Ben had told me there were five of them. We had already neutralised one, which meant that there were four left. One of them was here – but what about the others? Ben had thought they were probably watching our houses, which accounted for two more. But what if he was wrong about that? And where the hell was Ben anyway?
If he’d been neutralised, I wondered, would I know?
But I wasn’t ready to think about that yet. I pushed the thought away and tried to decide what to do.
If the forces of order were at the social I couldn’t risk staying here. The best thing to do was make a run for it and try to find somewhere to hide. I longed to go home and jump into bed and pull the covers over my head but I knew it was impossible. If Ben was right, they were already there waiting for me, and when I thought about the long walk home, in the dark, in unfamiliar heels (I’d borrowed Soph’s shoes), I knew it was a bad idea. What if they hunted me down on those dark empty suburban streets where there was no-one around to protect me? I wasn’t ready to take on an agent of order by myself.
Maybe I was better off staying here, where at least there were lights and teachers and safety in numbers. After all, what could they do to me in front of a crowd like that? And anyway, Ben would be here soon. He’d promised.
I was reluctant to leave the safety of the toilet cubicle, but I couldn’t be sure that a toilet door would deter an agent of order, and besides, there was somebody vomiting in the next cubicle. I decided it was time to rejoin the dancing throng.
The toilets were in a separate building outside the gym and so I had to walk past a long row of darkened classrooms to get back to the safety of the gym. I scurried along as quickly as I could, expecting someone to jump out at me from the shadows at any moment. As I passed the last classroom in the row, I felt someone grab my arm. I jerked free with a scream and I felt a crackle like lightning in my fingertips.
‘It’s me,’ Soph said. She seemed jumpy and excitable – even more excitable than usual that is. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you!’ She paused. ‘Meliss, I think your hand’s on fire.’
Blue flames flickered briefly from my fingertips and then died away. I hid my hand behind my back.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘I need your help with something,’ Soph said. ‘I just ran into Misha before and I told her I wanted to talk to Vicky. I told her I wanted to apologise for snogging Ravi but I didn’t want to do it in front of everyone else so I’ve asked her to come and meet me on the oval by the change-rooms.’
‘You’re going to apologise to Vicky Lind?’
Soph gave me a well-what-do-you-think look. ‘No. It’s just an excuse to get her there, and when she comes I want you to blast her. I don’t mind how you do it. I’ll leave that up to you.’
So there it was. I’d known this was where we were going to end up but I’d managed not to come to any sort of decision about what I was going to say when she asked me.
‘Just do this one thing for me and I’ll never ask you for another favour, I promise,’ Soph said.
I stared at her eager face, and a lot of thoughts flashed through my mind in quick succession. The smell of Amanda Dean’s sizzling hair. The possibly limbless Mr Granger. The boy Ben had told me about who ended up a quadriplegic. The spooky vacant expression of the agent of order after we turned his brain into an omelette.
‘Soph,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’
‘But why not? I thought you hated her!’
‘I do.’
‘Then why won’t you do it?’
‘Sorry, Soph, I just can’t,’ I said.
Soph’s face contracted in a spasm of rage, hurt and disappointment. ‘I thought you were my friend!’ she said, and turning, she stalked back into the gym.
It was the first time I had ever said no to Soph. I felt as if something was unravelling inside me as I watched her walk away, and for a moment it felt like I was watching her walk out of my life for good, our friendship torn apart by hormones and Vicky Lind and the forces of destruction. But then I remembered the forces of order and safety in numbers and I ran after her into the gym.
I had arrived in time for the presentations. My school doesn’t go in for all those horrifying rituals they have in movies where the best-looking people are judged and voted on and then the winners are crowned, as if they needed any extra affirmation. We do, however, have prizes for the organisationally-minded kids who’d been on the organising committee, and when they’d been thanked and gonged, there were still more prizes to be given out. Lucky door prizes. Prizes for the best dancer from each year. Prizes for the worst dancer. And prizes for the best-dressed.
Do you really need me to tell you which girl from our year got the best-dressed prize?
As I watched from the back of the room, Vicky Lind’s name was announced and she gave this completely fake-sounding cry of surprise. Misha and Lacey screamed and hugged her, and then Vicky went racing up onto the rostrum to receive her prize.
‘Congratulations, Vicky,’ said our principal, Mrs Vatsikopoulos, handing her a certificate and a posy of cheap flowers. Vicky accepted them both, but then something very strange happened. As I watched, her face turned white, a white that was almost green, and then she sagged forward and vomited. But it wasn’t just ordinary vomit. It was brilliant green bile.
The people in the crowd started to scream – especially the ones at the front who’d been spattered with acidy sputum – as long ribbons of green and yellow saliva dripped from Vicky’s mouth and her eyes rolled up into her head and she swayed and crashed onto the rostrum with her skirt rucked up around her undies.
Misha and Lacey ran up onto the stage to support her, crying and shrieking. Mrs Vatsikopoulos yelled for someone to call an ambulance. I saw Soph looking for me in the crowd, and when she saw me she gave me a stealthy smile. I realised, with horror, that she thought that this must be my doing. It wasn’t me! I wanted to cry.
But then I remembered that day in the mall, when Vicky had been such a cow, and I’d thoughtlessly fired a blast at her. At the time I’d assumed it hadn’t worked, but now I realised it had worked all too well. I had done something to Vicky, something horrible, and now the whole school was seeing the results.
But before I could pursue this question any further I felt a hand grip my elbow. ‘Mind if I have a word?’ murmured a voice in my ear.
I turned, and my heart fell through the floor. It was the dad from the drinks stand.
The Forces of Order
I’ll scream,’ I warned.
The dad smiled at me. ‘I’ll tell them I caught you with this.’ And he produced a hipflask which sloshed when he shook it. ‘Now come outside like a good girl and there won’t be any trouble.’
He steered me firmly to the door and out into the darkness. I went with him without a struggle. A strange feeling was creeping over me, a stultifying sleepiness which seemed to be radiating from the place where his hand touched my arm. Was this how the forces of order worked? By spreading a stupefying calm? It reminded me of the way I felt after I let someone talk me into doing a 20-kilometre fun run – just climbing out of bed the next day was like trying to walk through treacle. My eyes were droopy, my head ached, I couldn’t think straight. I wanted nothing more than to sink down onto the ground and have a little snooze.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ I asked.
‘Well, obviously I’m going to neutralise you,’ the dad said. ‘But first I’d like to have a quick word.’
I knew I had to try to stay awake – use my powers – do something – but my head felt like it was filling up with soup and I couldn’t seem to feel my powers anymore – or my feet . . .
‘My car’s parked just down here,’ the dad said.
He bipped the car’s remote central locking and I heard the door locks spring open.
‘In you get,’ he said.
And I really think I might have actually climbed in and stretched out on the back seat and gone to sleep forever
if I hadn’t suddenly been jolted awake by the sound of sirens. An ambulance came screaming up the road, lights flashing, sirens blasting, heading for the gym. Me and the dad had to jump out of the way of it, and in the sudden shock, the dad let go of my arm.
The woolliness vanished. The soup was gone from my head. My powers were back, sparkling and blazing, and I realised I was in mortal danger. I ripped Soph’s shoes from my feet, grabbed them by the ankle straps, and took off into the darkness, running as fast as my bare feet could take me. I zipped past the art rooms, doubled round the back of the music room and ran out onto the darkness of the oval with the dad from the forces of order in hot pursuit. He may have looked like a paunchy old middle-aged guy but he could turn on the speed when he needed to.
‘You can’t outrun me, Melissa,’ he shouted. ‘This is pointless.’
Pointless it may have been but stopping didn’t seem like an option either so I kept running, and as I ran I began to feel a surge of energy building up inside me. My spine tingled. My hands were on fire.
‘Forget it, Melissa,’ the dad yelled, his breath ragged.
‘Your powers aren’t fully formed yet. You couldn’t possibly defeat me.’
What if he was right? I had no idea what I was doing. And I couldn’t keep running forever. We were most of the way across the oval now. Soon I’d have to jump the fence and start running up the road and that didn’t seem like a good idea. He lunged at me and got so close I could feel his fingertips swish through my hair. The shock of it was like a slap and in my panic I felt a giant shockwave of energy burst out of me.
The effect was immediate. I heard him gasp, and then he let out a strangled moan of pain. I turned, and saw him take a faltering step forward, then sag to his knees, puffing and moaning and gasping, clutching his chest. It looked like he was having a heart attack.
Was this for real, I wondered, or was he just faking it so I’d try to help him and then he’d get the snooze grip on me again? I watched him writhe on the ground for a moment. It didn’t look like he was faking it.
‘Don’t try to get up,’ I warned him. ‘I’ll get help.’
I ran for the gym, where the ambulance officers were loading Vicky Lind onto a stretcher.
‘There’s a guy on the oval,’ I said, ‘I think he’s having a heart attack!’
A teacher who knew first aid hurried off with one of the ambulance officers to have a look, while the other one stayed with Vicky. Hordes of interested students followed them, hoping to see more sickness and suffering. This was definitely going to go down in school history as the most exciting social ever.
Music still boomed out from the gym, but I couldn’t quite face going back in there yet. In a daze, I kept walking, looking for somewhere dark and quiet where I could sit and think about what had happened.
I had taken on my first agent of order, alone, and won. I wasn’t prepared for this. I hadn’t believed it was possible. Hadn’t Ben said my powers wouldn’t work against an agent of order? But they had.
Of course, it was possible my powers had nothing to do with it – it was possible the guy didn’t get enough exercise and ate too much chocolate pudding and this was the furthest and fastest he’d had to run in years and his fat-clogged arteries had just given up the ghost. But it seemed like too big a coincidence that he’d keeled over so dramatically right after I unleashed the forces of destruction on him. I felt an odd little tremor of excitement, mixed with fear. If I was capable of doing this, what else was I capable of?
But then I began to wonder – why hadn’t the agent neutralised me straightaway? He could have done it easily, but he hadn’t. He’d said he wanted to talk to me first. Talk to me about what? I didn’t know anything. But then I realised – maybe he was planning to keep me prisoner until Ben showed up, so he could neutralise us both. Which had to mean Ben hadn’t been neutralised!
But if he hadn’t been neutralised, then where was he?
I was distracted by the sound of voices. Someone was coming towards my secret spot in the darkness of the shelter shed.
‘What about here?’ said a girl’s voice.
‘No – somewhere private,’ said a boy’s voice.
‘This is private enough. What did you want to talk about?’
I knew that voice. That was Soph’s voice. I listened intently, trying to work out who she was talking to.
‘We had fun last weekend, didn’t we?’ the boy said.
It was Ravi. I was surprised, listening to him in the darkness, by how high his voice was. I’d never noticed before.
‘Monday wasn’t so good,’ Soph said.
‘Ah – yeah. Look, that was Vicky’s fault. She’s so possessive, you know? Acts like she owns me.’
‘You could have said hello to me. You cut me dead.’
‘Hey, but that wasn’t about you. You know how I feel about you.’ Suddenly his voice sounded like honey.
‘Do I?’
‘I thought I made that pretty clear on Saturday.’
I could just see their two silhouettes in the darkness. Ravi had reached out and was doing that stroking her hair thing that people do on TV.
‘Do you think I would’ve kissed you like that if I wasn’t serious about you?’ Ravi asked.
‘I guess not,’ Soph said.
‘Then why are you being like this?’ Ravi asked.
Soph had no answer to that. Ever so slowly I saw him lean in and begin to kiss her – and she kissed him back. I didn’t know where to look. Please don’t take things any further, I silently begged. There were some things I just didn’t need to see. But then voices came echoing along the road and they broke apart.
‘Come on,’ Ravi said, and taking her by the hand, he led her away into the darkness.
Am I a terrible friend that I didn’t instantly rejoice at Soph’s good fortune? All her dreams were finally coming true and I know I should have been happy for her. But something about it felt wrong, and after a moment I realised what it was. Wasn’t Ravi supposed to be going out with Vicky Lind? And hadn’t she just been carted off in an ambulance? Why, then, was Ravi hitting on Soph when he should have been sitting in an ambulance holding Vicky’s hand?
Two half-pissed guys stumbled past, roaring, and I realised it was time I got back to the gym. I put Soph’s shoes back on and headed for the dance floor.
The ambulance had departed and the dancing had resumed, but the room was buzzing with gossip.
‘Did you see what happened to Vicky?’ Sarah asked, when I hurried up.
‘Wasn’t it disgusting?’ Emily said with relish, before adding, ‘Poor thing.’
‘Do you know what happened to her?’ I asked.
‘I heard she was drunk.’
‘I heard she was on drugs.’
‘It was like something out of The Exorcist! Maybe she’s possessed!’
‘Let’s dance,’ I said.
I wanted to be safely hidden in the crowd just in case any more agents of order came looking for me. We formed a circle and began to dance, but with all I had to think about – looking for Soph, worrying about the agents, wondering where Ben was, trying to work out what the hell I’d done to Vicky Lind – it was kind of hard to lose myself in the music.
The song we were dancing to ended and a slower one came on. My friends and I all stopped and looked at each other. This was the moment I’d been dreading: the slow dance. I looked around, wondering if this was the moment when the clinching started, and I saw the rest of the dancers begin to wonder the same thing. And then it began: one couple twined together, and then another, and another. Those of us without partners were left standing around like lost socks at the bottom of the laundry basket. I was about to suggest we all went to get a drink, and then –
‘Who’s that?’ exclaimed Mina.
I turned to see who had attracted her attention, and my heart leaped in my chest.
Ben was standing in the doorway of the gym, searching the dancing throng. He was wearing a white tuxedo shirt wit
h the sleeves rolled up and a different pair of jeans, slightly less faded and tattered than his usual ones. He was even (I discovered later) wearing shoes.
He spotted me just after I spotted him and began moving through the crowd towards me. My friends all stared, open-mouthed, as he came up to me.
‘Hey,’ he said. He had that vivid, wide-awake, on-the-prowl look he’d had when we neutralised the first agent. You could almost feel the energy pulsing off him in waves.
‘You made it,’ I said, although my voice was a little choked in my throat. ‘What –’
Before I could begin asking him questions he drew me into a clinch. I was so astonished I forgot to breathe.
‘One of them was waiting for us outside the school,’ he murmured, his breath hot against my ear. ‘He almost took me out, but I managed to neutralise him. The other three are going to be looking for us so we’ve got to get somewhere safe. Now.’
I was finding it hard to pay attention to what he was saying while his smell – male, sporty, a little sweaty, mixed with a strong, spicy aftershave – was filling my nostrils.
‘One of them was here,’ I whispered back. ‘I took care of him.’
‘How?’
‘I think I gave him a heart attack.’
He looked at me, and his crooked smile made his eyes scrunch up in the corners. ‘Good for you,’ he said.
But the smile quickly faded. ‘We’d better get out of here,’ he said.
He released me from the clinch and I looked at my friends. Their eyes were just about falling out of their heads with astonishment.
‘We’ve got to go,’ I said.
Ben took my hand and we hurried out of the gym together. My friends all watched us go. If I made it through the night, I was going to get a lot of calls tomorrow morning.
‘This way,’ Ben said, and began hurrying me towards the back gate.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked.
‘Get to the car. Drive to a safe place. Hit them with everything we’ve got. If there’s two of us and two of them then we’re in with a chance.’
Melissa, Queen of Evil Page 12