Weak Become Heroes E-Book

Nathan Allen

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A depressed town in the middle of nowhere. A cowed sixteen-year-old struggling to fit in at a new school. A plan for violent retribution against those who have made his life a misery.

But before Grover Tench can follow through with his vengeful intentions, his world is thrown into disarray thanks to a chance encounter with Kevin Zhu – private school kid, borderline genius, and unlike anyone he has ever met. Kevin favors creativity over carnage, brainpower over bloodshed, and he convinces Grover there might be a better way.

Together the two teenage outcasts will devise a strategy to fight back against their oppressors in a way that will have the whole world talking. They soon discover that with a little bit of ambition and a lot of ingenuity, there are no limits to what they can accomplish.

But can they really get away with something so audacious? Or are they in way over their heads?

Leseprobe

Weak Become Heroes

By Nathan Allen

Copyright 2024 Nathan Allen

Cover design by TboxCreative

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. Thank you for your support.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Also by Nathan Allen

All Against All

Hollywood Hack Job

Horrorshow

Pretenders

The War On Horror: Tales From A Post-Zombie Society

The War On Horror II: Return Of The Undead Menace

Chapter 1

“I told you I’d wipe that smirk off your face,” Grover Tench said.

As far as off-the-cuff quips went, it was about a seven out of ten. Kinda cheesy, as well as being a bit too obvious. Like something you might hear in a Schwarzenegger movie, and not one of the classic ones either. But it was funny, nonetheless. It was funny enough that Grover was disappointed there weren’t more people around to hear it. Only Wayde Andrews was nearby, and it was doubtful he heard much of anything. The blast had likely taken his hearing, along with his right eye and most of his nose. It had ripped open a large section of his cheek, exposing several molars and part of his jaw. One of his ears hung on by less than a quarter inch of skin.

The homemade explosive device had been rigged to activate when Wayde opened his locker, but that was not what killed him. He would have succumbed to his injuries eventually, probably within a minute or two, but he still had a beating pulse right up until the moment Grover aimed the revolver and buried a single bullet between his eyes.

It was his first ever kill. This was something he had fantasized about for so long, imagining what it would be like to cross that threshold and finally take a life. Now it had come to pass. If he was being honest, he didn’t feel all that different. He wouldn’t go so far as to say it was anticlimactic, but he would have thought such a momentous occasion would have left a greater mark on his psyche. There was no adrenaline rush, no surge of endorphins. Nothing much of anything, really.

There may have been a twinge of disappointment stemming from the fact that he could only kill Wayde Andrews once. Or it could have been that he had built it up too much in his head and set his expectations too high. Perhaps he should view this as simply the next stage of his evolution. This was who he was now. He was someone who could end the life of another, if he so desired.

Whatever it was, there was no turning back.

The enveloping haze gradually lifted. As it did, the rest of the world came into focus. Only then did he register the chaos that had engulfed West Midland High, triggered firstly by the bomb blast, and then by the gunshot. He had been so focused on Wayde Andrews that he had blocked out everything else.

He looked around at his surroundings, as if noticing them for the first time. Students and teachers were fleeing classrooms, tripping over one another as they scrambled down corridors, trying to get out of there as fast as possible. Their screams bounced off the walls. Bodies crashed into one another. Legs became entangled in the confusion. No one stopped to help the fallen. The smaller and slower were pushed aside in the race for survival.

The weak are meat the strong do eat. He heard this in a movie he once saw.

Bottlenecks formed at exit points. Panic rose to feverish levels. Grover watched with growing amusement as twenty or thirty bodies attempted to squeeze through a doorway that could accommodate no more than two at a time. The harder those at the rear pushed, they slower they filed out. For him, they were like sitting ducks.

He lifted the gun and fired. The shrieks rose to deafening.

Five bullets were left in the weapon, and each one found its way into human flesh. Kirsty Callaghan was the first to go down after being struck in the back, right between the shoulder blades. Aimee Carkeek hit the floor next, clamping her hands over the hole in her shoulder in a futile attempt to stop the blood gushing from her ruptured subclavian artery. Jared Sachs took a bullet to the back of his skull. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Grover paused to fish some ammunition from his pocket. Reloading took no longer than eight or nine seconds, thanks to hours of practice.

The corridor had emptied out by the time he was ready; in the short time he stopped to reload, most had managed to flee. Only an unlucky few remained. He pushed forward and fired again.

Two more were added to the body count. He noticed Aimee Carkeek still squirming as she lay on the floor that was quickly filling with her own blood. He stood over her and finished her off with a single shot. Her head burst like a piñata.

Time to reload again. He would have preferred a weapon that could hold more than six rounds, but he had to make do with what was available. Another small handful of bullets was retrieved from his pocket.

He fumbled momentarily as he tried to slot the first one into the cylinder, just as he heard footsteps charging. He thought the place had cleared out by now, but he was not as alone as he had assumed.

From there, everything played out in fractions of seconds.

There was a glimpse in his peripheral vision of someone closing in on him. They brandished a weapon of some kind.

The bullet stubbornly refusing to go where it should.

Recognizing the weapon as a hockey stick.

The fire alarm blaring. When was that activated? He hadn’t noticed it until now.

Identifying the wannabe hero as Dillon Bice from his English class.

Did the smoke from the bomb set off the alarm, or did someone pull it?

A sense of calm descending. An inner voice telling Grover to relax and not to rush. He had all the time in the world.

Dillon closing in with the hockey stick cocked back, ready to strike.

One bullet sliding effortlessly into the chamber. One bullet was all he needed.

The cylinder snapping into place.

It was over in a flash. His one live round was fired when Dillon was close enough to feel his breath on his face. The bullet took a chunk of flesh from the side of his neck. Dillon’s legs buckled, and his body twisted. A crimson geyser erupted below his jaw.

He spluttered and gasped as he spasmed on the floor. He tried to stand, but his shoes slipped on the blood pooling beneath his feet. Grover could have finished him off, but his pocket was already feeling a little light, so he left him there to bleed out. He was consuming ammunition much faster than he’d anticipated.

He moved on. Through the windows, he saw a hysterical mass fleeing for the emergency assembly point on the sports field.

The school belonged to him now. It was funny to think there was a time when he was intimidated by this place.

The next few minutes were spent stalking up and down each wing. He looked inside every classroom and checked behind every door for anyone left behind. He found two girls cowering in a storage closet, and Lukas Hodges hiding out in the photography darkroom. They were all swiftly dealt with. Then it was on to the science lab.

A chemistry class had been in progress when the room was evacuated. Equipment was set up at all the stations: Bunsen burners, beakers, flasks, test tubes, chemicals. Two burners were still on, their blue flames burning bright. He left those untouched while he disconnected the tubes from the other eight gas outlets.

Each turret was turned on full. He made sure all the windows and doors were closed. Gas slowly filled the room.

He had only just exited the lab when he heard the first siren. Then came another, this one approaching from the opposite direction. The cops were here earlier than he expected. Although this was a Monday morning in Midland Creek, so it wasn’t like they were run off their feet chasing criminals. This call had probably interrupted their morning tea.

All good things must come to an end, he mused. It had been a trip, and the whole thing had flown by way too fast, but there was nothing more for him to do. Ten or eleven insects had been snuffed out today, or maybe more – he tried keeping a running tally, but he lost track once the excitement took hold. The final number didn’t matter. His goal was to create chaos, to make a statement and leave his mark. In that respect, the day had been an unqualified success.

He flicked open the cylinder of the revolver. It was empty, as were his pockets.

He tucked the weapon into the waistband of his trousers, and he pulled his school polo shirt over the top to cover it.

He took a moment to soak in the devastation he had created – the strewn corpses, the blood-streaked floors, the lingering smoke, the droning alarm, the stench of death – before making his way to the main exit.

He kicked the double doors at the end of the corridor. They flew open in dramatic fashion.

It was less than eight minutes since the first shot was fired, and already every cop in town lined the school’s perimeter in preparation for storming the building. Orders were being shouted and strategies outlined. Service weapons were at the ready. A few fumbled to strap on their bulletproof vests. For most here, this would be the first time they’d had to wear one since training. Their trepidation was palpable. They would have assumed they would never have to pull on the Kevlar, especially in a place as nondescript as Midland Creek. Few could have imagined they would be attending a scene like this when they left for work that morning.

“Run!” he heard someone shout. It was one of the cops. “Quickly, son! Run to us!”

He didn’t immediately realize it was him they were addressing. They thought he was one of the survivors. They had mistaken his casual nonchalance for shock.

Grover maintained his languid pace as he headed their way.

“Son! Hurry!” the same cop said.

“That’s him!” The scream came from somewhere in the crowd.

“You need to run!” the cop said.

“No! Shoot him!” another voice said. Someone older, probably a teacher.

Confusion reigned and voices overlapped until one of the cops finally caught on. “Stay where you are and put your hands in the air!” he shouted.

These orders went ignored, despite the arsenal now pointed at him. This was going exactly as planned. His greatest concern in the lead-up to today was being taken alive. That could never happen. It had to end the way he’d intended.

“Hold it there! Don’t take another–”

An apocalyptic blast tore through the school. The windows of the science lab turned to glass confetti. An orange butane fireball belched out, and a wave of heat roared through the area.

Everyone but Grover dived for cover. He carried on as if nothing had happened.

When he was within twenty meters he reached behind his back.

“Put your hands where we can see them!” boomed one of the cops, the first to pick himself up off the ground.

“What are you waiting for?” someone else screamed. “Hurry up and shoot him!”

Grover removed the firearm from his waistband. Only he knew it was empty. As far as they were concerned, this was the weapon that had ended an unknown number of lives today.

“Drop it!” a cop shouted.

These words had no effect. He kept walking, his right hand hanging by his side, the gun pointed at the ground. No overt emotion was displayed.

“Put the weapon down!” another cop said. “Now!”

He came to a stop when he was about ten meters away. They looked at him, and he looked back at them. Time seemed to stagnate. The air hummed with menace.

“Shoot him!” an onlooker screamed, while others beside her filmed with their phones.

Seconds passed where no one said or did anything. Those watching held their collective breath, daring to hope the bloodshed had finally ended. It was what Grover wanted them to believe, giving them false hope in the lead-up to his climactic performance.

A demented grin spread across his face as his arm rose to a ninety-degree angle.

“Drop that weapon right now!” one of the cops demanded.

A crescendo of shrieks culminated in an explosion of police Glocks.

The first bullet clipped him just beneath his right shoulder. It was like being hit by a train. The gun almost fell from his hand, but he was determined to hold on. If he let go, that would give the police the opportunity to swoop in and arrest him. That was not going to happen.

Drawing on reservoirs of strength he never knew he had, he forced his injured arm back up.

The next shot went in his abdomen. The one after that hit a little higher. This almost knocked him down. It took every ounce of strength to stay upright. He wanted to give them the widest possible target.

In the end, he didn’t know how many times he was hit. He stopped counting after the sixth bullet. He stopped doing anything after the eleventh.

He would die with a smile on his face, satisfied his legacy was secure. West Midland High would remember his name. The world would know about this. His actions would inspire others.

Grover had fantasized about opening fire on his school more times than he could recall over the past two years, but the fantasies were never quite as vivid as they were right now. It was almost as if he was there, living inside the moment as it played out around him. He could smell the gunpowder and feel the soles of his shoes stick to the blood-smeared linoleum as he stalked the corridors. The screams of his classmates echoed in his ears. His heart drummed against his chest. He was starting to sweat. In his mind, he had already done it. Just thinking about it made him quiver with anticipation.

Perhaps this was because it was no longer an abstract thought or an idea, something he wished he could do one day, maybe. It was more concrete now. This was going to happen. He was committed. There was no turning back.

Perhaps it was so tangible because he now held the weapon in his hands.

It was a Ruger SP101, a double-action revolver. It had been purchased via the dark web and sent from Hungary. Its serial number had been removed before being disassembled and shipped into the country, hidden inside crates of solar panels. From there, it was reassembled, packed into a regulation brown cardboard box, and posted to an address a few streets away.

The house it was delivered to had been vacant for almost a year. The owners had been unable to find new tenants after the last ones moved out, despite lowering the rent several times. A few days before the package was due to arrive, Grover taped a sign to the front door that read “PLEASE LEAVE ANY DELIVERIES ON THE VERANDAH THANK YOU”.

The gun was paid for with six hundred dollars in cryptocurrency. When he was last at his mother’s place, he swiped a bottle of Shiraz from the wine cellar. His stepfather was a tax agent who collected vintage wines; a strange hobby considering he rarely drank any of them. The bottle Grover stole was said to be worth $1,500. He replaced it with a similar bottle filled with grape juice, and he sold it online.

His stepfather would eventually discover the missing bottle, but by that point it wouldn’t be his problem. He would probably blame it on Grover’s mother.

The Ruger might not have been quite what he’d had in mind when he pictured himself unleashing his vengeance on his fellow students. He’d always imagined something more muscular and intimidating, like an Uzi or an AK-47. Like the ones in all those action movies he loved to watch. An instrument designed for maximum destructive force. He would have to make do with this one, though. An Uzi was beyond his price range, and it might be a little trickier to sneak through customs.

Besides, he had never fired a gun in his life. This was the first one he had ever seen up close. Starting with an Uzi would be like taking his first driving lesson in a Formula One car.

He’d done his research, and the Ruger was more than capable of getting the job done. It wasn’t like he had to mow down scores of henchmen or anything like that. He just needed to get his point across.

A sudden shrieking snapped him out of his daze, and he was transported back into the real world. Only then did he notice what time it was. His bus would be leaving in four minutes.

Outside his bedroom window, at the house across the street, the neighbor’s blue Subaru Impreza screeched at a hundred and fifteen decibels. Every light on the vehicle flashed on and off like a Christmas tree. There wasn’t a house within three blocks that couldn’t hear that. This was an almost daily annoyance.

The car’s owner had installed an alarm that was as sensitive as fresh sunburn. It was going off constantly, often in the middle of the night, sometimes multiple times a night. A sparrow landing on its roof was enough to activate it.

He stashed the gun back in the box it came in, which he then placed inside a plastic storage container in the corner of his closet. He tossed some books on top of the box, replaced the lid of the storage container, and he dumped a handful of clothes and shoes on top of that.

The car alarm was eventually shut off.

He collected his backpack as he headed for the front door, bracing himself for another day in the unrelenting purgatory that was West Midland High. Maybe today would be marginally more bearable. Today he knew that he wouldn’t have to endure this torture for too much longer. His days there were numbered. The same could be said for several of his classmates.

Chapter 2

There was no single incident that tipped him over the edge. No shocking or traumatic moment that turned him from a reasonably normal, reasonably well-adjusted, slightly introverted teenager into a coldblooded psychopath who yearned to see the brains of his peers smeared across classroom walls. It was cumulative; thousands of small moments that piled up over two and a half years until a tipping point was reached.

Like his previous school, West Midland High was an underfunded and overcrowded state school, but the similarities ended there. His last school had its problems, but everyone was still reasonably civilized. West Midland High was more like a zoo – one where all the animals had been shoved into the one enclosure and left to fend for themselves. When he turned up, the carnivores smelled fresh meat.

Nothing about him stood out, aside from the fact that he wasn’t from around here and they were all afflicted with small-town mentality. He was just an easy target. He had never been good at fitting in, and everyone picked up on his insecurity and lack of confidence. Once they knew his weakness, they sought to exploit it.

At first, he was frozen out. No one would sit near him in class, and they would inch away if he came too close. If he tried talking to anyone, he would be ignored at best, ridiculed at worst. It was humiliating, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. It wasn’t as if he could force anyone to be his friend.

Being excluded was unpleasant enough, but then his belongings started to go missing. A pen here, a book there. Part of his lunch. They would turn up later, broken or defaced or, in the case of his lunch, spread across his locker.

During his third week at the school, his backpack disappeared. He spent hours looking for it before he eventually found it in the boys’ toilets, dumped in one of the urinals. He had no choice but to rinse it off, take it home, and keep using it. He knew then that life was not about to get any easier.

Still, he tried not to let them get to him. He thought if he didn’t give them the reaction they wanted, they would get bored and move on. He tried making himself invisible, starving them of material so they would forget about him, but nothing he did would change his situation. Ignoring the problem did not make it go away.

What he didn’t know then but understood now was that humans were predisposed to seek power. Popularity was currency in high school, and the easiest way to build your popularity was to drag others down. Being the new kid made Grover the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. Some went after him because it was fun, and others did it because they could.

In hindsight, he should have stood up for himself. He should have hunted down one of the ringleaders, the biggest and loudest of his antagonists – in this case, a lunkhead by the name of Wayde Andrews – and made him regret every life choice leading to this moment. Something he would never see coming, like a brick in the backpack swung at the back of the head. It would be worth the suspension. No one would ever mess with him again.

But doing that would require courage, and that was not something he’d ever had in abundance, so he retreated into his shell and allowed it to happen. This sent a message to everyone that they could do what they wanted without having to worry about retaliation. And so that was what they did, relentlessly. Day after day, for the next two and a half years. There was no let-up.

Until one day he woke up and realized there was no reason why he had to tolerate it any longer. These people had no authority over him. They were made of flesh and blood, and they felt pain like everyone else. Anything they did to him, he could do back.

Once the idea had taken root, he couldn’t get it out of his head. It was an extreme reaction, but it was so alluring. Like an unscratched itch, it soon became all he could think about. The only way to stop obsessing about it would be to actually do it.

That was the day he started his list. There were four names to begin with, and he would have been happy to keep it at four, but people kept giving him reasons to have their names added. The daily torment continued and the humiliations piled up, and adding to the list became a way for him to cope. It was easier to make it through each day knowing that karma would eventually catch up with those who deserved it the most.

The list was now at eleven names. Even then, he felt like he was exercising enormous restraint. It could easily have been three times that long. As far as he was concerned, everyone in this school was guilty. If they didn’t actively participate, they were complicit in their inaction. But some were more guilty than others.

He figured now was as good a time as any to make the list public.

Every day, he ate his lunch alone in the library, at the same desk in the far corner. This was the furthest he could isolate himself. The desk was covered in twenty-plus years of graffiti, but there was space in the top-left corner.

When no one was looking, he used his compass to carve seven letters into the bumpy surface: H I T L I S T

Beneath that, he scratched the names of the eleven students on the list.

He knew that when the time came he would be lucky to get to all eleven, but he would give it his best shot. If he could eliminate at least seven, he would consider that a win. He would die knowing the world was a better place with them no longer in it.

He took another quick look around before adding the finishing touches: his initials and the date. He brushed the wood granules off the desk and admired his handiwork.

He didn’t know who the next person would be to read this, but he could imagine their reaction. It might be months or even years from now, after the school had tried to pick up the pieces and move on from their darkest day. On that day, that future student’s eyes would drift around the table, past all the other inane scribblings, before they landed on the engraved lettering. They would recognize one of the names from a past tribute, and then another, and another. They would see the initials and the date at the bottom, and it would slowly dawn on them when they realized what they were looking at and who this GT was. By then, everyone would know who Grover Tench was.

Chapter 3

The town was called Midland Creek. Its name was derived from the fact that it was located on land, it was midway between two arbitrary points, and it had a creek. If nothing else, it was an entirely appropriate denomination, being the kind of place that one would drive through on their way to somewhere else without giving a thought to the people who lived there because they couldn’t imagine why anyone would.

The population at the last census was 29,679. Twenty years ago, it was closer to fifty thousand. It was a closed-off, close-minded, slowly dying, soon to be forgotten semi-rural community where nothing of significance ever occurred. The kind of place where the only options were to leave or have the life drained out of you, one interminable day at a time.

The one thing it did have in abundance was acres of disused land, miles from the nearest human. These were the places Grover would escape to whenever he sought a reprieve from his everyday life. His favorite spot was a secluded clearing deep in the woods, just east of the township. He had discovered it several months ago. It took forty-five minutes to get there on his BMX, the last ten of which was spent pushing his bike through the thick vegetation, winding his way through a maze of dirt tracks and bumpy terrain.

Near the center of the clearing was a patch of blackened ground, about two meters in diameter. This was the spot where he had been testing his homemade explosives. So far he had made six, each more powerful than the one that preceded it. The first four had been made from items he had found at home or purchased from the supermarket – aerosol cans, matchsticks, bicarbonate soda, linseed oil, nail varnish. He had learned how to assemble them from watching online videos.

The last bomb he had constructed contained ammonium nitrate and gunpowder. One of the benefits of living in a farming community was that he could obtain these kinds of materials without eyebrows being raised. The one before that was powered by a kind of homemade Semtex substitute he had cooked up in the kitchen by combining sugar, corn syrup, rust powder and copper sulfate.

His interest in combustible materials was piqued about a year ago when a chemistry teacher demonstrated how to make a small bomb using drain cleaner and balls of tinfoil. As soon as he saw this, he wanted to try it out for himself. The additional study he had done since, as well as the hours of experimentation, was why chemistry was the only subject he was getting good grades in.

But he hadn’t come here today to blow anything up. He was here to play with his new toy.

He dropped his bike on the ground, and he unzipped his backpack. He removed the Ruger first. The box of ammunition came next.

The weapon frightened him as much as it excited him. It granted incredible power to someone normally so weak, and yet he was intimidated by the idea of what he might do with all that power. The thought of being caught with it terrified him more than anything, especially before he’d had the chance to do what he had planned. He was taking a risk just by coming out here today, but he needed to test it out. He had to know that it worked the way it should, and he had to be comfortable firing it. Pointing it at one of his enemies and pulling the trigger could not be his first time. That was far too risky, and there was too much that could go wrong. He might pull the trigger and nothing would happen. Or he might freeze, which would be worse. That would be the ultimate humiliation – the realization that he was such a failure he couldn’t even get being a psycho right.

His first order of business was to figure out how to load it. He assumed that would be a simple enough process, but it took eleven frustrating minutes before the first live round was slotted into the chamber. Once he had that part worked out, the next five went in without too much trouble.

The gun was ready. Now he needed something to shoot at.

There wasn’t much to use for target practice other than trees. He probably should have brought some empty bottles or tin cans, or something he could line up and aim at. He often saw rabbits out here, as well as the occasional fox and feral cat, all of which were a nuisance to farmers. He could try shooting one of those if he spotted any.

The only wildlife he could see today were a couple of crows circling overhead. After a moment of consideration, he decided that shooting a bird out of the sky might be a bit too ambitious for a first attempt.

He didn’t have any real desire to hurt animals, either. The only ones he wanted to shoot walked around on two legs. Still, he needed to become comfortable with the idea of pointing the gun at a living creature and pulling the trigger. He could start small and build his tolerance, gradually desensitizing himself to the act of killing until it was rendered meaningless.

An inanimate object was probably a better option for a beginner, though. After trekking through the scrub, his eyes alighted on a raised mound. It looked like it could be an anthill. It was about knee-high.

He took aim but then lowered the gun. He wondered what would happen if he shot it. Would the bullet pass straight through and leave a small hole? Or would it explode, resulting in a shower of airborne dirt and ants? If that was the case, he didn’t want to get too close. He backtracked a few steps until he was about twenty meters away.

All he needed to do now was point and shoot. He’d never done that before, but it couldn’t be any more complicated than that. He’d seen it a million times in movies. Aim it at whatever you wanted to put a hole in and pull the trigger.

And so that was what he did.

The bullet did not pass straight through the anthill after the gun was fired. It did not produce a hailstorm of flying dirt and insects, either. It didn’t do anything, because the shot did not go anywhere near its intended target. Grover had no idea where it ended up. Probably somewhere in the sky, if the final positioning of his arm was anything to go by, now at a seventy-degree angle.

He hadn’t expected the gun to kick back with such force. It was as if someone had crept up behind him and karate chopped him on the crook of his elbow just as he fired.

The initial shock wore off right as the pain crept in. He saw blood. A lot of blood. It came from the base of his thumb. Soon, it was trickling down his arm. He didn’t know how, but he had somehow managed to shoot himself in the hand. Not his free hand, either. It was the one holding the gun.

His vision turned gray and the earth tilted. The Ruger fell from his grasp. He stumbled backwards clutching his hand.

This was bad. Really bad. It would be humiliating if it wasn’t so serious.

He knew he couldn’t panic. He had to deal with this somehow. He did his best to shake the wooziness, and he forced himself to examine the damage. There was less blood than he first thought, although it was still messy. The bullet looked like it had only grazed him. The wound was somewhere between his thumb and forefinger.

There was a deep abrasion. On closer inspection, he saw that it wasn’t caused by a bullet.

He sat down on a log and pulled off his shoe and sock. He used the sock to wipe the blood away before he wrapped it around the affected area. The stinging was really starting to kick in. He wondered if he might need stitches. It would probably leave a scar. He didn’t know how he would explain that.

His head cleared some more, and he realized what had happened. He hadn’t been shot at all. The skin on his hand had been torn. The gun must have recoiled with such force that it split the webbing at the base of his thumb. Perhaps he should have held it with both hands when he fired it.

Perhaps he should consider wearing earplugs, too. He knew it was going to be loud, but he hadn’t expected it to be that loud. The ambient sounds of the wind and birds and distant cars were smothered by a heavy drone that buzzed in both eardrums. For a few minutes he feared he might have caused permanent hearing damage, until the drone finally began to recede.

As it did, another noise came to the foreground. It was the revving of a small engine, or more than one engine. This place was not as isolated as he had assumed.

He looked over to where he thought the sound was coming from. He couldn’t see anyone, but his vision was limited by the thickness of the foliage. He wasn’t even sure what direction he should be facing. One minute the noise seemed to come from the south, the next it was to the west.

The engines grew louder. They sounded like motorbikes. A faint cloud of dust rose from somewhere behind the trees.

He hunched down behind a patch of bushes and long grass. He waited, an icy dread chilling his bones as they came closer. They appeared to slow down before coming to a stop.

The engines idled. He could hear two people talking, although he couldn’t make out any of what was being said. They sounded like they were right there, close enough that if he popped his head up they would spot him, even though he knew the sound was probably carrying further than that. He moved down as low as he could, lying flat on his stomach.

Panic coursed through his veins. He had no idea who these people were. It could be a couple of guys tearing around on dirt bikes who just happened to be out there at the same time as him. Or it could be the owners of the land he was trespassing on, and who were investigating the gunshot they just heard. Whoever it was, it would be better if they didn’t know he was there. If they saw him, they might come over and demand to know what he was doing. A confrontation could lead to him panicking and pulling the gun. They would take off and call the cops, and his plan would be in jeopardy before it began.

A tense few minutes passed before the engines revved and the bikes took off. They soon faded into the distance.

Grover didn’t move right away. He waited with his body pressed against the cold earth. Bugs crawled across his arms and the back of his neck. A few climbed inside his clothes. He had one bare foot, and a sock wrapped around his bleeding hand, and he still didn’t move. He stayed like that until he was confident it was safe to get up. It was at least seven or eight minutes; probably longer than he needed to wait.

He pulled his shoe on when he was back on his feet, and he brushed the dirt and grass from his clothes. It took him several minutes to locate his BMX and his backpack. In all the confusion, he’d forgotten where he’d left them. Once he found them he headed back through the woods, toward the road that led back into town.

There would be no more shots fired today. Not with his hand the way it was.

But he would be back here next weekend, and the weekend after that. This was a temporary setback. He had taught himself how to construct bombs. It couldn’t be that hard to teach himself how to shoot.

After failing at almost everything in life, he was determined not to fail at this. He needed to see this through to the end.

Chapter 4

Along with bomb-making, movie-watching was Grover’s favorite pastime. He had never been into movies that much before he came to Midland Creek, but it was now a daily ritual. There were several reasons for this. Having no friends meant being burdened with a lot of free time, and two hours spent enjoying a movie was a respite from a miserable school and home life. It allowed him to step into a fantasy world where morality was black and white, where good triumphed over evil, and where the bad guys always got what was coming to them. Movies were a place where the outsider was celebrated, and where it was okay to be different.

Another factor was that he had access to thousands of titles now that his father and stepmother subscribed to all the available streaming services. They had married hastily, only to discover they had little in common, and so most of their evenings were spent in silence in front of the television watching back-to-back episodes of whatever drama series was popular at the time. It was their way of filling uncomfortable silences and avoiding the fact that they never had anything to say to one another.

He liked all genres, but his favorite were the action movies. The ones with hitmen and vigilantes and epic gunplay. It always gave him a thrill to see someone get their head blown off, or to watch dozens get mown down with a machine gun. In the coming weeks, they would probably try drawing a link between his viewing habits and his actions, as if the movies made him do it or he couldn’t separate fantasy from reality. It would be a ridiculous assertion – his motives were clear, and he would make sure everyone knew that. Although he had to concede there may have been a few ways in which movies had warped his view of the everyday world.

As it turned out, a lot of what was depicted on screen had no basis in reality. This was something he had discovered after his first botched attempt at firing the gun, and again after watching YouTube videos that described what movies got wrong about guns. He now understood that hitting a target took great skill and practice, and that pointing a firearm at something and pulling the trigger was no guarantee you would even come close. Machine guns could not be fired one-handed, like in the Rambo movies, and you certainly couldn’t fire two at once, like in the Matrix movies. Bullets could not penetrate water, nor could they make a car explode. It was almost impossible to shoot a gun out of an opponent’s hand the way they do in old westerns. The purpose of silencers was to protect the shooter’s hearing; they did not make it possible to discharge your weapon so the people in the next room couldn’t hear.

He came across these clips after spending hours watching instructional videos demonstrating the correct way to handle firearms: how to load and unload, holding and firing techniques, the recommended stance, safety tips. The kind of research he probably should have undertaken before he ventured out to the field, and not after.

Watching these videos was a sharp reality check, and an important lesson. When the time came, he would remember to keep it simple. Don’t try anything fancy. Don’t attempt something that he once saw Mark Wahlberg’s stunt double do in a movie. What happened on screen and what was possible in the real world were two very different things.

Movies, he now realized, had given him a distorted view of many things in life.

Another example was bullying. This was a concept he’d had little knowledge of before he came to West Midland High.

The past two and a half years had taught him that bullies were not always chunky delinquents who spent their days thinking up ways to humiliate someone they had taken an irrational disliking to, usually to compensate for their low self-esteem. They were not victims themselves, nor were they necessarily products of unstable homes or negligent parenting. Most were regular teenagers from typical families.

They did not roam the school in packs, pushing smaller students into lockers and cracking jokes before high-fiving one another. They didn’t steal your lunch money or put gum in your hair.

It was never one person, or a small group. It was the whole school coming together to attack the weakest of the pack. Everyone had it in them to be an aggressor, regardless of their upbringing or personality.

In real life, their victims were rarely targeted because of some obvious point of difference, the way Hollywood screenwriters would want you to believe. They were not always overweight, or afflicted by disability or disfigurement, or hideously unattractive, or dirt poor. No one was ever bullied for being smart. Every instance could be reduced to basic human psychology: targeting someone who won’t fight back in order to establish dominance and increase social standing. They were stepping on someone to lift themselves up. Herd mentality and the lemming-like nature of the schoolyard ensured that everyone followed suit.

It was like a game of musical chairs. Someone had to be the outcast, the last one standing when the music stopped.

Major incidents, like when his backpack was dumped in the urinal, were rare. If that happened all the time, the teachers would eventually catch on and the perpetrators would be dealt with. It was never that obvious. It was two or three small things every day, death by a thousand cuts.

It was a passing comment as Grover walked through the corridor with his head down and his eyes on the floor, lobbed at him by some wannabe comedian who only found the courage when he was surrounded by five of his friends. It was the corner of a heavy backpack connecting with the side of his head as another student walked behind him in class. It was the snigger from the girls in chemistry when the teacher paired him up with one of their friends. It was punishment by exclusion, and the seemingly insignificant actions that chipped away at his self-worth until there was nothing left. The CIA could only dream of developing a means of psychological torture as effective as what sprung organically from the high school environment.

What frustrated and confused him more than anything was the arbitrary way in which the whole school decided to gang up on him, as if a meeting had been held the day before he arrived and everyone decided the next student to enroll would be their scapegoat. He was attacked because he was vulnerable, and once a few ringleaders set the tone the rest fell into line. He thought if he put up with it and didn’t make a big deal it would eventually go away, but this never happened. It only became more relentless, which in turn made him more withdrawn. His passive acceptance meant it was soon a daily occurrence.

There was one movie trope about bullying that he did embrace wholeheartedly. Almost all of these stories featured a triumphant moment where the victim looked deep within themselves to find the courage to fight back. Stand up for yourself and hit them twice as hard as they hit you, was the message endorsed in these films. Once you do that, they’ll leave you alone. No one will mess with you then.

It was a theory Grover intended on putting to the test. He would hit them a whole lot harder than they hit him. It would be a classic David v Goliath victory, and in one fell swoop he would go from being the most cowed student to the most feared. The tables would turn, and the audience would cheer when the perpetrators finally got a taste of their own medicine.

Grover’s parents had named him after his maternal great-grandfather, but no matter how many times he explained this to people he couldn’t escape the inevitable Sesame Street jokes.

But the occasional jibe about his name never really bothered him when he was growing up, and he enjoyed a childhood that was typical and unremarkable – school, friends, sports, television, fun, boredom. Generally happy, as most childhoods were, although this was something he only understood in retrospect. He never appreciated how happy he was until his life became unhappy. It all started when he was thirteen; the year when everything changed.

His parents’ marriage seemed to disintegrate in a matter of weeks, although it must have been falling apart long before that. But that was what having your whole life upended felt like. One minute, everything was fine, or everything seemed fine, as far as he was aware. His parents did have the occasional argument, but these were infrequent and subdued. They both seemed to make an effort to shield their problems from their only child, even as it was becoming increasingly obvious what was going on. But as more time passed, the less they bothered to hide it. The arguments became louder and more frequent, and when they would end an icy silence would descend on the house. Until the next one.

The name Gerald was often mentioned during these fights. He did not know who this Gerald was at first, but as each argument bled through his bedroom walls he came to learn that he was a tax agent who drove a Saab and collected vintage wines. He was someone his mother had been spending more time with.