Page 39 of Mixed Signals
My first hit doesn’t do much of anything. The hammer bounces uselessly off the top edge. But then I swing again, and again, focusing on the hinge of the thick metal door. Something rattles and the whole thing gives a deep, ominous-sounding groan in response. Gus presses in closer to my side.
“You’re almost there,” he breathes.
“Could you back up? You’re freaking me out.”
He grabs for my wrist. “Here,” he says. “I can help.”
“I don’t need your help.” I try to pull my wrist away while Gus tries to swing my arm for me. It’s clunky, and uncomfortable, and I'm not able to use any force whatsoever. “Gus, let go of my arm.”
“If you just—”
“I know how to swing a hammer.”
“Do you? Because it doesn’t look like you do.”
“Just back up.”
Except Gus doesn’t back up. He tries to swing my arm backwards again—to get some momentum or piss me off, I’m not sure which. But as he does it, he doesn’t pay a single ounce of attention to his own movement.
It happens in slow motion. Layla lets out a triumphant yell from behind us and I turn halfway to see what she’s up to. Gus doesn’t do a thing to slow his motion and his arm rockets back as he tries to force me on the safe. In all of the chaos of the motion and the noise and the distraction, my face gets in the way.
A blinding pain explodes in my left eye. I go from standing next to Gus to flat on my back on the floor, my vision swimming. Hazy globes of light dance with the severed heads hanging from the ceiling until I’m so dizzy I think I might be sick. I close my eyes with a groan.
The bruises from the roller rink make themselves known.
I am a catastrophic mess.
The zombie soundtrack comes to an abrupt halt. I hear the frantic pounding of feet in the hallway and then the slam of the door being thrown open, a high-pitched screech of an airhorn. Four different sets of explicit words echo around my head.
Monty is the first to speak after the sound fizzles out.
“For fuck’s sake, Eric. What the hell?”
“Injury on the floor!” Eric yells. There’s really no need for that kind of yelling. “The game is suspended!”
“I think we can go ahead and call the game forfeited,” I manage from the floor. There is no way I’m hauling myself up and finishing this thing. I’m tapped out. Completely and utterly done. For the second time in as many days, I roll to my side and lift up to my knees. I hold myself there, my head hanging limply between my shoulders. Layla’s small hand presses gently at the base of my spine.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I mumble. Bruised, probably. Embarrassed as hell, definitely. I crawl my way to a standing position and avoid her eyes. Mainly because I can’t see out of one of them.
It’s a small consolation that Gus is shamefaced by the door, his big arms crossed over his chest. He’s not the one that’ll have to teach a class to a bunch of kids with a shiner for the next couple of weeks, though, so it’s not too comforting.
“I’m really sorry, man. I tend to get lost in the heat of the moment.”
That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one. I glare at him with my one good eye. I recognize that he didn’t intentionally try to punch me in the face, but I need to not be in this room anymore. I reach blindly behind me for Layla. “We’re leaving now.”
“Hold on a second!”
A closet I thought was locked swings open in the back right corner. Billy limps his way out of it, his face covered in zombie makeup.
We all stare at him as he picks his way over the props littered across the floor.
“I thought you said no one was going to pop out at us,” Layla says.
“I didn’t even know Billy was here.” Eric is a combination of bewildered and resigned. I guess this isn’t the first time Billy has randomly popped out of a closet in the middle of a session.
Billy stops right in front of me, his hand searching inside his jacket pocket. He has paint there, too—something grotesque that makes it look like his fingers have been chewed to the bone. I wish I were more surprised.
