Day of the Edd PART I

He went to touch the pen to paper, but found that starting his memoir today would be difficult. Not that he didn't have anything to write about; in fact, the blood on his hands illustrated how many pages he needed to fill in the leather book. It was the dried, sticky blood between his fingers that made this difficult. He went to the bathroom and started scrubbing his hands, watching the red water splosh down the drain. Rinse, wash, repeat. Seven times. This was a practice that many had deemed anal, but this was how he did things. He had left a sticky note to his parents with a recommendation they put in him touch with a therapist, but they were so wrapped up in their own lives they barely noticed when he tried to get their attention.

He stood in front of the mirror for a moment, drying his hands. He looked at himself closely and adjusted his cap. It was a hot day outside, but the cap needed to stay on. It was just the way things were. He never entertained the thought of taking it off, but the others did time and time again. He had a certain way of doing things and, repeatedly, the other kids in the cul-de-sac insisted on interrupting his best practices.

Not anymore.

The teasing, the maiming, and all the bullshit over the years...it had gone on long enough. He had tried reasoning with them, but it was to no avail. They would not listen to his words, so brute force was all that remained. In the back of his mind, he had forseen this coming and spent the past few months studying ancient war tactics, as well as present-day urban combat. He returned to his bedroom, stepping over the piles of books and notes, and sorted through some papers on his desk. Although he had lived in this cul-de-sac for many years, he found it only fitting to his studies to have complete documents on all his enemies.

It started out innocent at first as he took notes of his peers in the interest of later studies, but it quickly evolved into the strategies that he found inside his military books. Know your enemy, understand your enemy. Learn where they live, sleep, learn, and play. Know where they will go in the event of an emergency situation. Map everything. Obsess over every detail.

And he did all this.

He had a detailed map of the cul-de-sac and all the areas beyond the borders of the suburbia. The junkyard. The trailer park. It was summer, so he left the school out of his worries.

He flipped through the files of Nazz, Sarah, Jimmy, Eddy, Ed, Johnny, the Kanker sisters, and Rolf. He stopped on Kevin's, where he put a big red X across the photograph. He reminded himself that Kevin was waiting for him in the basement. He closed the file and cross the room to his closet, where his supplies awaited him. Among his studies, he had picked up on different ways of torture or, the way the book defined them, "extracting information." He had to go to the internet to find all the gory details. Pepper spray, toilet cleaner, pins and needles, hairspray, lighters...there was a whole closet he had transformed into a war room, devoting most of his post-study time to prepare himself.

He pulled on a gas mask and leather gloves before draping an apron over himself. If it was one thing he hated, it was to get blood on himself. His hands were pruned from washing it off earlier. He looked over his treasury of supplies and grabbed a couple of items off the shelf before exiting his room.

He whistled lighty to himself. Today was a good day.

The boy didn't remember the last time he was this happy, but it bordered closely to the first day he made friends with the other Eds. He remembered how enthralled he was that other children wanted to play with him, rather than look on in disgust. His brow furrowed when he was reminded of all the teasing and maining when he was younger. Some of it had carried into his teenage years, with most of it embodied physically into the form of Kevin, the cul-de-sac jock.

Kevin, the cul-de-sac jock whom had repeatedly thrown him into the pavement and mocked him in front of his friends. Kevin, the one who threw him into the locker and left him in there for hours, all the while throwing his arm around Nazz, the girl all the boys yearned for. Kevin, who sat in a bloody mess on a chair in Edd's dimly-lit basement, who looked as the boy walked down the stairs. He had vomited earlier. Edd could see the stains on his shirt. His gas mask worked very well, so he didn't have as much difficulty breathing as Kevin did. he walked up to the propane tank next to Kevin's face and turned the valve shut.

"Do you like it?" Edd asked politely. "It's my own invention, you know. It's a combination of household cleaners...very basic, but irritating enough to your immune system that it will try to flush it out of your body any way it can. It looks like your body has tried that a couple times already.

"Fu...fuck you," Kevin spat, his eyes swollen and blood running from his nose. Edd grinned behind the mask and lowered himself to Kevin's line of sight, sitting on his haunches. "You know," The boy replied. "I never liked you, Kevin. I never have. I've always been a professional, you know. I've always tried to treat you as an equal. That's what you do in the professional world. But you insisted on making things miserable for me. So, I guess you can say that I'm kind of returning the favor. Just be glad I'm not doing this in front of everybody."

As he spoke, he opened his toolbox, from which he pulled surgical tubing. "Which reminds me. Now, open your mouth, please," He tugged at the bottom of Kevin's chin, but he refused to open his mouth.

"Now, what I'm going to do," he explained, "is dump this mixture of toilet bowl cleaner into your stomach. It's watered down and I added some other household ingredients to it so it shouldn't kill you, at least not immediately. However, it will give you horrendous cramps...that which can only be relieved by defecating." He smiled at the thought of Kevin shitting his pants while tied to a chair. He almost wished he had time to witness event. He fed the concoction into the tubing and watched the blue liquid drain into Kevin's mouth. The boy's eyes watered as he gagged, his body lurching foward, struggling to vomit. Edd watched on in a strange fascination as Kevin's body took in the foreign liquid.

"I'll see you later, Kevin...that is, if you're still around. I'm going to take care of the rest of the kids. Who knows? Maybe I'll bring Nazz down to keep you company. I know how much you like her.

"I'll kill you," Kevin gurgled, his head swaying lazily back and forth. Edd knew he was just on the border of consciousness. "Ta!" He waved his goodby as he closed the basement door, making careful note to turn off the light behind him. That bastard didn't deserve the slightest bit of sympathy.

Edd returned to his room, where he devised his war strategy. Odds are the kids were holed up in just one house and it only made sense. There was strength in numbers. this would require him to be extra careful. he wnet over all the house in the cul-de-sac and pinpointed Jimmy's house; it was the biggest on the block. It only made sense that there would be plenty of places to hide in a house that big.

It wasn't like it was a big deal if he were wrong, either. He had all the time in the world. All the parents spent most of their time in town, anyway. The cul-de-sac was pretty secluded, with the exception of the trailer park and junkyard nearby. He would find them all eventually. he opened his closet and, for a moment, marveled over the wealth of gadgets and weapons he had stockpiled over the years. The day of Jimmy's birthday party, a day that seemed so long ago now - where he had stocked all of his spy equipment - would play a vital role in today's activities. He had modified most of the equipment to be lethal, but in some cases only stunning. He may want some of them alive.

He undressed from his earlier attire and strapped on his armor, which was mostly made from sports equipment he had taken from Kevin's house and modified to hold cartridges of ammunition and other tools of war. He pulled on a football helmet that had been reinforced with carbon fiber around the outside; he had spent most of the night welding the fiber into place. This reminded him of the lack of sleep he had. The past 48 hours had been very strenuous, and he hadn't noticed it until now. All the planning and execution had taken place right in the past two days and everything had gone according to plan. Sleep was out of the question, as exhausted as his body was, but it was nothing that caffeine pills and some energy soda couldn't fix. He needed to be WIRED to accomplish his approaching task.

Finishing off his uniform with some leather gloves and combat boots (which he ordered online - he was very proud of these), he exited his room and proceeded to leave the house. Before exiting the front door, he stopped to listen to the melodious sound of Kevin gagging in the basement. How beautiful those stomach-lurching noises were to his ears. He stepped outside and into the bright sun.

The cul-de-sac lay empty, a comic tumbleweed passing by. The kids had left their toys in the street; Jimmy's stray bike lay on its side with the front tire spinning in the wind. The target was a house about five doors down on the opposite side of the street. It wouldn't be long now. Edd noticed his hands shaking in a kind of nervous anticipation. He needed to calm down. The caffeine pills and energy drink he downed before he left the house just took effect, and he could feel his heart racing. He took a deep breath and stood in the street, taking in the moment.

As he stood there, he reminisced various times he had stood on this street next to Eddy, who often preached something or another from atop a soap box. The kids would jeer and protest the interrupting of their play. All they wanted was jawbreakers. Edd ran his tongue over his lips. A jawbreaker sounded delicious right now. He made a mental note to reward himself with one after he was finished today. He waited another minute then continued his path. He reviewed his plan in his head.

Storm the front door. Sweep through the living room Make his way in through the dining room, and from there sweep around the outer rim of the house, making his way into the center. Jimmy's house was oddly designed. From the living room, you could only reach the dining room and once you passed through there, you had the choice of entering a hallway which seemed to wrap around the center of the house with bedrooms connecting off of it or you could enter a bedroom on the opposite side of the dining room where it met halfway through a walk-in closet.

He would have to remember this.

As he approached the front door, he took a deep breath. This was it. He could hardly contain his excitement. It all required careful planning, detailed drawings, and compulsive studying. It all accounted to this. "Hello?" Edd rapped his knuckles on the front door. "Jimmy, are you home? I'd like to have a word with you."

"Go away," someone inside cried out. Edd grinned. They were hiding. "I'm coming inside," Edd hissed. "There's nothing you can do about it.

"We'll call the police," they threatened.

How foolish they were. Edd took a minute to cast his gaze up and down the street. There were no police. There never would be. The phone lines didn't even reach behind the neighborhood, so he didn't bother with cutting them.

Without another word, he pulled a small plastic explosive from his utility belt. It was a product of his own design, hand-marked with his own signature on it. He readied the charge on the door and took cover in the bushes. The charge blew the door of its hinges, but it still hung lazily in place. Terrified screams erupted from inside the house.

Perfect.

He kicked the door in and pressed his back against the wall outside the house. Scooping up two small homemade smoke bombs, he tossed them inside and assembled his stun gun as smoke filled the living room and billowed out the front door.

The boy took a moment, as always, to marvel over each piece of technology he constructed. The stun gun was a modified squirt gun, about the size of a rifle, which had been reinforced to shoot darts. The darts were common playing darts laced with poison from his pet arachnid. He would miss his pet very much, but the spider's sacrifice was well worth it. With a deep breath, he turned the corner and entered the house, squatting low to the ground with his rifle raised. The smoke had begun to clear, with his cover dissolving, but he'd rather have it this way. He wanted the kids confused and disorientated from the blast of the door, nothing more.

His eyes swept around the living room. There were bags of chips and other junk foods laying in a littered mess on the floor. Disgusting. He made a mental note to go through and clean up later. Silently, he crept into the dining room, where he saw a figure dart into the hallway. "Oh my god! Sarah!"

It was Jimmy.

The coward ran to the end of the hallway, already sobbing profusely. Sarah appeared next to him, her face locked in a death stare. It didn't register with her that Edd had a gun as she ran toward him, readying herself for the comical beating she thought would ensue.

(Read Part II | Part III | Alternate Ending)