Scott Andrews - School_s Out

When the man came pelting through the door in pursuit, his face met the business end of a frying pan and his feet went out from under him. He crashed down onto the hard tiled floor with a rush of expelled breath. But still he kept a tight grip on his machete. I aimed a kick at his nuts but he rolled away. Nonetheless I connected with his thigh and he grunted. Finally a stroke of luck – I'd given him a dead leg.

He pulled himself up on a table as I swung at his head with the frying pan again. He swatted it away with the machete and it went flying from my grip, clattering to the floor. His nose was bleeding freely and one side of his face was vivid red where the pan had caught him on the cheekbone.

He snarled at me, wiped his hand in the blood from his nose, licked it, smacked his lips, and then smeared the fresh blood all over his face, mixing the new blood with the old.

"Safer now," he chuckled as he advanced, limping, towards me.

Jesus, was this guy for real?

I backed away, looking all the time for another means of defence. There was a rack of knives to my left, and I snatched a short one which I brandished menacingly. A voice in my head mocked: "Call that a knife? That's not a knife. That thing he's got, that's a knife!"

I continued backing away, trod on my discarded flying pan, and went flying like a character in a bad slapstick comedy. To add insult to injury I somehow contrived to land on my own knife, stabbing myself in the side. I yelled in pain as I pulled the blade out and felt hot blood seep down my hip. I looked up and there he was, looming over me, grinning.

"Good cattle. Bleed yourself. Save me the trouble."

"Oh, fuck off," I said wearily. And then I sat up, leaned forward and buried the knife hilt-deep into his thigh. Now it was his turn to yell. I flung myself backwards to avoid the answering swipe of his machete. I scrambled to my feet again and staggered away from him.

He resumed his advance without even pausing to remove the knife. I started grabbing things off the work surfaces and hurling them at him without taking time to see what they were. A colander, a kettle, a bottle of oil, a box of teabags; nothing slowed him down. This was futile.

I turned and scurried to the door.

It was locked. I looked left and right frantically. This wasn't the door Williams, Petts and I had entered from, that was on the other side of the room. This was – oh fuck, it was the door to a walk-in freezer.

I was trapped.

Long metal work surfaces stretched forward on either side of me, hemming me in. Behind me was a locked door, and in front of me stood some kind of Home Counties Jason Voorhees, dripping with blood, and grinning.

"Time to bleed, boy."

There was nowhere to run, nothing to hand offered any chance of defence or offence. It was just me, him and a very big knife.

Fuck it.

I put my head down, and charged the bastard. I slammed into his midriff and this time, with both legs damaged, he lost his balance and fell backwards. We tumbled to the floor and slid across the tiles and – hallelujah! – I saw his machete go sliding away underneath the tables. We wrestled, each trying to gain some purchase, but both of us were slick with blood and our hands kept slipping off each other. I tried to reach up and grab his throat but he was way too strong for me. He forced my arms down and somehow spun me, taking a firm grip on my clothes and pinioning me, face down on the floor. He folded his arm around my neck, nestling the soft inside of his elbow on my already bruised and battered windpipe, and squeezed.

For the second time in an hour I was being choked to death and I couldn't see any way of escape. I writhed and kicked, tried a reverse head butt, scratched and gasped and thrashed, but he was solid as stone, bearing down on me. I couldn't move him an inch.

Again my vision began to cloud, my ears began to roar.

And then my thrashing hands brushed against something hard. The knife – it was still in his thigh! I grasped it, twisted and pulled. He grunted and tightened his grip. I couldn't move my arm up to hit anything vital so I resorted to stabbing him in the thigh again.

And then again.

And again.

And again.

I kept the knife pumping in and out of his thigh with all the force I could muster, but as my body failed, my thrusts got weaker and weaker.

Eventually the blade fell out of my blood-slicked hands and I felt myself blacking out.

I regained consciousness what must have been a minute or two later. The dead weight of my assailant was still on top of me, but his grip on my neck had loosened. I lay there for a second as my head cleared. He wasn't breathing. I roared with the exertion of throwing him off of me, and I slipped and slid in the blood pool that surrounded us both before finally standing upright. Pausing only to pick up the machete, I staggered away, back towards the garden.

My windpipe was so badly swollen that I could only breathe in short ragged bursts. My side was on fire where the knife had speared me. I was a mass of bruises, my head felt light, my hearing was muffled and I was covered, absolutely covered from head to toe, in blood – both mine and that of the man I had killed.

No, don't think about that. Don't think about the killing, about the intimacy of it, the penetration and the spurting and the tactile slickness of his dead skin. Don't think about his breath on my neck, his hands on my throat, his knee in my back. Don't think about how awfully, sickeningly different it was to the clinical dissociation of a gunshot. Don't think about it. Save it for later. There's time for the nightmares later. Things to do.

I limped outside into the sunlight and listened. The chanting had stopped but I could still hear the noises of a large group of people. My route to freedom was still the same, so I started walking towards where Petts should have been lying unconscious. But he wasn't there. Had he regained consciousness and fled, or had he been found and captured? I peered around the corner of the hedge again and saw the machete men herding the townspeople into canvas-topped troop trucks, which had pulled up at the edge of the forecourt. They were shipping them off, presumably to their base of operations.

One man carried the dead body of the woman from the scaffold and tossed it into a truck amongst the living cattle.

Oh God, they had a use for corpses as well. Could they be cannibals too?

With a jolt I saw Petts, holding his head, clearly disorientated, being shoved into one of the trucks. There was no hope of a rescue. He'd have to take his chances.

There was nothing I could do here. I had to get back to the school and warn them about the imminent attack by all that was left of Hildenborough's militia, assuming it hadn't already taken place.

I made my way as fast as I could across the small section of exposed ground and then back into cover on the road, behind the hedgerows and up to a stile. Even the simple act of climbing over a stile felt like an achievement given what I'd been through. And then into the field and safe to the trees.

Apart from the young woman, daubed in blood, carrying a gun, barring my way and looking at me quizzically.

We stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then I smiled and said:

"Safe now."

She regarded my blood-soaked self and nodded.

"Safe now," she replied.

And I was free to go.

I had no idea what awaited me back at the school, but that three-mile journey felt like one of the longest of my life. I wanted to run but I just wasn't capable. A shambling half-jog was the best I could muster.

I wondered how good David's intelligence had been. Had he chosen this afternoon to attack Hildenborough because he'd known that some of their forces would be busy elsewhere? And if so, did that mean he knew about the school? Could we be his next target? All this, of course, assuming the school wasn't already occupied.