FicWad

Chapter 40: Bloodrush

“We’ll get in trouble,” the blonde girl hissed worriedly, but she did not attempt to yank her hand free from Lucas, who was holding it on his own.

“Since when has that bothered you?” he laughed, keeping his voice lowered as well. They had to be quiet if they didn’t want to get caught. They were in the middle of a school hall, behind a corner which Lucas glanced over to check if the coast was clear.

“It’s like you don’t know me at all,” Gia nudged his arm lightly with a small smile. “We should be in math right now. Do you realize that this is our senior year? If we get in trouble and they expel us, we’ll never get to college and that means I’ll never get away from my dad, and I think we both know -”

Lucas cut her off from the rambling by covering her lips with his own. She could feel him grin, and broke the kiss after a moment.

“This is all a big joke to you, isn’t it?” she asked. Strangely, she wasn’t nearly as worried anymore. Skipping a class was nothing new; she had done plenty of that while living with her mother, and sacrificing an hour of math for the sake of making out with Lucas in the bathrooms did seem rather fun. However, she really didn’t want to get caught.

Lucas glanced over the corner once again; the group of three teachers in the corridor were still there, deep in their conversation. He groaned in frustration. The only way out was past them.

“Oh well,” he sighed and shrugged his shoulders, “looks like we’re just going to have to jump out of a window.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Or we could try the emergency exit?”

“That would set the fire alarms off,” she reminded him. “Let’s go to class, we can say we had headache and went to see the nurse or something.”

“Or,” he began to say and forcibly pulled her body very close to his, so that her she was pressed against him and their faces were so close that their lips were only inches away from touching. “If we’re very quiet... We could do it here.”

Gia felt a shiver go down her spine when his lips grazed hers so softly that it felt like a feather, and she practically melted when he pressed them against the corner of her mouth. His hands snaked around her slim body, and Gia didn’t know what else to do but succumb to his actions. It was Gia who hungrily deepened the kiss, wanting him. While they hadn’t exactly had sex in months, not since that one unfortunate time in the summer right after she had moved back to Jersey and Frank had caught them half naked on the couch, they had done a lot of other things. It was usually Gia who stopped things before they went too far, but she’d noticed that it was starting to get a bit difficult to do.

“What if someone walks by and sees us?” she managed to gasp out when he moved down to her neck, kissing that spot right below her jaw that made her crazy. He knew her a bit too well, and that was part of the reason she found it difficult to say no. He knew how to drive her insane in need of him.

“Gia,” he said in a low, husky voice. “Let’s skip the whole day and go to my place.”

The blonde snorted out a laugh as quietly as she could. The three teachers were still standing in the corridor. “I have a physics class today, I can’t.”

“Come on,” he pleaded, burying his face into the crook of her neck. He planted a kiss there, tempting her. And she was about to give in, to drag him past those teachers, run to his car and do unspeakable things to him right there on the parking lot, when both of their heads shot up in surprise. There was a loud bang from upstairs.

“What was that?” Lucas gasped, looking up at the ceiling. They listened, frozen in their places, as after a moment of eerie silence, there were muffled screams and more loud bangs. Moments later, there were more screams from other classrooms as the students attempted to escape the classrooms which the teachers had locked shut. They didn’t know why, or who was doing it, but someone had brought a gun and was shooting.

“We need to go,” Lucas decided and grabbed her hand, pulling her.

“Wait! Wouldn’t we be safer in the classroom?” Gia asked, panic now filling her head.

“They wouldn’t let us in, they’ll just assume we’re the crazy people with the guns!”

Gia tried to find the words to protest, but unfortunately, she didn’t handle situations like this as well as Lucas did. Their best choice might’ve been to be inside a locked classroom and wait until the whole thing blows over, and not run on the corridors with a lunatic with a gun on the loose. But they had no choice.

“Should we call the police?” Gia asked him as they were hurrying along the hallways. They stopped at every corner to check if the coast was clear. They hadn’t seen anybody yet. Actually, it was a bit too quiet.

“No, the teachers have phones, I’m sure they’ve already called,” he assured her and led her further. They were almost at the large staircase that would take them down and to the front doors.

Gia actually screamed out in surprise when a tall boy their age appeared from behind a corner. She vaguely recognized her, she remembered seeing him in the school halls once or twice, but that was all. He looked perfectly calm, with that gun in hand. He was standing in the middle of the corridor, between Gia and Lucas and the stairs. For a moment they were all silent, Gia and Lucas both staring at the gun, and the third teen staring at the two before him. Slowly he raised his arm and the gun with it, pointing it directly at them.

“You don’t have to do that,” Lucas stated in a way that he hoped would be calming. He wanted to look around for a way to escape and hoped someone would come to them, but heard nothing and didn’t dare to look away from the gun. “Put down the gun, please.”

While Lucas actually tried to do something about the situation, all Gia could think that they were both going to die. She didn’t like guns, at all. She was practically paralyzed.

The guy didn’t reply, only shifted the gun slightly so that instead of Lucas, it was now pointing at Gia.

“Hey, if you’re going to shoot someone, shoot me,” Lucas begged. Having a gun pointed at him was of course alarming, but for some reason, when it pointed at his girlfriend, the fright grew to a level of terror. He had never wished this much that he’d gone to a math class.

It was becoming clear that the guy didn’t hear a word he said. He simply stood there, staring at them, as if debating in which order he wanted to kill them in. Which, he probably was. Still, Lucas couldn’t help but try to talk him out of it. There was nothing else he could do, except maybe try to wrestle the gun away from him, which would probably just result in all three of them getting shot.

“I know you probably think you need to do this, but we haven’t done anything to you,” he tried to reason with the guy. “You don’t need to shoot us, just -”

“Let us go, please!” Gia pleaded, finally having opened her mouth. The entire situation seemed absurd, but she did realize that this guy might actually shoot them dead. “We don’t even know you!”

Gia didn’t know if it was something about what she had said, but the guy’s calm expression turned to a dark frown and in one swift motion, he pulled the trigger.

Everything happened so fast, too fast for Gia’s brain to register it. For a short second when the bullet left the mouth of the gun, Gia felt panic. She had no time to react, but Lucas was different. The first thing Gia realized was that she had fallen under the heavy weight of the boy who had jumped on her. He fell on top of her, so it was difficult for her to see what was happening. One thing she did see. The boy with the gun was gone, she heard his running footsteps.

“Lucas,” she gasped, trying to push him off of herself. But when he only fell right next to her, that’s when she realized what had happened. He hadn’t only pushed her out of the bullet’s way, he had been the one to receive it. A bloody red flower was forming on his chest, staining the plaid fabric of his shirt. “Lucas?” Gia repeated, crawling to her knees from the half-sitting position she had been in. She crouched over him, hastily ripping open his shirt. There was so much blood coming from the hole in his skin. She stared at it in panic and was about to scream for help when she felt him grab her bloody hand. She looked into his eyes, and realized how scared he was. He didn’t speak, but his eyes told everything. His face was twisted from the pain.

“Oh god,” she cried, tears falling onto his chest, mixing with the blood. “Don’t die, please. I love you, don’t leave me,” she pleaded, and pressed her hands on the wound, trying to stop the bleeding. She had no idea what to do, so she shouted for help. Moments later she heard footsteps coming their way.

A few policemen rushed over to them, and one of them asked questions about the shooter. Gia could only point to the direction where the boy had ran off to, and when all but one of them ran, the one stayed with the two of them. The rest was a blur. Gia could only hold on to Lucas until the paramedics came and hauled him away. He was still breathing at that point, but oh, there was so much blood. She rushed after them, refusing to let him out of her sight. She didn’t care that she was covered in his blood, she didn’t care that the policeman wanted to talk to her, and she didn’t dare look back at the dark red puddle of blood they left behind.

She followed them to the ambulances outside, barely even acknowledging the other people, wounded or not. Before the paramedics loaded the stretcher into the ambulance Lucas grabbed her hand once again and opened his mouth to speak. He couldn’t say what he wanted to, because before he could, one of the paramedics forced Gia to step away. She did, but felt like she shouldn’t let go of his hand. It was like letting him go altogether, allowing him to step somewhere behind her reach. Feeling useless and guilty, she watched them lift the stretcher to the back of the ambulance.

She didn’t know how much time passed. Gia dragged her feet to the nearest stairs and sat there. If she hadn’t sat down, she knew she would’ve lost her balance and fallen. She felt light-headed. As she sat there, people rushed by her. She didn’t know if the guy had been caught yet, but at this point she didn’t care. She wanted the guy to die for what he did to Lucas, but first she wanted to know that her boyfriend would be alright.

Vaguely she realized that her father had rushed to her. Strange, she thought, the way he’d gotten there so fast. Then again, this was probably all over the news already. Of course he would run straight into a shooting scene if his kid was in the middle of it.

She brushed off his questions of why she was covered in blood, if she was hurt, and of what had happened. None of that mattered. “Dad?” she choked out.

“What is it?” he asked, expecting the worst. Had she been shot? Was she bleeding somewhere?

“They took Lucas,” Gia said, more tears pouring out of her eyes and down her blood-stained cheeks.

“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” was the first thing he said as he hauled her up from the stairs and walked her to his car. She followed quickly; she had to see him. All that could fit into her head was that she couldn’t lose Lucas, not now, not ever.

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A/N: Last chappy today! YAY! I'm so glad we could end this triple post in such cheerful moods :) See you next time! Make good choices, stay away from crack cocaine!