Dead Rules (21 page)

Wyatt pulled the borrowed car into the small turnout where only last night the pickup truck had been. He turned off the lights and took his foot off the brake pedal.

He handed Jana her cell phone. “You can call him here. You won't be able to farther up. The mountain blocks the signal.”

Jana didn't open her phone.

“Go ahead, Webster. I know you want to talk to him. Ask him if he's on time.”

“I can't,” she said. “I ran the battery out last night.”

“I put a new one in at the dorm. It's working fine.”

Although she was a Slider now, Jana's Earth skills were slim. She flipped her phone open, and pleased to see that her fingers worked the buttons, she punched in Michael's number. His face showed up. And he answered this time.

“Michael, it's me.”

He could hear her voice. Michael said hello in reply. He sounded nervous and confused, but he talked to her.

Jana was excited. Hearing Michael speak made her heart race. But something had changed. His voice sounded small. Michael sounded littler now, not quite as tall. He told her he was at the rock. She said she would be there soon.

“Will he be able to see me?” she asked Wyatt after she closed her phone.

“I doubt it,” he said. “You're too new to this, Webster. I'll help you when it's time. He'll be able to hear you, though.”

Jana smiled for the first time in what seemed like forever. She smacked her gum on purpose.

She watched Lookaway Rock rise above them as they drove into the gorge. The solid granite wall reached to the sky. It was hard to believe that she had jumped off that rock, had fallen that far. That fast. That hard. She smiled at the thought of it. She smiled at herself. High above the top of the rock, there was a star tied to Jana by a tiny string of light. She wanted to climb to that star.

And jump.

Wyatt parked the car in the clearing at the top of the switchbacks. Michael's car was there. She and Wyatt carried flashlights to the head of the trail. Entering the darkness under trees at night, Jana tripped twice. She dropped her flashlight. It hit a flat rock and went out.

Wyatt came back for her.

Jana banged the flashlight against her hand. It wouldn't come on again.

“It's broken,” she said.

“Leave it,” Wyatt told her. “Grab my belt. We're almost there.”

His awkward gait jerked her arm to the left with every step, but she held on. Jana walked through what seemed like a hundred separate strings of spiderwebs she hadn't felt the night before.

Leaves brushed her skin. She could feel and smell everything the Planet had to offer. The air was heavy with the scent of balsam and hemlock. Little dabs of perfume, the fragrance of moon vine and wild briar rose, hid in the darkness alongside the trail.

Michael stood at the juniper-moss edge of Lookaway Rock, the treacherous slope of mountain granite drifting off behind him. Michael was a tall silhouette in the darkness when Jana first saw him. The stars sparkled over his shoulders and to either side of him.

She stepped from the trail behind Wyatt, who turned his flashlight on Michael. The updraft of air that swam over the rock, from the bottom of the gorge to the top, bathed Jana like gentle hands lightly combing her hair.

“Michael,” she said. He looked left, but not at Jana. He couldn't see her.

“Turn her voice off,” Michael said to Wyatt. “That game is over. I'm not putting up with it.”

Wyatt leaned close to Jana and whispered for her not to talk.

The circle of light from Michael's flashlight found Wyatt's face in the darkness.

“Oh!”
Michael said. He saw a monster. “Who are you?”

Wyatt closed his one eye slowly and opened it. “Blind date,” he said. “I hope you're not disappointed. I like walking on the beach and summer picnics.”

Jana laughed. Sometimes you had to love Wyatt.

Michael looked to the left again, moving the beam of his flashlight. He saw nothing where Jana stood. He moved the flashlight back to Wyatt, and when he did, the half-face monster was standing closer. Wyatt's full Earth body was there looming in front of Michael like a threat.

“You're the guy from Sherry's house,” Michael said. “The police are looking for you.”

“That's not the way I hear it,” Wyatt growled. Nathan had told him that Michael was on the run, looking for a way out of the mess he was in.

“Look, I don't care what you think. I didn't kill that stupid bitch. She killed herself. Now, where's the can of locksmith spray?”

Jana was stunned by what Michael had called her. His words repeated themselves over and over in her head.

Her heart was ice.

Stupid bitch.

Then it shattered.

“The one with your fingerprints on it?” Wyatt said. “It's right here.” He cradled the flashlight in the crook of his bad arm and held up the aerosol can so Michael could see it.

As far as Wyatt was concerned, the date was over. Michael had said enough. Jana had heard him. It was up to her now to take in the truth and accept it or to stay trapped in her love for Michael for eternity.

“Give it here,” Michael said. “Give it to me now.”

Instead of setting down the canister, Wyatt sprayed the air in front of him with a fine mist of dark gray silicone particles. They sparkled in the light from Michael's flashlight like dust mites in bright sun.

“Why don't you hand me one of your shoes for a second?” Wyatt suggested. “Then put it back on and take a walk on that rock behind you. You know, as a joke. A prank. It would be kind of fun.”

“Set the can down and leave,” Michael said. “I have a gun.”

“Sure you do,” Wyatt said. He stepped forward, leaning into it and straightening up quickly. His flashlight beam brightened a circle of empty sky to the side of Michael.

Wyatt held the can inches away from Michael now. He sprayed it again.

Michael fired from the hip, accidentally. Nervous and scared, he'd only meant to lift the gun, to show it to Wyatt. To keep the monster from coming closer. Jana saw the bright flash of light before she heard the loud report.

Wyatt wobbled. His stance faltered in his own teetering sideways fashion. He lurched somewhat forward, like he was going to walk but couldn't. He folded to the ground on one bent knee. His flashlight fell and went out. Wyatt rolled on his side then his back, his good hand gripping his stomach where the bullet had entered. His head rested on granite rock. The aerosol can was under his leg.

Jana screamed. Michael moved his flashlight beam in frantic jerking swings, looking for the canister of silicone spray. Blood covered Wyatt's hand. It soaked his shirt.

Conditioning from life on the Planet told Jana one thing and one thing only.

“He's dead!” she screamed.

Jana rushed to Wyatt without a thought but to comfort him, to help him, to touch him before he was gone for good.

Michael stepped back. Jana fully naturalized as she focused her entire physical and emotional existence into urgently tending to Wyatt. She bent over the fallen monster and Michael saw her as plain as day. Jana looked up at him, her face contorted by rage and pain and fear.

“You killed him!” she yelled at Michael. She tore the words from her chest. “You bastard!” A piece of gum fell from her mouth. It looked to Michael like her teeth were falling out.

Michael stepped away from her. He moved his flashlight over Wyatt's lifeless form on the ground. He saw the blood from the bullet wound. He hadn't meant to fire the gun. It had fired on its own. He searched Wyatt's body for hope. There was none.

He dropped the gun. It clattered to the surface of Lookaway Rock, bounced, then slipped away along the slope of granite on which Michael precariously stood. The gun soon disappeared.

Wyatt slowly lifted his good arm, stretching it out above him until his blood-soaked hand was straight up in the air. His fingers spread as if to grab life itself. As Wyatt's arm moved, Michael jerked back another step.

“Damn, that hurt,” Wyatt said.

Staggering backwards from the shock of seeing Jana, of seeing the dead guy lift his arm, Michael lost his footing on the deceptive slope of smooth granite under his feet. His flashlight shone straight down, then the beam of yellow light swung into the darkness behind him as he bent forward from the waist to gain his footing. Jana heard a distant gunshot from the bottom of the gorge.

Michael cartwheeled his arms forward then back. He was falling, being pulled toward the darkness against his will. He danced on toe and heel, his shoes slipping on the granite floor.

He lifted one leg and lost his balance entirely. The only way to keep from falling on his face was to step backwards again. It was one step too far. And then it was too late. He held the flashlight high over his head, as Jana had held the bowling ball over hers. Michael looked like the Statue of Liberty when he went over the edge. He let go of the light.

He started to scream, then stopped. Michael fell quietly into darkness.

“I'm not kidding,” Wyatt said. “That really hurt.”

Chapter Thirty

“WHAT'S THAT?”

“It's a newspaper, Webster. Surely you've heard of them.”

“I meant what are you reading?”

“A little something about your boyfriend.” Wyatt handed Jana the local newspaper. He'd had to stay up all night to sneak off campus early to get it.

She sat next to Wyatt at the back. Other than the Virgin in the front seat, they were first on the bus. She had folded the top of her high-waisted uniform skirt down inside itself and tied the tails of her school blouse into a knot in front. She smelled a little less of Ivory soap this morning.

Michael's fall had made the front page. The paper headlined Lookaway Rock as a new Lovers' Leap.

The article reported that Michael Haynes of Asheville, distraught over the recent death of his girlfriend, had launched himself from the granite precipice late at night. His body had been found near a gun that had been fired twice.

“Suicides are like that sometimes,” a county detective was quoted. “They have more than one way to kill themselves in mind and decide which at the last moment.”

In county documents filed by the coroner, Haynes's cause of death was ruled as coronary asphyxiation.

“The boy was dead before he hit the rocks,” the coroner stated in a telephone interview with the newspaper reporter. “When you fall that far, it is possible to stop breathing. In this case, the trauma of beginning the fall stopped the boy's heart. He was dead of a heart attack in midair. It was fear, maybe. Or shock.”

Nathan Mills, of Asheville, a close friend of the deceased, expressed the more popular theory circulating among students at Central High School in Asheville, where Haynes was a senior preparing for early college coursework this summer.

“Broken heart is more like it,” Mills said. “His girlfriend, Jana Webster, died in a freak bowling accident and he couldn't handle it. They're burying him next to her at the cemetery. Everyone in school is calling him Romeo Haynes now.”

There was a new student on the bus.

“How come he gets to sit up there?” Jana stared at the back of Michael's head, where he sat near the front in a seat next to Henry Sixkiller.

“Maybe it was self-defense,” Wyatt suggested. He draped his crooked arm over Jana's shoulder and leaned back. “Or maybe he didn't mean to shoot me.”

“Why does he get to look so good? He should be all broken up.”

“He died before he hit the bottom, Webster. Remind me to do that the next time I'm on a motorcycle.”

“It's not fair,” she complained.

“Now you're catching on,” Wyatt said. “Brains
and
beauty, what's to become of you?”

“I don't have beauty, Wyatt. I wished you'd quit saying that.”

“Well, see, there's something for you to learn yet. You're the most beautiful girl in Dead School, Webster. And you were the prettiest girl in your real school too. It's hard to believe you never noticed.”

Fart, fudge, and popcorn. Wyatt had made her blush.

Mars turned around from his aisle seat right behind Arva's and looked at Jana once. He started to smile. She flipped him off. He looked silly with his hair combed and his school clothes ironed. Mars smiled anyway before turning to look front. Jana tasted strawberries every time she looked at him.

“You got that boy wrapped around your little finger,” Wyatt said.

“Which boy?” Jana grinned when she said it.

“All of them. All of them except one.”

“You mean you?”

“That I do, Webster. That I do.”

Beatrice and Christie sat together on the bus. Jana looked at Christie's hair and wondered if she could get her own hair to look like that. Beatrice got out of her seat, as if Jana's looking at her had been a cue. She walked to the back of the bus to talk to Wyatt. She wasn't supposed to.

She stood right next to Jana and grinned like a watermelon cut in half. Beatrice wore less makeup than usual. She lightly touched the top of her head where her hair was combed over the sawn-off inch of yard dart tip still in her head. Only the portion that killed her had to stay with her after death.

“I just wanted to thank you,” Beatrice said to Wyatt.

Sliders weren't allowed to talk to Risers on the bus. Wyatt nodded and winked his only eye.

“And thank the others too,” she added before walking back to her seat.

“Talk about wrapped,” Jana said to Wyatt, shaking her head.

“I am a handsome devil, aren't I?”

Sliders left the bus first at Dead School. Jana had a crazy thought. The aisle between the bus seats, the aisle they walked to file out, could be the aisle in a chapel. The Virgin up front was dressed for a wedding, after all. Jana tugged Michael's ring from her finger and buried it in her fist.

With her empty hand she touched the back of Mars's seat as she walked by, trailing two fingers gently across his shoulder. She knew the warmth he was feeling when she did that. She had kissed him once.

She paused next to Henry's seat. Jana reached her arm across in front of him. Palm down, she opened her fist. The heavy class ring dropped into Michael's lap. He looked up at Jana with his mouth open and blinked. It didn't mean anything, his mouth being open. It was always like that now. Michael's mouth was a permanent circular cave waiting for the scream to come out. It probably echoed when he talked. He looked like an idiot, Jana thought.

She glanced back at Mars and smiled. Even as a Riser, his blue eyes blazed under perfect brows when he smiled in return. She had kissed him once and she would kiss him again.

Jana had the jitters. For Mars.

She'd fallen for him.