Quaranteen: The Loners

  David was dying, and it was his friends who were killing him.

  David walked away from the hazy hospital room. They hooked a right into a wide hallway. The ceiling lights were burned out for the first few yards. After that, the hallway was barely lit for a hundred feet, where it ended in a T-junction. The last bit of power from the generator barely coursed through the building’s wiring. David led the Loners through the darkened section and into the pulsing light.

  He heard the footsteps of a crowd. Faraway chatter. Someone was coming. David stopped and motioned for his gang to halt. At the far junction, he saw Freaks, three of them, walking through the intersecting hallway. They passed through

  the junction without seeing the Loners. He waved the Loners back and reversed his steps as quietly as he could. More Freaks crossed ahead. If the Loners could back up into the dark section of the hallway, they could remain undetected.

  David glanced at his gang behind him.

  They were all Will. A wide hallway of convulsing Wills stood gagging behind him, their eyes rolling white, a froth of saliva shaking out of their mouths.

  David screamed.

  “LONERRRRRS!” yelled a Freak.

  A horde of Freaks flooded into the hallway and charged.

  They wore black, and their faces and arms were completely blacked out with some sort of paint. The chemical blue of their hair looked even more unnatural against their charcoal faces. Some wore swimming goggles. They carried scimitar-shaped shards of shattered blackboard with handles made of desk legs. The Loners sank into fighting stances. David saw an avalanche of blue fall toward him. The Loners ran forward; their white heads penetrated the blue mass. Violence exploded through the hall. David pulled a pipe from his belt.

  He prayed that whatever he swung it at was real. A blue-hair sliced his blackboard scimitar down at him. David blocked it with the pipe. The blackboard shattered, and the impact rattled the bones in David’s hand. The pain in his wrist was no hallucination. David clung to that pain. He swung his pipe into the kid’s hip. The kid fell.

  David hacked away at whoever came near. He took down a Freak who swung a rope with a brick tied into its end. A blue-bearded Freak swung a two-by-four that had nails driven through it, into the back of a Loner next to David.

  David saw a human skeleton weaving through the riot. It shoved people out of its way, throwing its bones into them.

  It had no jaw. There was a hammer clutched in its fleshless fingers. The skeleton turned to him. Dead, empty eye sockets locked onto David. It ran at him.

  A chair smacked into the back of David’s knees. He thudded down to the ground on his stomach. He whipped around onto his back. Ritchie was dragging a chair-wielding Freak away from David. David got up on one knee. The skeleton appeared above him, hammer raised high over its cracked skull. A wet, pink tongue extended out from the shadows under its upper teeth. It screeched.

  David gripped his pipe with both hands and put everything into one swing, chopping his pipe up into its dead head. The front of the skeleton’s skull, its bony face, broke off and flew over the heads of the feuding gangs. The skeleton thumped down on the floor next to David. It was Bobby. He was unconscious. It took David three blinks for him to see it clearly.

  Bobby wore the front half of a plastic rib cage from a biology classroom skeleton over his black shirt. The skeleton’s bony face had been his mask. David stood.

  The battle still thrashed around him. Blue and white hair

  was now stained with red. The Freaks had pushed the Loners back,into the darkened section of the hall again. Will and Ritchie struggled against four Freaks. Loners were out-numbered by Freaks, twofold. They were giving everything they had in David’s name, but they weren’t going to last much longer.

  “You want me, come and get me!” David hollered to the crowd.

  The Freaks all looked at David. Time to run. He bolted away from the Freaks, around a corner and into a narrow hallway.

  He slammed hard against a row of lockers. His depth percep-tion was jacked. He heard a wailing mob bottleneck through the door behind him.

  The hallway was a cluttered dumping ground. The Skaters hadn’t picked up garbage for weeks. He tripped over a stack of torn-up carpet and fell into a pile of trash. He fumbled to get to his feet.

  Gotta slow down.

  But he couldn’t. He glanced behind. The Freaks were bearing down on him fast. He collided with a tangle of desks and leapt over a plump garbage bag to keep his footing. He careened off one object and then another, always close to falling over.

  The Freaks shouted after him and threw things out of their way. The hallway narrowed around David as he ran. The walls squeezed in on him.

  It wasn’t real.

  All the doors were swinging open and slamming shut of their own accord. For a moment, he saw a bloodred elk running by his side. The noise behind him sounded like a stampede of screaming elephants. The noise swelled until David thought it was coming from inside his head instead of behind him.

  David tripped on a gallon milk jug full of piss, and ate it into a pile of pallets. Pain. He looked back. The churning mass of Freaks was only twenty feet behind him.

  David bolted up and hooked a left. There it was: the entrance of the cafeteria. It gleamed for him like heaven’s gate. He passed two Sluts taking out their garbage. Two more stood guard ahead of him by the doors.

  “Hey!” one yelled.

  He couldn’t explain. The guards reached out to try to stop him, but he ran through them, knocking the girls aside, and tumbled to a stop inside the cafeteria, in front of a crowd of Sluts. They rose to their feet and shouted at him.

  “Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” David shouted.

  Violent cut through the crowd to meet David, her face twisted in anger.

  “You can’t just run past my guards like that!”

  “The Freaks!” David yelled, trying to catch his breath.

  “They’re coming!”

  The blue-haired army rounded the corner and charged into the cafeteria. The Sluts ran at the Freaks with whatever

  they could grab, and the two gangs ripped into each other.

  The cafeteria was pure carnage. David punched at whatever Freak came at him and kept moving. The Sluts fought to get the invaders out. There were too many bodies to discern who was who anymore. He planted his feet. The people in front of him looked like two-dimensional cutouts. He swung his pipe and bashed it against anything solid.

  Another entrance to the cafeteria burst open. A hundred Freaks rushed through. The doors of a third cafeteria entrance toppled over. Throngs of Freaks flooded in. The cafeteria filled with blue-haired psychos, hundreds and hundreds of them, charging toward David. He swung his pipe wildly, smashing it into one Freak after another. For every Freak he knocked to the ground, five more would attack.

  They were on all sides, they pulled the pipe from his hands.

  He punched, he elbowed, he kicked. They clawed into him, tearing at his skin, biting his back.

  “David!” someone yelled from behind him.

  David spun around. Will stood in front of him. The Freaks were gone. Disappeared. In the blink of an eye, there wasn’t one head of blue hair in the whole cafeteria. There were Loners and angry Sluts standing all around him. They stared at him like he was a mad homeless man shouting at a bush. He lowered his fists. He felt sick, weak, scared.

  “What happened?” David asked Will in a hushed tone.

  “We forced the Freaks out. Us and the Sluts.”

  “And what did I do?”

  Will lowered his voice.

  “You kept fighting. After they were gone, you fought us.” David looked past the angry people surrounding him. The cafeteria was in shambles. Injured Loners and Sluts rocked and writhed on the ground like maggots in a trash bag. Mort clutched his blood-soaked stomach. He saw a Slut lying on a dining table with a six-inch shard of blackboard protruding from her chest. Violent was sharpening her knives and glar-ing at David, furio
us.

  “Not part of the deal, David!” she shouted. “Not part of the deal!”

  Will stared up at David as though he was expecting an order. David couldn’t be trusted to give them anymore.

  David pulled Will in close.

  “Will. I need your help.”

  34

  Will was in front, leading the climb up the stairs to the library. David clung tightly to his arm. His one eye trembled. Violent and twenty-five heavily armed Sluts were behind them, followed by the Loners, who carried any wounded who couldn’t walk. Ritchie and two other Loners carried the Slut with the chest wound. She moaned and sputtered and coughed. Ten more Sluts brought up the rear. They all climbed as fast as their battered bodies could carry them.

  “This sucks,” Ritchie said.

  Will agreed, but he didn’t know what else to do. The old plan was to cross the Freaks’ territory to get to the ruins. They couldn’t go back into Freak territory without another battle.

  The only other way was to go to the third floor and cross over the top of the Freaks’ territory, through the library. David

  sold Violent on the chance of escape, so she agreed to escort them. She left half of her girls to guard the cafeteria and brought the other half with her to see if this exit was for real.

  Will prayed the exit was real. If it turned out not to be, he didn’t think he would be able to hold David’s hand in those last moments, or tell him everything would be all right, when he knew it was a lie.

  “Pick up the pace, David,” Violent said behind them.

  “Come on,” Will whispered to David.

  Violent claimed she had an arrangement with the Nerds and could get them through. Back at the cafeteria, David assured Will that he knew, without a doubt, that Violent was telling the truth and could deliver on what she said. Once in the library, they would drop off their wounded and continue through to the other side, then down the stairs and into the ruins.

  “So, you saw this way out, Will?” Violent said, walking up beside him.

  “I saw a dog that found a way in.”

  “So, there was . . . what, like, a hole?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you go in the hole?”

  “No.”

  Violent grumbled.

  If Will couldn’t find the exit, or if that dog had somehow been in here with them since the quarantine, he knew they’d all turn on him.

  David spasmed as he took the next step and fell back against the wall.

  “I’m gonna die!” David said.

  He was shivering. His bulging eye looked like a hard-boiled egg.

  “No, you’re not,” Will insisted. He turned to everyone behind them. “He’s not. He’s fine.”

  Will reached out for David, but David swatted his hand away.

  “They’re crushing me,” he said.

  “David, just come on. It’s okay.”

  “David, there’s nobody there,” Lucy said softly.

  She reached out and took David gently by the hand. David looked to Will, his eye wide and helpless.

  “Am I holding Lucy’s hand?”

  Lucy looked on the verge of tears.

  Will couldn’t believe David was this far gone already. It was a strange sensation, taking care of David. He felt like he’d been walking a tightrope and someone just took away the safety net.

  The Slut with the chest wound hacked out a wet cough. It sounded bad.

  “Let’s go! What are we waiting for?” Violent said.

  Will pulled his brother forward while Lucy whispered quiet words of encouragement to coax David up the last leg of the climb. Their exchange was intimate, tender, and hard to watch.

  Will threw open the door to the third floor. It was a short

  hallway, a straight shot to the fire exit door that would let them in the library. He was glad they didn’t have to mess with the library’s front entrance. It was notoriously rigged with a series of deadly traps that had mangled raiders in the past.

  As far as Will knew, this back hall was safe.

  Violent brushed passed them and walked to the door. She pounded on it. A metal plate slid aside, and the narrow rect-angular window revealed a fat-necked kid with brilliant white teeth. He silently scanned the faces in the hall.

  “Get Kemper! We’ve got injured,” she shouted through the door.

  Moments later the door opened, and Kemper stepped into the hall. He and Violent engaged in a hushed dialogue. Occasionally, she would gesture back in their direction. Kemper nodded, and Violent walked back to Will, David, and Lucy.

  “So, what’s the deal? Who’s calling the shots now?” she asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

  David was staring at the ceiling.

  Will stepped forward and awkwardly cleared his throat.

  “Uh, me. What’s going on?” Will said.

  “They’ll let you guys through. But you gotta check your weapons. They’ll give them back once you get to the other side. That’s the deal,” Violent said.

  “Uh . . . gimme a minute.” Will strolled away from Violent.

  It sounded like a bad idea, but it was their only option.

  Will looked to his gang. Ritchie walked among the gathered

  Loners, checking on everyone, pepping them up with words of assurance. He strutted around like a mini David. God damn it, he hated Ritchie. Always trying to replace him. Obnoxious little gnome.

  “Ritchie,” Will said, “can I talk to you for a second?” Ritchie sneered in response, then swaggered over to Will.

  “What?” Ritchie said.

  “We need to hand over our weapons to pass through,” Will said.

  “Get out of my face with that,” Ritchie said.

  “This is the only way,” Will said.

  “Yeah, I get that, moron. That doesn’t mean we’re not walking into an ambush! Unarmed! Are you out of your mind?”

  “David swore to me that we can trust Violent’s relationship with the Nerds.”

  “Was that before or after he was fighting people that weren’t there?”

  “After. But I believe him. Look, Ritchie, we don’t have time to argue. David’s going to die. Can’t you do it for David? He needs your help.”

  Ritchie wiped his scarred face with his hands, frustrated.

  “This is such bullshit.”

  Will couldn’t lose him.

  “Are you gonna make me say this?” Will said. “The gang doesn’t like me. They won’t listen to me. But they trust you. . . .” Ritchie was shaking his head. There was one last thing Will

  was hoping he didn’t have to say.

  “And I’m sorry I pushed you down the stairs.” Ritchie looked back at the gathered gang. He cracked his knuckles.

  “Shit. I guess we have to try.”

  “Thanks,” Will said.

  Ritchie walked back toward the other Loners. He stopped halfway and turned back to Will.

  “I still think you’re a prick,” Ritchie said. He went to break the news to the gang.

  Will walked back over to Violent.

  “Deal,” Will said.

  Violent nodded to Kemper. There was no going back now.

  Five minutes later, Will led the Loners into the library.

  “Wipe your feet,” Kemper said as he slid the barricade back in place behind Will, David, and Lucy.

  “Fussy, fussy,” Violent said to Kemper with a smile. He blushed.

  Will looked down at a maroon rug. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked him to wipe his feet, but he could hardly object. The library was a marvel. The carpet was clean.

  Every book was in its place. It even smelled like a new building.

  Kemper clapped his hand on Will’s back with a friendly smile. “Welcome. Have you ever come to the library before?

  Even before the quarantine?”

  Will shook his head.

  “Well, everything is almost exactly like it was. Pretty cool, right? Nonfiction is over here. Fiction is on the far side. Over
there are the computer stations, but obviously, all we have is a local network. Not that we can use it when the power is—”

  “We need to get to the ruins,” Will said flatly. Will didn’t know Kemper that well, but a couple seconds told him the guy was a chatterbox.

  “Oh . . . right. I’ll take you to the east fire door. From there, you can take the stairs to the science department. Then, which way are you headed? Because—”

  “We got it from there, okay? Let’s go,” Will said.

  Kemper clamped his lips, like he was holding his breath. It looked like it hurt him to shut up. He forced a nod and led the Loners through a maze of bookshelves. Will was in awe of the Nerds’ little utopia. They’d converted tall bookshelves into bunk beds, four beds high. They passed through the common area where Nerd medics were tending to wounded Sluts. Mort and the other injured Loners joined them. The rest of the Nerds seemed unbothered by the interruption. The majority were reading books. Others were engaged in rounds of role-playing games. Will and Lucy shared a look of wonder.

  “This place is amazing,” she said.

  “Amazing,” he replied.

  Kemper led them through the stacks on the east side of the

  library, and they reached the far wall. David grabbed Will and stopped.

  “Whoa . . .”

  Will turned to see David staring through the window of a study room. He pawed at the glass with wide eyes. The central desk was cluttered with the innards of electronics and looping wires. It looked like some sort of two-way radio with a microphone. Thick cables ran from the main box up the wall and into the ceiling. Kemper quacked a laugh.

  “Cool, right? My masterpiece. It’s a ham radio,” Kemper said with a nod. “We’re trying to make contact with the outside.”

  “It’s real?” David leaned in and asked Will.

  “Totals,” Kemper said proudly. “Now all I have to do is make it work. I had a really cool idea the other day. I’d like to get a phone network going between the gangs. It would be great for negotiations. It’d be so much safer around here. Shouldn’t be too hard. The phone lines are already there. The hardest part really would just be everybody’s cooperation.” Kemper continued prattling on as he led them down a long corridor of eight-foot-tall bookshelves. Will was in front with David and Lucy and Violent. Seventy Loners followed behind them. The corridor of shelves ended at a barricaded red fire door, identical to the one that got them into the library. A line of Nerds stood in front of it, each holding one of the Loners’