Dead Rules (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

MARS WAS GRIM.

The hardest part was now. He and Jana stood outside her door. Mars had asked her to wait before going in. He had to tell her. It was going to be bad.

“I can't do much out there, can I?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Mars said. “You sort of have to naturalize yourself to the Planet. Concentrate on it. Focus. Practice. It will come.”

“You'll show me, won't you?”

“Knowing you, you'll be fully interacting in no time.”

Jana smiled. The thrill of falling, even the horrific bolt of the total slam, kept running through her memory and her body. Jana shuddered involuntarily from time to time as her bones remembered it on their own. Her skin danced with ghostly touches of physical memory. The fine hairs on her arms lifted at the thought of the long, empty night opening under her.

It was everything Wyatt had said it would be. And more. Because of Mars, it had been more. More purely physical than she could have imagined. Still, it wasn't Michael. It was Webster and Dreamcote, not Webster and Haynes.

“I have something I have to tell you,” Mars was saying. “It's something you've been overlooking. It's important.”

She looked at his blue eyes. His face was tired, but his eyes remained intense. Mars turned his gaze away from her.

“I didn't understand how serious you were about killing Michael, about wanting him here. I thought you would change your mind.”

“Oh, he's dead,” Jana said almost cheerfully. “Count on it.”

“That's the thing, Webster. You can't kill him.”

“Yes, I can. And I will.”

“No.” He held up his hand to stop her from talking. Mars looked into her eyes. “If you kill anybody, here or on the Planet, you're an instant vacancy. If you kill Michael, he'll be here, but you won't. If you kill him, it will just be murder, nothing more than that.”

The inside of Jana's chest felt like wasps were stinging her. She breathed fishhooks and thorns. There was nothing to say.

Jana was tired of it all.

She was tired of trying. She sat on her bed, back against the wall. When she lay down, the night would be over. Jana didn't want the night to end. She wanted it all to end.

Arva hadn't waited up. Both halves of Pauline were dead asleep. Darcee had the best of it, Jana thought. She wasn't waking up.

Jana had forgotten Michael's birthday. What else had she forgotten?

Had they made love? No, she didn't think so. Had they come close? She couldn't remember. She should be able to look at the inside of her hand and see his face there.

She was a Slider now. Jana had always been one, she supposed. Deep down, she'd always wanted Earth, the coarser touch of life. Deep down, she'd always wanted real life. Just as Christie had when she'd climbed on the back of the four-wheeler. Just as Beatrice had when she gave her bare breast to Brad. Jana had always wanted life and now that was exactly what she didn't have. Or if she did, she had only the small portion of it that hurt.

Michael hadn't saved her. He hadn't tried. He'd stood and watched her die.

That was the part that hurt. Not that he had sprayed her shoe with lubricant. That didn't matter. It was that some ghost had been there with her, doing what Michael should have done. Michael should have tried. Jana hated him for not being Romeo. She loved him with all her heart and hated him just the same. He should have killed himself over her.

“Dammit, Michael, love me!” Jana said out loud. The words flew from her heart. They were the color of blood. “Love me, love me, love me!”

Yes, he should have killed himself over her. That wouldn't have worked either. He would be a Gray. But he should have anyway. And now, if Jana killed him, she wouldn't be here at all. It was a maze with no exit. The last box that Mr. Skinner ever drew would be like that. Dead end. No way out. You just stood still inside the box and let it hurt.

It hit her like a hammer. Michael and Jana were no longer Romeo and Juliet. Jana was both. She was Romeo because Michael wouldn't be. She was Juliet . . . because she just was. She was both parts since she had died. It wasn't written that way. It would never work.

They were on the bus again.

“I can tell,” Arva croaked in her usual feather-and-beak whisper. “You're one of them.”

The emotion in her voice was either grave disapproval or ardent disgust. Jana looked at her hands in the lap of her school uniform, stared at Michael's class ring, and simply nodded in reply.

“You smell funny,” Arva continued. “You smell like a pine tree. When we come back, your room will be on the third floor. And so will all your stuff.”

The bus began to move. Jana swallowed the taste of strawberries and watched the houses out the window, wondering who lived there. And why. She wondered what people lived for. She hoped they lived for love. Love could be a good thing. Even if it hadn't been for her.

“You're like a heater now,” Arva complained. “I don't know why you're sitting here.”

“Because I still need a friend,” Jana said quietly.

Arva started to say something in reply, then stopped herself. She and Jana finished the bus ride in silence.

When they arrived, Jana let the bus empty without looking up. She didn't budge. At one point the driver was gone. She could talk to Michael now, but what good was that? She couldn't have him. It would only hurt more.

Jana could swallow a bird, if she could find one, and it wouldn't be as painful as seeing Michael again. Being sliced in half in a tornado didn't hurt at all compared to being torn to little ragged pieces by love. Jana couldn't put the pieces back together again. Her fingers, like her thoughts, were useless, awkward things.

She was an empty house with the windows broken out. Jana stayed on the bus.

“Look, we told him,” Nathan said.

“We?”
Michael said into his cell.

“Me and Sherry,” Nathan told Michael. “My mom went with us, and her dad. We told the detective how it happened. It was no big deal to him. He just wants to talk to you. He knows it was an accident and all, just a prank. You know, like hazing.”

“Hazing? Did he say that? Did he say
hazing
?”

“Yeah, I think so. You know, like no one intended anything bad to happen. It wasn't murder or anything.”

Michael cursed. Nathan was such an idiot. Hadn't he seen what happened to those other college fraternity guys when one of them died during a hazing? No, it wasn't murder. It was manslaughter by reckless disregard or something like that. They went to prison.

“Oh, and Sherry told her dad about the photos on your cell phone. Well, you know, kind of what they are. They asked the detective about them. He told them you couldn't show the pictures to anyone without her permission, that it would be a violation of her civil rights or right to privacy or something like that. Anyway, he told Sherry she could sue you in civil court and win if you showed the pictures to even one other person.”

“Listen to me,” Michael said slowly. “It's your word against mine. I'm telling them you did it. They got nothing on me. You better think this through, Nathan. Tell them you were lying because Sherry's dad was there. We'll both say that Sherry did it. Either that or I will tell them you did.”

“I don't know,” Nathan said. “I already signed the paper that had my statement on it.”

“Think it over and call me back. I mean it. I'll tell them you did it and that you and Sherry have this thing and she'll say anything you tell her to say. She's just a sophomore. They'll think she's lying. And it will all go away. They don't have anything on you or me.”

“I don't know.”

“I'm getting a lawyer, you little prick.” Michael seethed. “And I'm telling him you did it. We'll see what happens, Nathan. I'm Ivy League, you got that? You're nothing. We'll see what happens.”

As she stared at her empty hands, pieces of Jana's broken hope slowly gathered into a plan. There was one thing left to do.

She got off the bus and walked into Dead School. She walked by the Grays who monitored the halls. She walked by the closed classroom doors. She walked by the library windows.

No one was at the swimming pool this hour. She found the switches. She listened to the pumps come on. She turned on the underwater lights. Jana wanted to see where she was going. She left the overhead lights turned off. The water looked prettier that way. It looked pretty and deep.

There was nothing to think about. There was nothing left to consider.

She took off her clothes. Her body felt different than when she'd been a Riser. She was warm now, for one thing. Her body also felt a little heavier. Jana could feel the weight of her skin, her muscles, her blood. Gravity wanted a piece of her.

Considering carefully what she was about to do, Jana left Michael's class ring on her left hand instead of nesting it safely inside one of her shoes. She was taking what she had left of Michael with her. As she walked to the edge of the pool, the Virgins appeared. One after another, they showed up out of nowhere and formed a line above the pool. In front of her. Facing her.

Others appeared behind the first line of Virgins until they were four or five deep. There were dozens of them in their white translucent gowns and their white translucent skin. The Virgins reflected the light from under the water. Flashes of iridescent lavender and silver danced across their gowns and faces.

Jana pushed her toes over the edge of the pool and the Virgins came closer, as if they could stand on water. Jana could see the looks in their eyes, the pale colors of their eyes and hair. The Virgins held out one arm each and waved their hands, left to right, in front of them. They sang a harmony of one word. It was dull and flat and low.

The word was
No
.

Jana closed her eyes and jumped in.

Just under the surface of the water, she leaned back and let out all her air. Her eyes open, she could see the Virgins hovering above her.

She let herself sink. She turned her body over and pulled herself through the water with her arms, following the current at the bottom of the pool until she found the drain. As she reached for it, the suction grabbed her hand and jerked it down until Michael's ring was against the grate covering the drain. Jana could not lift a single finger from the drain. It held her hand like a jealous lover and would not let go.

A Slider came into class from across the hall and walked to Wyatt's desk at the back of the room.

“She's not there,” he said. “She got off the bus.”

“When?” Mars asked. He stood up from his seat behind Wyatt.

“Another guy saw her. He said she walked into the school a few minutes ago, but she's not in class.”

Mars pushed the Slider aside as he rushed toward the classroom door. Wyatt knocked over his desk getting out of it to follow as quickly as he could. He'd nearly caught up to Mars when Mars jerked open the library doors and shouted at Jameson to ask if Jana was there.

She wasn't.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

TIME WAS SHORT.

“Turn off the pumps!” Mars yelled to Wyatt as the two of them burst into the room.

Mars didn't have time to take off his shoes. He ran toward the pool, leaped as soon as he could, as far as he could, and was in the water like a knife.

Wyatt hit the switches, swung his bad leg around, and cursed when his weight caught it wrong. Despite the pain, he kept from falling over and kept from slowing down. His bad arm wouldn't allow him to swim well, but he could try.

Mars surfaced with Jana supine and limp in his arms. She was more buoyant than he'd realized. She'd always said so.

“Stay there!” he shouted to Wyatt just in time. Mars managed to bring her body to the edge of the pool, pausing twice to blow air into her gaping mouth. Her mouth tasted like strawberries, but he barely noticed.

Jana's body came up the ladder between the two Sliders, one pulling from above and one pushing from below. Wyatt clutched her body to him as if she were standing.

“Use your arm,” Mars was shouting as he clambered out of the pool. “Grip her diaphragm in your arm and jerk! Hard!”

Wyatt managed it. Water poured from Jana's mouth as Wyatt lost footing and fell backwards with Jana on top of him.

Mars's arms ached and he could barely pull himself from the pool. But soon he was over her on his knees, pulling her chin up in his hand, opening her mouth. Jana's eyes fluttered and she breathed out a short, hard burst of air. Mars touched her chest and felt it fill with a short gasp of air.

She breathed in on her own. Jana still existed.

•  •  •

They dressed her in the locker room.

Jana did nothing to help. She sat on the floor as if drugged from surgery.

Mars took off his clothes and wrapped himself in towels. He sat on the bench and kept one towel draped over his head. Wyatt remained standing. His clothes drip-dried where Jana had been against him, on top of him. He'd taken the cell phone from her skirt and now carried it in the back pocket of his jeans.

“It hurts,” Jana finally said without looking at either of them. Her socks and shoes and bra were in a pile next to her.

“Shut up, Webster,” Wyatt said angrily. “One of us wants to throw you back in.”

Mars trembled inside the towels. He couldn't get dry enough, warm enough. He chewed his lower lip to keep it from quivering.

“It's cold in here,” he said.

Jana sat for the rest of the day at the back of the empty bus.

Wyatt stayed with her. “I don't give a rat's ass about what you did,” he said. He sprawled across the seat in front of and across from her, his leg blocking the aisle. “You make your own choices and you can make that choice again.”

He pulled himself up with his good arm, his hand on the back of the seat. With his remaining eye, he stared at Jana's head of wet hair, her slumped shoulders. She wouldn't look at him.

“Before you do, there's one thing I want to show you. Tonight.”

Jana didn't respond.

“Tomorrow you can go right back and jump in that pool again. But tonight, you're with me. You got that?”

Wyatt dropped back down in the seat.

“Okay, we've got a deal, then,” he said.

Michael didn't go to school.

The detective called after Michael didn't show up for their appointment. Michael didn't answer the phone. When the unmarked police car rolled to a stop in front of his house, Michael hid beneath the windows. He didn't answer the door.

As soon as the car pulled away, Michael moved his car out of the driveway. He wore a baseball cap that covered his eyes from the side or whenever he ducked his head.

They were after him, he thought. They had a warrant by now. His license plate number would show up on the computers in police cruisers and county sheriff cars. Michael had to leave the county. He was careful to drive the speed limit, to signal every lane change and turn.

Mars didn't live on the third floor anymore.

Still wearing her school uniform, Jana sat on his old bed and waited for Wyatt. She had her own room at the other end of the hall, with Slider girl dormmates waiting to tell her how they'd died. Jana didn't feel like meeting anyone dead tonight.

She thought about that old movie from the 1960s,
Bonnie and Clyde
. Warren Beatty. Faye Dunaway. Jana had always hated that movie, hated the way it ended. Now she thought getting riddled with bullets together was what should have happened to her and Michael. The together part, anyway. If they had died together, Webster and Haynes would have lived forever.

Wyatt slipped through the hole in the fence behind the dorm. He talked on her cell phone while he tramped through the vacant lot to the street out front.

“Check it out,” Wyatt said. “You call that butthead right now and tell him to answer his phone when I call.”

“Yeah, sure,” Nathan stammered. “I will, I will.”

“Right now. And I know you will. I've got something you want. I've got something
he
needs.”

The drive to Lookaway Rock was a sullen one.

Wyatt's good side faced Jana. He had to keep turning his head to look out the driver's window. Once they were on the state highway, he handed Jana a stick of gum.

“It's from the Planet. Open it. Take the wrapper off without thinking about it too much. That's your first test.”

Jana slipped the gum out of its green paper sheath and unwrapped its foil covering. She put it in her mouth.

“Chew carefully,” Wyatt warned. “You'll bite your mouth if you aren't careful.”

It wasn't all that difficult. The flavor sluiced over her tongue, rich and sweet, almost choking her. She hadn't eaten since she'd died. She wasn't supposed to.

“And don't try that on campus. You'll choke. You stay out of the pool, we'll go get pizza in a week.”

The paved highway wound into the mountains, into the night. The sky was clear and the air was warm. Jana's bottom fit snug against the car seat. She was no longer fearful of falling out when she leaned against the inside of the passenger door.

“He'll be there?” Jana asked. “Are you sure?”

“He was most agreeable to the arrangement,” Wyatt said.

The aerosol canister of silicone lubricant that Wyatt had taken from Sherry's house rode in the backseat of the borrowed car.

“I told him to bring a flashlight for the trail,” Wyatt added. “He said he'd been to the rock before and knew how to get there.”

Jana's hair was a mess. She still wore her school uniform. It would have been ghoulish to show up in the clothes she'd worn the night she died, she'd decided. She remembered her death and decided not to go over it again. She would think about someone else's instead.

“How did you die, Wyatt? Will you tell me?”

Wyatt took a breath, then began. “It was a hot, sultry day,” he drawled. “The sun blazed down through the trees, trapping the little birds in their nests under wave after wave of glistening heat. . . .”

He broke out laughing. Jana managed a grin and almost swallowed her gum.

When Wyatt stopped laughing, he told her the truth.

The old man wore a paper hat.

He sat in a plastic chair next to his bed at the nursing home. His grandfather's large frail hands shook in his lap.

Wyatt held out a small sack and said, “Happy birthday, Granddad.”

The old man smiled. He wasn't wearing his teeth.

Wyatt tried not to notice how red his grandfather's eyes had become. Removing the saltwater fishing lure from the sack, Wyatt held it out so his grandfather could see it. He carefully set the large shiny lure on the dresser next to the bed.

Stories of fishing off the coast were the ones his grandfather still told with excitement in his voice. But Wyatt knew his grandfather would never cast lures into the ocean again.

“How's your car going, boy?”

“Like new,” Wyatt lied.

His grandfather had given him his car when they put him in the nursing home. It was a 1972 four-door Chevy Biscayne and Wyatt was lucky when he could get all four doors to close right. If he turned off the engine after the car had been running a long time, it wouldn't start again until the motor cooled down. No one knew why.

He told his grandfather the name of the lure and the type of big-game fish it was designed to catch.

Wyatt was going to be late for work. He'd left the car running in a parking space at the nursing home. His afternoon job three days a week, for which he received vo-tech class credits, was filling in on various job crews with a local construction company.

He parked the Biscayne at the side of the building and turned it off. He grabbed his work gloves and rushed inside the employee entrance only to find out that the crew had already left for the job site. The receptionist gave him the address.

“Hurry on out there now,” she said. “They're ready to let you go if you're late again more than a few minutes.”

Wyatt's car wouldn't start. It might be twenty minutes. He couldn't wait.

There was a motel and restaurant across the parking lot from the construction company. The motel manager's Suzuki 250 motorcycle was sitting there doing nothing.

It was a rash decision and a stupid one. A helmet would have been sensible. There wasn't one. That, and the single-cylinder Suzuki was about the least powerful motorcycle they made. It would barely keep up with old ladies and church buses in the slow lane of I-40. And that was going downhill.

Still, it was a pretty day. The sun was out. The wind blew through his hair and Wyatt remembered how much fun it was to ride a motorcycle. He pretended his work gloves were leather gauntlets. He pretended the little Suzuki was a full-throttle Harley.

In his rearview mirror, Wyatt saw the speeding car top the hill behind him. It felt to him like he'd seen the car top the hill before. The passing lane was full. The car was on his tail in seconds, still coming at a ridiculous rate of speed. Wyatt figured he was done for.

He leaned forward. It was all he had time to do. The car swerved to the right to miss him. The driver had two tires on the shoulder. The speeding car swerved to miss him, but a little too late. It clipped the rear fender of the Suzuki.

Wyatt heard the bark of brakes. Then everything upright sort of disappeared. The motorcycle fell on its side and Wyatt let go of the thing. The pavement grabbed his shoulder, his hip, his legs. The bike spun away from him.

The pavement was hot and hard. And rough. At first, he seemed to be sliding along without damage, without slowing down. Then the pavement grabbed his face. A bone in his leg snapped. His elbow banged down hard and bounced up.

Wyatt's flesh felt like it was on fire. He was engulfed in pain. Then his head bounced and everything went away.

The pavement was gone. The sun was gone. Wyatt was gone. His grandfather wasn't the only one who would never go fishing again.

“It happened fast enough,” he said. “But I wish it had been a little faster.”

Wyatt left out the part about how hot the highway was, how the searing pavement felt like it was burning him alive. It was like riding fire as he slid at nearly sixty miles an hour on the downhill surface of I-40. Torn-away pieces of his clothing smoked from the heat of friction.

Jana thought about the violence of Wyatt's death. At least she had died quickly. Snap, crackle, pop. It had to be difficult to die more slowly, to die painfully. It had to make you feel things differently once you were dead.

“What were you doing wrong when the car clipped you from behind? You were doing something bad or you wouldn't be a Slider. Were you speeding?”

“No. I could barely keep up with the traffic. If anything, I was going too slow.”

“Mars was speeding when he crashed and he was driving drunk,” Jana said. “He told me that much. That's what made him a Slider. And that's why he wanted to save a life. Another person died in his wreck, he said. He wanted to make up for it while he had the chance.”

“I guess that's it.”

“So what were you doing wrong?” she tried again. “Why are you a Slider, Wyatt?”

“Oh, that,” he said, tossing it off. “I took the motorcycle without asking. I could get it started without the key. So I did.”

He shrugged. “I was going to bring it back. With a full tank of gas.”

Jana believed him. It was just like Wyatt to steal things and bring them back.

“Was it his girlfriend?” Jana asked.

“Who?” Wyatt was confused.

“Mars,” she said. “Was it his girlfriend who died in the car with him?” She wanted to know if Mars was in love when he died.

“He was alone, Webster. Didn't he tell you that?”

“He said someone else died.” Jana watched Wyatt's face, the way his hand moved on the steering wheel, the way it tensed.

“You know who it was,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“You want me to name it to you,” Wyatt said. “The old ladies in my family, that's what they say when they're mad. My grandmother and her sisters. They're from way up in the back hills, like Christie's family. Anyway, they say they'll ‘name it to you' if you really want to hear it.”

This was the first time Wyatt had talked to Jana about his life. What you remember when you're dead isn't what you think it's going to be. It's dumb stuff. Things you don't really need. Like handkerchiefs.

“So name it to me,” Jana said.

“It was me, Webster. Mars was driving the car that came up behind me over the top side of the hill, the car that clipped the bike. He swerved to avoid it, but not quite in time to keep either one of us from dying.”