Part One
Students sat in rows before the stage, each being called up for their own special moment, their last moment of high school. Spectators in the audience behind them shed rivers of tears, excited to see their loved ones move onto a new stage of life. Everyone in a cap and gown was dry-eyed.
“We have finally concluded this year’s ceremony for the graduating class! Congratulations graduates!” The principal, Mr. Brown, stands in front of the audience on a stage, a podium blocks the view of his lower half. He tangents on and on about “what a year it had been,” and “the remarkable group of young adults in the audience.” Said young adults barely stir, some eyes void of emotion while others are filled with an unknown lust.
The man steps down from the podium as the graduates step unto the stage in a specific height-based order, each of them turning and facing the audience. The stage is filled to the brim, one could not distinguish the sleeve of a robe from the torso of another. The satin draped blue fabric glistens in the sunlight.
It’s a perfect day…until it’s not.
An blast shakes the Earth, screams erupt from the crowd below as the graduates onstage look down at the chaos, none of them flinch, not even a blink. One student holds a crude remote in their hand. There’s masses of flesh and organs and blood strewn about the surviving attendees and the bright, happy green lawn.
There’s shrieks of pain, shrieks of grief, of disbelief, and of fear. A little girl sits crying underneath the mussed corpse of what looked to once be her mother. Smoke rises from the sea of dead bodies and injured patrons. Pieces of earth stick up from the ground and mat the hair and skin of the survivors, all them covered in grime and gore and blood.
An unoccupied lower-half sits perched on a stained chair, the slim legs of the woman who’d been sitting there still remain crossed politely, even as the top half of her had been blown across the venue. Hands and arms are strewn about, some belong the survivors and others to the mass of corpses littering the area. The blast blew the head of a younger student that had been attending in celebration of their brother onto the stage, in front of the principal and for the graduating class to see front and center.
Said students calmly start to approach the edge of the stage, not one of them shaken by the grisly event that had taken place not even minutes earlier. They all jump from the stage, taking off their blue robes to expose a plethora of devices and weapons. Some hoot and holler with excitement, ready to mow down those still alive.
Someone takes the initiative to put on some thematic music, the sound of a rhythmic electric guitar rolls through the space.
“They said, oh! Teenagers scare the living shit out of me!”
A girl with dirty blonde hair jumps off the stage and onto an older man, who’d been trying to run away as best as he could. She drives a modest pocket knife through his left shoulder, bringing him down. She straddles the man and rips the blade out before driving it back in, over and over and over. She stabs at the man, blood coats her face as the music reverberates in the background.
Maniac smiles are shared within a group of boys decorated with dark clothes as they each swing a blunt object around in their hands. Arms swing and objects make contact with poor, poor citizens. A rusty nail that’d been crudely hammered into a baseball bat digs its way into a mother’s eye. Pulling back, the head of the nail yanks the eye from its socket as the woman screams at the top of her lungs, her left eye bobbing against her cheek.
One of his friends spits on the woman and laughs, he decides to finish her. With a powerful stomp, he drives the heel of his platform boots into the top of the woman’s head, pushing her to the ground until her skull is forced to break under the pressure. Even when her head splits and bleeds profusely, he does not stop until he can clearly see the brain matter scattered on the grass.
For fun, a third boy takes his mini axe and drives it into the spot between her shoulder blades, the bones in her back make a sickening cracking sound as the blade cuts into her. He continues to hack at her back until nothing distinguishable is left.
The song changes.
“Mad! You’re all mad!” A young teenage boy screams, he can’t be older than 15. Heads snap to him. He cowers back in fear, wishing and willing that he hadn’t been so careless. A girl walks up to him, curly hair a pretty dark brown and eyes a gorgeous blue. She steps closer and closer.
Once she’s close enough, she presses a nail against his jugular, it’s then that he realizes how sharp they are. She presses the acrylic to his skin, beads of blood welling up at the breaking point. He takes in a breath to speak and she shoves her thumb into his neck, other four fingers wrapping around it. Her other hand joins, opposite thumb piercing his skin as well. Hands grab in a desperate attempt to save his life, yet she continues to dig her nails into his throat, she can feel the squishy, wet inside of his throat as she strangles him.
Her eyes are devoid of any emotion as they stare into his, no remorse is detected as they watch him take his final breath. Once he’s mostly dead, she pulls her thumbs apart from each other, creating a gaping, bleeding hole in his flesh. She continues to stretch the skin until it rips and his neck is nothing more than a gaping hole, his head flops back at the lack of support. She drops the body and falls with it, leaning over the boy to dig her entire left hand into the chasm.
Gripping and pulling, she rips his throat from inside his body, his tongue from the very base, and his vocal chords are snapped into two. By the end of her assault, she’s absolutely covered in his blood, breaths heavy as her chest heaves with the effort. Her eyes are still blank as a sheet of paper. With the help of a bystanding friend, she lifts off his corpse.
