There were shouts in the next hallway, around the corner from the high school atrium. The shouts were followed by two BAM! BAM! shots, and a scream.

A teacher's voice, shouting into an intercom: "Shooting! Someone's shooting in the south hallway!"

The loudspeaker came to live. A calm male voice said, "Teachers, we havve a 10-32 in the building. Code Red. Repeat, a 10-32 in the building. Take appropriate action."

All around me, I could hear doors slamming and locking. Classroom doors, hallways doors... everywhere, doors slamming shut.

And then there was silence.

It filled the air, a heavy blanket of silence. No one breathed. I was kneeling in a doorway. The door behind me was locked down. I could see around piles of equipment toward an open door to the south hallway, and to my left was a long, open stretch to the exit doors.

Straight ahead was the atrium, empty and silent.

In the south hallways, someone was hammering on doors.

Then two kids came across the atrium toward the south hallway. More shots rang out, and they collapsed, screaming. One of them was coughing. His shirt was full of blood. The other was clutching his arm and screaming.

From acros the atrium, someone else came running. It was the school police officer, with his weapon drawn. He ran to the south hall doorway, not more than twenty feet from me. He shouted, "Hold it right there!" and was fired upon. He returned shots as he grabbed the legs of the boy with the bloody shirt and dragged him out of the way. The other boy crawled after him. He was crying.

Someone was kicking and hammering on a door down the south hallway as the school cop checked the boys' injuries.

"Open this door! Open this damn door right now!" It was a young male voice, hoarse with adrenaline and anger.

Another shot. Screams.

Behind me, I heard an echoing bang. I turned and coming down the hallway was an entire squad of police offficers. It was almost like a movie, but not quite. In a movie, Mel Gibson would have been running pell-mell through the hallways in a torn T-shirt and jeans, guns blazing.

These men were moving slowly, methodically, more like a military unit than "NYPD Blue." They were uniformed street cops, one moving on point with his body carefully angled behind his weapon to make him the smallest target possible. Four more officers flanked him on either side, and one man was bringing up the rear, walking backward and trusting his fellow officers to clear the way for him.

They seemed to take forever, advancing step by step along the hallway. Unlike Mel Gibson, they took nothing for granted; every possible angle, reflection, nook and cranny is checked as they pass.

They advanced past the doorway where I was kneeling behind the equipment. They were clear targets from the atrium, and they knew it, turning often in constant slow-motion.

They passed the school officer and the two wounded kids, proceeding into the south hallway. The boy with the arm wound was quieter. The other one was coughing, harsh, barking coughs. There had been no shots for a few minutes.

Another troop was advancing up the hallway. Only these officers weren't as heavily armed, and they had a paramedic with them. They moved faster, advancing to the school officer and the wounded kids. They hoisted the bloody one onto their shoulders and the school officer helped the other one as they all ran back down the hall, past the doorway where I was kneeling, out to the sunlit exit door.

But I didn't see them get out the door, because an explosion rocked the walls, a huge BOOM-CRASH from farther away than the south hallway. There were shouts, then silence.

The silence was worse.

I waited, listening. I didn't move. None of us were breathing.

There were footsteps. They weren't in the south hallway. They were closer.

"This school sucks, man!" shouted the young male voice. More kicking and pounding on doors and the clang of lockers being slammed, metal on metal.

That's when they came into view: two boys, one wearing fatigue pants, the other in jeans and a T-shirt, both carrying shotguns and pistols. They were on the far side of the atrium, hammering on doors. They were both turned away from where I was kneeling.

"Hold it right there!" shouted an adult voice from someone I couldn't see. The boys turned toward it, firing shots that echo in the huge atrium, and no one could hear anything but the terrifying BOOM of the shotguns they carry.

From both sides of the atrium, squads of officers appeared. The boys retreated, moving backward through the atrium, firing. One turned to run just as the officers shot him. He collapsed onto the floor.

The other one kept firing for another three seconds before he fell as well.

It was quiet for a moment. Offiicers advanced past them, training their weapons on empty hallways, just in case. Other officers checked the boys for weapons, rolled them over and handcuffed them, even though it was clear their shooting days were over.

"Clear!" shouted one of the officers, and I could stand up again. It's over.

Seems real, doesn't it?

It's the nightmare we all have been living since April 20, 1998. It wasn't the real thing - sorry to fake you out like that - but it was close enough.

When I went to school, we had fire drills. They were exciting, a break in the dull routine of school schedules. The alarms went off, you got to go outside, and odds were whatever quiz or assignment you were working on was going to be tossed aside when you went back.

Now we have Columbine drills.

It was a teacher inservice day at Our Town High School. The kids had been dismissed at noon, and the cops and the press moved in. We were given a very small section of hallway, marked off with yellow cones, from which we could observe the exercise. It wasn't intended to fall on the third anniversary of the Columbine massacre; that's just the way the teacher inservice days fell this year. But it was the video clip on every newscast that night. I was shorter than the TV camera stands, so I ended up kneeling in the doorway so I could see.

Just like the fire drills, there was excitement in the air. It was very much like the laser-tag games we used to play when I was in college, a high-tech version of water guns in the backyard, and therefore still cool to do in your early 20s. Gotcha-last.

It was also like being in a movie. We all watch Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger beat up the bad guys and chase them through endless hallways to gun them down.

It was like all these things, and none of them. We knew it was an exercise, and though the guns were ten times louder than TV gunshots, they were only blanks. We knew we were inside the yellow cones, wearing the orange vests that identified us as noncombatants. We were safe.

But none of that knowledge has removed the sight of those officers proceeding so slowly in formation from my mind. Because that's not the way they do it in the movies, or in laser tag. It wasn't even like a war movie.

It was how they really do it. They weren't actors, or teenagers playiing guns in a laser arena, or little kids chasing each other around the sprinkler wiith water guns.

They were real police officers, and they were training for a job they might really have to do some day. They were the guys who may really have to fight this hideous battle. Those doors were slammed and locked by real teacherrs, all of whom have been chewing their nails and waking up from nightmares since April 20, 1998, and would rather have been discussing teaching techniques or the Cardinals score than practicing for an armed raid on their school.

The police had three training session in the school during spring break. This was the first drill with the teachers, followed by a debriefing that would chill the heart of any parent: The cafeteria is a wide-open killing zone, with a million entrances and no way to safely secure it. A trophy case in one of the rooms is perfectly situated to reflect an image of the designated hiding place to a shooter in the hallway. The glass panels on the doors, required by building codes, allow a shooter to break the glass and unlock the door. Keys are required to lock classroom doors, and substitute teachers don't have keys. The intercoms make a beeping sound that could alert a shooter to the presence of hiding students and personnel. 

The police listen to the teachers' concerns, all items that will be addressed by the superintendent and the officers who are learning every inch of the school, hoping their knowledge will never be necessary.

No one had to do this five years ago, the superintendent mused. No on could ever conceive that armed military-style drills would be needed in high schools. "But we're there now," he said.

Someone wonders if they should ever do a drill with students in the school. For a high school with 2,300 students, it's a logistical nightmare. It's also a textbook for a potential shooter, a teacher points out.

But there's an officer who has studied 47 school shootings. Didn't know there had been that many, did you? He has spent his time studying these shootings and coming up with responses, infrastructure changes and police procedures to be prepared for a nightmare.

He tells the teachers that Columbine was a disaster because there was no plan. It wasn't their fault; no one ever thought such a plan would be necessary. Who could conceive of teenagers planning a guerrilla killing operation on their own classmates? But we're there now, and they killed students and teachers because there were people running around, in and out of the school, there was chaos and it killed them.

Friday's drill wasn't even as realistic as it could have been. The police have tested their response time to the high school from all over the city, and realistically, it would take eight more minutes for them to arrive, eight more minutes to kill. A private self-defense training company provided actors to play the wounded students and two of their instructors to be the shooters. They were good. The blood on the boy's shirt was very real. The shooters used their voices to try to frighten the teachers into opening doors.

The school principal has been through four drills, and said the sound of the guns in his hallways always makes him nauseous. 

They actually made it a little easier on the teachers. No pipe bombs this time, and they didn't set off the fire alarmms. The alarms at Columbine were on for three straight hours, and it makes communication very hard.

It was news because of the anniversary. It was news because it just sticks in your mind that we need tactical plans to retake high schools, that we need armed drills for shootings in schools, that whatever evil has bred in the minds of a few teenagers could very well lead to dead children in Our Town.

It was news, and all the usual suspects from the TV stations were there. As we waited for the simulation to begin, we eventually stopped talking and fiddling with our gadgets and our ugly orange vests. We were simply waiting. The silence grew.

"BOO!" shouted a police officer, and we all jumped. Then we all laughed, annd muttered that he needed a good slap in the face for trying to scare the press.

But we were tense because to a certain degree we have been living in this same nightmare with the parents, teachers, administrators and police. We who cover the news can also become the news, and then we won't be inside the yellow cones, wearing our noncombatant vests. But it's more than that.

This particular nightmare is the hardest of all the stories we may do. At the end of the day, the people look to us for answers. We're supposed to answer all their questions in our stories, and the biggest question that still remains, three years later, is "Why?"

To that, we still have no answer.