Coagulation

Chapter 3: Discourse Awakening

Coagulation

Discourse Awakening 

Reality was a blur from fantasy, and fantasy was a blur in the wake of reality. It was really hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Maybe neither of them had an ending or a beginning. They might have been one.

David forgot when he stepped onto the school bus. No recollection or memory came to mind when he thought about it. Only the haunting look of Anaheim and that statue, whatever it was, stuck with him.

‘I’ve had a long day, obviously.’ It was the obvious answer. What he saw was a product of delusion. That made the most sense out of all other possibilities that his mind could come up with.

The teen walked to the back of the bus and slid into his seat. He peered out the window and watched the rest of the students in the line march onto the bus; some were chattering with their friends, others were tapping away on their phones. A few did nothing at all, walking on without a care in the world.

His hazels looked past the line of people and between the two buses next to his. The cafeteria was in plain view behind them. He saw blood leaking out of the patio, running into the drainage system on the sidewalk. Two officers stood guard at both entrances, while others carried the limp bodies of the delinquents on their shoulders.

‘That’s justice for you.’ In an ideal world, justice was considered to be an act of preserving order through imprisonment. You murder someone, and you either get a life sentence or a death sentence depending on what was done and what transpired afterward. For rape, being neutered without anesthetics was always the preferred punishment; others included death by toys. For all misdemeanor charges and below, you’d lose a limb corresponding to the type of crime you committed.

But this was the real world. An eye for an eye was the punishment here. You commit a crime, then be prepared to experience it when the police apprehend you.

That wasn’t to say that all eye-for-eye punishments were fair. ‘Rapists are turned into cops, murderers and sadists are allowed to serve in the military.’ Chaos was a more appropriate term for the system out here, David thought.

He spared himself the view of the duo that had entered the patio before. If the flashes from the phones were any indication, they both got beaten very badly.

“The day is over.” He said quietly to no one. The other buses outside began to move around the circle, crawling out of the school parking lot like a legless centipede. His soon followed; the low rumble of the engine and the slight bounce of the wheels enticed him to nap. The chances of returning to that ocean of blood kept him from resting his head against the warm window.

So instead, he focused on the chatter as the bus moved out of the circle, entering the main stretch of road that would take it to the highway and a busy intersection. Younger students carelessly threw around gossip and flaunted their superficial popularity with their fake friends. Slightly older students talked about their future, their relationships, sex and shit pertaining to it. People his age either slept or watched recaps on the live Slaughter Faucet shows hosted in the heart of the capital further south of here. Slaughter Faucet was a show focused primarily around torture, rape, forced marches through miniature biospheres experiencing unrealistic climate change and, basically, suffering of others. They found solace in the misery, in the pain that those unfortunate people were forced to undergo. He failed to understand the reasoning behind it all.

The bus whipped around the corner of an intersection at speeds it wasn’t supposed to be going. Dargo, the bus driver, loved to show how “different” he was from the other drivers from time to time, at the cost of scaring his passengers shitless. Looked like he was at it again today, swerving between lanes, smashing his foot against the gas pedal, brushing the nose of the bus against various vehicles and screaming obscenities until his neck veins bulged and his face turned a deadly purple.