by Lex Thomas
“Get your own hair!” Belinda said.
Belinda pulled the wig over her head and rejoined the Loners. They all backed up through the double doors to the hallway. The twins shut the doors, and Will stuck a pipe through the door handles. It would hold for a little bit. He turned away from the door and locked eyes with Lucy. His gaze fell to her neck where the diamond pendant still hung.
He hurried past her.
“Will, wait a minute,” she said, but he ignored her.
“Get in,” David said from behind her.
Lucy turned to see David holding open the door to the cage, the same cage that housed Dorothy’s corpse. Zachary shook his head in disbelief at David.
“David, get real. I can’t get in there. She’s dead.” David gripped his forehead suddenly and closed his eyes.
He cringed. He looked like he was in serious pain.
“You should’ve thought about that before you pulled a knife on me,” David said. “Now, get in!”
“You’re an actor,” Ritchie said. “Act like she’s Paul’s new girlfriend and snuggle up.”
Zachary climbed in, grumbling.
“I’ll let you out when we get to Freak territory,” David said.
“You’ve got my word. Now I want yours. If any of your Geeks try to get in our way, you call ’em off.” Zachary nodded but kept his eyes down.
“I want to hear you say it,” David said.
“You have my word.”
“Thank you,” David said as he closed the door.
Zachary kept his word. At every hallway intersection, in every classroom door, there were Geeks waiting for them, now heavily armed. Every time, Zachary motioned for them to stand down. Lucy could see that Zachary was in misery, utterly shamed in front of his own gang. What would happen to him once he was returned to the Geeks? It seemed too easy for people to turn on one another these days.
She looked ahead to Will, again at David’s side. She wanted to clear the air.
“Will,” Lucy said, hurrying to his side, “I shouldn’t have kept this.”
She began to unfasten the necklace. He gave it a glance, then looked ahead.
“Keep it. What am I going to do with it?” Lucy lowered her hands, leaving the necklace in place.
David turned and shouted back down the line, “Ritchie, come up here and swap with Will!”
Will looked at David, upset, “What are you doing? I’ve got this.”
“I need you watching for Geeks coming up the rear. Lucy, will you help him?”
Will sighed and walked back. Lucy gave David a thankful little nod. She caught up with Will.
“You can’t avoid me forever,” she said.
“I think I can.”
“I can be pretty annoying.”
Will stopped. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to make it up to you. I don’t want to lose our friendship.”
“I can’t be friends with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because”-he hushed his voice as Ritchie hustled past-“because I loved you. Real sorry, but I can’t go back from that. You can be as annoying or cute or whatever as you want, but it’s not going to change anything. When we get to the outside, I don’t really want to see you again.” Will walked away.
“Looks like somebody saddled the wrong horse.” Lucy looked over to Zachary rolling along beside her, in the cage. He was sitting cross-legged, his hands draped over the bars. He watched Will walk to the back of the line and relieve Ritchie.
“What?” Lucy said.
“You know, one of my best friends was supposed to graduate last week. She got migraines just before she started losing her marbles. She was holding her head just like David’s been doing up there. He’s dying, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“Clearly a lie. You’re a very bad actor. Do you want a tip? The key to a good lie is—”
“I don’t want anything from you. David’s always been a friend to you. How could you do what you did?”
“Hold on, honey. David and I are friendly. Not the same. My friends are going to starve if I don’t find a way to feed them.
Would you do any different?”
Long wrinkles cracked his cheeks. She hadn’t realized how emaciated he looked before, but now she was closer. Stage makeup was caked on his face, but it couldn’t hide the droop in the skin under his eyes or the hollows under his cheek-bones.
“I wouldn’t do what you did,” Lucy said.
“Oh, I’m just a bad person, is that it? Nobody knows what they’ll do till it happens. What are you gonna do when David’s dead on the floor? Are you going to fight?” He looked her up and down. “’Cause, honey, I think you’ll run,” Zachary said. He pulled his arms back through the cage and turned away.
David wasn’t going to die. They were going to get out. She and David would be able to go to the lake house and live the dream she.. Lucy stopped herself. No, she realized. It couldn’t happen that way. By tomorrow, David wouldn’t be immune to the virus anymore. He’d have to stay as far from her and any other teenager as he could. Once they were on the outside, Lucy would have to make her way with Will… no, not Will, he’d sworn her off. She’d have to make her way with Belinda, living where? Not with her parents. She was toxic to them as well. She and Belinda and whoever else was with them would have to live on the run until they phased out of infection. That would mean years before she could be in the same room with David again. Years without being touched by him. Could she wait for David? Could he wait for her? She didn’t know the answer. The brutal truth crept into her head: She might not ever see David again after today. She felt alone, as though she’d been kicked out of the Pretty Ones all over again, and thrown to the animals.
When the gang reached Freak territory, David opened the cage and made good on his word. He let Zachary go.
“We didn’t know Dorothy was a brave girl, but she showed us different. Sure, she made mistakes. We all have in here. But what’s important is that she kept trying,” David said.
David looked at all the Loners surrounding the cage where Dorothy lay. He strained to squeeze out his thoughts, and his head pounded.
“This place has forced us to make a lot of decisions that we shouldn’t have to make. And sometimes, doing the right thing just brings you more misery. You start to wonder if there’s any point to trying at all. Dorothy’s mural reminded me of when I stood in the quad with eight people behind me, facing all of Varsity. I was sure I was dead. But you all saved me. You came to my defense, and together we overcame. We can do it again. We’re gonna get out of here. We’ve still got trouble ahead, and when we make it outside these walls, who knows what’ll be going on. It could be worse out there than we ever saw in here.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be free,” Will said.
“And there’ll be food courts,” Belinda said.
“And fresh underwear,” Mort said.
“And cars. I just want to drive. Like a road trip, across the country,” Sasha said.
“And new movies,” Josh said.
“And parades,” Leonard said.
“Parades? What the hell are you talking about?” Ritchie said.
“If I want to see a parade, what do you care?” Leonard said.
“David’s trying to say something nice, you guys,” Lucy said.
“And hamsters,” the girl twin said.
“And sledgehammers,” the boy twin said.
Everyone stared at the twins. They twirled each other’s hair.
Lucy took David’s hand. “What you said, David. It was beautiful.”
“We’re going to get out of here,” David told all of them.
They lifted Dorothy’s body and walked it to an open locker.
They gently hoisted her into her metal coffin. David put his hand on the door.
“Dorothy, we won’t forget you.”
33
The Loners crossed the line into what once was the humanities department. Now it was Fre
ak territory. He needed to be spry and alert, but David was seeing things.
First, it was the mural. He saw clouds drift across the painted sky. Then it was Dorothy. As he closed the locker door, he saw tears drop from her eyes. Neither of these things was possible. He didn’t realize it would start this fast.
David knew what happened to kids who missed their graduation. They stopped making sense. They would lose track of a conversation, then they stopped talking to anybody altogether. And finally, they started talking to people who weren’t there. They all cracked in the end.
It was happening to him now, but he couldn’t let anyone know. They were depending on him. Will sidled up to David.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked.
“Nothing. I’m just worried about the Freaks.” It didn’t look like Will bought it, but it wasn’t untrue. David didn’t want any trouble with the Freaks. They already hated the Loners. Sam’s ransom was just the cherry on top. When they happened upon two Freak guards, Will and the twins snuck ahead, pounced on them with knives, and threatened to kill them if they made a sound. They dragged the guards off to be bound and gagged and locked away in the nearest classroom closet. The rest of the Loners watched from a distance.
David kept seeing thin, dark fingers flickering at the edge of his vision. He kept thinking someone was standing behind him and reaching over his shoulder. He looked back and saw Lucy.
“What?” she said softly.
I’m losing my mind.
“Nothing,” he said. Lucy was depending on him too. He waved the Loners forward.
David looked through the open door of a classroom beside him. He didn’t see a classroom. He saw a clean, white hospital room. He could faintly hear the monotonous beep of a heart monitor. He could see someone’s arm, an IV taped to it. A curtain was drawn halfway so he couldn’t see the person’s face.
The harder he strained to see a face, the dimmer the room got until what he saw before him was a dilapidated classroom, but with the hospital room still hanging there, transparent, a suggestion of a room.
“David, we should go,” he heard Lucy whisper.
All he had to do was get everyone through Freak territory. Once they were on the other side, it was a short trip to the ruins. As long as they could navigate to room 1206, they could find their way to the outside. The longer he took, the less immunity he’d have against the fatal pheromones that everyone around him emitted. The less immunity he had, the more fevered his mind would become until the hallucinations drove him insane, and the meat of his lungs would unspool inside his chest.
David was dying, and it was his friends who were killing him.
David walked away from the hazy hospital room. They hooked a right into a wide hallway. The ceiling lights were burned out for the first few yards. After that, the hallway was barely lit for a hundred feet, where it ended in a T-junction. The last bit of power from the generator barely coursed through the building’s wiring. David led the Loners through the darkened section and into the pulsing light.
He heard the footsteps of a crowd. Faraway chatter. Someone was coming. David stopped and motioned for his gang to halt. At the far junction, he saw Freaks, three of them, walking through the intersecting hallway. They passed through the junction without seeing the Loners. He waved the Loners back and reversed his steps as quietly as he could. More Freaks crossed ahead. If the Loners could back up into the dark section of the hallway, they could remain undetected.
David glanced at his gang behind him.
They were all Will. A wide hallway of convulsing Wills stood gagging behind him, their eyes rolling white, a froth of saliva shaking out of their mouths.
David screamed.
“LONERRRRRS!” yelled a Freak.
A horde of Freaks flooded into the hallway and charged.
They wore black, and their faces and arms were completely blacked out with some sort of paint. The chemical blue of their hair looked even more unnatural against their charcoal faces. Some wore swimming goggles. They carried scimitar-shaped shards of shattered blackboard with handles made of desk legs. The Loners sank into fighting stances. David saw an avalanche of blue fall toward him. The Loners ran forward; their white heads penetrated the blue mass. Violence exploded through the hall. David pulled a pipe from his belt.
He prayed that whatever he swung it at was real. A blue-hair sliced his blackboard scimitar down at him. David blocked it with the pipe. The blackboard shattered, and the impact rattled the bones in David’s hand. The pain in his wrist was no hallucination. David clung to that pain. He swung his pipe into the kid’s hip. The kid fell.
David hacked away at whoever came near. He took down a Freak who swung a rope with a brick tied into its end. A blue-bearded Freak swung a two-by-four that had nails driven through it, into the back of a Loner next to David.
David saw a human skeleton weaving through the riot. It shoved people out of its way, throwing its bones into them.
It had no jaw. There was a hammer clutched in its fleshless fingers. The skeleton turned to him. Dead, empty eye sockets locked onto David. It ran at him.
A chair smacked into the back of David’s knees. He thudded down to the ground on his stomach. He whipped around onto his back. Ritchie was dragging a chair-wielding Freak away from David. David got up on one knee. The skeleton appeared above him, hammer raised high over its cracked skull. A wet, pink tongue extended out from the shadows under its upper teeth. It screeched.
David gripped his pipe with both hands and put everything into one swing, chopping his pipe up into its dead head. The front of the skeleton’s skull, its bony face, broke off and flew over the heads of the feuding gangs. The skeleton thumped down on the floor next to David. It was Bobby. He was unconscious. It took David three blinks for him to see it clearly.
Bobby wore the front half of a plastic rib cage from a biology classroom skeleton over his black shirt. The skeleton’s bony face had been his mask. David stood.
The battle still thrashed around him. Blue and white hair was now stained with red. The Freaks had pushed the Loners back, into the darkened section of the hall again. Will and Ritchie struggled against four Freaks. Loners were out-numbered by Freaks, twofold. They were giving everything they had in David’s name, but they weren’t going to last much longer.
“You want me, come and get me!” David hollered to the crowd.
The Freaks all looked at David. Time to run. He bolted away from the Freaks, around a corner and into a narrow hallway.
He slammed hard against a row of lockers. His depth percep-tion was jacked. He heard a wailing mob bottleneck through the door behind him.
The hallway was a cluttered dumping ground. The Skaters hadn’t picked up garbage for weeks. He tripped over a stack of torn-up carpet and fell into a pile of trash. He fumbled to get to his feet.
Gotta slow down.
But he couldn’t. He glanced behind. The Freaks were bearing down on him fast. He collided with a tangle of desks and leapt over a plump garbage bag to keep his footing. He careened off one object and then another, always close to falling over.
The Freaks shouted after him and threw things out of their way. The hallway narrowed around David as he ran. The walls squeezed in on him.
It wasn’t real.
All the doors were swinging open and slamming shut of their own accord. For a moment, he saw a bloodred elk running by his side. The noise behind him sounded like a stampede of screaming elephants. The noise swelled until David thought it was coming from inside his head instead of behind him.
David tripped on a gallon milk jug full of piss, and ate it into a pile of pallets. Pain. He looked back. The churning mass of Freaks was only twenty feet behind him.
David bolted up and hooked a left. There it was: the entrance of the cafeteria. It gleamed for him like heaven’s gate. He passed two Sluts taking out their garbage. Two more stood guard ahead of him by the doors.
“Hey!” one yelled.
He couldn’t explain.
The guards reached out to try to stop him, but he ran through them, knocking the girls aside, and tumbled to a stop inside the cafeteria, in front of a crowd of Sluts. They rose to their feet and shouted at him.
“Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” David shouted.
Violent cut through the crowd to meet David, her face twisted in anger.
“You can’t just run past my guards like that!”
“The Freaks!” David yelled, trying to catch his breath.
“They’re coming!”
The blue-haired army rounded the corner and charged into the cafeteria. The Sluts ran at the Freaks with whatever they could grab, and the two gangs ripped into each other.
The cafeteria was pure carnage. David punched at whatever Freak came at him and kept moving. The Sluts fought to get the invaders out. There were too many bodies to discern who was who anymore. He planted his feet. The people in front of him looked like two-dimensional cutouts. He swung his pipe and bashed it against anything solid.
Another entrance to the cafeteria burst open. A hundred Freaks rushed through. The doors of a third cafeteria entrance toppled over. Throngs of Freaks flooded in. The cafeteria filled with blue-haired psychos, hundreds and hundreds of them, charging toward David. He swung his pipe wildly, smashing it into one Freak after another. For every Freak he knocked to the ground, five more would attack.
They were on all sides, they pulled the pipe from his hands.
He punched, he elbowed, he kicked. They clawed into him, tearing at his skin, biting his back.
“David!” someone yelled from behind him.
David spun around. Will stood in front of him. The Freaks were gone. Disappeared. In the blink of an eye, there wasn’t one head of blue hair in the whole cafeteria. There were Loners and angry Sluts standing all around him. They stared at him like he was a mad homeless man shouting at a bush. He lowered his fists. He felt sick, weak, scared.
