The Rules

by Nancy Holder

  “With you,” he said.

  “Give me your keys. I’ll check your cars,” August insisted.

  “I came with Beth,” Robin reminded him.

  “I’ll check my own car after we find the other guys,” Larson said while Kyle handed over his keys.

  “But—”

  “Don’t touch my car. Don’t touch any of my stuff, or I’ll kill you,” Larson snapped at August.

  “Larson,” Robin said. “Easy.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “Stay out of this, Robin. You really don’t want to piss me off.”

  Her brows rose as she tried to stare him down. But he was scaring her, and she broke contact first.

  “Fine,” she murmured. “I’m backing off.”

  Larson huffed. “Hey, sorry, it’s just—”

  “Backing off and staying well away,” she said emphatically.

  Then hand in hand, she and Kyle jogged into the cave, Larson trailing after.

  THEA’S RULE #3: No one ever comes to save you.

  Since Thea didn’t have Beth’s keys, she had bolted for the Maximum Volume van with Mick. It turned out that Hiro, Drew, Stacy, and Praveen were huddled inside. When they heard August on the mike, they did exactly what he said and stayed there.

  That meant four of the people Robin and Kyle were looking for didn’t need to be found. Someone should tell them, but Thea totally wanted it to be someone else. They had to get out of there now. Stacy had a huge goose egg on her head from falling on the dock, and she was sick to her stomach.

  Then August came back and told them the cars weren’t working because someone had taken the batteries. Stolen them. Everyone completely freaked out. He kept telling them that he didn’t do it. How could he have? Thea was afraid they were going to murder him then and there.

  August said that they’d better go back inside the warehouse. That caused more arguments. Stacy was barely able to walk two steps without throwing up. When they reached the warehouse door, Drew balked.

  “No. I’m not going back in there. It’s insane,” Drew said, crossing his arms. He was jittering and sizzling, and if Thea ever needed a reminder that drugs were evil, she had only to recall how he looked right now. They were all terrified, but Drew was on another planet.

  “We have to all stick together,” August said, confronting Drew, totally in his face. “We should just go inside and wait for our parents to send out a search party or something.”

  No one knows where we are, Thea thought. No one, anywhere. Except whoever is doing this to us.

  “No frickin’ way,” Drew said. “We’ll be in there with the killer.”

  “Hey, we don’t know who it is or where he is,” August said. “It could be someone lurking around out here right now, watching us.”

  “Try ‘she.’ Morgan, you bitch!” Drew shouted. “Give us back our frickin’ batteries!”

  “We don’t know that she killed Cage,” Praveen said.

  “The hell we don’t. She was his partner. No one’s found her body,” Drew said.

  “I’m done,” Stacy said to Thea in her gravelly voice, “with the hurling.” Raising her head, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Get out of the way,” she said dully to Drew before pushing into the warehouse.

  Reluctantly Thea followed.

  Cage.

  Thea’s stomach lurched as she caught sight of the tarp that had been draped over his body. August had come in alone to search Cage’s pockets for his car keys while everyone waited in the lot. After August had opened Cage’s car to release the hood, he’d shown everyone a small cache of steroids he’d found in the glove compartment. It was almost as if August had known exactly where to look for them.

  After that, August had decreed that they would search each person’s car for “anything suspicious,” but other than drugs and more drugs, they were left empty-handed.

  Lacking Beth’s keys, Mick had suggested holding off on inspecting her car, but August smashed in her window. He found the release, and Mick popped the hood. Her battery was missing, too. Mick drew the line at breaking into Larson’s car, and this time August backed down.

  Her life was becoming a terrifying horror movie, the kind she hated with all her heart. Beth had talked her into breaking up with Jackson because he was in a gang? She’d be safer with him. The Free Souls had Jackson’s back.

  Shaking, she held on to Stacy as the tattooed singer staggered toward the stage. Thea couldn’t stop looking at the tarp. The floor tilted and she covered her mouth with both hands. She had to find a phone. She had to call the police.

  Stacy let go of her, wafting past Hiro like a ghost. Turning her back on him, she grabbed a water bottle from the table still loaded with food. Hiro didn’t look at either of them. Thea slid down the wall, then remembered a slasher movie she’d seen where the killer knifed a girl through a wall and scooted away. She draped her hands over her knees and lowered her head so she could hide her tears.

  She heard Drew yelling some more: “How are you going to stop me, August, stab me? Shoot me? Do you have a gun?”

  “You can’t leave!” August shouted. “We have to stay here, together!”

  “Like Beth, Morgan, and Heather or Kyle and Robin?” Drew said. “They’re probably off planning their next move. I’m going out the gate, and I’m walking up the road, and I’m sticking out my thumb, man.”

  “You’re drugged up. You’ll probably fall and kill yourself first,” Mick countered.

  “You’d hate that, wouldn’t you,” Drew snapped.

  Mick didn’t reply.

  “I picked this place because no one ever comes down that road,” August argued. “I didn’t want us to be disturbed. So we could have a blowout. Remember that one time when Cage had the party and it was so loud that…that…”

  That the police came, Thea filled in. She had heard all about it. Rumor had it that Cage’s father had paid the cops off. They left and the party kept going.

  Oh my God, she thought suddenly. That was the night Robin’s dad got hit in the fog. What if one of these people hit him?

  “Drew, no!” August yelled. “Damn it, no!”

  Thea wiped her eyes and saw Drew stride out the door and slam it behind him. August was looking at them all; then he dragged a chair over to the door and positioned it beneath the knob. She heard someone crying. It was Praveen.

  “You shouldn’t have let him do that,” Stacy slurred. She was nearly lying on the food table with an unopened water bottle in her hand. “He’s going to die.” She hefted the bottle toward August. It thudded onto the cement floor and rolled a couple of inches.

  “Or he’s the killer and he’ll mow us down with an Uzi or something,” Hiro said. “Nice work, August.”

  “Drew? An Uzi? Are you for real?” Mick walked over to the glittering assortment of booze, picked up a bottle of bourbon, and tipped it back. Hiro joined him and grabbed a bottle of tequila.

  “This is totally screwed, man,” Hiro said. “We have to get the hell out of here.”

  “No shit,” said Mick.

  Thea pulled in her arms and legs. One minute she was about to have a meltdown, another she wanted to run outside after Drew. She looked at the other people in the room. Had one of them killed Cage? Would she be next?

  She had no idea how much time had passed when August, who had been standing beside the door, jumped back.

  “There’s someone outside.”

  The door rattled hard. The chair under the knob skittered to the floor, and the door burst open.

  REVENGE TRIP

  HIRO’S RULE #1: Don’t get pulled into other people’s drama.

  About to chugalug the tequila, Hiro nearly dropped the bottle when the door flew open. Kyle, Robin, Larson, and August’s chick Beth stagger-walked into the warehouse. Beth was soaking wet, hunched over and crying with Robin’s arms protectively slung around her. Kyle was holding a baseball bat covered with what looked like dried blood, and Larson had a firm grip on his knife. />
  “Oh my God, Beth!” Thea leaped to her feet and jetted across the room. She threw her arms around Beth and Robin. She hadn’t so much as glanced at Hiro in hours. Last Monday had only been a hookup for him, too, but he could use a hug right now.

  And a gun.

  He was seriously terrified and he knew Mick was, too. Maximum Volume was freaked out to the max.

  “I saw someone down there,” Beth told the group as she limped into the room like she was a million years old. Thea was attempting to wipe the sand off Beth’s clothes, but it was hopeless. “He was wearing a coat. I climbed into the cave and then I started trying to find my way out and I couldn’t. I thought I was going to die in there!”

  “A coat,” Hiro repeated. He pointed in August’s direction. “Hey, nice trench coat, August. That you aren’t wearing anymore.”

  “What the hell?” August cried. “I took it off and I put it…right here.” He stomped over to the coffin-shaped table by the door and lifted up his coat. “Does it look wet and sandy? Does it look like I’ve been wearing it? Haven’t I been in here with you?”

  “Oh, stop it!” Beth shouted. “August, we know!”

  August jerked. “Know what?”

  “That you’re doing this! That you killed Cage. With this bat.”

  “What?” He stared at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language.

  She pointed at the bat that Kyle was holding. “It’s covered with blood. Cage’s blood.”

  August stood with the coat in his hands. “That bat isn’t mine,” he said.

  “Don’t even. You wanted us to know. You left all those sick clues to taunt us that you were going to kill all of us!” She was shaking her fists at him. Shaking all over. She lunged at him; she would have attacked him except Robin and Thea grabbed her arms and held her. Mick swore under his breath and moved back toward the stage. Hiro followed.

  “Oh shit,” August said, shutting his eyes tightly and grimacing. “Yeah, I know it looks that way, but—”

  “Looks that way?” She struggled hard to get free, teeth clenched, eyes wild. “Get him. Kyle! He’s the killer!”

  “I’m not!” August shouted.

  “Beth’s right.” Praveen glared at August. “He’s been acting so crazy all night. Like it’s all a big joke and now Cage is dead.”

  “I didn’t kill him!” August said.

  Larson took a step forward with the knife in his hand, and Hiro’s hair rose on the back of his neck. Drew really did have the right idea earlier. It was time to get the hell out of here.

  “You guys seriously need to chill a second before someone else gets…hurt,” Hiro said.

  “Yeah,” said Mick. He looked at Hiro as if to say, We can take a couple of them if we have to.

  “Then break it down for us, August. What have you been playing at all night?” Beth yelled at him.

  “You don’t know?” Larson asked her, looking surprised. “I thought you two were so tight.”

  “This time he didn’t share,” Beth said. Then her mouth dropped open. She blinked several times before she sucked in a breath. “Oh my God. It’s about Alexa. She died about this time last year.”

  They all fell silent. The room itself was holding its breath, beyond tense, minds racing, tempers in the stratosphere.

  “Exactly this time,” August ground out, his voice hoarse.

  More silence. Consternation. The monster, unmasked. The motive, explained.

  “It’s her anniversary, isn’t it,” Beth said. It was not a question. “Oh, August.”

  August gave his head a hard shake but the tears came anyway. “No one even remembered.”

  “I didn’t even know,” Beth said. “It was before my time.”

  “You did. I told you. You just forgot. You were too busy texting about Albino Man.”

  Beth sucked in her breath again. “Oh crap. I’m sorr—”

  “Don’t. You’re not sorry.”

  “So…you decided to make us sorry,” Praveen flung at him, and the tension rose again. It was as if a moment of silence had been observed for August’s loss, but the pressure was back on. “By butchering us?”

  August stared hard at Praveen. His crystalline eyes lasered in on her. This was one seriously pissed-off, messed-up, heartbroken brother.

  “You want to talk about butchering? You stole her sweater right off the pile at that party,” August said. “And it had my new cell phone number in it. On a piece of paper. I told her to create a new contact on her phone and she said she’d get around to it. But you took it and she couldn’t call me when she got locked in at the country club.”

  Praveen paled. “I…I didn’t do that.”

  “You did. She had her phone and she tried to text me. But she couldn’t remember my new number. I would never have known anything but the cops found it under a deck chair. You just used her. You broke her. You all killed her!” He broke down. “Lex. Oh God, Lex!”

  Beth stepped forward but August recoiled, backing up from her as if she had a gun in her hands. His white face was even whiter; he looked like he had seen a ghost. Then he dissolved, sinking to the floor like he had no bones.

  “Morgan told her she was fat and Cage hooked her on speed and Heather, that bitch, got her blackballed from all the school plays.” He raised his head and stared somewhere far away, somewhere terrible.

  “She wanted friends. She wanted love. And she tried everything and none of it worked. She went to that party and then she went swimming with Jacob. He left her and then one of you locked the gate on purpose. I know that for a fact.”

  “Did she say that in the text?” Larson said. “The one she didn’t send you?”

  August went silent. He looked utterly defeated.

  “She didn’t say, did she?” Praveen said. “It wasn’t me.”

  “That’s what I wanted to find out tonight,” August said. “Jacob made sure it was unlocked before he left her there. He told me that much.”

  “So you lured all your friends here tonight,” Thea said. “With prizes. So you could find out who to blame.”

  “For revenge,” Beth said.

  “Yes,” August said, and everyone stiffened, even Hiro and Mick. “Yes to both. But not by killing you. I knew if I gave you the test answers, you’d share them. You’d sell them to each other for weed, or sex, because that’s what you do. You’re all so lazy and greedy. I hacked the system to make sure the next one to go into the dropbox would get caught. They would expel you. All of you.”

  “But the winners could have picked the limo instead,” Robin said. “They wouldn’t get expelled for that.”

  “I was going to pay the chauffeur to make them miss prom.” He smiled bitterly. “Because it was so damned important to all of you. Because Lex will never go to prom. She’ll never graduate. Because of what you did.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair,” Larson said. “Okay, I should have kept calling, but people don’t die from a guy acting like a bastard. August, I hate to break it to you, man, but Alexa was already broken. She was seriously messed up. It wasn’t just us or one locked gate. Dude, a locked gate. I mean, really?”

  Robin whirled on Larson. “Really, Larson? You have to say that right now?” She walked toward August. Kyle reached for her hand but she kept going and crouched down beside him. She almost put a hand on his shoulder but held back. Right move, Hiro thought. This guy was on the edge. Still, Hiro was not convinced that August was the innocent he was claiming to be.

  “She was locked in,” August said between clenched teeth. He balled his fists. “She had no clothes. Someone took her clothes on purpose.”

  “Jacob,” Larson said impatiently.

  August was seething. “He said he didn’t.”

  “Like he’d tell you,” Larson huffed.

  “Please, tell us,” Robin said to August. “Did you do that to Cage?”

  August shook his head. Shutting down, withdrawing. These kids should give this guy some space before they got hit by the blowba
ck.

  “I don’t believe you,” Praveen said. “You’ve always been so…so weird.”

  “I don’t believe him, either.” Wow, you could cut steel with Beth’s hard fury. “All those hours we spent trashing your friends. You despise every person you invited to this hunt.”

  August didn’t react. Not a good sign.

  “You didn’t despise me,” Robin said. “You didn’t even invite me.”

  “But he had this all planned out,” Beth cut in. “That’s why he was so upset that I brought you.”

  “I did have it all planned out,” August said. “But only to get back at the guilty ones. I did normal hunts for your team, Beth. Because even though you are a two-faced, backbiting bitch, you didn’t have anything to do with Lex’s death. And Kyle, too. I knew people would ask questions if I didn’t have you both here at the party.”

  “So, no tricks or humiliation planned, but you had us gather the murder weapons. Like the baseball bat,” Kyle said angrily. “We found it in the tunnel.”

  “No,” August argued. “I didn’t have a bat on the list. I didn’t bring a bat.”

  “We’ll see.” Kyle crossed to the coffin-shaped table where August had placed his clipboard. He picked it up and started paging through it. Frowning, he flipped the pages backward. Hiro could read his expression easily: no baseball bat on August’s lists.

  “Was there an envelope attached to the bat?” August said.

  Kyle didn’t answer.

  “No,” Robin admitted.

  “Because it’s not mine,” August said desperately. “If I killed Cage with it, why would I leave it lying around?”

  “Because if you killed us all, it wouldn’t matter what you left lying around,” Larson said. “You could get rid of all the evidence later.”

  “You think I’m going to kill the band, too?” August demanded.

  “Hey, what?” Stacy slurred, making Hiro jump. He’d forgotten she was even there.

  Beth took a deep breath, as if what she planned to say next was painful. “Larson, you told me that you thought there were drug dealers here.” She nodded at Hiro’s incredulous look. “He said there are boxes in the tunnel.”