Rage Quit (✅)

Chapter Eight

Nope, Still Thursday: Is Today Over Yet...?

The sounds of fighting and the smell of smoke assaulted Alex's senses the moment he entered the building.

The next sense to be assaulted was his sight, the lockers all standing bare with their doors thrown and dented on the ground.

Fire blazed in every trash can, the resulting smoke triggering fire alarms, but the sprinklers seemed to be either malfunctioning or turned off.

Alex sadly followed the trail of celebrity reading posters to what remained of his hallway. The library, where he had spent so many lunches and recesses, was now a husk of what it once was with books, computers, and even librarians laying blackened and unrecognizable.

Across from the burned memory was Alex's kindergarten classroom where his teacher had taught him creative writing and had once told him that if he put his mind to something, he could do anything.

"Thankfully that teacher left that same year..." Alex whispered to himself, happy that that teacher wasn't one of the charred corpses in that classroom.

"Hey, you!" a voice snapped Alex back to reality.

"Looks like fried pipsqueak is on the menu!" the short kid, who couldn't have been more than ten, said as he raised his flamethrower and began to release the deadly flame.

"Seriously?!" was what Alex found himself asking in disbelief as he picked up a sharp piece of locker door and threw it, severing the tubes connecting the child's flamethrower to the pack on his back, sending flammable fluid everywhere.

While the child was busy trying to stop it, Alex used the distraction to bridge the gap between them. He grabbed his attacker's head and tripped him into the brick wall where he knocked himself unconscious.

Alex pulled his victim out of the deadly liquid and examined the weapon on his back.

"How did he manage to get this past security...?" Alex muttered to himself in thought before the shadows of four individuals, all armed with flamethrowers, too, danced across the wall.

Thinking fast, Alex ran into the Lost and Found room and locked the door, keeping quiet as he watched the shadows under the crack of the door come to a stop.

With no chance of escaping, Alex began to look at all the lost coloring books, clothes, and toys that were collected over who knew how many years.

He remembered when he began going to the school three seemingly endless years ago. He had a small stack of Yu-gi-oh cards that he lost on the playground.

Poor little Alex had cried for days when his parents refused to replace them.

That's when Alex wondered why he had started to reminisce all of a sudden while the enemy lurked just outside.

"Probably because I'm going to die..." he said to himself with a shrug before making sure his out loud thinking hadn't alerted the firebugs.

"I wonder if my cards are still here..." Alex whispered to himself as he began looking through the several shelves of miscellaneous items. That's where he came across an oversized marionette stage.

"Who could possibly lose this?" Alex whispered to himself once more.

Suddenly the corpse of Vlad popped up as the curtain was drawn upward.