The Burnouts (22 page)

Will felt a sting in his leg, and looked down to see the dart protruding from his thigh. Its tail had a blinking blue diode.

“Virus-free,” one of them said.

“Who are you?” Will said.

“We work for the government.”

“You’re military?” Will said. His stomach lurched.

“No,” one of them said. “We’re here to administer the cure.”

LUCY WANTED TO SEE DAVID BY THE GOALP
ost. That was what Mort had told him, and David headed there right away. The parents and the infected were getting along just fine now. Some kids had left right away, to head for their families’ houses, but many had stayed. The parents were tending to the kids like they’d been wishing they could do for two years, and the McKinley kids were soaking up the attention, regardless of whether it was from their own parents or not. Sam’s dad seemed to have accepted the situation. He was showing some Freaks how to milk a cow, and do other things to help around the farm.

With the afternoon sun on his back, David walked behind the school to the football field. He looked for Lucy at the goalposts. One of them had been knocked down at some point, and the other goalpost was still standing, but he didn’t see her by either. Then he heard a whistle.

There she was. Beyond the goalpost, Lucy stood on top of the farm wall. An extended aluminum construction ladder leaned against the top edge of the trailer wall, right by her feet. He didn’t know why, but his heartbeat was beginning to hurry. He trotted over and stopped at the bottom of the ladder.

“What are you doing up there?” David said.

“Come up.”

“What’s up there?”

“Just come.”

David did as she asked. When he stepped up onto the top of the trailer wall, Lucy pointed to the town side. He saw a station wagon parked just next to the wall, in the tall grass outside the farm. The back was stuffed with clothes, water, and supplies. She jingled a set of keys in her hand.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where?” he blurted, caught off guard.

“Anywhere else.”

“I don’t know,” he said, but she ignored him and tugged on his arm.

“Let’s leave. Just the two of us. This is all on the parents now. Let’s get out of here. I trust you, David, I don’t trust anyone else. We can be happy. I’ve got two full scuba tanks in that car. That oughta get us far enough until we can find something else for you. We can take care of each other, and that can be enough. Just come. I know it’s not the brave thing to do. But I have to get away from here. I never want to see this
place again. Please, just come with me. Let’s find some peace somewhere.”

He wanted to. It sounded great to leave it all behind, but he felt guilt creeping up.

“Didn’t I put them in this situation though?” he said.

“No. The virus did! Adults did. It’s not your responsibility. Stop being such a good person for once, you dick. Let it be me and you. It can just be me and you.…”

She was in tears by the time she finished. He wiped her tears. She wanted to sit down, so they sat, and she wanted him to hold her, so he did. Before long they were lying on their backs, watching lazy clouds mosey across the sky. Time blurred. Reality became nothing but his arm around her, his hand clutched in hers, and the warmth that radiated from her body. He wasn’t sure how long they lay there. He didn’t know what to do, what to tell her, and he wasn’t talking. Neither was she. It was as if neither of them wanted to speak for fear that the conversation could lead to them losing each other, and this feeling along with it. He wanted to get in the car with her and disappear. He did. But … Will.

“I just need to check for Will one more time. He might’ve come back,” David said, breaking the extended silence.

“And then we’ll go?”

David brushed her hair out of her face, but he didn’t respond. He wanted to tell her yes, but his mouth wouldn’t move.

“I’ll wait for thirty minutes,” Lucy said, “then I’m going.”

The directness of her stare was serious. She would go. He believed her. It scared him, but it made him respect her more.

“See you soon,” he said, and he touched the softness of her cheek.

“I hope so.”

He hugged her. He tried to keep his demeanor light and positive, because Lucy wasn’t smiling at all. He descended the ladder quickly, eager to be able to face the school and not see her sad eyes anymore.

David trudged back toward the school, knowing that if Will didn’t return in the next thirty minutes, he would have a hard time choosing to leave. He might lose Lucy if he stayed. He might lose them both if he stayed. If he left with her, Will would never forgive him, but Will might not forgive him if he returned either. When had Will ever forgiven him for anything?

He heard the noise of all the students as he rounded the side of the school. They were cheering. David sped up to see what the celebration was about.

All of the McKinley kids were lined up in a tight formation, like they were about to do group calisthenics. There was a massive white vehicle unlike any he’d ever seen, with a red cross on it, and a group of adults in white haz-mat suits lined up in front of it, holding long white hoses that came off its roof. The hoses ended in spray guns. Standing beside the
adults in the white haz-mat suits was Will in tattered clothes and wearing a gas mask. David was puzzled. Will stood on crutches, and he wore some sort of neck brace, but his shoulders were back, and he held his chin high. He was so far away that it was hard to tell, but he appeared to be smiling.

Pride puffed Will’s chest. He looked over at the parents, practically bursting at the seams in anticipation. He saw mothers crying. He gazed at the faces of the kids waiting to be cured. A lot of them still munched the provisions the government people had handed out. He looked at Bobby’s blacked-out head, and Bobby grinned back at him. None of the conflict between them mattered anymore. Will had made it all better. Will wondered what kind of life Bobby would have after this, with what he’d done to himself. But the same question applied to all of them. Bobby’s change was skin-deep, but Will knew that everyone had been changed on the inside by their time in McKinley. How permanent were those changes? he wondered. Was everyone stronger because of them, or were they damaged goods? Could any of them ever get back to who they were before the school blew up?

Probably not.

Once his mother had passed away, Will had realized, you can never go back in life. You can only reminisce.

Still, the mood in the air was buoyant. He saw P-Nut hopping in place, unable to contain his excitement. He saw Zachary
dancing gracefully with a smile on his face. He saw Ritchie, and Mort, and Colin, standing together in the back, instead of with their gangs, Loners once more. He hadn’t spotted Lucy yet, but the crowd was tremendous. It was nearly everyone. He’d see her soon enough.

One of the hose holders signaled back to the truck, and Will heard a low buzz. Pressurized, white fog sprayed out from the hoses in great plumes, and the men holding the spray guns angled them so that the fog shot over the heads of the entire crowd, then slowly settled onto them.

Will continued to search for Lucy in the crowd as McKinley kids danced in the descending fog, and held their hands up toward the sky.
Where was she?
He wanted her to know he wasn’t all bad. He wanted to see her joy as he took all of her problems away.

Something caught his eye in the distance. David stood by the side of the school. He raised his hand in the air, like he was reaching out to Will over all that distance, and Will raised his back. He wished he could communicate everything he felt through the way he raised his hand. He wanted his brother to know that he was sorry. That he didn’t mean it. He loved him and he always would, no matter what kind of fight they got into.

Thump
.

Will turned backed to the crowd to see P-Nut lying on his stomach, a thick froth of black blood gushing from his mouth.

Thump-thump-th-thump
. Kids went limp and crumpled to the ground like rag dolls, spraying black blood and glops of tissue from their mouths as they fell. Black blood arced through the air. Mouths became geysers. Bodies piled onto bodies. Other students fled. He saw them shoot a kid with the same blinking blue dart they’d hit Will with, then the diode turned red and the kid coughed black sludge and dropped.

“Stop!” Will cried. “What are you doing?”

The campus was chaos. Infected fled past David, away from the white fog, where thick streams of black blood flung through the air like a casino water-fountain show. David dashed toward Will. His brother was trying to tear one of the hoses away from a man in a haz-mat suit. David couldn’t process what was happening. He saw parents trying to help the kids escape. He saw Bobby’s mother shoving him into a pickup truck. He saw other parents fighting the men in the white haz-mat suits, trying to stop the massacre.

He was still so far from Will. He watched his brother lunge at the man holding the hose, and tear at the material of his haz-mat suit, trying to rip it open. He could see the panic in the way the man jerked back and strained to get away from Will. One of the guy’s buddies rushed up to help, and he had a rifle.

The man leveled the rifle at Will.

A spray of red burst from Will’s head, and David heard the
shot a moment later. The tiny shape of Will’s skull looked wrong for a second, like an apple with a bite taken out of it, then Will dropped like a bag of rocks.

The shock wiped David’s mind blank. He wasn’t aware of turning around and running. He just knew his feet were pumping and he couldn’t catch his breath, and he was halfway to the wall, and Will was dead. So many were dead. The aluminum ladder glinted in the sunlight up ahead. Fleeing infected were climbing it and jumping the wall. David reached the ladder and climbed. When he got to the top, infected were running for the woods. He looked for Lucy below him, and he saw tire tracks that tore a path through the tall grass, all the way to the road.

IT WAS GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. DAVID
could feel the first crispness of fall in the morning air. It was a primal thing, the way a change in the weather could alter a person’s mood. The whisper of leaves, the sparkle of the sun, the trees turning the color of pumpkins and roses made him happy. He welcomed that feeling.

The gravel in the driveway crackled under his boots. He opened the back of the Jeep and tossed in his bag. The car was the exact same year and model as the one he used to have, the one he used to drive Will to school. His father had bought it for him, in an effort to restore a sense of normalcy, but it just made him think of Will. In the Jeep, when the music was loud enough, and the wind whipped hard enough to strip everything away, David could feel Will sitting beside him, in the passenger seat, laughing at how hard he was rocking out.

David clicked the back door shut, trying not to make too much noise.

“David,” his dad said.

Too late.

David turned around. His father stood on the porch, still in his plaid pajamas. A beige mug of coffee steamed in his hand and he blocked out the morning sun by holding a folded magazine up to his brow. He still had a little bit of bed head. David loved his dad, and felt so lucky that he’d been able to track him all the way to Nebraska, but he hated seeing the guy in his pjs. He couldn’t explain it.

He’d found his dad in a town at the border of the infected zone, where the military had been releasing McKinley graduates earlier in the quarantine. His dad had spent a year and a half watching other parents get reunited with their children, until the day the government had told the parents that there had been a gas leak in McKinley, and that all of their children were dead. When David had shown up on his father’s doorstep, his dad had fallen to his knees. He’d thought he’d lost his son forever.

“Where are you going?”

“I, uh, I’ve got to take another trip.”

His dad stepped down from the porch. David’s instinct was to get in the Jeep, but that would come off as rude. And he didn’t want to make his dad feel insecure. He knew how guilty his dad already felt for not being among the parents who’d
helped the school, or that he hadn’t somehow, some way stopped that bullet from entering Will’s brain. David didn’t want to make his dad feel worse by thinking his only remaining son hated him.

“You just got back from your last trip, David. Why don’t you stay? I’ve still got a month of leave at work. We haven’t had one solid week yet to just … hang out.”

His dad tucked the magazine under his arm and rubbed the back of David’s head. He glanced at David’s eye patch, then looked to the ground, and looked back to David’s good eye. He did that occasionally, as if the sight of the injury overloaded his brain, and he had to descramble it.

“I’m sorry about that. I really am, but there’s a lot that goes into getting a farm on its feet.”

“But you’re not even at the farm.”

“I’m piecing together the workforce.”

“There’s plenty of people around that are out of work, David. All you’ve gotta do is put a job post online.”

David wasn’t sure, but it felt like this was the thousandth time they’d had this conversation.

“Dad—”

“I know, I know. That’s not the point. But you’ve got enough trouble as it is being registered as a former infected. I just … I just worry that you’re only making things harder for yourself by going state to state and consorting with more of them.”

“These people I’m ‘consorting’ with—they’re my friends. And a lot of them don’t have any place to go,
because
they’ve been registered and no one wants anything to do with them.”

“I understand that. I’ve seen kids like that around, begging for change, but you’re not like that, David. You’re a good kid. And you’ve got me. I mean, why can’t these other kids go be with their families?”

“I am their family,” David said.

His dad tried to answer, but couldn’t. So, he took a sip of coffee. He looked down the wooded driveway to the road at the bottom of the hill, then to the Jeep.