The following excerpt is a chapter from Daniel Beauregard’s unpublished novel [ADMIN].

[THE PINK ELEPHANT]

Jerri sits before a wall of televisions, focused on one in particular in the upper right corner of the display. Onscreen, a boy, no older than fifteen or so, sits behind a table in an interview room of sorts, speaking directly to the camera:

“He just kept saying how he felt ‘disconnected.’ None of us had any clue what he meant. We tried to get more out of him, but he clammed up. That’s all he’d say, no matter how many times we asked: disconnected.”

The picture cuts to that of an interior hallway, lined with rows of lockers. The camera jerks up and down; we’re seeing from the point of view of whoever’s walking down the hallway. We walk to the end and turn, approaching the door of a classroom and peer down, focusing on a black, mesh bag at our feet. Two hands unzip it and begin pulling pieces of plastic out. It’s difficult to determine at first what the pieces are due to the jerking of the camera, but the hands begin screwing them together to form a pink, compact, 3-D printed automatic weapon, which is  placed in the right hand; the other hand empties the rest of the bag out onto the ground, producing a pile of long, slim light pink plastic cartridges. We pick one up and slide it into the bottom of the gun, making a soft click. The left hand then scoops up the rest, jamming them into unseen pockets. The view then rises to face the small window of the door directly in front of us. Inside, a middle-aged woman stands touching buttons on a holographic display. Her back is turned. The door opens. The woman spins around, saying: “Well, look who finally decided—” 

Before she can finish, her body explodes into a spray of blood; the slim pink clip pops out and clacks to the floor. The hands jam in another and the shooter turns toward the rest of the class, which erupts into terror: screaming and metal screeching along the tile floor as students jump out from behind their desks and try to run. The runners drop in a fraction of a second, blood blossoming into a brilliant red bloom on the walls at the back of the classroom; a few stray bullets hit the others still behind their desks; one catches a young girl just below the eye, blowing through her head to leave a fine mask of pink mist and brain matter on the face of the girl seated beside her. At this point, most of the other students freeze, remaining standing or crouched where they are, or still seated behind their desks. One tries sliding onto the ground and slinking away but they’re stopped by the shooter almost immediately. Another tries the same trick, getting a back full of bullets. Somehow, still alive, he uses his elbows to try and drag his broken body to the door, a smear of jellied crimson in his wake glistening like the trail of a slug. He doesn’t make it very far.  

No one moves after that. There’s a brief pause. Offscreen, the pink semi-automatic is heard clattering to the ground. The vision of the shooter angles down, revealing shaky hands clutching a light pink apple, the same color as the clips now scattered all over the floor of the classroom. A dark stem with a green leaf protrudes from the top of the apple; it looks almost as if it had been put together with Legos. The stem’s pulled, comes off easily, and the apple falls to the floor. The shooter turns, focusing on the remaining classmates. There’s a brief juddering, skewing the vision like the tracking of an old VHS, then the screen goes blank. 

The video starts over again, with the kid in the interview room. 

Jerri leans back in his chair, crossing his hands behind his head with a loud sigh.