Bullettime by Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online Page B

realized that the money barely covered the outstanding debt on one of his credit cards and shut up about it. The school had a closet built into the corner where Dave died. It’s a little eerie, even to me, to stand in the middle of the leaning mops and the sparkling jeers of various cleaning product logos and mascots, waiting for the door to open at the crack of dawn.
    Experiencing Dave’s body—the one crumpled on the third floor of Hamilton High School, that is—feels like crawling into the slice left by cleaning and gutting a fish: cold, slimy, and ridiculous. When Dave wins, on the other hand, when those years of
Dungeons and Dragons
mapmaking pay off, when love and rage fill his heart like battery acid, and when he walks down the steps of his school all giddy and his arms heavy and hot from the shootings, that’s like stepping into an orgasm and riding it like a cab down a glorious spring day street. The day The Resistance is born.
    Then there are the endless Daves who don’t do it at all—the ones who stand outside the school, lips torn and bleeding, who turn around and go back home. Then ones whose plans melt like dirty slush the closer it gets to E-Day; a dozen Daves just live the fantasy of murder over and over as they shoulder and squeeze their way down Newark Avenue during lunch period—if only there was a way to clear the streets in a moment; point the gun and let the bodies bloom like instant red roses.
    Their bodies are all like dead fish too, if not in high school then by college. Communications major, Business Admin minor, nine credits of Japanese—maybe we’ll get into anime translation/localization or something, but we drop out or shuffle into Dad’s office or end up pushing around overhead projectors in the DoubleTree Hotel by the mall. We buy used Hondas because they’re sensible and worlds away from the awesome crime-fighting vehicles we used to design with crayon and construction paper. Our girlfriends have high Jersey hair and dull blue eyes and generally find us on the rebound from some five-year relationship with a barrel of a man named Ted or Bryant. They leave quickly enough too, after a summer of somedays about trips to Paris or marriage or moving out to some place where the houses have nice lawns and the Puerto Ricans are all cleaning ladies.
    Then there is the Kallis Episkopos. He lives in exile in another world, say his followers, despite the claims of the media and law enforcement and no, they don’t mean me. This is the Dave who walked out of Hamilton with raw trigger fingers and an eagerness to eat JCPD bullets from the cordon around the entrance, the one locked up variously in prison or mental hospitals, and his leaflets, zines, and broadcast email broadsides. The kid who got his nose sliced open with a shiv twenty minutes into his sentence and returned the favour that night by gouging out the eyes of his attacker—and replacing them with a pair of blue robin’s eggs he had somehow smuggled into prison. He dreamed of murders and got those dreams into the hands of fat girls from Ohio. You know, the ones with the long hair to cover their faces and the black blogs with purple lettering, and the box cutters to the throats of their ridiculous high school enemies. (“She called me a slut, once.” “I’m half-Jewish and he told me that God didn’t love me. And he was right, but Kallis Episkopos does.”) The man who after his death had an entire issue’s worth of
The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology
dedicated to articles about him and the movement he sparked.
    Sliding into him is like living in an alcoholic who can taste the Jack Daniels on her tongue in every glass of juice or soda, right before she finally says, “Fuck it,” and marches out to get laid, get drunk, and get royally fucked by the world she’s determined to toss herself out in front of. Kallis Episkopos is Dave Holbrook, with free will reclaimed.
    And me? I’m Dave Holbrook too—where Kallis