He turned off the pucks, then looked down at Jim.
Riiiiing!
His first thought was to haul back and kick the bastard in the head—
Riiiiing!
—but that faded. He knew Jim Marchuk, and this wasn’t him: not the old, inquisitive A-student with the inner monologue—
Riiiiing!
—and not the new philosopher’s zombie without one.
Riiiiing!
This sudden outbreak of violence had to be the result of what Menno himself had recently done to the poor boy.
Riiiiing!
The phone finally stopped, thank God. Menno was too winded to run away, and, damn it, if he left the boy lying here, knocked into unconsciousness, whoever eventually found him would doubtless call 911, and at the hospital they’d do an MRI and see the damage to his paralimbic system—and people would wonder how those fresh laser-carved lesions had been made.
Menno staggered over, found a chair, put the pucks in his lap, and closed his eyes for—
—for how long he didn’t know, but he was awoken by the sound of movement. Oh, God! On the floor, Jim was rolling onto his back. And then the phone rang again, just twice, its bell signaling round two.
37
What the hell? Where am I? How did I get here?
I looked at the window, and—
Blue sky?
Sunshine?
Trees covered with leaves?
But… but it’s January! How in the hell did I…?
My head hurt—but not from a hangover. I reached up to touch it, and—ouch! I’d banged it against something.
I rolled the other way, and there was Professor Warkentin, looking like someone had just kicked the living crap out of him.
I stared at him—really stared at him, locking my gaze on his fat face. Fucking guy was an asshole, pure and simple. An impediment. You could see it. Guy like that never should have been born. Waste of oxygen molecules. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but—
—but it didn’t matter. It was time to do something about it.
Seeing Jim stirring, Menno grabbed the hockey pucks and got up, but the student, still on the ground, shot his arms out and yanked hard again on Menno’s ankles. Menno lost his balance, falling backward, crashing to the floor. One of the hockey pucks went flying although he managed to keep hold of the other one.
Jim got up, dusted himself off, and scanned around the room. He spotted the baseball bat and picked it up from where it had landed, looking at it quizzically, as if he’d never seen it before. But then he turned and, gripping it with both hands, started coming toward Menno, who was still lying face-up. Menno rolled on his side, another jolt of pain going through him as he did so. The loose hockey puck was about four feet away. He started moving toward it.
Jim swung again with the club but managed to hit the floor instead of the rapidly beetling Menno, and the bat broke in half. Jim briefly held its stem up in front of him, the splintered end like frozen torch flame, then tossed it aside; it banged against a whiteboard-covered wall and clattered to the floor.
Menno scooped up the second puck, rolled over 180 degrees so that he was facing Jim again, and, with a sudden access of adrenaline, got to his feet and charged toward Jim, propelling him backward against the whiteboard, the dry-erase markers that had been stored on an aluminum shelf clattering to the floor. Menno slammed the pucks against Jim’s temples again, but—
Fuck!
He’d forgotten he’d turned them off. He quickly found the switch on the one in his right hand and thumbed it forward, but the other one had to be rotated single-handedly while he tried to reach its slider.
Jim spun himself and Menno around and drove a punch into Menno’s solar plexus, propelling him backward, his spine slamming against the whiteboard. The younger man pressed an open left palm against the center of Menno’s chest, pinning him, and he brought his right hand up to the edge of Menno’s jaw.
Menno was still trying to find the switch on the other puck. Jim’s thumb moved up, pressing hard into the lower part of Menno’s cheek, then he inched the digit farther upward, passing the side of Menno’s nose, then, repositioning it once more, and—
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
—digging it into Menno’s eye.
Menno brought his knee up into Jim’s groin. Jim grunted but continued to press in with his thumb and its hard, sharp nail. The pain from the marker ledge biting into Menno’s spine had seemed like agony—until he had this to compare it to, as—
Jesus Fucking God.
—as Jim’s thumb pierced his left eyeball.
Menno gasped. In a lightning-fast move, Jim switched hands, pushing Menno against the wall with his right one now and lifting his left.
Fighting nausea but still fumbling with the puck, Menno at last found its on switch. The pain was unbelievable, as—
God damn it!
—as Jim’s thumb burst through his other eyeball.
Menno groped to get the pucks over the student’s temporal lobes and—
Yes!
Judging by the sound, Jim must have collapsed at once like a sack of potatoes, but Menno couldn’t see that—he couldn’t see anything. He stumbled forward and tripped over what he guessed was one of Jim’s legs, splayed out across the tiles. Menno managed to regain his balance, made his way to the door, fumbled in a gray nothingness for the knob, and staggered out into the corridor.
Kayla Huron walked down the empty corridor. It was a warm, sunny day, and she was wearing cutoff jeans and a white blouse tied off above her navel. Since she’d broken up with Jim, she was back on the market and didn’t mind advertising—and all that time at the gym had been paying off.
Kayla had a summer job working in the physics department, which was perfect: the money she’d make would just about cover her third-year tuition.
U of M’s Fort Garry campus wasn’t that big; she’d caught sight of Jim a couple of times as he was coming out of the Tier Building—and had promptly hidden herself. She had zero interest in having contact with her many exes, and if she never saw James Marchuk again, it’d be too damn soon.
As she made her way across campus, listening to NSYNC on her Walkman, she’d kicked back a full bottle of Snapple. Thanks to it, a pit stop was in order, and so she nipped into the nearest building, taking the wide stairs up to the main floor two at time. To her left, down at the end, was a man, but the women’s room was to her right, and so she began to head that way, but—
But there had been something odd about the man. She turned around, and, yes, he was staggering, arms out in front as if groping along, and—
And, by God, it was Professor Warkentin. Even at this distance, she was sure that’s who it was. “Professor?” she called out. “Are you okay?”
He turned. “Help me,” he said weakly—or, at least, that’s what she thought she heard echoing down the corridor. She quickly jogged down to him, but found herself stopping short, her hand going to her mouth, when she saw blood streaming from his eyes…
No, no. Not from his eyes; from his eye sockets.
“My God, Professor, what happened? I—um. Where’s a pay phone? I can call 911.”
“No! No.”
“But sir!”
“Please.” The syllable was a gasp; he was clearly in agony. “Just get me to my friend’s office.”