by Lex Thomas
“What?” David’s tone was aggravated but his face was scrunched up in confusion. Clearly, Will apologizing was a new experience for him.
“I know we had it good out there on the farm. It was great. I didn’t mean to fuck it up. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
David stared at him with the same confusion, but only for a few more seconds before he closed his eyes and sighed. He exhaled, and all the tension in his body seemed to exit with his breath.
“I know,” David said. He massaged his neck. “I know you are.”
David had forgiven him after arguments in this elevator so many times in the past. Their love for each other would always be stronger than any conflict that came between them.
“Hey, remember when I wanted to knock a hole in the floor so we wouldn’t have to leave to go to the bathroom?” Will said.
One side of David’s mouth tilted up.
“How long did we fight about that?” Will said.
“Four months? Five?”
Will chuckled. “I still say it’s way more convenient. You’d only have to go into the school for food!”
“I can’t believe you want to get into this—what don’t you understand about me not wanting to watch you shit? About my house smelling like your ass?” David said, his smile widening.
“So the other person has to go up top and not come back till the smell’s gone. Is that so bad?”
“What about the giant pile of it that would build up at the bottom of the shaft? That would stink the whole shaft up.”
“I never smelled anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t think that’s a real problem, that’s all I’m sayin’.”
“Did you crap off the roof?” David said, pointing above.
“Well … yeah, I always figured you did too, but that we both kinda knew not to talk about it,” Will said.
“No, I did not do that! I went to the bathroom like a human being.” David laughed. “What’s wrong with you? It’s like living with a gorilla. How many of your turds are down there right now?” David said.
“Ballpark? Hmm. Let me think. I’m not great with math.”
“You have to use math?”
“I think I could guess my average weekly total. And if I multiply it out …”
“Jesus Christ, that means like every day. If you have weekly totals, that means pretty much daily.”
Will couldn’t stop laughing from how riled up David was getting. David was laughing in bursts, between stretches of mock outrage.
“No, okay, I’ll be honest,” Will said. “If I really had to put a number on it, conservatively I’d say thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five! Are you being for real?”
Will was being for real. Thirty-five was his best estimate.
“Yeah. About.”
David laughed and shook his head. He threw his hands up in the air. “I give up,” he said. “You are a maniac.”
“I like to be comfortable, that’s all. Hard to relax in the bathrooms when you always have to watch your back.”
David smiled, but he didn’t say anything back. Will didn’t know what to say next either. The jovial mood began to fade, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was normal. Will really was sorry he’d dragged his brother into this, but he couldn’t deny that he was relieved to have him here.
“I hate the idea of Lucy alone in here,” David said.
“It kills me.”
“Let’s go find her,” David said.
“You mean that? With two of us, we can definitely do it.”
“Definitely,” David said, but he didn’t get up.
Will didn’t move either. With David behind him, he felt a renewed confidence, but his body felt like a bag of sludge. He’d been going full throttle for a day straight, and it was taking its toll.
“I just need to catch my breath,” Will said.
“Tell me about it.”
Will closed his eyes for a second.
15
DAVID OPENED HIS EYE TO THE BRUSHED steel wall of the elevator. He’d had nightmares on the outside that had started like this. Back in school again. But this was no dream. He reached up to wipe the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his chin, but his fingers hit his face shield. He was still half asleep. His filtered breath echoed in his ears.
He looked at his watch: 9:05 a.m. David scrambled up to a seated position, his back against the wall.
No. That couldn’t be right. He looked at his watch again. He tapped on it with one finger. The digital seconds clicked along without a care for him or his rising panic. David looked over at Will. He was in a heavy sleep.
“Oh shit,” David said and stood. “SHIT!”
Will jumped awake.
“What the fuck?” Will said.
“Get up,” David said.
“I am up.”
“No, I mean, stand up. Let’s go. We gotta go.”
Will blinked a few times and shook his head like a dog. He stared at the floor, confused and groggy.
“Now!” David said and reached down to take his hand. He pulled Will up.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s morning. We slept through the night.”
“What?! You didn’t set an alarm or something?”
“I slept through it. I guess we were more wiped out than we thought. We’ve been running around with no water and …”
“Fuck!” Will said.
David pulled on his backpack. He dragged the milk-crate stepping stool to the middle of the elevator and got up on it. He slid the hatch open, and they made their way out of the elevator. Every movement was sloppy. His mind was moving twice as fast as his body.
“We’ll find her,” Will said when they made it to the hallway.
But they didn’t. As they searched, David watched the hours slip away until noon. Room after room and hallway after hallway, they didn’t find a trace of her, or get anything close to a lead. Eventually the halls started to blend together until it became hard to remember which ones they’d already explored. The time they had to spend hiding from people aggravated David, because they weren’t making progress, but he wasn’t sure that they were making progress the rest of the time either.
The two of them crept down another hall, side by side.
“Did you ever miss it?” Will said after a while.
“Miss what?”
“McKinley.”
David gave Will a look.
“Yeah, I’d write about it in my journal every night.”
“Really?”
“No. Why would I miss being locked up with no daylight and no food?”
Will shrugged. “There’s more going on in here than that. You were a rock star for a while. You aren’t that outside. You’re hanging out with a bunch of fifty-year-olds, shucking corn.”
David passed a decrepit classroom. He remembered what Mort had told him in the Stairs, that sometimes, he would go to the old Loners’ turf when he needed to relive happier times. He’d been moved when he’d heard that, but he didn’t feel that way now. He felt sad.
“I think we were all making the best of a bad—”
Will grabbed David’s arm and pulled him back from the corner they were about to turn.
“Ssh,” he said. “Look at that.”
Will pointed at the darkened doorways of the two classrooms nearest to them in the long hallway ahead. The classrooms were populated by ghostly figures. Freaks. They all held weapons. They were hiding. Waiting.
Two Nerds walked into the hall at the other end. They each shouldered plump bags from the food drop, and were chatting. He shared a worried look with Will. He was about to witness another mugging. Would he stand by and just let it happen again? But when the Nerds passed the occupied classrooms, the Freaks did nothing. The Nerds walked on, unaware of the danger they’d avoided.
“What’s going on?” Will whispered.
“I don’t ge
t it,” David said.
But then, he did.
A giant group of Skaters rolled into the hall from the same direction the Nerds had. It was nearly the whole gang, fresh from the quad, lugging their gang’s entire food drop ration. This was what the Freaks had been waiting for, a big score.
The Freaks pounced. There were so many. They leapt from their hiding spots, and burst out of classrooms to pummel the unsuspecting Skaters with baseball bats and two-by-fours. Food scattered onto the floor. A Freak threw a brick down onto the face of a tripped Skater and snatched the bunch of carrots from his hands. He saw a Skater girl get a knife in the shoulder. The Skaters tried to fight back, but they’d been caught off guard, and they couldn’t reverse the momentum. The food on the floor was snatched up by the Freaks, and once they had most of it, they fled, leaving the Skaters to pick up the remnants of their rations and hobble off home.
David’s spirits sank. He’d been so proud of what he and the parents had done on the farm. He’d believed the food drops had been made peaceful, and that he was helping turn McKinley into a safer place, but now he understood. The violence hadn’t been neutralized, it had only been pushed inside.
The brothers soldiered on, continuing their search, and Will started talking to him about some bullshit, but David wasn’t paying attention. He couldn’t stop thinking about how ignorant he and the parents were of what it was actually like in McKinley, and how their sense of control over the quarantine was only an illusion.
“… I mean, where did Hilary even get a loaded gun?”
“What?” David said. He turned to face Will. “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah. I heard a bunch of people talking about it. She’s got a loaded gun and she declared herself queen.”
David felt like he’d just been shoved off a cliff. Hilary with a gun. Hilary with power over everyone. How long would it take for her to find out he was here? How long would it take for her to send everyone after him, just like Sam had done? Goddamn it—he hated this school. What the fuck was he still doing here, he had to find Lucy and get out now.
David got kicked out of his thoughts when he heard a disembodied voice call out, seemingly from nowhere.
“Gas masks!” the voice said.
David tensed. There was no one else in the hallway but him and Will.
“Who said that?” Will said.
All the lockers around them sprung open. Forty Geeks, twenty on each side, bounded out of the lockers. They surrounded David and Will.
“Give us those gas masks,” a Geek with a knife said.
“Wait,” David said. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand they’re rare as shit and we’re gonna get so much food for—” The Geek’s eyes went wide. “Hoh …,” he said. “You’re David.”
“It is!” another said. “No way! And Will too.”
“If we get separated, meet at the elevator,” David whispered to Will.
The Geeks touched David. They touched his mask. Alien tribesmen meeting their first astronaut. David jerked away from one, only to end up in the hands of another.
“Hands off!” Will said.
“Tell us everything,” one said to David. “What’s going on out there?”
“It’s …,” David said. They tugged on his arms. On his bag. He could feel someone unzipping his backpack. Where the crane remote was. He shook them off his bag, but Geeks were crowding between him and Will, and David didn’t like it.
“We’re leaving now,” David said.
“Leaving the school?” one said with excitement.
“Can you get us out?” another said.
“Is it over? Is the quarantine over?”
“It’s all over,” one shouted. “It’s gotta be!”
“David’s come back and he’s going to let us out!” a Geek yelled like he was trying to tell the whole school. Other Geeks came out of hiding spots all down the hall and hustled over. The crowd around them grew.
“That’s not what’s happening,” David tried to say, but the idea had caught on too fast. The Geeks were already yelling over him.
“We’re getting out! We’re finally getting out!”
People from other gangs came running from halls and classrooms, breathless at the news. Four Saints came rushing around the corner. A group of Sluts appeared. Six Varsity came jogging up. He saw others approaching from the distance.
David’s eyes jerked to Will, and he saw the panic rising in his brother.
Will face-palmed a Geek into the lockers. “Run!” he yelled, and bolted away.
David wanted to run after Will, but there were too many people between them.
“Don’t let him go!” Geeks said, and grabbed for him.
David jumped out of reach, and was able to sprint away—in the opposite direction of Will.
16
LUCY WOULD NEVER THINK OF GASOLINE THE same way. If she ever made it out of McKinley and had a real life again, she’d probably hit the gas station every day and top off her tank, just to be around the wonderful smell. She pressed her gas-soaked rag over her mouth and nose and sucked, already anticipating the numbing haze that would descend on her.
She watched one of the Burnout girls squat down and piss on the floor of the hallway, with her shorts bunched at her knees. The urine pooled by the girl’s bare feet, which were black with grime. The girl’s eyelids were drooping, she looked on the verge of falling asleep. She showed no embarrassment that other people could see her. She even seemed bored. She pulled her shorts back on with no underwear and without dabbing herself dry. It meant nothing to this girl. It meant nothing to Lucy either, now that the gasoline fumes were swirling in her chest.
Lucy let out a breath and felt the ground begin to pull away from her feet. Dizzy, she had to grab Bile’s bony shoulder to keep from falling. The high she got from the gasoline fogged the world around her. As soon as the fog showed hints of clearing, she’d ask Bile to dribble more gas on her rag, and he’d look at her like a proud parent, then gladly oblige. That’s how it had gone for hours. She wasn’t sure how many. She just wanted to keep this feeling, or lack of feeling, going for as long as she could.
Bile touched her lightly on the small of her back, letting her know he was there to catch her again if she needed him to. He’d proven to her that he would keep her safe. Any one of the other Burnouts who tried to mess with her in the hours she’d been on this bender received a minor beating from Bile, or the threat of one. She knew what it looked like when a guy wanted to protect her.
They were in Skater territory, near P-Nut’s strip club. From what Lucy had heard weeks ago, the strip club was a joke, just one room where three or four girls danced in underwear with pillowcases over their heads to protect their reputations. For all the hype and promotion P-Nut had been doing over the PA system, the strip club hadn’t amounted to much. Kids weren’t rich like they’d been in the Gates days. Fewer and fewer people had extra food to throw away on a little look-but-don’t-touch action.
One of the other Burnouts—she’d heard Bile call him Clive—was selling homemade drugs. He wore a jean jacket with a dozen panties stapled to the front. His belt was two toy rubber snakes tied together. He wore black sunglasses in the dark hall. A Skater walked up to Clive.
“What are you selling?” the Skater said.
“Burners. Clouds,” Clive said.
“Are those new?”
“Blows my old shit out of the water.”
Clive pulled something out of his pocket. In his palm were a crusty cotton ball and a cigarette made out of notebook paper.
“Burners are the cigarettes, and they speed things up, makes things intense, y’know. These balls are called clouds. You light this up, inside a bag, or a bucket or something, and stick your head in that smoke, you won’t be feelin’ dick.”
“Cool, cool,” the Skater said, “I’ll take two clouds.”
“Smart man.”
Lucy wanted two clouds too, but she didn’t want to owe
Clive anything. He looked at her like she was a house of cards that he wanted to blow over. A nervous Freak walked up to Clive, looking over his shoulder the whole time like he was afraid of being seen.
“Hey, somebody told me I should come here for some, ya know, satisfaction.”
“Yeah, sure,” Clive said to the Freak. “Just wait over there.”
Clive pointed to the classroom where Lucy and Bile were standing. The Freak walked over to them, and stared at Lucy’s breasts like he could see through her shirt. He smiled at her.
“All right, nice,” the Freak said. “We’re gonna have fun.”
He reached out to touch her. Lucy didn’t move. She wondered what would happen. Would she care if he squeezed her? Would she like it?
Bile stepped between Lucy and the Freak.
“Three cans,” he said, his voice slow and lilting.
“Yeah, fine,” the Freak said and produced the payment.
“In there,” Bile said and thumbed the Freak toward the classroom.
The Freak smiled at Lucy.
“See you inside,” he said and walked in.
Bile planted two fingers in his mouth and let out a sharp whistle.
A girl walked out from behind the row of lockers across the hall. The others called her Horse, and she looked like a body that had washed up on a riverbank. Her hair was a bird’s nest, her eyes were sunken pits, and her skin looked like it was having an allergic reaction to her life. She wore a flower-print dress. Horse didn’t look at Lucy or Bile as she followed the Freak into the room and shut the door.
Part of Lucy was appalled. Somewhere in the depths of her mind Lucy knew that what was about to happen in that room, what she’d seen Horse do three times already, was wrong. But that part of her that objected was small and feeble-voiced and just barely rising into her consciousness. Bile doused the gas rag again and put it to her face. She clutched his hands in hers, tighter this time, and inhaled. That small part of her drifted away again.
Bile turned to Lucy and smiled. His inflamed gums seemed to be fleeing his teeth.
“You’d fit in great with us,” he said.
“I would?”
“Most folks think we’re crap, but you don’t judge us like that.”
