They all looked hungry. Especially the three that Lucy had suddenly realized were eyeing her. Two boys and a girl. The bigger boy wore a dead teacher’s suit. The smaller boy wore only sneakers, black gloves, and white briefs that were gray with filth. The girl had dreads. All three were getting to their feet. They walked toward her.
Lucy tried to stand up and she got dizzy. Pressure pounded in her head and she had to lean against the wall to not fall over. The big guy in the dead teacher’s suit motioned to the other two, and they each ran to a doorway. They were blocking the exits. The boy in his underwear twitched as he clapped his hands together in quick, joyous little bursts. The girl spun in a circle and choked herself with both hands.
Lucy tried to call out to the big one in the suit as he walked toward her. No! she wanted to scream, but her voice was only a rasp. He mimicked her, his white gumball eyes blasting open as he yawned a silent scream. Branched veins pulsed in his neck and down his forehead. His movements were slow, but his whole body shook with tension. Lucy hurt, her stomach, her hips, her chest, her face, and her soul. She knew she didn’t have enough strength to contend with him.
She pushed off the wall and tried to slip past him, but something jerked on her ankle and stopped her short. She looked down to find a black nylon cord tied tightly to her ankle. The cord’s other end extended through a hole in the wall and knotted around a plumbing pipe. Next to the hole, a piece of toilet paper was stuck to the wall, and written on it in the worst handwriting Lucy had ever seen were the words Be Back Soon. There was a lopsided heart drawn next to the message.
Lucy whipped her head back to see the suit still stomping toward her. She formed her fingers into claws and raised them up, ready to plunge them into his eyes.
A boy wearing a dress over jeans ran into the room, past the girl in the doorway, and shoved the boy in the suit to the ground.
“Stay away from my stuff!” the boy in the dress screamed down at him.
The boy in the suit scurried back, holding his shoulder and grumbling. The boy in the dress turned to Lucy and came walking over. Again, she was sure she was going to die, until he walked past her and picked up a plastic V8 bottle that was one-third full of yellowish liquid. He shook it over his head and bellowed at the others, “Mine!”
When he seemed satisfied that the others weren’t going to try and steal his bottle anymore, the boy in the dress calmed down. He knelt down at Lucy’s side with an entirely different energy. His eyes looked worried, and his movements were gentle.
His dress was a satiny slip that once could’ve been a light lilac, but now was blackened like a mechanic’s rag. One of the straps was broken and that side hung down, exposing his tiny dark nipple. He had a frame as skinny as a shaved rabbit’s, and his skin was covered in red rashes.
He tried to touch her knee and she jerked away. He frowned a little and pulled a sharpened letter opener out of his pocket. Lucy formed her fingers into claws again. The boy cut the cord around her ankle and put the blade away, setting her free. As he was leaning forward to do it, a glittering gold necklace swung forward that hung around his neck.
Her necklace.
She remembered him. This was the boy from the ruins who had tried to steal her necklace when the Loners were smuggling David out of the school. The chemical-huffing boy who’d said the necklace had belonged to his mother. The broken boy who had confessed that he had escaped the lab that had created the virus, and then tried to hide from the military in this school. The boy who had infected them all.
“Dey scare you?” he said. His voice was scratchy and full of hiss like an old record, his vowels elongated by a strong Southern drawl. “Real sorry ’bout them.”
Lucy stared at the necklace at rest on his pale flesh. It had been a token of Will’s love for her. She was sorry she’d ever let it go, but it didn’t matter now. What she needed to do was get out of here.
“I have to go,” she croaked, and tucked her legs underneath her to stand. Just the intention to move hurt.
He nodded. “Back to your plant room?”
Lucy stared at the boy. The room felt colder and smaller, and he seemed bigger, more dangerous than ever. She swallowed to wet the gravel in her throat.
“What plant room?”
He smiled and revealed a set of teeth like a crumbling housing project.
“Where you live, silly.”
“How do you …”
“I watch you.”
Lucy backed up.
“What do you mean, ‘you watch me’?” she said.
He waved his hands back and forth. “Don’t be scared. Hold on. Just wait here a second. Don’t leave.”
The boy bounded out of the room. Lucy looked around. The Burnout in his underwear had walked away from the other doorway. He was slapping the wall with a heavy metal chain and laughing. The one in the suit was making out with the dread-headed girl. If Lucy was going to run, it had to be now. She pressed her back against the corner of the room and pushed up with her legs. Every inch up brought a new level of pain until she had to stop. Her knees bent inward and knocking, her arms splayed and hunting for some crack to hold on to.
The boy in the dress ran back into the room, and Lucy sunk back down with a sob. He had her scuffed garbage bag in one hand, and Minnie, the hydrangea flower, in the other. The boy sat at the foot of Lucy’s backpack-pile bed. He plopped the garbage bag down between his legs and proceeded to pull out all her stuff.
“You don’t have to leave,” he said with that same big, rotten smile. “I fetched all your things, see?”
Lucy stared at her pathetic pile of things and how the boy was touching them.
“It ain’t safe for you out there,” he went on.
“I can take care of myself,” Lucy mustered.
He nodded as if he agreed with her completely. “You’re all fucked up though. From your fall.”
Fall. Lucy remembered looking down on that pit of trash. Then, a shove and the panic of having nothing under her. Someone had pushed her.
“You,” Lucy said. “Why did you push me?”
The boy shook his head. “No, no. Not me. I’d never. You must’a slipped or somethin’. I’d never.”
She wondered if he’d done anything to her while she was asleep.
“How you gonna get food all fucked up?”
“I—”
He slapped his bony chest. “I can feed you. You’re safe here.”