Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

“We might be dead, Webster. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do with ourselves.”

  “So what do you want to do with yourself, Dreamcote?” Jana tried out his last name for the first time. It seemed right since he chose to call her Webster most of the time. “Cure cancer?”

  “Something like that,” Mars confessed.

  “Really?” Jana stopped walking.

  “Well, sort of,” he said. “If finding a cure for cancer is saving lives, then that’s what I want to do.”

  “Save lives?” Jana was surprised. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know Mars wanted to save lives?

  “Okay then, one life. I want to save one life.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “I’m looking,” Mars confessed.

  “You’re looking for someone to save?” This didn’t make any sense to her.

  They were walking again.

  “Okay, tell me quick, what do you want to remember?” Mars asked. “Say it out loud. You’ll forget little things once we’re back in school.”

  “I don’t know . . . I . . .” Jana was confused. There was nothing she could think of she would want to remember because, really, she remembered everything.

  “Your hometown,” Mars suggested. “Say it again.”

  “Asheville.”

  “Address?”

  “Thirty-eight Biltmore Forest Road.”

  “Best friend?”

  “Wait,” Jana complained. “This is like trying to memorize lines I already know by heart. It doesn’t . . .”

  “Best friend?” Mars repeated, cutting her off.

  Jana was embarrassed. All she could think to say for the longest time was Michael. She didn’t have any best friends. By not being there all those years, her mother had taught Jana to be her own best friend.

  “Sherry Simmons,” Jana lied. Sherry’s name had simply come to mind. Michael was Jana’s best friend. There was no doubt. Jana knew better than to say it to Mars. He wouldn’t understand.

  “What’s your favorite—”

  Jana cut him off. “Stop it, Mars. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Last one, I promise. Who were you with the night you died?”

  “Michael Haynes, Nathan Mills, Sherry Simmons,” she recited. “Okay, that’s it.”

  “What does her dad do for a living?”

  “Locksmith. Hey, you said ‘last one’ already.”

  The bus waited. Mars and Jana approached from behind.

  An open jeep full of jerky-looking boys was parked across the street from the bus. Mars’s gait stiffened when he saw them. He hurried his step, reaching for Jana’s hand as he stepped off the curb. The bus door opened to the street. She gave him her hand and stepped along quickly to keep up. Jana tasted strawberries with every breath.

  There were four of them in the jeep. And one sitting on the hood. Losers, Jana thought.

  In her old school, they were called streeters. They were the kids who hung out on the street and in parking lots day and night, graduating from skateboards to cars without changing clothes. Streeters looked like they smelled of gasoline. Their graffiti were black tire marks left in streaks in the middle of the street.

  The one who sat on the hood of the open-top vehicle wore a jean jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He held an aluminum softball bat in one hand. As Mars and Jana stepped into the street, he slid from the hood. The others hopped out of the jeep. The one from the driver’s seat stepped quickly in front of the others.

  “Get on the bus,” Mars said.

  “Who are they? What do they want?”

  “Rogues,” Mars told her. “I’ll tell you later. Get on the bus.”

  With a rapid inward curling of his outstretched arm, he pulled Jana to him, then urged her on, letting go of her hand and stepping away from her.

  “Now!” Mars said loudly over his shoulder to Jana.

  Without hesitation, Mars strode into the middle of the pavement to cut off the group of advancing streeters from Jana and the bus. The driver of the jeep was carrying the bat now. He wore a light blue policeman’s uniform shirt with a yellow-and-black shoulder patch. The shirt was without buttons, open entirely from top to bottom.

  Jana did as she was told. She caught a glimpse of the streeter with the bat as she rushed to the bus. He had a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his chest.

  The bus door was open. Jana clambered up the three steps. Her school shoes clattered down the aisle as she flew to a window near the back. Jana fidgeted with the latches and managed to pull the top glass down six inches.

  “Kiss the ground,” she heard the one in front shout at Mars. “You know the drill, you Slider piece of puke. Kiss the ground!”

  Mars kept standing. His arms lifted out slightly from his sides. He bent forward at the waist. Jana could see his shoulders rise and fall with his breathing.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Mars said calmly, loudly. The actor in Jana instantly recognized the change in his voice. He was being street tough in a stage voice. Mars was acting. And he was good. But he should have been running away, she thought. There were five of them.

  There was motion off to the side. Jana looked to her right in time to see that one of the gang had drifted down the street and was flanking Mars. The others closed ranks to Mars’s left. Mars had turned toward them. He was blind to the rushing movement from the right. The kid was running hard, straight at Mars.

  Jana screamed.

  It was too late. The running streeter slammed into Mars in a headfirst dive. The two of them fell sideways onto the pavement. She heard their bodies hit the street.

  Jana screamed again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  MARS’S SHOULDER CRACKED.

  Fully materialized to fight off the Rogues, Mars suffered a blinding pain that bolted through his arm and neck as he hit the pavement. By reflex alone, he managed to keep his head from slamming against the street. He drew up his knees and struggled to catch his breath.

  The kid on top of him spread out like a fat spider working quickly to hold a captured moth in its place. The other Dead School dropouts rushed to join the assault. They pulled his arms and legs, and roughly turned Mars facedown on the street. His mouth and chin were scraped in the process. His lip bled.

  The lead Rogue poked the end of the aluminum bat into the middle of their victim’s back. They had him pinned. The one who had blindsided him took Mars’s wallet out of his back pocket.

  The bat lifted while they rolled him over on his back. They wanted his pants.

  It was tradition for Rogues to pants a Slider when they were lucky enough to catch one on the Planet.

  Jana rushed to the front of the bus.

  She had to help him. She didn’t know how, but she had to do something. Her head spun. She’d tell the streeters that her father was a cop. They’d leave.

  The bus door was closed.

  “Open the door!” she shouted. “They’re killing him!”

  “Can’t,” the driver said, without so much as looking away from the windshield. “The door doesn’t work like that.”

  “I don’t care how it works,” she said. “Open it!”

  Jana backed up a step. With both hands, she pulled the chrome handle next to the driver, the handle that opened the folding door. It wouldn’t budge. Bending her knees, she put her whole weight into pulling the handle. Jana pulled so hard she ended up sitting on the floor of the bus. Her arms trembled from exertion.

  She got to her feet somehow and flung herself at the thick glass of the door. Jana pounded on it with both hands. It was no use.

  His jeans were down over his shoes and off by the time Mars could catch his breath. The pain slowly subsided. He sucked air into his chest, tightening his belly.

  There weren’t enough of them to hold him still. Rogues didn’t have the courage to get the best of him. His body slowly mended. Mars focused. He arched his shoulder against the pavement for leverage.

  With a single thrust, Mars tw
isted sideways. His limbs flexed on solid muscle and in one instant he freed both arms from their clutches and managed to kick a standing Rogue a direct hit just below his knee.

  The Rogues scattered instantly. Except for the leader, who lunged toward Mars. Sunlight flashed from the blade of a small knife he held in his hand. Mars spun over on all fours, scraping his bare knee on the rough pavement of the street. His other knee was flying in a roundhouse backward kick, which caught the Rogue with the knife squarely across his legs. The Rogue fell.

  Somehow, before Mars could drop him, the Rogue had managed to cut Mars’s leg across the flesh of his thigh. The knife blade was razor sharp. It left a deep slash that burned like a hot wire had been drawn across the meat of his upper leg.

  Mars never stopped moving and was on his feet in a flash. The lead Rogue scooted backwards on his bottom as quickly as he could to keep from being kicked in the face. Mars picked up his jeans in one hand, flung them over his shoulder, then quickly snatched up the bat.

  The Rogues backed off in a wave.

  Mars had the moment.

  He pointed the bat at each Rogue in turn until he found the one holding his wallet. Mars held out his free hand, palm up, and flipped his fingers twice. The Rogue stepped forward and placed the wallet on the street in front of Mars. He wore a large steel safety pin in one ear. Mars picked up his wallet and flung the bat away. It clattered to the street.

  Mars was in jockey shorts and shoes. Blood ran down one leg from the cut.

  The Rogues were through. He turned his back on them, stuck his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans, and pulled on his pants. One of the Rogues picked up the bat and walked away. The others followed him to the jeep.

  Jana was saying something out one of the bus windows. As he watched, she left the window and moved frantically to the front of the bus. Mars latched his pants.

  He limped on his cut leg to the door of the bus, and couldn’t help but smile. He’d won. His mouth tasted like blood. His torn lip hurt. And so did his shoulder and leg. It was a really good day on the Planet. He swore he heard a bird singing.

  Mars was back to the bus on time. Jana had feared it would leave without him. She stood at the front of the bus. Mars easily pushed open the door from the outside.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, holding out her hands to him, her arms.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Here,” she said, and Mars took one of her hands. She tugged him up the steps of the bus. “You’re bleeding. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Mars said. “Just glad I wore underwear today.”

  “It’s not funny. They could have killed you!”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something, Webster? I’m already dead.”

  Jana dropped her gaze and stared at the oval of blood that had soaked through the upper leg of his jeans. He felt awfully warm to be dead, she thought. Even when he was beaten up and bleeding, his body was warmer than hers. He could open the bus door and she couldn’t. Mars wasn’t as dead as she was. At least on the Planet, the planet where Michael lived.

  “Well, they could have cut off your ears,” Jana said. “Or something.”

  The bus was moving. She let go of his hand.

  Mars motioned Jana toward the back of the bus. They sat there together so Mars could stretch out his leg.

  Jana couldn’t help herself. She wiped blood from his lower lip with her fingers. It was sticky and cold. She wiped her hand on the front of her blouse. His soft lower lip looked as inviting as ever.

  “Who were those guys?” Jana asked, still breathless from the horror of being trapped on the bus while Mars was being attacked.

  “Rogues,” Mars said. “Dead School dropouts. Rogues are Sliders who leave campus and don’t come back. They’re rebels, I guess. They don’t have long out there. You almost never see the same one twice.”

  “Someone comes by and picks them up?” Jana asked.

  “You might say that.” Mars pushed his hand through his hair. “But everybody gets a chance to change, Webster, even Rogues. Even if it’s only for a day or two.”

  “They don’t look to me like they want to change.”

  “True,” Mars agreed. “Rogues go to all the high school funerals, looking for tagalongs. I should have remembered that.”

  Jana watched people’s houses slide by outside the bus window. She was thinking of Michael and how they were supposed to have a house in Ireland someday and maybe one in southern France. And an apartment in New York.

  She was suddenly ashamed of herself. Mars was hurt and she wasn’t even considering that. She should do something to help him.

  “Take off your pants,” Jana said. “We need to do something with your leg.”

  “It’s okay,” Mars said.

  “They cut you,” she insisted. “You’re bleeding. It’s deep. We need to make a bandage or you’ll bleed to death.”

  “It stopped bleeding,” Mars told her. “It wasn’t that bad at all.”

  Jana stared at the blood-soaked faded jeans stretched over his thigh. The stain looked like it was drying. It wasn’t glistening like before. She wanted to touch it to see for sure, but thought it would hurt him if she did.

  “You’re going to figure this out sooner or later, so you may as well know,” Mars said. “It goes away.”

  “What goes away?”

  “Whatever you do to your body, it doesn’t stick. Sliders and Risers are a little different, but it’s about the same. You can cut your hair, Webster, but that’s about all. It’s not part of your body. I mean, it’s not alive or anything.”

  “We’re not alive,” Jana said.

  “Okay. But we have our bodies for now.”

  “So if I were a Slider, instead of being a spirit who can’t open doors, I could get into fistfights on the Planet and thump people on the head at funerals and . . .”

  “And use a cell phone. And be seen when you want to be seen and heard when you want to be heard. You might be able to do some of this stuff with practice already. Risers don’t usually leave campus on their own, so we don’t know for sure.”

  “Either way, though, I could do more on the Planet as a Slider than a Riser,” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I can do more the way I am now, I want to do it now. I want to leave campus with you tonight. Will you show me how?”

  Mars didn’t answer.

  “Look, I’m not stupid, Mars. I can leave campus on my own if I can leave at all. How does campus work, anyway? I don’t get it.”

  “We’re not supposed to understand everything,” he said. “I don’t understand everything. That’s the whole point of Dead School, Webster. And for some reason that’s where they want us.”

  “You mean the Regents Council?”

  “Davis is telling you more than I realized,” Mars said. “No one in school knows much about them. But they’re in charge.”

  “They’re angels,” Jana suggested. A tiny smile at the edge of her mouth said at least she hoped so.

  “More like old librarians than angels. Everything’s not going to make sense in the beginning, Webster. Trust me, I’ve been trying to figure out all this for several months now.”

  Jana looked at the tear in his lip. It was healing.

  “Okay, your body feels pain when you’re in Dead School. You can walk around with it and poke it with sharp objects. I got all that. But if I cut off my hand, it reattaches itself?”

  “Yes, your body fixes itself. It returns to the way it was when you died.”

  “That’s what Wyatt was showing me in the library,” Jana said.

  “He was being stupid, but that’s what he was doing. And he wanted to gross you out to, you know, get a rush from your reaction,” Mars said. “It’s against the rules to damage your body on purpose to have an effect on someone else. See, that’s the most important rule—you can’t impede other students. It’s best to go off campus if you want to experime
nt.”

  Mars spoke softly and watched Jana’s eyes to make sure she was understanding what he said. His eyes gave off warmth just like the rest of his body did. Jana secretly wanted to touch his eyebrows with her fingers to see if they sparked. Thinking such a thing about another boy made her think of Michael. Fast.

  “I want to go to the Planet tonight,” Jana reminded Mars. “I want to be with Michael.”

  “You’ll get demerits.”

  “You sound like Arva. How do demerits work?”

  “Nobody but Arva sounds like Arva,” Mars said in an imitation of her croaky voice.

  Jana laughed. It was the day of her funeral and it felt good to laugh. The warmth from sitting next to Mars had soaked through her skin and she felt warm inside.

  “Look, I can’t answer all your questions. Risers and Sliders are different. I’ve been trying to figure out my end of things since I’ve been here. So I don’t really know how demerits work for Risers. I’ve heard of one or two Risers getting into enough trouble here that they become Sliders. But I don’t know how it works exactly. I’m not sure anyone does.”

  When someone tells you he doesn’t know something, it makes you believe everything else he said. Jana believed everything Mars told her.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked. “I never had, you know, just a friend I could tell secrets to.”

  Mars nodded. His eyes found hers.

  “I want to kill Michael,” Jana said.

  Mars’s dimple disappeared. He looked away.

  “I was going to ask you to help,” Jana confessed. “But I really think I should do it myself.”

  She loved him that much, Mars thought.

  Mars knew that love wasn’t all red-paper valentines and candy hearts. Love wasn’t always joy. Love could be hot-blooded pain down to the bone. Sometimes love was despair. And sometimes love was wrong. Jana loved Michael enough to kill him for it. Jana loved Michael to death.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “OH GOD, HE RAPED YOU!”

  Arva’s face, when she first saw Jana at their table in the cafeteria, was a mixture of wild-eyed shock, anguish, and triumph. Arva had been right, after all. Rules had been broken and this was what it led to. Wanton savagery.