Quarantine #2: The Saints (23 page)

“What?” Gates said.

It was no longer daytime; it was night, the sky was black, and he was in Pruitt’s backyard, where tangled Christmas lights had been draped all through the branches of a barren winter tree in the center of the yard. The girls from the beach stared at him, annoyed, and fully dressed, and holding plastic champagne flutes.

“Where were you right then?” one of them said again.

“On a beach,” Gates said.

“Why are you acting so weird?”

When he looked back at them, their heads looked like fleshy marshmallows with black dots for eyes and no noses or mouths.

“Damn, girls. What happened to your faces?” he said.

“You like it?” one of them said. The area near her mouth seemed to pulse as she spoke, but he heard her quite clearly.

He wasn’t sure if he liked it. Their heads were structureless blobs, but on the other hand, their skin was beautiful. It was luscious and healthy. He could see the hint of bluish veins under the veil of their delicate skin, and it made him want to touch their soft, puffy heads.

“What do you kiss with?” he said.

“We don’t kiss. Straight to business,” the other one said.

He nodded. “You girls are cool.”

“Gates! You hear about the new hat?” Fowler said.

Fowler was walking across the yard toward him, holding a plain cardboard box in his hands.

“What new hat?” Gates said. The blobby-headed girls were gone, but he’d already forgotten them.

“A French fashion designer came up with the perfect hat,” Fowler said.

“What do you mean perfect?”

“The design of it is so perfect that it makes anyone who
wears it look the best they could possibly ever look. It doesn’t even matter what other clothes you’re wearing, you put it on and poof, immediately you’re better-looking than you’ve ever been.”

“It’s a magic hat?”

“No bro, it’s scientific,” Fowler said. “Just looking at the hat releases all this stuff in your brain.”

“But how?”

“There’s PDFs on their website; you can read all the research.”

“That rules so hard,” Gates said. “How much is the hat?”

“Free.”

“You have it in the box?” Gates said, pointing to the box in Fowler’s hand.

Fowler grinned. “You’re never going to be the same, bro.”

He pulled the top off the box, and inside was a green felt hat, with a pinched ridge running down the top, a baseball cap bill in the back, and three drops of white paint spilled on its front.

“Are you sure that’s perfect?” Gates said.

“Just put it on, dude.”

Gates took it out of the box and pulled it onto his head.

Instantly, he jolted with pleasure. It felt like his whole body was a tongue, the world was made of ice cream. He began to grow taller than everyone else. Girls came running out of the bushes, tearing their shirts off at the sight of him.

“Oh my God, Gates. There’s no one better,” he heard Lark say.

People were literally breaking out in tears when they saw how good he looked. He said his own name, “Gates.” The crowd of girls encircling him simultaneously achieved orgasm. He said it again. “Gates.” They fell to their knees, bodies quivering.

His fists grew to the size of boulders. He raised them up into the air and the girls all ran back to the bushes. He smashed his hulking fists into the ground, and made hot-tub-sized dents in the earth.

“Gates!” he screamed, and he launched into the air. Gates soared over all of Denton, spinning and twirling his way between buildings and over the trees, trying to swat all the birds out of the sky. He willed himself to go up, and he soared higher and higher, until the air got cold and thin. It pressed on his chest. He felt one with the wind, in complete control, but as soon as he thought that, he began to drift down toward the ground.

He tried to will himself higher again, but his powers of flight had abandoned him. He looked down at Denton, and saw that his slow descent was lowering him down to Capitol Boulevard, where most of the car dealerships were. His feet touched the ground in a cracked and overgrown parking lot, behind the local mini golf course. There were no cars, but five townie kids stood smoking weed by the light post. Their
clothes were dirty, and two of them were shivering. They listened to a baseball game on a portable radio.

The weed smelled good. He wanted some.

“Hey, can I get a puff of that?” Gates asked.

One of the kids, who had droopy eyes and a dusting of facial hair over his plump face, passed the roach to Gates. He took a long drag, and it tasted like an orange Creamsicle.

“Where’d you get that hat?” one of the shivering kids asked him.

They were all eyeing it. The vibe had changed in an instant. He knew with absolute certainty that these townies all wanted his hat.

“You can’t have it!” Gates yelled.

“Get that hat!” the droopy-eyed one yelled.

Gates ran. He tried to fly but he couldn’t. He sprinted across the cracked asphalt, and over the tufts of grass and weeds that sprouted out from the cracks.

He looked back and saw that all the townies had vanished and only one person pursued him—his little brother Colton, with a bullet hole through his forehead.

Gates fell from the shock, and Colton was on him in a flash. Colton grabbed him and rolled him onto his back. Colton was never that strong before. Broken chunks of asphalt prodded Gates in his back. His brother straddled Gates’s chest and pushed all the air out of him. His lungs were stuck empty.
Colton wore his black sunglasses, and Gates couldn’t see his eyes, but his face was scrunched up in contempt. The wet rim of the bullet hole in his forehead glinted in the moonlight. Colton opened his dead, gray mouth and cold saliva came pouring out of it, like lemonade from a glass pitcher. It splashed over Gates’s face and made him cough. The saliva began to shoot out of Colton’s mouth like a fire hose, pounding down into Gates’s head. Through the spraying saliva he could see how furious, how anguished Colton was. The saliva fire hose became a saliva water cannon as it began to blast down into his face so hard that he felt his upper lip and his eyelids begin to tear away.

Gates woke up on the floor of the bus. It was only a dream.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” he said, touching his face to make sure it was still there.

The back of the bus was dark. The light of the main room shined through the shattered windshield, but couldn’t make it all the way to the back of the bus. He pulled himself to his feet and kicked his way through food wrappers and empty soda bottles, and dirty underwear on the floor. He didn’t bother changing into fresh clothes for the day or gathering his toiletries for the shower. He wanted to get out of the bus and away from that nightmare immediately.

He left the bus for the brightly lit front room of the processing facility. He had to squint at first to handle the light. Most
Saints weren’t up yet; it was 6:17 a.m. There were a few shuffling through the room, trying to yawn the sleep away.

In one corner of the room there were two gaming chairs, the kind that rock back and forth, positioned in front of a flat-screen TV, and Will sat in one of them, playing a racing game.

Nice, Will was already up. Gates felt the tension of his nightmare washing away. He and Will always had fun together.

Gates ambled over, and plopped himself down in the free chair. He and Will high-fived, without either of them having to take their eyes off the screen to do it. They’d gamed so much together in the last few nights since the party that they might as well have slept in those chairs. He looked Will up and down. He wasn’t sure but he thought Will was wearing the same clothes as the night before.

“Have you been up all night?” Gates said.

“Yup,” Will said, his eyes locked on the screen.

“Is there a video game championship coming up that I don’t know about?”

“Ha. No. I just kept playing.”

“Wait. Should we have a video game championship?”

“We could,” Will said.

“I actually can’t believe we haven’t done it already. Fuck, it could be so awesome. We could go all night. What games do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“One fighting game, one-shooter for death matches, and
something that has split-screen multiplayer. Right? That’s not bad. That covers a lot of bases.”

“Sure,” Will said.

“You’re not excited about it? Look at you, you’re mister gamer.”

“No, I am, it sounds like a good time.”

“You all right?” Gates said.

Will didn’t answer, but Gates knew.

“It’s about that Slut girl from the party?”

Will shrugged.

“Oh, come on. She’s one girl. Who cares?”

“I like her.”

There was something about the way Will said those words that made Gates pause. It wasn’t their usual good time bullshitting kind of talk, Will meant what he said, and Gates could feel how deep his emotion ran when he said it.

He wanted to cheer Will up, Will had been his partner in crime, a fellow fun-hunter, and he didn’t like seeing him so torn up like this. He knew Will thought this girl was really important, and in truth she probably wasn’t. As far as Will had told him, this girl had done nothing but turn him down and lead him on, and Will kept going back for more like a loyal puppy dog.

“Best thing for you is to clean your palate with a new girl.”

“Yeah,” Will said with a sigh.

“Serious.”

“Yeah, I know. You keep telling me.”

“It’s not just for you either. It’s for this girl … what’s her name? Luther?”

Will laughed a little.

“You know it’s Lucy.”

“Right, Louis. It’s for Louis too.”

That got another laugh out of him. Will’s sullen shell was cracking.

“Nothing gets a girl interested in you faster than her seeing you with other girls,” Gates said.

“Hmm,” Will said. Gates could see the idea had needled into his brain.

“Besides, you KNOW Louis is in the Sluts, she’s probably getting her ditch dug out by some guy, all day and night.”

Will laughed, and cringed at the same time. “Damn! You’re a dick,” Will said, but he kept laughing.

Gates punched him in the arm. “Ah! You dirty motherfucker, you were thinking it. I know you were.”

“I definitely wasn’t.”

“She’s all unnnghhhh unnghhhh,” Gates said, miming like he was a girl in ecstasy. “What? You want me to do five guys? Okay.”

“Oh, come on!” Will said, smiling. He kicked Gates’s plastic gamer chair over and Gates fell on the floor.

“Please make a line out the door, everyone,” Gates said, “I
can only be humped by three guys at a time.”

Will threw an open bag of Reese’s Pieces at Gates and they hit him in the shoulder. Yellow, orange, and brown candies sprayed all over the floor. Gates laughed and scooped a handful out of the package. He chomped them and let the sugary peanut butter filling spread through his mouth.

“For real though. For real,” Gates said. “Are you okay if I go completely real now? I might have to get real.”

“Okay, okay, yes. Get real,” Will said, amused.

“I’m just confused. Why do you have to be a humongous pussy?”

“That’s it, I’m joining the Freaks.”

“No, hold on. I’m fucking with you. What I want to say for real, is you should be fuckin’ happy. We’re on top. Everyone’s coming to us, asking us for stuff. We’re the cool kids.”

“That’s true,” Will said, brightening another degree as he pondered the idea.

“I’ve got dates lined up for the next two weeks,” Gates said, “and I told all of them they had to bring a hot friend.”

“You did?”

“No lie. Now I could be throwing these girls Fowler’s way, or Pruitt, if that’s what you’re telling me I should do.”

“No one said that.”

“Oh, why?” Gates said, torturing Will. “Are you interested in hanging out with new girls?”

Will took a deep breath, and when he let it out he smiled. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

“That’s the dude I’ve been looking for!” Gates said, and threw his fists in the air.

“You have one set up for tonight?”

“Yeah, with a Nerd chick. I heard her friend has a third nipple.”

“Really? Full size?”

“You can only hope.”

“Cool,” Will said.

“This is gonna cheer you up. I’m going to make sure of it. We are going to party so hard for so long that you won’t even be able to remember this Judy girl’s name.”

“All right, all right. You’ve convinced me.”

“Perfecto.”

“I gotta piss,” Will said, and he got up.

“Great, thanks for letting me know.”

Will chuckled as he headed off for one of the bathrooms in the mess hall. Gates put his chair right side up and sat in it. Its curved plastic frame let him rock back and forth. He picked up the controller off the floor and unpaused Will’s racing game. He crashed the car almost immediately.

Gates heard the crunch of someone stepping on a plastic bottle behind him. He turned back.

Colton stood in the middle of the floor.

His skin was gray. He wore his black shades, and full St.
Patrick’s attire, a blazer, tie and sweater, slacks, and penny loafers. His brown hair was combed neatly to the side. Black blood dripped from the hole in his forehead.

Colton walked toward him. Gates scrambled out of his chair and into the corner. How was this happening? His dead brother made fists of his hands as he strode toward him.

“Get back!” Gates said.

“Gates?”

Will was standing at the entrance to the mess hall, staring at him, perplexed. Colton was gone. One second he was there and the next he wasn’t. Gates didn’t know if he’d just seen a ghost, or he was losing his shit, but just like earlier when he had seen Will in the gaming chair, just Will’s presence calmed him. He needed to stick with Will. He’d be safe with Will. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he could feel that it was true in his bones.

“Hey, man,” Gates said.

“Are you … messing around? You look all scared.”

“Yeah. You know me. Can’t keep it serious,” Gates said, assuming a relaxed pose. He hoped he wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore.

Will stretched and yawned. “So when does the partying start?”