Hailing skies
11 Rescue those being led away to death;
hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
12 If you say, "But we knew nothing about this,"
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who guards your life know it?
Proverbs 24:11,12 - NIV
Waverly University
9:07 am
Wang goes to room 211, smiling sadistically at the carnage he's leaving on his wake. He finds the door blocked. He shoots through the door, wounding one student and one professor who were holding the door in place. However, he's not able to open the door, and all students, all fifteen of them, escape through the broken window.
Not happy with that, he goes to room 207, and again finds the door blocked. The terrified students had barricaded the door, and had all gathered in the corner as far way as possible from the door, in a vain attempt to protect their lives. The heavy cupboard ends up saving their lives, as he's not able to shoot through the heavy volumes sitting in it. No one is hurt in that room.
He keeps walking through the corridor, looking for more victims.
9:11 am
The Metro police cars swarm to the campus, their red and blue lights flashing, and the police officers find several scared students running from the building. Some are gravely hurt from their fall, as they jumped from the second floor. They immediately set up the perimeter, and take stock of the scene before them.
They find the main door as well as the fire escape closed with heavy chains, and the computer typed warning that, if they tried to open the door, they would set off a bomb. They immediately retreat and call the bomb squad.
More shots are fired inside.
9:10 am
Wang is not happy with the barricaded doors that are stopping him to achieve his goal. He smiles like a maniac, and walks back towards room 205. There were still three survivors, one of them critically wounded, and two of them tried in vain to block the door and save their fellow student's life. However, the professor's table did not have the girth necessary to stop an automatic gun, and Wang enters again, and shoots one of the students at point blank range, killing him instantaneously.
In a last act of desperation and goodwill, the last man standing throws his body over his friend and colleague, shielding the wounded with his own body. That seals his fate, as his back is riddled with bullets, but it also saves his friend, as all bullets stop in his body. His friend would be the sole survivor of that room that day.
He shoots several rounds into the dead body, enjoying its dance under the spray of bullets.
His guns click empty again, and he walks out to the corridor and takes some seconds to reload both guns.
He is taken by surprise to see someone on the corridor, looking scared at the bodies fallen on the corridor.
It's professor Chewbowski, from room 305.
I've forgotten that they are also having classes on the third floor.
Professor Chewbowsk is looking at the carnage, shaking his head at the meaningless waste of human life. As a holocaust survivor, he had seen many horrible things in the concentration camps, but this was peace time, no one should have to go through that during peaceful times.
He looks up, and sees a young man, a boy really, holding two guns and calmly reloading them.
"What have you done?"
"They deserved to die. They are nothing but sheep." He says without intonation, as his very humanity had been totally obliterated by his coward act.
The professor shakes his head, sadly "they're not sheep, they're human beings."
He finishes reloading his gun, smiles and points them at the professor, who tenses. He shoots several times, hitting the professor several times both in his chest and his neck. The professor looks at him with a betrayed expression on his face, and slowly falls to the floor, killed instantly.
"Not anymore."
He walks back to room 206, sees that all are finally dead, and leaves the room. It is time to visit room 305.
9:13:13 am
Matthew is holding a shaking Sarah in his arms, against his chest, and he feels her tears slowly running against his neck.
He runs his hands against her back, in a vain attempt to soothe her, but it ends up soothing him. As far as he could, he arranged so that they could all be protected in the small locked lab. He, with the help of two other students, had dragged another heavy workbench and put it beside the first one. Even if he shoots down the lock, the two heavy structures wouldn't let him move the door even an inch. The other benches he organized like trenches, and put all students behind them, as far away as possible and out of the range of shooting, in a corner.
He ordered all of them to lie down on the floor, and the men to lie on top of the girls, in order to protect their lives with their own bodies, if that became necessary. There was a little whimpering, but all of them were deadly silent. He was lying on top of Sarah, her back against the wall, and his body completely covering hers. A heavy workbench was laying on its side, acting as cover in the eventual failure of the barricade. He could feel the tremors shaking her body, but there was nothing he could do besides waiting.
He also would not lie. Things still could get much worse before they finally could get better.
He hears some type of noise in the corridor and tenses. All noise in the lab ceases, as all students try to hear what is happening outside. He hears someone's steps on the corridor.
He was here.
9:13:49 am
Wang strolls up to the third floor, with his semiautomatic guns leisurely hanging from his hands. He sees the door of room 305 closed, and smiles at the carnage he's about to make. He approaches the door and tries the doorknob.
9:13:53 am
Sarah's shaking intensifies, and Matthew can feel the waves of terror emanating from her body. He kisses her forehead softly, and shushes her.
The steps have stopped outside. They hear someone trying to open a door.
9:14:21 am
As Wang can't open the door, he tries to look inside the room through the small window on the door, but the lights are off and everything seems to be dark.
He struggles with it, and he can't open it. He roars and takes a step back and aims at the door, and opens fire.
9:14:33 am
Despite the fact that Matthew was fully expecting it, the shots still came as a surprise. He closed his eyes, and covered Sarah's body with his, mentally asking his family forgiveness for having failed in such important task.
Sarah's terror had reached unimaginable levels, and as the rounds started being fired against the door, her mind simply blanked and she obeyed the most primal feminine instinct before danger: she opened her mouth to scream her terror.
Matthew saw it happening, and immediately took action to shut her up. He put a hand over mouth, and did his best to silence her primal scream. The shots fired covered the muffled sound, but she became incensed against him and started scratching him, being totally dominated by the instinct to flee the very present danger she was in.
Despite her struggles, Matthew was bigger and stronger than her, and used his body to stop her struggles against him, as she became dominated by fear. He looked down at her with tears in his eyes, but held her firmly in his arms, one of his hands firmly over her mouth.
He felt tears pooling in his eyes, as she fought him with all of her strength, and he leans his head against her perfumed hair, and whispers, "you will survive this, even if you hate me for it."
More shots and a maniacal laugh are heard. Then finally silence.
9:14:52 am
Wang empties the rounds of one of his guns into the door, and laughs as he kicks it open. He walks in the room, and swipes the room with a gun. He's disappointed though, to find that the classroom is empty. No one is there. He goes back to the corridor, looks to the right and the left, and goes back to the stairs.
There are no sheep on this floor.
9:15 am
The Metro police got tired of waiting for the arrival of the bomb squad, who is still fifteen minutes out. They can hear the shooting still going on, and every minute they spent outside was someone else's kid that died. One officer shoots down a deadlock on the door of one of the ground floor labs, and calls up backup to enter the building.
They form tactical units and spread out on the ground floor, not finding a soul in any room. They silently move towards the stairs at the end of the corridor, towards the second floor. As they are already on the middle of the stairs, they hear another shot.
They speed up, hurrying to get to the second floor. As they reach it, they start finding the bodies scattered on the floor of the corridor.
9:15:03 am
Wang goes back to the second floor and walks down the corridor to his classroom, room 206. He steps over the dead bodies of those who tried to flee his revenge, and were shot down like fish in a barrel. He steps over Prof. Chibowskii's corpse and enters room 206. He sees his classmates, all of them dead with terrified expressions on their faces.
Finally, his work in this world is done. Exactly twelve minutes since his first shot, he turns the gun to his own head, and pulls the trigger.
Reviews are food for my soul.
a/n: WOW ...