NAPAVINE - The gunfire at Napavine High School Saturday morning was real, but the bullets were blanks.
This time, at least.
Just a few days after all-too-real school shootouts in Colorado and Wisconsin, Napavine High School was the scene of grim theatrics that left 20 students lying contorted in fake blood, and another 26 screaming in pretend agony or fear.
Police stormed the hallways with guns pointed. Students shrieked and pleaded for help as two "bad guys" wearing black waited with their own guns in the library and a classroom.
In the commons area, more than half a dozen students lay contorted on the ground with stage makeup showing grisly wounds, including spikes through their bodies.
The police gradually cleared the school of the living students as firefighters and medics arrived to drive them to Providence Centralia Hospital, which was also practicing for a rush of badly wounded people.
THE ELABORATE scripted tragedy was called a "mass casualty incident." Last month, a similar exercise brought law enforcement personnel to Mossyrock for an armed standoff. A year ago, the drill involved a simulated bleacher collapse during an Adna-Morton football game.
"We try to make this as realistic as possible," said Sgt. Ross McDowell, deputy director of Lewis County's Department of Emergency Management.
As part of the county sheriff's office, McDowell's unit helped coordinate the day's events.
Police from as far away as Centralia, Chehalis, Vader and Winlock wore helmets and bulletproof vests as they charged into the school. Firefighters from around West Lewis County also responded with ambulances throughout the morning.
The event could only simulate tragedy to a limited degree; officials established a security line around the school, but didn't go so far as to enlist frightened parents and eager hordes of TV news crews.
For the record, parents are supposed to listen to radio and television to find out where to pick up their offspring - in the case of Napavine, either Bethel Church or Winlock High School.
Although Saturday's simulation was centered in Napavine, ambulances from the nearby fire hall didn't arrive immediately. The reality in rural areas, McDowell said, is that volunteer medics and firefighters must be called to the station and suit up before they can respond.
In this mock event, two victims "died" while waiting in the triage area for medics to arrive - one woman having been "beaten" so severely that a fake eye was hanging out of her head.
The exercise was carefully filmed by Pleasant Valley Productions for later scrutiny by the participating agencies. Evaluators in fluorescent green jerseys walked through the chaos, writing observations on clipboards.
There will be many things to learn, McDowell said.
NAPAVINE SCHOOL OFFICIALS revised their emergency plan before the incident, but Principal Douglas Skinner said he learned several things as soon as the event began.
Most importantly, he probably died moments after the shooting began, he admitted late in the morning.
After the incident began, with its reports of explosions and gunshots, Skinner walked from the front office through the commons to find out what was going on.
"The shooter was there," Skinner said. "I very likely could have died right there."
Likewise, as police carefully pushed through the school a few minutes later, they had no clear way of knowing who or what could be a threat.
Those volunteer students who weren't supposed to die were told to become hysterical. A few gave Oscar-worthy performances.
Kyle Davis of Rochester said he was in the library with "Bad Guy 1" when officers arrived. Davis rushed around the room and said an officer had a gun pointed at his chest. He heard it go off, but decided to keep running rather than pretending to die.
Davis, a Rochester resident and member of the Lewis County Sheriff's Office Explorers program, became a star of the show with his repeated cries of "My girlfriend's in there! You have to help her!"
He and other students were quickly handcuffed by police, apparently to keep them from injuring themselves, or from interfering with the ongoing search of the school.
Davis kept breaking away from the police to run toward the victims. His histrionics eventually became absurdly funny, but they also kept police on their toes.
"What kind of officers are you?" he screamed as the victims were being held outside the school more than an hour after the incident began. "You're all lucky I'm cuffed. I'm going in there to find my girlfriend!"
Karrie Hoksbergen of Mossyrock put more pathos into her performance.
She was in the same classroom as "Bad Guy 2," and said she was told to cause mayhem and disorder by drawing attention to herself.
As police "shot" the intruder and tried to help a severely "injured" teacher, Hoksbergen was wailing like a banshee.
"Please, I need help!" she shrieked, mascara running down her cheeks, as she bent over a victim with stage blood running from a wound in the back of her neck.
THE SCHOOL WAS FILLED with cacophony for the better part of an hour, with cries of fear and the deafening sound of the fire alarm.
To make sure the event didn't take a real psychological toll on the participants, a licensed mental health counselor, Diane Borden, talked to the students before and after the simulation.
The day wasn't without its real drama.
A coroner's office employee was hospitalized after showing signs of shock or stroke. Other members of the office circulated through the school photographing the bodies.
By late morning, the event was halted, and the rest of the cast and crew filed over to the cafeteria for a free lunch of hamburgers and bratwurst.
Kris Weiland, Lewis County Fire District 5 chief, was part of the unified command that coordinated the rescue and search efforts from a sheriff's office sport utility vehicle on the edge of the parking lot.
"There's absolutely lessons to be learned," he said, praising the coordination of law enforcement and medical personnel. He also noted that the week's deadly school shootings were a subtext of the drill.
"There's been too many of these going on lately," Weiland said.
With the day's theoretical disaster behind them, the wounded in Napavine washed off the fake blood and returned to life, sobered and wiser after their brush with tragedy.
