Rogue (16 page)

“She
what?
”

Driggs leaned forwa s let seemed rd and parted his hair, revealing a jagged scar Lex had never noticed. “She lost it. Just kept grabbing them out of the case and throwing them at me while Dad ran upstairs to get his gun.”

Now it was Lex’s turn to swallow nervously. “Gun?”

Driggs looked down the hallway, then at the floor. “I feel like this is the point where I should confess that it all went by in a blur, that I don’t remember anything about it. But—shit, I still do. I remember every second.”

He took a deep breath. “Dad came downstairs. Mom was still throwing bottles. I was bleeding all over myself, the couch, the carpet. Dad lurched forward, gun pointed at my head—I knew it was loaded, he always kept it loaded—and started to pull the trigger. But the guy was so damn drunk his finger fumbled and he missed. He missed the
trigger
. I saw my chance, and I yanked it out of his hands—he was so far gone, it wasn’t hard. I pointed it at him, and he just started laughing, laughing so hard he began to cough and had to sit down on the couch. But Mom was still hysterical, still throwing those bottles. And when another one hit me across the jaw, that was it. I turned and shot her.”

He worked his tongue around his mouth for a moment, then said, “I’d never shot a gun in my life. I couldn’t even tell you what kind of gun it was. But my aim was perfect—I hit her dead between the eyes, and down she went. It took a moment for Dad to realize what happened, but once he did, he started shouting—this awful, growling shit that wasn’t even words. He didn’t stop until I looked up from her and aimed the gun at him.”

Driggs’s breathing was getting heavier. “He wasn’t scared, exactly. He was more surprised, I think. Like it had never occurred to him that I might have the guts to do something like this. He opened his mouth, and I wish—I
wish
I had stopped for a second to hear what it was he had to say. I wish I knew what it was, that last thought that ran through his brain right before I blew it out the back of his head.”

Lex just gawked. She couldn’t believe this stuff was coming out of Driggs’s mouth.

“Hit him in the same place as my mom, right between the eyes. He was dead before he hit the ground, but I walked up to him, crying and yelling—I have no idea what I was saying—and stood over him. And then I shot him again. And again. And again. And again. And then my bullets were out and I sat down on the floor next to him and cried.”

He sucked in air through his teeth. “But not because I was sad, you know? Not even because I was numb, or felt no remorse.” He let out the breath he’d taken. “I was crying because I was so,
so
happy they were dead. It was the happiest I’d ever felt. I was delirious.” He looked straight at Lex, and this time, there was worry in his eyes. “What kind of person does that make me?”

Lex hadn’t spoken in a while, so when she did, her voice cracked. “I don’t know. A human person?”

He shook his head. “I sat there for a long time, just grinning and sobbing next to the corpses of my father and my mother. I had no immediate plans. The thought that maybe I should run popped into my head once or twice, but where to? We had no neighbors. We were miles away from the closest town. I had no other family, and no way to support myself. I guess I figured I’d just wait for the cops and let the juvenile corrections system raise me. At least in jail I’d get three meals a day.”

A weird whimper came out of Lex. Somehow that last bit seemed to make everything even sadder.

“But then,” he said, his eyes brightening slightly, “I heard a voice behind me. He’d let himself in through the front door.”

“Uncle Mort?”

Driggs nodded and collapsed back against the wall, spent.

Lex searched for the right thing to say, but she could have sat there until the heat death of the universe and never come up with the right thing. So she went for the obvious.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have parents like that.”

“They weren’t parents,” he said in a dark voice. “Parents are people who raise you and love you and teach you how to tie your shoes. These were just two savages who happened to live in the same house as me and yell at me to keep it down when I asked if we were having dinner that night.”

Lex winced, then winced harder as she thought of all the times she’d complained to Driggs about her own mom nagging to call her. How her parents were so overflowing with love and concern that it was suffocating. What kind of a person did that make
her?

She put her feet on top of his. “You did the right thing.”

He sighed. “No, I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” He leaned forward. “Lex, every single day since I did what I did to them, I have regretted it.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, shaking his head. “No matter what they’d done to me, it wasn’t my job to punish them. I should have told someone at school what was going on, gotten them arrested or something. Not killed them.”

He ran a hand through his hair, spraying Lex with water droplets. He’d become solid so gradually, she hadn’t even noticed. “That joy that I initially felt?” he said. “It didn’t last. On the ride to Croak, this bottomless dread sank in that was so dark and excruciating I thought I was going to drop dead myself, fall right off of Mort’s motorcycle. Like I said yesterday out on that lake, it felt like a part of my soul had gone bad, so full of evil that it rotted. And I’ve felt that way ever since, like there’s a gangrenous part of me that no one can see, but I’ll always know it’s there.”

Lex was still rationalizing, as per usual. “Okay. First of all, you were acting in self-defense. And second of all, they were monsters!”

“Self-defense? I shot my father point-blank, execution-style. That’s not self-defense, Lex, and you know it.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “I have hated myself for this. No matter what they’d done to me or how much they deserved it, taking people’s lives is wrong. It
felt
wrong
. And I guess I flipped out over all those people you Damned because seeing you repeat that same mistake only reminded me of how horrible my own was.”

“It wasn’t a mistake,” she insisted, though the look on his face put doubt in her voice. “And besides, I went after people who were just like your parents—the awful people in the world who deserved to be punished.”

“Lex. Think about it. You Crash in to that crime scene and see a man dead on the ground with five—
five
—bullet holes in him and a grinning boy standing over him with a gun. What would you do?”

Her breath caught.

“You’d Damn that kid in a second,” he answered for her.

Lex stared at him, numb.

Yes
, she thought.
I probably would
.

“And you wouldn’t even know why he’d done what he’d done. Or that he’d been the innocent one all along until those crucial last moments. Context matters, Lex. That’s why you can’t be judge, jury, and executioner. Humans make mistakes, which is why humans shouldn’t be allowed to make those sorts of calls in the first place. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Lex just stared at the ground, her brain all but fried.

Driggs let the silence happen. He grabbed her hands and squeezed them. They sat, quiet, the sound from the fluorescent li sluo/p>ghts echoing the tumultuous buzzing in their heads.

Lex spoke first. “No more Damning,” she said quietly. “I promise. Not even in the height of—battle, I guess, or whatever this mess is that I’ve gotten us into. I don’t want to damage the Afterlife any more than I already have, and . . . and you’re right,” she said, relenting. “It’s not my call.”

A small smile crept onto his face. “I’m right?” he said. “Did I hear that correctly? Can I get it in writing?”

She grinned back. “Don’t push it.” She rubbed his knuckles, the skin mottled with what she assumed were more scars. “Have you ever gone looking for them in the Afterlife?”

He visibly shuddered. “No.
Hell
no.”

She squeezed his hand again without even meaning to. It was the way he looked as if he were dangling off a cliff. She had to hold on to keep him from falling.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I dunno. It’s hard to talk about. And I felt like a hypocrite, with all the shit I gave you. Plus, I wasn’t sure if you’d . . .”

Lex frowned as he trailed off. “What?”

He tensed up. “Be horrified. Never talk to me again.”

Lex nearly laughed in his face. After all the things she’d done, he was worried about
her
dumping
him?

She smooshed his cheeks between her hands. “Here’s the deal, you nutball,” she said. “I love you. I don’t care what you did in the past, because it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what you’ll do in the future, because that won’t matter either. Lord knows you’ve given me the same sort of leniency. I’ll always love you. And I’m—”

“Going to fix me,” he said, smirking. “I know. You’ve mentioned it once or twice.”

Lex leaned in further to kiss him. She let go of him for a second, though, to try to move closer—and when she did, he slammed right back into transparency.

“Sorry.” He reddened, then gave her a rueful half smile. “This doesn’t usually happen, I swear.”

Lex tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite make it out of her throat. “It’s getting harder to stay solid when I’m not touching you, isn’t it?”

His jaw tightened. “Yeah.”

A voice reverberated down the hallway—possibly Ferbus, and possibly something about making sure the lovebirds were using protection.

Driggs rolled his eyes. “Well, we should probably go put a stop to that. Plus I don’t want to get eaten by rodents of unusual size, or whatever it is that guards these creepy hallways.”

Lex agreed. They got to their feet and started walking.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said after they’d gone a few paces.

“Thank
you
for not vomiting in disgust,” he replied. “You’re the only one I’ve ever told besides Mort.”

“So he just showed up, huh? Out of nowhere?”

“As is his way. Guess he used his little radar thingy. Except—” He furrowed his eyebrows. “Except there were no little locator triangles anywhere near where I grew up.”

Lex frowned. That was strange. “And he just—what? Told you to come with him?”

“Yeah. After having a debate with himself about whether or not I was too young. I guess the pro side won out, so I went.”

“And your parents didn’t object,” Lex said, repeating what Driggs had told her when she’d asked if they had a problem with him leaving. They were a little too dead to object.

“But why
did
he take you, when you were two years younger than the normal Junior age?” she asked, something nudging around inside her brain. “Obviously yo sObe you, wu had the requisite, um,
talents
—but if you didn’t show up on the locator and you were only fourteen, why did he bother to show up in the first place?”

Driggs shrugged. “I’ve always wondered that myself, but never asked. Never talked about it again. Never even found out who Killed and Culled them.”

Lex looked at him. “You think it was Uncle Mort?”

Driggs stopped cold. He just blinked at her, the answers to so many questions finally clicking into place. “Whoa. I never thought of that.”

“I bet he saw you during his shift, then came back for you later on that night.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Uncle Mort’s got an entire Home Depot’s worth of screws loose. Who knows why he does anything he does?”

“Yeah.” He started to walk again, but his eyes were still blinking, not really focusing on the hallway in front of him. “Who knows.”

***

They needn’t have worried about Ferbus teasing them when they rejoined the group. He’d already moved on to whining.

“You said the escalators and elevators were off-limits to us, right?” he asked Skyla. She had opened another door, beyond which was a metallic spiral staircase so tall they couldn’t see the top. “So that means—”

“Stairs it is,” Skyla said, chipper. “And the floors here are slightly taller than those in normal buildings—”

Ferbus assumed a hyperventilating position, his hands on his knees. “Oh no,” Skyla said, concern splashing across her face. “Is he anemic? Clinically asthmatic?”

“No,” Uncle Mort said, thwacking Ferbus on the head as he started climbing the stairs. “Just lazy.”

“Clinically lazy!” Ferbus wheezed.

They went slowly, at least. Uncle Mort and Skyla were up at the front of the pack, talking in low whispers. Occasionally a giggle would flutter down the staircase. An honest-to-God
giggle
. From Uncle
Mort
.

“This is too weird,” Lex said to Driggs, suppressing another gag. “I mean, are they a thing? Have they been going out underneath our noses the whole time?”

Driggs shrugged. “I’ve never heard anything about her before,” he said, then added in a sour voice, “but we all know how good Mort is at keeping secrets.”

“They just seem so . . . close. What was all that business about the pool table?”

“I think the less we know about the pool table, the better.”

“Since it’s not remotely any of your business,” Uncle Mort said from up ahead, “I’m inclined to agree.”

Lex cringed. “How does he
do
that?”

“Skyla and I,” Uncle Mort said, loud enough for the whole group to hear, “have been friends for many years. Ever since we were Juniors, as you were so cleverly able to discover. Since we’re not able to meet in person very often, we’re enjoying the opportunity to catch up a bit. If that’s all right with you, Your Excellency.”

Lex scrunched up her nose. She wanted to argue, but he was being perfectly reasonable. She hated when he did that.

But there was something niggling inside of her—not jealousy, exactly. She didn’t own Uncle Mort; he was an adult, free to have himself a lady friend if he wanted to. It was just that ever since she’d come to Croak, she’d been the only real family in his life, and they’d grown quite close, and it’s not that she was opposed to sharing him, but—