“Oh my god.” So much smoke.

“Oh my god.” Everyone was screaming.

“Oh my god.” The ground was shaking.

Lucy tried to right herself as the school rocked. Squeezing her hands over her ringing ears, she stood still in the dust, smoke, and debris. The fire alarms never went off. Shouldn’t they go off?

Never mind. The screaming was noise enough.

Left alone in the programming classroom, Lucy staggered her numb limbs toward the door. Out in the hall, students squealed and funneled out of classrooms to escape the fire blazing in the technology hallway. So many bodies stood between her and the exit at South Hall. Lucy joined the crowd at the back and pushed her way through. She wanted to see the sunlight from the doors just at the end there.

A rumble elicited more cries from the terrified teenagers. Lucy gazed up at the ceiling in time to watch an enormous beam collapse and crush in a classmate’s face. With fresh panic and screams, any semblance of order flew out the window. Chaos reigned. A wave surged through the crowd. Rushing forward became the only priority.

Lucy squeezed between her neighbors. Hands pushed on her back, elbows punched her ribs, and someone’s ankle entangled hers. Lucy thought for sure she might fall down, but the other girl lost her footing and fell under the heaving heap of stampeding students.

The girl screamed as one foot mushed into her, another bashed her head, and another stomped her until the screams gurgled into nothing. Lucy knew if she ever slept again, she would hear that sound in her nightmares for the rest of her life.

The herd of people thinned as one hall spilled into another. But why was everyone turning right? The exit was on the left. Lucy emerged from the technology hall and stopped so abruptly the crowd sent her sprawling onto the floor. She slid shy of a man’s combat boots.

The boots belonged to a behemoth guarding the exit. He snarled down at her with huge teeth and a sword. Startled, Lucy scurried onto her feet to rejoin the herd. After sparing a glance behind her, she noticed the man didn’t give chase.

Lucy ran outside the flood now, and it refused to let her back in. Where the elbows had annoyed her before, they pained her now. The aggressive jabs forced her out of the way. In one last ditch effort to keep her place, she dove into the mess of them.

Someone smashed the side of Lucy’s face against the lockers. The girl flattened Lucy there and ran off. Bodies brushed against her, feet rushed across her, her head smacked against a combination lock, and, without a doubt, Lucy would fall under the churning battery of shoes. Her screams would die after a time, like the trampled girl.

While the screaming never ceased, it took on a desensitizing rhythm. As the herd approached the cafeteria, that rhythm changed into an orchestra of sounds. Cries, grunts, groans, guttural sounds, wet sounds, crunching sounds. All of it awful. Some blood-drenched students ran screaming back into South Hall. They didn’t get very far before arms reached out from the cafeteria and pulled them back inside.

Swept into a break in the lockers, Lucy opened the door next to her and popped inside. She recognized the recently built band room by the smell of new industrial carpet and paint. Cast in darkness, focusing on the new-room smell helped Lucy ignore the smell of smoke and a faint odor she didn’t recognize. The stench made her pull her wrist to her mouth to stifle the urge to gag. Fumbling around the location of her fourth period class, Lucy stumbled over a desk. Beyond that was the podium, beyond that was the stage, and beyond that was the door. The way out.

Soundproof. Lucy no longer heard the violent deaths of her classmates.

What the hell was going on? How could this happen? Well, it certainly wouldn’t happen to her. She planned to get the hell out of there.

When Lucy hopped around the podium to claim the stage, something grabbed her arm. She yelped and jumped back, knocking over a sheet music stand with a terrible clang. It rang in the eerie silence until a wailing moan came from the dark.

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“Who’s there?”

Someone coughed in response.

Nothing attacked Lucy. Was someone in the dark? Maybe hurt? She found the courage to walk back to the podium. No grabby hands this time. She blindly reached forward. There, denim. Wet denim.

A moan answered Lucy.

“Who are you? Are you hurt?”

Lucy cursed the darkness as she recalled her cellphone. One thing at a time. Check on this person. Then call the cops. As soon as she hit a button, Lucy’s Nokia screen illuminated a patch of denim. She raised it slowly from the pants leg up to the hip then along the waist.

Lucy stopped.

The light bounced as her hands shook. So much blood. The person’s shirt was soaked black with it.

Another moan made Lucy jerk her hand up higher. Mr. Kent’s face was swollen black and blue.

Lucy dropped her phone and recoiled. She screamed as stands fell like dominoes around her. She tripped and landed with the lot of them and tried desperately to unhinge her foot from the base of one.

All the while, Mr. Kent echoed Lucy’s screams to the best of his abilities. Frightened and in pain, he needed help, but how could she possibly help him?

Pulling herself out of the frenzy, Lucy lifted her phone from the ground by Mr. Kent’s feet, slow and careful. This time the phone rattled in her hand. The light bounced around the room. She took a deep, calming breath and tried her best to be a decent human being. She refused to be like those students who’d crushed her against the lockers.

“Mr. Kent?”

He groaned and gargled.

“Mr. Kent, can you move?”

He thumped the podium.

Lucy swallowed as much apprehension as she could, resulting in a huge gulp that echoed in the room’s nice acoustics. She examined him again, careful not to shine the light on his face. If Lucy possessed an empathetic bone in her body, it told her that discretion mattered here. Mr. Kent might not know he looked like a monster, and screeching in his face was not the kindest way to tell him.

“…Me.”

Did he just say a word? “What was that, Mr. Kent?”

He moaned, “Mmm… me…”

Lucy moved closer, saying, “I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. Can you try again?” This close, she found the source of the smell. It came from him.

“Ki-kill… me…” The words were faint. Would they be Mr. Kent’s last? They should strike Lucy to the core, but it was odd how a battered face had numbed her. Somewhere in her subconscious, she’d already reached the same conclusion.

“Mr. Kent, I don’t think I can do that,” Lucy lied. Physically, it might prove harder than she’d expected, but she’d worked at her parents’ vet office on the weekends. She helped euthanize animals. Lucy understood ending another’s suffering, and right now Mr. Kent had suffered enough to warrant euthanasia. But letting other people know she took a cold, clinical approach to mercy killing could brand Lucy as a sociopath. So she lied.

Mr. Kent gripped a shard of wood in his hands. To Lucy’s surprise, he’d filed a shank out of it against the podium.

She winced and asked, “Mr. Kent, can you move?”

He muttered again, “Kill. Me.” He tried to hand Lucy the shiv.

“No, Mr. Kent. That won’t work, anyway.” She promptly shut up and used her phone to scan him one more time. Except for his face. No need to see that again. Those blue eyes beseeching Lucy against all that puffy flesh would haunt her nightmares forever, right alongside the trampled girl’s screams.

Lucy shuddered.

There.

Mr. Kent’s bleeding abdomen presented a more complicated case. A gut wound. Lucy turned her head away and tried to breathe shallow breaths. She refused to vomit. But damn it! She’d resigned herself to killing him.

Lucy said, “Okay.”

Mr. Kent tried to hand her the shiv, and she pushed it away once more.

“No, it won’t work.” As Lucy contemplated her options, she scanned the room in the Nokia’s dim light. Then she realized. “Of course.”

Walking over to the music stands, Lucy picked up the bigger, sturdier of the bunch. The teacher’s.

How messed up was this day that she was about to kill the band teacher with his own stand? At his request?!

Lucy divided it in half and poked the top to see if it was sharp enough. She wanted to put him down as painlessly as possible. Oh, who was she kidding?! This was gonna hurt like hell.

“Mr. Kent, are you sure?” Lucy said, trying to clear her conscience as she walked back over to him.

The band instructor gave one slow nod.

“You were one of my favorite teachers,” She offered as some cold comfort here at the end.

Mr. Kent coughed and groaned louder than he had so far. A sob caught on the end.

With his head resting on the podium, Mr. Kent was already in the optimum position for what Lucy had planned to do. Before she allowed herself to think about it, she lifted the stand over her hand with both hands and thrust it into the back of his neck.

Mr. Kent’s entire body convulsed against the podium. It wasn’t terribly violent. More like a prolonged shiver. Desperately, Lucy looked anywhere else. After a second, she considered retrieving the stand and trying again. But then all went still. No more sounds.

Lucy stepped as close to Mr. Kent as she ought to and held her breath. She listened beyond her pounding heart for any signs he was still breathing. Still in pain. Nothing. Mr. Kent was dead, and Lucy had killed him. It wasn’t anything like the animals.

Something burned Lucy’s face. She pressed a hand to her cheek, felt the tears through her shock, and said, “Thank you, Mr Kent.”