Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

He angled the knife down, inserting the point inside the waistband of her jeans, directly below her belly button.

Then something distracted him. A distant rumble. The floor shook briefly. There was a scream somewhere far away. He glanced over his shoulder instinctively, even though the closed door and windowless walls offered no vantage.

When he turned his attention back to the woman he noticed she had taken a step backwards. He looked down and registered that she had something in her right hand. Something long and thin. Something dripping.

He took a step towards her and felt his centre of gravity shift in an unsettling way. There was a soft wet sound and he felt pressure on his foot. He looked down to see his entrails spooling out of his belly and falling to the floor like a coil of steaming, lumpy rope.

Still looking at his feet in wonder he saw a hand enter his field of vision and felt it punch him on the breast. The hand withdrew and he opened his mouth in astonishment as he realised there was a black metal handle sticking out of his chest.

How the fuck had that got there?

He reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling it and exposing the blade of his grandfather’s bayonet. It emerged from his heart smoothly, without a sound. The room spun and he felt something hit him on the back of the head. He wasn’t conscious long enough to realise that it was the floor.

The woman reached down and took the bayonet from twitching fingers, then stepped over the giant corpse and opened the door. Somewhere in the distance she could hear gunfire.

She walked out of the room, blade in hand, spoiling for a fight.

As she moved down the corridor, she could still hear occasional bursts of gunfire somewhere below and ahead of her. She didn’t know how, but Cooper and his men must have found the warehouse. This mean that time was not on her side. She had to find Spider before Cooper did.

The corridor ran the length of the building along its external back wall. Tall metal framed windows ranged to her left, a collection of doors to her right. A quick glance outside told her that it was late evening and she was at least one floor above the lobby bar.

The door at the far end of the corridor burst open and the man with the yellow teeth came running through with a submachine gun in his hands. Without noticing the woman, he turned and entered the first door. The woman heard a girl’s scream and then a burst of gunfire.

She began to run. The man stepped back out of the room, the barrel of his gun smoking. He turned to walk towards the next door and then stopped in amazement as he registered a woman in a bra running towards him with teeth bared. It took him a second to react, but he soon brought the gun to bear.

“Rush a gun, flee a knife,” the woman muttered to herself as she barrelled forwards. The sound of the shots was deafening in the enclosed corridor, and she felt hot air stream across her right shoulder as the distance closed. Then there was a sharp sting in the same shoulder but she ignored it as she crashed into the gunman, flinging him to the floor. The bayonet clattered out of her hands as they fell. She wrestled with him for a moment and then, realising the madness of this, sat up, straddling him like a lover. Again he took a moment to react to this unexpected move, a moment in which she reached down, grabbed his gun, reversed it and used the butt to send the bones from his nose shrapnelling into his frontal lobe.

She leaned across him, grabbed the bayonet again then stood, blade in one hand, gun in the other. She checked the gun once, recalling Sanders’ tuition, recognising the vital parts. She pointed it at the chest of Yellowteeth and squeezed the trigger. A stream of bullets thudded into him.

The woman nodded, satisfied.

She heard a door open behind her and she spun around, raising the weapon. A teenaged girl peered out at her, eyes wide with fear. The woman lowered the weapon.

“You speak English?” she asked.

The girl nodded. The woman handed her the bayonet, and the girl looked at it in wonder.

“Take this,” said the woman. “Stick it in any man you meet who’s not wearing a uniform. Understand?”

The girl nodded.

“Good, now get everyone in these rooms into the dungeon at the far end. Lock the door. The keys are in the pocket of the dead man you’ll find in there. Don’t come out until the shooting stops. Can you do that?”

Again the girl nodded. “You’ve been shot,” she whispered.

The woman looked at her shoulder and registered a small hole at the top of her arm. She fingered it, and found the exit wound. The bullet had gone straight through and missed both bones and arteries. She didn’t feel any pain, though she knew that would not stay the case for long.

She turned, jumped over the corpse of Yellowteeth and ran out the door. She had wasted enough time.

She emerged onto a darkened dance floor with swing doors at the far right. She ran diagonally across it. As she reached the halfway point the doors swung open and three men ran in. All were in civvies and all carried guns.

Their eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, so by the time they realised they were not alone it was too late. The woman sprayed the doorway with bullets and the men jerked and dropped. She kept running, jumped over them and flew out the swing doors, ready to fire.

Behind her, in the corridor where she’d killed Yellowteeth, she heard shattering glass as Cooper’s men came in through the windows. So now they were ahead of her and behind her. She gritted her teeth.

She had to get to Spider first.

She ran down an empty staircase keeping the gun aimed at the bottom in case anyone else came running through. There was another soft explosion on the far side of the building as she reached the bottom and turned to find herself facing another corridor and another row of rooms.

These doors were open. One, about halfway along, had a single bloodstained hand stretched across the threshold.

The woman walked down the corridor checking each room for survivors. Despite her focus, she knew she would have to help any wounded girls she found, even if that meant letting Spider escape. But Yellowteeth had been thorough. Each room held at least one dead girl, some as many as three. No-one was to be left alive who could testify against them. No witnesses, no descriptions. The woman reached the end of the corridor with something approximating relief and pushed through into the lobby bar.

A patch of darkness on the carpet was the only evidence that someone had been stabbed in the head here not so long ago.

There was a burst of gunfire from somewhere close, beyond the opposite door, then heavy footsteps on the stairs behind her. She scanned the room in desperation. Had they already captured him? Had the bastard escaped her?

Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t seem right, so she turned and realised that there was another door, slightly ajar, behind the bar. It was flat and featureless, disguised as part of the wall, which was why she had not seen it earlier. She ran to it and pulled it open, squeezing through and closing it firmly behind her. Cooper and his team would probably not see the door on their first pass, especially if they were still encountering resistance. If Spider had come this way, she would be the only person in pursuit for now.

The woman smiled, but it was not like any smile Kate had ever worn.

She scampered down the dark, narrow stairs. A small landing with another discreet door marked the ground floor, then the steps continued down into the cellars. The woman saw a glimmer of light ahead and slowed. He turned the corner at the bottom and found herself in a long, low featureless brick corridor, painted black. There was no light here, but she could make out a fading glow at the far end, betraying the presence of someone fleeing with a torch. She took off in pursuit, catching only vague impressions of rooms off to her left and right, each marked by a low, round arch and some brick steps going down into a chamber. The squalid cellar entrances smelt of blood, shit and fear.