Petrol Wonderland

Twelve | Ragdoll

Blake knew that guns were loud. She knew it because everybody knew it.

Once, she'd even been rifle shooting with her boyfriend for his birthday and had witnessed the quite literal 'sonic boom' of one firing in person. It was immense, a powerful 'BANG' which thundered through her chest and rattled her sternum. Yet, that had been with some rather ridiculously thick earmuffs on and so she'd never truly witnessed one's full, ear-splitting fury.

Neither had she ever witnessed the true fury of someone about to fire a gun at another human being. A person pushed so far to the edge that they'd press a simple trigger that could easily take a person's life away from them in a flash.

But, now she had.

It wasn't exactly a bucket list item, but it was certainly something she was sure she'd remember for the rest of her life - however short the rest of her life may be. Something that would haunt her late at night no matter how hard she tried to erase it.

The look on Cleo's face was hauntingly animalistic. She wondered if, in some way, this was the true her. A real, untouched part of her humanity that was more buried deep inside of a teenage girl and yet somehow more real than the small smiles in the corridor and the snarky remarks when Blake didn't do her job right. This was Cleo Westbrooke pushed to her limits and, quite frankly, she wasn't sure if she feared this side of her just as much as the attackers.

There was something very wrong and stirring about this particular version of Cleo Westbrooke.

Unlike every book and movie ever would've had her believe about such an event, nothing slowed down. In fact, it was all extremely fast and impossibly hard to follow.

One moment, Cleo's finger had collided with the trigger of the shotgun and pressed it in so deep that her knuckles turned white. The next, the weapon jumped up and the recoil sent it backward and its barrel downwards. It smacked dully into her ribcage, causing a puff of air to be squeezed from her lungs and forcing her backwards, crashing into the chair behind her.

The sound was immense. It cracked the air in two and reverberated through Blake's entire body like a miniature earthquake. Her hands flew to her ears but it was already too late. The noise was over just as quickly as it had begun, yet the splitting pain in her ears and the echoing told her confused brain otherwise.

Something about the irritated shaking in Cleo's skinny arms before she fired the thing had sent it off course so that the black, streaky trail of a bullet blasted through the air and embedded itself in the Hatter's shoulder instead of his skull. He stumbled backward from the harsh impact with a groan as a chunky explosion of red spurted from the wound. Meanwhile, Rabbit took this small window of a chance to dive forwards and tackle the girl.

The two met mid-air and collapsed into a rolling, squirming tangle of limbs. Blake thought she saw him gripping at her hair and yanking it back as she shrieked and kicked and tried to bite him, but she wasn't entirely sure. They rolled and flailed and their every movement was like a lightspeed blur to her. It was too fast and too confusing to understand.

The last thing she saw and was able to take a mental note of was the Hatter's blood-soaked hand clutching feverishly at the open wound on his shoulder. With the other, he gripped at the corner of the shelf he'd thumped against and pushed himself towards his fallen pistol.

By then, fight or flight kicked in and her feet were already slapping against the ground.

She easily sprung up and cleared the wall of broken glass with the efficiency and grace of an Olympic long jumper. The cool night air graced her reddened skin only a mere split-second later. Freedom. Somewhere behind her, the sound of screaming and more gunshots rang out until her ears thrummed with a regular, throbbing pain but she didn't look back even as the guilt clawed at her. It was too late to be a hero now.