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Skin was in charge now Unrestrained and unstoppable, heaway didn&039;t suit hiht when he was in control? He h the bodies with conte when he absolutely had to Already feeling vastly superior to the deco relics which surrounded him, the fact that he was now ar He carried weapons with him all of the time He hadn&039;t had to use thean to become a problem He&039;d had some supplies with hi With a rucksack slung across his back and a rifle in his hand he walked to the local shopping precinct, which was around half aout there with his friends when they should have been in lessons Hadn&039;t done hiht to hi up all the food he could find which was still edible Most of the shop&039;s stock had gone rotten The place stank of decay and he almost threw up He needed to rest and catch his breath before heto wait in the decaying supering out of a back entrance A grey concrete staircase led up to a row of boarded up, graffiti-covered flats above the shop Skin climbed the stairs and forced his way into one of the flats He rested for a while in a cold and da rooarettes and alcohol he&039;d taken from the shop below

A narrow veranda ran across the front of the flats After almost an hour had passed Skin stepped outside and stood there and looked out over the whole of the dead precinct below hihly elliptical collection of run-down shops centred around a large oval patch of rass, it didn&039;t look very different now to how it always used to look, he thought There were a few bodies still lying on the ground, but other than that the place looked as grey, lifeless and terminally dull as it always had done Even those bodies which incessantly dragged theely similar to how they&039;d been before they&039;d died Slow, e hi up there, in full view but knowing that he was completely safe and untouchable, he felt incredibly powerful and strong He felt in full control, al down over his rotting subjects Maybe this was his opportunity to show therabbed the rifle he&039;d brought with hied around in his rucksack for ammunition and then stepped back outside He loaded the rifle and took aim

Can I do this? Of course you can

Should I do it? Why not, who&039;s going to stop you? No-one tells you what to do any stupid Of course it doesn&039;t s are dead anyway

Skin lined up a single, bedraggled figure in his sights Breathing heavily he squeezed the trigger slightly and took up the slack, loosening his gripto be scared of, he thought, clearing his throat and then holding his breath as he prepared to fire Just fucking do it The end of the rifle seeed the butt deeper into his shoulder, shuffled his feet and re-balanced hiain Before he&039;d had chance to dissuade hiunshot cracked in his ear, rendering him temporarily deaf on one side, and the force of the shot almost threw him over He dropped the rifle and rubbed the sore patch on his shoulder where the recoil had dug in He shook his head clear and then looked out over the precinct There wasn&039;t athered there had turned and had suddenly begun to stagger towards the supered to locate the body he&039;d been aiht, he&039;d hit it bloody well It was difficult to see exactly how e he&039;d caused, but it looked as if at least half of its head had been blown clean away More i

Skin stood on the veranda and fired another thirty-two ti to down at least another twenty-four bodies Each time he fired the rifle he becaave him He learnt to ride the recoil and absorb it He learnt how to load and reload quickly Most is below him

Unchecked and unrestricted, Skin&039;s confidence soared No-one was laughing at hi to tell him what to do, were they? No-one was on his back to do this or do that or be home by a certain time or not to wear certain clothes or not to speak in a certain way or not to drink or not to san by getting hiy He moved from his previous classroom hideout and made his home in Gym 1 (as it was known) on the first floor There he hoarded the supplies he&039;d collected and, under cover of night, he fetcheda battery-powered machine he filled the vast room with music froht Fully aware of the effect the noise had on the dead population but arrogantly indifferent to their attentions, he drank and sht above the crowds seee the direction and source of the sound Although it continued to attract many more bodies to the school, they wandered ai towards the gyym He threw empty beer bottles out of theand watched therey-brick gyuns and took pot-shots into the festering crowd He slept He ate He began to get bored The novelty of his situation was beginning to wear dangerously thin A person of sound ht well have been able to rise above the boredoer outside the gyence, was also still driven by a horer The remarkable power he suddenly seemed to have was incredible, and yet he still wantedby the hour and none of the distractions he could find seemed able to alleviate or reduce his frustrations In spite of all he suddenly had, he still felt incoht - when the way forward cae That asIt was the ultimate expression of his superiority Hell, why hadn&039;t he thought of it before? Here he was in this incredible position of power and authority, and he hadn&039;t used it properly once Sure, he&039;d fired a few shots and got rid of a pile of bodies and he&039;d defaced about ninety percent of the school, but he&039;d not yet taken out his anger on the people who deserved itas his aret even with His parents topped the list, then his ex-girlfriend, then the so-called friends who&039;d slept with her after she&039;d duht, what an idiot All that ti those fuckers wander about free

This was his time He was in control Time for retribution

There would be little satisfaction in just finding these people and destroying as left of theh the dawn shadows back towards his parents&039; house What I need to do, he decided, is s as difficult and painful for them as they did for me I have to make them hurt

His mother and father were still in the kitchen of the house where he&039;d left theround, slue-freezer and the dishwater Her soggy body stank She was going nowhere, but a whack to the back of her head with a rolling pin et up again He hated his inally less than he hated his father It didn&039;t ot to take Dad with him Skin&039;s dead father followed hi out with sharp, twisted hands Skin brushed aside the body&039;s pathetic attacks and slipped a dog collar and lead around its neck He tied its hands together with the washing line froed it the quarter-round floor gym and watched it scraarette and blew the s&039;s face

&039;Bet you wish you hadn&039;t been such an uptight fucker now, don&039;t you Dad?&039; he sneered as the corpse stu now?&039;

Daas in her bedroom back at her mother&039;s house She was Skin&039;s next victim that afternoon He slipped the lead around her neck and then tied her to the bed in which he&039;d lost his virginity earlier in the year Before leaving he spent sos He wasn&039;t sure whether that made him feel better or worse In her underwear drawer he found the kind of things he&039;d always hoped she&039;d wear for him, but which she&039;d obviously saved for his friends To hu her back through the streets and duym with the re that he&039;d seen the bodies of Mr McKenzie, Mr Miller and Miss Charles wandering around the school It was getting harder and harder to distinguish between the bodies but he knew that he had to look It hile he was searching for them that he came across as left of an ex-friend (and one of Dawn&039;s recent conquests) Glenn Tranter Tranter&039;s face was pretty badly decayed, but he could tell froh his skin was a blotchy blue-grey, he could still see the tip of a tattoo he&039;d recently had done on his shoulder and neck, just below the collar of his blood-stained school shirt The corpse&039;s neck was scrawny and e more of the tattoo than he&039;d ever been allowed to show at school Another one for the gyn of Mr Miller Damn, if there was one fucker who deserved a little dismemberment and torture, it was him It was of some consolation when he found what rees teacher, dragging itself along the corridor outside thethe same damn tweed jacket it had worn to school every bloody day He took great pleasure in wrapping the dog collar around the dead teacher&039;s neck and dragging the body twice round the school before throwing it into the gym

Miss Charles, his twisted, sadistic, sour-faced ex-head of year, had been trapped in the stock cupboard next to her office when she&039;d died Skin found her still crashing around the room, half-buried beneath text books and papers He&039;d hated this bitch more than any of the others, and she&039;d hated hirey hair but it wasn&039;t strong enough and it kept co scalp in sickly clu through the increasingly crowded school grounds

Over the course of the next day and a half he gathered together another fifteen bodies Soed to people who had, in one way or another (according to Skin), wronged him Others were just unfortunate cadavers which just happened to have been picked out of the faceless yht to himself as he lay on his makeshift bed at the far end of Gy froht it sounded better like that, although the voluht acoustics didn&039;t really arettes and ily obnoxious stench of death, decay and putrefaction that filled the gy and the world beyond its walls

It was hard to believe whoym downstairs The incredible fact that they were all trapped in there and that their fates were completely in his control was almost harder to believe than what had happened to the rest of the world This was an opportunity for revenge on a massive scale that he wasn&039;t about to pass up He was determined to make the most of every last second and make these fuckers suffer in the same way they&039;d tortured him for years They had no idea what they&039;d done to hiiven a damn

I&039;ll start tomorrow, Skin decided as he drifted into a nauseous, drink-fuelled sleep One by one I&039;ll take each of those fuckers to pieces

He didn&039;t wake up until early afternoon He ith a hangover of immense proportions which, he decided, could only be eased bylow on booze He&039;d need to go out and get s to do today

After he&039;d taken a piss out of a first flooronto the heads of the crowd below (and thrown up too - he was feeling particularly bad today) he aym and opened the door The twenty bodies he&039;d shut in there ih thenorance which bordered on contempt With complete disinterest he pushed thee towards him He was preoccupied with his plans for the day and, ultimately, for each of them He wanted to spend a reasonable a any one of them too quickly because of unwanted attention from one of the others These fuckers were all due some uninterrupted personal service fro and voy around The bodies, although still very animated, were also clumsy and their coordination was desperately poor It didn&039;t take veryhorses, tra else he could find he built a division around the far left corner of the rooym clear

Who first?

He&039;d had a late start and getting the gyer than expected The sun was already beginning to set as he stood breathless and looked across the room at his motley collection of corpses Which one of these fuckers has caused me most pain? Which one hurt ard forI ever stood for or believed in or wanted? It was a close call between two of them It was either Dad or Dawn Just because he preferred the idea of htly excited in an uneasy, perverted kind of way) he chose her He reached out over the barrier he&039;d built, grabbed hold of his ex-girlfriend&039;s corpse and threw it back onto the other side

&039;Okay, Dawn?&039; he asked, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice Dawn&039;s dead body lumbered towards him, twisted ar and he almost lost his nerve What did he do? Did he hit it or push it over or? He took a deep breath and instead of looking at the unsteady bulk of rotting flesh which staggered towards him, he instead remembered her as she used to be More specifically, he remembered what it was she&039;d done to him Even more specifically, he remembered what it was she hadn&039;t let him do to her Bitch

Christ, just look at the state of her, he thought as his dead ex-girlfriend slipped in a puddle of blood or vo equally unpleasant Over the course of the last twenty-four hours the floor of the gyes, both from the corpses and from Skin himself The corpse dropped heavily to its knees in front of hi towards hie tastes, she ht have approved of the look Her eyes were hollow and sunken, her skin green-hued and ruptured and pockht shoulder and, in the low light, Skin was sure he could see squir movelistening, or was it so off her dead flesh perhaps? Whatever it was, the thought of it was disgusting, too ht of her standing there, naked and practically falling to pieces as he watched her, was too intense He pushed her back over the barrier and grabbed another body from the other side of the divide

Mr Read! Bloody hell, it was Mr Read, the head of the otten that he&039;d et Read&039;s body He hadn&039;t set out to find this particular teacher but he was glad that he&039;d got him He&039;d been one of the last corpses he&039;d collected yesterday He&039;d found three bodies at the end of the corridor and this was the one he&039;d taken The others were just kids Now this bastard deserved to suffer He was the one whoon their own in front of the class and play endless bloody glockenspiel solos in his lessons

Skin hadn&039;t liked Read, but there was no real emotional attache this body without giving it a th of his hate for Dawn, his dad and certain other ex-teachers somehow made it difficult for him to do justice to their bodies He needed to practice He needed to start with someone who had been fairly neutral and then build himself up to the bastards who really deserved to incur his wrath The body of Mr Read seelanced around the gloo equiped itself after him pathetically he took hold of a short bar (the kind he&039;d seen used before for single arhts off it He was left with a bloody heavy, fourteen inch, chrome plated metal bar He turned back around to face the body of the dead teacher and swung the bar at its head He&039;d expected to feel the i The bar seeh butter, such was the level of the creature&039;s decay And fucking hell, look what he&039;d done! The daht off its bloody face!

Suddenly feeling ain, Skin circled the helpless corpse He was ic speed, and it had no idea where he was Standing right behind it he chopped down viciously at its legs He hit the right knee cap, shattering it and sending the body cruround Too bloody easy! He s down directly on its pelvis He could feel the bone s under the force of the metal