she asked the policeman quickly.
"What about you?" one student, astonishingly enough, asked her.
"I'll be fine. And well have class next week. I'll post a. ."
"Outtahere!" the policeman jerked his chin. The girls in their midst, they fled.
The students on the green screamed down the negotiator, tried to rush the cops, and found themselves pushed back, back toward electrified barriers set up on two sides of the square.
Wyn saw her students caught up and engulfed. "No!" She cried, "No! Help them!" A nightstick came down on the head of the boy with whom she had spoken Spanish with. He toppled, blood pouring from his nose.
Wyn grabbed the policeman's arm. It was like grasping an industrial robot. "You promised they'd be safe! Go help them!"
"Go out in that, lady, and no one can help you. Sorry." He wasn't.
Four technicians drew hoses from a cruiser. As the police advanced, they shot foam, gray and slimy over their heads. It splattered on the feet of the advancing rioters. Where it fell, so did the protestors.
Again, clubs rose and fell. Wyn pressed forward.
"Get her out of here," ordered the cop.
"Come on, lady. Move it, Professor." Forming a wall between her and the battle on the square, they forced her out a side door. She was breathing in gasps, forcing herself not to weep, not to swear. She had seen blood on the faces of students. Her students.
And she was powerless to help.
Around back, she saw President Kerr-Truman, still sweaty, pale now as he realized that his East Coast trophy had damn near been a casualty in this stupid private war of his.
They bundled her into a van, carefully unmarked with the University's crest. It sped down side streets, careful to avoid the press.
She waved away the offer to go straight to University Health or straight to LAX and back to Boston-Logan Airport and the refuge of her Cambridge home.
All she wanted was a bath, a drink, and a chance to do some thinking.
Even at dawn, blood and smoke still tainted the air. Jogging in place, Wyn Baker glanced about, surprised at her own wariness.
The gray college Gothic buildings of Los Angeles University's central square looked as if some inept army had tried to fight a rearguard action and lost.
Splashes of paint stained the walls, the bars, and the shattered glass of the narrow windows. Lower down were splashes of slimy white foam and other things she preferred not to remember.