Shooting School
On Tuesday the 15th of July 2003, a baby was born on the 3rd floor of a big inner-city hospital. His young mother screamed, and he screamed and they both cried, cuddling each other as if guarding one another against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
And fuck me, there were plenty of slings and arrows for this one. Born on the spectrum to a 16-year-old mum in a shitty neighbourhood of a crappy town up north that no one gave a fuck about. From day 1 his life sucked compared to the people around him and especially to people online. Shiny happy people who’d never know how bad it hurt or how shitty life made you feel.
Once he was old enough to jack off, he hit the pornbag hard, whacking off before school and after getting home in the evening. Like the diligent student he wasn’t, he’d sit in the gaming chair for hours, buck naked with a VR set over his head and a fleshlight over his junk.
Life was better with your dick in a pornstar telling you to cum on her face. The chicks at school didn’t even hide it when they laughed at him. Everyone thought he was a piece of shit. Not her. Not Anika Ashyenko who called him daddy and showed him her butthole.
Pretty much every day he’d lock his door, unlock his phone and spend quality time with his girlfriend. And it was actually Anika who’d introduced him to Eric T. Hall in the first place. Eric the legend. Or at least in a certain microniche.
Incels, Lost Boys, Trolls, Alt-Right. People called them all sorts. They called each other dick, fag, pussy and bitch. Whatever words you weren’t supposed to say, they came out with as jokes, insults, and terms of endearment.
Like every group of humans congregating around a shared interest, they developed their own slang, a code to telegraph belonging – an invisible membership card. Theirs was bigoted, ignorant, misogynistic, racist. Slurs against everyone and everything, especially yo mama.
A dark vein of humour flowed through it like blood soaking the sheets. The darker and bloodier the better. And the darkest, bloodiest of all was Mr Eric T. Hall who shot up his high school one midsummer morning.
Unlike all the other school shooters, Eric actually thought his shit through. Within 20 minutes of the cops arriving, the army was called in to reinforce their fallen comrades. Then Eric downed his second helo and the colonel in charge passed the order to bomb the piss out of him.
‘We had to destroy the school in order to save it,’ Colonel Waterhouse barked into a spray of microphones, spit flying out of his moustache. ‘We’re at war here, people. What don’t you understand? Do innocent people die in war? You’re damn right they do. If we don’t stamp out the enemy in his tracks, we’ll lose a hell of a lot more than one goddamn school, I guarantee it. So, I will not apologize. I will not stop. And I am prepared to drop a thousand more bombs on a thousand more schools if I need to.’
In one glorious flame-filled moment streamed over a trillion times, Eric T. Hall went from just another rich kid to an antihero feared the world over. Within weeks, we saw dozens of repeats. Not so well funded perhaps, but no less lethal for the scores of innocent boys, girls, teachers and support staff who bled out in classrooms, cafeterias, hallways, and playgrounds.
But back to our hero languishing in front of his pornstar girlfriend. The violence didn’t shock him or fill him with revulsion or incomprehension; no, to him, each headcount offered an alternative path, an opportunity, a way out of the dire circumstances he somehow found himself in.
Cause he wasn’t stoked to be where he was, you know. Like we said at the beginning – his was a shitty life. Not compared to some, sure, but it was still true that his head, heart and soul hurt every morning when he opened his eyes and saw his phone glowing, beeping at him to get up, out into the world of judgment where laughter cut him to the quick. Death by 10,000 cuts was his lived experience and the prospect of murdering his classmates brought him release. Relief. A tall glass of water in the sun kinda deal so he went online and bought 2 Liberators and looked up how to make pipe bombs on YouTube.
The morning of the last day of his life was cold and grey. Rain hit his face as he walked to school and he scowled, drawing his backpack straps tighter and tugging his hood over his newly shaved dome. He stuck his hands in his pockets, lovingly fingering the two Liberators, delicately stroking the triggers but one a little too firmly. With a bang, a whimper and a kick like a horse, he went down on the sidewalk a few yards from his mom’s front door – his femoral artery blown out and about 3.5 minutes to live.
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