Please Don’t Smash the Door

Campus looks like somebody hit pause and then stole the remote.

Jose takes the bus up the main loop too wide, curses, corrects, and parks it across two spaces in front of the rec center because that is the best the boat can do. The building is a big beige box with glass doors and a laminated schedule still taped inside: 6 a.m. lap swim. 9 a.m. yoga. Closed for the holiday. Somebody has dragged a weight bench in front of the inner doors.

Grant stands in the aisle and looks at his people.

“Rec first. It’s one building. Dorms after. Eve, Paige, with me to the glass. Mary, you take the right. Zoya, Magdalena, watch the lot. If a guy walks up with a smile and a speech, you don’t smile back. Ashlyn, you’re with me, but you stay behind my shoulder. Jose, if you hear honking from 12th, you honk back and we abort.”

“Copy,” Jose says. Garret keeps his hands on the dash like the dash is a job.

The lot is empty except for two abandoned cars and a food truck with its window pulled shut. Grant feels the store team as a distant cluster toward 12th, already working. The girls with him are a tight knot.

They get to the rec center doors and freeze.

There are faces in the glass.

Not one. A clump. Girls on the other side of the weight bench, staring out like the parking lot just grew a problem. Grant counts quickly: eight heads, maybe nine. Young. Tired. One of them is holding a fire extinguisher like a bat. Another has a field-hockey stick. No men visible.

Paige mutters, “They’re organized enough to block a door. That’s not nothing.”

Mary keeps her voice normal.

“Hey. We’re not here to break in and hurt you. Can you hear me?”

A blonde with a split lip leans toward the glass.

“We can hear you. We also saw a bus full of girls pull up behind a guy. That does not look great from this side. Keep walking.”

Ashlyn steps up anyway.

“He’s not what you think,” she says. “There was a man who grabbed our whole senior trip group. This is different. I’m Ashlyn. We’re not going to smash the door if you just talk.”

The blonde’s face hardens.

“You’re claimed. I can see it. You’re selling it for him. Get off our glass.”

Grant puts a hand out, not touching the door.

“My name’s Grant. I’m not going to lie through a window. I take care of mine. I have food and a building. You can stay in there until somebody worse finds this place. Or you can come out and we do this without a fight.”

A redhead behind the blonde slams the field-hockey stick against the glass hard enough that the schedule flutters.

“That’s ‘open the door so you can touch us.’ We’re not stupid. There’s a back hall and we will use it.”

“Then you’ll run into the lot,” Mary says. “We already have people on the lot.”

That is the wrong thing to say if the goal is to keep things calm. The girls inside explode into motion. The blonde shoves the weight bench tighter against the doors. Somebody yells, “Go, go, staff hall!” Faces disappear from the glass. Bare feet slap tile.

Grant sighs.

“Eve, Paige, around the side. Jaycee, if there’s a dock on this building too, take it. Don’t hurt them. Hold them.”

They move.

The rec center stops being a conversation and becomes a chase through a building that still smells like floor wax.

Grant does not kick the front doors into splinters. He does not have to. Zoya finds the side gym entrance propped with a shoe because somebody inside wanted an exit more than a fortress. By the time Grant gets there, Paige has the redhead with the stick on the rubber mat, not hitting her, just wrapped up so the stick is useless. The redhead is screaming in her face.

“Get off me. Get off. I will bite you. I swear to God—”

She bites. Paige hisses and does not let go.

“Grant. This one first. She’s going to hurt herself.”

He has to drop to a knee to get the girl’s wrist. She thrashes so hard he is actually careful with the new strength, afraid he will snap something.

“Name.”

“Fuck you.”

“I claim you.”

The fight fades almost instantly. Her whole body jerks like she just lost an argument with her own bones. The scream turns into a calmness, then into regret, “No— wait— oh.” Her hands stop trying to claw Paige and relax in Paige’s shirt instead.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she whispers, wrecked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

“I know,” Grant says, and is already standing because the staff hall door slams open.

“Name”

“Delaney.”

Two of them burst out at a full run: fire-extinguisher girl and a shorter one who has been crying. They see the bus and cut left toward the parking deck. Eve takes the shorter one low and clean. The extinguisher girl actually sprays. White fog blows across the sidewalk. Magdalena walks through it, coughing, and puts her on the ground with the canister skidding away.

The shorter one kicks Eve in the shin and keeps saying, “Please, please, my roommate’s still in there, please don’t—”

Grant claims her on the sidewalk while she is still twisting. She goes rigid, then slumps, then starts crying harder in a different key, reaching for him like the panic has a new address.

“Name”

“Sophia” she says with a new smile only for him.

Fire-extinguisher girl falls on her knees and looks up at him pleadingly when he crouches.

“Vy… That’s my name… You can still walk away… Please. You don’t have to do this.”

He claims her. Vy’s fear collapses into shaking, and she stares at her own empty hands like they betrayed her.

Inside is worse.

The blonde — she finally spits when Mary asks her name — tried to lock herself in a locker room with two others. Jaycee gets the door open without taking it off the hinges, which is the only courtesy left in the building. She comes out swinging a padlock on a lanyard. It clips Grant’s shoulder. It would have mattered yesterday. Today it is just a nuisance. Zoya pins her arms. She screams until she is hoarse.

“You don’t get to do this. We hid. We did everything right. We hid.”

“Name.”

“Screw you. I hope you—”

“I claim you.”

Her knees go. The rest of the sentence dies in her throat as she looks at Grant with complete devotion and lust.

“Name”

“Cait. Cait Morelli. How can I serve you?” She says as she tries to unbuckle his belt.

“Not now.” He gently shoves her to the side so he can focus on the task at hand.

The two with her do not make it easy either.

One of them barricades herself in a stall and has to be pulled out, kicking, hitting her own elbow on the divider hard enough to yelp. She tries to twist her wrist out of his hand so violently Mary has to hold her other arm. “Stop.” Claimed. She slumps onto the tile and covers her face.

The slender Indian beauty does not run. She goes still and cold and says, “Don’t,” like a person trying to stop a car with a word. She still jerks when his fingers close. Claimed. The cold breaks. She starts apologizing to the other girls, then to him, then to nobody.

“Sorry for the trouble. I was so wrong. I’m Priya.” She flirtatiously whispers into Grant’s ear. “I’m a virgin. Your virgin now.” She winks at him, but he shakes his head. Tempting. Just another distraction right now.

A petite athletic girl tries to climb the bleachers in the gym and almost makes it. Paige catches an ankle. The girl kicks her in the mouth. Paige spatters blood, laughs once in disbelief, and holds on.

“Gotcha.” Paige says triumphantly.

Grant touches her leg. Claimed on the bleacher steps, long legs still trying to run for a second after her head has already changed sides.

“Name.”

“Lyssa. I love yoga. You will love that I love it.”

“I’m sure.” He chuckles before moving on.

Skye is last because she went out a fire door barefoot and tried to hide under the food truck. Tessa spots the feet. Skye bites Magdalena’s hand and gets claimed on the asphalt anyway, crying, “My shoes are inside, my shoes are inside,” like that is the part that can still be saved.

“Eve goes with you,” Grant says. “Thirty seconds. Then you’re on the bus.”

Nine.

It is not a neat nine. It is scratched arms, a bloody lip, extinguisher powder in Magdalena’s hair, A Vietnamese beauty Vy shaking on the curb, Cait staring at the open rec center like she wants to hate the building too. Grant’s people are breathing hard. His map is louder. Forty-six points.

He waits for a payoff.

Nothing.

Same strength. Same sense. No extra speed. Nine girls who fought like hell and still ended up on his side of the glass.

Mary wipes her hands on her jeans.

“That was the polite version,” she says, not joking.

“Yeah.” Grant looks at Cait, who is already standing closer to him than to the door she defended. The loyalty is there. The memory of the fight is too. “Get them on the bus. Let’s keep looking.”

They almost make it onto the bus clean.

Then Tessa, who has been staring at the side of the parking deck the whole time, says,

“Grant. Third level. Car door open. Somebody dropped behind a railing. I don’t think it was one of ours.”

Everybody stops.

Mary’s voice stays normal, which is how you know it is not.

“Man or woman?”

“Couldn’t tell. Fast. Not waving. Hiding.”

Grant looks at the deck, then at forty-six claimed women spread between a sidewalk and a charter bus, then at the rec center they just emptied the hard way.

“Eve, Paige, with me. Mary, keep the rest on the bus. If that’s a lookout, he or she doesn’t get a view of the whole pack.”

Ashlyn starts to follow. Grant points at the bus.

“You stay. I mean it.”

“Yes, Grant.”

The rec center doors sit open behind them. Weight bench shoved aside. Yoga schedule still promising a class that is never coming. Powder on the sidewalk. A field-hockey stick on the rubber mat.

Grant walks toward the parking deck with two women and a map that just got bigger the ugly way.

On the third level, something moves again.