by Adam Cesare
The sheriff returned to the cruiser, ignoring Cole until he could no longer take his screaming.
“Shut your mouth, Hill, or I’ll call off the rest of the plans, drag you onto the side of the road, and put a bullet in your head myself.”
Twenty-Four
“When that tweaker drove up, God,” Matt said, his mouth next to Quinn’s ear, “I thought we were done for. Thought he was going to ruin everything.”
Quinn’s hearing felt . . . wet, like she’d just been in a wave pool and still had water rattling around in her skull.
“Couldn’t believe it,” Ronnie said, a couple of feet away. “What are the odds? Nobody drives that road. That was quick thinking, though, baby. You saved us.”
“I . . . ,” Matt said, suddenly bashful. Quinn could almost feel his blush, despite the world wavering, threatening to crash back into complete darkness. “Thank you.”
It sounded like he didn’t get a lot of compliments. Least of all from Ronnie.
“How should we do it?” Matt asked.
“I say we change her first. To make things easier.”
“Oh def,” Matt replied.
What were they talking about? Change her into what? Matt’s grip slackened and he readjusted Quinn’s body, hand on her ass, digging in for purchase and boosting her up, balancing her top half over his shoulder. It would have been simpler for him if he were taller or she were shorter.
“Hey, I see that hand,” Ronnie said. “Don’t be a creep.”
Pffft. Matt blew a raspberry, the sound so sudden and loud Quinn had to stop herself from flinching. So long as Ronnie and Matt thought she was unconscious, she was inclined to keep it that way.
“Look. If you want to go all women’s lib, you can carry her,” Matt said. “Gimme the gun. We can switch. She’s heavier than she looks.”
“You’re a child.” Ronnie tsk’d, then changed the subject back. “We can probably just find a rock and bash her skull in. No ballistics there. Makes it look like we got lucky, took one of the clowns down with improvised weapons.”
“Yeah. That’d earn us some hero points, too.”
“Don’t know how many hero points we’ll be getting . . .” Ronnie trailed off. “We didn’t really save anyone.”
“Well, I mean, we saved each other. Isn’t that important?”
“Important,” Ronnie said, a slight giggle, the fucking psychopath. “Important and romantic.”
Quinn kept her eyes closed, but she could hear that they were stepping out of the cornfield, into the clearing. The strong smell of burning confirmed it for her.
“Whoa,” Matt said.
“Yeah. Not exactly according to plan. Silo’s fucking gone. Who could have seen that coming? Dunne’s going to be pissed, but, the way I see it, this does nothing but help us. We’re—careful!”
Matt tripped, then caught himself. Quinn fought the instinct to grab onto him.
“Ugh, gross,” Ronnie said. And Quinn couldn’t help it, her curiosity was too strong. She cracked open an eye, trying to keep her lashes knit in case Ronnie was looking at her.
There, in the dirt, Janet’s dead face stared up at Quinn.
Matt either hadn’t seen the body or had tried to step over it and slipped in the girl’s blood. He kicked her head, rolling it over so that it followed them, was still wobbling slightly, gauzy dead pupils locked with Quinn as she looked down from over his shoulder.
“That’s fucked up,” Matt said, his voice losing something, no longer playful, undeniably disturbed.
“I know, babe, but that could have been us. If we didn’t choose the right side of history. They’ll make it worth it, though.”
Quinn closed her eyes again, not wanting to see any more horrors as they crossed the clearing.
“What do you think happened to her dad?” Matt asked.
“Whose dad?”
“Hers. Janet’s.”
“Stepdad,” Ronnie corrected.
“Like that makes it okay,” Matt said. “Last time I saw him, this one was shooting at him.”
“Oh please. She wasn’t shooting at anything.” Ronnie paused. “He’s probably back at Baypen, waiting for the delivery. He saw we had everything under control. No thanks to this bitch.” Quinn felt the butt of the rifle pressed into her thigh.
If she’d done anything to make Ronnie Queen’s night a little more difficult, she was proud.
Quinn tried to focus, parse what had just been said. Janet’s stepfather was one of the clowns? Was he the one with the machete who’d survived the silo blast? The thought gave Quinn a shooting pain over her left temple, a vein there throbbing, feeling like it would burst at any moment, killing her. Or maybe the one with the chainsaw? He could have been any of them, frankly. What did it matter—they were all fucking nuts.
Matt came to a stop.
“If we lay her here,” Matt explained, “it’ll be like we surprised her while she was chopping up the bodies.”
“You’re fucking sick,” Ronnie replied. “I love it.”
With that, Matt Trent hoisted Quinn over his shoulder. She would have had all the wind knocked out of her on impact, if her fall hadn’t been cushioned by something soft.
The back of Quinn’s neck was wet. Her left leg was on grass, but her right was up on something, knee propped on something squishy. She tried to hold still.
“So,” Matt said. “You giving her your suit or . . . what?”
“They’re the same size. Why don’t you take yours off?”
Quinn could smell cooked meat. She kept her eyes shut, tried not to tremble, tried to hold the terror and the sobs in.
They were standing over her, arguing about who would strip off their Frendo costume so they could put it on Quinn, framing her, and Quinn was lying on . . .
She could feel wetness, cold and tacky in the night air, under her hands.
Bodies!
Matt had tossed her onto a pile of bodies! All in different states of dismemberment, some hacked to death by Janet Murray’s stepfather.
“Look, she’s moving.”
Quinn fought the strong urge to open her eyes, see what was around her. The image couldn’t have been worse than what she was imagining.
“Shoot her.”
“No. No more gunshots. Quick. Find a rock.”
It was now or never. Matt and Ronnie thought Quinn was coming to, didn’t know she was already here.
Quinn threw herself toward where Ronnie’s voice had been. She didn’t open her eyes until she was fully upright, stomach muscles crunching and burning with the sudden activity.
The night was still dark. She caught the outline of Ronnie, standing in front of her, holding the rifle.
Her rifle.
Quinn roared one hand to the wood of the stock, one hand to where Ronnie had her fingers already wrapped around the grip and trigger.
“Oh shit!” Matt yelled.
Quinn grappled with Ronnie, their faces getting close, while Matt tried to get out of the way of the barrel of the rifle.
Quinn smiled, feeling the blood of her dismembered classmates dribbling down her back. Trying to work her sore mouth to speak.
“What?” Ronnie yelled.
Matt had one hand on Quinn’s shoulder and the other wrapped around the barrel of the gun—a cartoon move, like he’d be able to catch the bullet after it’d been fired.
“I said,” Quinn started between clenched teeth: “Trigger discipline.”
She mashed Ronnie’s finger down.
The bullet tore through Matt’s hand, sending the boy spinning away. He landed facedown on the pile of bodies where Quinn had been, seconds ago.
For a moment, Quinn thought—hoped—he was dead, but then he began to grip at his ear, screaming. Or . . . what was left of his ear, the flaps of it dangling down his exposed skull. Fresh blood shot from the side of Matt’s face, visibly darkening as it hit the air, and splashed onto the dead grass and bodies, oxidizing in the open eyes of the corpses.
&nb
sp; “Ayyyeeeeeee!” Matt screamed, the sounds he was making barely human.
Seeing Matt, Ronnie began to scream, too. Her eyes were frantic. “Matt, holy shit! Are you okay?” she asked.
Matt didn’t answer in words, and Ronnie still wouldn’t give up the rifle.
Ronnie slipped in a black, coagulated puddle, and seizing the chance, Quinn lifted up an elbow and brought it down on Ronnie’s chin.
Ronnie’s head cocked back, her neck like a spring, but still the girl’s eyes were ferocious and lucid, her grip on the gun still tight.
Fuck it. Quinn needed to get out of here while she had the chance.
Quinn gambled that Ronnie didn’t have many rounds left and that she’d been lying about being a great shot.
With both Ronnie and Matt sprawled below her, reaching for each other on the pile of bodies, Quinn broke into a run. She staggered, trying her best to remember which way they’d come from and which direction was north.
Behind her, Ronnie screamed. It was a guttural sound of betrayal, the screech of someone who’d been cheated, didn’t think that life was fair. Someone who seemed ignorant to the fact that she’d condemned all of her friends. Damned them, sold them out, killed them.
Quinn pumped her arms.
Fifteen feet until she was in the clear.
Even with a head start, some distance, she could hear the oiled click-clack as Ronnie advanced the rifle’s bolt.
“Don’t shoot!” Matt yelled to Ronnie. There was an uneasy second where Quinn thought Ronnie would ignore him.
Quinn crashed into the field, but not before hearing Matt say:
“We’ll catch her. There’s nowhere for her to go.”
Twenty-Five
After a silence of what was probably minutes, but felt like hours, Cole Hill asked, “Why?”
At first Sheriff Dunne didn’t acknowledge the question, but then he reached up, adjusted his rearview mirror so they could look at each other through the mesh partition, and spoke.
“For the laughs? Isn’t that what you’ve said in your videos?”
Cole crossed his arms, wouldn’t give Dunne the satisfaction of a response.
“‘Why?’ I’ve been asking you the same thing for years, Cole. I know your father has, too. But you never seem able to give either of us a good reason.”
“Don’t talk to me like you’re—” Cole started, but Dunne held two fingers up to stop him.
“If you want me to tell it, let me tell it. If not, we’ll be there soon. You can try to piece it all together yourself . . . in your final moments.”
Cole nodded. Hearing he was going to die didn’t have much of an impact. Didn’t shake him like Dunne probably thought it would. Cole had already assumed that this was how it ended.
“Now you probably have some choice words for me and my . . . brothers and sisters out there. You’d call us murderers. Psychopaths.” Dunne enunciated every part of the last word. Sy-co-paths. “What happened tonight will haunt me for the rest of my life. See, people from my generation, we have what they call empathy.”
Cole scoffed. People of his generation. History wasn’t Cole’s best subject, but he could remember a thing or two that Dunne’s generation had handled poorly.
Dunne continued:
“Why do it? Well, first there’s the ideological element.”
“Well, you’ve got to stand for something, right?” Cole asked.
“Shut it. I came up with this part. This is my gospel. I’d been thinking about it long before Victoria, but after what happened, after what you and your friends did to her . . .” Dunne paused, waiting for a denial, but Cole wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. If any two people in town knew how much Cole regretted that night at the reservoir and what happened to his sister . . . well, it was Cole and his father, but Sheriff George Dunne was a close third. He’d been the one to investigate the accident.
“What I realized was that you and all your little friends who’d been out there that night, even the ones not directly responsible, are bad. Whether you was born bad, or made bad by your phones, by the internet, by the music, by social media, I dunno.” Dunne said the last phrase with complete disgust. “But I’m not blaming those things, because what does the cause matter? It’s the result that matters.
“Way I like to explain it . . . you and your friends are a blighted crop.” He motioned out the window, into the darkness of the cornfields to either side of them. “That’s why we didn’t have a choice. If a farmer has fungus or beetles or any other scourge, it spreads if you don’t take steps to eliminate it. Cut and cull. Root out the problem. Burn the whole harvest if you have to, lose the crop to save the land. Then let the field lie fallow for a couple seasons.”
“So you’re going to wipe out an entire generation of the town, because, what—you think we don’t respect you enough? As if your generation gives a fuck about us. Everything was better way back when, but when we try to tell you how things are now, you don’t want to hear it. Make Kettle Springs great again . . . You’re not only a psychopath, you’re dumb as shit,” Cole said.
“Well, now you’re just being rude and proving my point,” Dunne said, surprising Cole by turning, the asphalt under them switching to the grit and bumps of dirt road. “Which gets us to part two, the practical part of the problem. The why and hows of the solution.”
Cole wasn’t sure where they were driving, but he knew they weren’t headed back to town.
“Now on the practical side of things, you ask, ‘How could you get someone to buy into what needs to be done?’ and I’ll admit, that was harder. But you and your friends helped.
“The stunt at Founder’s Day—that was what did you all in. Got people thinking we needed to act fast. For months we’d been bringing everyone together—everyone who we thought would listen and had a part to play. We called it the Kettle Springs Improvement Society. Didn’t tell them everything at once and didn’t tell everyone everything, but why do that? You’d scare them off. Even as we did it, it scared off Dr. Weller. He was one of our most vocal supporters, early on, but he threatened to turn rat. Which was a hiccup, but we fixed it. We fixed it together.”
“So you don’t only murder children, is what you’re saying.”
Dunne turned back to face him, the car wobbling.
“Stop actin’ like you’re children. You fight and fuck and drink. You are not children. You grew up too fast.” He paused. “Maybe that’s the cause.”
Dunne turned back to face the road, got himself and the wheel under control.
“But convincing the town that we needed to cull was not as hard as you’d think. I mean, we didn’t say it right away like that. You can’t say it all yourself. It has to seem like their idea. So you nudge. You tell people they’re right, tell ’em what they want to hear, you listen—really listen, not pretend listen—but then the whole time you’re doing that listening, you’re pushing the boundaries forward. Reshaping morality. Drawing a new line in the sand while nobody else is watching, then wiping away the old one. And the whole time you know . . . You know where it’s all leading.”
“Killing a bunch of high school kids at a party,” Cole said, simplifying.
“Don’t say it like that! Don’t make it sound like we planned it that way. The party was just . . . convenient. We knew where and when and that all your . . . social circle would be there. It was the perfect opportunity to save our town.” Dunne was proud of himself.
He smiled back at Cole, teeth glinting in the rearview mirror.
“You’ll never get away with it,” Cole said. “All those deaths; all those people involved. Many of them even dumber than you are.”
“But that’s the brilliance of it, son. You seen the news lately? No one’s going to doubt what a troubled, heartbroken teen could do. When armed.”
“Wait, wait,” Cole shouted. “You’re going to try to pin this on me?”
“You’ll be saving the town, Cole. We’ll make it look like a suicide. You and that new g
irl and the Vance boy. That’s why we used crossbows and chainsaws to cut down on the ballistic evidence. But I think once I get back out there and start making an official report, I’ll find you three presented us with more evidence, not less.”
“Quinn was our accomplice? Are you fucking nuts? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It never does. These senseless crimes.”
“We barely know her. Nobody’s going to believe that. You assholes are going to jail. I mean, the ones we didn’t kill . . . ,” Cole said, leaning forward.
And then without warning, Dunne stomped on the brakes. Cole’s face collided with the mesh partition.
“You didn’t kill anyone, Cole. Not tonight. So, please, don’t be a tough guy. Got it?”
“Fuck off,” Cole whispered, wiping the blood from his newly split lip.
Dunne resumed driving but more slowly, the road narrowing now.
“But why not the new girl? Three people doing the killing is more believable than just one. Isn’t it?” Dunne asked. It was like he was legitimately asking for Cole’s input, his help shoring up his rickety alibi. “The love triangle. Trudy thought of that piece of it. The Maybrook girl, she’s only been here for, what, four days? That’s long enough. Romeo and Juliet only knew each other for what? Three? This is practically the same thing.”
Cole wasn’t going to point out that was fiction. And that Romeo and Juliet hadn’t beheaded anyone with a circular saw.
The sheriff continued musing, almost to himself. “I suggested we have her kill her dad, too. Because these thrill killers usually do that anyway. It was the stress of moving, leaving her friends behind.”
“You know the thing that gets me?” Cole said. “How you pretend to care. Even in your insane way, you pretend to care. You’re all so worried about what’s wrong with the kids, when you’re the ones selling us guns, telling us times were better when men were men, pretending that global warming is a hoax, and turning hate into a team sport. I mean, yeah, you have taken it all a step further, sure, but it’s not like anyone over the age of fifty has ever really given a shit about us. You guys may be homicidal lunatics, but, hey, at least you’re being honest about how you wish we were dead.”