The Gymrat
A vignette in the midst of chaos
I believe this is what they call “non-linear storytelling”:
Damn Clowns took over the police
What will you do when they come for you? Clown cops, clown cops. Whatchu gonna do? Whatchu gonna do when they come for you?
She doesn’t know what’s going on. All that’s certain is something’s wrong.
She was driving the gang out of town last night when the road changed. It twisted and turned through the woods, packed with more trees than there should have been. They were so dense their branches hung down and scraped loudly on the roof of the Corolla. Instead of merging onto the highway, the road spat them back out in front of Eun’s.
After a short spat of arguing with the gang, she resolved to drive the other way through town. The long way would have them going through the Rez along the coast, but there’d be less trees at least.—Bad choice.
Main St. was quiet, but it was littered from the sidewalks to the center with broken glass from the buildings flanking the thoroughfare, cars that looked like they’d been sent off a cliff, blood…and bodies.
She had slowed down when she noticed the innumerable shards glittering under the streetlights; they crunched under the tires as she rolled past the crooked heaps the cars had been made into. She came to a stop before the bodies—she couldn’t tell what they were until the headlights shone into the dead, bleeding eyes of a girl she recognized from Eun’s. Maybe she’d seen her in a class.
A broken RCMP cruiser sat in the middle of the bodies. Several cops’ corpses slumped against it, chained up through the broken windows.
The gang urged her to turn back, so she did. She sped off back to the university. It wasn’t much better there, however.
People were screaming. Even though she couldn’t see them, their voices carried out from the dorms and other buildings on campus. They weren’t the screams and cheers of a successful football night or a good tear, but cries of horror and pleas for help mingling in a dull roar of panic. Students ran in front of Chisholm Hall, the admissions building, an old brick structure with a whitewashed roof and matching copula. They were chased by the cops—only those weren’t the real cops—they were pale-faced like ghosts, with marks of bright color on their cheeks and around their eyes. Their clothes as well changed like mood rings in constant flux.
One of the fake cops, a skinny man with an odd, waddling gait, threw a brick at the back of a guy’s head. The guy went limp as it struck him, the gravelly crack of the brick echoed by another as his forehead slammed into the sidewalk before Chisholm. The girls he ran with hardly looked over their shoulders as they fled from a pair of the fake cops.
The skinny man went up to the guy, still breathing and twitching, and stood akimbo over him. She noticed the massive bulge between his legs, likely the cause of his odd walk. He lifted one foot and brought it down on his victim’s head, again and again. Bone and flesh scraped against concrete.
She put the Corolla in reverse and sped back to town. Even with the blood, bodies, and ruin it was empty, she figured—she hoped. She raced down the hill from Eun’s and took a back road into town, one she took every morning—except Sundays—to a place she felt was even more comfortable than her own apartment. She whipped onto Monk St. and pulled into the plaza parking lot in front of GoodLife Lamibogish.
The gang hopped out of the car and rushed to the door. She was the first to reach it, opening it with a swipe of her keycard. They almost tumbled inside, surprising the bored-looking clerk at the desk, a scrawny, young Indian guy. He tried asking if they needed help, but they went right to barricading the doors. When he tried kicking them out, she wouldn’t have it, explaining to him exactly what she saw going down at Eun’s. And if he didn’t believe her, she said, he could go and see for himself. He relented, if only perhaps he felt like a hostage.
They used almost all the plates and dumbbells to block the doors, forming near-immobile masses of rubber, hard plastic, and cheap steel. They had set up the benches and yoga mats as beds, or at least something to sit or lie down on—none of them were in the mood to close their eyes for long.
In the morning, everyone complained of being hungry. At least none of the strangers terrorizing the school or town had tried breaking in overnight. She volunteered to make a run to Superstore, the Corolla was hers anyway—her brothers’ beforehand. It was a shitty 2001 model with almost 16,000 kilometers and climbing, but she handled it with the ease of a racer, thanks many to the training bestowed by its previous owners.
It’s a sunny morning, clear and crisp. The streets aren’t as empty today; a few cars pass by coming from McCarthy Plaza, likely hauling groceries and liquor. The faces of the drivers are tense, white—not as pale as those people at Eun’s, but simply blanched from stress.
Superstore is more crowded than she was expecting. Whatever’s happening in town, people are treating it like the end of the world. It’s a hell of a time finding a spot, and frustrating to navigate the hurried drivers trying to speed off while others are pulling in. Honks, strings of curses, and the rattling of abandoned shopping carts dominate the air. Finally, she settles on a spot in the front row, a dozen strides from the doors. She swipes it from an old lady who scowls at her, and even inches the front bumper of her car close to her legs. She ignores the bag and brushes past a young couple running out of the store, crying toddler held up by the father in one arm. Her heart churns at the thought of those pale-faced freaks attacking families like those—how many of them were there to cause so much panic? Are they still wreaking havoc?
Whoever they were, they seem to be giving some breathing room for the time being. Time enough for people to get their goodies before they come again.
If the parking lot was crazy, the inside of Superstore is chaos. All the carts are taken, the checkout lines are packed, people are screaming at each other and the workers—one middle aged lady working a register looks like she’s about to cry as she’s bagging a red-faced, fat man’s groceries; he’s shouting at her and waving his hands.
She chances going into the narrow aisles between the looming shelves. It’s morning and everyone’s hungry, so she thinks breakfast is the best option. They probably don’t have a stove at GoodLife so cereal will have to do. Of course, that section’s almost entirely gutted, save for a few boxes of raisin bran and cream of wheat. A worker trying to restock the shelves is in an argument with a flustered old man asking who the fuck took all the hotdogs? The cart behind the worker has a few stacks of Fruit Loops, Cheerios, and a few other “fun” cereals; she grabs several, then makes her way to the supplements section.
Oddly enough, very few customers were taking advantage of nabbing the actually nutritious, long-lasting stuff. The single, waist-high shelf of whey, protein bars, and prepackaged shakes had been mostly untouched. She grins as she notices a single bag of her favorite powder remains—Snickers. The gang gives her shit for it, saying it tastes too sweet, but she doesn’t care. She attributes it to her 111 kg deadlift PR. She grabs it, a box of shakes, and a box of bars, then makes her way to the registers.
The lines only got longer in the few minutes she was searching. They sprawl all the way back into the shelves; the people are getting louder. Those who do make it to the registers just throw their food straight into the carts then book it once they’ve paid.
Another thing hits her—she forgot her wallet in the car.
If she left this stuff to go and get it, there’s no telling if it’d still be there when she got back. Even if she did get it and even if she was lucky enough for the stuff to still be there when she got back, she remembers she doesn’t get paid until next Friday. She doesn’t want to keep the gang waiting, either.
Ducking into a secluded corner, she pulls the cereal bags out of their boxes and stuffs them under her hoodie along with the whey. The bars and shakes she removes from their packaging, and puts as many as she can in each pocket of her sweats, then the rest in her sleeves. She already feels hot with the hordes of panicking customers and the memories of last night, the pilfered goods make her feel even more uncomfortable. She shuffles towards the exit, looking about four kilos fatter than when she walked in. No one bats an eye, no one stops her. She feels bad, but promises to herself to fess up once this whole thing blows over.
In the car, she reloads the food into her bookbag, then backs out, not even looking. A horn blasting behind her snaps her attention back where it should be, but too late. The Corolla’s fender shatters a sleek, black sedan’s right headlight.
The driver shoves his head out the window. He has a dark goatee and patchy ballcap on, his face contorted in a snarl of pure anger.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he screams.
She knows she should apologize, swap insurance and all that, but she wants to get out of there. She has enough room so she cuts the wheel and hits the gas, narrowly missing a beat-up red truck, earning a honk from that driver. She slips out of the plaza and back onto the road. But the sedan is following her.
She speeds up. It speeds up. She makes a turn, and it follows.
The driver glowers at her in the rearview. His passenger, a man with dark stubble, says something to him, but he doesn’t respond.
She pulls up to a stoplight as it’s turning red. Her pursuers slow down to a stop, practically touching her fender. Once her hood passes over the white line, she guns it. She’s lucky there’s no one else in the intersection; she takes a roundabout way towards GoodLife, hoping to shake the sedan down some alley or other turn. They’re on her, plowing through the red light as well.
She takes all the turns she knows, but they’re still on her. She finds herself on the back way towards GoodLife and decides to stick with it, the whole time stealing glances back at the sedan. The guys are shouting at each other now, the driver’s grip white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
Between one of those glances she almost hits someone—two people. A pair of tall young men walking on the side of the road. One of them is black, taller than the other by at least a head and skinny as a rail. He’s pulled towards the grassy ditch off the road by the other, a broad-shouldered, black-haired guy with grey eyes that meet hers as she passes. The latter is carrying a short shotgun.
She guns it the rest of the way, tires screaming as she pulls into Monk St. She drives over the sidewalk into the parking lot. She’s pulling the groceries in her bag out as the sedan drives onto the sidewalk as well. She jumps out of the car and shouts for her friends to open the door. They do and she almost collapses as she throws herself inside.
The sedan parks behind the Corolla. Its driver steps out and storms up to the door and knocks hard on the glass, glaring inside.
“The Gymrat” © Ethan Sabatella 2025 – Current Year, All Rights Reserved. Reprinting or replication of this work in its entirety in any form (written, audiovisual, etc.) without express permission of the author is prohibited. Excerpts may be used for review or promotional purposes with credit and acknowledgement of the author. This piece cannot be used for training of Artificial Intelligence programs.
Tense and riveting.