Will kept ascending, giving thanks for every additional foot of space that grew between him and Gates. Then, he saw something horrible. Lucy had only managed to run fifteen feet in the mud. As Gates dropped himself back down into the saddle seat of the motorcycle, he carelessly clipped Lucy with the handlebars as he raced past her. She spun off her feet and flew into the mud.
“Lucy!” Will shouted.
Gates wobbled and crashed. Lucy wasn’t moving.
Will crested the roofline of the school and rose up to eye level with the parents who had gathered behind Sam’s father at the east wall. He stared into the black visor of the motorcycle helmet.
Will looked down to Lucy, who still lay motionless in the mud. He wriggled all around trying to look past Sam’s body to see where Gates was. He lost his grip on Sam’s slick, rain-soaked body, and Sam’s heavy bulk began to slip through his arms. Will instinctively clamped down to hold on, and got his forearms underneath Sam’s jaw.
Sam’s weight pulled down hard against his forearms and Will heard a snap.
Sam’s body fell out of the sweatshirt. It tumbled down and thumped into the mud below. But Will held Sam’s disembodied head, still in the sweatshirt’s hood. The rest of the empty sweatshirt flapped in the wet breeze.
Will heard the adults scream. Sam’s father fell to his knees, completely silent. He gripped his helmet in agony as he stared at Will holding his son’s dead head. Will dropped it. The woman in the lilac helmet screeched and screeched. Far behind them, he could see six more adults running toward the roof ledge.
The crane began to turn and swing Will away from the quad. He looked down into the quad. Lucy was in the same spot, but writhing around on the ground, beginning to stir. He saw Gates. He reached his hands up toward Will. He might have been screaming but Will was getting so high, and so far away from the quad, that he couldn’t hear it through the rain. Someone had to come help Lucy.
Will looked up to see the tip of the long, orange crane arm, high above him, and the arrows of rain zipping down toward him from dim gray clouds. Beyond the school, he saw a wall that went around the whole McKinley campus. It was made of big rig trailers, stacked three trailers high, the work of the crane Will assumed. The wall went all around the front hill and the parking lot and circled back behind the school to include the football field, until it disappeared into the gray haze of rain.
People walked on top of the truck trailer walls, patrolling with rifles. In the front lawn Will saw a forklift, a tractor, and more heavy machinery. He saw new prefab buildings along the wall. He saw a triple chain-link fence at the only break in the trailer wall, by the entrance to the parking lot.
There was other movement within the walls. Will saw horses. Pigs. Cows grazing. There were chickens too. He saw what looked like an unfinished barn and stubby grain silo. Will squinted and strained his eyes to understand what was happening on the football field. There was something off about it. The grass was too tall, it was swaying.
It was a field of wheat.
40
GATES PALMED SAM’S HEAD AND LIFTED IT up to gaze into its eyes. He studied the slack, dead face with an unhurried curiosity. Sam’s open mouth was full of mud and rain. The defiled head of the king. There was a spray of rain bouncing off both of their heads. There was a bleeding stab wound through Gates’s cheek, to go with the one Lucy had given him in his side. The motorcycle’s engine still hacked and popped and coughed. The bike was tipped on its side, on the ground by Gates’s feet.
Lucy was on the ground twenty feet away. It felt like the quad was spinning. The motorcycle accident had disoriented her. Her clothes clung to her, drenched.
Gates chucked Sam’s head over his shoulder like a watermelon rind at a picnic. It landed in the mud behind him with a splatter. He stared up at the sky, to where Will had gone.
“He’s gone forever,” Gates said.
Gates’s gaze lowered to Lucy. She didn’t flinch, she didn’t look away, but inside she was petrified by whatever mental, lunatic dialogue he’d had with Sam’s head. What grisly thing had he resolved?
He took off his pants.
A wave of nausea melted Lucy. She swallowed and blinked. She clenched her jaw and forced herself to sit up and brace for the horror of what might happen next.
“You took him from me,” Gates said.
Lucy got to one knee. Pain spread all through her body. She made herself stand. If the Sluts had taught her anything worthwhile, it was to never let your enemy know your fear. She didn’t quiver, she didn’t whimper, she didn’t cry. She gave him nothing. All those feelings were for her alone.
He pulled off his blood-soaked T-shirt and dropped it. The wet fabric slapped down into the mud. The skin of his chest was a mess of red dripping holes, the bite marks of Slut knives.
The quad’s spinning slowed. Lucy’s vision sharpened. Whatever Gates had planned made Lucy want to vomit. But what truly shook her, what obliterated all the heat in her body, was the sight of Violent’s many-bladed necklace around his neck. It shimmered in the pale light.
“It’s your fault,” he said, standing there in pale blue boxers and mud-covered sneakers.
No one was coming to save her. The Sluts had probably disowned her after she’d forced them into a gang brawl they didn’t want and then ran away with a boy none of them liked. David was dead. Will was outside. The Loners were no more. She had no ideas, no tricks up her sleeve. He might kill her right here. This could be the way she died.
She took a step forward, and it didn’t hurt too much. Then another. She walked toward him.
The surprise on his face was genuine. So was the confusion.
“Are you serious?” he said.
She sped to a jog. Her hips hurt. Her lower back clicked.
He seemed almost delighted to see her heading for him, but the coldness in his eyes took all the heart out of his smile.
Her jog became a run. She kicked through the mud, all the way to where he stood, by the motorcycle, fists up, stance wide. She kicked for his balls, and she connected, but mostly with his inner thigh.
He slapped her with a heavy hand, and blood burst from torn scabs left by the Pretty Ones’ claws, and streamed down her cheek.
She raked at his face with her fingernails. She made a grab for Violent’s necklace next. If she had a knife she could take him. But she never got the chance. He punched her in the stomach first.
Lucy crumpled. She slipped and fell into the mud, landing hard on her back, right beside the motorcycle. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was a vacuum. Reality hit hard. Gates was ten times stronger than she was.
Gates fell on her, he dug his knees into her ribs and began to strangle her. The rain fell in her eyes. All noise went soft and muffled when her ears sunk under the mud.
She needed air. She clawed at his hands. One of her fingernails bent back and she cringed. She shook her hand out on instinct and his grip tightened. Her vision dimmed. Raindrops hurtled toward her in slow motion and landed cold on her cheeks. She looked at his frenzied face. She looked at the bleeding hole in his cheek.
Lucy reached up and dug her middle finger through that hole. She hooked her finger inside his mouth and yanked. The stab wound widened, the hole stretched, and Gates let go of her neck. He was holding his sagging cheek in horror.
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.