Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

I got to my feet, stepped over him, turned and looked down at one of the men who had tortured me. I looked into his despairing eyes as he gazed up at me, grasping at the air, and I felt not one shred of pity or remorse.

“I hate bullies,” I said. Then I jumped and landed with both feet on the back of his neck. There was a sharp crack and I felt his body crumple and grind beneath my heels.

Strangely, it still wasn’t quite as satisfying as breaking Jason’s nose all those years ago. I suppose you just feel things that bit more intensely when you’re a child.

I rolled the cooling corpse on to its back, intending to take his trousers, but he’d wet himself too, and more besides, so I left them.

I frisked him, looking for a gun or knife, but he wasn’t armed; probably hadn’t thought it necessary. There was bound to be a man on guard outside, but the thick wooden doors had masked any noise, so I reckoned I had a few minutes at least. I ran to the window, but there was no balcony or convenient ledge I could climb out onto. The door it was. I looked around the room for some kind of weapon.

In the centre of the room stood two wooden chairs with the board laid across them. The hood, towels, bucket and ties were lying discarded on the floor beside it. I walked over to the apparatus, lifted the board and placed it on the floor. Then I picked up one of the chairs and smashed it into the wall as hard as I could, snapping one of the legs off. Voila: one genuine vampire-slaying stake.

I ran over to the door and banged on it, and then I crouched down, holding the stake in both hands against my chest, pointing out and up. The door cracked open. In normal circumstances a well trained soldier would have drawn his weapon and pushed the door open at arm’s length, but these doors were so weighty that the soldier outside had to lean his full weight against it, and even then they moved slowly.

He was so focused on pushing the door open that he didn’t notice me, crouched down below his eyeline, until it was too late.

I sprang up and drove the stake with all my strength into his belly and up under his ribcage into his heart, lifting him off the ground with the force of my attack, pushing a spout of blood out through his mouth. I couldn’t hold his weight, and he fell backwards, crashing to the floor in a dead heap.

Was a time I would have felt bad about doing something like that, but I thought of all those people left to rot in the town with huge shafts of wood sticking out of their shattered ribcages, and any remorse I might have felt evaporated.

The general’s desk stood alone at the centre of the vast room, but there was no-one else there. I grabbed a gun and some magazines from the impaled soldier and ran to the main doors, familiarising myself with the weapon as I ran. It was some variant of an M16; not a weapon I was familiar with. All I knew is that you load it by pulling the charging handle back and letting it go. Simplicity itself. Other than that I’d have to hope it wasn’t too different to the guns I knew. I found the safety and switched it off.

The problem with these huge bloody doors was that you couldn’t hear a thing through them. Probably useful if you wanted to stage a little private torturing, or a discreet orgy, but fuck all use if you wanted to sneak around the place undetected. I pressed my ear to one of the doors but there was no way of knowing what was happening on the other side. I was about to climb out the balcony when I noticed something slightly askew in one of the wall patterns in the far corner; a tiny line that didn’t quite fit the design. I ran across to it and found a concealed door with a metal ring flush to the wall. I popped it out and pulled, revealing a narrow, gloomy back staircase, presumably installed for the servants.

I stepped inside, pulled the door closed behind me and made my way downstairs, gun at the ready.

I passed one exit, which I gently cracked open. It led into a large kitchen on the ground floor. There was no-one inside, so I took the opportunity to slip out and find a couple of good knives which I slipped into my waistband. I then returned to the staircase and continued my descent. Eventually the stairs ended at another door, beyond which lay the damp concrete corridor and the cells. I crept along the corridor to the point where it met the cell block at a kind of T-junction. Back to the wall, I risked a quick glimpse into the prison run and saw only one guard, sitting reading near the main entrance. He was facing me, about fifty metres away. No way to take him out silently. I was just going to have to hope for the best.

I shouldered the M16, took a deep breath, and steeped into his line of sight. He didn’t look up; too engrossed in Tom Clancy. I walked towards him, gun sighted square on his chest as I did so. I was half way to him when he turned the page, and in that instant he registered my presence. He looked up at me in surprise and opened his mouth to challenge me. I squeezed the trigger softly and sent a round spinning straight at his chest.

And missed.

I’m not accustomed to missing, but I’d never fired an M16 before so I was unfamiliar with its quirks. The gun pulled upwards much more than I’d expected. The bullet hit the wall beside his shoulder, sending out a puff of white plaster. My surprise at missing caused me to hesitate, and in the instant before I could resight and fire again my target said: “Jesus, Lee, what the hell are you doing?”

Which was unexpected.

TEN MINUTES LATER, with a knife at my throat and my right arm pinioned behind my back, I was led out of the palace into the dark orange of sunset. The palace looked oddly unimpressive from outside. Partly this was because it had been shot to shit more than once, partly it was that all the opulence inside wasn’t reflected in the blocky, uninspired exterior. The effect was that of walking out of a cinema into the street; glamour and colour replaced by dullness and dust.

The man with the knife — the man who I’d failed to shoot — marched me straight ahead, past the wonderful gardens and on to a paved path that led from the main palace building to a smaller, but still very large outbuilding (a palacette, perhaps, or a palacini?) There were a few of them dotted around inside the thick stone walls that ringed the enormous compound. There were fields too, scrubby and untended with a few lonely trees, probably once intended as orchards but never irrigated properly and now ignored.

It was a grim place. Badly planned, hardly finished, abandoned, fought over and now occupied, baking in the relentless heat. But that garden somehow seemed to have survived. Perhaps it was because I was so nervous, but I fixated on the garden as I walked away from it, daydreaming about its pools and arches. But I wasn’t going to somewhere calm and cool and green. I was going to be executed.

There were two other soldiers escorting me, and two more at the open doors of the building ahead. We entered a large reception hall, lit by the amber light that flooded through an enormous lattice window. Blythe was there, seated on a seventies style sofa; polyester covered foam squares on a basic metal frame, all in a garish swirling pattern of green and brown. My father sat beside him, hands cuffed to the frame. In front of them stood something that came up to my shoulders, covered in a white sheet out of which snaked thick cables that coiled across the mosaic floor and out of the door we had just entered by.

“Thank you, Major,” said Blythe. “You can release the prisoner.”

The knife was removed and my arm freed. The man who’d been steering me stepped back into the lengthening shadows.

“You all right, Lee?”

“Yeah Dad, I’m fine.”

“You are anything but fine, son,” said Blythe.

“He’s not your son,” spat my father.