The Burnouts (16 page)

“Got any more jokes?”

Will shook his head. He wanted so badly to say something mean, but he had to get a hold of himself. This was real. He could die. Bobby was practically blowing death into his face.

He shut up, and the Freaks took him home. They kept a firm grip on his arms and never gave him a moment to make
a break for it. They carried him through the halls, hands wedged under his armpits, the toes of his boots barely scraping the floor.

“What are the chances you’d end up my prisoner
after
you graduated?” Bobby said from behind him, as the Freaks pushed him down the hall. “Guess good things really do happen in McKinley.”

This was bad. Very bad. Will and Bobby had always hated each other, but in the past Will had almost always gotten the better of Bobby. He’d stolen from Bobby, injured him in food drops, mocked him publicly, and had spread multiple rumors about him that had driven Bobby crazy. That Bobby had constant diarrhea and had to wear a cloth diaper under his pants. That he played with dolls. That he got an erection whenever he cried. Bobby had a lot to want payback for.

The Freaks shoved Will through an archway that had been smashed through a hall wall. Will had never ventured this deep into the Freak base. He’d stolen a TV from them, but it had been from one of the rooms on the outskirts of their territory. There were so many holes in the walls, and walls that had been completely destroyed, that Will was afraid the ceiling would cave in. The place was like a beehive. The Freaks’ destructive power was something to marvel at.

The Freaks had laid claim to most of the A/V equipment early in the quarantine and Will was finally getting to see what they did with it. He was led through a room that glowed
with blue light. Bedsheets hung from the ceiling all around the room at different angles to each other, with blue images projected on them by old overhead projectors and new digital ones. Fans on the floor made the sheets dance. Will saw a fluttering blue video of Bobby sacrificing a naked Freak girl with a ceremonial knife like it was a pagan ritual—you could tell the knife was painted cardboard. Wobbling blue images were everywhere. A microscopic image of blood cells, an old anatomical etching of a skinless man whose muscles were unraveling from his bones, a close-up photo of a bare breast blotched and speckled with scabs.

In the next room, they’d rubbed soot all over the walls and ceiling, nearly blacking them out, and had carved images of screaming skulls and smiling demons into the walls. The carvings revealed the white of the drywall’s core, turning the room into a black-and-white nightmare factory. A blue-haired girl was piercing her boyfriend’s nipple with a sharpened bobby pin. Some Freaks were applying ghoulish makeup to their faces. Others were competing with each other over who could slump the most tragically in their chair. An atonal Freak band banged on desks in the corner. The singer’s voice sounded like a garbage disposal full of phlegm, and they all wore black T-shirts with the words
Old Pervert
written in dripped bleach.

They walked him into a lecture hall. There was a twelve-foot pentagram burned into the floor. The walls were lined
with televisions, and they all played the same footage of a crackling fireplace, surrounding everyone in the hall with a rectangle of fire. It bathed the room and all the Freaks in a warm, sweet-potato-colored light. A projection screen on the far wall showed camcorder footage of an old food drop in which the Freaks were dominating. Based on the angle of the video, the kid that had shot it must have been watching from a third-floor classroom. He did play-by-play commentary like it was a baseball game, and he cheered when Freaks snatched more than the other gangs or won fights on the battlefield. Freaks sat in chairs and watched the video and chatted with each other.

Bobby and his crew led Will through the room, to a sectioned-off area near the screen. It was separated from the rest of the audience by chest-high walls made of classroom doors that had been nailed together. Inside was a cardboard couch with stuffed T-shirt pillows. Bobby pointed to a spot on the floor.

“Put him there,” Bobby said. “On his back.”

Will tried to stop them, but he was no match for their combined strength. They put knees on his shoulders and hands to pin him to the floor. Hands held his ankles.

Bobby kicked something around the area like he was fooling with a soccer ball. It skittered across the floor. A human skull. Will reminded himself that Bobby used to wear part of a bio lab plastic skeleton, and that it was probably from one
of those. But it didn’t have the creamy yellowy-white color of a plastic skeleton. And it didn’t look plastic. It looked like bone. Teeth were missing from it. He could see some hair. Where did Bobby get a human skull? Whose skull was it?

Maybe it was one of the teachers, Will told himself. Or one of the seniors who had died before graduation was established. Maybe some bodies had to be moved for some reason. Bobby could have just found it. Just ’cause he had a skull didn’t mean Bobby was the one who killed the person. Probably not.

Bobby sank into a wooden chair and stared at Will. He whistled and a wide-thighed Freak girl, holding a plastic grocery bag and dragging a folding chair, came plodding in. When she reached Bobby, she sat and pulled a bottle of ink, a rag, and a mechanical pencil from the bag. A needle extended out of the pencil’s tip instead of lead. She laid the rag over her forearm and dipped the needle into the black ink. Will watched her fold Bobby’s ear forward and saw that the back of his ear was unpainted. It was only then, Will realized, Bobby hadn’t painted his head and face black. He’d tattooed them. His eyelids, his lips. Up into his nostrils. Dull black.

“That’s a tattoo?”

Bobby smiled with a mouth full of glistening red teeth.

“Almost done,” Bobby said.

“Why would you do that?”

“You’d never understand. This is who I am now.”

Bobby was right, Will didn’t understand. He’d always
thought Bobby was all show, and that deep down he was a scared little wimp. But this … blacking out your entire head … Bobby was permanently deleting his old self. That scared Will. Maybe Will had always been wrong about him, or maybe Bobby had been pushed too far and he’d finally snapped.

The girl tapped away at Bobby’s folded ear with the inky needle. Bobby pulled sugar cubes from out of his pocket and started eating them like popcorn. Bobby smiled so wide at Will that he saw an inch of pink gums above his red teeth.

“Scared?” he asked.

Will shook his head on instinct.

Bobby burst out of his chair and rushed Will. Will writhed against the knees that riveted him to the floor. Bobby stopped short of him and raised his boot in the air to stomp down on the face shield of Will’s mask. But his foot hung there without smashing down. Bobby placed it back on the floor, and snickered down at Will.

“You should be.”

PROM WAS IN TWO HOURS. AND THEN HILARY
would only stay for two more. That included dancing, posing for pictures, and being crowned prom queen. Immediately after her coronation, she’d run to the quad to be lifted out. That was a total of four hours. She could last four hours.

The wads of toilet paper she had wedged up her nostrils to stop the bleeding were getting soaked. She’d have to replace them soon. The hallucinations had begun, but they were minor. She’d seen her fingers as dove wings, and the way her white feathers had wrapped around the gun was beautiful. Sometimes, when she’d close her eyes, she’d be in a motel room where her mother was sucking face with Sam on stained bedding, and they were tearing off each other’s clothes. She’d open her eyes immediately to rid herself of the sight, but sometimes it would take a few seconds for her vision to kick in. Even after she was firmly back in reality, she could
hear the slippery wet noises of their mouths smacking together.

Hilary lay on a bed. She’d made Varsity construct a platform for the bed that rested on the top three bleachers. From there, she could keep an eye on everyone in the gym at all times. She yawned and stretched her arms in the air. The gun was in her hand, and everyone in the gym was either looking at it, or making a point not to. She knew they all craved it. And someone would come for it eventually. But by the time one of those idiots worked up the courage, she’d be gone.

Even with the power of the gun, she may not have gotten away with all her demands if the girls of the school hadn’t rallied behind the idea of a prom. Every boy who griped about the work it took to make the prom happen had at least three girls surround him and threaten him if he were to do anything to derail this for them.

The Geeks were finishing decorating the commons in her chosen theme: spring. She had a Geek boy, two Pretty Ones, and a Nerd girl going without sleep to make four dress options for her that she’d try on shortly. She’d tested out five different makeup artists from across the gangs, but had yet to find one who could do her face justice. There were still more showing up to the gym for the chance to get on her good side.

If there was no one worthy, she’d do it herself. She was already going to do her own hair, but that was because she didn’t want anyone standing behind her. Makeup artists
stood in front of her where she could shoot them. But a hairstylist, behind her back, could slip a wire around her neck and strangle her to death, and all Hilary would be able to do was blow holes in the ceiling.

There would be no other weapons allowed other than her gun, and Varsity would be working security at the doors. The Nerds had the largest music library in the school, and they were doing their best to perfect the playlist that she’d already gone through with a red pen. Everything was happening according to schedule. There was no way in hell she was leaving high school without being prom queen.

The gym floor became a giant pool of rice pudding in front of her eyes. The feet of the Varsity boys and Pretty Ones were buried in pudding halfway up their shins, and each step pushed the pudding around, ruining the perfect, lake-like surface. Blood began to bubble up through the displaced pudding like crude oil.

Hilary shook her head. When she looked back at the gym floor it was wooden again, the mulch of bloody pudding was gone, and all shins were dry.

She rubbed her eyes. She could do this.

The bleachers began to vibrate with footsteps. Her eyes bent left to see Terry limping up the bleachers.

“Stop,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said and hunched like a whipped puppy. “It’s just, Bobby is here to see you.”

“Didn’t I already tell him to get lost?”

“Yes, you did,” Bobby said from the gym doors. He and a troupe of Freaks entered the gym, all of them shrouded in black. One even wore a black sheet over his head like a medieval executioner. Bobby’s head was black as well, like the burned head of a match. He opened his mouth and his teeth were crimson.

“If you’ve come to ask me to prom again, the answer is still no, I am not picking my prom king until the dance,” Hilary said.

“I’ve come bearing a gift in the hope that you reconsider,” Bobby said with a flowery bow.

“Don’t be a pain in my ass, loser. Get to the point.”

Bobby moved toward the kid with the executioner’s shroud. On closer inspection, Hilary realized the sheet didn’t have eyeholes. Bobby pulled the black sheet off the kid’s head. It was David’s little brother in a gas mask.

“Will. He’s all yours. Your own uninfected. No one else in the school has one,” Bobby said.

“What would I want with an uninfected?”

“Nothing, you should let me go,” Will said. Bobby kicked Will’s knee, and he fell to the floor.

“Well, word is that he didn’t come back alone. David’s back as well. He’s not dead, and he’s in McKinley.”

And just like that, the last puzzle piece finally plunked into place, and Hilary’s vision of her prom was complete. Her
old sweetheart from her innocent days, David, would be her beau. It was just so … perfect.

“I’m certain he’d want to come to wherever his little brother is,” Bobby said. “I’ve adored you forever, Hilary. I hope this gift finally proves to you how deep my feelings run.”

Hilary looked Bobby up and down with a judgmental glare that made most boys shrivel. Bobby may have been a sniveling weirdo, but he held her gaze.

“You can walk me in,” Hilary said.

WHEN HE SAW THE SCARECROWS, DAVID HAD
known. Somewhere ahead was Gonzalo’s old Scrap hideout. Early in the quarantine, Gonzalo had taken up residence in the third-floor senior lounge after most of the seniors had died. He’d cobbled together scarecrows and placed them throughout the hall leading to the lounge, to creep out anybody who was thinking about wandering down this dead end. They’d done the trick. It appeared that no one had set foot in this dusty hall in a long time.

David held Lucy’s hand tight as they wove between the haggard figures. A plumbing pipe armature kept each one upright. The bodies were made out of clothes stuffed with trash, and the stinking sentinels were arranged in a staggered zigzag down the narrow hall. Each had clumps of real, white hair obscuring its featureless face. Once-wet toilet paper, that had dried and wrinkled, covered the floor. The
crusty, weaving mini mountain ranges were stained with nauseous colors. Dry yellow puddles. Reddish brown splatters that might have been blood. The paper had been torn up in places by dark grimy footprints. Tufts, clippings, strands, and tangles of white hair were dried into the paper, and they crunched underfoot like winter grass. The place stank, the walls were upholstered in a thick fabric of dust as if there were flypaper underneath. All of it made you wonder what kind of monster would choose to live at the end of this path. And then you’d see gigantic Gonzalo with a fire ax clutched in his paws. And you wouldn’t think past that. You’d turn and run for dear life.

It showed a side of his old friend that David had never had a chance to see. When Gonzalo made a gesture it was always big, but day to day, he’d never been generous with his emotions. This place, however, was entirely his creation. It was a glimpse inside his mind—when he’d been just a kid trapped in school who’d wanted to go home. Even the big guy had been scared at some point and these sculptures had been his protectors and his company. Gonzalo had joined up with David because he’d needed a family, and in the Loners he’d found it, and he’d found love with Sasha. That had been why all the Scraps converged on him that day on the quad, why they’d fled the safety of their own hiding places. They’d wanted a family too. He felt proud to have given them that, and grateful that they’d gotten him out of McKinley alive.