Headburst

TW: self-harm, mutilation, violence, blood

Chapter 1 – Storm

Hues of orange and red filled the western skies just behind the majestic building of Gowtham Techno School as the sun was about to set. A group of young teachers stood in front of the building and exhaled wisps of smoke as they looked into the eastern sky. Behind them was a bigger smoke cloud coming from the incinerator located a few yards from the school. In fact, it was built on the land owned by the school itself, and it was not uncommon to find the school officials in the incinerator compound for collection of rent. But it was indeed uncommon to find a schoolboy there, let alone finding his charred face, with its unique star shaped scar, looking out the window of the furnace, as the rising smoke cloud, strangely didn’t possess the smell of flesh.

The group of teachers were in a hurry to smoke as many cigarettes as they could. Their neatly ironed shirts were getting stuck to their backs with sweat. One of them was fanning himself with his free hand. They were busy coughing and smoking when the school bell rang. All the teachers were busy putting off the cigarette stubs except the science teacher.

The science teacher was least bothered of the whole ruckus as he kept staring at the still, red sky, wiping his bald head once in a while. He opened his parched mouth, “A storm is coming.”

The English teacher, PJ, flicking the sweat off his forehead, curtly said, “Have you lost your mind, RK? Look at how still the sky is.”

“Precisely why I say it.”

The night was as still as it could get. Looking from a classroom window, high on the third floor, the outside world looks like a painting, with its unmoving trees, empty roads and scattered streetlights here and there. No settlement in sight except the big incinerator grunting tirelessly through the night. Inside the classroom was a different story. The room was filled to the brim with benches, students placed apart on them, some sitting on the floor. There were books everywhere, on the desks, on the floor, in the aisles between the benches. There’s barely enough space for PJ to sit on a chair in front of the blackboard.

PJ was trying to take a nap but was being woken up frequently, sometimes to fan himself out of the heat with a hand fan and sometimes due to the chatter of students. He was shouting into the air, “Silence,” whenever he woke up. This time though, he was pleasantly surprised to be woken up by a cool breeze. He opened his eyes and could hear the faintest sound of a thunder as he walked towards the window at the back of the room. The students’ noise intensified as talks of a rain spread across the room. PJ turned back in anger at the escalating noise to find a lanky boy near the blackboard, roaring with laughter.

PJ stormed over to the laughing boy, making him and the one he’s laughing with, stand up.

He glared over them and shouted, “Harish!” The lanky boy’s friend looked up. “Even you are chatting in the class. What happened to you? Scoring high in the prefinal exams isn’t enough. The final exams are in two months, and you are idling away with this moron,” he frowned, “it is unacceptable.”

He turned towards the taller one, “What about you, mister? You are a good for nothing fellow yourself. Why are you spoiling the careers of good students? You should be ashamed of yourself. Your parents work hard day and night to send you to a top-class school and this is what you do. Imbecile!”

A roar of thunder filled the class, causing the students to gasp.

“Silence!” shouted PJ.

The lanky boy started tapping his head to the bench, and soon, the taps turned to thumps and then to bangs. He slammed his face into the bench vigorously, making the bench shake. He turned towards Harish, looked at him through his swollen eyes, blood trickling down through his crushed nose, “Sorry for the disturbance, Harish,” and let out a high pitch sound. His wail filled the whole class, and it was so overwhelming that the teacher’s cry for silence went unheard. He wrapped his arms around the bench, crushing it with all his might, as his skin broke and his muscles snapped. His wail only grew more intense as he let out a final death cry as his bones crushed and red, hot blood splattered all over PJ.

Water came gushing into the room from the window at the onset of a deluge, which was to last about one week, a fact, unfortunately, forever unknown to the teachers and the students. It washed away all the blood but couldn’t move the transfixed teacher from his position.

Chapter 2 – Missing

It was a rain like no one had ever witnessed before. It was near impossible to walk in it with a normal umbrella as the rainwater would tear through it and injure the person under. The skies always remained dark turning the week into one endless night. There was no electricity, and all the wireless communications were cut off. The calamity called for swift action and the principal arranged an emergency meeting with all the students.

All the 106 students were gathered in a small, cramped room with the teachers spraying a room freshener occasionally to negate the stench of sweat. The principal, in his neatly tucked shirt and shining shoes, addressed the students, “Dear students, I have two announcements to make. One, our school transformer got damaged completely and we will be running on generator power until the rain stops. I have sent men to get reinforcements, and diesel supplies from the town. You don’t need to worry about anything.

“Two, we will be having another set of prefinal examinations from tomorrow. The deluge gives you the perfect environment to be productive. No disturbing phone calls from parents, no pleas for outings and no waste of time with sports. I have arranged rooms for your teachers in your hostels,” he patted each of the teachers on the back, “and they have valiantly decided to stay by your side in this terrible rain and achieve the targets set by the head office.”

The students started whining about the exams when the principal raised his hand, “Silence! Silence!” The noise subsided, “You don’t have anything better to do. If you guys waste this time because of the rain, the other branches would march ahead of us. Also, please don’t be distracted. I heard of a suicide a couple hours ago but don’t let it affect you. It will only impede your academic progress if you keep thinking about such things. Our goal should be to secure more 10/10s than those in the Maruthi Nagar branch. Keep that in mind.”

The principal left for the godown, with the student coordinator, to inspect the food supplies next. It was a dark place, lit by a flickering table lamp at the supervisor’s table and a glimmer of streetlight coming in through the half open shutter. It has two racks, and the workers were moving the supplies from the wet rack to the dry rack. He went straight to the supervisor who informed him that the food reserves will last a minimum of 30 days.

The principal stood by the half open shutter, the heavy rainwater spattering over his shoes, took the attendance register from the wiry student coordinator, who was busy wiping his glasses off, and skimmed over to find the absentees, “There are two absentees, Samba. Are you sure you did the headcount correctly?”

Samba leaned over to see the names of the absentees and promptly replied, “One of them is the boy who committed suicide. The other one, sir, has been missing for a day.”

“What do you mean missing? Did he run away?” the principal demanded.

“You summoned him to your office the day before he went missing, sir. We can only say if he ran away based on what you said to him.” Samba stood back and delivered it in the gentlest tone possible for him.

“Bullshit. It was just a performance analysis meeting. How dare you blame me for your inability to rein in the kids?” The principal fired back in anger. Samba fell silent for a while. The attendance register in the principal’s hands was getting wet, so he dusted it off and closed it, saying, “You better organize a search party for the boy unless you want to get your ass busted.” He walked away with the register, picking up a tissue on the way, to clean his shoes.

Samba couldn’t find enough resources to search for the boy, but it wouldn’t have mattered, for the boy had already been reduced to ashes in the incinerator, an hour before the deluge began. Two days ago, the boy with the star shaped scar, Kiran, was summoned to the principal’s room for discussing his examination results. It was nothing new for Kiran. Teachers complain that he always zones out of the class, always leaves his homework incomplete, and doesn’t even attempt half the question paper in exams. Consequently, the principal scheduled weekly meetings with him, the meetings which Kiran eventually came to dread.

On this particular day, the principal was snipping his mustache when Kiran entered. He was instructed to take a seat in front of the principal’s desk and to read the report of his “mischief”. Kiran took his own sweet time, to read the report letter by letter, “Does not pay… attention in… class. Scored 12… out of… 100 in the test…”

“Didn’t I tell you that ‘you’ will get pass marks for copying the question paper?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, how the fuck did you get 12 marks?”

Kiran looked down at his shoes and fell silent.

“Look here,” growled the principal and he aggressively charged towards Kiran with the scissors in his hand. “It means that you are not listening to me. Why didn’t you do what I told?” He squeezed Kiran’s face in his left hand and put the scissors near his neck, “Tell me! You idiot. Why did you disobey me?”

Kiran struggled to answer, being stuck in the principal’s grip, “I have to answer the questions, sir. Not just copying them back.”

The principal lifted Kiran up a little from his chair, “Here comes the genius! Do you think you are intelligent enough to write correct answers? You are a fucking dimwit, can’t even read English without commercial breaks, and you are telling me how to write an exam.” He threw Kiran on the floor. “All you morons are getting on my nerves. Head office wants 100% pass rate, but how can I get it with Einsteins like you?”

The principal crouched over Kiran lying on the floor and pointed the scissors at him, “I will ask the science teacher to conduct an exam for you tomorrow. Would you copy the question paper neatly?”

Kiran looked at the sharp blade aimed at him and hesitated for a moment.

The principal twisted Kiran’s arm in a jerk and slapped him on his back, “I should not see a moment’s hesitation in you.” He stood him up, “Remove your shirt,” while he walked towards his cupboard to get his cane. The cane was a familiar weapon to Kiran as his back bore witness to his familiarity by a few thick bruises. The principal flogged Kiran with the cane, shouting, “Listen carefully, idiot. Don’t try to use your intelligence to write the exam. I am helping you to pass the exam and you think that you could pass it on your own, with your dumb chicken brain. Don’t forget that you are a useless piece of shit and if you fail 10^th class, nobody will even look at you. I don’t care what you do later in life but just pass the fucking exam and get out of my sight. I had enough sleepless nights because of you morons.

“I’m asking you for the final time, would you do as I say?” The principal raised his cane and stopped as he waited for the answer. Kiran didn’t reply. It took another round of flogging for Kiran to finally say that he would obey him and come out of the room, sobbing.

Chapter 3 – Obedience

PJ was known to be the most dictatorial and stonehearted among the teachers. So, it certainly wasn’t surprising to see him diligently overseeing the study hour just after a boy committed suicide right in front of his eyes. He shared his thoughts with the class as he made his seat before the blackboard. “Death is easy, my friends. You don’t need to worry about bills, exams, groceries, anything. Do you know what is difficult? Living. Topping the exams. Making your parents and teachers happy. Only a quitter would choose death. Whenever you think about our dead friend, I want you to remember he’s a quitter, a loser. I want you to hate him for taking leave of you in this harsh world and I hope the hatred gives you the energy required to rise above your hardships.”

The class was dead silent. The children just stared into their books. It was unclear whether they heard PJ’s passionate monologue. The silence was interrupted by a student at the back, raising his hand and shouting, “sir, toilet.”

PJ sprang to his feet. “Shut up! You have a bigger battle to fight,” he pointed to the textbook on the student’s desk. “Getting distracted at every opportunity. No toilet breaks until the study hour ends. Understood?”

He roamed around the classroom, muttering to himself, “No discipline at all. The management wants 100% pass rate, and these fucking kids want everything except studying.” He addressed the class loudly, walking around, “Do you know how respectful we used to be towards our teachers? Even now, if I see my teachers, I will bow down in respect. Your generation kids don’t even know the spelling of respect. If not for my teachers, I would have been cleaning toilets in this very school.

“You all must know the story of Karna who endured the excruciating pain of a scorpion’s bite to not disturb his guru’s sleep. That is how a model student should be, which unfortunately none of you are.” He stopped at a bench where a boy was nodding off. He hit him on the back of his head, “This idiot can’t even control his sleep. How will you get 10/10? You guys have all the comforts in life. So, it’s paining you to study. Your parents will come at us if I say a single word to you. Canes used to break in our times. Speaking nicely to you is a waste of effort. You will neither study nor stay silent. Instead, you want to commit suicides.”

He yapped for a while and dozed off in his chair. He was woken up by a crushing sound, the sound of a crushing skull. He opened his eyes to find a boy kicking another one lying on the floor. There was no display of emotion as he drove his boot through his skull, just methodical precision as the boy on the floor bled to death. The class didn’t particularly care for this act, and they went along with their studies like it’s regular work. PJ rushed to the act and held the boy, “What the fuck are you doing?”

The boy replied calmly, “It is all for the greater good, sir. He has been disturbing the class with his little antics,” he pointed to the heap of paper rockets on the dead boy’s desk. “I doubt he will pass the exams too, so I eradicated him before he pulls the class average down.”

PJ felt his head spin and looked around the class to find small puddles of blood on every bench. The students all had little knives in their hands and were swaying back and forth as they kept reciting their chapters. Every time one of them feels sleepy, they would slash themselves up with the knife to stay awake. PJ tried to run out of the classroom in terror, but he slipped on some liquid on the floor. He was terrified it might be blood and slowly put his hand under him to feel the liquid off the floor. He saw that it was a clear liquid and took it to his nose to realize it was piss. He looked up at the boy on the adjacent bench, “Sorry, sir. I tried so hard to control but my bladder couldn’t keep up.”

Chapter 4 – Exams

Exams started the next day. The events of the previous day shook the strong English teacher as well and he was running a fever. In his feverish haze, he was totally oblivious to the empty seats, and it was not until he looked at the bunch of leftover question papers did he realize that some students had not appeared for the exam. He was in no condition to bother with such issues and asked the science teacher, RK, to help him find the missing students.

RK went into the students’ hostel to find if any of them were hiding inside. His watch told him that it was 10 in the morning, but it certainly didn’t appear that way. The hallway was pitch dark. They were saving on the generator fuel as there was no sign of the men they sent to fetch supplies. He crept along the hallway’s right wall, stumbling on various metal objects on the way. Some had really sharp edges, but he couldn’t tell what they were just from touch. His hurry to get out of there left him no time for idle inspection. He kept on shouting, “Anyone here?”

He found something soft hitting his legs when he walked into one of the rooms. It was a boy. He lied there motionless, unresponsive to RK’s nudges. RK said in an agitated tone, “Hey! The exam has already started. Why are you still sleeping? Just get up and go.”

The boy sat up abruptly, his head knocking into RK. RK fell back a few paces, he didn’t know how many, but enough to get the boy out of range of his hand. He heard the boy rise up and stride through the darkness with ease, like how one would on a sunny day. RK touch-scanned the floor of the entire room before the boy’s footsteps drifted into the distance. He reentered the hallway and continued his languid walk along the wall.

He found a room which was lit by lightnings flashing through a massive window facing the door. He kept his eyes closed as they couldn’t bear the flush of light, coming from pitch darkness, but what piqued his interest was a small nibbling sound, like someone biting their nails, coming from the corner of the room. He opened his eyes to find someone sitting in the corner, but the ghost of the lightning was still in his eyes, and he couldn’t see who that was. He went near the corner and asked, “What are you doing here? The exam has started. Hurry up!”

The boy answered in darkness, with the sound of chewing still audible, “I didn’t study well, sir. I don’t want to take the exam and fail.”

The ghost of the lightning was fading in RK’s eyes, and he could see the boy’s eyes now, which looked like a scared little cat’s. He said curtly, trying to be assertive, “So be it. You must take the exam. Don’t try to escape it.”

The boy started sobbing, “But… I don’t want to…”

Another flash of lightning and RK’s eyes adjusted finally to see what was in front of him. Tears streamed down the boy’s cheeks into his mouth, where his bloody teeth were biting his nails. But something felt amiss. The lightning vanished before he could figure out what the missing thing was. The next lightning revealed the missing piece – the boy’s right hand. He had bitten off his nails till the hand and was chewing his forearm.

RK was terrified of what he saw and ran away as fast as he could, ignoring the safe and slow way he walked in. As a result, he suffered cuts at many places by the time he came out of the hostel. He ran to his cycle, trying to unlock it to flee from there. He was startled by a big thud, like a rice bag falling on the roof. RK paused. A couple of thuds more. RK glanced to the side when three boys came creeping down the roof, like slugs. They had jumped from the top of the building and fell face down on the roof.

The three boys crept towards RK, swinging their dangling forearms, with their bloody, broken faces looking up at him. RK threw his cycle at them and ran deep into the cycle stand. One of the boys tried to catch it but the cycle took his forearm along with it. The boy in front caught up with RK, grasped his foot, and looked up at him, trying to speak as far as his dislocated jaw allowed, “What time is it now?”

The three boys crept back to the examination hall when they heard the time was around 11 in the morning. They got up on their feet and walked to the sound of cracking bones. The boy sent by RK from the hostels, was also just approaching the hall. The four of them collected their question papers and went on to sit on different benches.

The boy from the hostel scanned the entire room and picked up a tiffin box. He got the answer sheets and settled on his desk. He put the tiffin box behind his head and tilted his head slightly backward to collect some blood from the gaping hole in his head – the ink. He asked his friend to punch him in the face and then yanked his tooth out – the pen.

As all the students turned their papers in, PJ observed that more than half of them were in red ink. He was frustrated at the sheer blasphemy in display, but his frustration soon turned to horror when he had started smelling blood.

Chapter 5 – Incinerator

The principal, with his reading glasses on, was seriously poring over some huge blueprints in the staff room. He was neatly tucked away in one corner of the room, right beneath a staircase, which covers more than one-eighth of the room. The room was designed to be a storeroom, but growing inventory forced the storeroom to shift to a bigger room, making this the staff room solely because of its proximity to the classrooms. The storeroom must contain some diesel, at least some kerosene which would last them for a minimum of two days. But the only problem was that all the staff in the school, the principal included, joined after the restructuring, so they need to check minimum 200 rooms to find the one.

It was at this moment RK entered the staff room. The principal, deeply involved in his analysis for the most probable room to check first, didn’t notice him until RK cleared his throat, before speaking, “Sir, the situation has turned worse. We have to leave this place as soon as possible.”

The principal looked up sharply at RK, “What about your targets?” RK looked hesitant. “Just be happy that Kiran is not taking the exam, and you will have one less failure.”

RK tried to insist but the principal wouldn’t listen. At the same time, PJ came running to the staff room, shouting, “They’ve all gone insane.” He showed the answer sheets in his hands, “Look, it’s all blood.”

POOF! The power went off.

The darkness wouldn’t allow them to move but it was the rain which kept them hopeful with its persistent sound filling the silence. Even in the heavy rain, it was not hard for them to spot a hundred footsteps coming their way, stopping just outside the room. RK and PJ involuntarily jumped towards the corner where the principal was sitting. The students spoke in unison, “We want our papers evaluated, sir.”

The principal tried to conceal his fear, “No evaluation until all the exams are over.”

“We want our papers evaluated,” the student body repeated.

“Children, I want you to go to your rooms and revise in your minds for the exam tomorrow. I will arrange for the electricity. Go and be prepared.”

“We want our marks,” the student body grunted.

“I said to go to your rooms!”

BOOM!

A big chunk of the doorway flew onto the staff.

RK shrieked, trying to ad-lib a reason for their defiance, “How do we do it in the dark?”

A sound of a stricken matchstick. A thin spark appeared in the air, which grew into a flame, slowly revealing the finger on which it was lit, followed by the grinning face of the student who lit it, followed by the entire flock of students and their dislodged, dismembered body parts. The flame looked green in color and consumed the student’s flesh faster than wax. He hurried the staff towards the incinerator.

The boy with the green flame led the way in the rain, the flame, unharmed by the downpour, crept down his chest, after it had engulfed his right arm. The other boys pushed the staff towards the incinerator as they wanted to reach there before the flame consumed his whole body. The boy reached the incinerator with just the left half of his body. He quickly collected the clothes of all the students into the furnace and invoked the green flame on them.

“Evaluate my paper! Quick!” he shouted as his left lower leg had evaporated.

It was a science exam and RK hurried to evaluate the paper. By the time he was done, the boy with the flame was left with just his head, burning in dazzling green. RK declared, not without a ton of disbelief, that he had scored a perfect hundred. All the students began to move in a circle chanting, “ONE HUNDRED! ONE HUNDRED!” The blazing head laughed hysterically and rolled off into the furnace, producing a short explosion as the flames surged. Ghoulish laughs permeated the furnace and RK began evaluating the next paper.

Another perfect score of 100. The scorer jumped into the furnace yet again, making the flame even bigger. Bigger grew the surprise in the teacher’s faces. They thought them all to be failures.

Another 100.

And another…

The flame was as big as the room now. It swirled around like a big tornado as the ghoulish laughs spread throughout the room and pierced the staff’s ears. Only one student was left, and RK graded it, ignoring his burning flesh and bleeding ears, to another score of 100. The last boy standing turned to the principal, “Principal sir, this is what you wanted, right? A full house of top scores,” and jumped into the furnace. The flame ballooned into a wildfire, blasting off the incinerator’s roof and headed off like a frenzied top to swallow the teachers, the principal and the whole school.