by Vox Day
“Then we’ll make the front page, Mounds View Armed Drug Gang Arrested! Yeah, baby!” He grinned and turned to Rob. “Seriously, they had this headline in the Strib, like, two years ago, when they busted these guys with two shotguns, a pistol, and four plants in their basement. Shit, we’ve probably got more crap than that between all of us!”
Brien put his head in his hands, but he couldn’t help being kind of amused despite himself. He couldn’t believe the things Derek did sometimes, but his friend’s sheer insanity was part of the fun of hanging out with him. It was kind of like making a deal with the devil, he supposed—it was always a lot of fun, but sometimes you got a little more than you bargained for.
“Oh, fuck!” he heard Rob swear. “Way to go, Bry. You just had to say the word, didn’t you. Speak of the goddamn devil!”
Brien looked up and his heart sank. In the rear-view mirror, he could see a white-and-green police car approaching from behind them. Please, please, keep going, he thought desperately. It’s only six weeks until graduation. I do not need this right now! He held his breath as the squad car came closer, dreading that heart-stopping explosion of blue light that always signified trouble.
He could almost hear his heart thumping, and it was hard to swallow. Derek and Rob were silent and motionless, like two fawns holding stock-still in the hopes that the wolf stalking them would somehow fail to see them lying helpless by the side of the road. Thank you, thank you, he thought, relieved beyond measure, as the white car marked Mounds View Police did not slow down as it passed them by, seemingly without notice.
“Man, that was too close,” he said, turning back to the others with a sigh of relief. “Shit, the weed would be bad enough, but with your stupid gun and that pipebomb, we’d be drinking age by the time they let us out!”
“No doubt,” Rob agreed heartily, but Derek didn’t say anything. He was staring past Brien with a strange look on his face, and his dark eyebrows were drawn together in focused concentration.
“Um, Brien, I hope you got a good arm,” he said finally.
“Why’s that?” Rob asked, but Brien understood even before he turned around to see the red glow of the cop’s brake lights. His knees suddenly felt weak, and his stomach hurt.
“Because possession is just a misdemeanor,” Derek explained softly, his eyes still locked on the police car as it came to a halt about forty feet in front of them. “A loaded gun, on the other hand, we’re talking felony.”
Chapter 6
Abominations and Altercations
You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say,“If only it were evening!” And in the evening,“If only it were morning!”- because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.
—Deuteronomy 28:66-67
Jami looked down at the hard plastic tray in front of her brother with dismay and more than a little disgust. The food from the school cafeteria was always questionable at best, but looking at today’s pizza, she felt the hairnet ladies had managed to outdo themselves again. The presumed pizza was a concoction of what appeared to be slugbelly-white and schoolbus-yellow plastic melted over a browned doughy substance which bore only a passing resemblance to real pizza crust.
“Looks pretty nasty, huh?” commented her brother.
Jami didn’t bother to reply. The nastiness of the pizza, she thought, was beyond words. She held her tongue and winced as he picked up his slice and bit into it. This should be good, she thought, as she waited to hear Christopher pronounce his judgement. They’d been having lunch together once a week since school had started again after the New Year’s break, usually on Fridays, and she’d learned that his acidic rants could be pretty funny as long as they weren’t aimed at her.
Christopher chewed, made a face, and wiped a drop of yellow oil off his chin. Then he glanced at her plate and saw in place of pizza, she had two apples and a banana sitting in her plate’s largest rectangle.
“Hey, where’d you get the fruit?”
Jami grinned and slapped away his hand that was reaching out for an apple.
“Get away, you!” She pointed the banana at him as if it were a pistol. “Don’t even think about it. I’ll shoot, I swear I will!”
“Ha ha,” he made a face. “Seriously, where’d you get it?”
Jami indicated an overweight boy with glasses sitting three tables away from them. A brown paper bag in front of him was marked with a large grease stain which was the only remnant of her pizza slice.
“I traded Greg Lundeen for it. He brought a bag lunch, but he loves this cafeteria crap. I don’t know why. I mean, pizza I can understand, kind of, but they even screw up the spaghetti here. Spaghetti! How do you screw that up?”
“Jami!” Christopher was appalled. “All that fruit—he’s probably on a diet!”
“So?” Jami shrugged indifferently and peeled back the banana skin. “It’s not like there’s anything real in that stuff, it’s mostly plastic anyhow. Can’t be too many calories in it.”
She laughed as Christopher shook his head and returned to his lunch. Her brother didn’t seem to be feeling any ill effects from the knock on the head he’d taken the night before; fortunately, his hair covered the spot where the branch had cut his scalp. They hadn’t been able to keep the Walters from calling Mom and Dad, but thanks to some mild twisting of words on both their parts, had managed to leave their parents with the impression that Christopher had simply slipped on the ice while the two of them were out jogging together.
Something familiar caught the corner of her vision, and she looked up. Her twin sister, Holli, was entering the cafeteria at the side of a tall senior who walked with the easy grace of the natural athlete. She recognized Eric Johnson at once; he played on her indoor soccer team. He also happened to be the star of Mounds Park’s varsity squad. But why was his arm doing draped around her twin like that?
“What’s up with Eric?” she asked Christopher as she polished off the last bite of her banana. She pointed in Holli’s general direction. “Did I miss something?”
She dropped the empty banana peel onto the hard plastic of her lunch tray, and it landed with an unpleasant splat.
“What’s up with what?” Christopher looked back at her blankly.
“That!” Jami pointed again, rolling her eyes. Guys were so clueless! “Eric is, like, all over Holli. Did I miss something here?”
“Oh, that.” Christopher nodded. “I forgot you went to bed before she got home. Anyhow, I guess Eric asked her out last night after the baseball game. He’s taking her to a party on Saturday or something like that.”
Oh. “A party, huh?” Jami shrugged. She wasn’t sure what she thought about Holli going out with Eric. It wasn’t as if she had a crush on the guy, or anything like that, but she always thought of Eric as one of her people. He was her teammate, and so it was just a little strange, that was all. “It’s probably that one at Jill’s I heard about. Gina told me her parents are in Europe again.”
“Cool.” Christopher nodded approvingly, although they both knew he wouldn’t be going.
“Don’t worry about it,” she smiled at him, knowing what he was thinking. “There’ll be others.”
For the last three months, following the strange experience with the supernatural they’d all shared, Jami and Holli had worked hard to help Christopher fit in better with the popular crowd at Mounds Park. He’d made quite a bit of progress, thanks to them, and he’d even had two dates, but there was still a lot of work left to be done within the rigid social circles of the high school. Jill Mondale was only a freshman, but she was at the very center of Mounds Park’s social elite thanks to her boyfriend, the all-state tennis star, and her parent’s frequent habit of vacating their large house in North Oaks in favor of Italy or some other exotic destination. Only the jocks and the beautiful people were allowed at her parties.
“I’m not going either, so don’t give me that h
urt puppy look. Jill thinks Dan has the hots for Holli, so she hates both of us, of course. She’s such a dimwit, I’m not even sure she realizes there’s two of us. I don’t need to deal with that.”
“But Holli’s going to go?” Christopher was puzzled. “I thought you said Jill doesn’t like her?”
“Eric asked her out, dummyhead!” Jami couldn’t help but laugh at her brother’s inability to grasp the obvious. “She’s not going to blow him off just because that little Mondale brat is jealous. I’d almost like to go, just to see Jill’s face when Holli shows up with the super soccer stud. Serves her right.”
“Serves who right?” Holli asked, as she joined them, followed closely by the soccer stud himself, who was carrying a tray in either hand. “Eric, do you know my brother Christopher?”
The tall senior grinned absently down at Christopher, passed one tray to Holli, and extended his free hand to her brother.
“I guess I do now. How ya doin, Chris,” he said, in a friendly, but superior manner as he shook Christopher’s hand. He nodded at Jami too. “What’s up, teammate?”
“Hey Eric,” Jami returned the greeting. “What’s up is his name is Christopher, not Chris.”
“Sorry, my bad. So, Christopher, then,” the tall boy smiled easily. “Mind if we join you for lunch?”
The request was more of a formality than anything. Holli was already pulling the cheese off her pizza.
“Go ahead,” Jami said. “But what’s this I hear about you hitting on my sister?” She glanced at Holli, who glared back at her.
Eric laughed, completely unfazed. He’d never struck Jami as a particularly interesting guy, but his laid-back, easygoing attitude was hard to dislike. She’d known of him for years; everybody in the local soccer world had, but he was a senior and she didn’t get to know him personally until his friend Jason had asked her to play on their indoor team. He was good-looking, but only in that boy-next-door sort of way that most of the soccer players had. It surprised her that Holli was willing to go out with him; he wasn’t really her usual type.
“We’re just going to Jill’s party,” Holli said, sounding exasperated. “Jeez, don’t have a cow. When did you turn into Mom and Dad?”
“Yeah, you can even come with, if you want,” Eric said, ignoring Holli’s alarmed glance at him. “I mean, we’ve got a game that afternoon anyhow.”
Jami stifled a grin, and mischief tempted her. Holli wouldn’t mind her going to the party, of course, but there was no way she wanted Jami to ride there with her and Eric. Her sister’s blue eyes pleaded with her to turn down the invitation, but for a moment, she pretended not to notice.
“That sounds great!” she said slyly, enjoying Holli’s obvious discomfort. She paused for a long moment, then laughed and stopped tormenting her sister. “But I’m not going to go. Angie and Rachel wanted to go to the Megamall on Saturday night, and I told them I’d go.”
She stole a glance at Christopher, and predictably, his ears perked up. He had an awful crush on Rachel Burdette, who, Jami had to admit, was nice enough to go out with her brother.
“Well, if you guys need a ride down there…” Christopher offered. “I was thinking about going down to Peter’s house, in west Bloomington. So I could take you.”
“Really?” Jami pretended to be surprised. Holli’s lips twitched, and they exchanged a glance. Boys were just too easy sometimes. Even her brother wasn’t hard to figure out, now that she had a handle on what made him tick. “Hey, the mall would be right on your way, then.”
“Wait a minute!” Eric exclaimed suddenly. He was staring at Christopher, his brows knit together in concentration. “You play soccer too, right? You played B-squad.”
“Yep,” Christopher nodded. He didn’t seem very interested in talking to Eric, but Jami knew he was only pretending to be nonchalant because he looked up to the senior star.
“He’s a forward, just like you,” Holli informed Eric.
“Only I’m not quite as good in the air,” Christopher admitted. “Or on the ground, for that matter.”
“Can you play defense?”
Not really, Jami almost said, but she managed to keep her mouth shut. She hadn’t gone to many of his games last year, but she’d seen enough of them to know that her brother was a one-dimensional player. He was fast, but that was about it. He didn’t finish well, which kept him from scoring very much, and he had the typical forward’s dislike for getting back to help the midfield. When her varsity team had scrimmaged the B-squad boys, she noticed that he only came back on corner kicks, and once, when she found him defending her, she’d dogged him with an easy nutmeg. But she didn’t want to embarrass him in front of Eric now. He’d already had enough trouble with the seniors on the team.
“Not really,” Christopher said. “I mean, I can play it, I’m just not very good at it.”
“I can understand that. I suck at defense myself,” Eric assured him. “Wisconsin was trying to recruit me as a midfielder, but there’s no way I’m going to spend half my time making runs down the sideline and the other half trying to cover the other guy making his runs into our end.”
“Admit it,” Jami teased him. “You’re just not man enough for the midfield!”
“Nope,” Eric didn’t seem to mind admitting his limitations. “And you are?”
“Rrrr!” Jami pretended to flex her arms, and both the boys laughed.
“Is that why you decided to go to Santa Clara?” Holli placed her hand on Eric’s arm, a little possessively, Jami thought. “Because you didn’t want to go to Wisconsin?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Eric replied, and then, to Jami’s surprise, he blushed a little. “The winter’s are a lot nicer than here in the Midwest. That, and I didn’t get into Duke. My grades were okay, but….”
Eric started to say something about his SAT’s, but the buzzer signifying the end of fifth hour drowned out the rest of his sentence. Jami sighed and pushed away from the table, thinking that if the school divided the day into hours, then she should have a whole hour for lunch, not just forty minutes. She glanced inquisitively at Holli, but her sister shook her head and Jami nodded, understanding immediately. This wasn’t the time to quiz her about what was going on with Eric. So she said goodbye to the others, then gathered up her books and headed towards the stairs that led to her Geometry class. Friday afternoons were always the worst; they seemed to last forever.
Oh well, she thought, at least Holli had given her something to occupy her mind now. Eric Johnson. She shook her head. Who would have guessed?
Brien Henry closed his eyes and leaned against the open door of his locker. The hated, boisterous voices of the jocks were growing louder as they came closer, heading for their first-hour classes, and he put his head down, desperately hoping that for once they would decide to pass him by. He didn’t dare to look and see how many of them there were, but he could hear at least three different voices, one of which was Kent Peterson’s.
Too late, he realized that his locker door was open, exposing the color scans of CD covers and clipped-out magazine pictures that decorated the interior. If he’d learned anything in three-and-a-half years of high school, it was to give them nothing. Anything, a picture, a word, a piece of clothing, or just a simple meeting of the eyes, might set them off. And it would end the way it always did, in pain and humiliation.
He started to quietly close the locker, but suddenly, a hand shot past his shoulder and held it open. He cursed under his breath and turned around slowly, steeling himself for the imminent confrontation.
“Ooooh, nice locker, Brain.”
As he’d feared, the hand belonged to Kent Petersen. Kent was short, but was much stronger than he looked, good-looking in a feral way, with curly brown hair and small, devil-may-care eyes. But now those eyes were hard and full of cruel anticipation.
“KMFDM, Bloodhound Gang, Rammstein” he peered past Brien and read the names on the CD covers. “Wow, losers and eurofags. What a big surprise. But I guess you put a
lot of time into this. Is that what you do? Do you want to be, like, a home decorator when you grow up?”
“Thoundth perfect for you, Brien,” Jim Shumacher, Kent’s constant partner-in-crime, affected a lisp. “A homo job for a homo faggot!”
Jim’s voice crescendoed on the last word, and he shoved Brien with both hands, slamming him hard into the locker with a loud metal bang. Brien felt a sharp stab of pain exploding in his back, just as Kent’s foot adroitly pulled his own feet out from under him. Before he’d even realized what they were doing, he found himself writhing on the ground with a painfully bruised tailbone as Kent, Jim, and the third guy, Jay, leaned over him and playfully ripped down the pictures he’d painstakingly scanned from his CD collection, printed out, trimmed, and taped up in his locker. What had been the work of hours was destroyed in less than ten seconds. When they were finished, the three boys laughed triumphantly, exchanged high-fives, and walked away without looking back at him.
There were more than thirty kids in the hallway, but only a few even bothered to look up at the sound of the commotion. Brien could feel the familiar sting of tears threatening to appear in his eyes, but he gritted his teeth, straightened his glasses, and gingerly pushed himself upright. No one offered him a hand, although a pretty blonde girl passing by bent over to pick up one of the torn pictures. She smiled sympathetically as she handed it to him, then continued on her way to class, or the cafeteria, or the library, or any of the hundred circles of this hateful place that Brien knew to be Hell.
He looked down at the ripped paper in his hand. It was a picture of a yellow sunflower on a psychedelic blue background. The name of the CD was torn away, but the band name remained. My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. He read the name twice, and stared down the hallway where the three jocks had disappeared into the crowd. Someday, he vowed to them silently, I’ll get you for this, I swear. I will get you back!
