Title: Bang Bang Bang

Book: Letters from the Inside

Characters: Mandy, Steve, Katrina and Tracey

Notes: This take place on Christmas Day, a few hours before Tracey writes her December 26, 3 a.m. letter.

She was hiding under her desk, like a scared little child – she was a scared little child.

She should have run out of her room – to stop Steve, to call the police, to flee – anything. Instead, she acted like a scared little child.

She blocked her ears as gunshots rang through the house – bang, bang, bang, -and as her mother screamed over the death of her father.

Then all she could hear was a cold thud – the thud of her mother dying. She had no idea of how Steve killed her – she didn't want to know.

She just wished there was something she could do to calm herself. Her hands were shaking, sweat was running down her anywhere there was a pore and her breathing had fastened and became erratic – she was hyperventilating.

She heard footsteps going pass her door and the soft click of the door to the bathroom opening. She heard muffled sounds of Katrina asking what Steve was looking for – what he wanted to achieve. Then a scream – one scream, two screams, three screams – then a thud and somebody fumbling with the bathroom door.

Then all she could hear was a sickening crunch of something going through Katrina's bones, through the wood of the door.

She wanted to move, she wanted so desperately to get out of there. Her body disagreed – her breathing was quicker than she would've liked and her legs and arms refused to move.

She heard Steve's feet stop outside her room and she could see the doorknob jiggling – she could see the door moving and the light that Steve had let in filling the room gradually.

She could see his body moving and she could see his body bending as he moved to get a good look at her. She saw the Devil's face on him – she had been hoping that he would have a neutral face on; as if this was some duty he had been ordered to carry out as a soldier for his country.

Instead there was a feral grin on his face and his eyes were sparkling with something – malice, sadism, glee – and oh God, how she wished she could escape what was coming.

She felt the pain of being stabbed twice, but she never got the chance to feel the pain of being stabbed thrice – hand, heart, head. She felt the blood dribbling down her palm, she felt the blood trickling down her chest but she never got the chance to feel the blood flowing from her skull - her skull fracturing but not in the fashion of a pretty spider's web and more like a porcelain face that had been smashed in the middle.

She had been dead before she hit the floor, cracking more of her skull. She never heard the butterfly dagger piercing the skin on his neck, she never felt him hitting the floor and she never sensed him smirking as he died.


In the small hours of the morning, Tracey dreamed of the blood spilling from Mandy's hand, the blood rushing down Mandy's chest, and she was forced to watch the blood as it oozed out of her skull.

That morning, in one of the tiny slots in A Block, Tracey woke up with her period.