Quarantine: The Saints q-2
Page 27
She stabbed her fingernails at his eyes. One nail hit its mark. Right in the red. He grabbed at his eye and fell back, screaming. He lay groaning on top of the fallen motorcycle, pressing his fingers into his eye. He rolled around with his head on the back tire. The engine crackled underneath him.
She’d put a skid mark on his face. She grabbed the front handlebar and twisted the throttle. The spokes of the speeding back tire caught hold of Gates’s long hair that was whipping off his shoulders. The whirring wheel kicked his head around, and snapped his neck.
Gates was dead. His neck was a Twizzler.
Lucy lay down in the mud.
41
HILARY’S PLIERS SCRATCHED ACROSS THE enamel of the Freak girl’s tooth.
“Stop squirming.”
The Freak girl was small. Tons of freckles. Probably naturally a redhead, but her pixie haircut was chemical blue, and her eyebrows were white. Her wrists were fastened to her ankles by wire. Her ankles were fastened to the chair, which stood in a clearing in the trash-filled basement. She’d woken up just minutes before. She probably didn’t even remember Hilary whacking her in the back of the head with a two-by-four.
Hilary had a grip on that tooth and she wanted it now. The pointy jaws of her needle-nose pliers were jammed into the pink of the Freak’s gums. The girl’s crying made her face uglier. She wasn’t much of a looker, but she had great teeth.
Hilary pulled. She squeezed just tight enough to keep even pressure. The girl screamed into the old gray hand towel that Hilary had crammed into her mouth. Hilary tongued the gap in her own teeth as she strained. The pliers slipped off and snapped closed, her arm yanked back.
“Whore!”
Hilary kicked the girl’s chair over and it fell on its side. The freckly girl shook her head violently. She made more sad honking noises. Hilary closed the metal jaws on the tooth again and imagined it was Lucy tied to the chair. She sat on the floor and got her feet in the Freak’s face. She shoved one of her heels into the girl’s open mouth, bottom of her shoe against the girl’s upper row of teeth. Her other heel was in the girl’s eye, pressing down on the lip of her brow. She pushed with her legs and pulled with her back, like she was using a rowing machine. The girl honked into the towel again.
Scream, Lucy.
Both hands crushed down on the rubber handles. The burning muscles of her forearm stood out like steel cables. Her thumb wanted to cramp. She gave it everything. The girl shrieked. Hilary heard a crack.
Something gave way inside the Freak’s gums. It felt like tearing a drumstick off a chicken. Hilary stood up, still gripping tight on the pliers. The Freak coughed out the towel and screamed for her mother.
The tooth was beautiful. So long and pointy, like a normal tooth with a unicorn horn on top. It might be a little too wide, but maybe she could grind it down.
She’d find a way to make it fit. She’d climb her way back up to the top, return to her former glory, and no one would ever know. That vile pig, Lucy, was the only one who knew her secret. Hilary was coming for her, and no one in McKinley could keep her away. Nothing could stop Hilary from yanking every tooth out of that bitch’s head.
42
COLD RAIN PELTED WILL IN THE HEAD. THE raindrops were fat, and the downpour had doubled in strength in the short time since he’d been lifted out of the school. The crane had swung him away from the school, and was now lowering him down to the ground. He could hardly see a thing in the heavy rain. The harness pinched his skin. Thunder cracked. Wind whipped across his wet body and Will shivered.
His mind was on Lucy. What would happen to her? What was Gates doing to her right at that moment? Was he running her over to get back at him for leaving? Was he riding through the halls with her corpse laid over the motorcycle? Or dragging behind? Jesus. He should have waited, he should have stayed in McKinley another day, at least another few hours. Even though his mind would have started to break apart and he might not have gotten another chance to get out, and he might have died… he should have stayed.
Through the torrential downpour, he could barely make out the base of the crane in the distance. He was being lowered into a fenced-in area, on the lawn next to the school. Barbed wire ran along the top of the tall chain-link fences. The only thing inside the fenced-in area was an Airstream trailer. It looked like an aluminum Twinkie. His descent ended as his sneakers sank into the moist grass.
Will unfastened himself. He was glad to get the harness off. The wind surged again, blowing the rain sideways for a second. The harness rose back into the sky. He watched it go until he couldn’t see it anymore.
He was freezing. There were lights on in the trailer. The square windows with rounded corners glowed a faint orange. He hugged himself and hurried over to the door. The rain sprayed off of its rounded roof.
He found the door unlocked. He opened it cautiously and poked his head in. There was no one inside, but a single lamp was on, filling the interior with warm, butterscotch-colored light. There was a bed, a small bathroom, a tiny kitchen with a stove and oven. Cereal boxes and bags of trail mix were arranged neatly on the kitchenette’s counter. He saw a pile of books. The inside of the trailer was dry and he was about to walk inside when he heard someone shout his name.
“Will!”
He turned. There was a figure standing just beyond the fence. Will shielded his eyes from the rain. He couldn’t make out anything more than the shape of a man, but he knew what this was. The second Will had realized that he was holding Sam’s disembodied head in front of Sam’s father, he knew he’d be in serious trouble when he hit the ground. He was going to have to talk his way out of this before Sam’s father pulled out that rifle again.
“Sam was already dead! I didn’t do it!” Will shouted to the man.
“That’s good to hear,” the man said.
Will swore he could feel his heart stop inside his chest. He knew that voice. Will ran toward the fence. The hazy figure brought a scuba mouthpiece up to his face as Will got closer. The mouthpiece stretched his lips out of shape, and his hair was brown now, and his eye patch was black instead of white, but it was him. Will had to hook his fingers through the holes of the fence to keep from falling over.
David was alive.
Copyright
EGMONT
We bring stories to life
First published by Egmont USA, 2013
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © Lex Thomas, 2013
All rights reserved
www.egmontusa.com
www.lex-thomas.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Lex.
The Saints / Lex Thomas.
pages cm — (Quarantine ; book 2)
Summary: The world inside an infected Colorado high school quarantined by the government takes a startling turn for the worse when a new gang enters the school and starts gaining power.
eISBN: 978-1-60684-337-6
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Gangs—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Virus diseases—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Science fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.T366998Sai 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2013008605
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
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Document creation date: 17.7.2013
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