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Post by ch00beh on Oct 23, 2011 23:53:30 GMT -5
He was vaguely aware of screaming and linoleum pressed up against his cheek. Everything was dark—no, his eyes were closed. He opened them, but everything was dark around the edges of his vision, and everything else was blurry at best.
He was on the ground; he could tell that much. He must have slipped because it felt like there was some kind of liquid soaking into his shirt. He tried to push himself up, but his arms wouldn't cooperate and his body was too heavy. His body shuddered. Was it getting colder? Wasn't it the middle of April?
Before he could follow that line of thought, a familiar girl's screaming caught his attention. She seemed to have fallen back into a wall, her legs flailing frantically away but pushing her nowhere. He opened his mouth and managed a cough.
"Sh-Shana... what h-...?" He coughed again and noticed flecks of red decorate the off white linoleum in front of his eyes.
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Post by The Evil Biscuit on Dec 19, 2011 1:41:44 GMT -5
The bells for third period rang, their urgent pealing echoing in the deserted halls. Huckabee still had his eyes fixed on the body at his feet.
“…Paulie?”
And it was, wasn’t it? Paulie Matthews. The B-minus kid. He’d made a game of sorts out of rating his students with letter grades, mostly based on their social and academic talents, but also on their potential and their propensity towards applying it to their lives. Paulie was a B-minus kid. Too smart for his own good, Daniel had always thought. Never paying attention, hell, never needing to, and turning in B-minus work. He never complained. Daniel had once scribbled in the Matthews boy’s term paper You’re selling yourself short. Do you even know what your best is? but he’d never heard a word or noticed a change. Kid probably never even bothered to read it. And now, here he was, bleeding out on the bleach-scrubbed tiles of a school, his life extinguished before it ever really began. Huckabee squatted down to be closer to the white-faced boy as his mouth struggled to form words, thinking to himself that those days of grading papers seemed to be years in the past.
“Stupid kid.” These weren’t his words, were they? He felt something rising in his belly, a coldness, spreading into his chest and shoulders. He forgot the kid’s name, remembered it – Hakeem – then forgot it again. He prodded the boy with his gun, rolling him over and exposing the neat black hole in his chest, the rosy bloom nearly soaking all the white from his shirt. His eyes, already beginning to dilate, found Daniel’s. They were they eyes of the dying, the afraid. He didn’t understand. Daniel shook his head, clucking his tongue. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” What was happening? He felt like he was floating above himself, watching this old, weathered monster jab at one of his students with a pistol as if inspecting a car tire. The coldness spread into his loins, crawling down his legs. For a moment, he felt the hot Iraqi sun searing the back of his neck, and he calmly rubbed it away with his free hand.
“Yeah, Paulie, you’re dying. You’re shot.” The eyes pleaded with him, unable to accept it. “What even possessed you to run out there, anyway? Her?” he flicked the gun at the hysterical Michaela girl, who had simply covered her head with her arms and begun wailing at the top of her lungs. “Paulie, you never had a chance with her. Anyone could have told you that. And now what? You’re dead. All because of the girl.” Daniel ran a hand through his thinning hair and sighed. The cold numbness was in every extremity of his body. It was as though someone had walked into the dark, black recesses of his mind and flipped some dusty switch to the OFF position. He stood up, smoothing his shirt. “Sorry it went this way for you, kid. Should have listened to me the first time.” Paulie’s mouth opened again, but it was too late. The breath was already beginning to escape him – his eyes began to fade, his fingers relaxed. Daniel didn’t wait around for him to die. He turned to Rance. In the distance, the sound of sirens could be heard.
“Run.”
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