"Open Fire"

“Open Fire”

By John Smith

 

1.

            Randal Bitters put his arm around his New Oxford Annotated Bible along with a copy of God Behaving Badly by David Lamb and a book titled A New Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and swept them into his back pack. The weight of the books made the straps of the bag slip from his hands and the backpack fell down hitting Randal’s bare right foot on the way down before finally rolling over to its side.

            “F**k!” Randal shouted as he leaped back and sat down on the couch and grabbed his foot. After a couple of minutes of steaming and massaging his foot where the books hit, he stood up from the couch and slipped on a pair of brown leather sandals.

Randy reached back down in front of the desk and picked the backpack back up and zipped it. He placed the shoulder straps on his shoulders and walked over to the black filing cabinet that was sitting beside the bed and opened the top drawer. He took out something that was wrapped in a white handkerchief and shoved it into the coat pocket of his leather jacket beside his favorite cigarettes on the market, Marlboro.  Randy gave it a gentle pat to make sure it was secure and then walked over to the door of his dorm room.

Randy turned the golden doorknob and the door swung open. He reached to the light switch beside the doorway and flipped it down turning off the lights. Randal looked back into the dark room and smiled.

“See ya later alligator! It’s been a fun semester! But now, it’s got to end!” He said smiling as he closed the door behind him.

 

2.

            As Randal walked along the sidewalk after walking out of the dorm room he started thinking. Summer was coming soon. It was finals week and Calvary Baptist College and it was the day of his Old Testament final. That was the class he hated more than anything. He made it clear quite often how he felt about the class.

            But when people asked him why he hated it so much he just replied with the unsatisfying answer “I don’t know!” But that wasn’t entirely the truth. No, he did know why he hated the class. He knew of a few reasons to be exact, but he didn’t want to say it. He felt he would be judge.

            Randy was an atheist. He had no belief system, but try telling people that in a Christian college. So why did he go there? The simple fact is that his mom forced him. If she was paying for his education, then he was going to go wherever she wanted him to go…so she chose Calvary. He hated the idea of religion and quite honestly hated Christians for it.

            But truthfully, this is not the only reason he hated the class. It was bad enough that he was having religion forced upon him, but the professor was enough to drive him insane. Her name was Ms. Stitch and to everyone else she seems rather sweet and caring. But not to Randal. Not at all. To him, she almost seemed too nice to be real.

            “Anybody who acts that nice has to be hiding something! Something deep and dark!” He would often say only to ignore by his peers. She was quite pretty to most of the students. She was tall and had a very thin but still absolutely perfect body. Many of her male students often daydreamed about her including Randy. But that’s not how she looked in Randal’s fantasy. In his fantasy, she was skinny, tall, but had boils covering her face. Long horns grew from her head and she had razor sharp teeth.

            “She used them to eat babies!” He often would say. That’s how he saw her. Not as a sweet and gentle young woman, but as a flesh eating monster.

            ‘Wonder what I’m going to do this summer. If I get away with it all I could celebrate, but if I get caught…’ he thought to himself. He finally reached the Religion Building on campus and walked inside. He walked down the hallway and turned the corner. There was his classroom.

 

3.

            Randy could see Miss Stitch writing on the chalkboard at the front of the classroom. He walked into the classroom and leaned up against the doorway. The other students paid him no mind. He didn’t really expect anything else. Randy quietly closed the door behind him and locked it from the outside. He then walked to the front of the classroom and shut the door and locked it.

            “Can I help you sweetie?” She asked. Randy rolled his eyes and looked at her.

            “No. No you cannot!” He said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the thing in the white handkerchief. The hanky dropped to the floor revealing a small Black Hand gun. He pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. The bullet shot from the gun and through her left eyeball. “Well, I guess you can say I got a hole in one!” He said smiling. Randy pulled the trigger once more shooting her in the center of the forehead. She fell to the floor. She was dead.

            “That second one was just for good measure! Now I’m having some fun!” He said as he looked at the faces of his shocked classmates.

copyright 2014 by John Smith

Courtesy of True Crime Press

A division of TTP Entertainment

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Reviews

[Hawkmoth]

Well, as the reviewer below said, this was intriguing! I felt there was little to justify the murder, even though it was clear that Randall saw his teacher as a devilish creature...would have liked more insight into his thoughts and emotions, something that could explain what he did- and also would have liked to learn more about the teacher herself. I would suggest reducing the number of "ands" in the first chapter and finding some other way to link sentences.

[Stephanie M]

That was a quite intriguing story.