Dead Rules
Page 22
Jana screamed. Michael moved his flashlight beam in frantic jerking swings, looking for the canister of silicone spray. Blood covered Wyatt’s hand. It soaked his shirt.
Conditioning from life on the Planet told Jana one thing and one thing only.
“He’s dead!” she screamed.
Jana rushed to Wyatt without a thought but to comfort him, to help him, to touch him before he was gone for good.
Michael stepped back. Jana fully naturalized as she focused her entire physical and emotional existence into urgently tending to Wyatt. She bent over the fallen monster and Michael saw her as plain as day. Jana looked up at him, her face contorted by rage and pain and fear.
“You killed him!” she yelled at Michael. She tore the words from her chest. “You bastard!” A piece of gum fell from her mouth. It looked to Michael like her teeth were falling out.
Michael stepped away from her. He moved his flashlight over Wyatt’s lifeless form on the ground. He saw the blood from the bullet wound. He hadn’t meant to fire the gun. It had fired on its own. He searched Wyatt’s body for hope. There was none.
He dropped the gun. It clattered to the surface of Lookaway Rock, bounced, then slipped away along the slope of granite on which Michael precariously stood. The gun soon disappeared.
Wyatt slowly lifted his good arm, stretching it out above him until his blood-soaked hand was straight up in the air. His fingers spread as if to grab life itself. As Wyatt’s arm moved, Michael jerked back another step.
“Damn, that hurt,” Wyatt said.
Staggering backwards from the shock of seeing Jana, of seeing the dead guy lift his arm, Michael lost his footing on the deceptive slope of smooth granite under his feet. His flashlight shone straight down, then the beam of yellow light swung into the darkness behind him as he bent forward from the waist to gain his footing. Jana heard a distant gunshot from the bottom of the gorge.
Michael cartwheeled his arms forward then back. He was falling, being pulled toward the darkness against his will. He danced on toe and heel, his shoes slipping on the granite floor.
He lifted one leg and lost his balance entirely. The only way to keep from falling on his face was to step backwards again. It was one step too far. And then it was too late. He held the flashlight high over his head, as Jana had held the bowling ball over hers. Michael looked like the Statue of Liberty when he went over the edge. He let go of the light.
He started to scream, then stopped. Michael fell quietly into darkness.
“I’m not kidding,” Wyatt said. “That really hurt.”
Chapter Thirty
“WHAT’S THAT?”
“It’s a newspaper, Webster. Surely you’ve heard of them.”
“I meant what are you reading?”
“A little something about your boyfriend.” Wyatt handed Jana the local newspaper. He’d had to stay up all night to sneak off campus early to get it.
She sat next to Wyatt at the back. Other than the Virgin in the front seat, they were first on the bus. She had folded the top of her high-waisted uniform skirt down inside itself and tied the tails of her school blouse into a knot in front. She smelled a little less of Ivory soap this morning.
Michael’s fall had made the front page. The paper headlined Lookaway Rock as a new Lovers’ Leap.
The article reported that Michael Haynes of Asheville, distraught over the recent death of his girlfriend, had launched himself from the granite precipice late at night. His body had been found near a gun that had been fired twice.
“Suicides are like that sometimes,” a county detective was quoted. “They have more than one way to kill themselves in mind and decide which at the last moment.”
In county documents filed by the coroner, Haynes’s cause of death was ruled as coronary asphyxiation.
“The boy was dead before he hit the rocks,” the coroner stated in a telephone interview with the newspaper reporter. “When you fall that far, it is possible to stop breathing. In this case, the trauma of beginning the fall stopped the boy’s heart. He was dead of a heart attack in midair. It was fear, maybe. Or shock.”
Nathan Mills, of Asheville, a close friend of the deceased, expressed the more popular theory circulating among students at Central High School in Asheville, where Haynes was a senior preparing for early college coursework this summer.
“Broken heart is more like it,” Mills said. “His girlfriend, Jana Webster, died in a freak bowling accident and he couldn’t handle it. They’re burying him next to her at the cemetery. Everyone in school is calling him Romeo Haynes now.”
There was a new student on the bus.
“How come he gets to sit up there?” Jana stared at the back of Michael’s head, where he sat near the front in a seat next to Henry Sixkiller.
“Maybe it was self-defense,” Wyatt suggested. He draped his crooked arm over Jana’s shoulder and leaned back. “Or maybe he didn’t mean to shoot me.”
“Why does he get to look so good? He should be all broken up.”
“He died before he hit the bottom, Webster. Remind me to do that the next time I’m on a motorcycle.”
“It’s not fair,” she complained.
“Now you’re catching on,” Wyatt said. “Brains and beauty, what’s to become of you?”
“I don’t have beauty, Wyatt. I wished you’d quit saying that.”
“Well, see, there’s something for you to learn yet. You’re the most beautiful girl in Dead School, Webster. And you were the prettiest girl in your real school too. It’s hard to believe you never noticed.”
Fart, fudge, and popcorn. Wyatt had made her blush.
Mars turned around from his aisle seat right behind Arva’s and looked at Jana once. He started to smile. She flipped him off. He looked silly with his hair combed and his school clothes ironed. Mars smiled anyway before turning to look front. Jana tasted strawberries every time she looked at him.
“You got that boy wrapped around your little finger,” Wyatt said.
“Which boy?” Jana grinned when she said it.
“All of them. All of them except one.”
“You mean you?”
“That I do, Webster. That I do.”
Beatrice and Christie sat together on the bus. Jana looked at Christie’s hair and wondered if she could get her own hair to look like that. Beatrice got out of her seat, as if Jana’s looking at her had been a cue. She walked to the back of the bus to talk to Wyatt. She wasn’t supposed to.
She stood right next to Jana and grinned like a watermelon cut in half. Beatrice wore less makeup than usual. She lightly touched the top of her head where her hair was combed over the sawn-off inch of yard dart tip still in her head. Only the portion that killed her had to stay with her after death.
“I just wanted to thank you,” Beatrice said to Wyatt.
Sliders weren’t allowed to talk to Risers on the bus. Wyatt nodded and winked his only eye.
“And thank the others too,” she added before walking back to her seat.
“Talk about wrapped,” Jana said to Wyatt, shaking her head.
“I am a handsome devil, aren’t I?”
Sliders left the bus first at Dead School. Jana had a crazy thought. The aisle between the bus seats, the aisle they walked to file out, could be the aisle in a chapel. The Virgin up front was dressed for a wedding, after all. Jana tugged Michael’s ring from her finger and buried it in her fist.
With her empty hand she touched the back of Mars’s seat as she walked by, trailing two fingers gently across his shoulder. She knew the warmth he was feeling when she did that. She had kissed him once.
She paused next to Henry’s seat. Jana reached her arm across in front of him. Palm down, she opened her fist. The heavy class ring dropped into Michael’s lap. He looked up at Jana with his mouth open and blinked. It didn’t mean anything, his mouth being open. It was always like that now. Michael’s mouth was a permanent circular cave waiting for the scream to come out. It probably echoed when he tal
ked. He looked like an idiot, Jana thought.
She glanced back at Mars and smiled. Even as a Riser, his blue eyes blazed under perfect brows when he smiled in return. She had kissed him once and she would kiss him again.
Jana had the jitters. For Mars.
She’d fallen for him.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the following talented individuals for all sorts of hard work, and for many other things:
My editor at HarperCollins, Erica Sussman, and assistant, Tyler Infinger; my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, and assistant, Jennifer Escott, Writers House; agent Sarah Self, the Gersh Agency; my favorite movie producer, Mason Novick; and Jenna Block, creative executive, Escape Artists production company.
Lifelong writer friends Robyn Carr, Sally Goldenbaum, Judith Kelman, Lia Matera, and Nancy Pickard. Colleague authors Shawn Goodman, Marissa Guibard, Kathy McCullough, and Ruta Sepetys. First readers Janet Barnett and Cat.
And, of course, my family: Janet, Gracie, and Honey Bunny.
About the Author
RANDY RUSSELL believes in ghosts. He conducts an annual ghost seminar for the State of North Carolina and can be found most summers sharing true ghost stories at visitor centers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He wrote DEAD RULES because he believes ghosts should be allowed to share their stories of encounters with humans. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Visit Randy online at www.ghostfolk.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Credits
Front cover art © 2011 by Bailey Elizabeth
Jacket design by Torborg Davern
Copyright
Dead Rules
Copyright © 2011 by Randy Russell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russell, Randy.
Dead Rules / Randy Russell.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When high school junior Jana Webster dies suddenly, she finds herself in Dead School, where she faces choices that will determine when, she, a Riser, will move on, but she strives to become a Slider instead, for the chance to be with the love of her life—even if it means killing him.
ISBN 978-0-06-198670-3
[1. Dead—Fiction. 2. Future life—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.F915937De 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010032452
* * *
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062084446
11 12 13 14 15 LP/RRDB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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