by Frazer Lee
“Worry about that later,” Lena says through gritted teeth.
Seconds later, I hear a loud click. Lena’s done it. She’s cracked the lock. With a flourish, she opens the door.
“Okay…worry about it now, bitches,” she says.
We each exchange glances before joining Lena by the open door. I look through the gap and see the corridor stretching out beyond, and all of a sudden it comes to me.
“I may have a plan,” I say.
The open-mouthed looks on their faces should offend me, I suppose. To be honest, though, I’m as surprised as the next girl.
* * *
Weird, isn’t it, how you seem to find fault in good ideas the more you dwell on them? That’s why I ask Lena to run through our plan one more time as we walk the corridor.
“Seriously?” she says. “It’s like the third damn time we’ve been through this.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but we only have one shot at it.”
Lena shrugs.
“Okay. You losers give me a head start. I bust into the med cabinet, grab some sedatives. Meantime you find Quick, tell her that I went on a one-way ticket to Crazy Town and that I’m headed for the clock tower. You lead her up there and – boom! We whack her, drug the bitch. Then we get the fuck out of here. That it?”
“Sounds about right to me.”
We approach a turn in the corridor. Lena brandishes her lock-picking wire.
“Right, this is me, I guess,” she says. “Give me a few minutes at least.”
“Okay.” I nod.
“Later, ladies,” Lena says, before she heads off into the other corridor.
We wait there in silence, and already I begin to question the plan. What if Principal Quick isn’t even in her office? What if Lena bumps into her on the way to the med store? My head begins to throb with each possible outcome. I shake my head, willing away the onset of that ringing in my ears.
“Do you think we gave her long enough?” Victoria whispers, breaking the silence, and thankfully the maelstrom in my head.
“Give her too much time and she’ll be high as a kite,” Annie says.
“Shit, I hadn’t even thought of that,” I say.
We each exchange concerned glances.
“Let’s move,” I say.
Maybe things will seem better if we start walking to Principal Quick’s office. At least we’ll have a sense of purpose, and then my plan might not seem so lame after all.
Chapter Fourteen
Lena
Lena turned the light on inside the med store and pulled the door shut behind her.
She passed the shelves lined with boxes of bandages, packets of gauze, and other medical consumables and walked up to the drug locker. Eyes on the prize. She reached out and grasped the padlock. It was heavy and had one of those sliding metal covers over the aperture. Lena thumbed the cover open and bent over to take a closer look. The barrel looked too small for the wire she was carrying, but she tried it anyway.
Damn. Her lock pick had made light work of the main door, but this baby was going to take something else if she wanted it sprung anytime soon.
Lena surveyed each of the shelves that were in reach for anything useful. She had to use a plastic chair in the corner to check the upper shelves and found them devoid of anything except dust. Then, inspiration struck.
She hopped down from the chair and upended it. The legs were fashioned from black, enameled metal. She slid one of the chair legs inside the padlock. Using it as a lever, she pulled down on the chair, twisting it sharply.
With a satisfying snap, the padlock broke open and fell to the floor. Putting the chair to one side, Lena flung open the cabinet.
Whoah.
Inside was a prescription drug mother lode. Lena began rifling through the shelves of vials and blister packs of needles. She absentmindedly licked her lips like a kid at a candy store window. In the back of her mind, a vaguely fuzzy warmth. A memory of more carefree times. Of oblivion.
The warmth was snuffed out by a chill at the nape of her neck. She saw a shadow-shape flicker, reflected in the drug bottles. Holy crap, maybe Principal Quick had found her out already.
Lena turned.
There was no one there. But the feeling that someone was there lingered.
Lena swallowed, and said shakily, “Hello?”
She felt on edge. But there really was nobody there, and the door to the med store was still closed, as she’d left it.
Lena returned her attention to the contents of the med cabinet. It didn’t take her long to find exactly what she needed to make Principal Quick go bye-bye for a little while. Lena knew all of the names on the bottles and cartons. Knew exactly what they did, and how much to use. The printed characters on the labels were as familiar to her as the lyrics to old nursery rhymes. Fair-weather friends, and bad-time buddies each of them.
Lena felt her lips curl into a smile as she released a hypodermic from its packaging. She broke the seal on a vial and plunged the needle in. She loaded up the syringe, ready to use on Principal Quick when the time came. Lena held the syringe up to the light and gave it a couple of flicks with her forefinger. Her slight smile became a wider grin at the tactile memory of performing that ritual so many times before.
A dark shape filled the glass tube of the syringe. A shadow, of someone standing right behind her. Lena glimpsed a darkly glinting eye. She saw a pale hand reach for her shoulder.
Lena dropped the syringe.
“Shit.” She stooped to pick it up.
Lena grabbed the hypodermic. Thankfully, she hadn’t broken it. She rose back to her full height again. And as she did, she came face to face with a hideous, gray girl. Or rather, face to hair, because the girl’s face was obscured by dark, tangled strands of it. The girl’s black eyes blazed into her, through her hair, filling Lena with their darkness.
Lena felt a well of despair bubbling uncontrollably inside of her. Her cry of alarm was cut short when the girl clamped her cold, dead hand over Lena’s mouth. The chilly touch penetrated Lena’s body and mind with the sharp intensity of an electric shock. Lena fell forward, and she couldn’t stop herself. The cold hand pulled her down until she hit the ground, on her hands and knees.
Somewhere…else.
The smell from the garbage bags was overpowering. They lay all around her, a nest of filth and decay. Several of them had burst open in the hot sun that Lena could feel beating down on her back. Rotten food baked and basted in the foul juices of human waste. Soiled diapers twitched as engorged rats devoured their contents. The stench made Lena gag. But she knew how to dull her senses to make it go away. She could make all of it go away.
Urgent grunting from over her shoulder told her he was almost finished. His halitosis mingled with the stink of the alleyway and she felt a spike of acid in her throat. He’d better cum soon or she might throw up before he got there. Maybe he’d enjoy it. Maybe not. Lena didn’t care. She only cared about the reward. Eyes on the prize. He grunted some more and spurted his slime into her, before coughing and cackling. She pulled away from him but he ran his trembling fingers through her greasy hair and dangled a plastic baggy of junk in front of her.
She reached for it but his fingers snapped it away.
“Ah, ah….”
He laughed like a drain into her ear and she grimaced at the sluice of his breath.
“I’ll pay you double for your sister,” he grunted.
Lena wriggled free and pulled up her panties. “Leave my kid sister out of this, asshole.”
“Aww,” he crooned, “you’re jealous?”
He dangled the baggie again. A carrot that was just out of reach. Lena hated his games. Hated him, and the things she knew she’d do for that little portion of powder held between his fat, nicotine-stained fingertips.
“Never. I’m number one and you know it
,” she taunted.
He hit her. That was how it always ended. A bit of pillow talk and then some violence. She’d kill the fucker someday. But first, she just needed a hit. Her lip began to bleed. She sucked at it, tasting the salt tang of her blood. It would taste sweeter with a hit coursing through her veins.
“You’re all used up. Bring your sister to me, tomorrow. Or no more candy for you. Just stone-cold turkey.” He teased her with the wrap of drugs.
Lena’s face burned with tears. She couldn’t do what he asked of her. Couldn’t drag her sister into this walking death. But she had to make him think she would. So she nodded. His triumphant laugh made her feel worst of all. He dropped the baggie in her lap and then, zipping up his pants, ambled away down the alleyway. She heard him hawking and spitting into the garbage and then he was gone.
The sun ducked behind a cloud. The shade felt good as it cooled her tears. She wiped them from her face, along with the snot from her nose and the blood from her mouth. Then she set about prepping her fix. The track marks on her arm seemed almost to pucker as she held the needle close. Each puncture wound was a little mouth, hungry for succor. She felt it enter her, the opposite of sex, as it spiked into her senses and carried her over the edge and into the sun-kissed never-lands, far, far beyond the corrupt physical world of the stinking alley in which her frail body lay.
But something was wrong.
The horizon tilted and tipped over. She had nothing to cling to, and was sent tumbling in a spiral, down into a black void.
Lena heard a distant scream, quickly subsumed by animalistic grunts.
The scream became cries of anguish. And those only seemed to make the grunting all more aggressive, and urgent. Lena felt sick. She was hearing the sounds of innocence being torn away. The track marks on her arm began to throb painfully. She saw them pulsing in the bruised flesh of her arms, and watched as black tendrils snaked up her arms, filling her veins with poisonous bile. Lena looked away and only then saw a pale shape next to her. Her kid sister lay dead by her side. Her fragile form discarded with all the other garbage. Overdosed eyes fixed wide open. Young eyes that had seen too much to bear.
Lena tried to scream, but could only gasp. She had done this. She had.
She felt freezing cold gripping the sides of her head. Then the cold was gone and Lena felt her body lurch, head over heels through space until—
She slammed back against a hard metal surface.
Lena breathed in stale, dusty air. She was in the med store again, with the cold metal frame of the shelving at her back and the hard floor beneath her.
Glancing around in terror, Lena found that she was alone in there. The gray girl had gone. But the throbbing in her veins still lingered. It intensified as her senses came back to her. She looked down at her arms, turning them over to reveal the source of the pain. Both arms were red raw with jagged needle marks. Lena realized why the throbbing pain was so intense. Her veins had been torn wide open. She was bleeding out all over the floor.
Lena kicked out her legs in a spasm and heard the scraping of glass against concrete. Dozens upon dozens of syringes lay at her feet. Tears welled up in her eyes, clouding her view. Desperate to stand, to get up and out of there, to live and not die – not like this – Lena clutched at the shelf behind her and tried to push her body up from the floor.
She slipped in her own blood. The contents of the shelf came crashing down. Lena fell with them. She had lost too much. Too much innocence. Too much blood. The red sleeves of her arms dropped to her sides. As Lena’s eyes rolled back into their sockets, she saw a gray shape watching her from the shadows.
She’s been with me all along, thought Lena before the dark took her down.
Chapter Fifteen
Girl A
It doesn’t take us long to reach Quick’s office. The corridors are deserted, and we move quickly and quietly. We pause for breath when we reach Quick’s door. I’m nearest to it. I look at Victoria, and then at Annie.
“Okay, here goes…” I say. I knock. No answer. I knock again.
“Crap,” Annie says, “she’s not even home!”
I twist the door handle and push. The door is unlocked. It swings open and I step inside. Victoria and Annie join me in the office. I hear a disembodied gasp and realize that the sound is mine.
Principal Quick lays slumped across her desk.
A bottle of vodka stands next to her, half-empty and missing its cap.
“Principal Quick?”
She’s not moving. No sign of her breathing, either. We approach her desk together, cautiously. Tension hangs in the musty air of the office. It feels as though the principal may startle into life again any moment. Then I see an empty prescription pill bottle next to the vodka. There’s no label on the bottle, just the powdery residue of whatever tablets it contained.
I don’t want to touch her, but I have no choice.
I reach out and brush Quick’s hair away from her eyes. They’re glassy, and wide open. Her face is locked in a silent scream of pure terror. Her hair feels weird against my skin. I wonder if it’s still growing, even though she’s—
“She’s stone-cold fucking dead,” Annie says.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” Victoria pants.
“Try the phone,” Annie says. “Call for help.”
I reach out and pluck the receiver from its cradle. I put it to my ear and can hear no dial tone, nothing.
“It’s dead,” I say, and wonder if that’s an inappropriate thing to say, given the macabre circumstances.
Annie marches over and takes the receiver from me. She puts it to her ear and listens intently. I guess she needs to try it for herself before she’ll believe me. She looks crestfallen and then drops the receiver onto the desk.
I see the clipboard on the desk next to Quick’s stiff, bony hand. She must have been looking at it before she died. I pick it up and start leafing through the pages.
“Emily?” Victoria asks. “What are you…?”
Each page has one of our psych profiles on it, and I start reading the notes written in Quick’s spidery hand.
“This can’t be right.”
“What is that?” Annie asks, sounding agitated.
“Profiles. Psych evaluations, the whole lot. Look, here’s Lena….”
Annie takes the clipboard from me. She reads in silence. I glance at Victoria, who bites down on her lower lip.
“It says she died of an overdose,” Annie says, sounding mystified. “Institutionalized since the rape and murder of her kid sister. Jesus, it says here Lena was pimping her own sister out to pay for her habit….”
At that, Victoria reaches across me and grabs the clipboard. “Let me see that,” she says.
Annie looks kind of relieved to let it go, and Victoria turns the page.
“This one’s you, Annie. Oh, fuck.”
Annie looks alarmed. “What?”
“Someone’s sick idea of a joke,” Victoria says, handing the clipboard back to Annie.
Annie examines the page through ever widening eyes. Then she looks up, and appears to be completely aghast at what she just read. “Enough,” she says. “Enough of this fucked-up place. I am out of here.”
“No,” Victoria protests, “we have to stick together, we—”
Victoria tries to stop Annie from walking away from the desk. Annie seizes her shoulders and pushes her away.
“Do not touch me! I am out of here! Fuck!” Annie turns tail and bolts out the door.
Victoria looks down at Principal Quick’s corpse in disbelief. “She was insane. That’s the only explanation. Quick brought us here to fuck with our heads until we were all dead.”
“Then…. Why kill herself before she finished the job?” I ask, and even as I do ask it I’m pretty sure I don’t even want to know the answer.
Victoria flips throug
h the pages on the clipboard. Something in her body language changes. She stiffens. Then she looks at me, her eyes almost as stone cold as Principal Quick’s are.
“You tell me,” she says.
“You think…. Whoever this gray girl is?”
“You would know, wouldn’t you, Emily? What is it you’re not telling me?” Victoria brandishes the clipboard like a weapon. “This ‘on the fucking spectrum’ act of yours, it doesn’t wash any more. You know something and yet you’re still not telling.”
My head begins to spin. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s all a big act.” Victoria holds up the clipboard. “You’re the only one without a file, Emily!”
I look at the files she’s holding. Victoria has folded back all the pages, to reveal the blank clipboard beneath.
“I did time here before,” I say. “Maybe there wasn’t any need for a new file.”
“Sure you did. And why exactly was that again?”
“I don’t…. I don’t remember.”
(And really, I don’t. I told you, I’m unreliable, I….)
“You know, that I do believe. Principal Quick’s little pet fuck up, aren’t you?”
Victoria tosses the clipboard onto the desk, careless of Principal Quick’s head lying there with her eyes fixed open in death’s stare. I turn the clipboard the right way around so I can read it. Then I quickly leaf through each page in turn, to check if what Victoria has been saying is true.
“Okay. There’s no file on me, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist at all.”
Victoria’s expression is blank.
“It could be filed away somewhere else,” I say, and begin to look through the papers on Quick’s desk. Still no sign of my mugshot anywhere.
Then the cover sheet of Quick’s manuscript catches my eye. ‘Girl A’ by Mina Quick. I discard the clipboard, and flick through the first few pages of the manuscript.
“Quick was running some kind of experiment,” I say. “Look. ‘Girl A’. I think she might be the one who’s been stalking us, picking us off one by one.”
