by J. S. Carter
Ryan leaned in over my desk and stared. “Why?”
I shook my head. Out of all the questions he could have asked me, he had to pick the one that I couldn’t even answer. I didn't know, but it didn't matter. The burning wreck was proof of it from miles away. “She'd dead.”
My face suddenly swung away against the back of his hand and I let my bangs hang over my eyes while I stared at the ground. The cuts on my cheek burned like no other. I set my jaw through the motions and tried not to focus on the pain. It was the first time he had ever hit me.
“Don't you fucking lie to me.”
I glared back up at him. “I'm not!”
“Then what the hell have my men been shooting at for the past five hours?”
No...
That was impossible. She couldn't have been alive. How could anything have survived that? I didn’t get much time to think about it before he walked behind Jeremy and squeezed his face at an awkward angle.
“We're gonna use him and his friends as bait. Which means if you don't tell me why this thing is looking for you, he’s gonna die. His friends are gonna die, and—”
“I’m telling you I don’t know!” I screamed into his face. Whatever he had planned wouldn't work. It would be pointless. So many people would end up dying for nothing.
He pounded a heavy fist on my desk and spat back. “That’s fucking bullshit! That fucking nut job shows up out of the blue as soon as this thing did and just hands himself over. Then you both disappear. What the hell did he say to you?”
Chris?
My tongue felt numb as I failed to come up with the correct thoughts. What could he have possibly known that I didn't? Only Kyle knew enough to ask him something before he shot him.
I opened my mouth, but stopped as the sudden realization hit me. I glanced at Jeremy's worried face and then back up at Ryan. Someone was keeping a secret from all of us and Ryan didn’t know either. “Kyle doesn’t know we're here...” I let the thought slip my mind and it pissed him off.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“I don’t know.”
He slammed another fist on my desk and ran at me, pushing my chair back and yelling into my face. “YOU'RE LYING!”
I stuttered for a moment, nervous, but I kept my mouth shut. I got up as he lifted my desk and he threw it across the room, forcing me to step away until my back hit the wall and he shoved his hands above both of my shoulders.
His lips curved into a hard snarl as he screamed at me. “Do you have any idea what the fuck you did?” He swung a fist towards my face and it slammed into the drywall, leaving a gaping hole right next where my head had been a split second earlier.
I cowered into the corner as he kept the pressure up, his hands close to my face before leaning in with his own.
“You stupid bitch… I don’t care how important anyone thinks you are. You keep this up and you’re gonna wind up in a ditch somewhere like your goddamn friends.” He shoved himself off of me, but all I could think about from his words was Ellie.
The nervous little girl’s face flashed in front of my eyes again. I couldn’t escape the thought of her lying motionless somewhere as the wind blew back her hair and collected dirt on the tips of her face, her eyes boring holes in the sky.
“Fuck you.” I could feel the anger rise up from inside my chest and flush my cheeks as Ryan stopped and turned to look back at me. I couldn't control it anymore. And I didn't want to. I wanted him to hear it. I had let everything out. I wasn’t in control of myself anymore. There was no composure, no more hiding behind a hollow shell.
“What the fuck did you just say to me?” He marched back over to my corner and shoved his face in front of mine, grabbing my neck and forcing my head up. “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
I could feel his damp breath on my skin as I strained to get my own past the fingers clenched around my throat. I could feel the rhythmic pressure of my veins threaten to burst while I looked into his eyes and watched them bounce across my face, back and forth, looking for any sign of resistance. I tried to think of what he would have done to me if I had stayed there, speechless like I had before. Instead, I decided to give him an answer.
The resistance around my wrists slowly melted away in warmth and I carefully pulled the pistol from his hip and pressed it in-between his legs. “Fuck you.” I said it again, louder, and I could see his eyes slowly shift as he recognized the pressure. I prodded the end of the barrel deeper into his flesh and pushed his hand off of me. “Get the fuck away from me.” I got out of the corner and shoved him back into the center of the room.
His men immediately brought their own guns up and threatened to shoot, but he waved them off.
He started to smile. “You really think you’re gonna kill me now? Is that it?” He managed to laugh, the only sound in the world at the time that could have struggled to question my anger and coerce my finger into sending a bullet away from me, through his heart and out into the wall. “Come on, Jessica...”
“Let him go.” I waited as the men dropped their guns and set Jeremy loose and Ryan brought my attention back.
“You're nothing. You're the same piece of shit I found before and you forget the only thing you're good for whenever you open your goddamn mouth. You're gonna wind up with a bullet in your face, just like your fucking army— ”
“SHUT UP!” I took a step forward and screamed, pushing out against all the feelings in my mind. All the chairs slid away from me in a sudden burst of speed and I pressed the front of the pistol against Ryan's head. “Shut. Up.” My hand started to shake, but I cocked the hammer back with my thumb and shoved the barrel further into Ryan's temple until he winced from the pain.
He wouldn't stop. “I fucking knew it... you're a goddamn Sed—”
I pulled the trigger.
Ryan only blinked, and it took me a moment to realize what had happened. The hammer had flown forward, only to end with a metallic click. The round had never gone off.
I quickly cycled the slide and pointed the gun back at Ryan's face, the faulty bullet hitting the floor and rolling off past the desks. He wouldn't be lucky enough to survive it again. I tensed my finger just as Jeremy sprung forward with a rifle in hand, saving Ryan from death for the second time in a row.
“Tess—don't.” I still kept the gun up and he put a hand on my arm. “We need him.” He gently made his way towards my wrist and grabbed my hand, forcing the shaking to stop. He didn't understand.
“I need to kill him...”
“I know.” He carefully pushed the pistol down until it pointed at the ground, never taking his eyes off of me. “But we need him if we're gonna get everyone out of here.” I glanced back at Ryan and took in his scouthering demeanor. He should have been dead. Instead, we were letting him talk.
“Kyle’s in the theater... Alone.”
He could have just been trying to save his own skin, but it didn’t matter. I immediately went for the door when Jeremy caught my arm again and I shoved him back, holding the gun up between us to keep him from getting any closer. The door swung open automatically and crashed itself into the wall for my escape. “Don't...”
Jeremy brought his hands up, stared over my shoulder and then peered at the gun pointed at him in silence, suddenly looking hurt. “Tess... You're not one of them.”
Them?
The implication already hurt. I never expected it from him. I had the sudden urge to give up and cry, yet it quickly melted back into anger.
He seemed to trip over his own words. “You don't have to do this.”
“Are you gonna try and stop me?”
He stared at me for a moment and slowly shook his head. “No.”
I could feel my stomach and chest ache as the word settled, but I put it to the side. If he didn't care, then why should I? I stormed out into the hallway and picked a random direction. It didn’t so much matter how I got there. I was going in for the kill. There was no way I would leave without paying a visit to the man that needed to die.
>
My boots echoed across the hard floors and through the empty hallways, every step reinforcing exactly how I felt. I couldn't see anything else. There was only what I needed to do, and where I was. I needed to move and I needed to kill. I wanted to feel the sensation that the witch had shown me up close and personal. I needed to take his life.
I reached the school’s auditorium and stepped out onto its glossy floor by the time Kyle turned around to look at me. He raised an eyebrow, confused to see me by myself and dumbstruck to even see me at all. I stopped a few feet in front of him when he finally formulated a thought.
“Where’s Ryan?”
I didn't move. I found myself hanging on indecision, but it was now or never and the anger didn't let up.
Where's Chris?
I brought the pistol forward and pulled the trigger, only to see him flinch and bring out his own to shoot back. I kept firing as fast as I could and quickly made my way over to a backdrop as bright blasts of hot metal flew past my body.
I threw myself behind the soft cover and hid my head underneath my arms as bullet holes riddled the thin membrane above and on either side of me, the explosive sounds echoing off in the giant chamber. I shook as the last shot rang out and looked down at my own gun. The slide was hanging out halfway past the handle. I was out of bullets, but I could still hear Kyle swear at me from the other side, almost out of breath. He sounded like he was in pain. I must have hit him at least once. I couldn't have missed every single shot.
I strained to get up and nearly cried out as a piercing sensation immediately pulled me back down. I hunched over and put a hand on my stomach, pulling back to see a deep red pool of blood starting to drip from the underside of my clothing. I couldn't believe it was all coming from me.
I struggled to control my breathing as the shock began to set in. I had just gotten shot. It felt so surreal, yet the feeling of ten knives being driven into my stomach repeatedly begged to differ. I reached up and put a hand on a wooden frame to pull myself along, the excruciating pain forcing every single effort to take up all my strength. I tried to focus on the sound of his voice.
“Knox wants you alive, Jessica!”
I could see part of his shadow move as I crossed a beam and worked on flanking him from the opposite side that I had come in.
“But I have no problem killing you! Do you fucking hear me?”
I winced as my body continued to spill out and warm my hand. I understood loud and clear. I leaned against a wooden scaffolding and peered through a crack to see him scour the backdrop for me with his gun still in hand. I took out my spent magazine to throw it away on a whim and watched as he turned to face the sound, immediately shooting into the area and sending his lead downrange away from me.
I made a run straight for him.
He turned as soon as he realized what was happening and I screamed. He took an extra split second longer than he had and I managed to pistol whip his hand to the side just in time to miss another bullet, the flash of light almost blinding me as I tried leveraging my weight to disarm him.
We fought over his gun and it went off again and again, each time closer to my face until it ended with a sharp crack and curse as I broke one of his fingers. The gun dropped and he threw his hand forward.
I blocked his forearm to the side only to get a left hook square against my jaw. I immediately dropped onto the deck, dizzy from the pain. I looked up just in time to see another fist crash itself into my skull and I spilled over onto the floor.
I watched a thin stream of crimson stretch itself from my mouth and out onto the shiny panels of wood in front of me. I struggled to get my hands on something solid while the world continued to spin around me. I was in no way ready for a fight. I wasn’t even as good as I thought I was. I had been delirious thinking I could do anything at all.
The sudden realization began to dawn a little too late by the time Kyle pulled me up by the hair. “How many times is it gonna take?” He pulled out his taser and stabbed it into my stomach. He let it loose longer than I had ever felt before, the wave of pain forcing me to scream as loud as I could until the air in my lungs burned like the sharp jolt of electricity that shot itself across my body and burnt nerves. He finally let go and I hit the floor, curling up into a ball as I pressed my limbs against my belly and watched his feet step around my face. “Do you know what your problem is?”
I let myself think about it. It was the pain.
He grabbed me by the hair again and pulled my head up so that I looked at him.
I needed to stop thinking about the pain.
“You need to start fucking following directions.” He pulled his arm back again and I smiled, making him stop.
“Thank you.” I could taste the copper in my mouth while I flashed my teeth and he held me still. It caught him off guard.
“For what?” He waited until he heard a click and then I jammed my pocket knife as deep as I could into his thigh repeatedly.
I wouldn’t have been able to do that by myself.
He quickly shot away and stumbled onto his back. I painstakingly got up and he put a hand on his leg, cursing at me and trying to stop the bleeding, but thought better of it and began waving the taser through the air to try and ward me off as I got closer.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
I swiped my knife at him until it met his wrist and he let go. I picked up the taser in my other hand and watched as he scrambled to try and get away. I brought them both up. “One of these leaves a mark...” I sidestepped a kick and threw the taser into his side and watched as it forced him to scream out in pain. I took the opening to straddle him and pushed the knife up against his throat. “Guess which one I’m gonna use?”
He pushed his head back against the floor and I pressed on, just barely leaving a mark next to the beating vein in his neck. “Fuck you.”
I leaned my head down against his, his face just inches from my own. I wanted to see it in his eyes when I took his life away. All I had to do was push my hand to the side and he would spill out onto the floor in front of me. He glared at me as my hand started to tremble.
I readjusted my grip and tried to force my muscles to move, but they wouldn’t work. The knife stayed put. I pushed his head back and screamed at him. He needed to die. He had killed Chris. He was the source of suffering for countless others and he wouldn’t stop. He wasn’t even afraid. I needed to kill him. I shook my head as tears started to roll down my cheeks and drop down onto his face. The words barely made it past the blood in my mouth. “You don’t deserve to live!”
He only stared at me. He didn’t even deny it. He didn’t beg for his life or ask for forgiveness. He knew what he was doing and he didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn about himself or anybody else. I could feel my fingers loosen around the handle until he moved without warning. He lifted his head up and I pushed it back down, almost forcing me to cut into his skin, but I blinked. I had almost killed him.
I visualized the knife severing the front of his neck in two like a stick dragged through still water. His blood would have immediately began to flow over my hands and pool onto the wood paneling in front of me while I would watch him gasp for air like a fish out of water, choking on the red. I wouldn’t understand what was happening until his eyes would bore through my own and stop moving entirely. I would lean over him, frozen, staring at his lifeless face. But it never happened. Instead, I watched him swallow, the soft bump in his throat diving underneath the blade and back up as he took another breath to chastise me.
“You don’t have the balls.”
I took a long breath and stared at the knife. He was right. I didn’t. “You’re right.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, confused, but I wasn’t done yet.
“Neither do you.”
His eyes lit up as he struggled to get free. “Fuck you.”
I slammed his head back down and shoved the taser underneath his chin.
You wish.
I set the taser off and let
him clench his jaw in agony for as long as I could help it. He almost passed out by the time I grabbed his hand and laid it flat on the floor with his palm facing up. I pressed my knife against his fingers and let him go, only pausing to stand up and sandwich the blade between his flesh and the bottom of my boot.
He began to reach out with his other arm and I pressed down ever so gently just to get him to stop, the metal digging further into his digits.
“You’re never going to hurt anyone else. Do you understand?” I pressed down a little harder and looked down at him as he nodded, his face turning beet red in between shouting obscenities at my face and pleading for mercy. “You’re never going to touch another girl so long as you’re alive. You’re not going to look at them. You’re not going to talk to them, or even breathe on them.” I gazed at the wooden panels beside his body and let myself go. I had always been good at keeping promises. “Or I swear to God I’ll find you.”
I shoved all the weight into the heel of my boot and stomped the knife into the wood, easily breaking through the resistance with the sudden snap of his delicate bones.
He immediately cried out in pain and curled over to hug the stump of his hand.
I didn’t even bother looking at it. I didn’t want to see. The pain was for him, anyway. There’d be no point. I had my own to deal with.
I grabbed my knife and walked into the nearest hallway before collapsing against a locker in a lightheaded daze, smearing a whole line of red across the blue paint. I couldn’t guess how much of it I had lost already. I hadn’t felt the pain, the fear or the emptiness, but I didn’t have to. I had already felt the sensations myself. I had come so close to killing Kyle that I had a hard time convincing myself he was still alive.
The muffled sound of gunfire finally registered in my mind and I looked at the nearest exit. Something was going on outside. Jeremy must have gotten caught. I brought myself up and stumbled into the open to meet the light of the moon break the clouds as men, women and children ran yelling down the street from the sound of the firefight. I hadn’t seen so many people at once in such a long time. And they were all afraid.
