A glittering object fell from the sky, jingling as it went. Sam reached out and caught it. His face lit up as he looked into his hand. It was a key chain in the shape of Notre Dame’s mascot, the Fighting Irish leprechaun.
Sam’s head rose slowly, and it appeared that the psycho was feeling some form of love, but somehow Sam made love look angry.
“I knew it was you, Dad!” Sam said. “I knew it.”
Sam dashed out of the quad, clutching the key chain with both hands.
Will slowly shook his head. No. It couldn’t be true. The man in the motorcycle helmet couldn’t be Sam’s father. Life couldn’t be that unfair. How did the tyrant of the school, the kid who beat up people having seizures, get to have his father back, while Will would never see David again?
Will grabbed a desk and hurled it across the room. It spun through the air and crashed into other desks, making a loud clattering noise. Will refused to accept that this was how things would turn out. He’d make sure things didn’t work out for Sam in the end. There had to be a way.
“Give us that honey,” a voice said.
Will looked to the door to see three huff-heads from the ruins walking into the room. Burnouts. David had always been paranoid about getting mugged by burnouts and it never happened. Will had come to assume it never would. Whoops.
There was a big guy, a little guy, and a girl. The three of them seemed both exhausted and wired at the same time. Giant dark circles under their eyes. The big guy wore a dead teacher’s suit, with a brown bloodstain that covered the front of the dress shirt. The suit fabric was thoroughly soiled, and ripping at the seams, like the kid had lived in it for months. The little guy wore a heavy chain of combination locks as a necklace. No shirt, no pants, just loose boxers, black leather gloves, and tennis shoes. The girl wore two large mens sweatshirts, one like a normal human being would, and the other as pants. Her ankles came out of the sweatshirt’s wrist holes and she’d made suspenders out of backpack straps to keep her sweatshirt-pants from falling down. She had dirty gray dreadlocks that hung over her face.
From out of his inside jacket pocket, the big one pulled a short section of broom handle wood, with a four-inch screw driven through the center of it, like a basic corkscrew for wine bottles. He closed his fist over the broom handle part, and the long gold screw stuck out from between his fingers.
You could generally gauge how scared you should be of someone in McKinley by what kind of weapon they brandished. Knives and baseball bats were normal, but Will didn’t want anything to do with a dude who carried a punching spike.
They came at him. Will jumped out the window.
Right after his heels hit the ground, his knees hit his chin. His teeth clapped together, he fell on his side. He got to his feet and ran, stumbling and weaving, with a sore chin and aching teeth, still entirely disoriented from his fall. But he’d gotten away with it. The honey was his, and he could already feel his stomach churning through what he’d eaten.
A loud thump behind him. Will looked back. The big one was getting up and dusting his suit off. He saw the girl land on the ground, while the little guy in his boxers jumped from the second-floor window.
“Kill me now,” Will said to himself.
He bolted into the nearest hallway and ran all the way to the front foyer, honey in hand. Will could hear their footsteps closing in on him, and he was getting out of breath. He ran through the front foyer’s steel graduation doors, to hide in the white room and hope the burnouts ran past. The white room was glaringly bright, as before, and it was empty except for shiny, plump, black trash bags piled up by the walls. He turned to face the doors and walked backward through the white room, watching the steel graduation doors, and praying that no one came through.
The three burnouts entered. The big one in the dead teacher’s suit was coughing, with veins puffing out from his neck and forehead. He glared at Will. The little one had lost one of his leather gloves and the skin of his hand was badly burned. He was laughing like a panting dog. The girl with the gray dreads in her face held a permanent marker in her hand, and she had the uncapped marker stuck up her nose. Her nostrils were stained with blue. She held her other nostril closed with her finger and took long, slow inhales of the marker fumes. He could see one of her eyes. It was green, but it was so dilated that it was mostly black.
“Last chance,” the big one said. “Honey. Now.”
His teeth were brown. He brandished his punching spike in his fist, and the gold-plated screw gleamed in the stark light. The girl began to dance with herself, as if no one else was there. The little one took off his combination lock necklace. He let the heavy chain hang at his hip, in his gloved hand.
Will looked at his honey. He hesitated. The big one walked toward him and cocked his spiked fist back.
SSHTUHH
Will felt a door slide open behind him. He ran through the open doorway without looking and collided with a barrel-chested Saint who was trying to exit. Will saw a red button on the wall by the door and he smashed his palm onto it.
“No, wait,” the Saint said from behind him.
The big burnout was dashing toward Will, but the metal door slid out of the wall and slammed shut between them. Will heard the dull thump of the burnout’s fist hitting the door and a muffled whelp of pain afterward.
Adrenaline buzzed through Will’s body. He turned to the Saint, to thank him for saving his life. The Saint vomited all down the front of Will’s shirt.
14
“WHY’D YOU CLOSE THE DOOR?”
“Why’d you throw up on me?!” Will said. He held his puke-soaked T-shirt away from his body with pinched fingers.
“Oh, shit, look at you.”
The Saint wiped the vomit off his mouth. He was a bleary-eyed guy with a moon face, sitting on his ass in the middle of the hall. “Party foul. My bad, dude. I’m so fucked up right now.”
“Are you?” Will said, with maximum sarcasm.
The hallway was dim and its shadows were deep. The burnouts thumped on the metal door from the other side.
“I gotta get you a new shirt,” the Saint said. He crawled on his hands and knees into one of the open containment cells that lined the hall. Half a minute later, he came stumbling back out of the cell on his feet, with a yellow shirt over his shoulder, a towel in one hand, and a bottle of water in the other. He tried to pour the water on the towel, but he missed and most of it splattered on the floor. Will managed to wriggle out of his soiled shirt. He took the towel and water and wiped the puke moisture off his body.
“Thanks,” Will said.
“Here, take this.” The kid held up the bright yellow shirt. It was a short-sleeve, collared, Izod golf shirt. Will pulled it on. It was brand-new. Fabric this clean and fresh and unblemished didn’t exist in McKinley, and wearing it now made Will feel like it was the first day of school.
“Lemme getchoo a drink,” the Saint slurred. “Come on.”
The Saint weaved down the hall, away from Will, clearly drunk. Will didn’t know what he was walking into, but it had to be better than the honey-hungry burnouts waiting for Will in the white room.
“Yeah, all right,” Will said.
He caught up with the Saint.
“I’m so sorry, dude. Name’s Fowler,” the guy said. They shook hands.
“Will.”
As Fowler led him through the hallway of containment cells, and through the room with the airtight doors, Will heard the sound of people laughing. Lots of people. He heard sing-alongs. Happy shouts. Will followed him into the room where the ruined school bus protruded from the wall of rubble. The giant slabs of concrete had been wrestled away from the bus and now you could clearly see the front cab of the bus extending out from the wreckage of the wall. The bus’s yellow metal was bent and battered, the windshield was smashed out, the grille was crumpled. The front left wheel had come completely off so the whole thing tilted at an odd angle. Saints sat on the bent hood of the bus, joking with each other and drinking from disposable plastic cups.
“Check this out,” Fowler said.
Fowler led Will to the bus, to the misshapen hole that used to be the door. They went through the bent hole and up the three stairs into the bus. It was lit only by two camping lanterns. The inside was busy with activity. Saints were tearing out the seats and passing them up front to be removed entirely.
“It’s being turned into Gates’s room,” Fowler said.
Fowler led Will further in, past the Saints at work, to the back of the bus, where the lantern light barely reached. Every window was blacked out. Will clicked on his phone and shined its light to see why. On the other side of the glass was gray cement. He swung the phone around to see that it was true for every window.
“Whoa,” Will said. “Did the parents do this?”
Fowler nodded. “Yep. It was like this when we finally got inside. They sealed the whole thing in cement. Guess they mean business.”
“Guess so,” Will said, marveling at it all.
“You have any cigarettes?” Fowler said.
“Cigarettes? Are you serious?”
“Figured it was worth asking. I didn’t know if you had them here or not. I’m dying for one, Dill.”
“Will.”
“I said Will, man. Pull it together.”
Fowler slapped Will in the chest and led him back out of the bus. They went to the room that was the source of most of the noise in the processing facility, the soldiers’ mess hall.
It was a party. Most of the Saints were packed into this large room, plastic cups in hand. Rows of long metal tables dominated the space and Saints lounged atop them. There was slurred speech, and eyelids at half mast all around Will. So many drunk people, telling each other how much they loved each other, and thinking things were funnier than they were. A short Saint boy ran down the length of one of the long metal tables, and his friends chased him. Their footfalls sounded like someone punching a steel drum. The kids leapt from table to table, and the Saints who sat at those tables would yell in protest but almost immediately return to their sloppy conversations and be laughing moments later.