Pearce Hansen - Stagger Bay

Then the chattering burst of fire stopped with the loud beautiful clack of the bolt holding open on an empty chamber: The skinhead had run out of bullets.

Too bad for him, I thought with glee, and swiveled around the corner in time to nail him in the back as he turned to run. He soared forward to face plant hard with the empty M-16 beneath him.

The only things existing now were the door to that classroom and the children’s sobs leaking from it. I was drenched in sweat as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on, I was breathing like a bellows as I left the cover of the doorframe and started slowly across the wide open kill-zone of that hallway, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and fall on Wayne’s entrails, the.38 extended stiff-armed to my front.

The skinhead lay face down atop his M-16, kicking rapidly at the floor with both steel toe boots alternately like he was trying to scamper horizontally through the linoleum and away from this whole fiasco. The entrance wound in his back wasn’t spurting or welling with blood – instead a red splotch slowly, quietly spread on his denim vest.

That meant his heart had stopped, and his horizontal shit-kicking two-step was no more than his cortical ganglia firing reflexively in denial of his own end. He wasn’t a threat so I put him from my mind as irrelevant – ‘No time, no time,’ a voice in the back of my throat wanted to moan.

Through the door I saw the weasel leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk. His right arm hung down limp from his smashed and bloody shoulder. The canvas bag and his.45 lay on the desk but his other hand was out of sight. I kept my pistol pointed at him as I passed through the doorway and stepped over the skinhead’s spasming corpse.

The children were crowded against the wall, sitting or on their knees, many of them with their hands behind their heads like they were under arrest. They squirmed and cried; snot and tears streaked most of their faces.

The school janitor, a small man with wavy black hair, lay on the floor in front of them. His mop was still clutched in his outstretched hand as he sprawled there, shot dead trying to defend them with it.

The teacher gaped at my mauled remnant of a face, and several of the children whimpered even harder when they saw me. Hell, I looked worse than the Bad Guy here, with half my head a gory ruin. But at least I was becoming numb now.

I held up my left hand to shield the bloody crater in my face from the children’s horrified view. I wrenched my single-eyed gaze away from all those staring little faces and turned toward the Weasel. Behind me, the dead skinhead’s steel toes stopped drumming against the floor.

The Weasel was a barely contained bundle of nervous energy, bandy-muscled and intense; fully alive – as alive as me or any of these children. His previously hidden hand was now revealed, holding up a grenade rigidly akimbo. The pin was pulled – only the pressure of his hand kept the spoon from flying away and the fuse from igniting.

He glared wildly at me, the bridge of his nose wrinkled rock hard like a marble bust. "Think you're bad, motherfucker? You back off, right now, or all these kids get splashed." He appeared on the edge of hysteria.

Someone outside was barking something into a megaphone – the cops, of course. But they were out there. It was a whole different world in here.

I limped robotic and stiff-legged toward this last threat, aiming dead-on at Weasel.

"Stop. Stop right there or I’ll do it, man, I’ll do it,” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he clutched the grenade like some sort of talisman guarding him from the reality of consequence.

I did stop, the muzzle of the.38 about a foot from his sweating face. I was wobbling badly on my feet now, and I had to finish this before I fell down for good. Weasel would honor his threat and drop the grenade or throw it any second now.

Without turning I mumbled to Teacher. "Down, get them down." My croaking voice didn’t sound human, even to me.

At first she made no reply. Then realization must have dawned in her distracted mind: “Lie down children, lie down now,” she said.

I could barely hear her voice through the growing roar in my ears. I sensed rather than heard all the kids stirring as they obeyed her.

“What -?” Weasel began, staring at me in incomprehension as I carefully shot him, right between the eyes.

Blood and brains squirted out the back of his head, his eyeballs bulged onto his cheeks from over-pressure, and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. His grip loosened as he fell brain dead, and the spoon flew off his grenade with a tinkle.

I toppled forward atop him, fumbling for the grenade as if it were a loose inflated ovoid in some kind of team sport championship game. I grabbed it with my numb fingers and pulled it in tight to my stomach and landed heavily on my side, body curved to maybe shape the blast a little bit away from the children.

Time slowed way down as I lay there and waited forever. When I finally realized the main charge wasn’t going to detonate, an epiphany sputtered and fizzled through my sodden brain: This is what it comes down to, I thought – a freaking hang fire, that’s all it was.

I lay there for a moment on my side, stunned for the second time since the start of this whole thing by the mere fact of my continued survival. Then the last scraps of my strength gave way, and I lost my grip on the grenade and rolled onto my back.

The cops were coming into the building now, baying at each other like hounds as they cleared the rooms in turn and by the numbers. Outside, ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ finally ended and the DJ began spieling an excited monolog about the hostage situation at the school. This whole fracas had lasted less than three or four minutes from beginning to end.

Despite the growing cold seeping into my bones, I was mentally spry enough to wonder if they’d get an ambulance to me in time. To tell the truth I was getting pretty tuckered, and a dirt nap didn’t sound like that unpleasant of a prospect. I looked up at the darkening ceiling for a while and then I managed to peer around at the hysterical children, all of them unharmed as far as I could see.

My eye lit on the wall clock, and I tracked the second hand as it swept round the dial. I seemed to be riding an eternal present here. How strange to lie here counting each new ‘now’ as it came into existence with every second ticked off by that ratcheting clock hand, surprised each time that I was still there to see it.

I was still wondering what was going to happen next even as everything faded to black.

I died on the way to the hospital but they weren’t willing to let me go, they insisted on bringing me back with their drugs and machines. I remember a dream wherein I bobbled balloon-like around the ceiling of the ambulance, looking down at my torn bloody body from outside as latex-gloved hands scuttling over me like crabs on a drowned corpse; hands doing hateful things to me. But the hallucination ended when I ectoplasmically burrowed back into that meat puppet shell.

I remember frantic voices and bright lights, and the acrid medicinal stench of the E.R. I knew so well from my misbegotten youth. They’d successfully jump-started me back into the land of the living but I was living in pulses by then, fading in and out until it all went completely black again as they wheeled me into the O.R.

I went away, for how long I couldn’t tell you. There was just enough consciousness flickering through me that I had a dim somatic self-awareness – but not enough to know my name or care about my situation.

My ego was on hold. ‘I’ no longer existed. ‘I’ was a plant, a vegetable enjoying my unconsciousness.