Feral (17 page)

She trembled, sucked in a breath, and pushed through the doors—grateful that her coat hid the way her chest shook with each breath.

The library smelled like old paper and mold and earth. Claire wondered if every building in Peculiar reeked with age.

“Help you?” a voice rasped with authority from the research desk.

When Claire turned, she found herself facing a woman who—judging merely by her appearance—spent every workday behind this very desk and whose only taste of adventure surely came from the pages of a book. The librarian's back was bent at an arch, the fingers she'd placed on her desk red and knobby. Her entire body appeared as one twisted, inflamed knot of arthritis.

“Yes. Thank you. I'm looking for back issues of the Peculiar newspaper,” Claire explained.

“Microfilm,” the woman offered, her blue eyes rotating above red bags of skin as she pointed toward a gray cluster of metal cabinets.

Claire nodded a thank-you and raced forward. “Got it,” she said, not wanting to make the librarian move. She knew firsthand how hard it was to steer a body that only wanted to rest until the pain subsided.

But Rich caught her arm. “Actually, we're looking for information on the incident with Principal Sanders,” he said.

“
Sanders?
” Claire asked. “What does he have to do—”

She stopped mid-sentence when she saw the woman's face darken, her features shift downward, as though the mere mention of the event had filled her with sadness.

“November 2007,” she whispered.

“You know what he's asking for?” Claire asked. “You can remember the date off the top of your head?”

The woman's blue eyes darkened as she admitted, “Something like that—you don't ever forget.”

“Thanks,” Rich said, turning and heading toward the metal cabinets of microfilm.

Claire followed, still jarred by what the librarian had said. Were there truly incidents so horrific that they never faded in time?

Rich tugged a drawer open, reached inside. “Pretty old-fashioned, compared to Chicago, I bet,” he said as he fed the microfilm into a reader.

“There he is,” he said, pointing at the black-and-white image on the screen.

“There who is?” Claire asked.

“Casey Andrews,” he said.

“Casey—”

“Andrews,” Rich said. “For your story about the basement. Your urban legend.”

“
That's
what Serena was researching? An urban legend?” Claire's eyes scanned the print glowing on the microfilm screen. She leaned forward, making the zipper on her backpack let out a little scream as she threw it open. She propped her computer into her lap.

“Yep. Serena was sure there was a story here.”

“Okay, then talk,” she instructed Rich. “The facts are good, but I need to know all the human interest stuff, too—the things that Serena would know about, because she'd lived here her entire life.”

“What are you going to do, take notes?” Rich asked, eyeing her keyboard.

“I'm writing the backstory as
story
,” Claire said. “I don't care how impartial a reporter's supposed to be, a story's not a story until it's got guts. And a story doesn't have guts until some emotion gets mixed in with the facts. So—talk.”

She listened, and her eyes danced about the screen of the microfilm reader. She began to transcribe the events, her fingers tapping out details so horrendous and vibrantly real, she couldn't help but imagine it all from Casey's eyes—especially the last scene. The scene that had played itself out more than a month after Sanders was hurt . . .

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
asey Andrews slammed the door of his pickup, parked in the small field just behind Peculiar High. He stood on a soft muddy patch of earth, feeling the bite of the wintry night air as he watched his breath stream out the front of his face. He eyed the stars. He felt the weight of his father's shotgun in his hand.

His feet crunched against the dead leaves out behind the school. Summer had held on longer than usual; the trees had all turned brilliant shades of red and orange shortly before Thanksgiving. Even now, a week before Christmas, leaves were still tumbling onto sidewalks. Kids were still being told by parents that they could earn their allowance with a rake. It was one more thing he'd never do again, Casey thought as he approached the window. He'd never rake his parents' front yard, the smell of burning compost wafting about his face.

He crouched down low, toward the ground-level windows to the basement. It was easy to find the ones that led to the boys' locker room because they were tinted, so no one could see in. The girls' locker room didn't have windows at all.

He counted the dark glass squares, pressed his hand against the fourth from the right. When he pushed, it gave. Just like he expected it to.

He'd broken the window a month ago. Broken the latch, anyway, from the inside of the building. Busted it with the quick smack of a hammer swiped from shop class, while the rest of the guys in third period gym were in the showers.

He'd laughed when it had broken, then hidden his smile along with his hammer as he'd raced back to the showers before anyone could suspect anything.

It would have been easy, too, for any of them to think he was up to no good. Of course, “no good” with Casey had always been uttered through a grin. He was a prankster; that's what everyone had said ever since elementary school. An old-fashioned prankster, the kind that had always been able to escape any real punishment because his antics had even made his teachers smile. The tools of his trade had been whoopee cushions and confetti in buckets propped on the top of classroom doors. In middle school, he'd gone running buck naked through a soccer game. By freshman year, he was standing up in the middle of lunch and belting out “The Impossible Dream” in a fake-operatic voice, just for the fun of seeing people stare at him like he'd lost it.

He'd had a plan, a month ago. Another prank—the best prank of all, he'd thought, sneaking into the locker room through his broken window, a good two hours before the big goony jocks came strutting in to get ready for the championship game.

He was already giggling as he'd dropped to his knees in the midst of the lockers, placing his supplies on the floor: a two-liter soda bottle filled with paint and a small container of dry ice that he'd crushed into pieces small enough to fit through the bottle's neck. He'd slipped into his dad's heavy-duty work gloves and smiled as he'd shoved the dry ice into the container, quickly. He shook the bottle, threw it, and ran. He had enough paint in that bottle for a good thirty-plus seconds of spray. Of hot neon pink spray.

Casey's bomb was going to throw a cloud of pink over everything: the lockers, the towels, the toilet paper, the toilet seats, the mirrors, the urinals. Most importantly, pink paint would splash across the uniforms, all hanging in a row beside the lockers, like they always were before a game, because Peculiar High had a laundry service for the athletes. Small towns took care of their own.

Everything was going to be pink. And everyone would know—this has got to be another Casey prank, they'd laugh, hugging their blankets around their necks in the stands as the team appeared in hot pink splatter-painted uniforms.

It was so, so perfect.

Except for the fact that Dr. Sanders was still around. Casey hadn't planned on that. Nor had he planned on Sanders hearing noises coming from the boys' locker room.

The dry ice burned Sanders when it had flown into his face the moment he'd gone to check out the strange racket, spraying him right in the eyes. He'd let out a horrible, shrieking wail, like a man being set on fire.

Casey'd raced back inside the locker room, feet slipping on the sloppy pink paint that had sprayed across the tile. He'd dragged Sanders to the hall, and he'd pulled his cell out of the back pocket of his jeans to call 911. He'd tried to help flush Sanders's eyes clean in the water fountain, and he'd cried as the ambulance took off.

The damage was done, though. Sanders had all but completely lost his vision in one eye and the other was only marginally better.

Grief came to sit heavily in Casey's chest, torturing him. He'd blinded a man. All because he wanted some football numbskulls to wear pink jockstraps.

“For God's sake, Casey,” his dad had said when the bills started arriving. “Didn't you ever think about how dangerous that dry ice was? Didn't you ever think that we would have to pay for your stupid nonsense?”

He hadn't, actually. He hadn't thought of anything but the laughter his prank would create. But his family was liable for the uniforms—and Sanders's medical costs. Casey's sister's college money had gone up in a giant black cloud.

And no one wanted to touch the horrible story themselves, not voluntarily, not even a little, which meant that no one was calling his father the plumber to unclog their drains, not anymore. The family business was teetering on the brink of nonexistence. No one talked to his sister at school. She ate alone in the bathroom. She didn't think he knew, but he did. And his mother—his poor mother—all the other moms around tried to pity her, tried to be overly nice to her, but that just made things worse. She behaved as though she'd been shunned, choosing to shop at a grocery store thirty miles down the highway. She cried while she did the dinner dishes.

Nothing was the same. Every day something else crumbled into black ash.

And it was all his fault.

Everyone who'd had anything to do with him—his childhood friends, his parents, his teachers, his old soccer coach—acted like they had screwed up, like they had helped create some kind of horrible, vicious person and they couldn't figure out just where, exactly, they'd gone wrong. Small towns took the blame for their own, after all. He had hurt a man, blinded him for the rest of his life. He had taken his sister's future away. He had surely stolen his father's business. All for a prank.

The horrible part, he'd come to realize, was that everyone was right. He was selfish, he was stupid, he was maybe even vicious. Something was wrong with him. He could not tell anyone how badly he felt about it. Because all anyone ever did if he tried was nod in a way that said, You should feel bad.

He told himself that it was the low point, that he would dig himself out, just like a rat climbing out from the sewer. But how could he help make things better when every day brought something new—another bill that they couldn't afford to pay, his sister's tears—and he knew that what he had done had ruined everything? They would go bankrupt. His sister would never have the life she wanted. So why should he have his? The world would be better off without him and his stupid ideas, all the things he'd destroyed that he couldn't bring back, the mistakes that he would never be able to make up for. Some stupid suspension from school and probation until he graduated would never atone for it all.

It would be his Christmas present to everyone, he thought, as he slipped in through the still-broken window, into the boys' locker room.

Quietly, slowly, he walked to the same spot where he'd squatted to assemble his paint bomb. The walls around him were marked with stains that would never come out—awful pink smears so wild, Casey almost swore they were screaming.

Happiness was a charred pile of ash, he thought.

He turned off his phone. He didn't want to be interrupted.

Closing his eyes, he took one last deep breath before putting the barrel of the gun in his mouth.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
laire stopped typing, collapsed back into her chair. “It just built upon itself,” she murmured. “Until he felt like he had no choice. Until he—” She sighed, shaking her head sadly.

“They closed the basement after that,” Rich said. “At the time, the school was being used as a middle
and
high school—that's why two gyms, one upstairs and one down. They moved the middle schoolers out, into an offshoot of the old elementary school. Moved the high school gym and classes upstairs. The idea was to keep the basement closed until they had enough money to completely renovate the place. One of the top priorities was to replace the old boiler, if I remember right. Everyone said it got too hot for the classes that were held down there. School board's tried a few bond issues, but nothing's really worked. They haven't hit the fund-raising goal.”

“Under these circumstances, you'd think everyone would want to chip in to fix the place up,” Claire said.

“They would if they could have. But times have been hard here. Nobody's had a lot of money to give. The Andrews family moved away a while back. The basement's been locked to the outside ever since the accident.”

Rich's eyes grew distant as he clarified, “In a way, it kind of feels as though the basement's always been boarded up to the outside. That door that leads to the downstairs basement—the one next to the front office? I don't think it
is
locked—janitors sometimes toss stuff down there—but it might as well be. Everybody knows it's off-limits, and besides, nobody really wants anything to do with the place, any more than they really want anything to do with a cemetery at midnight.”

Claire rubbed her chin, a long sigh filling the air around her head. Her eyes were gritty and her throat was dry.

“But this isn't investigative,” she said. “This is a finished story. With the exception of the pending renovations, anyway. What could Serena have possibly been looking into?”