Lon and Brian’s Dorm Room Afternoon
The hour after Intro to Psych on Thursday was the best hour of the week.
Intro to Psych was my last class before the weekend, a three hour long black
hole of monotony, providing a perfect closing note to another week of my worst
semester ever. People
said the second semester of senior year was supposed to be chill, that you
didn’t have to work your ass off anymore.
Not for me, a late-decision Computer Engineering major.
Just to get my degree I had to take four programming classes.
On top of that, I was missing one humanities credit, and Intro to Psych was the
only class with openings by the time I finally got around to signing up for
classes. So, I was
stuck with 274 freshman and 16 sophomores for three hours of hell every Thursday
from
I loved the hour after Psych. For those sacred sixty minutes, before ultimate frisbee practice, I would go to my room, put on my Simon and Garfunkle Greatest Hits album, close my eyes, and relax. My roommate kept odd hours, so he was never there, leaving me the room to myself. Alone time was a rarity in college, so I needed to take this hour and utilize it to its full potential. After this particularly grueling Psych lecture, I had sped towards my room, almost to the point of tripping over my own feet on the way up the stairs. Thus, I was very disappointed, and quite surprised, to find my roommate in the room, sitting at his computer quietly.
“Hey Lon,” I said to him tentatively, hoping he would tell me why he was here without me having to ask.
“Brian,” he responded. I thought he was speaking faster than normal, and I almost detected a quavering in his voice, but, to be honest, I didn’t know him well enough to tell if it was actually any different than his normal speaking voice. I sat on my bed, still perturbed about my lack of solitude.
“Brian,” he went on. “Brian Brian. Brian. Brian Brian Brian Brian. What are you doing, Brian?”
“Umm…” I was unsure of what to say. “Nothing. I just got back from Psych. You usually aren’t—”
“Brian, what are you doing, Brian?” he said, raising his voice and cutting me off. “What are you doing, Brian? Brian? What exactly, Brian, are you doing, Brian?”
“Nothing, dude. Is something wrong? What’s up?” I wished he would stop repeating my name.
“Brian. What the FUCK are you DOING, Brian?” He stood up from his computer quickly, knocking it off his desk. “Shit,” he mumbled. “Shit shit shit. Brian Brian Brian. What are you doing, Brian?”
I was officially scared now. “I’m gonna use the bathroom, dude,” I said, my voice noticeably less confident than it had been a few minutes ago.
“What?” he replied. “Sit the fuck down, Brian. Brian. Sit down. Don’t get up, Brian. You’re not using the bathroom now.” He laughed.
“Dude, really, just tell me what’s going on, or I’m using the bathroom.”
“I just fucking said, Brian, that you’re not using the bathroom right now. I just said that, Brian. Stay the fuck on your bed, Brian.”
“Look dude, I’m going to the bathroom. Please just get out of my way and let me go to the bathroom.” I stood up slowly.
“WHAT THE FUCK DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT STAY THE FUCK ON YOUR BED, BRIAN?” Suddenly, Lon had a gun, and he was pointing it at my head. I sat down. “Just stay on your fucking bed, Brian. On your bed.” Lon reached down, never taking his eyes off me, and grabbed his computer. He put it down on his desk, where it had been.
I was motionless, too scared to move or speak. Lon typed a little on his computer, muttering every now and then. I guess it was after about five minutes of this that I first began to notice that there was a faint smell of something rotten in the room.
Lon must have noticed me sniffing, because he stopped typing and addressed me. “What are you doing, Brian?” he said quietly.
I was still too terrified to respond. Lon picked up his gun again and repeated his question, slightly more emphatically this time. “What the fuck are you doing, Brian? Brian, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I croaked inaudibly.
“What?” he said, once again aiming the gun at me.
I cleared my throat. “Nothing.”
“No, Brian, not fucking nothing. What the fuck were you just doing?” Lon shook the gun in meter with his words.
I breathed deeply. “There’s a smell. Like something rotten.”
“Fuck. Oh fuck. Shit. Shit, Brian. Brian, you motherfucker. What the FUCK are you doing, Brian?”
I didn’t respond. Lon continued to type with one hand, still pointing the gun at my head with the other.
Suddenly, Lon jumped up from his chair, ran to his closet, and started kicking it with his toe.
“FUCK,” he screamed. “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.” He looked like he was on the verge of tears. “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU KAREN! FUCK YOU JEFF! FUCK THE REST OF YOU! FUCK YOU BRIAN! FUCK YOU BRIAN!” He collapsed on his bed, sobbing uncontrollably.
I decided that this was the time to try to make my escape. Lon wasn’t even facing me, and he was crying so hard I could probably get out of the room before he noticed what I was doing. I jumped up and started sprinting towards the door. After about three steps I felt a massive blow, as if someone had just kicked me really hard in the back. I slammed hard into the door and slumped to the ground, struggling to breathe. Slowly, I managed to twist my body around to face the room. Lon was standing over me, heaving, his smoking gun still in his hand.
“Brian,” he said, his voice now eerily quiet. “Brian Brian Brian Brian. Brian. What the fuck, Brian. What was that, Brian? Brian, what the fuck was that? Fuck, Brian. Fuck.” The pain in my back was blinding.
Lon walked to the window and peered out of it. “Fuck,” he said again. I could hear commotion in the hallway.
Lon was crying again. “Fuck, Brian,” he said his voice getting high and desperate. What are you doing, Brian? What the FUCK are you DOING?”
He ran to the window again. “FUCK,” he yelled, crying louder. “WHAT THE FUCK, BRIAN,” he shouted, and, running back towards me, kicked me in my gut. I could feel myself getting fainter, and it was hard to keep my eyes open.
Just then there was a pounding on the door. “FUCK.” Lon grabbed his laptop and threw it out the window. “FUCK.” The pounding was getting louder. The doorknob started quaking violently. Lon dashed to the other side of the room and dove behind his desk. I pulled and scooted myself a foot out of the way of the door.
The door collapsed just as I got my leg away. Two massive campus policemen charged in, guns drawn. One went down immediately, hit in the shoulder by Lon’s bullet. The other dove behind my bed, shooting towards where Lon was crouching. There was screaming in the hallway.
Lon shot wildly. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed over the rain of bullets. I cowered in my corner, still unable to stand, hoping I was out of the line of fire.
Meanwhile, the officer who had been shot in the shoulder had crawled to a spot where he could see Lon under the desk. Gritting his teeth in pain, he fired a single round, hitting Lon in the thigh.
Lon staggered. “FUCK YOU,” he continued to shout. The wounded officer fired again, hitting Lon in his upper arm. Lon collapsed, his gun falling away from him.
The unharmed officer immediately sprung up and pounced on the fallen Lon. With one knee holding Lon in place, he cuffed his hands behind his back. Over a chorus of “fuck you Brian”, he pulled out his walkie-talkie.
“Shooter subdued, I got an officer and a student down,” he said.
The hallway was erupting with screams and pounding feet.
Finally, I succumbed to my blood loss passed out.
***
It was five weeks after the shooting in my room, and my back was feeling great. The gunshot wound I had sustained was almost completely healed. The bullet had missed everything important, so my recovery time had been relatively short. At the time, I was going to my new senior internship. In light of my special knowledge of the circumstances of the shooting, and my major, the police had agreed to allow me to work with them on recovering data from Lon’s broken laptop. This was my third time going, and we had made some serious headway into fixing the hard drive. When I got to the station I saw my team staring at a computer monitor.
“Hey Brian, you wanna come check this out?” shouted Corey as I entered the lab room. Corey was the electronics expert on the police force, and my supervisor.
“What’s going on?” I replied.
Corey turned the computer monitor to face me. “We just opened this. It’s the most recently modified file on the hard drive.”
“What is that, Excel?” I asked, moving to get a closer look at the screen. “Spreadsheet? What’s on it?”
“Mostly numbers. The column headings are all pretty normal. You know, length, volume, thickness, et cetera. But look at this.” Corey scrolled up, showing me the title of the document.
I gasped. “Holy shit. Skull dimensions? Are you kidding me? I was rooming with a guy who was studying human skull dimensions for four months?”
“Guess so. Those anatomy majors have some weird senior projects. You wanna see something even weirder, take a look at this.” He scrolled right, highlighting the headings on the horizontal rows of the spreadsheet. They were names.
“Oh my god. Names?” I felt nauseous.
“Yeah. Guess he wanted to maintain a personal relationship with his, uh, subjects.”
I was amazed at how aloof Corey was acting, but I guess his line of work would do that to a man after long enough.
“Jesus,” I said, still in shock from this revelation. “I almost wish I kept the bit about Lon’s computer to myself. At least I wouldn’t have to know all this.”
“Hey, I get you,” Corey replied. “But at least now we know why the six bodies in your closet were all missing their heads.”