Bloodshed by Michael Lister

Author:Michael Lister [Lister, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pulpwood Press
Published: 2018-07-16T22:00:00+00:00

29

A text I thought I’d never send: Someone is shooting people at my school.

When all the shooting starts, Josh Stewart is in the boys’ restroom on the east side of the school. At first he’s not sure what he’s hearing, but then he hears someone scream and guesses it’s gunfire.

Today is Josh’s fifteenth birthday.

To celebrate, his mom had gotten up early and made him a big birthday breakfast for him, which included his favorite—breakfast burritos.

His mom’s efforts made him feel loved and celebrated, but also a little nauseated, and by the time he walked into his first-period class—Biology with Mrs. Abanes—he had to walk right back out again, and by the time he rounded the final curve before the boys’ bathroom he was running.

A school shooting at Potter High and he’s caught with his fuckin’ pants down.

Finishing as fast as he can, doing only a decent at best job wiping, and not bothering to wash his hands, he decides to make a run for it.

He decides this in the split second he has to decide and he does so because he thinks that the gunfire sounds far away and that he’ll be far safer in the classroom with Mrs. Abanes, who seems far too solid and stern to get shot or let any of her students get shot, than he would out here by himself.

Picturing himself as a vulnerable, young gazelle separated from the herd, Josh runs as fast as he ever has around the empty hallway toward Mrs. Abanes’s classroom.

Explosions rocking the school.

Smoke beginning to fill the hallway.

Obnoxious alarm bleating.

And the gunfire sounding closer now.

Am I actually running toward the shots? he wonders.

It’s hard to tell.

So many sounds. All of them ricocheting around the hard surfaces of the circular hallway.

For the briefest of moments, he thinks of turning back, but figures he can still make it.

Long, skinny teen legs stretched out, arms and heart pumping, little gazelle running for his life.

As he rounds the final curve before Mrs. Abanes’s room, flailing as if death itself is chasing him, something out of a horror movie is standing there in the smoke.

Long black leather duster. White expressionless face. Assault rifle rising. Firing.

The first round shatters his ankle and brings him down hard, head first into the cinderblock wall, knocking him unconscious so that he’s unaware of what the subsequent rounds do.

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