The Right Fight (Part 1)
Part 1
This is a longer work of fiction, published in smaller parts on Medium.
Chapter 1
Kennedy High School clung to the top of the hill the way a polar bear clings to the top of a tiny piece of ice in the Arctic. A careful inspection would lay bare the essential issue: the school was too large for the hill and the buildings were built haphazardly across the precipice with apparently very little planning and the absolute least concern for structural integrity allowed.
One could then surmise that Kennedy High School was never intended to be this big. Owing to the strict limitations of financial investment into things like education, the community and the state had refused to build a new high school over the decades and instead continued to add buildings, at the cheapest rate possible, to accommodate the rapid increase of high school students as the town burgeoned into a city and then into a metropolis near the Pacific Coast in Southern California.
The buildings themselves showed varying levels of decay and the need for repainting. The steep slope upwards from the intersection of Simmons and Glacier presented the sprawling array of edifices to the city as though they were being exposed as an example of how not to build a high school campus.
Kennedy High School had originally been intended to hold 2,000 students, but on this day, this Wednesday in the spring upon which our story begins, more than 6,000 students had classes to attend on the premises.
School began at 8:30 am each day and between 8:00 am and 8:40 am one could expect to find a seemingly endless throng of adolescents crushing through the walkways, often going against the traffic signals and causing consternation among the drivers on their way to work. Particularly heavy from 8:20 onward as students made the mad dash for class, Kennedy High School staff generally would avoid this time of day by arriving at least 30 minutes early and well ahead of the chaos created by 6,000 nearly adult children careening their way into classrooms to beat the tardy bell.
It was in the midst of this traffic that campus supervisor Alonzo Morgan found himself speed walking to make up for being late to work. A short man with a muscular build, he had stopped for coffee and a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. Almost jogging to his supervisory position, he carried the source of his tardiness in a paper bag while his stomach grumbled.
He stopped suddenly. Something in the chaos was wrong to his eyes. The students, normally pressing confidently in the direction of their classes, began to scatter as though they were a school of fish hunted by a barracuda.
In the brief pause of his step Alonzo could see more clearly that there was a man with a large Bowie knife attacking the flock of students. The attacker’s movements were erratic and obviously violent and the mass of students panicked. He heard screams of terror.
Alonzo dropped his coffee and breakfast sandwich to the ground as he ran at the top speed available to him into the menacing confrontation.
