Debacle at the Class Reunion

Debacle at the Class Reunion

by Jason Earls, author of Cocoon of Terror & How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell

His 40-year class reunion was coming up and Sven Thompson was really looking forward to it. He'd received the papers in the mail a couple of months ago requesting his presence along with a $1,000 donation and he'd been saving up his money ever since. Sven had never attended one of his class reunions before, but this year he felt ready. Man, this is really gonna be great, he thought, it is finally time.

Sven was in top physical condition for a 59-year old man, thanks to a rigorous workout regimen that he'd been developing for many years. He worked out alone in his apartment with homemade exercise equipment that he'd built himself, and his body was an intimidating machine of taut muscle and lean sinew. His body weight was presently at 173 pounds - nearly the same amount as the year he had graduated high school. Every day Sven would run through his workout routine and follow a special diet of fish and vegetables that increased his health and fitness level considerably.

Sven did not have a normal job. Instead, he made his living by establishing unusual streams of income that flowed in continuously, which he did not like to discuss with strangers. But he also lived a frugal lifestyle and always had enough money for his needs. He had been living in a small efficiency apartment for the last twenty years and he loved the place. His apartment had only one main room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, but was filled with the basic necessities of survival, plus a few luxuries that included some books, magazines, guns, knives, and of course his tobacco pipe. He saved on his electric bill by using an extension cord connected to an outlet that belonged to the neighbor's apartment. Sven's electricity was supposed to be disconnected, but somehow he had stumbled upon a single outlet that still worked in his closet, and gradually he figured out they were charging his neighbors for the electricity that he was using, but of course he never told anyone about it and continued using only that single outlet for all his needs.

Two weeks before the class reunion, Sven found a nice gray suit in the middle of Padon street and he took it home and scrubbed it clean in a bucket filled with soapy water. The suit fit his muscles tightly and he liked the feeling. That evening he admired himself in his new suit in the mirror for hours thinking about all the women at the class reunion who would soon be seeing him again. He wasn't nervous at all, for some reason his body was filled with supreme confidence and he walked around town with the stride of a master carpenter.

Friday night arrived, the evening of the class reunion. Sven washed up good and put on his gray suit and slicked his hair back with his favorite comb and went over to a secret wooden cabinet hanging over his bed and took out two of his homemade knives and a small white envelope. Sven was an excellent knife craftsman and sold a few occasionally but kept the best knives for himself. His knives were large and deadly and made from high quality steel files and he made nice leather sheaths to go with them. He tucked the two knives and the small envelope into the back of his pants and went out the door and locked it securely. Then he took off walking down the road to the high school because he detested cars and refused to drive.

Many fancy vehicles were parked along the street and in the parking lot, banners and decorations were hanging on the buildings, he entered the front doors of the school, smiling and brimming with absolute confidence as he walked to the center of the large room. He took the envelope out of his pocket and held it high in the air and said, "All right, who does this thousand bucks go to? I hope it's for a damn good cause." Then he slapped the envelope down on the floor and took off walking toward the punch bowl. As he strolled through the room, he looked around for people he might know. But they were all gray and fat with pot bellies and he didn't recognize anyone. Not a single person looked familiar. They had all changed so much, while Sven had pretty much stayed the same due to his low-stress, high-freedom lifestyle.

He continued moving around the room, eyeing the females, and letting the rest of his former classmates get a good look at him. Finally he recognized Dawn Patterson, a woman who had been especially cruel to him in English class his junior year. Her hair was red instead of gray like the rest of the people in the room and she still had that beak-shaped nose. Sven sidled up to her and said, "Hello Dawn, do you remember me?"

"Of course I do, Sven, you look exactly the same as when we were in high school. How are you?" She smiled showing pure white but fake looking false teeth.

"Good, really good," he said. He could feel his face getting warm, he was never too comfortable talking to women. "So where do you live now, Dawn?"

"Over in Bowen, I'm a legal secretary now."

"Is that right."

"Uh-huh, so what do you do now, Sven."

"Oh, this and that. Just run amok mainly. Hey Dawn, have you ever seen one of these before?" Sven lifted out one of his long homemade knives from the back of his pants and held it out to her.

She stepped backward and covered her mouth for a moment. "JESUS, SVEN! WHY DID YOU BRING A KNIFE HERE?"

"Hey, keep it down, Dawn. What's the big deal? Look, it has a double-edged blade and everything."

Two former classmates heard the commotion and came over to them. "Sven, you'll need to put that knife away," the largest man said.

Sven stood there ignoring them and thumbing the blade, testing how sharp it was. Finally he glanced at the two men and they had gray hair and were overweight and he didn't recognize them at all. "Who are you guys, anyway?" he said.

"I'm Jim and that's Tom," the smaller one said. "Now come on, Sven. Put the knife away and get yourself a drink of punch and relax." He reached out for Sven's knife.

Sven jerked it back and said, "Hey man, you better not even think of touching my knife!"

The two men both stepped closer and stared at him intensely.

Sven took another step back. "Whoa! You two are actually gonna try and take this knife? But there's two of you, so I need another blade!" He reached back and pulled out his other homemade knife while steadily walking backwards. He held them both out and gave a couple of quick slashes through the air without hitting either of them. Everyone in the room was watching what was happening.

"Now, don't get excited, Sven. Just put the knives away," the smaller one said.

"I'LL SHOW YOU EXCITED, YOU DIPSTICKS!"

Sven jumped toward the larger one and slashed his arm with the double-edged knife. The man fell to the ground with blood trickling down and the other classmate started backing off. When Sven had swung the knife, his suit had ripped under the arm from his large muscles contracting, and everyone had heard the fabric tearing. For some reason, this made Sven even angrier and he flexed his back and more of the grey suit ripped in different places. Sven wanted to flex so much that the suit jacket would just fall completely off of his upper body but he knew that was physically impossible, so while still holding his knives, he pulled at his jacket and tore it away and then ripped at the white shirt beneath until he was standing there nude from the waist up in front of all his former classmates.

Everyone in the room gasped at his awesome physique. His chest and deltoids were large and perfectly formed, his abdominal muscles were ripped, his trapezius muscles stood tall and his biceps were huge and had thick purple veins running through them. He looked like absolute chiseled perfection, like a real Greek God come to life.

Someone in the audience whispered the word "steroids" and it echoed over to Sven.

"I HAVE NEVER TAKEN STEROIDS IN MY LIFE. I AM PERFECTLY CLEAN AND HEALTHY. I NEVER USE DRUGS AND I NEVER WILL."

Sven then released a loud growl followed by a roar and ran around the room jumping and swinging both of his knives simultaneously, slashing at the walls and cutting at the paintings and pulling down the party decorations, his muscles naturally flexing and rippling as he moved with the reflexes of a leopard and snarled, panting like a wild animal.

Everyone in the room was afraid to try and stop him. Nobody said a word. The room was almost dead silent, just a few scuffling feet, the ruffling of clothing.

The injured man whom Sven had cut earlier was still sitting on the ground with someone attending to him. Everybody was afraid to even make a noise and it finally hit Sven that someone would probably soon call the police. He had never been arrested before and didn't want to start an arrest file at this late stage of his life.

"I'M DONE WITH THIS!" Sven yelled. "BUT IT WAS FUN! I'LL SEE YOU ALL AT THE NEXT CLASS REUNION."

Then he calmly inserted the knives into the back of his pants and boldly walked toward the door and left.

Everyone in the room stayed perfectly quiet, until an unknown female yelled from the back of the room, "Sven, wait!" Then she ran out the door after him...

-end-

Jason Earls is author of the books Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Red Zen, Heartless Bast*rd In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); } and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover's books, Wretched & Violent, Mathworld, Chiaroscuro, Switchblade, Dogmatika, Neometropolis, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG's Speculative Fiction, AlienSkin, Escaping Elsewhere, Werewolf, Recreational and Educational Computing, Thirteen, Theatre of Decay, Nocturnal Ooze, Prime Curios, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, The Swallow's Tail, and other publications. He currently resides in Texas with his wife, Christine.