Brutally Beautiful(47)

A shuddering fear gripped me as my eyes scoured the pictures. My tears fell and my stomach rolled with each new photograph. My cold trembling fingers covered my mouth and my chest tingled, as I scrolled through the pictures of each dead student. The beautiful innocent faces of each dead student.

Dead students.

Photographs of the three teachers, and their families that would never see them again.

The question whispered in my mind like the wind, slow at first, then picking up speed and howling through my skull. Was Kade a sick sadistic killer? Kade murdered those children. How can he do such a thing? My God…no wonder people said he was the devil. Why wasn’t he in prison? Was it because he was a juvenile when he murdered a classroom full of innocent kids? Through the blur of tears, I finally found my answers.

Kade Grayson, sixteen-year-old high school junior was the only survivor in the entire junior class, although severely wounded. The gunman, sixteen-year-old high school junior, Thomas McKadley, committed suicide after the attacks by a gunshot wound to the head. In addition to the shootings, the disturbing and extensively planned attack involved propane tanks converted to bombs placed at each exit of the school, and two explosive devices rigged in a car and eight under the stands of the gymnasium.

Oh, my God.

Kade.

What do I even do with that? What do you do? How do you get over that? Fucking hell. That was just like Columbine. How…how do you live from there? Oh God. Sixteen? Severely wounded? Watched his entire class slaughtered.

How do you go on?

My chest tightened and my throat thickened with knots I couldn’t swallow. A thick sheen of guilt and sweat covered my skin. I assumed Kade was a killer, just as he assumed I was a stripper. Kade was a man who lived through horror, real life horror. Of course, he would be untrusting and full of hate and rage. That’s a f*cking given when people are trying to kill you. You don’t get over that. You never get over that; it scars you.

How did he live through that? How did he deal with it?

I googled Cory Thomas next, just like Dylan told me to, with tears stinging my eyes and racing down my cheeks. Websites upon websites, fan sites, fan forums, blogs, reading groups, Facebook pages and fan-fiction; it was an endless supply of people who loved this obviously incredible reclusive author. His readers loved him. That is how he dealt with it, he wrote about it.

I clicked on his list of books; there were hundreds of them. Hundreds.

All he did was write. All he did was hide from the world and write.

His latest book, Behind Green Doors, was independently published just the day before. There was a crazed buzz about it. Reviews and comments in forums spoke about it being his best work to date, a mixture of erotic horror, and thriller with a love story twisted inside of it. I downloaded it to my eReader, then cleaned up my mess of coffee, made a new cup and crawled into a ball on the couch. Wanting. Needing to climb into the mind of this man, this man who had seen mayhem first hand and had tried his best to live with it. I knew all too well how scary and real his nightmares might be. Trying to wipe away the last of my tears, my raw eyes strained to see my eReader.

Two beautiful green eyes graced the cover of the eBook, floating in darkness. I hadn’t read a horror book in ages. I swiped the page and stopped on his dedication page, spilling my coffee for the second time in my lap.



For the mysterious green-eyed waitress

She is now my favorite flavor



What the f*ck? What the f*cking FUCK? I stood up, dropped my eReader and paced the room, coffee still dripping off my shirt. He made me lose two f*cking cups of coffee. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I was going to need an entire bottle of wine to read the rest of this shit.