Mercy

by J L Aarne

  He would remember it forever, he was sure of it. He would remember too that it didn’t frighten him or excite him to kill her; it was just something that happened. Then he did it again. And again. And again.

  He stopped only when Mercy put a hand on his shoulder and told him it was okay. He could stop now. It was enough.

  The trash bags Isaac and Molina had collected all the cell phones in were still lying on the floor nearby. They had been stomped on several times in the rush, but none of the phones had escaped to go sliding across the floor and scatter their pieces. He picked the bags up and gave them to Isaac before he went to sit down and reload his gun.

  “Mr. Stills,” Mercy said.

  Mr. Stills was still alive. So was his daughter. He held her while she cried.

  “What?” Mr. Stills said. The expression on his face when he looked at Mercy was one of mingled fear and loathing.

  “Do you know how many people kill themselves every day because of bullying?” Mercy asked.

  Mr. Stills looked like he might not answer her for a moment then he shook his head. “No, Miss Hartwell, I don’t.”

  “I read something about it maybe a year ago,” Mercy said. She turned away from Mr. Stills dismissively. “A kid commits suicide as a direct result of bullying once every half-hour. Nearly fifty people a day. If it was anything else killing these kids, it might seem important.”

  Ezra walked over and sat down on the raised platform beside the stairs and looked at Corey. He had the rifle resting against one leg. “You okay?”

  Corey nodded and snapped a bullet into the clip he was loading. “Everyone heard that, you know,” he said. “We gotta do this if we’re going to do it.”

  Ezra nodded. “We’re doing it. She’s got to talk a bit first though. They gotta understand why.”

  Corey shrugged. He got it; they needed everyone’s participation. They still had to hurry up or something was going to stop them.

  “You didn’t kill that kid, Jesse,” Ezra said.

  Corey lifted his head and looked where Ezra was looking. Jesse sat high up on the bleachers in the back with some other boys. He shrugged again.

  “Not the right time?” Ezra asked.

  “I don’t know,” Corey said. “I wasn’t really thinking about it. I’m kinda… fucked up in the head. You know… since.”

  Ezra smiled at him and reached over to muss his hair. “Yeah, you’re a real screwball,” he said dryly.

  Corey looked between Ezra and the dead and wounded near the double doors, lying where they had fallen or sitting on the nearest bench they had been able to reach after being shot.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said.

  “Screwball” was one of the nicer things to call it.

  “Do you know how many text messages I got after my brother tried to kill himself saying shit like ‘I hope he dies’?” Mercy asked the room at large. No one said anything. “Those were the nicer ones, too. The ones that just said they hoped he died. But no one’s going to say anything about it. No one’s going to do anything about it. You know why? Because it’s high school!”

  A girl near the front row started to make a sound that made Corey think of the sound their cat, Spud made right before he hacked up a huge, slimy hairball. It was the sound of someone crying when they couldn’t catch their breath.

  Mercy acted like she didn’t even notice and maybe she didn’t. She started to pace toward the far end of the bleachers, not looking at any of them, watching her feet as she walked. She had blood drying on the toes of her boots. There was probably blood on her hoodie and jeans, too, but they were black and the material hid it.

  She had asked them all to wear black today.

  “Out there in the real world,” Mercy said, “if we weren’t in high school, if we were adults, what you do would be considered psychotic, sadistic, antisocial behavior. It wouldn’t be tolerated. You’d get arrested. You’d have to register as sex offenders. There would be a court order saying that if you came within fifty feet of my brother, you would be thrown in jail.” She took a deep breath and dragged her hands through her pixie cut black hair. When she spoke again, the growl of rage that had entered her voice was contained again. “You’d be locked up. In here? It’s boys will be boys. It’s growing pains. It’s seen as the evolutionary byproduct of that old survival of the fittest rule. The law of the jungle. It’s evolution, right? All animals weed out the weak.”

  She suddenly turned, pulling her gun from the small of her back, and pointed it in the face of a girl named Angela Kent. Angela screamed and tried to duck down in her seat, but Mercy followed her with the sight of the gun.

  “Angela,” Mercy said, her voice calm and reassuring in horrible contrast to the gun in her hand ready to fire. “Didn’t you used to be friends with Lina? Good friends. I remember. You’re John’s girlfriend now, aren’t you? Must be something; dating the mayor’s son. I never did like you, you know.”

  “Please don’t kill me!” Angela wailed.

  John Rehbein did not come to her rescue. Corey could see him, sitting a couple of steps up from Angela, watching it all in a tense, terrified kind of wonder. He had blood on his bottom lip and a cut across the bridge of his nose. His right eye was turning black. He looked scared as hell, but he didn’t look like a hero.

  “You’re not friends anymore, are you?” Mercy asked, like Angela wasn’t piss-herself scared and they were just having a conversation. She put her foot up on the step Angela was sitting on so she could brace her elbow on her thigh and point her gun close to Angela’s head. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with why she’s so different these days, would it?”

  “N-no. I don’t know! Please, Mercy, please don’t. I didn’t do anything!”

  Angela dyed her hair a color of dark red that made her look like a cartoon character, Corey observed. You might not even see the hole in her head if Mercy shot her in the right place.

  “The difference between us and the animals,” Mercy said, “is that we know better. We are supposed to know better. We don’t live in the jungle anymore. Do you know what that means, Angela?”

  “No,” Angela said, tears and snot running down her face, melting her makeup. “No, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “It means that we can choose to be kind,” Mercy said.

  She took the gun away from Angela’s head, put her foot back down on the floor and paced again, back the other direction. Eyes followed her. They were hanging on every word. Their lives might depend on it.

  “Four years isn’t so long, you know,” she said. “That’s what everyone says. Bullying toughens you up. Gets you ready for the real world because the real world is full of bullies and life’s not fair. Except… Except even in the real world, when you torture someone for four straight years, it’s a long time. Four years is a long time. It’s long enough. In here, you’re powerful. There’s no one to stop you from ruining a girl’s life because you think she’s prettier than you or she doesn’t wear the right clothes or she has bad acne, or from destroying a boy because he’s too fat or too thin or he has asthma and can’t run. Any little reason you like, and you do horrible things, and you get a slap on the wrist for it. You will never be this powerful ever again. Then you leave and you forget about it, but they don’t get to forget. They will live with the stain of what you’ve put them through forever.”

  She stopped pacing and faced them all. “Does that seem fair to anybody?”

  Corey laughed. It was startling and inappropriate, but it bubbled up and he didn’t try to stop it from spilling over. He loved Mercy, but she was a little fucked up sometimes.

  He wondered if maybe they should move the bodies so the blood didn’t seep under the doors, but he didn’t suggest it to anyone. He choked back another burst of laughter, snapped the clip back into his gun and pulled back the slide.

  Isaac sat down beside him with the bags of cell phones, took one out and set it on the floor, then smashed it with his metal baseball bat. He pushed the pieces aside and
did it again. There had to be about three hundred of the things.

  “You going to do that to all of them?” Corey asked.

  Isaac jerked a shoulder in a shrug. He smashed another phone. “That’s the plan.”

  No one said anything to Mercy or answered her question. She waited until it became obvious that the question hadn’t been an idle one; she expected someone to say something.

  Mr. McGuinn, of all people, was the one to finally speak. “Miss Hartwell, please don’t do this. Look at these kids. They’re terrified. You’ve… God. You’ve killed so many already. Their poor families. They have families, they have mothers and fathers and… Just stop. You can do that; just stop.”

  Mercy looked at the bodies closest to her. Corey automatically glanced that way, too. There were maybe twelve or thirteen dead. Twice that number were wounded. Mr. McGuinn wasn’t one of them, but that was only because he, Robby and Dr. Hunter were all restrained with their hands behind their backs and hadn’t been able to get up and run. Or perhaps they had known better; that it was stupid to try to escape by rushing the people with the guns and the doors that couldn’t be opened. Most of those who had died in the stampede had probably known better deep down too, but panic didn’t listen to reason.

  Corey didn’t feel anything about it. He looked at the dead, at their broken, unmoving, bloody bodies stinking up the place and he felt nothing. He recognized some of their faces, knew their names and didn’t care that they were dead. He knew that wasn’t normal, but he was glad of it anyway. He wondered if it made him a bad person and he tried to feel bad about it when he decided that yes, it probably did, but he couldn’t. There was an invisible insulated wall there keeping it out. Something was running interference, tying all his wires into knots. Maybe they would die, turn black and fall off like a puppy’s tail with a rubber band around it. Maybe he would never feel bad about any of it ever again. He should have cared about the dead. Before, he would have cared, if only in the abstract way most people cared about death when it happened to a lot of people. He had awakened in the hospital feeling pretty much the same. It was only later he had realized that he wasn’t.

  These dead people he had once known weren’t entirely real to him anymore. Nor were the alive ones.

  Beside him, Isaac smashed another phone. And another. And again. He did it calmly, doing a job that needed to be done, but every time the bat smashed a phone to pieces it made a little bang when it hit the floor and everyone flinched.

  “Mr. McGuinn,” Mercy said eventually, “we’re all a little past the point where appealing to our humanity is going to help you. We’re… resolved, I guess.”

  “You’re a kid,” Mr. McGuinn said, becoming angry despite his fear. “You’re a kid and you’ve grown up with these people your whole life. How the hell can you do this?”

  Mercy sighed and turned her attention away from him, back to the room. “All right, we’re kind of on a time trial here,” she said. “Pretty soon someone’s going to come sniffing around because of all those popping sounds, and Sally got a look at us and ran off before anyone could stop her, so the police are on their way.”

  There was some hopeful murmuring.

  “Yeah, don’t get too excited. We’ve still got time.”

  The double doors on her left rattled as someone tried to open them. There was a pause, then a fist banging on the metal door. “Hello?” came a muffled voice from the other side. “This is the police. We received a call. Open this door.”

  Several people; Wayne Olmstead, Kinsey Stills, Jesse Gleason and a few others stood up like they were going to shout for help, but Mercy made a sound of negation in her throat and pointed her gun at Jesse. They all froze and looked guilty, like kids caught shoplifting candy from the 7-Eleven.

  On the other side of the doors, faintly, someone said, “Holy shit, is that blood?”

  Blood from the bodies near the doors. It had leaked under them after all. Probably not a lot, but enough to catch the attention of a small town cop answering a call of possible shots fired at a high school.

  Mercy left her place at the front of the bleachers, left the mic on the floor and crossed the gym to the equipment room and disappeared for a few minutes. No one moved or said a word for a while. They shifted their attention to Corey, Isaac and Ezra, but they didn’t try to scream for help.

  Molina was standing against the wall near Ezra and she suddenly slid down it to sit on the floor. She looked a little sick.

  “Corey?”

  Corey jerked his head up at the sound of his name.

  A girl, he thought her name was Beth Greene, was looking at him. “Hi,” she said. She was small and blonde with a heart shaped face. She had a bruise on one cheekbone and blood on the legs of her light blue jeans. “Hi, I just…”

  He couldn’t hear her very well from the other side of the huge gym, so he stood up and walked closer. He was soon standing next to the microphone on the floor. He looked down at it but didn’t pick it up. “What?” he said.

  “Hi,” Beth said again, nervously. “Sorry. I just… I wanted to say… I never thought the pictures were really… really you. Because, well, you know, the tattoo for one thing. I mean, that just seemed like—”

  She broke off as Corey lifted the left side of his shirt to expose the tattoo. It was big, part of it wrapping around his hip to his back and creeping onto his stomach. A skull done in the style of Día de los Muertos candy surrounded by red poppies, red poppies coming out of its grinning mouth, one flower growing through an eye socket. Memento Mori: Remember you will die.

  The year before, Lilia had pretended to be his mother and given her permission so he could get it. Corey kind of wished he could say that it hadn’t been him in the pictures. That it had been some guy with his head Photoshopped on. But it hadn’t been and the evidence was right there in his skin, indelible and undeniable.

  “Guess you didn’t see the video,” Corey said. He let his shirt drop back over it.

  “No,” Beth said. She was wide-eyed and looked scared, like Corey might punish her for mentioning it. She might have been attempting to empathize with him, to get him on her side, but it had backfired on her. “I’m sorry.”

  Corey shrugged. What was she sorry for? That he was gay after all? Everyone knew that, but maybe that was it. He wasn’t harmlessly, neutered gay anymore; he was in-your-face really, truly, having ass sex and liking it gay. He was sorry for that part, too; that part had been private. Or maybe it was that he’d been so screwed up by it that he’d tried to kill himself. That he’d nearly died. Maybe she was sorry for that. It didn’t really matter anymore. Even if she was sorry, even if they were all sorry, it was way too late.

  Mercy came out of the equipment room dragging a chair. The legs scraped across the floor, the sound echoing hollowly off the walls. When she reached Corey, she set it down with a loud clap and stood behind it with her hands resting on the back.

  Isaac had paused for a time in his cell phone bashing to drink from a bottle of water and smoke a cigarette. He resumed it as Mercy and Corey stood there looking up at everyone. It was like listening to the most gruesome ticking of the biggest clock in the world. A doomsday clock.

  The cops who had found the blood outside the doors had gone away, but they would be back with more cops soon enough.

  “You want to pick first?” Mercy asked Corey.

  She meant did he want to pick the first person to accuse and execute. He thought about it and let his eyes scan them all; considering his options. His gaze rested briefly on Jesse, who glared defiantly back at them, but he shook his head. “No. You go.”

  Mercy picked up the microphone. “Billy Cullen,” she said. The name echoed in the dead quiet. No one moved.

  Mercy lifted a hand and pointed at Billy. He looked around like she might mean someone else sitting beside him. Maybe someone behind him. People around him shifted uneasily and scooted away from him in case this might somehow turn out to be the case.

  “Billy, come do
wn here and take a seat,” Mercy said.

  Billy slowly stood up and made his way down the steps of the bleachers to the floor. He was a tall boy, Mercy and Corey’s age, though not in any of Corey’s classes. He knew him only a little. He played football, his dad worked at the Napa auto supply store, his mom worked at the Conoco, he wasn’t the most popular guy in school, but he had friends and he always seemed to have a girlfriend. He had a very square jaw and big, deep-set hazel eyes. There was blood on his white T-shirt, but it didn’t look like it was his own.

  Corey watched Billy walk down the steps and he couldn’t think of a reason why Mercy would have singled him out. Out of everyone there, why him?

  Then he remembered. Billy Cullen had told her he could straighten her out. He was the boy Mercy had kicked in the nuts and punched in the face. She had been suspended for it, but Billy hadn’t been punished at all. Maybe everyone thought getting his ass kicked by a girl half his size in front of half the student body was punishment enough.

  Billy looked like he remembered it, too.

  “You gonna shoot me?” he asked her. He stood in front of her and clenched his hands into fists. “Go on and do it then, bitch.”

  Mercy gestured to the chair for him to sit. “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll have to see. Sit down.”

  “I ain’t sitting in that chair,” Billy said. He stuck his chin out and glared down at her.

  Mercy stared back.

  Corey pulled his gun and pointed it at the side of Billy’s head. “Sit.”

  “You take your orders from this girl now, huh, Rollins?” Billy asked, slanting his eyes to the side to look at the gun. “You do what your sister tells you to do? What kind of fucking pussy are you, huh? All screwed up in the head from having your ass plastered all over campus and now you’re letting this girl tell you—”

  “Sit the fuck down, Billy,” Corey said.

  Billy stood there for another moment then he sat down.

  Isaac stopped smashing phones again so Mercy could speak without trying to talk over the rhythmic BANG… BANG… BANG of the bat. When she had everyone’s attention, she told them all the story of what Billy had done to her the year before. Pretty much everyone already knew the story; many of them had seen it happen. When she was finished, she fell silent and looked down at Billy. He was staring at his hands, clenching and unclenching them in his lap. Faces staring down at him, people looming over him had him sitting uneasily in his chair.