Excerpt from How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It is eleven o'clock. By noon, he will have killed nineteen people, wounded forty- five. He is armed extensively, enough to take out more than that, but his gun will jam and one of his homemade bombs will not detonate.

The pizza scalds the roof of his mouth and he feels the skin peeling off with the bubbling cheese and he drops the slice back onto the plate, sauce slopping out of his burning mouth and searing his chin and he thinks: Fucking pizza pizza fucking fuck all the fucks. Then he thinks: I could just do it here. Then he thinks: If that guy looks at me again. Then he thinks: Play it cool. You made a plan for a reason.

Later, the pundits will speculate. They will look for reasons. They will want to know why. They will call him a loner and they will quote former teachers saying he was bright but shy and they never thought he'd be capable of something like this. They will say, Nobody ever suspected it could happen here.

The pepperoni is unctuous and too round too obviously manufactured too hot too crispy too indifferent. Pepperoni is made from dead animals, he reminds himself. They died for you. Like Christ except at least pepperoni serves a function. There are two jobs in the slaughterhouse, the slaughtered and the slaughterer. Most of them don't even know until it's too late.

There will be a hero teacher who tackles him, and that hero teacher will be the last one to die.

He bites into the pizza again and now it's not too hot, it's so- called just right and as he grinds it with his teeth and feels it sliding down his throat, it goes to that place in him that craves garbage, that is insatiable in its pursuit of grease and sugar and fat, that place in him he would cut out if he could because then someone else could be the fat kid at school, the slob, the punch line. He feels the grease cooling inside him, congealing, and he feels at the same time satisfied and helpless and angry, and then he takes another bite.

Everyone eats a last meal, even if most don't realize it at the time. You have a bowl of grain- based flakes and skim milk before heading to work and having a stroke at your desk. His father's last meal was a hot roast beef sandwich and a bag of chips, washed down with between eight and twelve beers. He didn't come home from the bar, but that wasn't unusual; they didn't even think anything was wrong until the police called and said they'd found his car and someone ought to come in and identify the body.

Rasputin's last meal was sturgeon in Champagne sauce and poisoned honeyed cakes. Eichmann had half a bottle of red wine. Timothy McVeigh had two pints of mint chocolate- chip ice cream. John Wayne Gacy ate deep- fried shrimp with fried chicken and strawberries.

Gerald Lee Mitchell— a bag of Jolly Ranchers. Patrick Rogers— a single glass of Coke. Stacey Lawton— a jar of pickles. James Edward Smith— a clump of dirt. Dozens of condemned men ate pizza before they faced the firing squad or the chair or the injection. Everyone in the pizza shop is condemned, he thinks, they just don't have the luxury of knowing how or when the end is going to come.

The door behind him swings open, bells ringing, a cop jangling fat and sloppy to the counter, too dumb to know what's going to happen. Too dumb to even suspect. He is jovial and everyone here knows him. He carries himself like the world is a good and fine place and like there is meaning in being an overweight small- town policeman who spends his days in a pizza parlor watching terrible TV.

The officer will be one of dozens pursuing the shooter through the woods near the school, and he will be maimed by one of the traps laid there in advance. He will lose his left hand and sustain severe burns on the left side of his face and he will never work active duty again. After nine months of rehab he will try to reclaim his life but will never again feel like the world is a good or fine place.

Excerpted from How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister. Copyright © 2018 by Tom McAllister. Excerpted by permission of Liveright / WW Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.