Spencer had practically collapsed under the stress into a complete, total wreck. Half the time he was with me in the real world, shuffling in the brown slush toward our dorms. The other half, he was still standing in the snow dumbfounded over Laura's crumpled body. I tried urging him along as discretely as I could, but he always slowed back to his funeral march. It was probably really accurate foreshadowing, I thought. He was fucked, and at that point I was still unsure if he deserved it.
Legendary "Prankmaster Gen'ral" Spencer divulged to me in the laundromat that he had, the week before, gone through all the effort to make himself look like a real zombie for what I'm sure he felt was his best prank yet. It was real convincing, he said, scars and makeup and fake blood and the most worn-out clothes he could find in his closet. He wanted to create some sort of zombie scare, maybe get on the news again and make it onto the internet. He trudged out into one of the more remote campus walking trails, into the woods one evening and waited for someone to walk by. That someone had been Laura. Mousey, loner Laura who had been trying to get out of the dorms for once probably. Trying to feel the world. Maybe trying to relax in a way that, given the circumstance, was ironically normal.
He said he shuffled toward her out of the woods, well, like a zombie. If I know anything about Spencer, I would guess it was pretty convincing, complete with a limp on a crooked leg, mouth agape, and a practiced but ghastly moan. She called out to him at first, guessing his name correctly, but he kept limping toward her. She shouted a warning, too, he said, but he wanted the illusion to be complete and figured if anyone would believe it it'd be her. So he kept it up. He was closing on her, and she was hyperventilating. She started fumbling for something in her bag, and Spence was real close then. He was looking up and trying to space out, to stay in character, he said, so he couldn't see real well what she was doing, but he could hear her breathing, sharp, rapid, and shallow. Then came a painfully loud gunshot, and a ringing in his ears, and a dose of panic.
When he looked at her, he said, she was only about ten feet away, falling into a heap by the snowy trail. Blood was creeping out from all around her, gushing from a gaping hole in her chest. I could picture it as he told me how she looked, the stained snow and vacant look and wet bloody coughs and pale clammy skin. The gun was a snub-nosed pistol, probably a .357 mag, the kind people get for self-defense and never practice using, and it was lying on the ground between them with the barrel pointed at her feet. A tiny silver-and-black thing that bit its owner, as if to show it could bite. Spencer knew right off he was way too late to do anything, he said it all happened so fast that he couldn't tell what she did. All he knew at that point was what it would look like. He fucked up royal, I knew when he told me through bleary eyes and big tears, a bitter and scared expression, how he dragged her into the woods and into a snow drift, picked up the pistol and laid it beside her. He was lucky it snowed heavily since then. He had wandered around the outskirts of town, avoiding anything and anyone for the next six days until he followed me into the laundromat. He slept like a homeless person, wrapped in newspapers or under bridges or whatever they do. He didn't even remember. He said he thought about going back and seeing if there were more bullets left, that he might have offed himself out of guilt and fear of blame. He thought better of it. Looking back now, I'm glad he did.
But he was really boned. Like, really bad, and I told him so, and the look he gave me begged for help. I did. I was. I took him back through the darkened streets to our dorm, and helped him pack some clothes. It was too late to suddenly appear, and no doubt he'd crack if anyone asked him anything about anything. He was going to disappear somehow, like we'd seen in movies and TV shows and video games. I was going to help him vanish.
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i am sorry these have been so short and end so abruptly. i should probably start writing these earlier in the evening. -M
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