Much has been made of this time. Most e-sleuths and crime aficionados and other commenters on Columbine see it as either a sign of remorse, somehow, or a sign about how much they hated the school. They wished to destroy the institution itself. They wished to shoot the lockers against which bullies had pushed them. Something like that.
I think both interpretations fail utterly, and the one with the most potential to be correct is left off the table. As horrific as it is, one needs to put yourself in their shoes. You are a teenager who has just murdered several of your classmates in your school. In all likelihood, you were supposed to have committed suicide by now. You don't plan on getting out alive. What's on your mind? Police, surely.
Also, they planned on killing cops that day. Whether attempting to goad Eric into committing the massacre with him and thus forcing Dylan to commit suicide, or a genuine statement of his feelings, Dylan wrote in Eric's yearbook: "killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops!! My wrath for January's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons."
The commons is the cafeteria, and "January's incident" refers to their joint arrest for breaking into a van in January of 1998. It seems to have been a pivotal moment. In February of 98 Dylan is mentioning a massacre, going "NBK" with a girl, like in the film Natural Born Killers, and Eric is mentioning going NBK in April. They seem to have bonded a bit over the van incident, and the massacre seems in part to be revenge against police for this event. Others speculate it was also e. g. jocks doing worse but not getting in trouble. It's as good a date as any for the transition from no thoughts of a massacre to thoughts of a massacre. Dylan wore a shirt saying Wrath during the massacre, of course; though Wrath and Godlike are also both KMFDM songs.
There's also the issue that the evidence suggests Eric, not Dylan, shot at police that day. While Dylan, not Eric descended the stairs presumably to shoot at students, and Dylan, not Eric enters the library first; and Dylan, not Eric, is having the time of his life during the library massacre. It's also true that Eric was the one more into the video game Doom, which involved people shooting back at you. One can even interpret their t-shirts this way. Eric thought of "natural selection" as making people have to play Doom in real life, and while Dylan mentions wrath against police with Eric, in his private journal he talks about hating jocks for having girlfriends, not about playing Doom in real life. "The lonely man strikes with absolute rage" is what Dylan wrote to himself.
So, quite probably in my view, Dylan had gotten his wish (aside from suicide which he had wanted for years) with the massacre by this point. Several students have been killed as part of his wrath, but Eric has not gotten his wish of a shootout with police. They also probably hoped they wouldn't have to kill themselves with their own guns. They had already expected a bomb to kill them, in the library and when they try to make it explode in the cafeteria. They probably preferred suicide by cop.
They were also supposedly "bored" with killing students. They had mentioned maybe knifing people would be more fun, and wanted bombs not just shooting. Police are certainly "up a level" from killing students.
Therefore it seems apparent to me they were roaming the halls looking for police. People impose their knowledge on them that the cops did not enter, when everybody was shocked by that, surely including the perpetrators. Even if they were not around, you would think they were somewhere in the building. I think this is probably also why they were shooting and tossing pipe bombs.
Most interesting for all of this, when they return to the cafeteria, on video, the most infamous picture of the massacre happens, because they have their guns drawn.
Eric then seems to wave. He had written down hand signals for them to use during the massacre. Waving is the signal for "cops sighted". That ends the issue for me of what was on their mind when they roamed the halls.
Best clip of it I can find at the moment, 20 seconds into this:
"Remorse" is just silly. They had plenty of time to feel remorse before the library massacre. Eric was fond of quoting this line from the KMFDM song Anarchy, "Feel no remorse, no sense of shame". Also, while probably the thing about the massacre I would add but have the least confidence about, though there is a litany of things from the massacre which the pair got from video games; it was noted that Eric played the video game Postal. The "tagline" for Postal is "I regret nothing", and it's said when the main character shoots himself in the mouth, as Eric did.
At best, "Remorse" comes from the hero-worship all too common in this case and ill attempts to explain a tragedy; and not knowing about the second bomb set for 11:35, thus having to come up for some reason why they stopped shooting at 11:35, as well as forgetting that the cops not entering was anomalous. Though their actions after 11:35, such as Dylan taunting Evan and calling him a fat fuck and asking why he shouldn't kill him, and then trying to make the bombs explode, hardly signals remorse.
They also point to the fact that they didn't try to enter classrooms. It is perhaps curious. Eric mentioned doing so in an earlier version of a plan for the massacre. However, by that time, most classrooms were simply locked. It's also not at all clear they didn't try to enter some.
'They wanted to destroy the school itself" is at least better than remorse, though again seems to ignore the police, as if they weren't there. Also, if they wanted to destroy the school, they could have done a lot more. Instead of wandering they could have destroyed. They lit one gas can in the cafeteria when Dylan tossed his Molotov cocktail, but there were others in the cafeteria. They could have gathered one and spread gasoline through the halls if they wanted to do so. Also, it doesn't seem to me to make sense to get bored with killing students, and move on to shooting ceilings and lockers and trash cans. That seems even more 'boring', not less.
It's true of course their bombs would have destroyed the cafeteria and the library, and that would destroy the school in a sense. But that was also the front facing bit of the school, to be captured by television and all the rest, and where they had the most victims. Destroying the back of the school on the inside where there's nobody to see it and where there are no victims because you are bored seems to me curious indeed, and not close to the best explanation.
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