Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “Or was this closer for you?”

  I was wrapped in suffocating Splinter, its sharp tendrils under my skin, between my bones, closer than close in the worst possible way.

  “No wonder Ben couldn’t get through. Poor guy never stood a chance after that, did he?”

  Ben.

  For some reason my mind latched onto his name as if it supported my argument.

  “Ben left you!” The drawer of his pictures opened, sending them fluttering across the desk. The map became a giant phone screen, his tracker storming away. It took up my entire range of vision. “He wants nothing to do with you! Name one reason why he would!”

  I couldn’t.

  “Even if you could have made him happy, how long could it last? Do you think The Old Man was too paranoid about your mother? You think she wouldn’t make you trade him away for some Splinter diplomat the way she did?”

  I would never—

  “Not to save the town? Save the world? To stop whatever else they threaten you with and then do anyway? You caved to that treaty, didn’t you? You think putting some dying Bigfeet out of their misery and annoying some Slivers the Splinters want to stop anyway makes you a hunter again? You’re hiding, Mina. Even when you’re not busy having psychotic knife fights with the dead Splinter of your dead boyfriend! You’re cooperating! You’re beaten!”

  Next we were sitting on my bed. I’d utterly lost track of where my body really was in the room, if I was even really in my room. Shaun cornered me against the edge that touched the wall. I closed my eyes, but I could still see him.

  “In eight years, you’ve accomplished nothing, and no one cares. What do you have to stay for?”

  In a fit of pure, futile rage, I jumped at him, knocked him backward on the mattress, and sank straight through, right into the middle of him. He solidified while we occupied the same space, rubbery sheets and misshapen masses of Splinter instantly bisecting my entire body, and suddenly I was the one on my back.

  A piece the shape of a circular saw blade ran from the right side of my neck, right through the carotid down through my chest right next to my heart, all without drawing blood. A scalpel-edged wedge wrapped thickly around the inside of my left hip bone. We were so folded and twisted and layered together, like half-kneaded dough, that I could have lost track of where I ended and he began, if every Splinter part had not then made itself violently and inescapably known with a paralyzing and thoroughly realistic electrical charge.

  Only one part of me was free; the hand with the knife.

  You want to kill me, Mina? I’m right here. I’m inside of you. Let it happen. Let it in. It’ll be easier. Quicker. Over.

  The offer was very nearly irresistible.

  I don’t care about quick and easy.

  That’s what I like about you.

  The knife tip was two and three quarters of an inch from my skin when the window opened and something real, someone real landed on my bed. The relief was distressingly indistinguishable from disappointment when Aldo twisted it out of my hand.

  “Mina, what the hell?”

  16.

  Day of the Dead

  Ben

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that they found me. Every day I had to find a new quiet stretch of hallway or hidden cul-de-sac near a building where I could eat in peace. I couldn’t use the same place twice, not if I wanted to stay hidden. I’d been pretty lucky so far.

  On Halloween, that luck ran out.

  I was eating lunch in a small alcove just off the science building when I heard them coming. I tried to look like any other student.

  It didn’t work.

  “That’s him!” one of them said.

  “Come on, droogs, let’s get ‘im!” Patrick cried gleefully. They started to run for me.

  I set my lunch down and stood up. If this was going to happen, I was going to be on my feet.

  I was thrown to the ground in a flurry of punches and kicks by Patrick and three of his friends. I kept my arms up, covering my head and neck.

  The beating felt like it lasted for a few hours, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. If it had been a few hours, I wouldn’t have survived.

  “He’s not fighting back,” one of them said, confused.

  “He will,” Patrick said, dragging me to my feet. I stood. Barely. I could taste blood, feel one of my eyes swelling shut.

  “Come on,” Patrick said. “You just gonna take this, or are you gonna fight?”

  My voice came out raspy, hollow. “I’m gonna take this.”

  Patrick laughed. “But don’tcha see? You don’t have to. Just confess. Just walk right into the police station, tell them what you did, and take your medicine like a big boy.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. I tried to sound firm, but probably only pulled off tired.

  “Bullshit,” Patrick said, knocking me down and attacking me with even greater ferocity. Yelling, cursing, kicking me to the ground. A few weeks before, he had threatened to kill me if I ever bothered Madison again. I hadn’t believed him at the time.

  I believed him now.

  Faintly, I could see his friends shifting from helping him to nervously trying to pull him away. Being a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than the rest of them, he could easily throw them off.

  A loud, authoritative voice called out. “Hey, stop that!”

  His friends ran for it, but Patrick was blind to them.

  “This doesn’t concern you,” Patrick said as he continued to attack me.

  “You got that wrong,” the voice said, approaching Patrick and grabbing him by the shoulder. Patrick whirled on his attacker, punching him with all his might.

  Patrick howled in pain as he broke his hand against the Good Samaritan’s chest. As he stumbled away, I was able to see that my savior was an honest-to-God knight in shining armor, covered from head to toe in polished steel plates and wielding a vicious looking pole-axe. At that moment, cradling his swelling, shattered hand, Patrick was angrier than he was smart. He rushed the knight. My rescuer just took a casual step to the side, swinging his pole-axe in a wide arc and sweeping Patrick’s legs out from underneath him. Patrick landed on the ground in a heap.

  The knight walked over to him, holding the spear tip of his weapon right above Patrick’s throat.

  “Keamy, I don’t know what’s more stupid, the fact that you just attacked a teacher, or the fact that you just attacked a teacher wearing full plate armor and wielding a flippin’ halberd!” the knight said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Finn,” Patrick said through tears of pain.

  Mr. Finn. He’d been boasting about having an awesome homemade Halloween costume for the last few weeks.

  “You could be expelled for this, you know that, right?” Mr. Finn threatened.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Finn,” Patrick repeated.

  “Good. You just saved your school career,” the knight said. If I could see his face, I knew he’d be smiling. “Now apologize to Pastor here.”

  Patrick looked at me with pure hate in his eyes. “I’m sorry. Can I go to the nurse’s office now?”

  “Feel free,” Mr. Finn said, helping Patrick to his feet. “Now if anybody asks . . . ?”

  Patrick’s hand had swollen to almost double its size. “I fell down.”

  Mr. Finn nodded. “Good boy. Don’t want an ‘assaulting a teacher’ charge on your permanent record now, do you?”

  “No, Mr. Finn,” Patrick said, limping away.

  Looking back to me, Mr. Finn pulled up the visor of his helmet. “You all right there, Pastor?”

  “I’ll live,” I said, getting back to my feet and dusting myself off. I was pretty bloody, but nothing felt broken.

  Mr. Finn smiled. “Well, if Keamy there did you one favor, it was giving you the best damn zombie costume in the school.”

  I didn’t laugh. Mr. Finn didn’t seem to care.

  “I’d say you should head to the nurse’s office, but with Keamy there probably loo
king for a round two, I wouldn’t advise it. Come on down to the shop with me. My first aid kit’s stocked better than most ambulances.”

  I didn’t want to follow him; I was plenty content to just wallow in my misery, but part of the old programming kicked in, the programming that said I had to listen to my teachers. Slowly, I grabbed my backpack and what was left of my lunch.

  Mr. Finn walked ahead of me, using the halberd as a walking stick of sorts to compensate for his limp.

  A little sheepish, he said, “Also, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread around what I did to Keamy there. The little prick had it coming, but that doesn’t make it better in the administration’s eyes if you know what I mean?’

  “I didn’t see anything. I was just eating lunch,” I said.

  Mr. Finn clapped me on the back with one of his heavy gauntlets. “Mr. Pastor, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  His first aid kit wasn’t so much a kit as it was a filing cabinet full of enough supplies to treat a classroom full of severed limbs. I didn’t need much more than a bottle of peroxide, some gauze and a few large Band-Aids. Mr. Finn provided the mood music, popping a mix-tape of surf tunes into an ancient-looking boom box, warbling along with the Beach Boys as they mused about how nice it would be to be older.

  They didn’t know how right they had it.

  “So should I be asking about why Keamy there wanted to rearrange your face?” Mr. Finn asked as he polished the blade of his halberd.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  He didn’t buy it. “Nothing like the mess your life’s become lately?”

  I looked at him questioningly.

  “People talk, and you’re hardly keeping a low profile these days,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t confirm it, nor would I deny it, not to someone who didn’t understand. Someone who couldn’t understand.

  “Well, say something or say nothing, either’s fine by me. Let me tell you, I don’t believe a word of any of those rumors,” he said.

  “You don’t?” I asked. My voice was faint, but there might have been some hope in it.

  “Look, if you did one bad thing, maybe I’d believe it, two or three, still possible, but at the rate your evil deeds are stacking up, you’re looking less like Charles Manson and more like Job. Small-town people love to have their pariah, and when one isn’t readily available, they’ll make one on their own,” Mr. Finn said.

  He hobbled over to a mini-fridge by his desk. Opening it up, he pulled out a couple of bottles of root beer and tossed one to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “Nothing but the best for Mrs. Finn’s pride and joy. And present company, of course.”

  I took a sip. I tried to ignore his kindness as I had ignored Kevin and Haley. It wasn’t as easy.

  “So why’d you ask me, if you already knew?” I asked.

  He shrugged, which was no easy task in his heavy armor. “Give you a chance to get it off your chest? Sometimes when life’s treating you like an outhouse, it helps to talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I’d been saying that a lot lately.

  “Fair enough. Mind answering a different question then?” he asked.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Did you let yourself get beat up there because you’re feeling sorry for yourself and thought you deserved it, or because you knew by fighting back you’d stand a good shot of getting kicked out of school? Please say it’s because you didn’t want to get kicked out; makes you sound like less of a dumbass,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to give him the easy answer, but he knew the truth before I could even get those false words out.

  “Got it. You’re a dumbass,” he said.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to call students dumbasses,” I said.

  “You’re also not supposed to use power tools without wearing safety goggles, but what can I say, sometimes I feel like taking risks,” he said. “By the way, I ever catch you using power tools without goggles, you’re failing that assignment. Besides, sometimes calling someone a dumbass when they’re being a dumbass is the best way to get through to them.”

  “I don’t need getting through to,” I said. “And I don’t need any more first aid. I can take it from here.”

  I got up from my stool painfully and started to walk to the door.

  “Would it make you feel any better if I told you that things won’t stay bad if you don’t let them?” he said.

  I stopped in my tracks. Those words were too familiar, cutting into too many recent wounds. I grabbed a chisel from a nearby work station and turned to him.

  “Are you a part of this?” I asked shakily. “Are you here to see if I’ve broken yet? Are you reporting to Madison or Sam? If you are, you can tell them that they don’t have me!”

  Mr. Finn didn’t flinch.

  “What is it you kids don’t get about the whole armor and halberd concept?” he asked.

  The weapon felt pitiful in my hand compared to my shop teacher, the walking tank. Still, I held the chisel threateningly, prepared to give whatever kind of fight I could, if I had to. Mr. Finn looked unconcerned, but I noted his grip on the halberd had tightened slightly.

  “Answer the question,” I said, trying to sound threatening and failing abysmally.

  “Fine, if it makes you feel any better. I’m a part of a lot of things. The United States Marine Corps, honorably discharged, the Prospero Parent Teacher Association, the Split Infinitives Bowling Team, but Pastor, I’m not your enemy. I’m not a part of whatever it is that’s going on in your life right now. I’m a teacher, and I’m concerned that one of my students is about to do something very stupid with his life. I’ve been where you are; you’re not the only one this town’s nearly killed. I want to help,” he said.

  Splinters are good liars. Billy was an exceptional one. Right up until the end, I thought he was someone I could trust. I didn’t want to let my guard down again, but for some reason, I did with Mr. Finn. Maybe it was because he was a teacher, or because I just couldn’t hold it up any longer, or maybe even because he reminded me a little of my dad. I set down the chisel and took a seat.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  In answer, he removed the armor from his left leg and rolled up his jeans underneath. Just under his knee there was a terrible, jagged scar that looked as if someone had tried to remove his leg with a chainsaw. No wonder he limped.

  “Just after I got out of the Corps, I was on a hunting trip in the woods just outside of town with some buddies. I was out on my own for a bit, when this . . . thing came out of the forest. Not sure what it was, it walked on all fours, had thick patches of fur and scales, more eyes than I could count, and a mouth that looked like a blender. If you wanted to call it a monster, I don’t think you’d be that far off. I tried to run. It didn’t want me to.”

  He rolled his jeans back down, started to reattach the armor. “Don’t ask me how I fought it off because I don’t rightly remember most of what happened that day. I remember a lot of hollering and pounding and the feeling of my leg going down its slimy, toothy throat. I even remember my buddies getting me to the medical center. Now, I didn’t serve during wartime, but I’d seen some combat. I’d thought I could handle pretty much anything, but seeing that thing . . . It snapped something in me, something that ought not have been snapped.”

  Mr. Finn took a swig of his root beer and tossed the empty bottle at a nearby recycling bin. He almost made it. Considering the other odd pieces of broken glass that covered the floor by the bin, I didn’t imagine this was his first attempt.

  “I knew I had to warn everyone about what I’d seen. Sure, some people would listen to my story in the good old humoring sort of way. They’d laugh, pat me on my back and recommend a good place where I could get a tin foil hat. But then there were people who wanted me to shut up. They said that I was bringing ‘unnecessar
y attention’ down on this town. They tried to bribe me at first, but when I turned that down, they just started to threaten me. They said that if I didn’t play ball, they’d take everything from me. Friends, family, the life I’d built.”

  This sounded a lot more familiar than I would have liked. “So what did you do?”

  He laughed humorlessly. “I didn’t let them push me around. I told the truth because it was the right thing to do. And that’s when things started to go downhill. I lost my job, my apartment, and my girlfriend in the stretch of a week. I got blamed for a hit and run—it wasn’t my fault, but they had enough to lock me up for a few weeks. A paperwork mix-up even had me put in a psych ward for about a month, pumped full of drugs and surrounded by loons. By the time I got out, everybody in town thought I was crazy. A lot of my friends, some of my family, even, wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I thought I was alone. I wanted to be alone. I hated myself so much that I thought maybe if I just gave up, maybe if I ended it all, that everything would be better.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “Obviously,” Mr. Finn responded. “Because I realized that, as much as I hurt, killing myself would be damned selfish and would hurt the people who still loved me a lot more than I was hurting myself at the time. So I got out of my pit. I found my friends who hadn’t abandoned me. I still got attacked plenty, but knowing I had people who would stand by me no matter what made it easier. And after a while, simply by standing with them and not giving up, the attacks started to taper off. I was still ‘Crazy Old Leslie Finn’, but nobody bothered me anymore. Life went on in Prospero as it always does, and I now have my cushy teacher’s salary to show for it.”

  His words hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t know if he knew about Splinters, not really, not the way he was talking, but it was clear he’d been through what I was going through.

  I’d been going about this the wrong way. The Splinters weren’t taking my friends away from me; they were making me do it for them.

  “Thanks, Mr. Finn,” I said.

  He smiled broadly, stroking his large chin with one of his heavy gauntlets. “Now, I’m not gonna say I can fix your life, that’s your problem, but I can at least help you out with your lunchtime problem. I got a side job, making furniture and replica medieval weaponry; good money. I do most of my work during lunch and after school, and I keep myself locked in. However, for you, the door’s open. You can lunch in here if you want, any time you want, avoid Keamy’s wrath—or half-wrath if that hand’s as bad as it looks—but I’m gonna work you. You work with me, and you earn a fair percentage of each piece you help me complete. Sound good?”