The Burnouts

  Her hands slid. The moans of the injured kids two floors down beckoned her to fall. She wanted to take one of her hands off the bar and reach for the edge of the floor but she knew that she couldn’t support her full weight with one hand. The bar would tear itself out of her fingers. She’d drop, accelerate to her death, and make a pretty mess on the floor. Her whimpers echoed. She slipped.

  A hand grabbed her wrist.

  She looked up.

  It was David.

  He grasped her forearm with both hands and pulled her up. They flopped back onto the floor once her knees cleared the hole. She rested on top of him, her arms planted over his shoulders. There was his face, better than she remembered. His features richer than they’d ever been.

  A dam shattered in her heart. The love she had hidden away and had tried to forget came flooding through her. Looking into his eyes she felt the familiar jolt of connection. Her attraction to him was automatic. She had no control over it, and she’d forgotten how it felt to want someone so viscerally that thought never entered the picture.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  David cracked a little smile and stared at her. He wrapped his arms around her and laid both hands on the small of her back.

  “Back at you,” he said.

  The desire was there. A tickle up her spine that told her he wanted her as much as she wanted him. It was the only way to explain how they could look at each other like this, like they were lying in a wildflower meadow with no one around for miles. The moaning two floors down and the hiss of spraying water were nothing more than ambient noise. All Lucy knew was the strength of David’s arms and the warmth of his smile. She leaned closer to kiss him, but the tip of her nose pushed into the clear plastic of his face mask.

  David pushed Lucy off him. She rolled onto her back. Jarred by his sudden change, she lifted herself up onto her elbows and looked at him. “We’ve gotta move,” David said. “They’ll be coming up the stairs.”

  He got to his feet and pulled her up. He put his hand between her shoulder blades for a gentle push forward, and she melted. David’s touch made her feel high again. She was transported back to a time when she had needed no shell to protect her, before she’d been hardened by the Sluts, back to when she’d been just a girl.

  David led Lucy out of the third floor classroom and into the hall. To their right were the building’s foyer and the main staircase down into the school. He pulled her toward the stairs, but the thunder of footsteps echoing up made him freeze.

  “Shit,” David said. He looked down the hall to their left and gritted his teeth. “We’re screwed.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said, looking back at her.

  Lucy was staring at a sign scratched into an upturned table. It warned about the hallway that stretched out to their left. The only place to go. Past this point-DEATH it said.

  “Come on,” Lucy said, and started in that direction.

  “We can’t,” David said, resisting. “It’s booby-trapped.”

  “Yeah, and I know where. Come on, they won’t come looking in this direction.”

  David looked at her like he wasn’t so sure he should be letting Lucy take the lead. He was the rescuer, after all. Not her.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  Lucy tugged David toward the rigged hallway that led to the library. She wasn’t as entirely positive as she’d let on about what traps were where, but she thought that up to the end of the first row of lockers was safe.

  “Here,” she said, and they tucked into the darkness where the locker row ended.

  Kids stampeded up from the main staircase and into the hall. Lucy closed her eyes and held her breath until the clomping of feet faded. She opened one eye and looked at David.

  “They’re gone,” he said, “but we should stay put, just in case they come back.”

  David kept his body only an inch from hers and never let her hands go. She was happy for that. His fingers stayed intertwined with hers. David’s breath whistled softly through his gas mask. She stared at him, and every minute or so, his good eye would flick from its diligent watch on the hall, back to her.

  “Why did you come back?” Lucy whispered. She only wanted to hear one thing.

  “To find you.”

  Lucy sighed and smiled. “I never believed you were dead. Not really.”

  David’s face became stern. His eye flicked back down the hall.

  “I can’t take credit for coming in here,” he said, his voice dropping to a grave octave. “That was all Will.”

  Lucy felt like she was going to faint. She rested all her weight against the locker.

  “Will came too?” she said with barely any breath.

  Lucy knew in an instant why David’s face had gone stern. She’d said she had never believed David was dead, but if that was true, she would have never fallen for Will. Suddenly, she was aware of all the awful things David must have thought about her for hooking up with his brother.

  “What did Will say—”

  “Shh,” David said, and Lucy realized she’d blurted it at full volume.

  Lucy heard feet shuffling near the entrance of the hall, but they faded off down the main stairs.

  David looked back at Lucy. She loved him. She should have felt wretched about it because she cared so much about Will. Why hadn’t Will even crossed her mind since she’d laid eyes on David? It was because, with Will, things had to be very particular. Stars had to align for her to love him, and even still, she’d always felt a flicker of doubt. With David, there were no special circumstances. If anything, the world fell away. There was no debate, her body made the choice, and her mind shut up.

  She couldn’t feel sorry about that. It was what he did to her.

  “Where’s Will now?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t know. We got split up. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Is the baby okay?”

  Lucy stared at David. Her brain went haywire, trying to make sense of—and then she knew.

  “Belinda,” she muttered.

  Her old friend had come through, and Lucy had stopped believing in a rescue party the minute Belinda was out of sight. But now they were here, looking for a pregnant girl to save, and she was about to be a disappointment.

  “I—”

  She couldn’t look David in the eye anymore. She was so ashamed. When she’d given up hope, David had been here risking his life for her. And Will …

  “What did you mean, this was all Will?” she asked.

  “Will dropped in here after … I told him it was too dangerous.”

  “You tried to stop him?”

  “Wasn’t exactly my finest moment,” he said. “But I didn’t know the baby was his. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of keeping you safe.”

  Poor Will.

  David put his hand on her shoulder as he continued, “He was right. I was wrong.”

  “I lost it,” she said. She had to say it. She couldn’t lie to him.

  “Hmm?”

  Lucy didn’t want to say the word, and when she forced herself, she started to cry.

  “The baby, David. I lost the baby.”

  Her insides twisted up. She dealt the locker an angry blow. She saw David take a little step back, away from her. Would he not love her anymore now that he’d seen what she’d become?

  She didn’t want him to see her ugliness, but she couldn’t help it. Losing her baby was a wound that would not close. It wouldn’t even scab over. It stayed wet and skinless and raw to the slightest touch. Lucy yearned for the day that it would merely be a scar.

  “I’m sorry,” David said.

  “Nothing to do about it now,” she said softly.

  “You can’t tell Will.”

  Lucy looked up.

  “But—” she said.

  “It’ll destroy him,” he said.

  19

  THE DANGER MADE WILL FASTER. HE WAS sucking in hard breaths, working twice as hard as hi
s pursuers to drag air through the mask’s filter. There were three Varsity on his tail. The closest was only two yards behind Will. He was screwed, but a little part of him loved this. It was just like old times.

  He had to lose these kids and do it now, before he started slowing down. Someone swatted the tail of his sweatshirt. Will pushed himself to max out his speed. His lungs felt like they were turning inside out. The skin on his back was tingling in anticipation of the hand that would grab his arm and drag him to the ground.

  Will slammed through a set of all-black double doors into a lightless hall. He waited for the metal slap of the doors hitting the wall again when the Varsity guys ran through. Seconds passed, but still no sound. Will turned back and slowed.

  The three jocks were standing in the doorway. They were leaning on each other and on the door frame, catching their breath. Will stopped and fell against the nearest lockers. He tried to laugh at them, but he didn’t have enough wind in him. He pointed at them and shook his finger as if to say nice try. They didn’t react, and Will was slow to realize that they weren’t looking at him. They were looking above him.

  Will craned his head up. The ceiling had been trenched. There was a five-foot gap that ran down the middle of the ceiling, the length of the hall. It opened Will’s hall up to the hall above it.

  Black legs dangled down from the ledge. Blue hair above it. Will stopped breathing altogether. He looked to the Varsity guys on his level, in the doorway. They shook their heads at each other, turned, and walked away.

  Will got ready to run again, but whump, a black figure dropped into the hall from above. Then, two more behind the first, then four, then eight, thudding onto the floor. Will turned on his heels to run the other way. A figure in black dropped down right in front of him. The ceiling lights flickered on a floor above, and the electric blue of the kid’s hair shimmered from the new pale light.

  “You look lost,” the Freak said.

  “I’m good,” Will muttered.

  Will looked beyond the Freak to the double doors where the Varsity guys had just been. If there was ever a time for David to show up out of nowhere again, it would have been now.

  The Freaks behind Will grabbed him. The one in front of him sucker punched him in the stomach. Will gasped and a spray of his spit flew up on the inside of his mask.

  “Jackal!” they started to yell.

  No. Not Bobby. He writhed in the Freaks’ grip. Anybody but him.

  Even though Will was scared for his life, that fear was drowned out by an even stronger emotion: raging annoyance. Bobby had to be the most irritating person in all of McKinley. No one could feel bad for themselves as well as Bobby. Self-pity was his religion. He reveled in his own anguish. Always pouting. Always scowling. Always trying to broadcast to the world through his cartoonish evil costumes that he was someone to be feared. And pitied. God forbid that you forgot to pity him. That really drove Bobby up the wall. Obviously he was suffering worse than you, because look at the black makeup around his eyes, look at how he slouched and brooded.

  Bobby/Jackal emerged from a darkened classroom. He’d shaved his head and painted his face black. He looked like a burned mannequin. The Freaks all seemed very impressed by Bobby’s latest look. They smiled wickedly and stared at Will as if they were expecting him to faint at the sight of their leader. Bobby wove his way through the Freaks.

  “What is that?” he said, tilting his black head. “A parent?”

  “You’re never gonna believe it,” the Freak in front of Will said.

  The whites of Bobby’s eyes encircled his corneas when he recognized Will.

  Bobby smiled, and it looked like his mouth was full of blood. As he approached, Will could see it wasn’t blood. Bobby had slathered his teeth with glossy red nail polish.

  He’d also gotten kind of fat. Will remembered laughing with Gates at Bobby’s list of desirables that he’d delivered to the Saints, to request from the parents. Almost everything he’d asked for had peanut butter in it—bulk packs of Reese’s cups, jumbo boxes of peanut butter Puffins, jars of all-in-one PB&J. Black might have been slimming, but it didn’t do much for Bobby’s new double chin. It looked like he’d been doing his suffering on the couch with corn dogs.

  “What the fuck? Didn’t you get out?” Bobby said. “What kind of dumb prick would come walking back into McKinley?”

  Bobby turned to the rest of his gang and started laughing. It was a screeching giggle, and he held his belly as he did it. The rest of the hallway joined in, but at least the others sounded normal. Bobby sounded like a dying eagle.

  Bobby grabbed the cylinders on Will’s mask and shook his whole head with them.

  “What is this?” Bobby said. “This is supposed to keep you safe?”

  Will jerked his head away, but other Freaks grabbed his head and cranked it back until he faced Bobby.

  “I mean, anyone who wanted to could pull this thing right off you.” Bobby stared at him in disbelief. “I knew you were a stupid moron, but this is a whole new level.”

  Bobby rapped his knuckles on Will’s head.

  “Anything in there?” he said.

  Will wished he could spit on him.

  “You are completely powerless,” Bobby said. He licked his red teeth.

  “You are completely fat,” Will said.

  Bobby’s smile shrunk to a pinched frown, like a bomb exploding in reverse.

  “Bring him home,” Bobby said with a sneer, “I’ve always wanted a pet.”

  “Always wanted a cookie,” Will said.

  Bobby worked a finger under one of the rubber straps that secured Will’s mask to his head. He slid his finger closer to the mask, coming dangerously close to lifting up the rubber by Will’s temple. Bobby gently blew on Will’s temple.

  “Got any more jokes?”

  Will shook his head. He wanted so badly to say something mean, but he had to get a hold of himself. This was real. He could die. Bobby was practically blowing death into his face.

  He shut up, and the Freaks took him home. They kept a firm grip on his arms and never gave him a moment to make a break for it. They carried him through the halls, hands wedged under his armpits, the toes of his boots barely scraping the floor.

  “What are the chances you’d end up my prisoner after you graduated?” Bobby said from behind him, as the Freaks pushed him down the hall. “Guess good things really do happen in McKinley.”

  This was bad. Very bad. Will and Bobby had always hated each other, but in the past Will had almost always gotten the better of Bobby. He’d stolen from Bobby, injured him in food drops, mocked him publicly, and had spread multiple rumors about him that had driven Bobby crazy. That Bobby had constant diarrhea and had to wear a cloth diaper under his pants. That he played with dolls. That he got an erection whenever he cried. Bobby had a lot to want payback for.

  The Freaks shoved Will through an archway that had been smashed through a hall wall. Will had never ventured this deep into the Freak base. He’d stolen a TV from them, but it had been from one of the rooms on the outskirts of their territory. There were so many holes in the walls, and walls that had been completely destroyed, that Will was afraid the ceiling would cave in. The place was like a beehive. The Freaks’ destructive power was something to marvel at.

  The Freaks had laid claim to most of the A/V equipment early in the quarantine and Will was finally getting to see what they did with it. He was led through a room that glowed with blue light. Bedsheets hung from the ceiling all around the room at different angles to each other, with blue images projected on them by old overhead projectors and new digital ones. Fans on the floor made the sheets dance. Will saw a fluttering blue video of Bobby sacrificing a naked Freak girl with a ceremonial knife like it was a pagan ritual—you could tell the knife was painted cardboard. Wobbling blue images were everywhere. A microscopic image of blood cells, an old anatomical etching of a skinless man whose muscles were unraveling from his bones, a close-up photo of a bare breast blotched
and speckled with scabs.

  In the next room, they’d rubbed soot all over the walls and ceiling, nearly blacking them out, and had carved images of screaming skulls and smiling demons into the walls. The carvings revealed the white of the drywall’s core, turning the room into a black-and-white nightmare factory. A blue-haired girl was piercing her boyfriend’s nipple with a sharpened bobby pin. Some Freaks were applying ghoulish makeup to their faces. Others were competing with each other over who could slump the most tragically in their chair. An atonal Freak band banged on desks in the corner. The singer’s voice sounded like a garbage disposal full of phlegm, and they all wore black T-shirts with the words Old Pervert written in dripped bleach.

  They walked him into a lecture hall. There was a twelve-foot pentagram burned into the floor. The walls were lined with televisions, and they all played the same footage of a crackling fireplace, surrounding everyone in the hall with a rectangle of fire. It bathed the room and all the Freaks in a warm, sweet-potato-colored light. A projection screen on the far wall showed camcorder footage of an old food drop in which the Freaks were dominating. Based on the angle of the video, the kid that had shot it must have been watching from a third-floor classroom. He did play-by-play commentary like it was a baseball game, and he cheered when Freaks snatched more than the other gangs or won fights on the battlefield. Freaks sat in chairs and watched the video and chatted with each other.

  Bobby and his crew led Will through the room, to a sectioned-off area near the screen. It was separated from the rest of the audience by chest-high walls made of classroom doors that had been nailed together. Inside was a cardboard couch with stuffed T-shirt pillows. Bobby pointed to a spot on the floor.

  “Put him there,” Bobby said. “On his back.”

  Will tried to stop them, but he was no match for their combined strength. They put knees on his shoulders and hands to pin him to the floor. Hands held his ankles.

  Bobby kicked something around the area like he was fooling with a soccer ball. It skittered across the floor. A human skull. Will reminded himself that Bobby used to wear part of a bio lab plastic skeleton, and that it was probably from one of those. But it didn’t have the creamy yellowy-white color of a plastic skeleton. And it didn’t look plastic. It looked like bone. Teeth were missing from it. He could see some hair. Where did Bobby get a human skull? Whose skull was it?