Quarantine: The Saints q-2

by Lex Thomas

  “That’s for a costume,” Zachary said, deadpan.

  “I’m sure,” Lucy said.

  “Hey,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. “How do I know you?”

  “You don’t. So, don’t try and butter me up now, Geek. Too late for that,” Lucy said, keeping her eyes down on her sorting.

  Back when she was helping David escape the school and they had Zachary prisoner, Zachary had told Lucy that if David died she wouldn’t be able to go on without him. Zachary had said that Lucy would “fall apart.”

  But here she was.

  She could get through this without him recognizing her. The last thing she needed was for Zachary to make a big scene out of who she used to be, especially with Lips all ears. Lucy got to the last item in the pile, the best of the bunch, maybe the most exotic thing she’d seen all day. A real, fox fur coat. Her mother had always wanted one like this.

  “Oh my god, you’re so slow,” Zachary said, lifting a garbage bag onto the table and opening it for Lucy to see. It was mostly full with cereal variety packs, paper towel rolls, and batteries as a top layer. Underneath was a new pillow, a pair of work gloves, and a coil of bungee cords, none of it that impressive. “Here, just take this. That should cover it.”

  Lucy glanced over at Lips, knowing that she had an opinion. But to her credit, Lips kept her thin lips sealed.

  “I got it,” he said and pointed at her. “I know who you are.”

  “Congratulations,” Lucy said, dry as sand.

  Zachary covered his grin. “Look at you. A Loner in Slut clothing. I don’t know about the red, honey. It’s a little… desperate.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” Lucy pushed the garbage bag to Zachary. “Now, I got one for you. You’ve got to spend more if you want more. This isn’t going to come close to covering it. I’ll take seven more bags just like it,” Lucy said.

  Zachary snapped his head back like she’d just pinched his nose.

  “You’re too funny, but let me tell you how it’s going to be, big britches. That—” Zachary said, pushing the garbage bag back at Lucy “—is what I’m going to pay for this.”

  He laid his hand on the fur coat, his fingers disappearing in the softness. Lucy wrapped her hand around the reddish brown collar.

  “Just this coat is worth thousands of dollars,” Lucy said.

  “Uh-huh,” Zachary said. He nodded with a condescending tilt of his head that made his toy crown almost horizontal. “Out there, it is, but reality check—we’re in here. And you’ve got no grounds to ask more than what I’m giving you. A coat is a coat. And if you keep pushing me, I might get offended. I might even ban my gang from trading here ever again. And how do you think Violent would feel about that, Ms. New Slut?”

  Zachary tugged on the coat. Lucy let the collar slide through her fingers. This was her grudge with Zachary and she didn’t want it to turn into a full-fledged gang rivalry. Lucy glanced at Lips again, whose eyebrows began to crinkle in frustration. Lucy remembered Violent’s words from her initiation day: We don’t wait for permission, we don’t take any shit.

  Lucy was quick with her knife, pulling it from its sheath at her thigh and sticking it into the table with a perfect CHOCK. The blade sunk in the faux-wood less than an inch from Zachary’s fingers. He yanked his hand away with a yelp.

  “Hands off the merch until you pay,” Lucy said. “The price is set.”

  Zachary clutched his hand as if it had been stabbed. He studied Lucy with a curious sort of shock.

  “Well, you’ve changed,” he said.

  “Pay up or move the hell out of the way,” Lips said, standing for impact. “We’ve got other customers, Geek.”

  Zachary sneered, “Put my stuff on hold, I’ll be back.”

  He snatched up his garbage bag and stormed off.

  “Hurry up and maybe it’ll still be here,” Lucy said, grinning.

  When Zachary turned away, Lucy and Lips met eyes.

  “Sorry,” Lips said. “Didn’t mean to butt in.”

  “‘S okay,” Lucy said. “Thanks.”

  Lips nodded, then turned to the Skater girl that she was dealing with and pointed to the stack of T-shirts on the table in front of her. “Same goes for you. You browsing or buying?”

  “Forget this, man,” the Skater girl said. “I’ll just put in a request with the Saints for the next drop. If you make out with Will a little he’ll put you right at the top of the list.”

  The Skater walked away without the T-shirts. Lucy turned to Lips.

  “What’s she talking about?”

  Lips shrugged. Lucy stood in a rush.

  “I, uh…,” Lucy said. “Will you, uh…”

  “Need me to cover you?”

  “Yeah, that,” Lucy said.

  Lucy hurried through the classroom, weaving around piles until she got to the door. Violent was doing a head count of shoppers and glanced at Lucy.

  “Where’s the Saints’ table?” Lucy said.

  “To the right.”

  Lucy stepped into the hall and up onto a folding chair that Violent had outside the trading post. She looked over the river of passing kids to the other side of the hall where three Saint boys sat behind a long folding table. Will was the one in the middle. They each had spiral notebooks on the table in front of them. Neither of the three seemed concerned with the line of kids waiting for a chance to talk to them. Their focus was on the girls sitting in their laps.

  “Oh my god,” Lucy muttered.

  A Geek girl was sucking on Will’s neck while a Pretty One chewed on his earlobe. She had her body wrapped around him like a python. Lucy felt sick. Will’s eyes were wider than an owl’s. He was laughing hysterically, but Lucy couldn’t see anything funny. She felt like a fool for ever feeling sorry for him, for even thinking about him. Clearly, he wasn’t thinking about her.

  21

  GATES SAT IN THE DARKENED BACK END OF the school bus. It was his room now. Orange extension cords snaked along the floor, which was littered with candy. He’d removed all the bench seats except for a few, which he’d left loose, like the two arranged end to end that he sat on now. They worked as both his couch and his bed. The four TVs he had arranged in front of him shined a modulating light on his face. Three were hooked up to separate DVD players, and one to a PlayStation. He was watching a porn, a supernatural soap opera, a movie about bicycle racers, and playing a firstperson shooter video game, all at once.

  He was bored.

  Getting the parents on the roof to bend to his will was supposed to make him feel better. When Will had told him the name of the motorcycle man’s kid, he’d known he had to do what he did right then. He’d figured it could ingratiate him to the rest of the population by punishing their ex-tyrant, while also turning the tables on the evil pricks that had them locked up. But more important than anything, he’d figured it would be really fun.

  He’d been riding that high for a week. These kids must have thought he had five-hundred-pound balls after what he’d done on the quad. It more than made up for not being able to free everybody when they’d first shown up at McKinley. Every day since he’d kidnapped Sam, he’d anxiously anticipated the parents next move, loving the constant tension of not knowing. But when they caved, and they delivered everything he asked for, it just… kinda sucked the fun right out of it.

  His eye stung. It felt like there was a grain of sand under the lid, but no matter how many times he splashed water in it, the feeling persisted. He opened an individually packaged Rice Krispies square, and tried to see how big a bite he could take. His bite was so big, it started to hurt his jaw to try and chew through it. The chewy muck didn’t taste that great. Like Styrofoam and a sweet version of glue. Glue wasn’t sweet at all, he’d tried it. He’d always thought wood glue would taste sweet, because the color of it looked dessertish, but it turned out to taste awful.

  With a burst of machine-gun fire, he died in the video game. He hadn’t been paying attention. That had always been his problem in scho
ol. He couldn’t pay attention to what the teacher was saying to him, even when he was talking right in his face, it was just too boring. His mind would start wandering in the middle of the teacher’s sentence. He’d start thinking of how many dance club foam machines it would take to fill the whole school with bubbles. He’d fantasize about the girls he was chasing. He’d try to think of ways to embarrass the teachers. They all thought he was dumb anyway, just because he couldn’t bear to listen to their boring bullshit. He found it really hard to focus during tests and he always tested terribly. He failed course after course, but his parents paid buckets to keep him enrolled. It made him feel like a fraud, like everyone thought he didn’t deserve to be there, but they had to tolerate him anyway. He resented his parents for keeping him there. He’d never wanted to go to boarding school in the first place.

  He did learn one thing at St. Patrick’s though—breaking the rules is fun. It started with little stuff. He poured gin down the horn of his trumpet and kept it balanced against the wall as his secret liquor stash. He grew his hair past the acceptable length. He stopped wearing ties, and he’d untuck his shirt, both clear violations of the dress code. The school almost ran out of ties with all the ones they tightened around his neck when they caught him without one. He snuck into the girls’ dorm at night. He started pulling pranks on other students, and on the teachers, but eventually, all that stuff got boring too.

  So, he decided to throw a party in the old abandoned boathouse, downriver from the dock where the crew team would put their shell into the water for morning practice. It was a bit of a hike, but it was far enough away from the main campus that they’d be able to make some noise and no one would know. Pruitt and Fowler had helped him set it up. The party was world-ending, it was so good. It was a brain-melter. He’d changed kids lives that night. It was that fun. Unfortunately, a groundskeeper heard the party, and they got shut down before the grand finale. He had been planning to clear everyone out of the boathouse at the end of the night and then set the rickety old thing on fire. It would have blown minds.

  The boathouse party got him in a truckload of trouble. But the school had no proof it was him that organized the party. A hundred-odd kids had been brave enough to sneak out of their dorms, unnoticed, and leave campus to come to the party. They couldn’t all be expelled. The St. Patrick’s judicial council tried hard to get Gates to confess, they were looking for some way to trip him up and get him to reveal something, but he played dumb. Inside, he was celebrating. He took their accusation as a compliment. Basically, they were telling him, “Who else could have pulled off something so gigantically kick-ass? It had to be you, Gates.”

  He didn’t get into as much trouble as he would have if they could have proved it. But his parents back home flipped. They were going to send him to military school but his little brother, Colton, talked them out of it. Somehow, Colton was able to convince their parents to enroll Colton at St. Patrick’s so that he could look after Gates.

  Once his little brother showed up at school, everything changed. Colton was the only one who could lift him out of the dark moods he got sometimes. Colton looked out for him, talked him out of his crazier ideas, and took the blame for more of Gates’s fuckups than Gates liked to admit. He’d loved Colton, but he couldn’t think about him without also feeling the crushing weight of how much he missed him. He’d only lost Colton a couple months ago, and he knew that was why he was so down. He hadn’t been able to fully process it yet.

  Gates fished around inside his beat-up camping backpack until he found his old phone, wrapped in a sock. They’d spent so much time hiding, away from electricity, that he’d hardly ever had the chance to charge it. It had lived at the bottom of his bag, a useless keepsake. He found the old charger wrapped in another sock. He plugged his phone into one of the extension cords and laid it on the floor. After a moment the phone chimed and a charging symbol appeared on the screen, but it needed more juice before it could turn all the way on.

  “Gates?” a voice said from the front of the bus. He looked up to see Will poking his head into the bus. Will climbed up the short staircase with excitement. Gates wished he would go the hell away.

  He liked Will in general. He’d saved Gates’s life on the first day he’d met him and had only brought good things to their group so far. Plus, he hadn’t dyed his hair some goofy color like the rest of the McKinley kids, so that had to stand for something. But Gates didn’t want to talk to anyone at the moment. He hoped he didn’t end up saying something horrible to the kid. He knew how easily aggravated he could get when he was down in the dumps like this. He had to keep a lid on his mood and hope whatever Will had to say was brief.

  Will walked as he talked. “We missed you in the market, man! Everybody was shouting at us. It was like when you see the stock exchange in movies. A bunch of different girls made out with me to get their requests moved up the list. Can you believe that? We’re like, heroes. I mean, it’s all ’cause of you. It should’ve been you out there taking requests, really.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Gates said with no enthusiasm. “Did they taste different?”

  “Huh?”

  “The girls you kissed.”

  “Oh,” Will said, and thought about it. “Sort of? One was kind of spicy now that I think about it. Why? Does that mean something?”

  “Just occurred to me, I guess. Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “No, I came because… it’s a happy day in the school today, everybody’s loving it, and I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right that the guy responsible for it all is sitting alone in his room.”

  Gates let out a quiet sigh. “I’m in the middle of a bunch of things.”

  “You sure? You gotta see how much stuff people gave us at the market, it’s ridiculous. Just come sift through it all.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Right…,” Will said. It seemed like he was about to leave, but he paused. “Oh! Also, you know that observation room that looks out to the white room? They just got the control board hooked back up and you can control the sprayer thin-gee on the ceiling. We should get the Skaters to come pick up trash and we’ll nail ’em with it.”

  “Eh… nah. Is that all?”

  Will slumped, looking a little letdown. He went to leave, then stopped and turned back, looking uncomfortable.

  “Listen, uh, I’ve never been one for telling people I appreciate them or whatever, but it’s something… I want to start doing. Ugh, I hate how dumb that sounds. But you get it, we could be dead tomorrow and all. So, uh… anyway, I know I’ve only been a Saint for a week, and that isn’t long, but, one week back was the lowest point in my life. If you hadn’t made me that offer, I don’t know if I would have survived. And like I was saying… today’s like the best day ever. I didn’t think people would ever treat me with that kind of respect again. You gave me a chance to erase the past from people’s memories, man, and I’m going to treat it like a total fresh start. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks.”

  Gates’s phone chimed again. He glanced down to its bright screen and saw Colton. He’d forgotten his old wallpaper photo on his phone was a picture of the two of them in their St. Patrick’s uniforms, before the infection. Gates had his arm around his brother. Colton wore his stupid black Ray-Ban sunglasses that he never wanted to take off. He thought his eyes were too close together, and he’d wanted to hide them. Colton’s hair was cropped close, and parted precisely on the side. He always kept it short and neat, even for the year they’d spent on the run together.

  Gates’s mind flashed with the last memory he had of Colton alive. His brother was trying to turn himself over to the military. They’d been arguing about it for weeks. Colton believed the military was telling the truth, that there was a facility where the government would take care of them. He didn’t want to run anymore, and he thought Gates was being paranoid. Colton snuck away when he was out scavenging in town with him and Pruitt. Gates ran after him, but he only got to him right as Colton was wal
king up to the soldier to turn himself in. Colton had his arms up in the air. The soldier raised his pistol and fired a round into Colton’s head. The wind caught the cloud of red mist that puffed out of the back of his brother’s head and carried the blood away. Colton’s dead body flopped to the ground, the back of his head dug out like a ditch.

  Gates cringed and tried to make the image go away with how hard he held his eyes shut.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Will said.

  Gates opened his eyes and clicked the display to sleep without looking at the phone. He turned to Will.

  “Did you say I can spray people?” Gates said. Will grinned.

  By the time he and Will had made it out of the bus, through the infirmary where they’d found the gurneys, and up the staircase to the observation room, Gates was already regretting leaving the bus. The control panel in the small room didn’t even light up or anything. The observation room was small and long, and was really just a long desk underneath a long window that looked down to the white room. A couple file cabinets that had been emptied out were stacked at the end of the room. There was a black control board in the center of the desk, with loose wires coming out the back, and a microphone jutting out of it like an antenna.

  “Here, use the joysticks,” Will said.

  Gates sat down in front of the control panel, and Will showed him how to trigger the water from the multi-hosed water sprayer on the ceiling of the white room, beyond the window. As soon as Gates got the hang of it, some people did come walking into the white room and he was able to nail two of them with the water jet. He scared the other one by making all eight of the contraption’s mechanical arms come to life all at once. Will thought it was all hilarious and was laughing so hard that he collapsed onto the control board. Will accidentally ended up pressing a bunch of buttons.

  Inside the white room, there was a large, square metal door in the wall that Gates and the others had never managed to get opened. But now, it crept up like an automated garage door. Beyond the door, inside a small room with bare concrete walls, was some sort of clear cube on wheels. Gates felt his first spark of real excitement since the parents had caved to his demands.