Quarantine: The Loners q-1

by Lex Thomas

  “Let’s go,” Violent said.

  The five of them ventured out into the hall. Lucy stuck close to Violent. She cringed with each step, waiting for something awful to happen to them.

  Violent screamed. Lucy jumped.

  Violent’s leg had gone through the floor. She was grabbing at her leg and shouting. Julie tried to help her pull her leg out.

  “Spikes!” Violent screamed.

  Violent peeled back the broken floor tile to reveal the hole in the floor.

  Her leg was in an aluminum mop bucket that was lodged into the innards of the floor. The interior of the bucket was lined with whittled wooden spikes extending down at a forty-five-degree angle. It was easy to get your foot in, but any effort to pull it out drove the sharpened spikes farther into your flesh. The rough-hewn spikes were plunged deep into Violent’s calf. She was literally nailed to the floor.

  “We have to get the bucket out,” Lucy said.

  Julie nodded. They dug their fingers into the floor and pried at the bucket. With a few minutes of work, Violent was able to lift her leg out, bucket and all. They marched ahead.

  Violent dragged her bucket foot in long scrapes punctuated by painful grunts. Lucy couldn’t understand how Violent kept from crying. They reached the turn in the hallway.

  The long hallway ahead was mostly dark, except for a few broken lights that spotlighted small sections of the floor, making it look like a suburban street at night. Junk was piled up along the sides of the hall. Halfway down it, the doors to a row of lockers on one side were bent and torn. Sharp metal edges stuck straight out from the wall like thresher blades.

  “We need more bricks,” Violent grunted out.

  “Let’s go back and get some,” Lucy said.

  One of the Sluts walked over to a nearby pile of stuff. It made Lucy nervous how casually she kicked through the pile.

  She wrenched a desktop from the junk.

  “This’ll work.”

  Lucy heard a click. A locker next to the Slut sprang open.

  Inside there were three spray bottles full of liquid. Their squeeze triggers were tied with strings that ran through a series of pulleys, to a stack of books. The books dropped down the length of the locker. The bottles drenched the Slut, high, low, and middle. When the books hit the bottom of the locker they triggered the spark of a lighter. An aerosol can blast shot a plume of flame at the girl. It ignited her soaked clothes, and fire engulfed her.

  The Slut howled and ran toward Lucy. Lucy could feel the heat coming off of the girl’s burning torso and head. The Slut was blazing white. Lucy and the others had no choice but to run into the rigged hallway.

  CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! Violent’s bucket-foot clapped against the floor as she ran.

  Ahead of them, a tile popped out of the ceiling. A sharpened broom handle dropped out of the ceiling. A block of bundled library books the size of a guitar amp was duct-taped to the top as a weight. The heavy spike sank into the second Slut’s torso, right behind her collarbone. The flaming girl was gaining on them, baying and dripping fire. She cast a blazing orange light on the hallway that made Lucy and Violent’s shadows stretch out long before them.

  CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

  Julie had managed to get ahead. She was staying a safe distance from the mangled lockers ahead on the left, but a trip wire snapped loose by Julie’s foot. An overstuffed duffel bag detached from the ceiling, swung down on a rope, and crashed into Julie like a wrecking ball. It launched her into the bent metal teeth of the mangled lockers.

  Violent yanked Lucy to a stop. Lucy whipped her head to look back, expecting the burning Slut to crash into her.

  Instead, the girl was smoldering on the floor, crushed under a set of five weighted lockers that had fallen out of the wall.

  Lucy heard sobbing. Violent was crying, holding her face in her hands, and staring at Julie. Julie’s spine was folded in half.

  Her body hung over a twist of metal like a wet towel. Violent collapsed. Lucy stumbled to catch her. They fell against the wall together in an awkward embrace, both out of breath.

  They sat in silence. Clumps of gray dust floated in the air, blown upward by the swing of the heavy duffel bag that had rammed Julie into the locker doors. Bricks spilled out of a rip in the busted bag. The dust fell like dead snowflakes to the floor.

  Five minutes passed, maybe ten. Violent rolled her head right to look at Lucy. Sweat had grown cold on her forehead.

  “You believe there’s really a way out?” Violent said.

  Lucy nodded. “I believe Will.”

  “You think the two of us can make it to the ruins?” Lucy looked at the bucket on Violent’s foot. Blood dripped out onto the floor.

  “I think we should deal with that first,” Lucy said.

  It took them ten minutes to get the spikes out of Violent’s leg. When they did, Lucy helped Violent to her feet and carried as much of her weight as she could. The pair walked cautiously to the end of the hallway. They walked past an upturned table. Looking back they could see it was a warning sign, a message from the Nerds vigorously scratched into the dark faux wood

  surface of the table. It read: Past this point = DEATH.

  36

  Everything was going to hell.

  Will ran down a hallway, and Nelson followed. All of the hallway’s linoleum floor tiles had been ripped up. A hardened squiggle of glue remained for every missing tile, the color of peanut butter mixed with blood. Nelson huffed and puffed; he kept wanting to stop. Will wouldn’t let him. There wasn’t time. David would be gone soon.

  All of this was Sam’s fault. And now Sam had David, probably locked up in a trophy cabinet. After the ambush, Will had tried to run after the Nerds who’d carried David off. He couldn’t catch them. He was able to find Nelson and Belinda.

  He sent Belinda off to room 1206 to meet up with Lucy. Will had a plan, and it required a little muscle. Nelson was going to have to do.

  As he and Nelson ran toward the school’s administrative offices, Will could feel the tension building in his gut. He had to control it. Now was not the time to lose himself. He had to keep a clear head. Will laid on the speed, hoping that Nelson would keep up.

  Within minutes they reached the door to the teachers’ lounge. Will trotted down to a walk. Nelson panted his way over to him. Nelson had a smear of soot across his face. His pants seemed like they were about to fall down. He bled from a cut on his scalp, and blood drizzled down his face. If Will looked anything like Nelson, they were in trouble.

  “Can you look meaner?” Will asked.

  “What?”

  Nelson didn’t have his ear horn. Will spoke directly into his ear.

  “I said, can you look meaner?”

  Nelson tried to sneer his lip and bare his teeth like a wolf.

  He looked more like a worried troll doll.

  “That’s all you got?”

  Nelson kept his face frozen like that and nodded his head.

  Will sighed.

  “Okay.”

  Will shook his arms to get his nerves out. He knocked on the door and backed up. After a moment the door opened a sliver. A Skater with a shaved head and a fat lip peered out.

  He instinctively recoiled at the sight of Will’s white hair and slammed the door shut again. He heard the kid send an alert out to the rest of his gang.

  “Loh-ners!”

  Will felt a chill.

  “Let me do the talking,” Will said quietly to Nelson.

  “What?” Nelson said, still holding the same ridiculous expression, except now he was bugging his eyes out. Will didn’t know what that face was, but he had to admit it looked weird as hell.

  The door flew open, and Skaters poured out, surrounding them. The fat-lipped Skater held the jagged edge of a broken skateboard deck to Will’s neck, pinning him against the wall.

  “Where’s David?”

  “I want to talk to P-Nut,” Will said.

  “I said, where’s David?”

  “Sam
’s got him.”

  Fat-lip eased off on the skateboard, sparing Will’s throat.

  The Skaters grumbled at the news.

  “Sam caught David himself?” Fat-lip asked.

  “No. The Nerds,” Will said.

  “The Nerds?”

  “Come on!” one Skater said. “God damn it!” said another.

  Fat-lip looked at Nelson, who stared back with his I’m worried and I’m in an electric chair look.

  “What’s wrong with this kid?”

  “He’s crazy,” Will whispered. “Don’t look him in the eyes.”

  Fat-lip followed Will’s advice and looked away from Nelson.

  Nelson was pulling it off. Will got a surge of confidence.

  “So, if Sam’s got David, what the hell did you come here for?” Fat-lip said. “You gonna pay us back for our boards?”

  “Like I said,” Will said, “I need to talk to P-Nut.” Fat-lip laughed.

  “Your funeral, kid. But your friend stays here.” Will turned to Nelson and shouted, “Try not to kill anybody.” Nelson nodded, his nostrils flared in faux anger. The Skaters kept their distance.

  Fat-lip and his friends grabbed Will roughly by the shirt and shoved him into the teachers’ lounge. A half-pipe skate ramp dominated the room. The surface of the ramp was covered in the missing linoleum tiles from the hallway. It formed a seamless surface. The ramp was at least eight feet tall, and they’d torn out the ceiling to access about three feet more of headroom. But no one was skating. They didn’t have many boards, thanks to Will. Every Skater in the room stared daggers at him.

  He was pushed into the next room where they’d created a mini skate park, full of school benches and wall-mounted handrails pulled from the stairwells, all marred with black scuffs.

  Fat-lip pounded on a heavy wood door on the far end of the room. There was a placard on it that read PRINCIPAL WARFIELD. The name WARFIELD was scratched out. Underneath

  it, P-NUT had been scrawled in silver marker.

  The door opened, and a cute Skater girl in a bikini top stuck her head out. The sides of her head were shaved, but the hair on top was long and black and fell to one side. Fat-lip whispered something in her ear. She gave Will a once-over and opened the door wide. One of Will’s other escorts gave him a halfhearted pat down and shoved him into the room.

  P-Nut lounged on a brass-buttoned green leather couch. He had all sorts of angular designs shaved into his short black hair. The bikini girl sat next to him, and there was another hot girl curled up on P-Nut’s other side, with a shaved head.

  P-Nut smiled at Will. He was a white kid, but somehow he maintained a light tan when none of them had seen the sun in more than a year. Will heard he was part Native American. He always looked like he’d just come back from vacation. Maybe that’s why the girls liked him. Or maybe it was because he was always smiling. Whatever it was, they liked him. And he liked them back. P-Nut was known as the horniest guy in school.

  P-Nut got up and sat on Principal Warfield’s huge oak desk, which was covered with hand-drawn stickers. Behind him, numerous photos of Principal Warfield, some with his family, one with the mayor, hung on the wall, but they had been rehung upside down. P-Nut swung his legs casually back and forth and sized up Will. Will shifted his weight, self-conscious.

  Will cleared his throat.

  “My name’s Will Thorpe.”

  “I know who you are. You’re the one who broke my board.” The bikini girl whispered something into P-Nut’s ear.

  “Bummer,” P-Nut said.

  P-Nut sat down and grabbed the microphone for the school’s public address system from the center of the desk.

  He pressed the button at its base; Will could hear different sets of loudspeakers squawk to life in the distance.

  “Hello, kiddies, this is P-Nut. Got some breaking news.

  David Thorpe has been caught by the Nerds. The turkey hunt is off. If you’re hungry, you might want to think about eating your shoes.”

  P-Nut let go of the button, and the speakers went quiet. He looked back to Will again.

  “So what did you want?” P-Nut said.

  “I’ll get to that. But first…”

  Will pulled his smut phone from his pocket.

  “Do you like Freak girls?”

  P-Nut smiled.

  37

  It was all food. A hillside of food. It cascaded down the bleachers. This was Varsity’s greatest achievement, a symbol of their power in McKinley.

  David watched the food in this brief, tranquil moment. As gruesome as his hallucinations had been, they could also be awe-inspiring. The food flowed down the hillside and disappeared once it touched the gym floor, like a giant fountain.

  Occasionally, some of it would spout up into the air in a kalei-doscope of color. It was beautiful. He would have been content to stare at it until his time ran out.

  Heavy ropes tied David to the front of a football tackling sled. His hands were bound behind him. The ropes bit him under the ribs. The dummy cushioning on the sled had been torn away so that his back lay flat against metal bars. His whole body was tilted forward so he had to struggle to lift his heavy head if he wanted to see what was coming at him.

  David dragged his head up. At the other end of the gym, Anthony Smith was down in a three-point stance. Other guys lined up for their turn. Anthony broke into a run, straight for David. With his first step, it looked to David like he was a mile away. With the next step, a quarter mile, then fifty feet. David closed his eye and wondered if this was the last hit he would take; if Anthony would smash into him and lung muck would rocket out of his mouth.

  David snapped his eye open. Anthony was right there, running at full speed. His shoulder rammed into David’s chest with all the momentum of his run. Vicious, worming pain dug its roots down into David’s chest. He lost all of his air. David’s vision went crimson, as if the ceiling had bled on everything in the gym. He heard the gritty rasp of the tackling sled as it scraped across the wood floor. It skidded to a stop. Anthony pushed off David and let out a victory scream. He raised his fists. The Pretty Ones cheered.

  “That was for Brad,” Anthony said with a slap to David’s chin, and jogged away.

  David took in air. The red faded from his vision. He stared at a white candy wrapper on the varnished maple floor. The white wrapper tumbled across the floor and then flitted up, caught by a breeze. It twirled and blew away. He could feel the cool breeze on his face.

  “You’re okay,” a voice said.

  David looked up. Lucy stood before him. The breeze was coming from her. Her dress was clean and luminescent, the color of moonlight. She laughed, but he couldn’t hear it. Her smile crinkled the skin under her eyes. David loved that. He wanted to know what she was laughing at.

  “I’m back in your room,” Lucy said. “I’m waiting for you… naked.”

  She smiled again. David felt blood drip out of his mouth as a goofy grin spread across his face.

  A sprinting linebacker in a scuffed football helmet ran right through Lucy. She burst into a thousand shreds like confetti. David felt his chest collapse. The pain dug through him. His world went red again. The sled scraped. He heard the linebacker grunt then walk away.

  He’d never see Lucy again. He knew that now. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about living anymore. It was that he couldn’t care. He had no fight left in his body, and he was in Sam’s world now. The game was over. Sam won.

  “That’s enough,” Sam said.

  David rocked his head right, his eyelid heavy. Sam was sitting on a folding chair, getting his hair redyed yellow by a Pretty One. He was watching David. He pushed the girl away as she dried his hair. David heard another Varsity come running from the other side of the gym, feet clomping on the hard floor. Sam stood, still wearing the towel around his neck from the dye job.

  “I said enough!”

  The clomping slowed to a stop, and the line of would-be tacklers dispersed. Sam dragged his folding chair out in fro
nt of David. David breathed through the discomfort. Sam casually sat down in front of him. He stared at David and considered him as if he was a piece in a museum.

  “Why didn’t you kill me?” Sam asked.

  “What?” David replied.

  “Back on the quad. When all your Scraps were trying to tear me apart, you stopped them. Why’d you do that?”

  “Why?” David said. “I don’t know, I felt bad for you.”

  “You felt bad?” Sam asked.

  Sam scrunched his face up. He was flabbergasted.

  “What would it have proved?” David asked.

  “Proved? It wouldn’t have proved anything. It would have gotten rid of me. You had to know I wouldn’t stop, that I’d keep coming for you.”

  “I’d already won,” David said. “It seemed… too cruel.” Sam scoffed. “That’s a loser’s attitude if I’ve ever heard one.

  Guess you’re regretting that one now, huh?” Sam smiled then looked upset when David didn’t react.

  “What do you want from me, Sam?”

  “I don’t want anything from you. Look around. I have it all.” Pain flared through David’s head. His patience for whatever little game this was had come to an end.

  “You sent the whole school after me. For what? What did I do to you? I hit you once for stealing my girlfriend,” David said, raising his voice. It hurt his chest to talk so loud.

  “Oh, that,” Sam said. He stood up. “I sent the whole school after you just to keep them occupied. They all want to kill me for my food. But now, instead, they’re killing each other to get to you. They’re hungry. They’ll do anything. They’ll kill their best friends. All I have to do is dangle some food in front of their noses. I don’t even have to give them any. I stiffed those Nerds who brought you in,” he went on. “Later tonight I’m putting a bounty out on them. And then I’ll put a bounty on the ones who bring them in, on and on, and by the end of the week, the whole school will be so weak and hungry that even if they all banded together they wouldn’t have the strength to knock on my door.”