“I’ve been waiting for this,” Lark said.
“Wait. No, you have it wrong.”
“Did you kill Gates?” Lark frothed.
“Yes, but—” Lucy said.
“Then how do I have it wrong?”
Lark flashed her eyes as if to dare Lucy to speak.
“Because …,” Lucy said, swallowing hard to wet her dry throat. “Gates wasn’t who you thought he was. He snapped. He killed your friend Pruitt.”
The other Saints eyed each other with doubt. By the way they were reacting they might already have suspected that fact, or known it. Lark slapped Lucy in the face with the heel of her palm. Lucy’s ear buzzed. Her cheek flared hot.
“Gates was a hero,” Lark whispered.
The Saints nodded, until Lark pulled out a buck knife. The blade had seen heavy use, its finish was dull, and the cutting edge was bent and wiggly. Lark pressed the misshapen blade into the softness of Lucy’s neck.
“Gates was my friend,” Lark said. Her voice chugged like a steam engine. Tears streamed down her cheek. “I loved him.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. She meant it. She could feel the first drip of blood roll hot down her neck. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry won’t bring him back.”
“Take it easy, Lark,” one of the Saints said. They were looking to each other now, wondering who would stop her. This was apparently more than they’d bargained for.
“He’d want me to do this,” Lark said. “You know he’d want revenge. We owe it to him.”
Lark locked eyes with Lucy again and tensed her wrist. Now was the time to fight back, this was the moment, and yet she didn’t. Something inside her gave way. A long straining muscle finally went slack. She allowed an idea to enter her mind, and it shocked her how amenable she was to it. The pain could all stop right here. The knife could end it.
The thunder of approaching footsteps filled the silence. All heads turned to peer at the hall’s end where the ceiling light worked and the area was bathed in a bright light.
A boy in a gas mask ran around the corner.
A clamoring crowd was right on his heels. Lucy focused on the prey, but the masked boy ran past the lit section and into the dark belly of the hallway, becoming one with the darkness. She watched the crowd follow. A constant river of faces, each defined in brilliant light for a brief moment before slipping into the black. They were mostly Geeks. Lucy felt the Saints’ grip on her relax. They were clearly as dumbfounded as she was. Saints whipped out their phones. Nine smartphones shone their wan light toward the oncoming stampede, illuminating nothing, but casting a pale glow that only made it harder to see, like a film of milk glazed over the scene.
The masked boy burst into the light from the open bathroom, colliding with a few Saints, and then dashed past. In the second that he was fully illuminated, Lucy could see right into his mask.
Lucy saw an eye patch.
18
THE SAINTS TOPPLED LIKE CANDLESTICK PINS as the rushing crowd barreled down the hallway. One Saint held onto Lucy longer than the others, but the current of bodies knocked him down, too. He almost pulled Lucy to the ground with him. When the cotton of her shirt slipped out of his grip, she burst forward like a sprinter out of the starter blocks. Lucy lost herself in the confusion of the speeding mob.
It couldn’t be.
But she’d seen it. She knew she had. In that blur of a moment, she’d seen a black eye patch. She wasn’t sure about the guy’s face. When she tried to summon a mental image of the face she’d glimpsed, it was a hazy and shifting blob. But who else could it be? Who else would come back into this school? It was the scenario Lucy’d dreamed about, but it had been so long since she’d had those dreams because it was impossible. David was dead. He’d been dead for months. He hadn’t dug himself out of the grave. Zombies weren’t real. David wasn’t Jesus. It had to have been someone else with an eye patch.
Grunts. Heavy breathing. Screeching sneakers. Lucy fought her way toward the front of the pack. The mob hooked around a corner, past a melted plastic display case full of black-and-white photos of old school plays. She realized her aches and pains had evaporated.
She saw David. Or whoever it was. For a flash, she saw his back before he rushed around another dark corner thirty feet ahead. She lusted to grab this guy by the shoulders, whip him around, and stare through that mask. Her mind had become very clear. For the first time in weeks, life didn’t seem so futile. Gone was her inner conviction that every road would end down for her. If David was alive and he was here, then everything would be all right. She knew it would, if he was here. The last time she had felt truly safe had been with David, and she had never allowed herself to admit that fact until now, because it was too sad, because it could never happen again, because he was dead. Now, he might be alive, with a fifty-foot lead, doing his best to get the hell away from her.
The kid who might be David slammed into a door frame ahead and then scurried into a classroom. Lucy and the mob rammed toward the classroom and clogged the doorway. Stuck inside the knot of bodies in the doorway, Lucy spotted a pair of legs hanging out of a fractured hole in the classroom’s ceiling. The legs swayed and kicked as their owner climbed up a wobbling orange extension cord that hung down through the hole.
Lucy slipped out of the knot of bodies, just as it was starting to pop through the doorway. She was the first to grab the extension cord. It swung with her weight, and the Geeks trailing her tumbled down as they grabbed for the cord and missed.
The masked boy’s feet were already too high to grab, but she would’ve if she could’ve. She hoisted herself up with a tremendous pull. She felt the cord jerk with new weight below her. The Geeks were getting a grip now.
The extension cord was knotted every two feet with handholds like a rope swing. Above, she saw that there was another hole hacked through the second-floor ceiling, and the knotted extension cord hung from the third-floor ceiling like a gymnasium climbing rope. The masked boy didn’t look down. Lucy climbed, gripping knots in her hands and clamping them between the insteps of her feet. The climb was hard. It didn’t help that kids were fighting each other to be next up the rope, and she swore she could feel someone tugging on her clothes.
Lucy breached the hole in the ceiling. Her head was now on the second floor. The walls of this second-floor classroom were papered with photographs of grass and foliage from textbooks. There was a picnic blanket laid out in the middle of the room with a cracked acoustic guitar on top of it. The boy in the mask was waist-high into the third floor and climbing. She saw the bottom of his boots above her head and wondered whether those were the kind of shoes David would choose if he were on the outside.