Snippet #2244

Face down on the cold floor, Stephen Blackwood's chest heaved suddenly. It felt like he was hauling himself up through a nightmare; the columnist's limbs felt nothing. Yet, when he finally regained the ability to haul himself slowly, ponderously, up off the floor, what he saw shocked him.

His arms were a mottled crisscross of angry red, purple, yellow and blue markings, some of the bruises going past his polo shirt and presumably down across his torso. He attempted to wrinkle his nose and felt dried blood cracking beneath it, along with the feeling of the cartilege shifting in a very uncomfortable manner. Reaching one tentative hand up to feel at his nose, Blackwood noted, to his dismay, that it was shattered. He set it as best he could, and bent to retrieve his fallen hat from the floor when the memories struck.

Pain. Distant, fuzzy, dulled by the passage of time and adrenaline. He had been heading home from the library via the sidewalk carrying his printed articles for the newspaper in his arms. He was moving vast, attempting to beat the setting sun, and his peripheral vision was blurred as a result. The columnist deduced this was why he hadn't seen his assailant. All he knew was that one moment, he was running, and the next there was a cold steel bat being slammed against the back of his skull.

Stars flared behind his eyes, a multicolor rainbow filling his vision briefly as the mysterious attacker drew back for a second blow. Stephen saw himself turning, moving as if in a drunken stupor, attempting to face his assailant. The second swing knocked the glasses from his face and shattered his nose, blacking both of his eyes. The adrenaline settled into him at this point, where his thoughts blurred. He raised his arms to cover his face from another blow, and the strikes from the bat rained down. Dull metallic sounds as the bat hit his shattered watch - clank, clank, clank - followed up by the sound of that same bat smashing into his bare arms. The feeling of a hand pulling at his forearms, tearing his defensive barrier down. The columnist remembered himself slapping the attacker in the ear with a flattened palm, sending him - or her - reeling for a few seconds, long enough for him to throw a right hook that missed horribly. The bat hit him in the torso, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him onto the ground. The next hit forced him into unconsciousness.

The most destressing thing about it was that he couldn't recall anything else. His last thoughts escaped him, as did everything else that ran through his head during the fight. Thoughts, instincts - all were wiped clean. Stephen shuddered at the thought. He was at peace with the thought of his own death, but not being able to remember what had happened was the worst part. Probably due to the fact that he couldn't get good and steamed up at the person who had killed him, so he could write a nice angry note to that person. Lord knows violence hadn't worked.

The columnist eventually regained enough sense to examine his surroundings. He looked around and saw three others. One generic looking girl - one of the popular girls, if he recalled properly. Steve wondered what she was doing here. Izzy, the druggy girl who had all of the trance music on her iPod. He grimaced at the thought of her being without her omnipresent galaxy of brightly-colored pills, ready for sale at any time. A couple Vicodin would work miracles for his swirling thoughts at that moment. And Rinni. Little Rinni. Quiet, confusing, introverted, shy, cute little Rinni. The stoic, angry columnist's heart sank a couple pegs at realizing she was dead as well - he could understand someone wanting to kill him and Izzy, for obvious reasons. Even the popular girl may have pissed someone off enough to do the deed. But Rinni, who had appeared to not have done anything horrible in her life at all...

Steven felt the immediate urge to run over and check everyone (starting with Rinni), see if they were alright. But he decided against it in favor of examining their present environment.

That, and he doubted that the angry, cynical, controversial newspaper columnist would be a calming influence on anyone at all. Especially at this point in time.