Plebs

by Jim Goforth

  In several lessons which Corey’s mother wasn't privy to, his father also taught him various questionable but effective procedures for modifying firearms.

  Corey was adept with an air rifle when he was barely knee high to a grasshopper and he progressed on up the ranks to .22 rifles and then handguns, large caliber rifles and shotguns.

  When they were scarcely into their teens Corey, Lee and Tim would all do a fair share of hunting, not to mention countless hours wiled away blasting tin cans, targets and other inanimate objects.

  Corey found more joy to be had in shooting these things than in the practice of hunting animals.

  He never particularly enjoyed firing at living beings; only in times of necessity would he do this.

  Tim on the other hand was something of a bloodthirsty ghoul and as he was an excellent shot with a rifle he claimed plenty of trophies and beasts to serve up for dinner.

  Corey was more of a hand gun aficionado. Though he was reasonable with the bigger guns his forte was pistols, and he was quite a decent marksman which accounted for him being able to plug two Plebs with two shots.

  He would have cited panic as being the chief reason why he hadn't checked the safety on Desiree's pistol before attempting to shoot at the attacking Plebs originally when on any other occasion he certainly would have done.

  Thinking of those things now, the good old childhood days spent with his lifelong friends made Corey feel wistful and reminiscent.

  It also served to dredge up painful memories both recent and not so recent.

  The recent event of course happened an hour or less ago on this very night, the violent murder of Tim.

  Had Tim still been here in this well armed party and clutching a rifle of some description, possibly the old Winchester he'd been so fond of in younger days, then the hordes of Plebs would be in some serious trouble.

  Unfortunately Tim wasn't here with them, he was dead; speared through the cranium in a savage act which would have extinguished his life instantaneously.

  The other sad recollections dragged up to the fore of Corey's thoughts involved both of his parents and their respective passing.

  Corey was about sixteen years of age when his father passed away.

  Plagued intensely by horrible memories of friends and acquaintances lost in battle and the atrocious things witnessed on duty, Corey’s father put an end to both these tragic remembrances and his own life by gassing himself in the family car.

  Less than six months later his mother also died, of heart failure so said the autopsy though Corey tended to think otherwise.

  He was of the belief that she simply couldn't go on without the presence of her life partner and simply gave up on living.

  In those six months before she died Corey noticed the spirit simply vanish from her being, she was morbid and agitated as though she could hardly wait to abandon her earthly body and meet up with her love on some different plane of existence.

  In any case, at sixteen Corey inherited a decent completely furnished two storey palatial abode filled with firearms, alcohol, army memorabilia and truckloads of other odds and ends.

  Funnily enough, not too long after that, Corey's popularity at school shot up to an all time high.

  He had always been something of an outsider, popular only by association since Tim one of his two best mates was one of the most adored kids in school.

  Once Corey ended up dwelling alone, no parents and as an only child, no siblings, he too became somewhat popular though he knew it wasn't on his own merits.

  It was his house; a residence devoid of any parental supervision was the ultimate party destination and therefore for a while Corey, Tim and Lee along with several others who joined their gang (including Peter Molina who'd celebrated his birthday tonight) became legendary party hosts.

  Always respectful and mindful of the firearm safety taught to him, Corey managed to keep all guns and implements of danger safely locked away during these riotous drunken affairs.

  Though common sense often eluded him with some of the activities he chose to engage in, at heart he was quite a sensible lad and knew when to keep fun separate from danger so nobody was ever allowed to even know he kept firearms in abundance on the property aside from Tim and Lee who knew better than to broadcast the fact.

  These frivolous occasions, this non-stop partying and carrying on had to come to an end as everything ultimately does, and they did under particularly tragic circumstances.

  It was one fateful night, an end of year blast organised as usual by Tim the party planner.

  Though Corey owned the house Tim the Popularity King was always the go-getter, the organiser of such events, the man to be counted on for filling the rooms up with hot chicks and ensuring everybody had a good time.

  It was the end of tenth grade, an occasion to be celebrated by various people.

  Corey was merely celebrating the end of another school year while his two partners in crime Tim and Lee were heralding the end of school for good.

  While Corey, oddly enough the only one with no parents to force him to return to school, was electing to study for two further years, Lee and Tim, academic fuck ups the pair of them, were choosing not to.

  It was a hollow celebration for Corey because his mates wouldn’t be with him when next he returned to school and that depressed him greatly.

  Fortunately Peter and a couple of others in the crew were planning to return and commence further studies but still, it wouldn’t be the same without Tim and Lee around.

  While this fact had him down in the dumps for a while it was still a long way off before school kick started again so Corey chose not to dwell on it and decided to get excited about the party instead.

  He planned to have a great night; half the school would be there courtesy of Tim and his very generous broad band invitations, not to mention a lot of very slutty girls from surrounding schools.

  It was going to be the biggest party yet held at the Somerset residence and it was going to be one hell of a blast.

  For a while it was; alcohol flowing freely, music pumping, kids everywhere just cutting loose and having fun, nobody causing any more trouble than a few minor breakages and a couple of overzealous cheap drunks making messes of themselves, throwing up and passing out in the back yard.

  Then, uninvited, Greg Scanlon and his troublemaking team of hoods turned up to gatecrash the event.

  Corey's dealings with Greg Scanlon and his six strong posse were minimal though he had run into them on occasion with differing results.

  Lee on the other hand had many run-ins with the nasty Scanlon crew since Lee had been a punching bag of Scanlon's ever since the earliest grades of school.

  Greg Scanlon was the bane of Lee Hunters existence and it was fair to say Scanlon may have been a chief motivation behind Lee turning onto smoking marijuana to faze himself out of the reality of being bullied.

  Scanlon never once missed a single opportunity to tease, taunt, torment and terrorize Lee simply because he could.

  Until Lee became friends with big Tim Hayworth he was bullied by Scanlon's despicable cronies almost on a daily basis. This continued infrequently after, though never in Tim's presence.

  Events were somewhat foggy in the minds of most at the party that night, but everybody remembered Scanlon and co. barging into the middle of the house, making rude inappropriate comments to the females, trying to pick fights, trying to steal alcohol and generally making prime nuisances of themselves.

  "Where's that fucking hippy Hunter?" Scanlon asked.

  "Upstairs," somebody replied helpfully.

  Scanlon headed upstairs to find his target.

  Later Scanlon was seen leaning over the railing looking down on the lower floor partyers.

  The next thing anybody remembered was Scanlon falling over the railing and taking a dive.

  Nobody caught him or got in the way.

  He fell to the bottom, landed on his head, broke his neck and died instantly.

 
There was a police investigation, but the death of Greg Scanlon was ruled to be 'accidental, deceased was very intoxicated and unaware of the danger to his own personal safety by leaning out (over the railing) a perilous distance at a great height'.

  Only Corey and Tim knew, after Lee confided in them, that Scanlon had been pushed to his death. By Lee.

  That secret Tim had taken to his grave.

  Scanlon's boys, not knowing just how close to the mark they were, resolutely swore to the police on the scene that their fearless leader had been pushed from the railing.

  Their events of the story were not taken seriously; they were all badly inebriated and they were violent louts who were trespassing as it was, having not been invited to the party.

  Really nobody at the party was sober enough to constitute being a reliable witness and with the majority of folk claiming Scanlon had fallen under accidental circumstances that was the final ruling in the death.

  Lee was of course questioned considering his name came up during interviews with Scanlon's chumps, but he stoically stood by his story that he'd been in a bedroom with a girl.

  His story was backed by hers, though unbeknownst to her Lee left the bedroom for that one single minute it had taken to send Scanlon over the railing.

  The book was closed on the event, but it also brought about the end of the partying.

  After that only Corey's close mates gathered at the Somerset house.

  Corey never saw Lee as a cold blooded murderer or anything of the sort. Both he and Tim saw him for what he was, just a bullied kid who had finally taken enough pushing and pushed back.

  Unfortunately the push cost a human life, but Corey knew Lee hadn't planned to kill Scanlon.

  Since a ruling had been made on the event and it had been classified as a tragic accident Corey and Tim elected to call it an accident also.

  The trio had never spoken of it again and with Tim now dead, they never would.

  In the twenty two years spent on this planet Corey Somerset had lived a rollercoaster life, through some good times and some bad, but he'd never experienced anything of the magnitude he was experiencing right now.

  Even the unfortunate death of Greg 'Bullyboy' Scanlon paled into a mere insignificance compared to the absolutely beyond bizarre scenario he was currently faced with.

  To recap, he was standing on the outskirts of what had once apparently been a fully functional village for a wild tribe of resilient young women with a loaded pistol in his hand, a girl on his arm, one of his two best friends with him, the other dead.

  The aforementioned village was a giant smoking black pockmark on the face of the earth littered with burnt items and incinerated body parts, targeted by the same bunch of weird inhuman beings who'd brutally murdered his other best friend.

  He was madly in love with a strange, achingly beautiful woman he barely knew and her posse of surviving friends were walking towards them, grim faced and armed for combat.

  He had fired upon two of the murderous beasts, killing one and feeling nothing more for it than if he'd stepped on a cockroach and he knew deep in his heart that the fun was only just beginning.

  CHAPTER 14

  At last they were there, the eight strong army of women lead by Melissa and as they arrived Desiree ran to them, flinging arms around both Melissa and Blaise.

  "I thought you were dead!" She exclaimed, squeezing both of her friends with enough ferocity to crack bone.

  Blaise and Melissa embraced her with their free arms then the trio separated.

  "Enough of our people are dead," Melissa said grimly, eyes darting from Desiree to Corey and then to Lee and Tash.

  At the mention of this, the six other women in the posse looked more distraught and sickened than they already had.

  With the exception of Blaise and Melissa, none of the girls would look at the smoking mess to their right, refusing to gaze upon the carnage.

  All of them wore pale ghostly faces with puffy bloodshot eyes which were full of nervous apprehension, terror and nausea.

  The burning smell pervading the air was one of death and charcoal meat and it was only too understandable as to why so many of them looked sick.

  Though there was very little left burning but stubborn sections of housing, which steadfastly refused to die as quickly and suddenly as the rest of the village, it was still a horrible scene to behold, the massive black circle of devastation.

  "Where's Erica?" Asked Melissa as Blaise queried virtually simultaneously.

  "Where is Tim?"

  Tasha hung her head in deep despair and Corey, flinging a covert glance in the direction of Lee saw tears shimmering in his friend’s eyes.

  "They...they're both dead," he said, hating those words as they tumbled out of his mouth, hating the fact that they were so painfully despairingly true.

  Tim shouldn't be dead. He should be here with them, complimenting Blaise on what a great ass she had, antagonising Melissa by telling her he'd love to see her naked, the lewd, crude, uncouth Tim so full of exuberant life.

  He should be here but he wasn't. He was gone. For good.

  The tears sparkling in the eyes of Lee were tears which eluded Corey.

  He felt dry and numb.

  "The Plebs killed them both," spoke up Tasha unnecessarily, her voice barely more than a choking hoarse whisper. "Desi and Corey came and saved me while they were out but Erica...she...she was already dead. They tortured us...and she died."

  Tasha still had her head slumped, so low in fact it was as if she was trying to dig the point of her chin into her chest.

  As she mumbled something else about Erica's plight the feelings of sheer desolation overtook her again and she quietly began to cry, soft sobs barely heard by anybody else.

  Her shoulders shook and Lee, his own eyes brimming with the tears for the death of his own friend, placed a comforting arm about her.

  The girl with the pink and blue hair, Rachel, also began to weep as did many of the others.

  Melissa and Blaise did not.

  Blaise's pretty face hardened immeasurably and her hand tightened on the pistol grip of her shotgun so firm that her knuckles went white.

  Furious rage sparked like a match on flint in the depths of her green eyes and in those eyes Corey caught a glimpse of what he imagined to be the real Blaise, the genuine dangerous Blaise who masqueraded as a promiscuous good time girl, dancing and capering, flaunting bare buttocks in a miniscule thong and forever spouting suggestive comments.

  That girl, the slutty skimpy dressing Blaise masked the true Blaise or so Corey was beginning to believe, and if so maybe she was more to be feared than her openly intimidating leader.

  "Motherfuckers," snarled Blaise, her voice as hard as the set of her face.

  "Corey shot two," Desiree informed them. "Killed one. I got another."

  "Good work Corey," Melissa said. "Hope you're ready to shoot more."

  Corey gestured at the scorched devastation of the village and both Blaise and Melissa turned their steely eyed gazes towards it.

  "How...how did they do this?" Corey queried hesitantly, not certain if it was a subject to be broached though it was certainly an obvious one.

  "The Plebs? Wasn't just them," Melissa answered cryptically.

  Puzzled looks and expressions of consternation greeted this unclear remark. For one irrational moment of inanity Corey believed that Melissa was perhaps referring to him and Lee, as if suggesting that they were somehow behind the devastating fire.

  Just before he opened his mouth to protest this unlikely accusation he let his mind do a bit of thinking for a change, realising that had Melissa and company truly believed that he and Lee were guilty of the mass murder and arson attack surely the pair of them would have been shot on sight.

  As nobody had yet trained a gun on him and Lee, let alone fired off any shots at them, the couple could hardly be the culprits Melissa spoke of.

  "How do you mean?" This from Desiree.

  Corey noticed that
the expression on Blaise's pretty face seemed to get darker and darker; simmering with a furious rage she was barely managing to restrain.

  While the other ladies in the survivor party continued to cry for a variety of lost comrades, Blaise looked to be approaching boiling point.

  Melissa was calm, but that apparently unruffled attitude most likely cleverly masked a seething angry interior which mirrored that of Blaise.

  "Well they were there alright," Melissa continued. "But they weren't the ringleaders. They were just the donkeys, doing all the hard work."

  Corey still wasn't following. Either he was incredibly obtuse or Melissa just wasn't explaining herself very clearly.

  He opted for the latter of the two likelihoods since the rest of his party didn't appear to have many more clues than he did.

  "Who were the ringleaders?"

  "It would appear..." Melissa said slowly. "That somebody in the camp has been thinking of doing a little Lord of the Flies scenario. And planning it for a long, long time."

  Once again firmly grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick Corey blithely assumed she was speaking of Desiree, choosing to follow the boys to the Pleb house and abandoning the camp.

  Of course he was wrong as he saw angry comprehension blaze in Desiree's eyes, at the same time they widened in shock.

  "You don't mean...?"

  "Yep." Nodded Blaise, her first offerings to the conversation. "Raven. That fucking backstabbing psychopathic bitch Raven. And Jett."

  "And a bunch of fucking sheep seduced by Raven's bullshit delusions," Melissa added venomously.

  This stunning revelation dropped neatly into the ears of Corey, Desiree, Lee and Tasha exploding with all the damaging ferocity of a cleverly planted bomb.

  Had Raven really done this? Had she really instigated a power struggle of sorts, divided the women tribe and then commandeered the thoughtless Plebs to destroy her people’s camp and murder her opposers?

  Though Corey was absolutely dumbfounded by Melissa and Blaise's statements labeling somebody he thought was their friend and ally as the black hearted cold blooded mastermind of the massacre, he supposed he shouldn't really have been surprised.