The radio crackled a mechanical dying breath then went silent. A loud sigh, heavy with blame, broke the silence and filled the darkness like invisible fog.

The words that followed the sigh shot out like poison darts at their unseen target. “You’re an idiot.”

“You’re an idiot,”came the weak, echoed reply.

Several minutes of silence followed until the frustration erupted again.

“Shut up!” the first girl spat into the silence at nothing in particular.

“You shut up!” was the flimsy retort. This elaborate exchange continued for some time, the two young ladies who sat together in the pitch black darkness each becoming more and more entrenched in their view that the other should “shut up.” Suddenly, a dim gray light lit up the edge of the door, light only inasmuch as it was not the utter darkness that filled the rest of the room. The inane fighting halted momentarily.

“Is it morning?” piped up the second voice, high pitched, tense, and with a practiced puritanism that underpinned every syllable and belied its youthfulness.

“There are no windows in the hall. Someone must have tripped the motion sensor light.” This voice had a sternness borne of frustration, was tight-lipped but clear, like the voice of a librarian scolding a noisy youngster. It was the conscientious mother to its counterpart’s naïve child. Another brief pause reified the silence as the two girls listened intently for whomever had brought the gray light to their dark little hole. The thick wood of the door yielded no sound or clue, no matter how they strained their ears. The schoolmarm-sounding one chided the other.

“It’s probably some idiot freshman boy going to the bathroom,” she said, sounding thoroughly unconvinced by her reasoning. Unseen, her lips untightened as she lapsed into thought. She and Fiona had been trapped in this blasted janitorial closet for two days now. On Friday, their lazy and generally good for very little student supervisor Kit had sent them to change the room’s fluorescent light so he wouldn’t have to do it himself and interrupt his reading. “Useless layabout,” she thought. Somehow, Fiona, her impish little child of a maintenance partner, had managed to lock the door from the outside before it shut, leaving both the keys and their work radio just outside the door. Along with the new light bulb. She boiled with rage just thinking about it.

At five o’clock on a Friday night in the freshman dorms the day finals had ended, their pounding and pleas for help echoed through empty hallways. Everyone had gone home already or was out for the night. By the time anyone got home, it was so late they hadn’t dared say anything for fear they’d be fired for being in a men’s dorm so late. “Stupid BYU,” went her angry thoughts. “Stupid everything!”

They’d spent a miserable night huddled on the cold linoleum floor in the dark. The next day, they began to call out again, but to no avail. Everyone must have already left and she was certain she was going to die in that room. Luckily, there was a dump sink which had doubled as a source of water and the second most bitterly humiliating bathroom experience of her 23 years of existence. At least Fiona had had to suffer the same ignominy. Now she was ravenously hungry and beginning to consider whether or not beating Fiona to death with the pipe wrench in their tool bucket would solve all her problems.

The worst part about this whole affair was that she had missed church. Church. Where she was finally going to sit next to Cameron, the beautiful half-Korean boy who had recently begun to occupy the vast majority of her thoughts. She could feel her skin turn red, first with embarrassment at her infatuation, then with more anger. Fiona! That underdeveloped little twerp had ruined everything. She felt around in the darkness for the tool bucket as the heat spread through her body.

Finally, her fingers felt the cold, round, steel haft of the heavy pipe wrench and she pulled it from its slot with a metallic rattle.

“Evelyn, what are you doing?” Fiona asked timidly.

“Just…don’t move, Fifi,” Evelyn replied with a terrifying firmness. In the darkness, Fiona couldn’t see the Raskolnikov-esque glint in Evelyn’s yes as she raised the massive wrench above her head. It was something she never would have believed she was capable of, but the last two days had pushed her to her breaking point.

The breath caught in Fiona’s throat as the wrench swooped down in a vicious arc. A sharp crack rang out in the darkness, then a gasp, then a lifeless thud. Then, silence.

A soft light shone through the round hole where the door handle had been.

“Evelyn, what did you do!?” Fiona squeaked. “We’re going to get in so much trouble!”

“Oh, shut up!” came the exasperated reply. “No one saw us, so they won’t know whom to blame. I can’t stay in this dank little cave one second longer.”

She hooked her finger through the hole in the door and pulled it open.

“I am not peeing in front of you again,” she said, and stepped out into the dim hall. She had no way of knowing what time it was. Evelyn had forgotten her crummy little cellphone back at the shop, while Fiona always insisted on leaving hers there out of some kind of misguided principle. She didn’t want to get distracted while they were supposed to be working. The little killjoy.

They looked around the hallway. The coast seemed clear. They could sneak out without anyone noticing. But Evelyn’s bladder was about to burst and there was no time for subterfuge. She bolted toward the floor’s communal bathroom like a woman possessed, pipe wrench in hand, simultaneously sprinting and clenching to avoid wetting herself.

She finally reached the door and pulled down the handle in gleeful triumph. With a rush of wind, it flew open, striking her in the forehead and knocking her to the floor. Her wire-framed glasses had fallen and she could feel fresh, warm blood running down her face and into her mouth from a gash on her head. Someone stepped out of the bathroom and past her prostrate body. Someone large, blurry, and unmistakably naked.

“Maintenance, woman on the floor!” she heard from what seemed to be a million miles away in a voice filled with the kind of panic that can only be aroused in a 19 year old prude seeing a naked man for the first time. As Evelyn felt for her glasses, the naked man rushed past her and toward Fiona down the hall. A rush of cold, naked air filled Evelyn’s nostrils. Suddenly, Fiona screamed a strange, childlike scream that awakened something maternal in her.

She found her glasses and placed them on her slightly crooked nose. They were smeared with blood. Standing up, a rush of adrenaline coursed through her veins and her transparently pale skin grew hot and feverish. Now she bolted the other way after the naked man who was charging down a now shrieking Fiona. Her screams ended in a sickening thud and a painful choking sound as the naked man crashed into her like a rampaging bull. She flew through the air like a ragdoll before hitting the thinly carpeted floor with a limp crunch. Evelyn felt a surge of panic shoot up her spine.

“Hey, stop! I’ll…I’ll call campus police!”

The nude freshman turned his attention to this new distraction. Through the red mist that covered her lenses, Evelyn could see something like black ink covering the boy’s mouth and chest. She didn’t dare look further down.

“Stop! I mean it!” she yelled in a voice filled with the kind of panic that can only be aroused in a 23 year old prude seeing a naked man for the first time. He didn’t stop. He careened toward her like a fleshy rocket, arms outstretched and mouth agape, black teeth bared. Fear like she had never known welled up in her heart.

This was it. She was going to die. She was going to be violated, then brutally murdered, all because that idiot Fiona had gotten her locked in a janitorial closet.

He was a step away when instincts she didn’t realize she had kicked in. While the rest of her body remained paralyzed, her right arm swung upwards in a perfect arc at the end of which was five pounds of pipe wrench-shaped steel.

The head of the wrench connected with the assailant’s jaw in an explosion of blood, teeth, splintered bones, and Evelyn’s screams. The naked freshman fell to the ground briefly, his ragged jaw hanging piecemeal from its hinges and oily black blood pouring from the gaping hole of his mouth.

Before she had time to realize what had happened, he was back on his feet and lunging again. This time, Evelyn didn’t hesitate, and the heavy steel came down on the naked man’s skull like some kind of medieval instrument of death. The back of his head burst like a rotten cantaloupe, brain, skull, and blood exploding outward like a firework of carnage.

Heart palpitating, breath short, Evelyn looked down at the horrific scene she had wrought and vomited the meager contents of her empty stomach. Then, without even the slightest hint of dignity, she fainted.