part 1

Chad Peters shot up and immediately recognized the fact that he was about to puke.  He barely had enough time to turn his head to the side and let everything out onto the dusty, dirt ground next to him.  When he finally opened his eyes, he was staring right into a puddle of his own vomit.  All he’d had to eat or drink in the past day or so was beer and pot brownies, and his nostrils immediately filled with the all too familiar smell of beer mixed with his own stomach acid.  His shoulders rose and fell with a low, hearty chuckle.  There was nothing funny about this unfortunate soul’s situation, however.

As his blurry, spinning, and hazy vision fixated on his surroundings, he realized that the once lively pack of celebratory seniors had been replaced by an empty forest clearing coated in cups, cans, bottles, joints, even a few bras.  He realized what was lying next to him and scurried backwards on all fours.  His heart raced, and he did not even notice when his hand came down on the sharp point of an empty beer bottle. Almost his entire body weight balanced on that one hand proved enough force to stab the beer bottle almost completely through the palm of his right hand.  But he felt nothing except for the rampant beating of his heart in his chest.  He managed to use a picnic table to lift himself of of his knees and into a wobbly, swaying standing position.  

He had been lying next to a corpse. The corpse of a scrawny, eighteen year old boy in his chemistry class.

Chad opened his mouth to scream but was silenced by by the nearby sound of a gunshot.  He looked left, then right, then examined the forest right in front of him, but the only movement he could make out was a swaying t shirt hanging from a tree limb.  

He took his first and last step eastward and immediately felt what he thought were the effects of too many pot brownies and too much beer.  His eyelids grew incredibly heavy and his legs weren’t moving the way he wanted them to

He looked down.

His right half of his grey t shirt was soaked in blood from the chest down.

He felt the cold, hard barrel of a gun on the back of his head, and did not dare to move.  He lifted his hands above his head as a sign of defeat.   Maybe it was just one of his dumb classmates or an angry neighbor from nearby.  There was the the sound of a gun cocking, and Chad’s fate was sealed.  

Chad did not see the grinning gunman holding the detailed, silver revolver to the base of his skull.  He did not get a chance to look into those crazed, blue ish grey eyes.  The last thing Chad saw was the swaying t shirt hanging from a tree limb.  

Just as the sun was coming up, a whining police dog would lead the police to Chad’s body and the body of the scrawny eighteen year old.  The scrawny boy’s estimated cause of death- asphyxiation.  It would take the police force quite some time to discover the identity and cause of death of the body lying next to the asphyxiated corpse.  There had been quite a bit of mutilation.  At first they might declare that cause of death was the gun wound that tore open his right lung.  Then they would find a blood- splattered piece of wood nearby.  Cause of death might have been blunt force to the head.  There was even a time when the police would think that the now blackened boy had been burned alive.  Upon further investigation, though, the cause of death would finally be ruled as a close-range gunshot to the head.