The drizzle of precipitate from the skies above calmed his unruly hair. Where once it roamed his scalp, wild and entropic in nature, it now lay down as if to die. Water streamed down channels of brown and black, emerging in droplet form at the tip of clumped strands. The rain was only light, though the clouds overhead would suggest otherwise. It made the evening much darker than the normal summer ambience would have you think; sun and heat absent altogether. The lights on the campus were timer based, and would not be on for another couple of hours. The twilight ambience that ensued felt odd; a liminal space unfamiliar.
The walkways that opened onto the empty car park were vacant of life. Lingering smoke from a cigarette wafted on the breeze and he inhaled deeply. He didn’t smoke, but the smell was still tantalising on his olfactory palette. Mixed with the smell of the rain it disturbed distant memories in his mind. Memories that were hidden and untouched for a reason. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, pushing back and down the melancholic bile in the back of his throat. To rid his mind of these wandering he put his earphones on and queued up dulcet tones; soothing and distracting from the world at large. Having walked the path every day of the last couple of years, his feet could take him without thinking, allowing him to lose himself in the music that flowed directly into his mind. The weight of his bags was as heavy as the weight on his mind. This was quite a feat, as the combined weight of his shoulder luggage rivalled that of a proverbial mass of bricks. Massaging his tired shoulders with the crossed straps of the bags, he trudged slowly forward against the light breeze.
The crunch of gravel beneath his feet was lost in the sound of The Cure as he traversed the empty paths. Dirty yellow light filtered down from the few lit fixtures in nearby windows, casting a filthy glow and chasing shadows into corners. He gripped his car keys a little tighter, fingering the buttons on the immobiliser in anticipation. The day had been long and tiresome, and the thought of getting home came a close second to the thought of sitting down with a bourbon on the rocks. Anything to calm these frazzled nerves, he thought to himself. He surveyed the car park before him as one would a cemetery. The bleached white bone of crushed lime strewn as far as the eye could see bore berth to a handful of abandoned vessels. The emptiness in between gave home to murky puddles, full of chalk and dust; miserable.
It was a shiver down his spine that gave warning to the approach of a shadow behind him. Sixth sense or no, it was enough for him to spin on the spot and catch his attacker in the act of drawing a blade from his pocket. Removing his headphones, he only caught the last of what was demanded of him. Complying, he removed his bags, placing the first on the ground, holding his laptop in both arms. On an impulse he hurled the bag at the aggressor, forcing him to step back and deflect the projectile PC. Keys still gripped tightly, he saw the opening.
Like a rift in his mind, rage and frustration spewed forth into his frontal lobes, blinding him with fury. Keys protruding between fingers, he leapt forward and punctured the stomach of the attacker. First there was slight resistance, but the pathetic barrier skin offered eventually gave in, rending flesh as the carved metal pushed further and further in. A second strike saw a similar hole appearing in the under hang of the aggressor’s jaw, pushing up into his skull.
The blood was warm as it trickled in between his fingers as he heard the uttered words in his mind "You dropped your bag", and he asked himself: Had he remembered to take his meds?