Room 53

The following story contains scenes that some readers may find disturbing.
Reader discretion is advised.

“James, are you afraid of God?” she asked.

I stared at her, void of a response. We’d never discussed religion before; it wasn’t an important factor in my life. I believed God existed, but I just didn’t care. I noticed Abi twiddling her thumbs and grew nervous myself. The backpack by my feet contained a bomb that was set to detonate in 10 minutes, and when it did I needed Abi to have an appropriate mental state.

“Why do you ask?” I finally murmured.

She finally met my stare as she placed her hand softly on mine. She spoke just quietly enough to make sure nobody could eavesdrop in the crowded cafeteria: “We’ll be seeing to him soon. We’ll have to answer for everything. What we’ve done. What we’ve said. And what we’re going to do.” A group of freshmen boys walked past us, talking about their plans for the weekend. Their happy tone, their ignorance of what was about to happen, unsettled me. I shook the topic off of my mind as I glanced at my watch, which was set to a countdown timer: 9 minutes 32 seconds left.

“No, I’m not afraid of God,” I said confidently. “What we are doing is right and just.” I paused to gauge her reaction. She looked at her hand stiffly. I could still see the doubt in her eyes. “We need to disassemble the false sense of happiness that we live in. Only then can we rebuild the reality that everybody around us is denying.” These were the only words on the suicide note I left in my car. I glanced at my watch again: 8 minutes 56 seconds.

“It’s time for us to go,” I stated. As I rose from the table, Abi firmly grabbed my hand. She looked at me with concern; I could see the sadness in her eyes.

“I’m holding a knife to the beating heart of my humanity,” she muttered.

I smiled.

“Come,” I insisted. She complied and followed me as we walked down the hallway. When we passed my classmates, whom I had come to love, respect, and work with over the years, I had to resist thinking about how they were about to be shoved into a brutal hellscape. When we stepped outside we were greeted by a gust of wind that blew Abi’s hair back majestically. I gave her a smile, which she returned with a look of panic. I then kissed her softly. As I pulled away, her look of concern transferred to a slight smile, and a soft giggle.

“What the fuck was that?” she asked.

“A kiss.”

“I know it was a kiss, but why?” When Abi began to stare off into the distance, her face returned to the same look of fear and concern. “I mean... we’re about to do something. Something horrible. Something that will destroy our humanity forever. Something that only a sick, demented, and diluted person can do. Something so horrible that we won’t be able to live with ourselves after.” She paused, as her voice turned soft and weak. “I’m scared, James. I’ve never been more scared in my whole life.”

She stared at me with a begging look. She wanted me to back down, to deactivate the bomb, and to not kill anyone. We both knew, however, this would never be an option.

“The kiss was to lighten the tension, to make you feel more human,” I said. “Abi, I’m scared, too. I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m anxious. I’m concerned. I’m skeptical...” I trailed off as another gust of wind blasted into my face. When the wind died down, I exhaled softly. “But this has to be done.”

“Why?”

I paused for a moment, to collect my thoughts. “Do you believe that society is pursuing a false sense of happiness and safety, and that if this trend isn’t stopped immediately, that it will spiral out of control and eventually result in the inevitable destruction of the human race?”

“Of course,” Abi stated confidently. “Ever since Stephen died, I just... I just didn’t know what to think. Not until the following night, when you gave me your explanation, your new perception on the world based on our experience. Nothing else made sense to me except what you said.”

“Is that just because you love me?”

“No. Well, that’s part of it... I do trust you, and you know that. But, nothing else made sense. Stephen was my best friend, the closest person to me, besides you. When he died, I lost myself, but you gave me purpose. A reason to get up every day in the morning. You gave me an idea to believe in. I just... I didn’t know I was going to be so scared, leading up to this. I thought my mind would be calm, cool, and collected, but instead I’m frightened and ashamed.”

“You’re human, Abi. We’re about to murder our classmates, people whom we have come to love, know, and respect over the years, all for a greater cause. If you didn’t feel some kind of guilt over that, I would be concerned. Any person with anything humane in them would feel like they are holding a knife to whatever is left of their humanity at this point. But this isn’t an excuse for us to ignore our duty to humanity. We have to shove aside our humanity, shove aside any part of us that doesn’t want to do this.”

Another gust of wind blasted into my face. When the wind finally died down, I glanced at my watch: 3 minutes 21 seconds left. I kissed Abi softly again, and when my face was only inches from hers, I whispered: “It’s time for us to go.”

We walked back through the main doors of the building to find a completely empty room with nobody in sight. The glass doors and large windows beside them would allow our victims to see safety, but not reach it. I pushed the thought out of my mind as Abi placed her backpack on the ground, and grabbed two large chains with metal locks. I grabbed one, and got to work on the left pair of double doors. I simply looped it through the two handles, and secured the lock below it. Finally, I secured a note on the handle of the door that read: “Any attempt to exit this building will trigger additional bombs.” When Abi and I were both done, I glanced at my watch: 1 minute 32 seconds. Abi left her bag by the doors as we proceed to a nearby classroom. It wasn’t taught by a teacher that either of us had ever met, which was the main reason we chose it.

As we stood by the classroom door, I could hear the teacher’s muffled voice. Abi grabbed my hand as she stared down the empty hallway. “If you would have told me two years ago,” she explained, “that I was going to commit mass murder, I would have slapped you.”

I chuckled. “Nobody could have predicted this, Abi. Not even God himself.” Abi gave me a questioning stare as I glanced at my watch again: 43 seconds.

“Well, this is it,” I noted. “Months of preparation for this moment.” Abi and I had trained ourselves how to be most efficient with our AR-15’s by spending hours every weekend at shooting ranges in preparation for this very moment. We claimed that it was out of recreation, until we became very experienced. Nobody questioned it. After only three short months, it took us no more than a few seconds to reload, and our ability to hit targets at medium range were fair. After so much practice, we barely had to concentrate when firing at our opposition. “Are you ready?” I asked.

Abi stared into my eyes. I no longer saw fear, rather I saw readiness, calmness. She pressed her hand lightly on mine. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.” All I could feel was my heart beating at an incredible rate. We both stared at my watch as it counted down to zero: 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. My watch beeped, but I heard no other noise. I shut off the sound on my watch, and waited: silence. I couldn’t even hear the teacher in the nearby classroom. A deep sense of relief hit my stomach just before I heard a large explosion off in the distance. The lights in the hallway went off, leaving it only lit by the natural light from the window.

Abi and I sprang into action simultaneously. We both shed our trench coats to reveal several magazines of ammunition strapped across our chests and our AR-15’s. We walked into the classroom, and as we rounded the corner we wasted no time by shooting the first kids we saw. The students screamed in horror as our rifles tore through them. The room was only lit by a small skylight, producing a grim feel of horror. As we shot students, we would occasionally hit an artery, causing blood to squirt away from their wound. I shoved these details out of my head, trying to remain as neutral and focussed as possible.

The teacher in the room ran at us screaming “Stop! Drop the weapons!” Without hesitation, I shot him in the head multiple times, dropping him to the ground. As I shot one girl with orange hair and glasses, she fell on her knees, subsequently intercepting Abi’s attempt to kill a boy behind the orange haired one. I aimed at the boy behind her, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I was too moved by the girl’s attempt to save his life. Then, Abi shot him. I wanted to look at Abi, but I resisted, proceeding to easily kill the rest of the teenagers in the classroom.

Within a minute, every victim in the room was lying on the floor, motionless. There was blood everywhere. Most students had blood stains on their clothing, or had small puddles of blood by their massive wounds. I scanned the faces of the corpses in the room and came to a very important conclusion: I did not recognize any of them. This fact gave me an incredible sense of relief for a brief moment before I began to think about the lives that I had just destroyed.

“You ok?” Abi asked. I looked up at her, and she was giving me a questioning look. So much for her questioning her actions.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I replied. She seemed to be unconvinced, but ignored it. We exited the room quickly and proceeded back to the main entrance to the building. Around fifty students were running to try to desperately exit through the main doors, stopping in fear as they saw the chains.

The students seemed to be running away from the bomb we had detonated in the cafeteria, as almost none of them noticed we were holding rifles. This changed when we began to fire into the crowd. Many ran down a hallway as Abi shot them, and I joined in in an attempt to take out as many as we could. However, when I began to recognize a few faces in the crowd, I specifically aimed away from them. When it was all said and done, there were a couple dozen dead bodies around us, smothered in blood.

Abi looked at me. “Now what?” she asked. I looked around us and sighed, it would take too long to find another classroom that hadn’t tried to evacuate yet. Anyone left would have locked the door and hidden at the very least after they had heard the gunshots and the explosion.

“This way,” I said. “Some students ran into one of these classrooms.” We walked down the hallway until I came to about the location that I thought the students had fled. I turned to my right, and tried the door for room 53. It was locked, and was only lit by a line of windows in the back of the room. I peered my head inside the window of the door, and I couldn’t see anything. No human, no abandoned bookbag or personal possessions, nothing.

“Are you sure this is where they went?” Abi asked.

“No,” I said. My doubt grew as I pulled out a master key that I had stolen from a janitor a few months back. I figured that if I was wrong, we would just try the rooms around us until we found them.

As I opened the door, I looked to my left to find about eight students hiding against the dark wall. Their eyes lit up with silent horror when they saw us. “Everyone line up against the back wall, now,” Abi ordered. When nobody moved, only staring at her, frozen with disbelief, Abi shot a boy with long, blond hair. “NOW!” she screamed. Everybody except a young girl did as ordered. She stayed behind, holding the hand of the boy Abi killed, sobbing. “You, too,” Abi ordered. The girl refused to leave as Abi pointed the barrel of her riffel only inches away from the girl’s head. “Move. Now. Your boyfriend is gone.” Abi commanded.

The girl, still sobbing and holding the hand of the boy, looked up at Abi. “He wasn’t my boyfriend, he was my brother. And you killed him! You fucking cunt! I’ll fuckin’ - ” Abi stopped the girl’s thought cold by shooting her in the head, causing her corpse to fall on top of her brother’s. I gave a quick glance at Abi as the kids at the back of the room gasped and screamed with horror, who fell silent as Abi and I pointed our guns at them.

Abi walked closer to the remaining six students standing against the bright window. I stared at Abi as she began to wave her gun from student to student. Some of them cried, some looked away, but one of them just stared at her. It was a girl, a senior that I had recognized from my AP Biology class. Her name was Alice. Abi kept her gun fixated on Alice, appearing to try to get some kind of a reaction out of her. She simply stared at Abi with a blank expression. Finally, Alice spoke with a clear, monotone voice: “Why are you doing this?”

Her question took me off guard. Not the fact that she asked the question, but rather the calmness in how she asked it. Abi interrupted my thoughts: “Look around you,” she began. “You see a world corrupted by greed and stupidity. People are so desperate for happiness that they have created a false sense of safety, where they believe that they cannot be harmed. If this continues, society will become so dependent on this that when something truly horrific does happen, society will crumble. We are simply exposing this flaw of society early on, in the hope that people will see how flawed their system is. No matter how horrific this day may be, it’s nothing compared to what will be happening if we don’t do something.”

Alice kept her blank stare at Abi. “You’re wrong,” she bluntly stated. Sadness began to fill her voice. “You’re so wrong that you cannot be corrected. Where did you get such a convoluted, ridiculous idea?”

Abi smiled. “Someone’s experiences can really change a lot about them and their belief system.”

Alice looked at Abi, puzzled, and spoke calmly: “What could possibly have made you want to do this? And what makes you think that you have the right to do so? Nothing that anyone experiences can be horrific enough to give them the right to murder another human being.”

Abi lit up with rage, and smacked her rifle against Alice’s side. Alice fell to the ground and looked up only to see Abi pointing her rifle inches from her face. Alice backed up against the wall, but Abi kept her rifle fixated on her. “You wanna fuckin’ know what happened to make me want to do this?” Abi shouted. Alice was paralyzed with fear, unable to reply.

“I’ll tell you. You remember Stephen? One night James and I went to go see a movie with him. As we were walking back to our car, we got mugged. The man drove a knife deep into Stephen’s chest, again and again. James was frozen with fear and panic, and I tried to shove the assailant away but I was too weak. When he was done, he just walked on off like he hadn’t done anything. He just left us there, with the corpse of our best friend, who had just been murdered brutally before our eyes. I cried myself to sleep that night, with some of his blood still on me.”

Alice, still pinned to the ground with a rifle only inches from her face, finally was able to speak through her freight: “You still shouldn’t be doing this. Remember how you felt that day, and imagine what I must be feeling right now.”

Abi grew even more angry. “You have no idea what kind of pain I felt,” she said. “But I’ll give you an idea.” Abi moved her gun to the boy beside Alice, and shot him. Blood sprayed onto Alice, causing her cry out.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I looked away. My eyes gravitated towards a world map that was posted on the wall. My eyes became fixated on the atlantic ocean as I heard another gunshot burst. Then another. Then another. I turned back to Alice, and saw 4 corpses to her sides, and a boy with curly hair and glasses sitting beside her. They were both covered in blood.

“I’m sorry!” Alice cried. “I’m sorry! Please stop, please, please stop killing!” Tears trickled down her face and mixed with the blood.

Abi could only laugh. “Alright, bitch, you understand now? The pain that one goes through when another human being, one that is close to them, is murdered before their eyes?” I had to resist telling Abi to stop. My fingers on my right hand naturally began to dig into the skin of my palm.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, I understand. Please, please don’t kill us!”

Abi shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. If you did, you would be begging for death right now.” Abi shot the boy, and then Alice. When she looked at me, I was horrified by how much blood was on her. “What now?” she asked.

I looked at the dead bodies, and outside the window in the classroom. The parking lot was void of human presence. There were still many cars, but it seemed like everyone had ran off somewhere else. “Nothing,” I said. “We’re done. No more shooting, no more killing.” And I was glad of it.

We both set our rifles down on the ground when Abi looked at me, with a blank expression. “So, this is it then? We kill ourselves now?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. We don’t die yet. Only when we hear the sirens, come on.” I led Abi outside through a door in the classroom.

When we stepped outside we were greeted by the nice, warm spring air. Birds were chirping in the distance, and there was a freshly-mown-grass smell in the air. As we walked across the wet cement a small amount of water splashed up into my socks. We sat on a bench next to the building, surveying the parking lot. “What’s taking the cops so long to show up?” Abi asked. “Don’t they typically show up to shootings within five minutes?”

I shrugged. Abi and I had programmed a bomb to disrupt the city’s power at the same time as the cafeteria bomb, in an attempt to delay the authorities for as long as possible. We hadn’t expected this plan to work as well as it had.

“Do you think we should go check on the bomb? See how that turned out?” asked Abi. I waved off her request; we only had a few minutes left to live and I wanted to spend it in peace and silence, not racing across my school’s campus to see how well a bombing turned out. However curious I was, I had full faith that it served its purpose; besides, I didn’t care anymore.

“You asked me before we started the shooting if I was afraid of God,” I said. Abi nodded. “Are you?”

Abi stared at the ground. “I was,” she said. “Before the shooting, I was so conflicted. But I pushed everything aside, and now I just feel so... blank. Heaven, hell, or purgatory. I don’t care what happens to me now.” She looked off into the distance.

As I heard sirens off in the distance, I stared into her eyes. “Well, it’s time for us to die now. And to tell you the truth, I’m scared.”

She looked at me. “OK,” she said, and pulled out a pistol from her side harness and handed it to me. “Me first, then you,” she whispered. I stared at her, not wanting to kill her, then she added: “We’ll be together on the other side. Don’t worry.”

“Alright,” I replied, and I took a deep breath before shooting her in the head. She dropped to the ground dead, with blood coming out of the bullet hole in her head. It began to mix with her beautiful brown hair. As I stared at Abi’s lifeless corpse, I began to feel more and more disturbed. She was here because of me, lying dead on the pavement, covered in blood, both her own and countless others. An idea, if believed in enough, can change anyone to do anything. The idea that I gave Abi changed her into a monster. I had destroyed her humanity.

I reached into the side of my jeans and pulled out a sharp pocket knife. I flipped it open, and sliced myself in the arm immediately. As I continued to slice my arm as hard as I could, blood trickled down, splashing against my shoes and the cement below me.

Why did I drag Abi into this? Why was I so fucking selfish in not wanting to do this alone? Why could I not just leave her to her own life where she could be happy? Why did I have to throw my beliefs at her, convince her to join me? What kind of a sick cunt am I to do this, to be responsible for her demise? How can I be OK with doing this to her? How could I be OK with doing this to those people? How could I kill countless lives? How could I not deserve pain and suffering because of this? How do I not deserve to be damned for eternity?

When I was done, my arm was a bloody mess. Pain was erupting through my body at unbearable rates. The sirens were getting closer, but I figured I still had the chance to perform a prayer to God, to ask him for forgiveness. I knew I didn’t stand a chance of going to heaven, I just wanted to tell someone that I was sorry. I began: “Dear God,” but I didn’t know what to say; I had never prayed to God before. So instead of making something up on my own, whether or not it was appropriate for the time, I recited the Lord’s Prayer from deep within my memory from when I was younger. I spoke the words softly to myself:

“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our sins...”

I paused, then added: “I am so, so sorry.” Without further thought, I aimed the pistol at my head. I’m going to hell. I thought. I’m really going to hell. This is happening. I pulled the trigger. The following gunshot was the loudest sound I ever heard.