“Jesus!” yelled McBride, recoiling from the body.

Johnson stumbled backwards and bumped into another member of the SWAT team. Neither of them seemed to notice. “You... you see, Chief?” he imparted. Every eye in the room was still on the sniper, but he had every ear. “She's a MONSTER! This isn't your average cheerleader we're dealing with!”

The chief of police scowled down at the field. Chase had stopped approaching. She wasn't looking for a hiding place or scavenging for more weapons. She simply stood and stared up at the box. Her eyes met McBride's, and an unspoken challenge was exchanged.

McBride was a very big man. He was not quite big enough of a man to admit he'd been wrong. Still, he was not so stubborn that he was unprepared to learn from his carelessness and apply it to his actions moving forward.

He looked to his men. “Well, you've all seen what she's capable of. I don't believe I need to tell you this, but we are dealing with a professional here. You are not to underestimate her due to her looks, and you are not to hold back. Use nothing less than lethal force. Do I make myself clear?”

Boy, did he. Before, they had been unsure why their presence was even needed for such a seemingly simple mission, but after seeing what just happened, they had no choice but to take this very seriously. McBride had successfully taken a potentially morale-dampening loss, and turned it into something to motivate them.

Chase had hoped her flashy kill would declaw them a bit, but they looked fearless as they rappelled down from the booth to the field. It was clear they would fight hard, without fear, and without mercy—an advantage she was accustomed to monopolizing. Nothing about this was going to be easy.

She snatched up a cymbal and threw it like a discus. It sliced cleanly through one of the officer's ropes. He screamed as he fell forty feet to the ground below. They expected, and hoped, the screaming would abruptly cease upon his collision, but instead it merely changed shape, to cries of pain rather than fear.

Boots hit turf. Assault rifles were readied with mechanic, meticulously rehearsed efficiency. Chase's every instinct told her to flee, but she knew her only chance was to get close and take away their range advantage. So she did the one thing they didn't expect: she rushed them.

The chill night air was suddenly lit up with the ratatat of gunfire. Chase leapt over the wall of bullets, did a flip in mid-air, and successfully bridged the gap, bringing her foot down on one of the soldier's faces, breaking his goggles.

What followed was a bloodbath. Chase stabbed one man in the chest with a flute, strangled another to death with a trombone's slide, and used a heavy bass drumstick to bash another's jaw clean off his head, sending it spinning end over end through the uprights for a field goal.

Not all the blood belonged to her enemies, through. At one point, Chase heard a noise like a typewriter go off behind her, and watched three bullets burst out of her body right before her eyes. She'd been shot in the back. The first emerged directly below her right collarbone, the second through her left, bottom rib, and the third through her stomach, around her right kidney area. Blood and pulp splattered onto the green grass in front of her.

She whirled around blindly. All around her, dead bodies were strewn. Only one soldier was left, shaking as he held his gun. He expected her to fall after sustaining that kind of injury. She used this to her advantage.

After incapacitating him with the drumstick, she dropped it limply to the grass and inspected her wounds in a daze. Already, the adrenaline was starting to wear off, and in its place, the pain was setting in. A lot of it. She was losing blood: lots of that, as well. She was leaking red onto her skirt, shoes, and the surrounding field like a cracked sieve.

Heavy footsteps. She looked up. More soldiers, twice as many as she'd just dealt with, this time entering by ground, through the front gate.

She couldn't face them, there was no way. Not like this. Chase knew she needed to regroup. She turned tail and ran, bullets nipping at her heels. She scaled the chain link fence that surrounded the field in two quick motions and jumped down on the other side.

The girl looked around for somewhere where she could hide for a moment. Tend to her wounds.

Then, she saw it, not fifty feet away—the gymnasium. The window of the girls' locker room. Still open!

She jumped up, grabbed the windowsill, and pulled herself in, gunfire and shouts still burning up the darkness behind her. She closed the window with a slam, moved a bench beneath it, and hefted a locker unit up on top of that. The window was completely blocked.

After doing the same for the boys' locker room and barricading both the front doors of the gym and the emergency exit, she finally had time to stop and assess herself.

On a positive note, the bullets had passed completely through her, so she didn't have to worry about extracting anything. There was first aid equipment in the PE teacher's office, as well as some stuff that could best be described as second and third aid equipment, so she was able to at least clean and bandage herself up. It was anyone's guess what kind of internal damage the bullets had caused, but she was conscious, and she was able to stand. Kind of. To her, that meant she was able to fight.

Out in the gym, she could hear hammering on the front door. They were trying to break in. Her blockade wouldn't last very long. In a matter of minutes, twenty or thirty soldiers would pour into this place, and the only line of resistance they'd meet would be one weak, wounded, and honestly pretty scared teenage girl.

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Chase pulled her top back on over her bandaged body. She knew what she had to do, but she needed to act quickly. This was where her true mettle as a hunter would be tested.

..............

WHAM. The door finally gave way. Guns immediately leveled at the open doorway, but all their owners could see is darkness.

“Lights,” said the foremost soldier. Lights went on on the barrels of their guns, and slowly, the SWAT team entered.

They crept through the dark, empty gym, their heavy boots generating loud, sustained echoes on the hardwood floor. Light was thrown in every direction, but they saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Think she gave us the slip?” asked one of them.

“Impossible,” said the one who'd entered first. “She had every exit locked up tight. From the inside. Stay frosty, that psycho is in here somewhere.”

The group continued to explore. They checked the locker rooms, the PE teacher's office, behind the bleachers, everywhere. It wasn't until they came across the equipment room that they found something truly unusual.

The double doors had been thrown open wide. Their flashlights threw oddly shaped shadows against the far walls as they caught wire ball bins and gymnastics apparati. The latch was also illuminated, and had clearly been forced. A heavy padlock, its metal hook twisted out of shape, lay discarded in the threshold.

They stood there for a second, staring at their prey's handiwork. Then, the one leading the pack crouched and picked up the lock for a closer look.

A clunk echoed somewhere inside the equipment room, followed by a weighty creaking. Every gun in the room pointed hurriedly at the entrance. The creaking grew louder. Accelerated.

The last thing the man noticed before he died was that the padlock in his hand was tied to a thin piece of fishing line.

WHOOM. Out of the darkness of the equipment room's ceiling swung a huge, heavy pommel horse, suspended by two large ropes. It was moving fast in a huge, unstoppable arc of destructive force. With a chunky crack, it collided with the soldier's head, knocking it clean off his shoulders.

Somewhere in the darkness, probably around half court, they heard the head bounce once before rolling to a stop.

The men stood in dumbfounded silence for a moment before springing into battle mode.

“Shit,” said one of them. “Shit shit shit.”

“Traps!” said another. “She set traps. This whole place could be a minefield.”

“Nobody move. Nobody move.”

“Aaack,” moved somebody. A snare made of jump ropes whisked him up by his ankle into the shadows.

From there, panic spread like a domino effect, just as it had on the football field. And as panic spread, the group became more disorganized, their formation became looser, and mistakes were made.

A volleyball net was launched out of nowhere to coil around and entangle one small group, sending them struggling to the floor. A javelin fired, making a shish kebab of a soldier and the four men lined up behind him. A cascade of barbells came clanging down the bleachers, crushing an entire platoon.

Screams sounding all around him, one man accidentally tripped a wire down by his feet. High up over his head, he heard the sound of metal creaking, straining, and giving way with loud snaps. He and the half dozen men next to him looked up, probing their narrow beams of light into the void.

What they found was the huge, four sided scoreboard that hung at half court. A final snap sent it into a plunge. When it made impact, its weight and velocity were enough to shatter even the hardwood floor. There was no chance any of the fragile people caught in the middle survived.

Finally, one of the soldiers found the lights and turned them on. Immediately, he regretted it. The scene of carnage and destruction revealed was one no man should ever have to see. Blood and bodies were strewn all over the huge room with reckless artistry, painting the floor like a giant maple canvas. Somehow, a leg had achieved enough altitude during its severance to get caught in one of the basketball nets.

Most shockingly of all, he saw her. She was standing up on top of the set of bleachers furthest from the front door, bloody, battered, but alive and with an intensity he could feel all the way over where he was standing.

In her hand was a bow. On her back was a quiver full of arrows.

It was then he noticed about about half the bodies in the room weren't dead from gruesome traps. They had arrows poking out of them.

Chase confidently nocked one. Had she been in better shape, she would have jumped for joy when she found these in the equipment room. She didn't have to improvise anymore, scrounging around for any weapon she could find. She had HER weapon. It was like she was back home.

She slotted an arrow into a guy who turned his weapon on her, then another into a guy who was running for the door, then a third into the guy who turned the lights back on. She was readying a fourth, when she saw she was out of targets.

The gym was completely still. There was only one person left alive, and that was her. She'd done it.

With a relieved sigh, she jumped down from the bleachers to the floor. Her landing was a bit more jarring than she expected, making her wince and clutch her wound. Suddenly, she felt very lightheaded, and she had to brace herself against one of the bleachers' supports to keep from collapsing.

If it was really over, it wasn't over a moment too soon. She knew she was in very rough shape. Never in her life had she felt so weak. Third aid had worked well for a little while, but she was at the point where what she really needed was last aid.

She stumbled her way through the maze of corpses, bow drawn back and ready to fire in case any were still alive. When she neared the door, she almost tripped over her own feet as she picked up the pace. It was a good thing she didn't. If she fell at this point, she wasn't sure she would have the strength to get back up again.

The door was right in front of her. If she could just make it outside, find the other girls...

Click. Cold metal pressed against the back of her head, freezing her in her tracks.

“That's far enough.” said McBride.