Hey guys! So I apologize in advance if this chapter has a few grammatical mistakes in it, I've been in a bit of a rush lately but really wanted to get this chapter up.
Hope you enjoy, as always thanks for all of you!
Chapter 7
Define a Lifetimes
(Mercedes Jones)
For as far back as Mercedes Jones could possibly remember, her number one pet peeve in life had always been her parent's relentless insistency upon hovering in tandem above her sleeping bedside in order to awaken her for yet another terribly dull school day…
Ever since her days at Lima Elementary they had been doing it, and ever since her days at Lima Elementary, it had frustrated her to positively no end – the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 being absolutely no exception to that rule.
It was 6:30 a.m. that she'd thrust a tired arm out from beyond the confines of her comfortable cocoon of blankets and pillows in order to slam an angry hand down against the snooze button of her insensitive alarm clock, looking for a mere handful of additional minutes of blissful sleep.
But ultimately, it was a handful of additional minutes of blissful sleep that she would never get, because by 6:31 a.m., there were her parents, just as they were every day, standing before her sleeping bedside as they shook her obnoxiously by the shoulders and yelled for her to emerge from underneath the comforts of her bed.
That morning, Mercedes had opened her eyes with an angry glare already prominent on her face, fully prepared to direct her sleepy glower up towards her parents for their inconsiderate insistence upon rousing her at such a ridiculous hour of the morning…
And that was about the time that things began to get really weird.
Her eyes focused slowly from her fuzzy haze of sleep, clearing against the world surrounding her so that the first thing that she saw wasn't her parent's obnoxiously smiling faces as she had expected it to be, but instead an oversized letter nestled gently between her father's outstretched hands being jutted towards her general direction.
For several elongated seconds, the words merely danced into and out of focus before her very eyes as they adjusted slowly to the combination of sunlight streaming neatly through her bedroom window in addition to the painfully close proximity of the official-looking message displayed before her.
The first thing that she had ultimately managed to distinguish between upon her careful observation of the letter before her was the familiar seal imprinted into the upper right-hand corner of the paper; sixteenth notes arranged strategically within a soft circle, the words National Adolescent Show Choir dancing lively between them.
Her heart pounding almost painfully inside of her chest, excitement coursed through her veins as a surge of natural adrenaline erased any remaining ounce of sleep left inside of her body, shooting her upwards into a seated position against her pillows as she grabbed the letter from her dad's grasp and read hastily, the words that they professed to her with a wide-eyed intensity.
Dear Ms. Jones,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to participate in the upcoming call-back auditions for participation in the National Adolescent Show Choir's 2010 summer world tour.
Enclosed you will find the scheduled date and time of your assigned audition. We look forward to seeing you there.
Sincerely,
Alyssa Rothschild
NASC Director & President
Her very insides swelling with joy, rather than releasing the series of slurs that she had previously prepared in response to her parents' abrupt awakening of her, she instead offered them a single, high-pitched squeal of delight, her body practically lifting itself up and out of her bed as she bounced across her room, clutching the precious letter between her hands as she danced in graceful pirouettes.
For the remainder of the morning, she'd found herself unable to help but to drift continuously into and out of focus with her surroundings.
But with her impending tryout lingering incessantly in of the back of her mind and the dreams that travelling around the world with the most prestigious show choir in the country would produce for her, how was she expected to have helped it?
What, with the extent to which this company was celebrated combined with the experience that spending the summer travelling the globe would provide, acceptance into this program would virtually guarantee her a successful future in the music industry.
And if there was one thing that Mercedes Jones was more certain about than anything else in the world, it was that one day, her voice would be heard, that one day, every man, woman and child across the planet would recognize her name, they would know her face, and they would know exactly what she had gone through to get herself there.
With her primary goal of the day being to take complete advantage of the bragging rights automatically enacted upon her with the potential of her spending the summer touring the globe with the most high profiled show choir in the country while Rachel Berry would be stuck inside of her bedroom making daily Myspace videos, she had to say that when she walked inside of William McKinley High School's crowded cafeteria alongside the blaring lunch bell at 10:46 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010, she was actually disappointed to find that Rachel wasn't even there…
But Mercedes hadn't gotten this far in her life by being impatient; she had been waiting sixteen years for this moment to come, so theoretically, she could wait a little bit longer…
She took advantage of the free time, settling herself in a chair between Kurt and Tina at the tiny glee club lunch table, both mentally and physically preparing not only for the guaranteed diva-off that her announcement would undoubtedly result in, but also, for her future auditions as well, the gentle, yet powerful instrumentals ringing in through the back of her head so vividly, that she would have sworn a full orchestra to be playing directly behind her.
And I am telling you, I'm not going.
You're the best man I'll ever know, there's no way I can ever go.
No, no there's no way.
No, no, no, no way I'm living without you.
She was only vaguely aware of the fact that she had begun swaying alongside the silent masterpiece blaring inside of her head, only vaguely aware that she had closed her eyes against the image of herself standing center stage, belting the powerhouse vocals that she always knew would take her far.
The fact of the matter was, that Mercedes had managed to get so far ahead of herself in her anticipation of the future that she'd nearly forgotten the seemingly simple idea that a present time even existed at all.
It was why she found it so easy to register the very world around her solely in terms of her own unconscious existence.
It was why she'd barely recognized so much as a single noise surrounding her as lunchtime across William McKinley High School progressed as usual.
It was why when the first gunshot sliced distantly across the cafeteria's inner boundaries, silencing it into an unnatural quiet, she had been so involved with the dramatic finale of her audition piece that she'd literally believed the semi-unexpected sound to have been a sharp, realistic snare drum shot echoing loudly in the back of her head, and the back of her head only.
Impressed with herself for her level of such flawless dedication, Mercedes allowed herself to remain completely convinced of her apparently obvious explanation towards such a sudden, sharp outburst of noise for several bypassing seconds until finally, the song that had been playing on repeat in the back of her mind since early that very morning faded away into a harsh silence that followed her straight into reality; her surroundings perceiving just as quietly as the subsequent music had become.
"Get out of here." Finn's warning was the first conscious sound that she had actually registered, having actually heard his words of caution before identifying with the fact that he was sprinting towards the cafeteria doors and towards the hallway as he spoke, an indirect confirmation that whatever it was that she had previously believed to have been all in her head hadn't been… not at all.
"What?" Puck addressed the inquiry that had been on every mind across the length of the table before him so that Mercedes couldn't help but to keep her head poised firmly upwards, awaiting the answers to the incessant questions darting across her brain, leaving her unable to help but to wish that she had been paying more attention to her surroundings than what she had been previously…
"Just do it" Her sensitively trained ears allowed her to immediately register the hidden panic buried beneath the back of Finn's voice so that just as quickly as she had been flattered with a sense of unspoken confidence, buried by an avalanche of good fortune, it was all eliminated in one single, prominent thought –
This wasn't good.
"He's crazy." Mercedes only vaguely registered the uncharacteristic lack of confidence behind Puck's voice as she watched Finn disappear in his entirety from beyond the rounded corner of the cafeteria doors, "It must be from dating Rachel; I think that she's starting to rub off on him."
Her mind faded distantly alongside the dull laugh that followed Puck's attempted explanation, contributed by a mere handful of her fellow counterparts.
Silently begging for her incessant unease to fade into a limbo of non-concern, Mercedes somehow managed to convince herself that Finn's reaction to the noise that she had barely even heard to begin with was a mere overreaction, or at the very least, she had done so enough to allow the soft lyrics of her audition piece to ease back into the space between her ears.
Darling there's no way.
No, no, no, no way I'm living without you.
You see there's just no way.
The only reason that the noise, identical to that which had been discharged previously had so much as processed itself inside of her mind the second time it echoed across the cafeteria was because this time, the harsh, drum-like strike had emitted off beat; a lingering half note, present where it shouldn't be throwing off her concentration so that the thousand students, white walls and rows of lunch tables quickly faded back into her senses.
Annoyance filtered suddenly across the length of her brain, directed towards whoever it was that was clearly trying to sabotage the most important event of her life.
The harsh lighting flickering across the cafeteria contracted her pupils into a sense of focus that allowed her to fall very consciously aware of the fact that nearly every eye within the room was being pointed directly towards the cafeteria entranceway that she had just watched one of her co-captains disappear from mere moments before.
To Mercedes, her perception of reality had been so obscured all day long, so shrouded in a fine line that not even she could truly register between, that the second that she recognized William McKinley High School's most celebrated AP Physics professor, Dr. Benjamin Roscoe, lying flat against his back, sprawled across the cafeteria doors, his torso riddled with bullet holes as Jacob Ben-Israel and Suzy Pepper hovered above him, guns draped casually within their grasps, she wasn't exactly certain what it was she should make of the scene before her.
Of course, the reactions of her fellow classmates, each and every one embedded within their silence, still and unmoving as if captured between the still-frame of a movie, didn't exactly help very much.
Her brain desperate to make sense of this seeming spectacle, faded into an absolute silence for the first time since she had woken up that morning, the music that had, until this moment, been lingering on repeat in the back of her mind vanishing in a manner that sent shivers up the length of her spine.
Taking several threatening steps forwards, the two gun-wielding classmates entered before them, a room so silent that each of their resonating steps produced a slap of boot soles against linoleum so prominent that Mercedes couldn't help but identify with the fact that the rhythm retained a perfect tempo to the song that she could no longer hear in the back of her mind.
The two advanced forward without resistance, performing several staggered steps before pausing isolated in the center of the room, all eyes glued to their destructive forms as if preparing for them to display some sort of epic performance that they had yet to identify as being a black comedy or else a senseless tragedy.
They paused in an ominous matter, the time between the two student' motions growing further and further apart so that Mercedes could no longer ignore the panic as it filtered steadily across every crevice, every wormhole of her body, constricting her blood vessels into nearly painful proportions so that finally, when Suzy Pepper's gun discharged in a clear indication of the fact that this wasn't a joke, this was indeed very, very real, the physical agony that the noise brought her might as well have made it so the bullet actually struck her.
Above Suzy's head, the ceiling crumbled alongside the force of the bullet, stray chunks of plaster falling like snowflakes into the bespectacled girl's hair without her seemingly noticing a damn thing…
Mercedes focused her every concentration upon the girl's empty face, her smoking shotgun as she slung it without so much as a second guess carelessly across her shoulder where she allowed her lingering gunshot to fade into a subsequent silence that lasted but a split second before the true pandemonium finally emerged amidst the crowd.
Erupting with the speed of a sudden lightning flash, chaos broke out across the entirety of the student body, previously segregated within established friendships and cliques, now meshing together poetically into one projected rush directed towards the only exit the faultily designed cafeteria had to offer them.
Mercedes could feel herself being pushed and shoved every which way, the chair below her jostling with the frantic motions of her fellow peers although, no matter how much her brain was yelling at her to do so, she couldn't seem to similarly convince herself to stand up and follow them…
She was suddenly becoming all too aware of the fact that people like her had a tendency to exist with this distinct stereotype, this social label that told the world that people like her were automatically typecast to have grown up within broken down old ghettos in the middle of broken down cities, that they were supposed to be surrounded constantly by nothing more than crime and violence and guns, that they were expected to know what to do when they found themselves in situations such as this one…
But for Christ's sake, her parents were freaking dentists living in the middle of northwestern Ohio, and besides, even if they hadn't been, she wasn't sure that there could have been anything for anybody to have possibly done in order to prepare for this, although she still wasn't so sure she knew exactly what this was, per se.
She was absolutely certain of the fact that had it not been for the wave of charging students flying in a sprint all around her, she would have sat frozen in the exact same chair that she had lowered herself into at the beginning of this dreaded lunch period the entire time.
She didn't understand why she couldn't quite seem to self-motivate herself to stand, to embark on the same bid for freedom as the classmates around her had managed to achieve. She didn't understand why she couldn't seem to process the imminent danger, why she couldn't find it in her to run to save her mortal soul.
But whatever the reason, she couldn't… she just couldn't.
It was only as a large senior boy that Mercedes instantly recognized as one of the burly members of the school's notorious hockey team barreled towards her so quickly that he was tripped up by his own two feet, falling gracelessly so that his shoulder caught the table that she had previously been sitting in, overturning it in its entirety onto its side that she was giving the shock value she needed to move, standing amidst the chaos where she was involuntarily thrown into the belligerent pack of stampeding students and flailing body parts as they thrashed and jostled her, imprinting her with a series of bruises that felt as if they would certainly be nothing less than permanent.
Her feet still refusing to move her in any direction, let alone a tangible one, she allowed the tide to carry her, drifting with the waves until she'd found herself impossibly wedged into a nearby corner, the bodies darting around her rendering her completely unable to commit to motion, even if she had wanted to.
Her eyes scanned the crowd's surface, wide in their desperation to locate any sign of her friends and fellow glee members, but amidst the muddled chaos, she couldn't see them, not a single one…
And with the recognition of the fact that the closest friends she had ever had, and probably would ever have were trapped in a state of imminent danger who's scale not even she could truly process at the moment, for the first time, she truly began to allow herself to panic; chest heaving with painful contractions, eyes watering in her fear as her neck spun upon her shoulders so quickly in its search for her friends that the motions had left her dizzy.
"Kurt!" She screamed for her best friend, the tone that her single syllable had to offer leaving her desperation for a response obvious, however, her voice, usually so prominent, so distinct amongst the insignificance of the rest was muffled, drowned out for the first time in her entire life by the thousands of screams of thousands of fleeing students. "Tina! Artie! Puck! Where are you guys?"
She moved along her short list of companions, audibly cataloguing them based on the order that she had vaguely remembered them sitting around her before the chaos had erupted… But as with her initial attempt, her remaining shouts merely fell upon ears previously deafened by the thundering resonance of gunshots that continued to fill the air after what seemed like hours following Suzy Pepper's initial shot heard around the world.
Through the small gaps between the heads of fleeing students, Mercedes managed to identify the still form of Jacob Ben-Israel, standing eerily stiff directly beside Suzy Pepper in the center of the room. Hovering in a soft clearing, students scrambled to form as large a radius of free space between themselves and the shooters as humanly possible while simultaneously trying to escape through the doorway that their prominent act of revenge had left practically barricaded.
His shooting arm pointed towards the general direction of the hoard, Jacob fired in a nonchalant succession, the only motion his otherwise stone-still body made being the involuntary shuddering of his arm against the violent recoil of his weapon as his finger flexed persistently against the worn trigger.
Mercedes watched in its every excruciating detail as the exceptionally unlucky Rebecca Andrews was struck by two successive bullets, the first piercing her right shoulder, forcing her to reel backwards in her pain as her previously pumping legs collapsed limply, leaving her unable to run any longer as the second bullet caught her directly underneath the elbow with such a force that she was pushed forwards from where she stood, several more inches before simply collapsing onto the ground below.
Directly to Rebecca's right, a boy that Mercedes recognized as being in her grade, fifteen year old Jason Ruiz, hesitated briefly in the subsequent shock associated with having just watched somebody get shot right before him, pausing in his motions for just a split second too long so that he lost the natural momentum of the crowd, leaving his fellow students now pushing against him rather than alongside him so that it was only a matter of time before he'd caught an elbow square against the center of his face with a force that sent him straight down to his very knees below, his nose erupting in a volcano of blood as the students above him tried their very hardest to avoid him but still, refused to stop in their running so that he was quickly trampled underneath the various feet of his classmates until he was knocked sideways into an unconscious heap below them.
There was the briefest of pauses, a second of a lingering silence, so that for a small while there, Mercedes actually allowed herself to naively believe that this nightmare had ended just as quickly as it had begun.
But as her eyes glistened over towards where she knew the two gunmen to be standing, she couldn't help but notice that rather than lowering his firearm in surrender, Jacob was merely reloading it, the emphasis on the fact that he had prepared himself with enough ammunition to shoot to kill as many people as humanly possible prominent in Mercedes' mind.
He fumbled only briefly with the clip of the Tech-9 Semiautomatic Handgun so that beside him, Suzy Pepper assigned it her own personal duty to pick up the slack, taking careful aim with the shotgun that seemed to be even bigger than she was before firing.
The thundering boom of Suzy's shotgun rivaled even that of Jacob's, the sound magnified impossibly above the cloud of screams as they emitted from the mouths of their horrified classmates below.
Mercedes wasn't so sure that she wanted to see exactly, the direction which Suzy's intentional bullet was travelling, she wasn't so sure that she wanted to see what was going to happen to whoever it was that that bullet hit, but for the life of her, she couldn't seem to look away…
The thick shotgun shell soared without remorse into the stream of students, striking a young freshman that Mercedes immediately recognized as fourteen year old Lauren Marley; a girl that Mercedes happened to know for a fact had a positively stunning voice, but lacked the confidence that she required in order to share her talent with the rest of the world…
The young girl reeled backwards only briefly, every last muscle in her body contracting instinctually in response to the pain of a bullet ripping through her spine as the white shirt she had been adorning glistened with a fresh blossom of blood that sent her flying straight down and into the ground where she skidded only briefly across the floor before coming to an abrupt halt, laying so still that Mercedes couldn't tell whether or not she was dead or alive.
She was just squinting down towards the prone figure below her in an effort to catch a better glimpse when a fourth body skidded to a halt directly beside her; yet another student hailing from Mercedes' grade; the basketball star, Sheryl Pierce, who's eyes were dancing in pain within her skull as she pressed her palm into her bleeding pelvis, determination laced across her features as she begged her mutinous body to get up and keep running, only to be met with failure.
There were so many people running, so many students barreling to squeeze themselves through the small set of double doors, that Mercedes struggled to evaluate just how many of her classmates had been injured, let alone the exact extent of the damage said injuries had caused.
But the crowd dissipated with a surprising rapidity so that through the growing space between frantic teens, she managed to identify the majority of the students that had joined the ranks of the fallen, some moving, others not as they were trampled and run down by rushing students, all apparently unaware of the fact that they were stepping on top of their classmates without so much as a second glance in an effort to save themselves.
Her eyes lingered upon the flaccid form of the lone professor lingering clearly dead within the entranceway of the cafeteria as the variety of students pushed and kicked their way outward and into the hall, unwittingly terrorizing the man below as he was dragged like a ragdoll from his obstructive position in front of the door.
A pang of remorse filled intrusively inside of Mercedes' chest, her classmates defiling of such a celebrated man leaving her unable to help but to linger on the disrespect surrounding this entire situation as a whole, no matter the details, or the intentions.
"Hi, everybody!"
The cold, emotionless tone emitted across Jacob Ben-Israel's ominous greeting filtered through their cement prison, meshing alongside the fading gunshots so that Mercedes was left unable to move, more so even, than she had found herself before.
She was suddenly exponentially aware of the fact that the patter of thundering footsteps had dissipated in its entirety, that students were no longer filing from the cafeteria doors in droves, that this was it; everybody who had managed escape had already gotten out, leaving the rest of them to merely hope and pray that if this was the end, the least that Jacob and Suzy could do for them was make it quick.
Jacob walked a slow, steady lap around the length of the room, his weapon retaining its measure of prominent significance from its lingering position between his still palms despite the fact that, by some sort of miracle, his finger chose not to grace the length of the trigger as he blew past Mercedes, propped against the corner like a sitting duck, without so much as a second glance.
She turned her eyes from her young classmate, unable to meet his gaze for fear that had she have done so, she would have recognized the transition that she, as well as the rest of her school had somehow missed of Jacob going from a free-spirited, albeit obnoxious menace to him becoming a positively evil threat.
With his back turned towards her, Jacob lumbered back towards the center of the room, Suzy standing firmly in the doorway – an established guard that ensured that the hundred or so students remaining inside of the cafeteria weren't going to be able to get out without first going through her…
"No, please don't do it, please! No!" The voice, so frail, so high in its terror sent a series of chills through her veins, forcing her to watch as Jacob dropped down to one knee beside the trembling form of David Karofsky, huddled alongside a handful of his fellow football players beneath the façade of protection that had been offered to him by the underside of his lunch table… until now, that is.
With a smirk and a look that could have killed on its own accord, even without the added effect of the weapon between his hands, Jacob terrorized the lumbering jocks, his mouth opening with the formation of words that Mercedes hadn't had the opportunity to hear before a hand clamped down firmly against her shoulder, sending into a spiraled panic.
Her world tunneled inwards around her, focusing on the potential threat and any and all possible solutions she could enact to escape it before she turned, slowly managing to identify with the fact that the perceived danger was never actually dangerous at all.
"Shh," Kurt's voice filtered between her ears like music as she subconsciously released a muffled scream into the palm that he had instinctually brought upward and over her mouth to silence her, "Come on, get under this table."
A godsend clearly sent to protect her, Kurt practically dragged Mercedes by the shoulder over towards the table that they had been sitting at before all hell broke loose, now upturned and resting upon its side, and ducked them both down behind it, their backs pressing so close against its underside that Mercedes was certain that it would leave an imprint of their bodies behind.
"Don't shoot me, please. I don't want to die, please!" Karofsky's desperate cries remained prominent despite the fact that Mercedes could no longer see him, the tone behind his voice practically forcing her to curl herself upwards into a tight ball, knees raised against her chest with the idea in mind that as long as she separated herself from her reality, she could convince herself that this really was all in her head, that this was merely a nightmare that she would awaken from soon. "Please man, I'm sorry, I…"
Mercedes flinched alongside the ring of a treacherously loud gunshot as it erased the remainder of Karofsky's final sentence permanently.
Her breath escaping in a series of rapid pants that burned painfully at her lungs in their refusal to actually allow any oxygen to filter between them, Mercedes pressed herself deeper into Kurt, begging herself to escape to anywhere other than where she actually was, begging herself to believe that there was actually a chance that she held the capacity to escape this nightmare alive...
The continuous screams, so uncharacteristic of the football players by which they were being emitted from, reduced an entire team of impossibly strong jocks into a group of blubbering idiots.
The sound of scrambling feet filtered across Mercedes' ears, freakishly enormous teens running terrified from their scrawny counterpart in a near humorous irony as they quickly decided that running for their lives rather than simply waiting in hiding to die as their leader had stupidly done was a risk well worth taking.
And as surprising as this realization came, it seemed to Mercedes as if the sudden pounding of the footsteps below, the screams of the frantic football team as they rushed across the room, actually enabled within her, more of a sense of order than what the silence had left her with, allowing the terror to slowly siphon away from her brain, leaving room for the first in a series of conscious thoughts.
For the first time since the situation had unfolded before her, rational ideas began to overpower her pure, unadulterated fear, allowing Mercedes to recognize the fact that with the gunmen currently distracted by the charging football players before them, this was a perfect opportunity for her to reach out for the help that they all so desperately needed right now.
Turning towards Kurt in an effort to silently communicate her intentions, she emphasized her motions as she dug briefly through her pockets for her cell phone, withdrawing it quickly before dialing the three magic numbers that she knew solely held the capacity to allow them to escape this ordeal intact.
"911, what is your emergency?"
The operator sounded flustered, desperately busy with what Mercedes could only imagine was an endless stream of calls identical to her own, so that she suddenly was very much so aware of the fact that hers couldn't have been the first emergency call to have been placed from within the walls of William McKinley High School today.
"Please, I'm at William McKinley High School, there's a shooting at my school." Her voice choked upwards in a traitorously loud fashion, emitting in a prominent sob that forced Kurt to immediately shush her before quickly checking over his shoulder to ensure that her outburst hadn't attracted the distracted attention of the shooters.
But the deafening screams of the football team still dancing between her ears seemed to have masked her involuntarily magnified plea for help from those that she didn't want hearing it, her uncharacteristic stroke of luck forcing her to pause momentarily in an effort to concentrate on her breathing.
In through the nose, and out through the mouth; repeat…
"Okay honey, we have units responding to the scene right now," The woman responded with a professional calm behind her voice that filled Mercedes with a surprising sense of warmth, "Police, fire and EMTs are on their way. Are you a student at the school?"
"Y… yes," Mercedes hiccupped, leaning into the comfort of the conversation.
"Can you tell me what your name is?"
"M-Mercedes…" The young diva stuttered over the seemingly simple question, "Mercedes Jones."
"Okay Mercedes," She spoke, using the newfound information to her advantage, "Are you inside of your school right now?"
"Yes!" Mercedes practically shouted in the frustration that the answer to this question caused her. "Yes, I'm inside of the cafeteria."
"Can you tell if anybody has been injured?" The question seemed ridiculous to Mercedes to the point that her subsequent answer appeared to her, to be too personal for her to actually relay to the woman at the other end of this phone call… It was as if the names of all of the dead and the injured, permanently glistening off of the tip of Mercedes' tongue were words too offensive to be uttered, too sacred to be disrespected any further than they already had.
"Y-yes," She answered despite herself, closing her eyes against the various images of Dr. Roscoe and Rebecca Andrews and Jason Ruiz and all of the others that she had watched tumble to the ground in a heap of their own blood. "Yes, a professor and a couple of students as far as I know."
"Alright Mercedes, and what about the shooter," She spoke casually in regards to the individuals who had just permanently shattered the very world around her in a manner that Mercedes almost took offense to, "Do you know where the shooter is right now?"
"They're… they're right here!" The frustration was prominent behind her voice as she addressed the question as if the answer had been obvious, 'They're inside of the cafeteria with us!"
"There's more than one shooter, Mercedes?" The woman addressed Mercedes' unexpected usage of pronouns, leaving the diva to open her mouth with the intention upon delivering a confirmation towards her worst fears before a series of heavy gunfire swept the words right from her mouth, turning them into a painful hiccup that burned silently at the back of her throat.
"Mercedes, are you okay?" The operator reacted naturally to the shots, so deafening that they pierced even beyond the barricade of the phone lines, "Mercedes are you still with me? Are you okay?"
"Oh my God…" Mercedes spluttered into the phone, subconsciously providing the woman with the answer she had been looking for albeit the fact that she hadn't been addressing anybody in particular, "Oh my God, they just shot him… They shot him. I think he's dead, oh my God, I think he's dead!"
Beyond the edge of her table barricade, a set of limp legs jutted out before her, motionless against the ground… But between the angle of the body and the angle by which she was sitting, she couldn't seem to identify Jacob Ben-Israel's latest victim… And for the life of her, she couldn't tell whether or not this was a bad thing or a good.
"Okay Mercedes, I know that you're scared right now but I need you to try and stay calm for me…" The operator spoke with a gentleness that she was trying to transmit through to Mercedes, but of course, that was much easier said than done. "Is there any way that you can get out of the cafeteria?"
"No," Mercedes spoke the first confident answer that she found herself certain of within the entirety of this brief conversation, determined to relay the knowledge that there was no way in hell she was going to be escaping this cafeteria any time soon, not with Jacob and Suzy inside of it anyway. "No, I don't think so… they're standing right over me, I'm hiding behind a table…"
"Okay, what I need you to do is stay behind that table for me. Stay as low to the ground as possible, okay?" She relayed her instructions although Mercedes hadn't really had any intentions of moving anyway, "Now, are you saying that you can see two shooters from where you are?"
"Yes," Mercedes confirmed with a head nod despite the fact that she was consciously aware that her actions wouldn't be transmitted through the phone, "Yeah, there's two of them… they're… they're students here."
"Do you recognize either of them?" She asked, pushing relentlessly for the details.
"Y-yeah, I know them… One of them is Suzy Pepper, she's a senior here, and the other one is in my grade, he's a sophomore. His name is Jacob… Jacob Ben-Israel. Oh my God, why are they doing this? They… they're just shooting at people, and he's dead, oh my God, he's dead, I… I…" Her incessant ramblings faded into oblivion as her eyes danced subconsciously upwards in an effort to survey the scene so that in an instant, her eyes managed to lock with the image of Artie, his wheelchair toppled over onto its side and his body splayed against the ground as Tina desperately tried to heave him upright while still keeping her own body covered underneath the protection of their own table barricade.
"Mercedes are you still with me?" The operator responded to Mercedes' sudden silence, concern dancing briefly behind her voice before fading back into her sense of professionalism, "Mercedes can you stay on the line with me?"
"Sorry… I'm sorry; I just saw one of my friends." Mercedes directed her words to the operator towards Kurt as well, pointing silently to him towards the direction where Artie and Tina were struggling on the floor. "I think… I think he needs help."
"Mercedes don't," Kurt hissed, begging his friend not to attempt what he knew she was thinking of attempting, "Tina is helping Artie, he'll be okay."
"Mercedes, I know that you want to help your friend, but I want you to stay on the floor, okay?" The operator mimicked the warning that Kurt had just offered her.
Pausing only briefly, Mercedes considered this option, straining her eyes to identify with the details of Artie and Tina's private struggle, watching as Artie's head bobbed up and down in response to something that Tina had just told him, the briefest of motions forcing her and Artie's eyes to lock briefly.
Their contact left Mercedes prominently aware of the fact that she had silent tears streaming from her eyes as she studied him, his useless body dangling in an awkward squat that was being supported solely by Tina's feeble arms as his glasses, cracked down the center, dangled by their frames askew against his noise, which was pouring continuous streams of his own blood…
"I'm going to go," Mercedes spoke firmly; the recognition of how much Artie seemed to need her at the moment confirming the necessity of her actions, "I'm gonna go help him."
Removing the phone from her ear, she hastily ended the call before the woman on the other end of the line would have the opportunity to try and stop her.
"Mercedes, stop!" Avoiding Kurt however, wasn't quite as easy as his voice rang harshly through her ears despite being emitted at a volume no louder than a whisper. He groped upwards towards her shifting body, trying desperately to pull her back down and onto the floor as she pulled herself onto her feet, bent precariously at the knees behind her lunch table hiding place, recognizing full well, the fact that now that she was up, there was absolutely no going back, "You're gonna get yourself killed, Mercedes! Come back!"
With a deep breath, she ignored the beckoning calls of her best friend and leaned protectively close against the table before her, walking on her tip-toes over towards Artie, her eyes darting back and forth between her surroundings the entire time that she moved in a bid to remain persistently aware of exactly where Suzy Pepper and Jacob Ben-Israel were standing at all times…
But despite this heightened sense of awareness, despite the fact that she had believed herself to have entered this self-assigned mission prepared, she had been foolish not to anticipate the sound of footsteps as they approached her from behind; a mistake that she had only recognized upon them being directly above her crouched form.
Her body rendering itself positively frozen against the impossible loudness of such a seemingly quiet sound, she found herself suddenly no longer able to control any of the motions of her limbs as the ominous shadow hovered increasingly above her.
She didn't want to turn around. She didn't want to identify the source of her imminent danger, because the hair prickling upright against the back of her neck was more than enough information to tell her exactly what it was, and that it wasn't good… it wasn't good at all…
Slowly, as if being controlled involuntarily by a group of puppeteers, dangling her from a string, her body aligned itself upright, spine stiff and poised so that her posture displayed an air of confidence that her mind certainly did not reciprocate, her body involuntarily screaming at her that if she were about to face death, she was going to do so with, at the very least, an air of dignity.
Jacob Ben-Israel's breathing was strangely even, carefully controlled as he stood a mere five feet in front of her, his empty eyes staring a hole through her slightly shorter frame.
There eyes locked as a soft wheeze slowly began to emit from between Jacob's teeth with each organized inhale that he took, forcing her body to tremble despite her mind screaming at her not to appear so weak with him directly in front of her.
Through her peripherals, she identified the weapon currently linking the two of them together, Jacob's enclosed right hand extending the open barrel directly towards Mercedes' head.
And all at once, all of the wasted hours that Mercedes had lost in the past sixteen years of her life danced in front of her eyes… The hours that she had spent foolishly sleeping, studying, worrying about her future when she should have been singing, dancing, living… the regret of the details struck prominently against her heart now that she knew that she wasn't going to be granted as much spare time to make up for them as she had originally believed.
"Please Jacob," It wasn't in Mercedes' nature to plead, it wasn't in the diva's repertoire to beg for anything at all, but she'd suddenly identified with the fact that right now, begging was the only thing that was going to allow her to walk away from this, so right now, she was willing to beg if that was what she had to do, "Please don't do this. Just walk away… there's still time, Jacob… Just walk away."
But Jacob didn't respond to her desperation, he didn't say anything at all; in fact, he hadn't even made so much as a single indication that he had so much as heard Mercedes besides their dangerously close proximity telling her that there was no way that he had missed it.
Splotches of blood glistened against his starkly pale skin underneath the glow of the fluorescents and the natural sunlight streaming through the windows…
Standing face to face, Jacob and Mercedes' eyes never left the other's, the contact lingering painfully despite the voice inside of Mercedes' head screaming at her to run, made more prominent as Jacob's finger clicked backwards, the hammer of his weapon so that she could literally hear the bullet that she knew to be destined for herself lodge itself deep within its chamber.
Recognizing the end for exactly what it was, Mercedes couldn't seem to think, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't so much as speak to save her own life…
Her muscles tensed in her anticipation, her eyes breaking the contact previously maintained between her and Jacob automatically as they squeezed shut on their own accord so that when the bullet that she now knew was coming directly for her actually came, she wouldn't have to see it…
She guessed that all she could do now was hope that it would happen quickly.
"Mercedes, no!"
Mercedes had been so expectant of the fact that the next sound that she was going to hear would be the air of a rushing bullet spiraling towards her general direction faster than she could ever even think to leap away from it, that when instead, she heard the familiar male soprano of her closest friend, she jumped more than she probably would have had the gun actually been discharged.
Her eyes forcing themselves open, her senses tunneled inward towards a flash of navy blue, that damn Marc Jacobs jacket that Kurt loved so much despite Mercedes' insistence upon its hideousness, so that for the briefest of seconds, she was impossibly blinded by the sheath of fabric in a manner that blocked even the spark of a bullet escaping deep from within its chamber…
The sound produced in response to steel striking skin was horrifically indescribable; connecting with the thud of a dull bass drum, but resonating with the splash of a rock being thrown into a pond below…
The feeling of fresh blood, warm and scattered as it splayed artistically in a mosaic against her skin sent a shiver through her body that extended the length of her feet, all the way up to the tip of her head.
But still, Mercedes felt no pain so that she couldn't help but think that if this was dying, maybe it wasn't so bad after all…
It was only after the scream had filtered through her ears louder than any gunshot could ever possibly think of doing that she registered with the idea that the bullet that had previously been intended for her, hadn't actually struck her at all…
Kurt's eyes were squeezed shut against the overwhelming nature of a pain he had never considered so much as possible before, his arm reaching instinctively upward in order to cover the bullet hole that had embedded itself somewhere firmly against his upper body…
But at her angle, and with the amount of blood covering the boy in front of her, it was impossible for Mercedes to tell just how bad it was, impossible for her to know just how badly her best friend had been injured as a result of her own stupidity.
Her friend fell unceremoniously against the ground below, his body rolling upwards and against her feet in such a manner that nearly took her out at the knees directly alongside him…
But with her final measure of protection in a bleeding heap against the ground below her, and Jacob Ben-Israel cocking his weapon to fire once again, she couldn't help but almost wish that he had…
Temporarily forgetting the details behind the precarious nature of her current position, Mercedes allowed her guard to visibly falter, her eyes dancing across the boy at her feet in an attempt to evaluate just how injured he truly was.
He was bleeding, that was for damn certain. He was bleeding, and he was bleeding a lot, but with her vision clouded with tears, and her conscious mind hazy with fear, she couldn't truly identify with the scope of his injuries, or even with the possibility of whether or not it was possible that he would be okay.
And despite her previous anticipation for the worst, she never actually saw what happened next coming.
She was only distantly aware of the blurred features of the room surrounding her; the image of every eye pointed directly upwards and towards her, waiting with hitched breaths to see what would happen next, the dull roar of a second identical bullet flying from between the carefully controlled hands of Jacob Ben-Israel, the brief, lingering pain associated with the slug, travelling faster than the speed of light, embedding itself through a thick layer of clothing, skin, muscle and bone before striking with a prominent finality straight through her heart…
But as quickly as she had managed to identify with the life surrounding her, she suddenly stopped identifying with absolutely anything at all.
You see, Mercedes Jones had always known that life was the one thing that you could never truly get, that you could never truly understand no matter how hard you tried… And this was why she knew that eventually, you would have to grow to accept the fact that despite having it clutched seemingly between your very fingertips at one moment, it was possible for you to lose it in its entirety the next.
And despite the fact that not everybody is always ready to commit to this fact of life, today, she was more aware than she had ever been before that you didn't always have a choice in the matter.
Now she could only be left to wonder if it was possible for her to ever make a difference in the world when she would never so much as make another sound.
Because Mercedes Jones had woken up at 6:30 a.m. on the morning of Friday, June 4th, 2010 knowing that one day, her voice would be heard, that one day, every man, woman and child across the planet would recognize her name, they would know her face, and they would know exactly what she had gone through to get herself there…
And later that evening, as horrified citizens across the globe tuned into their televisions in awe, unable to avert their eyes away from the terrors being relayed to them via the 11:00 news, and they listened to the audio recording of a terrified 911 call that had been placed mere hours earlier by a budding young sophomore, the sound of her frantic pleas masked by distant bullets superimposed over the image of her smiling yearbook photo, Mercedes Jones' voice was finally heard, every man, woman and child across the planet suddenly recognized her name, they knew her face…
And they all knew, exactly what she had gone through to get herself there.