What the hell had just happened? AO, or my demented mind, had sent me to a gunfight with a knife. Now, not only was Candy going to be a widow, but dozens of parents were going to lose their children. What was the sense of my coming here?
“To answer your question,” the kid said, standing over me, the gun pointed at my face, “I’m smarter than all those other school shooters. I’m actually going to get away and live a new life in South America. I have it all mapped out.”
He grinned, and in that moment, I knew I had seen pure evil for the first time in my life.
“I wasn’t coming back here anyway, so I don’t mind making a mess.”
I feebly put my hands in front of my face, as if they were made of Kevlar. From between my fingers, I saw him pull the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He pulled it again, and again. The gun was jammed.
I rolled away from him, opening the latches on the scimitar’s case.
“Hey!” he shouted as if to get me to stop so he could have an easy shot once the gun was working properly.
The scimitar nearly jumped into my hand. I lashed out without looking, feeling slight resistance. The kid looked down at his legs, his mouth in a frozen O. The blade had sliced through his shinbones as if they were made of cream cheese. Well, raspberry cream cheese.
The gun fell from his hand, finally going off. The bullet buried into the kid’s side as he fell back onto the bed.
Getting to my feet, I rammed the blade down on his wrists, severing both hands and just missing one of the grenades.
“Oh my God!” the kid wailed. Gouts of blood pumped from the stumps, bathing him in gore.
“Too late to switch sides,” I said. I rammed the curved tip of the blade into his throat. It went through him and halfway into the mattress. His eyes bulged and more crimson bubbled from his mouth. Arterial spray painted the wall to my right. The kid’s legs and arms spasmed for a bit, then went still.
The moment the light went from his eyes, the searing agony of the gunshot wound in my leg screamed for attention. In between my angry hisses of pain, I heard a door open and close.
Was this nightmare ever going to end?
“Ralph?” a woman’s voice called out. “I just got a call from school that you cut class again. You better have a damn good excuse.”
A middle-aged woman dressed in a Lady Gaga T-shirt, tight jeans, and high heels stopped in the bedroom’s doorway. She had dyed blonde hair and too much makeup. She looked every bit the part of the dried-up woman desperately wanting to be a MILF. Stale alcohol oozed from her pores.
“What did you do to my son? Aaahhhhhh!”
I pointed the bloody scimitar at her.
“You raised this monster?” I said, gritting my teeth from the pain in my leg and the anger at a parent that could allow a child to fall so far.
“I’m calling the cops! You murdered my boy!” She started backpedaling, hands fluttering around her mouth.
“I did the world a favor,” I said.
As she turned to run, I cleaved her left shoulder with the scimitar. It took the breath right out of her. She fell face-first onto the floor, quickly flipping over so she could beg for her life.
“Please, I didn’t do anything to you,” she said, all concern for her son gone now that she was facing her own mortality. “If you leave me, I won’t tell the cops that I saw you. I’ll tell them I came home and found Ralph dead.”
Her plea made me physically ill because I knew she would be true to her word. She cared more about herself than her child.
“Don’t bother,” I said, swinging the scimitar like a pendulum. Her head rolled away from her body, settling against the baseboard. Her eyes blinked hard several times. I had to stop myself from kicking her right between them.