Kung Fu High School

by Ryan Gattis

  Jimmy ducked a trombone. Some Blades had just emerged from the band room to our left and must've grabbed the only weapons they could find. The only things heavy. Slightly dizzy, I pushed myself up along the wall as Jimmy took a trumpet away from a Blade and then started whacking her in the legs with it, right on the kneecaps and then he really started moving. His whole body was a storm cloud and his limbs were bolts of lightning. Seriously, there was no other way to describe Jimmy as he sped his movements up like the Bionic Man, as if everything he had done previously was actually Jimmy slow-mo: completely surrounded by five kids, he lashed out with a kick in front of him that smashed a pelvis, spun and slung out both arms in what I think were punches and both kids went down grabbing their throats, but as they were falling, before they even hit the ground, Jimmy twisted away from a lame kick like it wasn't even there and powered the Blade in front of him into the wall next to me before unleashing the most wicked roundhouse I've ever seen on the last one, fully bending the trombone into a forty-five-degree angle like it was a paper clip before kicking the kid to the ground with a speed not unlike Dermoody's shotgun blasts.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  I could only nod and hope that the twinge at the base of my skull wasn't about to become a gorilla-sized headache. Or worse, the old one coming back, the fist crammed into my brain stem. The tumor.

  Jimmy pulled the door open and we entered the darkened theater at the back, looking down on the seats and the stage. I made sure the door didn't make any noise when it shut.

  The theater itself was as old as the school, but Ridley was having it redone. The carpeting once affixed to the outer concrete walls had been completely torn out and now it was just huge curved slabs with tiny chunks of said carpet still sticking to the wall where the glue was too strong. Eventually acoustic-friendly panels would get socketed in but not until much later, not until seats'd been torn out and boxes added.

  As it happened, the seating was split into four sections, with two wing groups on the outsides, and one large middle section that was cut in half by an elevated wooden walkway. It stopped just short of the abbreviated orchestra pit and led to the light and sound booth, which could only be accessed by a ladder and basically looked like a diorama designed by a six-year-old: a spray-painted black shoe box stood on its end with a rectangular hole cut out at the top that had a big black table inside, filled with buttons and lights.

  Looked like whoever was in there was just learning because the trio on the stage kept getting hit with alternating hues of red and orange lighting: on, off, on, off. The stage went blue.

  "Enough with the fucking lighting! Let them act!" someone screamed from the front row, momentarily shocking the actors on stage.

  It was Ridley.

  THE FINALE

  Ridley must've been pretty confident that everything was going to work out since he was sitting in the front row, just watching the play rehearsal, when we walked in. Act I, Scene iv of Hamlet, the very beginning of it, with Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus on the platform. But the platform in question was just an awful twelve-foot-tall canvas painted with big gray bricks to look like the side of an old castle but really it looked more like misshapen LEGOs. I didn't even need to see behind it to know that it was probably built like a tree-house landing.

  Apart from an awful background painting of the castle throne room pushed slightly off to the side, the stage was bare. Made of the same black wood as the walkway and sound booth, it was a good-sized stage breadthwise. Lots of room for a sword fight. The actors were crowded together in the center of the stage, lit up in a wavering blue spotlight. The kid playing Marcellus looked like he was wearing plastic armor. Just fake.

  The actors started the scene again. Right about the time the pain in my head reached official headache status.

  "The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold," the kid playing Hamlet said. He was a Runner. I knew him. Heller, his name was, and he was actually an Uncle in his family.

  "It is a nipping and an eager air," Fred said.

  "What hour now?" Heller was overacting already, craning his neck and everything. He was sniffing the air too. No idea why.

  "I think it lacks of twelve." Fred was real understated, just like a companion to a prince would be, I guess. He was stealing the scene.

  "No, it is struck." Heller raised his voice too much, played with his gloves too.

  "Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Fred's last word hung in the air.

  Then the actors stopped, waited. Fred did a great little improv where he put his hand to his ear and got a silly look on his face. He knew the scene was blown.

  "Trumpets! Fucking Trumpets and Fucking Ordnance!" Ridley screamed at the booth behind him. "Sound effects! Actors need cues! So does the audience!" Funny thing though, at that point, he was the only one in the audience. Apart from us.

  Looked like Ridley had taken over directing duties. Or at least thought he had. He didn't throw the script down or anything, just sat there, waiting. He probably knew we were there. But it was Mock that spotted us first. He'd been leaning against the fire exit by the right wing of seats, dragging on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out the slit in the door but he didn't waste any time tossing it away.

  He came at us, right up the aisle. I've got news for you though, if you're not fast enough to dodge an attack coming from someone above you, then don't go after someone higher than you on any staircase, ever. Gravity just isn't on your side when fighting upward on a slope. The consequences are pretty much disastrous and Mock learned them all firsthand. Never even had a chance. He caught jimmy's full leaping kick in the throat and tumbled down the stairs backwards making cracking noises that echoed around the theater. I swear I saw Ridley put his hand on his head when Mock flopped onto the concrete beside him.

  A few stragglers followed, all three repeated Mock's mistake. Bodyguards working as shop monkeys, set designers, carpenters, whatever. Ridley had put them all to work. And they might as well have all been named Jack, because each one fell down the hill, broke his crown, and wouldn't be getting up in the morning. I slung one into the seats to my left. This Jill wasn't going tumbling after.

  People jumped out of the lighting booth and ran for the exits as I followed Jimmy down the stairs. Marcellus ran for it too, scraping his plastic armor together the whole way.

  "Your lucky day, huh?"

  Ridley got up and walked through the orchestra pit and took the side stairs up to the stage. He was in no hurry. He was wearing a blue, white, red, horizontally striped polo shirt that changed to square lines of purplish red and all-over blue as he passed under the stage lighting.

  "You forced my hand. I wasn't quite ready to go ahead with everything today but I had to, didn't I? You and your preemptive strikes. So how is Melinda? Is she well?" Ridley walked to the back of the stage, behind the throne room painting. "All the same, I had a feeling it would end this way. It's what I get for being disorganized. Perhaps a little bit greedy."

  Jimmy and I didn't need to say anything. We crossed the pit and got up to the stage, taking up fighting positions side by side.

  "Freddy, please go to the dressing room right now." It was Ridley's firm voice and Fred scooted off stage right, leaving a mushrooming of swept velvet curtain behind him.

  Then the other actors emerged, forming a barrier between Ridley and us. It was pretty clear that we had to go through them to get to him. So be it. They must've been doing a costume fitting or something, because they were all dressed up. I don't know, maybe it was a full dress rehearsal. They did only have a week until the opening. King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Heller Hamlet, Laertes with his sword, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were all going to get it about four acts too early, all for real on a big, empty, black stage.

  Quick and messy: I saw legs in alternating colors of tights fly up into the air of my peripheral vision before I even threw a punch. There went Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I kicked Gertrude in
the belly and then swept her legs out from under her. Her hooped dress billowed as she fell. I stomped her in the mouth and felt her jaw give underneath my heel. Strangely satisfying. Her crown rolled off as she jerked, gurgling for air. It got crushed underfoot by Laertes backing up from one of Jimmy's furious combinations. Also trying to avoid Jimmy, Claudius got my nasty boot in his ear and then a chop to the throat for his trouble. He raised his face to me from where he fell so I smashed him in the eye with my elbow. He brought his head up again so I kneed him in the ribs and kicked him in the solar plexus, then the neck. After that, he didn't move. The nails sunk in all the way to the rubber of my sole both times, taking bits of flesh out with them like little shish kebabs. Laertes's dull metal sword snapped in two and the other half was sticking out of his leg when he fell to the floor with a hollow thud. The stage wasn't solid.

  Heller Hamlet was no better a fighter than an actor. Jimmy beat him with the flat of his own blade before knocking him out with the hilt in the back of the neck. Next to Heller Hamlet was the face of a sixteen-year-old made up to look like he was sixty with a dark gray painted-on mustache and greasepaint wrinkles staring up at me without drama, not closing his eyes because he couldn't anymore. Stupid Polonius. I had no idea where he came from. Jimmy must've really got him good. I wished I'd seen it.

  And then it was just me and Ridley, with Jimmy standing directly between, warning me off trying to be the hero and protect me. Everything was lit up in the blue light. That hue that was supposed to tell the audience it was nighttime, that something dramatic was about to happen, and the only recognizable sounds in the whole theater were the wheezes of half a dozen injured people cursing and struggling to breathe.

  THE BIG BOSS

  With Jimmy in front of me, I never saw Ridley pull the gun. But then Jimmy disappeared, just gone. Like he did against The Bulgarian, must've, there was no other explanation, but there was an explosion and I was the absolute center of it. It was so much louder than I thought it'd be, not bang. BOOM. Like an old cannon, and then again, BOOM. Then there was a flash and everything went white, then black. I didn't know it was a bullet at first.

  The wrenching shock wave hit me in the right arm just as the sound fully reached my ears. Then I could feel air there, an actual hole. It felt like my whole body got kicked down with a giant boot, leaving its imprint from head to toe with its ridges and valleys of hard rubber sole. Supposedly I was already falling backward when the second bullet hit me but I didn't feel it, didn't feel pain, just another full body earthquake, an aftershock. The epicenter was underneath the side of my rib cage, with the fault line torn lengthwise somewhere inside my chest.

  I thought I was dead. I wondered who would give Dad his meds with me gone. I heard my mom's voice. It was very clear.

  She said, "Don't climb there."

  It was the exact thing she'd told me when I was five. I climbed the stacked-up railroad ties at the back of our old house anyway. I fell hard on my back and knocked my wind out, then lied to my mother about how it happened. I told her I'd been stung by a bee. I didn't want her to know I'd disobeyed.

  When I got hot, I knew I was still alive. I swear I could smell my skin burning as I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling of the theater, the alternating lines of visible girders painted black. I clawed at my side, at my arm, at the bullets that had burrowed inside me. They were lighting me on fire. I scratched harder and harder but I couldn't even come close to it with my fingers still taped to my palms.

  "Look, my lord, it comes!"

  Still in character, Fred must've yelled it from his hiding position behind the curtain. Guess he hadn't gone to the dressing room as Ridley had commanded. The show must go on.

  Enter the ghost. I pushed my head back, to look behind me, upside down. A trapdoor in the walkway had opened and this glowing white thing came out, raised itself up. Great special effects, I thought before I looked at the empty light and sound booth behind the ghost. It looked so much like Cue. I couldn't believe it. I probably smiled when I said, "Hey, Mister Cue."

  It had to be him. It had his nose. He was looking at me and it was real quiet. I thought maybe the explosions had damaged my ears, broke my eardrums out because they weren't ringing. I'd heard Freddy though, his projected voice. I'd heard Freddy. The words banged around in my brain: I'd heard Freddy.

  But then Ridley responded to Fred, maybe he'd studied Fred's lines with him so much, always being Hamlet to his Horatio, that it just came out of him: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" And I heard fast footsteps as he took off running through the backstage area for the exit doors. Beyond them was a strip of sidewalk and then the parking lot. He must've thrown them both open with outstretched hands because the stage got flooded with lights. White, red, and blue threw themselves all over the theater, through Cue's body. Cop cars, had to be, because I could hear a siren too. Then nothing as the doors sprang back and closed heavily. Everything was back to blue.

  I knew I was bleeding, but I couldn't feel it going out of me, just my back getting wet. My chest got heavy. Like someone sitting on me. Cue was next to me then, putting his hand on my forehead and my headache went away. The fist unclenched. The tumor shriveled. Like he took it with him, pulled it out of me when he stood up and walked forward. I could move my neck so I raised it a little and saw Jimmy standing there. He had his head down. He was facing away from me.

  I wanted to tell Jimmy that I was okay, but I couldn't. I could barely breathe. Maybe he thought I was dead and it was his fault for dodging, for disappearing. But, I wanted to say, Jimmy, it isn't your fault I'm so slow. I didn't feel as hot anymore, but it felt like I had two basketballs implanted underneath my skin and they were stretching too much from being pumped up. That I was going to pop soon. It isn't your fault, Jimmy. Never was your fault that I'm so slow.

  Cue's ghost walked forward, disappeared into Jimmy's back. Like he stepped into him. That was when Jimmy's head came up. He ran toward the doors and jump kicked them open so hard that they groaned and I only saw the darkness of Jimmy's outline connect with Ridley's hands-up silhouette, like a cut-out shadow with his arms held high against the lights, and then Ridley fell forward, pretty much busted in two. He didn't put his palms down to keep himself from going headfirst into the sidewalk. And he didn't move after that.

  "Jesus!" screamed somebody outside. It was a male voice.

  "He's fucking killed him!"

  One of the doors stayed open. Jimmy must've broken the hinges. The other one shut but didn't latch.

  "Get on the fucking ground, now! Right now!" The closest cop was yelling at Jimmy. He had his gun out, real straight. I think he was scared and surprised. He hadn't expected someone to come flying out the doors maybe.

  Another cop came up beside the first one, and he hit Jimmy with his gun. They made Jimmy get on his knees and put his hands on his head. Then they put the cuffs on him, bent his arms back, and locked his wrists together with steel, nice and tight. Cuffed his ankles together too. Then they dragged him to his feet, out of all those lights. Out of the alternating blue and red, and the harsh, continuous, headlight white.

  I heard a car door close and I knew it was locked. Probably twenty cops spiraled in through the exit after that, with their guns and roving flashlights, but they waited for an ambulance before they moved me. I must not've looked so good. Two guys had to turn away and one looked like he was going to be sick. My tongue felt swelled against the roof of my mouth, and I had to work to get air in around it. But the worst part was that the taste had disappeared, the salt-blood, every last ounce of Cue, gone. The little girl was finally alone.

  The last sound I remember was Fred's uncontrollable shrieking. The high moan that didn't sound all that different from the sirens but came in thick bursts of lung-emptying exhales. I recognized it. I felt it reverberating in my ear canals and shaking down inside me and matching something. It was the exact same sound I would've made for Cue, if only I'd given in that night I lost him. It was a noise, a p
itch, that played in me too. Like both Fred and me were instruments with a single string encased deep in our flesh, deeper than bullets could go, tuned to play a long monotonous note from one plucking. I tried to move my left arm. It was stuck to the floor. I closed my eyes, tried to keep my breathing going around my abandoned tongue, my sinking chest, as I waited for the gurney. I didn't need to see anything else. I knew he'd found Ridley. I knew he was crying. Good night to that sweet prince.

  CONSEQUENCES A.K.A. THE EPILOGUE

  They blamed almost every death that day on Jimmy. Well, except for Dermoody and Cap'n Joe. Those two got blamed on Dermoody, but that got kept real quiet. Every other death got pinned on Jimmy though, all thirty-six. It didn't matter that they had very little hard evidence. He was an easy target. So they found witnesses, and lined them all up against him. The kid with the reputation, that big old outsider. That slant-eyed kid with a different last name who would kill you as soon as look at you. See, the blond girl on the news didn't say it but her eyes did. And then she flipped her hair.

  So even though he was seventeen years old, Jimmy was tried as an adult and got handed seventeen consecutive life sentences, one for each year he'd lived. He got incarcerated at a maximum-security prison and had to be isolated from the other prisoners because of his skills. He isn't allowed any visitors. He didn't appeal. During the trial and sentencing, Auntie Marin moved into our house. After all the drama ended, she was unable to move out. Guess she couldn't face the prospect of an empty home on top of everything. I wasn't able to convert Cue's room for her right away even though I had plans: new bed, new everything. She mostly slept in Dad's room with him. They got real close through the whole ordeal. She'll never be my mom though.

  As for our cozy little family funeral, I don't feel like talking about it. I told Dad to sell all of Cue's old comics to pay for his burial and the body went right into Dad's plot next to Mom. Out of Cue's stash, I had Dad keep #337 and #394 of The Mighty Thor for me. I just liked the covers.