//Author's note: This chapter may trigger and upset readers sensitive to gun violence and the current school shooting epidemic. Reader discretion is advised.

†"Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: 'It is mine to avenge; I will repay,' says the Lord." - Romans 12:19 †

-Flashback: Pre-carrion virus-

The folded piece of paper hits her in the back of the shoulder, but CiCi Destefano doesn't react. In fear, of course, as always, that the teacher would catch them.

He's showing them his presentation on the smartboard. Biology, her least favorite subject and one, she had yet to conquer an "A" in. CiCi didn't want to get on the professor's bad side when it came time to make the grade this semester. Then, she'd have the summer to dread coming back for more biology, which would be an absolute nightmare.

As the teacher turns his back, CiCi is quick to grab the note on the floor. Her turn. Even though she told both Dalton and Audrey that she didn't get a kick out of these childish games anymore.

She opens the note, reading what Dalton last wrote in their conversation.

U taking notes for the rest of us, CiCi? Ur the only one paying attention to Mr. Crespo's lisp!

Glaring over her shoulder all the way to the back row, she catches Dalton's mischievous grin that never wavers. He always had that look of trouble and he was a walking troll in everyday life that often landed him in detention.

He doesn't take her seriously. None of them ever do. They didn't have CiCi's parents, or strict rules to live by.

It's her turn to write in the conversation, then pass it to Audrey in the row next to her. She hated this and always had a rush of anxiety that she'd be the one to get in trouble. Still, she always felt pressured by her friends to partake in this stupid game. This time, so to spite Dalton, she crumbles it up with her hand poised in Dalton's sights. Then, she crushes it under her boot and keeps it under her weight.

"Oh, man..." Dalton says from his seat, loud enough for everyone to hear.

The Professor turns around, "What was that, Mr. Fallon? Something to add?"

"Nothing," Dalton replies, "I just...lost the ink in my pen is all. It had too much fun taking all these notes..."

Dalton's mocking the professor and his drawn-out, repetitive lecture that took all of Dalton's energy not to laugh through with his speech impediment. Some of the students chortle. The teacher, however, doesn't catch on.

"Oh, well, I'm sure someone will lend one to you," Mr. Crespo replies as the girl dressed in goth attire seated next to Dalton hands over a black pencil with a skull emblem on it.

"Thanks, I'm just going to hope that this doesn't put a hex on me or something," Dalton jokes to her and as the goth girl's cheeks flush red, CiCi laughs without inhibition like some of the other students as the professor tries to take the spotlight away from their personal class clown.

"Alright, back to the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and the work of Belyaev..." The professor starts again but is halted by the succession of popping explosives in the distance.

"Fireworks?" Dalton asks and in the oddness of it, all of them are perplexed by the out-of-place disturbance.

"I thought I heard someone scream..." Audrey says, casting worry into their professor before the rest can grasp what all this means.

As screams and more pops sound off closer still, the professor goes to the door to close and lock it. On the other side of the door made predominantly of glass, the blur of people run past.

In the harshest reality of their nation, they all understood faster than the victims of all those who'd been under siege before them. Now they lived, what they never thought would touch them.

"This can't be happening," CiCi says into her hands that she's clasped tightly around her mouth.

The professor is directing them to take cover, to hide under the desks. Their temporary tombs, should the shooter decide to focus on them.

Gunshots fire in rapid succession. No longer resembling that of fireworks or any excuse that could dull out their living nightmare.

Listening to their teacher as Audrey does the same in taking cover, the majority of the class does what they have been told to do by their designated leader.

CiCi's eyes drip with the tears she can't help but shed in the terror, while the rest of the faces around her light up with the glowing screens of their phones. Having forgotten hers in the dorm, CiCi wonders who will ever tell her father, her mother, just how sorry she was in not having the opportunity to say goodbye.

The professor calls 911, reporting their grim fate, but when CiCi scans the room for Dalton, she can't find him. The students cry into their phones as they talk to their parents, or friends trapped in other parts of the building. Others, take videos, maybe not understanding, that their last moments are devoted to their precious social media.

Perking up from underneath her desk, CiCi nearly knocks it over from the sudden scare of blood-curdling screams. Gunshots and pleas for their lives sound out in the room next to them. To the window, she finally notices Dalton.

He's attempting to unlatch them, trying to push them down past the safety feature. The goth girl is trying to help him, then gives up on Dalton's attempt and finds another way to freedom by handing him a paper weight from the teacher's desk.

"Dalton...what are you doing?!" CiCi cries out, trying to control her volume behind her hand that never left over her trembling mouth.

The jump from the second floor, was one that guaranteed broken bones, or death should they fall the wrong way. In CiCi's mind, it wasn't an option. Though, for Dalton and the girl in black helping him, it seemed to be the only one.

Agreeing with this idea, was the professor on the phone, who informs the 911 operator of their current plan.

"Throw it!" The teacher urges Dalton.

Immediately, Dalton winds it up and makes his pitch. The glass shatters within the large frame on impact.  

As the glass falls to the floor, CiCi can hear the boots. She's honed in, to the beat of their oncoming attack. Before the last of the glass can settle and the goth girl can make it out, bullets reign in from the glass doorway. Their would-be co-hero in black slumps down into the window's frame as the spray of bullets hits her in the head and back.

Taking on the bullets with her, was the teacher. His phone slips from his hand as he clutches his chest. On his blue dress shirt, two distinct wounds bring him vacant to life and he embraces the cold linoleum floor.

The class screams, then Audrey cries out in hysterics with the teacher slumped a mere inch from her shoes and the blood creeps toward her. As CiCi watches Dalton grab the broken Audrey from the floor, he ushers her to the window.

Frozen in her terror, in her uncertainty as to what option was safer, CiCi waits underneath her desk a row away, watching in horror, as the shooter reaches in through the broken glass he destroyed in the gunfire. He unlocks the door with his leather gloved hands. It's here she finally makes out that Dalton and Audrey are screaming her name, but there was no way she was going to find the courage to take that risk.

"He's in!" CiCi screams as the door flies open and slams into the painted brick wall.

The window is rushed with students able to take flight, forcing the hesitant Audrey to fall out of it to her possible death. As the rest jump without trepidation, the bullets spray out into the desks at random.

Her face soaked in hot tears, CiCi watches the shooter go down the first row. Abandoning his assault rifle and takes to a shotgun strapped over his shoulder. Patiently, he's loading the shells in the span of painstaking seconds. Their killer is in no rush, even when he hears the sirens in the distance.

For, they all knew, they would all be long dead before the cops would even dare to enter the building.

As he blows a bullet into the head of the girl hiding under the desk in the front row, he then shoots the next, then a third-row hider, and further on to the last hider in that row in his methodical method.

Choking on her own saliva, her own dread, CiCi can't help but think that it shouldn't end this way. In the desk behind her, the boy vomits a puddle of his anxiety onto himself. Urine coats her boots, staining them yellow and while she thinks at first it's from one of the dead bodies, she realizes it's from her own dissociation to her fate.

As the shooter makes it to the fourth row—her row—and starts to shoot again from the back, the seconds are counted with the short moments she has to live. When the last bullet from the chamber sounds, she learns she'll have this time given in the short now, to bolt for that open door as he reloads.

Though her feet don't meet the pace of her mind, she's lifting off on the delay of her wary wet ankles.

As she runs for the door, the wind she creates starts drying the tears from her cheeks. Her heart hammers in her throat, her ears, begging to escape from her tightening chest. Behind her own body, she can hear other footsteps. Those, who managed to find strength to run out with her.

The shots ring out, chasing after them in the spray of bullets belonging to the return of his assault rifle.  She doesn't dare look back. Though she waits, with each stride of her buckling feet, if she'll feel the pierce of a bullet, or will greet infinite blackness should his aim prove deadly.

As she turns the bend, making her way into the darkened hall, she passes the doorways of the classrooms he's hit before theirs. Though she hears no other footsteps behind her, not of the killer, nor of her fellow students, she's not sure to be relieved or guilty that she survived this far.

She breaks through the open door and the team of police scream a thousand orders for her.

Her hands fly up, but she's not even sure if her fingers met the height to where she aimed them. Still fearing that the shooter is at her heels, she doesn't stop moving forward should he finally catch up to her.

When she's dragged into the embrace of an officer that tells her repeatedly that she's safe, she cries again. letting go the scream of what she couldn't release in that overcrowding morgue.

Her mind ran wild in the imagination, that Dalton was in the line of people shot behind her that bolted. Or, dead from the gunshots that hit the students climbing out the window.

When seconds turned to ten minutes and the police finally made their way inside, she's given a phone by an officer.

Though she feels as if her insides are made of all the lead targeted inside the university today, she manages to voice out a single, "Hello," in hearing it's her father.

As he cries with her, the man of her life who never shed a single tear in her presence, speaks in Italian, but CiCi makes out every word he promises her.

He's coming for her, they're on their way--and it's all she wants to hear from him.

Though she'd wanted nothing more than her independence, to break away from her strict parents, she can't help but be grateful and need them more now than ever.

When the news breaks in on the police radios that the suspect is down, she's both happy, yet enraged. That psycho would never see the justice of men, nor pay for his crimes in this life. As she clutched the gold cross from her necklace, she prayed. Trusted, that God knew just what to do with him.

As the ambulance rolls out their gurneys, the direction they head catches CiCi's attention. The direction, where Dalton gave an escape route with the girl in all black. The goth girl, whose name CiCi can't conjure, went horribly judged. They'd made fun of her before today, like most of the students here. Yet, she was one who gave fight instead of flight alongside Dalton. Her parents, would never see her again and now, CiCi feared, Dalton's family would never see him again either.

CiCi's running to that direction to search for him and for Audrey, but she's restrained by officers at the line where they scour for both the living and the dead. All she can do now is wait with the rest of the spectators and escaped students mourning over the tragedy, as parents rush onto the scene finding their own interception from cops not letting them cross the line.

No gunfire reigns any further. Nothing but the sound of mother's broken cries fill the void.

//Soundtrack song: "The Loved Ones" - Sanders Bohlke

https://youtu.be/5rrv0TUMWaM

Author's note: Dedicated to the victims, the survivors, the families, the friends of those touched by these awful tragedies. Let's hope for an answer to stop all this madness soon. Thank you all for reading. Next chapter coming soon. <3