Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “STOP SMILING, DAMN IT!” I yelled.

  Hands grabbed me by the back, wrenching me free from Robbie. Someone I could not see clocked me in the head, hard. The world melted away. I was in some dark, concrete tunnel. Kevin was grabbing me by the arms, looking at me fearfully.

  “Stop fighting me, brother!” he said. “You’re all right, you’re okay!”

  I looked down where Robbie should have been and only saw Mina Todd, crawling on all fours, wheezing for breath. A spatter of blood hit the ground where she coughed. She looked up at me, eyes strained and red, fresh bruises forming around her throat. Haley tried to help her to her feet, but she was incredibly unsteady. What happened hit me like a ton of bricks.

  “Oh God.”

  “It’s all right,” she choked hoarsely.

  “Mina, I—”

  “It was Robbie!” she choked again.

  “I’m so sor—”

  “Save it for him,” she said, angrily. I had hurt her. Badly. Beaten her and choked her nearly to death. Words my dad had told me long ago echoed in my mind. A man who takes out his anger on a woman is a poor excuse for a man. Seeing her, seeing what I’d done, I could barely hold it together.

  “This is his fault, not yours,” she said.

  “I nearly killed you,” I said.

  “I’m sure that was the idea,” Mina said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Will you?” I asked.

  She smiled up at me. Even in her bruised, bloodied state, she still managed to pull off most of that radiant smile.

  A wave of relief stronger than any I’d felt before hit me. Before I knew what I was doing I grabbed Mina and pulled her into a powerful hug. She responded slowly and awkwardly, clearly pained and even more uncomfortable with the action in a dark, Splinter-filled school than a crowded, human-and-Splinter-filled one, but soon wrapped her arms around me in kind.

  “We should get moving soon,” Haley said. Mina and I parted. I came to my senses, finally realizing where we were.

  “Are we . . . ?”

  “We’re under the school,” Haley confirmed.

  I looked further down the tunnel, caught sight of Aldo, Greg, Julie, and Courtney with us.

  “When we were dealing with the other Splinters, you broke off and followed Robbie down here. Mina followed you. We didn’t know he had you,” Kevin confirmed.

  Almost as a peace offering, he reached down and handed me the sledgehammer I’d dropped. I could have sworn that I’d dropped it miles away. I took it, gratefully.

  “Which way did he go?” I asked.

  Haley pointed down the sloping path of the corridor. I nodded. We pursued him.

  We were tired, battered, bloodied, and soaking wet, but we did not stop. If anything, I could swear that his siccing the creature Splinters upon us and forcing me to attack Mina had made us a more determined, more dangerous group. I knew then that he’d made a terrible mistake in telling Mina to bring us all here.

  Haley led us to the ladder that went up into the auditorium. She led the way, and one at a time we followed. I was last, helping Mina keep her footing.

  The trapdoor above the ladder opened up on the main stage. We stood around in darkness, wondering just what kind of trap he had set for us.

  Then the main lights above the stage lit up, blinding us.

  Somewhere in the darkness, Robbie York laughed at us.

  “AND . . . SCENE!”

  25.

  The Bogeyman

  Mina

  It was just light, but for those first few seconds, it might as well have been acid thrown in our faces. I turned a small circle, willing my eyes to adjust and show me my surroundings, which direction the next attack would come from, but nothing moved in the opaque brightness. Nothing but a little ball of fluff at shoe height.

  It hopped into sight, a rabbit, no bigger than my foot, fluffy and white and—I couldn’t help noticing—uncommonly cute, wearing a tiny Santa hat.

  Knowing the Shard-Robbie’s sense of humor, I had to fight back a wild rush of dread at the sight of it.

  I feel nothing.

  I’d been saying this to myself a lot since Robbie’s invitation. It wasn’t quite like grief armor, too stretched and general to be as strong, but it was something.

  I feel nothing.

  “Don’t touch it,” I warned the others when the rabbit hopped past me. “It’s either a Splinter or an illusion, and either way—”

  Julie’s bleary eyes found the rabbit, and she leapt onto Greg’s back with a bloodcurdling scream.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m fine! It’s nothing! I’m fine!” she insisted breathlessly into Greg’s shoulder, her arms and legs still clutching at his neck and waist. “Just . . . just get it away!”

  “You’re scared of bunnies?” Aldo asked her.

  “It’s not funny!” Greg snapped at him hoarsely, trying to get a secure grip on Julie and shift her arms away from his windpipe. When he found his balance, he kicked the rabbit in Aldo’s direction. It made a pitiful chirping sound of fright and scampered into the darkness of the wings. “It’s called an irrational f—” The floor behind me exploded with a plume of green smoke.

  I’d turned half a step when something in the cloud hit me hard in the side, knocking me off the stage.

  “Mina?” Ben called out, staring at the place where I’d just been standing as if it were empty, as if the fire-faced Halloween gunslinger were not stepping out of the smoke cloud to stare down at me, lasso poised at his side. “Mina!”

  “Ben!” I shouted back.

  The gunslinger twirled the lasso once before throwing it at me where I’d landed, sprawled on the hardwood between the stage and the first row. I rolled, and if it had been an ordinary circle of lifeless rope, it would have missed me. It corrected in midflight, stretching to wrap around my upper torso and the back of the nearest uncomfortable wooden stadium chair, then cinched tight in one rough instant, forcing me to sit in it. The trailing end twisted just as easily around my arms, pinning them to the armrests, crushing the taser out of my right hand.

  “Ben!”

  “They can’t hear you,” the gunslinger told me in Robbie’s undisguised voice. With a snap of his fingers, he was in the seat next to me, one arm stretched along the back of mine. A gesture of the other hand removed the fire to show Robbie’s face.

  “I’m going to give you one chance, Mina,” he said as if gently reprimanding a misbehaving child. “One chance to die with your eyelids attached. So be a good, attentive audience.”

  He gestured the fire back on, then reached up like an eccentric conductor and pulled down on thin air. The lights dimmed with his movements to a moody, graveyard scene pitch, the temperature dropping ten degrees to match, the remaining, greenish aura glinting off the ornaments in the Christmas garlands draped over the stage and aisles.

  “Showtime,” he whispered, and, with another thoroughly unnecessary snap of his fingers, vanished.

  I pulled against the lasso he’d left behind, and it held fast, sticky and rubbery. Splinter matter. Part of him.

  I feel nothing.

  “Mina!”

  It was Aldo calling out through the dark this time, and I tried calling his name back, not expecting him to hear it through Robbie’s mind blocks. I was already working on shuffling my bag toward my left hand with my knees, to see if I could get a knife out of it. Robbie might pick the idea right out of my head and stop me, but that didn’t mean I had to make things easier for him than they needed to be.

  “She’s here somewhere.” That was Haley, looking soothingly from Ben to Aldo and back again. “He’s the one we need to find. We stop him, everything else will start making sense again.”

  Greg gave this levelheaded advice its least levelheaded interpretation, shouting wildly into the darkened audience, “You hear that, Robbie? You want a fight? Get out here, and we’ll give you one!” He set Julie on her feet behind him on the currently rabbit-free stage, ignoring almost a
ll of his natural blind spots. I could hear them before I could see them—a low, almost imperceptible, rustling hum of tiny moving legs, too small to make a sound alone, too many to be silent together. Then the tidal wave of spiders broke over me on its way to the stage, coating every surface with a double-thick layer of pincers and writhing feet.

  I feel nothing I feel nothing I feel nothing.

  They wriggled over my skin, and under, and over again, with a sting like a cactus spine each time one broke through. Something particularly hairy and about the size of a quarter crawled in through my right cheek, over my tongue, and out through my left, while something smaller and startlingly strong tried to fold itself into my left ear canal.

  I feel nothing I feel nothing.

  Greg did his best. He stood in front of Julie, breathing in increasingly jagged gasps, until the first spiders brushed his shoes. That’s when his legs gave out. Julie tried to catch him, but she was still shaking herself, and they both toppled into flood.

  “Sweetie, it’s okay,” she cooed desperately over his screams, spitting out what spiders got in the way of her tongue. “It’s okay, just let it pass.”

  Ben and Kevin hurried to help Julie hold him still, frantically brushing more spiders off themselves as they went.

  There was another stage-like explosion, and the head of the gunslinger appeared stage right, magnified to a hundred times its size. Robbie’s voice boomed louder than the theater’s amplifier.

  Ladies and gentlemen of Mina Todd’s Resistance Network. Your fearless leader has led you right through the gates of your own personal hell. I am the Bogeyman! I am Fear! And you cannot fight me!

  Greg struck out at the image, which dissolved into smoke. He thrashed out of Julie’s arms, and then bolted for the edge of the stage, already scratching a bloody gash in one of his arms as he went. Julie grabbed for him and missed, but Courtney was closer to the edge and pushed him back with a firm hand on each shoulder.

  “We stay together!” she said. “That’s the whole point!”

  It looked like Courtney and Julie might have held him, if Courtney had not at that moment cried out and clapped a hand to her stomach, ignoring the spiders she crushed into her own shirt and palm.

  “No!” she shrieked. “No, not yet! I’m not ready!”

  Courtney’s flat stomach ballooned over the course of ten seconds to the distinct shape of advanced pregnancy, and she doubled over with an agonized cry.

  “It’s not real,” Ben reminded her. “Think about it. It can’t be real.”

  But Courtney was beyond consolation.

  “I can’t do this! I haven’t lived my life yet!” Another obvious wave of pain shot through her body, and she collapsed against the nearest edge of the backdrop, nails raking down it for support, blood stains appearing under the layer of spiders on her pressed grey slacks.

  I’d worked my left hand under the flap of my bag. There had to be a knife just inches from my fingertips.

  Greg stole his opportunity and ran into the wings, still digging at himself, Julie right behind. There were two loud puffs of stage smoke for emphasis when they left sight of the others, and a third when Courtney crawled somewhere behind the curtains. From the way Ben, Kevin, and Aldo were squinting after them, I knew Robbie hadn’t let them see exactly where the others had taken cover.

  Only Haley had barely moved since the beginning of the spider onslaught. She was shaking violently from head to toe, but was otherwise doing nothing to remove them from herself, and her eyes had not stopped scanning the dark on all sides, searching for a hint of something real. I could just read the words her lips kept forming whenever I could shake the spiders from my eyes.

  “Not real and not crazy, not real and not crazy.”

  If we got out of this, I was going to buy her the biggest malt she could drink.

  When we got out of this.

  My fingers finally brushed the handle of a pocketknife, small but adequate, and fumbled to pry out the blade.

  Hale-y, Robbie sang. Is this the first time you’ve heard voices in your head? If you insist on living, it won’t be the last. Mina’s told you, hasn’t she? What happens to people who escape? What happens to people who resist too long?

  “Not real and not crazy,” she muttered louder.

  A Splinter tendril shot out of the stage with a crack and wrapped around her leg. She blasted it with her flamethrower and jumped backward, squarely onto the stage’s trapdoor, which gave way under her, a squirming tangle of purple tentacles dragging her into the cramped maze beneath the stage with another puff of smoke. The spiders poured into the opening after her like floodwater until they piled level with the stage, and it was hardly possible to tell that there had been a door at all. Ben, Aldo, and Kevin were shoveling barehanded through the itching, burrowing, biting black swarm where she had disappeared when another snap of fingers and flash of light removed it, all of it, every spider gone, as if they had never been, leaving the stage impermeable and intact.

  In the spiders’ place, Shaun Brundle stood downstage center. For a moment I hoped that this was it, this was my turn, that Robbie’s attention was mine, away from the others. The blade came free. All I had to do was work it carefully between the Splinter rope and my wrist and pull, and as soon as Robbie made the slightest error, gave me the vaguest hint of where he was, I’d drive the blade clean through his brain and have him wrapped in copper wiring before he could re-form a working cerebellum.

  But of course (guess who I’m saving for last), this one wasn’t for me.

  Shaun winked at me before turning to face his brother.

  Kevin kept staring at the polished wooden surface where Haley had disappeared and wouldn’t look at him.

  “Give it up, Robbie,” he said blankly. “I dealt with that. I mourned. I’m over it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Shaun, beginning a slow circle around where Kevin stood. Ben tried to block his path, but Shaun walked right through him.

  A ghost.

  “I know exactly how fast you got over me. I know how you mourned. You never fought for me when I was alive. Why would you after I was dead?”

  “I’m not sorry I haven’t spent my life punching out my problems, Robbie,” Kevin said, still not looking at the circling Shaun illusion. “It wouldn’t have solved anything.”

  “You never wanted to solve problems for me,” said Shaun. “I was your problem. Your embarrassing, immature, hotheaded little brother. The one who actually did things you were afraid to take a chance on. And you were jealous of what it got me. How long did it take? How long had my life been over before you started thinking about stealing it?”

  I feel nothing I feel nothing.

  “It wasn’t like that!” Kevin broke and looked up. Shaun looked ready to punch him. “There was nothing between us! She was there! She was hurting too! She understood! That’s all it was!”

  “Sure.” Shaun rolled his eyes.

  “Nothing happened!” Kevin shouted and elbowed Ben away hard when he tried to restrain him.

  “I don’t care!” Shaun shouted back. “I don’t care that you never had the guts to make anything happen! Even when you found your own girl, she had to ask you, didn’t she? And what was it she left you for? For wanting to run away!”

  “College isn’t running away!”

  Shaun ignored him. “Of course nothing happened! Nothing ever happens for you! The point is that you wanted it to!”

  The metal was against my skin, under the rubbery coil, digging in. With all the strength in my wrist, I pulled, and the Splinter lasso broke like a giant, overwrought rubber band, snapping hard against my skin as it pulled away, leaving me free.

  This happened in the same second something invisible and very heavy knocked Aldo backward off his feet.

  The same second that Ben turned to look at him, and Shaun and Kevin both vanished mid-insult in another puff of smoke behind his back.

  Just two left.

  No, just two left that I could see. F
resh flamethrower in hand, I hoisted myself back onto the stage.

  Aldo was crouching in a defensive position. Ben was kneeling next to him, shaking his unresponsive shoulder.

  “Stop, please stop, I can explain!” Aldo begged the empty air in front of him. I didn’t know if he was seeing his mother or his father or both, or why Robbie had decided not to let Ben and me see them, too, but even if I had to shake him a lot harder than Ben was, I would make the illusion leave him alone, the way he had done for me.

  “Wait!” he whimpered, arms raised to protect his face.

  I tried to hold his stiff hands, but they wouldn’t hold mine back. “It’s me,” I said. “It’s okay, it’s just me.”

  “It’s not what you think! Please, Mina, don’t do this, you don’t understand!”

  An invisible force that had nothing to do with Robbie knocked the air out of my lungs. “Aldo?” I whispered. “What don’t I understand?”

  Robbie’s laughter filled the auditorium.

  Now, if THAT one isn’t a heartbreaker!

  I could feel his eyes on me, from wherever he was. He was watching and laughing and—I was suddenly sure—delighted that I’d cut myself free on schedule, at exactly the right moment to see the fear in Aldo’s face close up. He’d let me go. He’d thinned my forces, and he’d let me go.

  What do you say, Aldo? She’s right here. Should I tell her? Should I tell her what’s had you so worried all these years?

  “No!” Aldo screamed, crawling backward away from me. “Please! I’ll do anything!”

  “Mina?” Ben called out, towering protectively over Aldo, searching the darkness at the words “she’s right here.” “Mina! Where are you?”

  “I’m here!”

  I knew it would happen, the moment I looked at him, and he looked through me. Before either of us looked back, there was another puff of smoke, and Aldo was gone.