My eyes scanned through the sickening photographs of the school. The crowds of screaming students, close-ups of crying teachers, zoomed in pictures of bullet holes in the windows of the classroom, and a terrifying black and white grainy video surveillance still shot of a lone gunman walking the hallway of the school, a duffle bag full of firearms hung from his shoulder. At the end of first period, each one of those guns would be emptied of bullets.
A shuddering fear gripped me as my eyes scoured the pictures. My tears fell and my stomach rolled with each new photograph. My cold trembling fingers covered my mouth and my chest tingled, as I scrolled through the pictures of each dead student. The beautiful innocent faces of each dead student.
Dead students.
Photographs of the three teachers, and their families that would never see them again.
The question whispered in my mind like the wind, slow at first, then picking up speed and howling through my skull. Was Kade a sick sadistic killer? Kade murdered those children. How can he do such a thing? My God…no wonder people said he was the devil. Why wasn’t he in prison? Was it because he was a juvenile when he murdered a classroom full of innocent kids? Through the blur of tears, I finally found my answers.
Kade Grayson, sixteen-year-old high school junior was the only survivor in the entire junior class, although severely wounded. The gunman, sixteen-year-old high school junior, Thomas McKadley, committed suicide after the attacks by a gunshot wound to the head. In addition to the shootings, the disturbing and extensively planned attack involved propane tanks converted to bombs placed at each exit of the school, and two explosive devices rigged in a car and eight under the stands of the gymnasium.
Oh, my God.
Kade.
What do I even do with that? What do you do? How do you get over that? Fucking hell. That was just like Columbine. How…how do you live from there? Oh God. Sixteen? Severely wounded? Watched his entire class slaughtered.
How do you go on?
My chest tightened and my throat thickened with knots I couldn’t swallow. A thick sheen of guilt and sweat covered my skin. I assumed Kade was a killer, just as he assumed I was a stripper. Kade was a man who lived through horror, real life horror. Of course, he would be untrusting and full of hate and rage. That’s a fucking given when people are trying to kill you. You don’t get over that. You never get over that; it scars you.
How did he live through that? How did he deal with it?
I googled Cory Thomas next, just like Dylan told me to, with tears stinging my eyes and racing down my cheeks. Websites upon websites, fan sites, fan forums, blogs, reading groups, Facebook pages and fan-fiction; it was an endless supply of people who loved this obviously incredible reclusive author. His readers loved him. That is how he dealt with it, he wrote about it.
I clicked on his list of books; there were hundreds of them. Hundreds.
All he did was write. All he did was hide from the world and write.
His latest book, Behind Green Doors, was independently published just the day before. There was a crazed buzz about it. Reviews and comments in forums spoke about it being his best work to date, a mixture of erotic horror, and thriller with a love story twisted inside of it. I downloaded it to my eReader, then cleaned up my mess of coffee, made a new cup and crawled into a ball on the couch. Wanting. Needing to climb into the mind of this man, this man who had seen mayhem first hand and had tried his best to live with it. I knew all too well how scary and real his nightmares might be. Trying to wipe away the last of my tears, my raw eyes strained to see my eReader.
Two beautiful green eyes graced the cover of the eBook, floating in darkness. I hadn’t read a horror book in ages. I swiped the page and stopped on his dedication page, spilling my coffee for the second time in my lap.
For the mysterious green-eyed waitress
She is now my favorite flavor
What the fuck? What the fucking FUCK? I stood up, dropped my eReader and paced the room, coffee still dripping off my shirt. He made me lose two fucking cups of coffee. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I was going to need an entire bottle of wine to read the rest of this shit.
I changed my clothes. Again. My body was shaking, worse than it normally did. I was livid. I was shocked. I was…I was smiling. Why the FUCK was I smiling? This was bad. This had BAD written all the fuck over it. This…this is just a morbid filled ice cream cone dipped in psycho flavored sprinkles. My mind was racing, from pictures of the murders he witnessed as a sixteen-year-old boy, to the erotic violently sensual way he kissed me, to the lone man sitting in a diner, bloody and devoid of any expression, emotionally detached from the rest of the world. The room was literally spinning around me, pulling me under, and panic was pumping straight adrenaline through my veins.
Picking up my eReader, I tried again, taking a deep breath and counting backwards from twenty. I scanned the words on the device until my eyes blurred from tears…and my heart broke from…no, for Kade.
I can clearly remember the first time I met her. Those brilliant green eyes hiding all her secrets, keeping them from me… Like a wrecking ball, she came in, crumbling my walls into dust… She was as broken as I was…I could see some sort of pain in those green depths, some sort of mirrored knowledge that the world sucked. And, I thought to myself…finally…finally someone on my side of the fishbowl. I wanted to know what haunted her and hold hands in the darkness…together…
Blood. Gore. More blood and gore. By the fourth chapter, I was sure the male main character was a fucking serial killer.
As soon as my lips touched hers, her smile wandered its way to my mouth. I loved the softness of her lips, the warmth of her tongue, the way she moved her mouth over mine, her body leaned closer against me. “You make me smile when your lips are on mine, like I’m borrowing your happiness, like it’s wiping off on me. Maybe I’m just stealing it, I don’t know. All I know is that it gives me a calmness, a happiness I never thought I could feel…you give me a reason…”
She was mine, and no other’s. Only my lips could kiss hers. Only my hands could hold hers. Only my body could sink deep inside her between those smooth ivory thighs…And only she could tame the beast I was. Only she could quench the thirst I hungered after, and coax the monster inside me to be a man again, if only a broken one…
More carnage. An eerily true to life decapitation scene from an accident, and wait…by chapter twenty, I believed the female character might have been the serial killer. This book…this book was dragging me to the dark dungeon of my own psyche where I did not wish to linger. Holy crap, I just got mindfucked. The book ended with a cliffhanger that made me scream. Like literally, scream. Out loud. His words were like liquid poetry, emotion dripping thickly off of every single sentence. It made my heart thunder in my chest and ache for the characters. They were written so close in likeness to both Kade and me, right down to the way my hands trembled and twisted napkins when I got nervous, to the destructive and angry way he tugged on his hair. The scenes of carnage, the gruesomely horrific violence, were so real and terrifying that I found myself gripping the edges of the couch cushions with anxiety.
Is that why the people in this town think he’s the devil? Because he writes horror-fiction? That’s absurd.