Chapter 9

 

Well, you’ll never strut your stuff again, Herbert thought, wiping the blood from his face.

Before him lay the waste of what had been a beautiful girl, never to be beautiful again. Oh, she might turn a few heads in the near future, but it was hard to be beautiful when your face was missing. She’d run out of the Gingerbread House in front of him, all bouncing blond curls and ass, and he’d put a bullet through the back of her head.

He squatted under the marquis, squeezed the dead girl’s breast, and groaned. Jesus. Still warm.

Opening his backpack, he moaned again. Such toys!

From inside the Gingerbread House came a glorious symphony: screaming, smashing glass, the thuds and crashing of toppled furniture. Through the glass of the front door, Herbert saw a meathead humping a girl. As he watched, a cocktail waitress appeared and yanked a mouthful of flesh from some asshole’s shoulder.

"Tsk, tsk," Herbert said, "somebody was drinking on the job." Then he let go a high-pitched titter. Everything was going as planned!

Oh, how the meatheads wanted to kill him! Initially, they’d charged from all sides, but he’d been too quick for them, laughing as he punched holes in their foreheads. It was risky, sure—fucking-A-right it was risky—but what a rush!

Turmoil churned all around him. Fights raged. Meatheads ran and screamed and killed each other. They boiled out of bars and restaurants. Nearby, a pair of crazies reveled in the messy remains of what had once been the parking lot attendant. One looked up, grinning green, and ran at Herbert. He didn’t make it far. Herbert snapped off a quick, center-mass shot and dropped him. The other one, seemingly oblivious, buried his face in the attendant’s entrails.

At any moment, Herbert knew, a whole crowd of meatheads could rush him, and if enough of them got pointed in his direction, he wouldn’t be able to fire fast enough. He’d empty the clips and work with his knives, but if there were enough of them, they’d eat him alive.

Let them try.

Through the glass doors, the mad humper turned his attention to the girl who’d bitten a chunk out of him.

Get some while the getting’s good, Herbert thought, then turned his attention to the pipe bomb.

Professor Dougherty told incoming honor students that every chemist entered the major for one of only two reasons: drugs or bombs. Either they wanted to make drugs or make bombs. Then, after an appropriate pause, the handsome professor spread his arms and said, "Good news is, there’s money in both!" Herbert heard the joke as a freshman and again in every section he TA-ed, every semester, every year since. Always the same line, always the same delivery.

He’d long doubted Professor Dougherty’s aptitude.

Dougherty was a showman first, a scientist second. Maybe third. Maybe even fourth. The guy sure did love his Porsche, and he took handball awfully seriously.

Herbert never shared Dougherty’s distraction and didn’t feel limited by the Professor’s adage. Herbert was here for bombs and drugs. Tonight was his self-administered final examination, and so far, he was acing everything. As far as drugs went, it was his own pharmacological experiments, shit he’d made—Phineas Gage and the Amygdala Hijack Express!—causing all this craziness. As for his bombs, well, he’d test those soon enough.

He reached inside the pack and withdrew a simple, anti-personnel grenade. These were a cinch to make, and fun, too. It just took a little know-how, and Herbert had plenty of that. He’d started with twenty pounds of graveyard dirt—Graveyard dirt, can you dig it?—rendered half a cup of wood ash, and picked up a gallon of rot gut whiskey, and he’d been halfway to saltpeter, what the improvised munitions handbooks call potassium nitrate. Once he’d prepped the saltpeter, he was halfway to nitric acid, and that’s what he’d used, mixed with oil of mirbane, to fill the pipes before setting the caps and waxing the ends. Finally, using packaging tape, he’d nail-wrapped the charges, then dipped them in glue and rolled them in broken glass. Glass doesn’t show up in x-rays.

Herbert lit the 12-second fuse then squeezed four rounds into the glass door beyond which the cocktail waitress appeared to be getting the best of the humping meathead. The glass shattered, and Herbert tossed the pipe bomb into the bar.

He had just enough time to get out of the way before the explosion walloped the air. Windows burst; flame and debris shot from the door, and the fierce, fiery push of flame and heat almost knocked Herbert from his feet.

He turned and was in love.

Flames gushed from windows and door, scaled the outer walls, and covered the Gingerbread House in a glaze of fire so beautiful that it took Herbert’s breath away. Alerted by a scraping sound, he watched a charred meathead who’d blasted clear of the restaurant struggle to stand, clothes and hair still aflame. "Barbecued asshole," Herbert said, and plinked the scorched meathead with his trusty peashooter. The meathead dropped. One shot, one kill.

His dick was hard as hell.

No time for that now. This was it, the big deal, the moment of which he’d been dreaming since he was ten and switched over to middle school. He’d told his parents what happened there, told them what the kids there put him through, begged them to home school him or send him to private school—even Catholic school, for Chrissakes!—but they ignored him, told him to make the best of it, told him the experience would make him strong. What it had made him was pissed the fuck off. High school had been even worse—same assholes, only bigger—and college had proven little better.

"Well," he said, loading fresh clips of ammunition, "if you can’t beat ‘em, kill ‘em!" Cackling, he walked north toward campus. Crossing College Drive forced him to start shooting with both hands, cowboy-style. Crazed meatheads covered in blood wove between smashed cars. Alarms squealed. Meatheads screamed and laughed and bellowed. Herbert targeted green, smashing bullets through emerald grins. He stared in fascination as one meathead leapt from a hotel rooftop, laughing and flailing his arms in a wriggling four-story belly flop onto the spikes of the black metal Victorian fence surrounding the inn.

Herbert headed up the cement path that led toward the main quad, the chem building, and the car he’d parked there. He fired and reloaded as he walked, finally stopping when he saw the girl blowing the dead guy.

She had a great ass. Perfect. Perfect legs, too. She leaned over the dead guy, who was sprawled across one of the park benches lining the pathway. Her head bobbed up and down in his lap, and her skirt was hiked up all the way, giving Herbert full view of those shapely legs and that heavenly ass, all curves and black thong.

"I see London, I see France," Herbert chimed.

The girl lifted her head and turned, her face a red and green mask, the eyes wide and hungry, the mouth chewing on something raw and…

"Now that’s just wrong, sweetheart," Herbert said. "If there’s one thing worse than blowing a dead guy in public, it’s eating his dick in the process."

The girl started for him.

He popped her in the forehead with the .22, and she dropped on the spot.

"Sick-o," Herbert said, and started walking again.

He’d nearly made it to chem building when he saw the meatheads mobbing the BMW.