Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived by Ron Franscell

lay next to a man’s legs near Keith’s head. He didn’t know whether either one was alive or dead. He peeked up through a hole in the bench above him and saw the gunman lurking near the front counter, lifting his gun. Firing at someone.
    That’s when Keith noticed his own left arm was bleeding. It must have been cut by flying glass, he thought. He surely wasn’t shot because he never felt any impact, just a slight burn.
    He didn’t want to run. He wanted to see Matao. He wanted to know what was happening. He wanted to do something. He wanted to fight back. Oh God, how he wanted to fight back. But how? He was a twelve-year-old kid with nothing more than a plastic fork, no match for the shooter. He thought of his mother.
If I die, she’s gonna lose it
.
    Keith felt Huberty’s dark presence the whole time. It terrified him to teeter at the edge of death, but he was powerless to do anything else.
    He found out later that every time he twitched, every time he moved his leg or his head, Huberty fired and hit Ron Herrera, who still curled protectively around Keith.
    Keith drifted in and out of consciousness. Time got all mixed up. Minutes dragged out forever as he floated between waking and blackness. Had it been an hour? Two?
    Suddenly, from his hiding spot, Keith saw more camouflaged pants just a few feet away. Were there more bad guys? He grew even more confused when he heard Ron Herrera talk to the combat-booted men who were budging bodies on the floor.
    They were cops.
    Keith wriggled around. Matao and Blythe were slumped under the bench, both seemingly asleep. Blythe was disarrayed, stained with blood. Matao had blood all over him, too, seeping from some holes on his bare legs.
    Keith slapped Matao’s leg.
    â€œWake up!” he yelled.
    Just then, a cop with a mustache grabbed Keith from behind and pulled him from under the table. Keith fought him as he was hustled to the curb outside, where the cop left him sitting alone. He watched the chaos unfold around him as other wounded people and survivors were hurried to waiting ambulances, wailing and bleeding. Everything became a blur of uniforms and bloodstains. And he had never felt more alone in the world.
    He also saw a bloodied Ron Herrera out there, sobbing as he tried to go back inside, seemingly unaware he’d been shot eight times. It began to dawn on him that maybe Matao was not asleep at all.
    Another cop tried to remove Matao’s bracelet from Keith’s arm, which was streaming blood onto his shorts and legs. He refused to give it up and started to cry. A paramedic walked him to an ambulance where medics were treating a woman who’d been shot in the breast and a teenage McDonald’s worker who was shrieking over a leg wound; the paramedics quickly moved him to another ambulance. He sat there with a little girl about his age whose mother and sister were wounded, too. They talked to each other as if they had not just come within an inch of dying.
    The ambulance took them all to the hospital. There, doctors found one 9 mm bullet had grazed Keith’s right wrist, and another had entered his left forearm and burrowed into his shoulder, where it ricocheted back down his arm and exited near the crease of his elbow.
    His mother was late getting to the hospital, posing a horrible scenario in the little boy’s mind: Was she dead, too? To him, the possibility that anyone could die at any time without any reason or explanation had suddenly become all too real.
    His grandfather later told him what had happened in McDonald’s, at least as much as anyone felt he should know. Blythe and Matao were dead, he said. But he didn’t tell the poor kid that they’d both been hit several times, apparently as they tried to crawl toward a nearby door. They were slaughtered when they retreated back under the table.
    Matao was the good one, Keith always said. He was a gentle soul. And now that he was dead, Keith began to