Quarantine #2: The Saints (26 page)

“I’m gonna need all of that back.”

“Depends if you behave yourself or not,” a big Slut said, and gave him a cheap slap in the crotch. Will winced. He would have fought back but he couldn’t screw up his chance to see Lucy.

They shoved him forward. He couldn’t believe how clean it was in the cafeteria. They walked him through a door on the other side of the dining room. Will knew the Sluts had claimed a full hallway of classrooms off the cafeteria, including a small student lounge, but he’d never been inside.

They led him into the triangle-shaped lounge. All of the
plastic covers over the fluorescent tube lights in the ceiling were transparent red. The light they gave off was so dim Will had to work to see people’s faces. He felt as if they were all at the bottom of a glass of red wine. Sluts lounged in well-preserved, plushy love seats and cushioned chairs that populated the space. Any of them could have been Lucy in the deep red of the room.

Seven angry girls, all with pale skin and dark lips and thin eyebrows that slanted down toward the bridges of their noses, followed him as he walked. He passed pretty girls who seemed dead inside. Some of the girls had dates, guys interspersed in the group. Will peered at the dudes. Some ignored him, others casually tried to hide their faces, and then there were the ones that scowled at him until he continued walking past their girl, then they went back to not caring. A skinny girl with a red bob growled at him like she wanted to kill him. A Slut with black lipstick and a train track of gold safety pins pierced through her left eyebrow screwed up her face at Will and flipped him off. He didn’t let any of it shake him. He was a man on a mission.

“Will?”

There she was, in the red, lying on her side on a sofa, her body twisted away from Will. He had to squint. She was wearing a shirt that was hardly a shirt. It draped too loosely on her, threatening to show too much. She wore a pair of sweat shorts that stubbornly refused to cover the bottom of her butt.

That kid, Bart, was lying next to her. He had his stupid arm around her, and she looked cozy as hell all nestled into his side, except for her face, which was stiff with shock. She sat up and straightened her shirt. Bart kept his hold on her.

“What are you doing here?” Lucy said.

“Can we go somewhere and talk?” Will said.

Lucy looked to Bart, concerned. “I’m kinda in the middle of something.”

Will wanted to explode.

“Please, I really need to talk to you.”

Lucy opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Will stayed patient.

“Will … what else is there to say?”

“I love you.”

Lucy stared at Will. Bart started laughing.

Will ignored Bart and pushed on. “Listen, we had a string of really shitty luck and it ended badly, and that sucks. But I want to take care of you and I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back in my life.”

Through the heavy red light, he saw a hopeful little smile bloom on her face for just a second. And then she looked at the other Sluts around her and dropped it.

“Oh god,” Bart said. “That was so lame.”

“Fuck you, Nerd.”

Bart laughed again, harder than before. It was the most annoying laugh Will had ever heard.

“Will, I think you should leave,” Lucy said.

“Lucy, it’s me,” Will said, and he touched her arm.

As soon as he touched her, Sluts converged on him. In a few simple, strong moves, they ripped Will’s hand free of Lucy and wrenched his arms behind his back. He strained and twisted against their grip.

“Get off me,” he said through gritted teeth.

They pulled Will away from Lucy. She stood, but didn’t stop them. She didn’t care.

The Sluts lifted him off of his feet and carried him like they were going to use him for a battering ram. He would have screamed if they hadn’t brought their knives to his throat so quickly.

They carried him out of the lounge, through the cafeteria, and sure enough, opened the door with his head. They threw him out into the hall. His weapons were tossed out after him. He landed on the floor, next to a pile of trash bags that leaked a puddle of red onto the floor.

“I GOTTA GO TO THE BATHROOM,” GATES SAID
to Will, in a hallway near Freak territory.

That sounded great by Will. Will could use a break from the guy, even a short one. He’d been hanging with Gates nonstop since Lucy shut him down. He was exhausted, and Gates was beginning to grate on his nerves.

“Go for it,” Will said. “I think there’s a bathroom up there to the right.”

Gates paused.

“Actually, you want to come?”

Will stared in disbelief. Gates wasn’t kidding. It never ended.

“No, I’m good,” Will said.

Gates frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I’m good. I already went.”

“I don’t remember you going.”

“Well … I did,” Will said.

Gates narrowed his eyes at him.

“What,” Will said. “You don’t believe me?”

Gates pursed his lips, and stared at Will until the awkwardness was painful. Will prayed for him to leave.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Maybe I just didn’t notice or—yeah, you know what? I’ll go later. Let’s keep looking for it.”

Will sighed, and the two of them continued their search, poking their heads into classrooms that they had no business looking into. Will carried a six-pack of canned beer in one hand and an extension cord lasso in the other. Gates held a spear made from a whittled wooden flagpole.

“This is where that Freak girl said she saw it?” Gates asked.

Will nodded. “Yep. Second floor. Near room 213.”

“Soo-ey,” Gates yelled. “Soo-ey! Here, piggy piggy.”

Will stood in silence, watching Gates as he snorted like a pig. He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry. Gates could be super fun, but Will just couldn’t keep up anymore. Nobody could.

Will tossed his empty and cracked another beer. He’d already thrown up once that night, but he’d kept drinking. Gates was easier to take when Will was drunk, and so was the crushing pain of missing Lucy.

“When’s the last time you saw the hog anyway?” Will said.

“I don’t know,” Gates said. “The party?”

“Which one?” Will said, but he didn’t really care.

“The first one, buddy. The best one, our pizza party. Come on!”

“Oh, yeah,” Will said. There was no hiding the boredom in his voice.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Will shrugged.

“Please tell me you’re not still obsessing about Lucy, man. She’s ruining your life. I told you to keep away from her, didn’t I? How many times are you gonna let her treat you like dirt?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Will said.

“Well, I do. This is my life too. And she’s ruining it ’cause if you’re in a bad place, then that brings me down.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m fine,” Gates mimicked Will with a slack jaw and a dead voice.

“What are we gonna do when we find this thing?” Will said, trying to shift gears back to the hog.

“I just want it back,” Gates said with a twinge of annoyance. “It belongs to me. It’s my pet. Why should somebody else get it?”

“Because you let it go in the first place.”

“Hey,” Gates said and bashed his spear into the nearest locker for effect. “If you were gonna be like this, then why’d you come along?”

Will had the urge to tell Gates off, but Gates was acting so
odd that he felt a twinge of fear as to what would happen if he did.

“Did you hear that?” Gates said, his annoyance morphing into excitement.

“Nope.”

“Listen.”

Will tuned into the silence, and then he did hear something. It was faint like the distant sound of someone scraping ice off a driveway, but deeper, darker, wetter.

Gates eyes went wide, and for a moment, Will felt a tickle of a thrill.

“Let’s go,” Gates said, hushed, and snuck forward.

They crept up on a darkened classroom. Will and Gates planted themselves on either side of the doorway and peered inside. Just from the stink, Will had a feeling this was a Freak dumping ground. One room to pile up all the nastiness and trash from two floors of turf until the Skaters got around to hauling it all to the dump. They’d gotten lax on their garbage business lately.

A loud snort blasted out of the darkness.

“Light it up,” Gates whispered.

Will softly set down his beers and pulled his Maglite from the back pocket of his jeans. He clicked it on and pointed it into the room. The beam slipped across piles of filth, some as high as four or five feet. A miniature landscape of deflated garbage bags, wet clothes, and rotting food.

“There!” Gates said, still whispering. “Go back.”

Will traced the beam back between two mounds of black garbage bags and he saw it. “Oh god,” Will said, holding the beam in place over the massive hind region of the hog. It was on its side and its head lay flat on the floor.

Thick, coarse hair. Black. Stiff. It covered the hog’s entire body. Long white whiskers angled off its rumpled, bucket-ended snout, which glistened in the beam of Will’s flashlight.

“What’s wrong with it?” Will said.

“It’s sleeping, I guess.”

“Why is it sweating? Do hogs sweat?”

“I don’t know,” Gates said.

“It looks sick, man.”

The hog snorted again, and it sounded like a belch of air from a clogged sink. Both Will and Gates jumped at the sound, then Gates started cracking up. He covered his mouth. The hog’s breath was fast. Will felt like they should help it, but he didn’t know how to even start. He and Gates just stared at it like it was the engine of a broken-down car.

Will trailed his light across its muscled bulk. It had to be three hundred pounds. Its long thin tail waggled violently. He shined his spotlight on the tail. It was still, then flailed around with more spastic jerks. Its ass bulged.

“Oh, motherf—” Will said.

Around a dark hole in its rear end, a donut of flesh pushed out.

“The thing’s gonna have the shits all over the place!” Gates said.

The hog farted, and the slimy head of a piglet popped out. It stayed there a moment, wearing its mother’s body as a turtleneck. Then the rest of the piglet’s slick sausagelike body slid out. It landed on the concrete floor. Its flesh was pinkish where it wasn’t black, and the pink skin looked see-through, like raw chicken breast. Its snout was short and stubby, and it writhed on its side.

Gates had reached out and grabbed Will’s arm for impact. Both of them stared with their mouths wide open and their jaws jutted out.

The piglet’s little slimy eyes opened. The mama hog roared. It was a horrible sound somewhere between a lion’s roar and a volcano with bronchitis. Will flinched. His flashlight beam seesawed. When he tilted the beam back onto the hog, he nearly fell over.

She was looking right at him.

Her long, heavy-boned head was craned just far enough over that she could stare at Will out of the corner of her right eye. She had eyelashes. Soft brown ones. And the white of her eye was prominent from this angle, a crescent of brilliant white. It made her eye look entirely human. A woman’s eye in the head of a pig.

The sight of it made Will’s stomach lurch, and he took off
running. He got all the way around the corner to the next hall before Gates caught up with him. He was dying laughing.

“Ho-lee shit …,” Gates said, “have you ever seen anything like that before?!”

Will shook his head. He was trying to forget about it. It all seemed so wrong. That thing didn’t belong in here. Those little things didn’t deserve to be born in this place. But they were here because of Gates and Will.

“We gotta go back,” Gates said.

“What, why?”

“Those are my little piggies!” Gates laughed, and Will recoiled. “I betcha there’s like eight of ’em coming. Dude, we could train ’em, like attack dogs. Attack hogs! How badass would that be? You mess with me, you mess with my hogs!”

“Just leave ’em be. You shouldn’t mess with its babies. Everything’s not here for your amusement, okay?” Will said.

Gates’s face drooped like he’d been the birthday boy and Will had just popped all his balloons. Will didn’t care though, he’d had enough Gates for today. All this partying and thrill-seeking, it wasn’t working anymore. He felt like he needed to sleep for a week just to think straight again.

“Fine,” Gates said. “Be a little bitch about it.”

“Whatever dude, I’m heading back.”

Will turned and strolled down the hall. He didn’t hear anything from Gates behind him.
Let him stay here and stare at
his piglets
, Will thought. And that sounded like what he was going to do, but then Gates piped up again, and Will died a little inside.

“Wait up, we’ll go together.”

LUCY WAS GOING TO SLEEP WITH BART.

Lucy and Violent walked up the stairs to the library. The only noise was the jangle of Violent’s necklace made of sharpened cafeteria cutlery. They’d done this walk before, under crazier circumstances, on their way to the ruins, when David was dying by the minute. It had all gone wrong in the library.

Lucy didn’t anticipate Bart to be some rape-crazy maniac, but Violent’s intention had always been that Lucy feel over-prepared for the moment. And Lucy was definitely that. She had five condoms so Bart couldn’t pull any lame excuses. She’d been practicing her scary voice every morning with Sophia, so things didn’t have to get physical if he tried anything she didn’t like. And if he did, Lips taught her eight different ways to hit a guy in the nuts. Raunch gave her a pouch of salt in her pocket to throw in Bart’s eyes if things got out of hand. And if worse came to worse, she had her blade to cut him from neck
to nuts, to use one of Violent’s more quotable phrases.

“I feel like you’re my mom dropping me off at the mall for the first time,” Lucy said. “You really didn’t have to walk me.”

“I didn’t have to, I wanted to.”

It made Lucy smile a little.

“Really?”

Violent nodded.

“Thanks,” Lucy said, and they walked the last flight up in silence.

“I heard some shit went down with Will in the lounge,” Violent said when they reached the third floor.