Six bullets. More than enough to kill anything that moves.

[MurderWeasel]

Darlene Silva's life was over. This felt really unfair, since it had hardly properly begun!

None of that had stopped her from starting to load the revolver.

With shaky fingers, she'd done it. One bullet, two, three, four, and then she dropped number five on the ground. Immediately, she leaned over to scoop it up, but she was holding the gun by the barrel and wasn't that coordinated and managed to fumble it and turn it around so the other four fell out too, and then she was on her hands and knees in the dirt, picking up bullets left and right.

This really actually sucked quite a lot. She'd just wanted to go on vacation. Darlene never did anything interesting in her life except for singing in the choir sometimes, so she'd thought that a trip to the nation's capitol would be a really exciting yet generally safe thing. She'd thought about the school trip angle a little, because if anyone didn't they were truly totally dumb, but she'd also listened to someone who was better than her at math breaking down exactly how unlikely it was for anything to go wrong.

Now, because she'd wanted to have a good time, she was going to get skewered by some football player with a fire poker!

Darlene's breaths were fast and shallow, and her fingers felt fat and clumsy. She brushed the dirt and grass bits off the bullets she'd scooped off the ground, rubbing them against her sweater. At least she had a gun. She didn't know how to use it really but she'd read about guns online once or twice so she knew what not to do, sort of, right? You never ever treated a gun like it was unloaded, even if you knew it was. She'd already failed at that because the first thing she'd done was look right down the barrel and make sure it was empty, but she would do better now. Would it be smarter to just throw away all the bullets she'd spilled? She had a whole lot of bullets in a box. Was it worse to waste or to put bullets that might have invisible dust and dirt on them in the gun?

When the man with the ponytail blew a hole in Ms. Garcia's head, Darlene had closed her eyes very tight, so tight that the tears couldn't even really leak out of the corners. She hadn't opened them again for the whole time, even though she'd listened closely. Now her eyes were gunky and gummy and gross, and she wanted to rub the eye boogers out of them but first she had to load her gun. She'd just use the old ammunition. It was already in her hands.

One bullet. Smooth and simple, a clink as it slipped into the chamber. Her knees hurt. It was hot but no way was Darlene taking off her sweater. No way!

Second bullet. Clink. This process was a little easier the second time, or maybe she was going slower, or maybe she was just lucky because her hands were definitely still shaking. If she dropped another bullet she was going to scream and just start pulling the trigger.

Not really. That was a horrible thing to want to do, even if it wouldn't hurt anybody. Clink. Three.

She was in this little wooded copse of trees and had looked out at this weird pool with some scaffolding or something in it and a couple chairs, but it had felt too exposed so she hadn't gone that way and hadn't paid too much attention. Maybe that was a mistake, though, because now there was this roaring sound. Darlene recognized it from when a windstorm knocked some of the branches off a big tree in her neighbors' yard and the city made them get it taken down. It was a chainsaw! Or maybe a motorcycle but she didn't think so. Four. Please oh please, she thought, please don't drop number five.

Clink. Her breaths went faster and faster. She glanced over. There was a rustling, people moving through the trees, but not right by her, a good distance away. Too close, though. The people in her class were not good people. Not all of them, at least. Darlene knew some of them were very bad indeed.

The last bullet slid home. She snapped the cylinder into the gun and the click was louder than anything else she'd done but still quiet compared to the screech of chainsaw. Darlene inhaled long and slow.

Where could she go? What should she do?

Uncertain, she fell back on what she always fell back on: slowly, with soft steps, she crept towards where she heard activity, the fear almost choking her but not quite as strong as the fear of going off all on her own. And then, from the shadows, she watched.

((Darlene Silva continued in dehiscent))