[Dawes]

March 11, 2009.
10:16 A.M.

Tragedies aren't predicted; they simply happen, and that's what this did – it happened.




“He's dead,” Paul whispered to himself when the silence assured him that it was alright to breathe again. Everything that had happened was still a senseless ball of sound and noise and emotion in his head, waiting to get peeled apart later like an orange. Later, when he was ready for it. Later, when he could cry and rock back and forth and wonder what the fuck happened and why he had kept his eyes open the whole time. “He's dead, right? Right, but that's ... that's a mercy, yeah? Would've been bad,” Paul promised himself, biting his bottom lip and turning away from Brendan Miller's body. “Great job.”

He still had a few rounds left in the pistol, and had he still had the guts to have a real rebellious streak in him, maybe he would have found a copy of The Catcher In The Rye so he could put it in his pocket and say it inspired him. How many rounds left? Not sure, not sure – Brendan had eaten a few, but Paul couldn't remember how many. Three? Four? Enough. One was enough, but the others...

The others had just been security.

He moved automatically, his brain still someplace else, someplace where the gravity and the reality of things like you-just-shot-a-fucking-kid and everybody's-dead-but-you,-Bucko were safely stored behind a mental wall. Empty brass cartridges rattled against one another as he took a few steps through them, and headed towards the library's glass doors. He thought that he would wait for the cops to arrive before he blew his own brains out. Then he thought that he'd just point the gun at them through the glass so they could do the job for him. Then, they could parade his dead body out and cover up the fucked-up reality of everything that had happened in the Brasswick High Media Center, and things could appear to have gone as he originally planned them: dead kids, check; dead teachers, check; one dead kid sporting Pap's old G.I. firearm, fueled by a bunch of suicidal thoughts, violent music, and violent videogames, check.

But that wasn't what happened. Not exactly like that, anyway.

His head throbbed with the pace of his pounding heart, too heavy to sit upright on his shoulders. As he came to the glass door of the library, he reached out his hand and felt the cool glass. It felt amazing. He pressed his cheek against it and closed one of his eyes, and then raised the hand with the gun in it and put it on the glass too, as if he were trying to pull himself into the refreshing sensation and forget the mangled dead kids behind him.

A soda would be awesome right now, he thought. A soda, or a fucking Hawaiian Blast.

He did not know how long he sat there, leaning his face against the glass, waiting for the police to arrive and bust him full of holes. It could have been ten minutes, or twenty, listening to the tip-tap of the large-faced clock hanging just above the door and the hum of the ancient air-conditioner. They accompanied one another with a rhythm that, while it was off-time, complemented the morning's spontaneity perfectly. Yet, Paul Kraszwyk could not just sit there in the school's library forever. He curled his free hand into a fist and punched the glass, rattling the old pane and relieving some of the tension in his bones.

“Come on already,” he moaned. “Where the fuck are you?”

Just want the cops, his brain added. Just want to get out of here, but I'm too much of a pussy to open the door. Can't break the seal, yanno? Things wouldn't feel safe anymore. He would be beyond the realm where a pistol and some good luck meant he was in control.

One of the bodies refused to give him the satisfaction of his silence, though, for as Paul Krazswyk leaned there against the glass door, he heard a squeal from behind him. He nearly squeezed his trigger-finger before he had pulled his head off the gun to look, and just as he did, he snapped his glare towards the source of the noise, which crescendoed into something more obnoxious. Even though Leslie Farmer was dead, Paul pointed the gun at her anyway, because there should have been absolutely no reason why someone who had been such a pretty girl before being dead should have had any excuse to make a sound like that. Even though she was dead, the mousy little squeal became a single uproarious fart, as if everything inside of her was just trying to nudge its way out while it had the chance.

The fact that her body continued to empty itself despite her lack of life seemed enough of an excuse for Paul to break away from the library. He'd read about that kind of shit before, about how the body continues to work despite its death – about how nails and hair still grow, about how other stuff keeps happening. It had probably been in one of those 1,001 Facts You Didn't Care To Know About books that he'd thumbed through in his grandfather's bookshelf or something.

Either way, the fact that a dead body could fart better than most live people he'd known was enough reason for Paul to stuff the Colt into his hoodie pocket, grab the handle of the glass door, and wrench it open. He left the massacre in the library behind and broke into a swift jog down the single hallway. Green lockers swept past him as he ran, occasionally broken in their pattern by wooden doors that led into individual classrooms.

All of them looked empty, Paul realized – the lights were still on, but as he darted past them, he did not see groups of teenaged heads tilted towards the front of the rooms. Instead, the desks were empty, reflecting the March morning sun off of their pencil-tattooed surfaces. They must have evacuated the minute they heard the gunshots, he thought. I run down here and turn the corner, and the blockades are going to be ready, and there are going to be badges pointing guns, telling me to get the fuck down and kiss the floor. The silence is part of the ruse. It's how they draw nutcases out of their hidey-holes, I bet – they tease them with the potential freedom, and then you turn the corner, and you're staring down guns. Yeah, that's what they do.

By the time Paul reached the end of the hall, his heart was sending left hooks into his ribcage and filling his lungs with lava. Once he turned down this hall, he'd see the front doors of the school lobby, and the floor tiles would turn from smooth white into hexagon-shaped bricks. Then, when he saw the lobby, he'd see the police, and he would be lucky not to catch a bullet in his jaw.

The fear of defeat did not stop him, though. His feet wanted to put distance between him and the inexplicable massacre, between Brendan Miller and Leslie Farmer's ultra-talented corpse. Anywhere, he realized, would be better than being in Brasswick High anymore, the place he had planned to gun down that morning with his grandfather's service-issue pistol, not for any real reason other than to try to fix all the fucked up things swimming around inside of his skull.

Just as he rounded the corner, however, Paul Kraszwyk's right foot abruptly stopped, and while he kept moving, it refused to. His sneaker squealed against the floor. The sudden change in momentum launched the Colt out of his hoodie pocket and sent it sliding across the floor while he – without any time to react – smashed down to the floor on his hands and knees.

“Motherfucker,” Paul hissed. He tried to tug on his foot, but it was caught on something. Paul jerked again, and then twisted at the hip to look behind him.

A hand squeezed like a clamp around his ankle, having caught him mid-stride, and the fingers refused to let him go. The hand belonged to an arm thrust out from one of the class-rooms. Instinctively, Paul gasped and tried to break his foot free, meanwhile reaching back to slap for the pistol. His fingertips brushed the handle and drug it a little closer to him.

Four little lines of blood were stretched across the floor, and Paul saw that his sock was red too. The hand was bloody, quivering, and desperate. “Get the fuck off,” Paul whimpered, and he used his other shoe to kick the wrist and break himself free. No sooner had he done so than he dived for the pistol and the opposite wall, trying to get away from the hand and the voice that rattled from behind the door.

“Police,” Paul heard the person say, as he flattened himself as hard as he could against the lockers and tried to slide to an angle where he could see into the classroom. He felt his way along the row of lockers by the handles, the Colt rattling loosely in his hands. What's seriously going on around here? What the--

“Please,” spat the figure, who begged Paul from the doorway of the classroom like a street-urchin begging for food. It – for he could not tell by voice or by body if they were male or female – seemed afraid. “Don't ... l-... leave me,” it said.

“What's going on?” Paul demanded. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Please don't leave me,” it repeated, voice grinding like a wet garbage disposal. The bloody hand reached out for Paul, digits shaking like little worms. “It's ... it's freezing in here, and I'm ... I'm not so fast.”

Paul remembered that somewhere before he had planned to gun down a few classmates, he had a conscience that belied his favorite heavy-metal shirts. He reached out to cup his hand in it's hand – in her hand, because he saw a hint of blue nail-polish beneath the blood – and heaved, trying to drag her out of the room and into the hall. Inside, Paul's mind was screaming at him to get away, an instinct that knew damned well better than to show a good heart. Had the same thing that had happened in the library – the same thing – happened out here? Frightfully, Paul gave the woman – a teacher he never had, he presumed – a heavy tug, compensating for the weight of pulling a whole body out across the floor. He dug his heels against the tile and bent his knees, heaving her out.

She was a lot lighter than he first expected, though, and he staggered backwards once he released her hands, having exerted much more strength than he actually needed. She screamed in agony, and her shoulder-blades buffeted against the floor.

“I-... I'm sorry,” Paul apologized, at first thinking that he had pulled her wrong, had hurt her more. “I'm sorry about...”

But then he realized two things: he realized, very suddenly, why she was screaming, and he also realized why it had been so ridiculously easy for a dweeb like him to pull an adult across the floor like that. At least there was sudden relief in knowing that he hadn't hurt her ... much.

After all, how much more pain could he have put her in when her suit-skirt was nothing more than a sopping, tattered mess tangled around two very blunt stubs where legs had once been?

“Holy fuck,” wheezed Paul, putting the back of his hand over his mouth. He bit down on his knuckles to keep from screaming. It felt like his eyes were going to blow themselves out of their sockets as he stared sobbing at the mealy stubs kicking and flailing as if they thought they still had knees and feet. “Oh God, Oh--”

Last night's beef stew tasted like shit the second time around, and looked even worse.

Paul spit out puke and slammed back against the lockers, his gaze rolling towards the ceiling, his hands steepled around his nose and mouth. The teacher was mewling and moaning, reaching out for him, but all he could think about were her legs – her fucking stumps – kicking like animatronic nubs, beating a wet cadence on the floor. The image kept replaying in his eyes, more gruesome and more violent each time.

“Don't go,” she said.

“Oh God. Screw this,” he said, tapping the Colt's slide against his temple. “Screw this place.”

“Don't leave me.”

“What the fuck is going on in this place?”

“It's so cold...”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Don't go,” she said again.

Wet stumps flopping on the floor like dead fish, splashing in blood. Little twists of stocking-strings swimming in lumpy ichor. Ripples with each beat...

Paul grabbed the sides of his head and bounced it hard against the lockers. “Shut up “

“You can't leave me.”

“Why the fuck not?” he begged to know, as if she was in any state to give him moral support. He was crying. “All I want to do is go back home and get the fuck out of here, alright? I have to call someone,” he reasoned. “Gotta call my Grandpa, alright? Tell him what's going on, and–“

Her voice flattened out. “Just don't leave me. Please don't.”

“Why not?”

The fading woman's lips twisted into a thoughtful line before, with almost tactile disappointment, she said, “Because I don't want to die alone. Because if you leave me alone, it's going to eat me. It's going to eat me, because it's still hungry.” She raised a blue-edged finger and shook it at the empty classroom from which Paul Kraszwyk had dragged her.

She whispered, “It's still in there, and I don't want to die alone.”