Rogue

by Gina Damico

  She ushered them inside and closed the door behind them. “The closest entrance to the Backways is on the other side of this next room.”

  At the end of the hall they reached a door, where Skyla typed a code into the keypad that sat beneath the handle. Its little glowing light switched from red to green as the bolt unlocked with a deep click. In the faint light, Lex could see that someone had scratched ABANDON ALL HOPE on the door’s surface.

  “But first,” Skyla said, turning the handle, “a little unpleasantness.”

  ***

  They stepped into a dark, smoky space. A thin trough of fire snaked around the circular perimeter, creating the effect of an ancient sacrificial altar. The air was thick with the smell of excrement and burnt oil, and although, owing to the smoke, Lex couldn’t see how far the fiery light extended, she could tell by the acoustics that the room was huge.

  And the only reason she could tell anything about the acoustics was because of the inhuman moans echoing off the stone walls.

  The Croakers inched forward in a slow-moving clump. “What is this?” Elysia asked Lex in a frightened whisper.

  “I don’t know,” Lex said, her eyes watering as she tried to squint through the smoke. All she could make out was a pit in the floor a few feet away. When she moved to investigate, Skyla grabbed her arm.

  “Careful,” Skyla said. “Stay close to me. You don’t want to fall in.”

  “Fall—” And with a sick, sinking feeling, Lex realized where they were. “Oh God. You brought us to the Hole?”

  “Don’t panic,” Skyla said in an even voice as the Juniors started to do just that. “Just keep walking and try not to look in.”

  A voice arose from somewhere in the room, a quivering yet monotone voice that could have come from either gender. It continuously recited the words of a poem, getting faster every time, and always shouting the last three words:

  To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock

  In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock

  Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock

  From a cheap and chippy chopper on a

  BIG

  BLACK

  BLOCK!

  Tositinsolemnsilenceonadulldarkdock

  Inapestilentialprisonwithalifelonglock . . .

  Lex’s body gave a violent shudder.

  The farther they got from the rim of fire—the closer to the center of the room—the more the air cleared, though it was still comparable to a thin fog. Lex could now see that the floor was dotted with dozens of holes, all approximately five feet in diameter.

  She couldn’t help herself. She stepped up to the edge of the closest hole, poked her flashlight inside, and peered down.

  Staring back up at her was a living skeleton. Half clothed in tattered rags, he held a trembling arm over his eyes to block the light. His eyes were exceedingly bulbous, popping out from his sunken, bruised skin.

  “Throw it.” His voice was feeble and gravelly, ruined by years of futile calls for help. “Throw it down!”

  “Um—” Flustered, Lex held a hand over her nose. The stench was overwhelming. “Throw what?”

  “Please!” he rasped, staring blindly into the dot of Lex’s flashlight.

  Skyla yanked the light from Lex’s hand. The hole plunged back into darkness, but the image of the ruined man still burned bright in Lex’s vision.

  “Don’t talk to them,” Skyla ordered. “It just makes things worse.”

  “Throw it!” The man called as the group moved on, his voice joining the other moans wafting up from the holes. “Throw it!”

  This seemed to rile up the rest of the prisoners. Elsewhere in the room, a high-pitched female voice started crying, then grew louder to a moan, then became tortured screaming, a feral wail that rocked every inch of the cavern. Lex covered her ears as Skyla prompted the group to pick up the pace, but her hands weren’t enough to block out the noise. It bounced around inside her skull, boring into her brain, thoroughly inescapable.

  The screams morphed into words in her head: This could have been you.

  Lex closed her eyes and broke into a run, her eyes watering.

  If you get caught, this WILL be you.

  At last the howling ceased.

  Lex wiped the grime off her face and opened her eyes. She and the others were standing inside a dim, musky hallway. Skyla pounded the door shut, sealing off the last of the smoke, screams, and misery.

  No one spoke. Skyla walked to a metallic box and pushed up a lever. With a crackly hum, a thin band of fluorescent lights flickered to life along the ceiling of a curving green hallway. In the flat, unforgiving light, the rest of the group all looked as traumatized as Lex did. Pip held the back of his hand over his mouth, as if he were about to throw up. Uncle Mort’s head was pointed at the ground as he scratched at his head. Elysia was still shaking.

  Skyla readjusted her pack and strode forward, pointing her flashlight down the corridor. “Come on,” she said gently. “Let’s get as far away from all that as we can, shall we?”

  The group lurched forward in silent agreement.

  Lex trailed behind them. They had walked all of fifty feet when she halted. She leaned against a wall and sank down to the floor, her head pressed into her knees.

  Driggs was the first one to notice. “Wait up,” he called to Skyla at the front of the pack. Skyla glanced back, assessed Lex’s condition, and looked at Driggs.

  “About two hundred paces ahead, the hall branches into two paths,” she told him. “We’ll wait for you there.”

  He nodded and crouched down beside Lex as the group strode on, Elysia lingering and nervously glancing back.

  Once they were gone, Driggs swallowed. “Lex—”

  “That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Or heard. Or smelled.” She looked up at him, her voice hoarse. “That could have been me, you, any one of us. It’s going to be us, if we screw this up!”

  He reached out to stroke her arm, but his hand went through it. “It’s not going to be us,” he said. “Because we’re going to win. You said so yourself. You’re going to fix it.”

  She glared at him.

  “So,” she said. “You’re talking to me again now?”

  He stood up and scratched the back of his neck, embarrassed. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “What was that all about, Driggs? Couldn’t resist the urge to jump back up into that seat of judgment again, huh?” She was being a total snot—she could hear it in her voice, the way she kept sniffing and scoffing—but the Hole had upset her too much to care. “Look, it’s nothing you haven’t reamed me out for before—that it’s not our place, that we’re not the ones who are supposed to deal out justice, yet that’s exactly what I was doing by Damning those criminals and it’s super wrong and unacceptable and I deserve to rot and fester in a dank, dark hole for the rest of my life. I don’t need another lecture. I get it.”

  Driggs balled up his fists. “You don’t get it.”

  “Yes, I do. What I don’t get is why, in your mind, it’s so much worse than everything else I’ve done. I mean, you know I’m evil. You’ve known it for a long time now. Every time I’ve tried to take the law into my own hands, even way back when I first came to Croak and wanted to go after all those criminals, you were always the first one to yell at me. So why would one more abhorrent thing that I’ve done so deeply offend and surprise you all of a sudden?”

  He was agitated, she could see. He was pacing back and forth between the close walls of the hallway, like a caged animal. “Because this time you really did it. You really did go after those criminals.”

  “And I’d do it again!” she shot back. “They were revolting people! I was doing the world a favor—”

  “But what gives you the right to make that decision?”

  “What gives you the right?” she shouted up at him. “Taking this moral high ground, this rock-solid conviction, acting like you’re a friggin’ saint and I’m the monster for dispatching these peo
ple! You act like I never even gave it a second’s thought, like I’m just a bloodthirsty murderer on the prowl for my next kill. How can you think that about me? You think I haven’t weighed those Damnings over a billion times in my head? You have no idea what goes into making a decision like that, to take the life of someone who isn’t supposed to die. You’ve never held that power in your hands. You’ve never killed anyone!”

  “Yes, I have,” he said quietly.

  Whatever words Lex had planned on saying next died in her throat. “. . . What?”

  He held her gaze with dead eyes.

  “I killed my parents.”

  9

  For a second Lex wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly—but there it was again, reverberating down the barren hallway, amplified and clear and thundering forever in her ears.

  She couldn’t talk. She could barely breathe; it seemed that all her brain activity had ceased. All she could do was look at him.

  Driggs was half facing away from her, but she could see that his fingers were clawed into his still-soaked hair, his eyes red and wet and blinking a hundred times a minute. He was breathing very fast. His back heaved and trembled.

  For a moment they were both very still.

  “Driggs,” she finally whispered.

  At the sound of his name, he deflated a little, curling into himself. He crumpled to the floor across from her and put his back against the other side of the corridor. They sat facing each other with their knees bent and their feet touching, forming an M on the floor of the hallway.

  Lex put her hands flat on the cement. She needed something stable, solid. “Driggs,” she said, a little louder, but with as much warmth as was possible in such a cold, empty hallway. “Look at me.”

  His eyes met hers. He looked scared, lost, like an abandoned puppy. “I’ve never told that to anyone,” he said in a small voice.

  Lex didn’t say anything, didn’t push it.

  Driggs opened his mouth, then closed it again. He seemed to be having some difficulty knowing where to start. After a moment of thought, he finally just gave her one of his usual smirks.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I come from a long line of colossal assholes.”

  Lex held his gaze. She knew that already; she’d seen his scars. But she knew nothing about the people who’d given them to him.

  He breathed deeply. “My parents beat me because their parents beat them. It was a family tradition, apparently. I bet it’s on our crest, a guy waving a belt, a kid screaming and running away.” He laughed at that, then stopped. “I guess that’s not really funny.”

  He bit his lip. “I don’t know if they were ever decent people—I suppose they must have been at one point, to fall in love and get married, but I never saw any evidence of that. They both had shitty jobs in sales at a farm equipment supplier—not that steady employment actually mattered, since they blew every paycheck on booze.” He paused. “The only shred of humanity I ever gleaned from them was the fact that, years before, they had had dreams of opening their own business—which is hilarious, really, because they were both lousy salespeople. But then I came along and ruined their lives, so that was that. That’s what they always told me, anyway. Completely ruined their lives.” He counted on his fingers. “Other greatest hits included: I was the biggest mistake they’d ever made, I’d never amount to anything, and I was worthless and stupid and—the household favorite—a pointless fuck.”

  Lex could only stare in disbelief. “How did you turn out to be such a decent human being with all those atrocious things they said?”

  His mouth crinkled into a shy grin. “I didn’t believe them. Like I said, they were lousy salespeople.”

  Lex exhaled a half laugh.

  He looked down. “I remember the night so well. It was cold, right on the cusp of autumn. It felt like Halloween, even though October was still a few weeks away. There was that crispness in the air, that smell. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” said Lex. “My neighborhood always smelled like truck exhaust.”

  “Well, that’s one perk of growing up in the sticks, I guess.” When Lex looked surprised, he frowned. “You didn’t know that? Upstate New York—just a couple of hours away from Croak, actually.”

  Lex shook her head. Somehow, she had not known where her boyfriend grew up. He just seemed so at home in Croak—as if he’d been there his whole life—that she’d never even thought to ask.

  Driggs blew out a puff of air. “My dad had just begun his nightly routine of stumbling through the door with a half-empty case of beer. But one dirty look from me was all it took for him to decide that this evening’s festivities would have the added bonus of a boxing match. With his fourteen-year-old son. While my mom sat on the couch and cheered him on. He only ever had one rule: I was never allowed to hit back.”

  He swallowed. “Except this time, I did.”

  He swallowed again. “I’d had it. I was just so mad, so sick of their shit, the way they treated me, the way my life was this unending mess that I couldn’t escape from. So I clocked him right in the face. Broke his nose.”

  Lex thought back to a few months earlier, when he’d done the same thing to Ferbus. No wonder he’d looked so disgusted with himself afterward.

  “Then things got really bad. He threw his bottle at the TV and broke the screen. That really pissed Mom off, but of course it was all my fault for angering him in the first place, so I’m the one she hit over the head with another bottle—”

  “She what?”

  Driggs leaned forward and parted his hair, revealing a jagged scar Lex had never noticed. “She lost it. Just kept grabbing them out of the case and throwing them at me while Dad ran upstairs to get his gun.”

  Now it was Lex’s turn to swallow nervously. “Gun?”

  Driggs looked down the hallway, then at the floor. “I feel like this is the point where I should confess that it all went by in a blur, that I don’t remember anything about it. But—shit, I still do. I remember every second.”

  He took a deep breath. “Dad came downstairs. Mom was still throwing bottles. I was bleeding all over myself, the couch, the carpet. Dad lurched forward, gun pointed at my head—I knew it was loaded, he always kept it loaded—and started to pull the trigger. But the guy was so damn drunk his finger fumbled and he missed. He missed the trigger. I saw my chance, and I yanked it out of his hands—he was so far gone, it wasn’t hard. I pointed it at him, and he just started laughing, laughing so hard he began to cough and had to sit down on the couch. But Mom was still hysterical, still throwing those bottles. And when another one hit me across the jaw, that was it. I turned and shot her.”

  He worked his tongue around his mouth for a moment, then said, “I’d never shot a gun in my life. I couldn’t even tell you what kind of gun it was. But my aim was perfect—I hit her dead between the eyes, and down she went. It took a moment for Dad to realize what happened, but once he did, he started shouting—this awful, growling shit that wasn’t even words. He didn’t stop until I looked up from her and aimed the gun at him.”

  Driggs’s breathing was getting heavier. “He wasn’t scared, exactly. He was more surprised, I think. Like it had never occurred to him that I might have the guts to do something like this. He opened his mouth, and I wish—I wish I had stopped for a second to hear what it was he had to say. I wish I knew what it was, that last thought that ran through his brain right before I blew it out the back of his head.”

  Lex just gawked. She couldn’t believe this stuff was coming out of Driggs’s mouth.

  “Hit him in the same place as my mom, right between the eyes. He was dead before he hit the ground, but I walked up to him, crying and yelling—I have no idea what I was saying—and stood over him. And then I shot him again. And again. And again. And again. And then my bullets were out and I sat down on the floor next to him and cried.”

  He sucked in air through his teeth. “But not because I was sad, you know? Not even because I was numb, or felt no
remorse.” He let out the breath he’d taken. “I was crying because I was so, so happy they were dead. It was the happiest I’d ever felt. I was delirious.” He looked straight at Lex, and this time, there was worry in his eyes. “What kind of person does that make me?”

  Lex hadn’t spoken in a while, so when she did, her voice cracked. “I don’t know. A human person?”

  He shook his head. “I sat there for a long time, just grinning and sobbing next to the corpses of my father and my mother. I had no immediate plans. The thought that maybe I should run popped into my head once or twice, but where to? We had no neighbors. We were miles away from the closest town. I had no other family, and no way to support myself. I guess I figured I’d just wait for the cops and let the juvenile corrections system raise me. At least in jail I’d get three meals a day.”

  A weird whimper came out of Lex. Somehow that last bit seemed to make everything even sadder.

  “But then,” he said, his eyes brightening slightly, “I heard a voice behind me. He’d let himself in through the front door.”

  “Uncle Mort?”

  Driggs nodded and collapsed back against the wall, spent.

  Lex searched for the right thing to say, but she could have sat there until the heat death of the universe and never come up with the right thing. So she went for the obvious.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have parents like that.”

  “They weren’t parents,” he said in a dark voice. “Parents are people who raise you and love you and teach you how to tie your shoes. These were just two savages who happened to live in the same house as me and yell at me to keep it down when I asked if we were having dinner that night.”

  Lex winced, then winced harder as she thought of all the times she’d complained to Driggs about her own mom nagging to call her. How her parents were so overflowing with love and concern that it was suffocating. What kind of a person did that make her?