"He's right there, officer," Agnes Wright said as she and two local police officers closed in on me.

I almost gulped but somehow managed an innocent look of concern. "Who, me?"

"Yes, you, you rotten kid!" Agnes screeched.

"That'll be enough, Ma'am," said the officer to her right, a dark-skinned officer of medium build who looked like he wanted nothing more than to get the school secretary far, far away from him. He looked at me. "Justin Case?"

I nodded. "Yes, officer?"

"Mind if I ask you a few questions?"

I managed a shrug. "Sure." Elyssa squeezed my hand as a jackhammer pulse pounded in my chest.

"I'll take him to my car," the officer said to his companion.

I looked through the milling mass of students in the church parking lot and across the road where the nearest patrol cars sat, blue lights flashing. "What's going on? What happened?"

He gave me a shrewd look as we walked toward the car, a look that made me think he could see straight into my soul and pick out every little lie. Once we arrived, he retrieved a metal clipboard from the front seat and wrote a few things down on the paper clipped to it.

"Where were you at ten this morning?"

"Biology class."

"And after that?"

"Uh, Ms. Wright called my class on the intercom and told me to go to the front office."

"And?"

"I went there and met with Principal Perkins and our football coach." That much was true.

He wrote that down. "What was the nature of the meeting?"

"They took me outside and told me some college scouts might be coming to our football game this Friday and if I played well, I might have a chance at a scholarship." Actually, they hadn't said much of anything until they'd gotten me inside the football training room where Sheriff Skinner, Chief Amerson, a doctor, and two goons with guns were waiting.

"Anything else?"

"They said they were proud of me, sir." The absurdity of that lie almost made me burst into hysterical laughter. Instead, they'd informed me the blood sample I'd submitted for testing as part of the standard procedure for joining the football team had returned very surprising results. They thought I had a miracle steroid in my blood enabling me to be the best football player they'd ever seen and planned to milk me of that steroid and make millions. Until Brad showed up and killed them all.

The officer scribbled my lies on his notepad, stopped, and tapped the pen against his chin. "Where outside were you exactly?"

"On the side of the school, kind of near the cafeteria."

"Did anything else happen?"

"No. I left them right after they told me about the scouts and headed back for class. Well, first I had to go to the bathroom because I was kind of nervous about the scouts thing and it upset my stomach something awful. Whew, let me tell you it took a few minutes to squeeze those demons out."

He cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow.

I wondered if I might have over-embellished the details. "Uh, yeah, let me think. Oh, and then I headed to class but the bell rang and I found out we were evacuating."

"Did you hear anything on your way back to class?"

I shook my head. "No. Just the bells."

He narrowed his eyes and stared at me for several seconds. "Are you sure that's what happened?"

"That's exactly what happened." It took everything I had to look him in the eye and keep a straight face. For all I knew everything in my posture and voice was screaming, "Liar!" I swallowed and asked, "What's wrong? Why did we have to leave the school?"

"I'd like you to have a seat in this car until I say you can go." He opened the rear door of the patrol car and motioned me in.

"Am I under arrest for something?" My heart was trying to burst out of my ribcage at this point and it was all I could do not to run away at top speed.

"No, but I need to confirm your statement before I let you go back to your friends, okay?"

I nodded and got into the car. He shut it and walked across the barricaded road. Underborn met him halfway and spoke with him. My nerves splintered even further. No telling what the slimy back-stabbing assassin was saying.

I slumped in the seat and buried my face in my hands. I could kick the door off the hinges. Run away and never look back. My normal life was all but over anyway. With the sheriff and his co-conspirators dead, my friends Ash and Nyte would probably be safe from retaliation. But another part of me recoiled in horror at the thought of giving up on a life that, up until a month or so ago, had been painfully boring and normal. I'd been an overweight dyed-in-the-wool nerd with a hopeless crush on Katie Johnson, who I'd mistakenly believed to be the love of my life.

I shuddered at the memory, but still kind of missed being normal.

Screams and shouts reached my ears and tore me from my thoughts. I peered through the windshield of the patrol car but saw only the other car blocking off the high school entrance. I looked through the side window and saw students scrambling deeper into the church parking lot in a panicked mass. One of the cops standing in the middle of the road pulled his sidearm and aimed at something behind me.

I twisted in my seat as the officer fired and saw bullets pinging off the grill of a huge truck charging right at me.

MEET THE AUTHOR.

John Corwin has been making stuff up all his life. As a child he would tell his sisters he was an alien clone of himself and would eat tree bark to prove it.

In middle school, John started writing for realz. He wrote short stories about Fargo McGronsky, a young boy with anger management issues whose dog, Noodles, had been hit by a car. The violent stories were met with loud acclaim from classmates and a great gnashing of teeth by his English teacher.

Years later, after college and successful stints as a plastic food wrap repairman and a toe model for GQ, John once again decided to put his overactive imagination to paper for the world to share and became an author.

end.