The Burnouts (3 page)

“They care,” David said.

Will looked at his brother. He knew that serious face. It used to piss him off. He had always thought it was self-important and stupid, but that viewpoint seemed immature now. David was right. These parents wouldn’t have been here, risking getting killed like they had last night, busting their asses like
they were now, if they didn’t care. He could see what he could never understand inside—they were regular people doing the best they possibly could under the shittiest circumstances. They’d occupied McKinley for half a year, but what they’d produced was impressive.

Near the parking lot garden, a team of moms was sorting through crates of fresh produce and cardboard boxes of supplies, making organized piles of cans in the grass. They distributed everything into battered plastic tubs that were on the crane pallet. They were prepping for a food drop. Two of the moms stepped away from their work to take a break. They shared a heartfelt hug.

“How often does this place get attacked?” Will said.

“That was the first time since I’ve been here. Pale Ridge hasn’t seen too many homesteaders yet. From the wall, we’ve spotted the occasional RV or truck passing through town. Those guys last night are the first to stick around in a long time.”

“Will there be more?”

“Maybe. People are moving back to Colorado since the military did their purge of infected. But the good news is we don’t have to be here forever. We only have to last as long as the virus dies out inside McKinley, right? There’s only so many people left inside.”

Will nodded. He was only thinking of one. And if what David had told him was true, that Gates was dead, then he
didn’t have to worry about Lucy too badly. She had the Sluts.

“We just have to hold out until then,” David said. “Thank God the parents planted as soon as they arrived. There’s nothing more to be found from neighboring towns anymore. I know what you must think of Mr. Howard, but the guy had a plan for when the truck shipments got fewer and further between. We’ve got to be self-sufficient. Especially if we’re going to have to be a fortress in the final days.”

Will started to get sucked into a vortex of worry about how many other people like the grenade gang might eventually call Pale Ridge home again.

David put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot. We’ll get through this too.”

Will nodded. “Yeah, we will.”

“We’ll be watching cable on the couch before you know it.”

Will laughed.

“You two!” Will and David looked over to see Sam’s dad watching them. He leaned on a cane. David cringed and shot Will a worried look.

“Shit, here we go. Let me do the talking, okay? I’m in good with him,” David said, then waved to Sam’s dad.

“Will, I’ve got a special job for you. Think you can handle it?” Sam’s dad said.

Will nodded and stood.

“Get your brother and follow me,” Sam’s dad said to Will.

David looked at Will, baffled. Will hadn’t told him about
saving Sam’s dad’s life the night before, and clearly no one else had.

“ ‘Get your brother’?” David muttered.

Will grinned. He couldn’t help it. He loved when David was shocked. Will gave David a semi-gentle shove forward.

“You heard the guy. Get moving, slacker.”

THREE CANDLES BY VIOLENT’S HEAD. THEY
were the only light source in the small room. Lucy stood by the door. Violent hadn’t noticed her yet. Asymmetrical swelling warped the shape of the Slut leader’s head. Her breathing was shallow. They’d made her a bed on the floor out of all the gang’s pillows, near an air vent in the wall so it would blow gently on her face. They’d thought maybe the filtered air would be better for her. Violent looked weak and vulnerable on the floor. Her health had been going downhill fast since the brawl with the Saints. The brawl that Lucy’d gotten them all into.

Her eyes bulged like two plums. Her head was wrapped in a white terry cloth towel, but red had soaked through. Her injuries were severe. Lucy knew Violent was human like the rest of them, but she carried herself with such an air of invincibility that Lucy had come to believe it was true. This seemed
like a trick, a practical joke, that Violent was damaged and defeated. It didn’t seem possible.

Her plum eyes opened and she looked at Lucy.

“You asked to see me?” Lucy said.

“C’mere.”

Lucy approached with reluctance. She was frightened of what Violent would say. She’d never imagined this would happen. The other Sluts didn’t want her talking to Violent. They were furious with her for getting their beloved leader so badly hurt in a brawl over a boy. Each girl had made sure to tell Lucy their version of the story—and list their personal injuries, all to get the point across about how badly she’d screwed up. After Lucy had escaped with Will, Gates and Violent had tangled and Violent had quickly lost the upper hand. Gates had slammed Violent’s head into the floor over and over, and hadn’t stopped until long after her eyes had rolled back in her head, and her arms had gone to rubber. The fact that Lucy had killed Gates was the only thing keeping the Sluts from ripping her apart. She was sure of it.

Lucy knelt by her leader’s side. She took Violent’s hand in hers. It was cold. She held it between her hands to warm it.

“I need to talk to you,” Violent said. Her voice warbled. The authoritative bass she spoke with was gone, as was the forceful diction. Her voice had a childlike tremor to it.

“I’m here.”

“I think this is it for me,” Violent said.

“No, don’t say that.”

“I can feel it going away.”

“You’re imagining it. You’re not going anywhere. I need you here.” Lucy started crying. Saying the words out loud made her understand how much she depended on Violent, how much she drew strength from her. All the Sluts did. “The girls need you too.”

Violent sighed, and Lucy could hear a gurgle in her windpipe.

“Doesn’t change anything,” she said.

“It’s my fault,” Lucy said.

“Lucy, shut up.”

“Okay.”

“I’m scared, Lucy. I’m really scared.”

Lucy froze. This wasn’t right. Violent didn’t get scared. Sluts weren’t supposed to.

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” Lucy said through a choked throat.

“I don’t want this to be the end.”

Lucy nodded. She didn’t know what to say.

“I couldn’t tell any of the others,” Violent said. “They wouldn’t understand. But you do.”

But I don’t
, Lucy wanted to scream.
Please go back to being the old Violent
. She wanted her to sit up, shrug this off, and ask, “What’s for dinner?”

“You’ve always reminded me of me,” she said.

“How is that possible?” Lucy said.

“I used to be like you before all this. Soft. Sensitive. Worried about everything.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“That’s my secret. I still am that girl. I’m scared, Lucy. All the time.”

“No, you’re not. You’re the most confident person I know.”

Violent gripped her wrist. With a burst of strength, she yanked Lucy in close. Face-to-face. Sweat streaked Violent’s pulsing temples. Her mouth couldn’t decide on a position. Her pupils shivered.

“I’m too young to die,” Violent said, on the edge of crying.

“Please don’t say that.”

“Help me, Lucy.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

Violent moaned through a raspy throat. She held out her arms to Lucy. She wanted Lucy to hug her. Lucy hesitated from the shock, but as she went to hug her, Violent collapsed. She slumped facedown on the floor.

“I need help!” Lucy hollered.

The door whipped open and Sophia shot in. Sluts piled into the small room. They pulled Lucy away from Violent. Lips got ahold of Lucy and shoved her toward the door.

“Out,” Lips said. She stared at Lucy with murder eyes.

Lucy ran out of the room, to the cafeteria dining hall. Black eyes, bloody lips, and scraped tits all around her. None of the girls was happy to see her. Lucy hung by herself in the corner.

It was only twenty minutes later that Sophia came shuffling into the dining hall. The bruising around Sophia’s broken nose was purple and black, and her cheeks puffed out from the swelling, stretching her skin until it was shiny. Sophia blinked as she stared at Lucy, and when she spoke, her voice was cold as a gravestone.

“Her heart stopped beating,” Sophia swallowed. “We couldn’t get it back.”

Everyone lost it, Lucy included. There was no Slut bravado, only grief. Girls started hugging, some dropped to the floor in agony. Lucy spotted Raunch and went in for a big hug. Raunch straight-armed her, palm to the chest. Raunch’s tears soaked into the bandage for the severe gouge that now split her cheek. There was no love in her eyes. Lucy wandered to some of the other girls, but no one in the cafeteria would hug her. The picture was clear. Lucy didn’t deserve a place in this mourning. She snuck off to the bathroom to cry alone.

“You sleep out here tonight,” Lips said later, when it was time for bed.

The rest of the Sluts retired to the kitchen to sleep together, swaddled by the heat of the ovens. Lucy lay on a foldout table in the wide, empty room, where every creak of the table echoed, and she wished she had a blanket. The only thing
that kept her company was her anguish over Violent, and one nagging question. If Violent’s confidence had been fake all this time, if she was just as vulnerable and scared as the rest of them, what hope did Lucy have?

The thought kept her up for hours.

In the morning, Lucy made sure to get up before anyone else, stow her table away, and do some general chores before the rest of the girls woke up. She knew she had a lot to make up for.

When the Sluts filtered out of the kitchen to start their day, they ignored her and the work she had done. Things puttered to life as if she weren’t there. Pots and pans clanged as Samantha prepared breakfast. Girls stowed their mattress men away, then trudged to the bathroom to take sink and bucket showers. Their faces were grim, but they went about their chores with a sense of purpose, like they’d been given a pep talk in the kitchen before they’d emerged. Raunch swept the cardboard wrestling mat where self-defense training would be commencing shortly, and paused to clean her prescription basketball goggles with her shirt. Lucy wondered if she should go over to help. She was afraid to talk to Raunch, to any of them.

Lips emerged from the kitchen with a full trash bag in her hand. Her other arm was in a sling made out of a pair of jeans. She looked at Lucy, and the look wasn’t hate-filled like
Lucy expected. Lips’s poor excuse for a mouth, that crack in her face, wasn’t frowning as usual, or pinched up in disgust either. It was a flat line. She walked up to Lucy and held out the heavy trash bag.

“Take this out,” Lips said.

Lucy could suddenly breathe again. This was a good sign. She’d do their chores for weeks, if that’s what it took.

“Thanks,” Lucy said.

“Just do it, fuckhead. No talking.”

Same old Lips.
Best not to push it
, Lucy figured. She took the heavy black bag, opened the cafeteria door, and carried the trash out to the pile in the hallway outside. As soon as she swung the bag into the pile, she felt a wave of loneliness rush through her, and she started to cry. About Violent, about Will graduating early, about no one wanting to hug her, and all her friends shunning her, and a tiny bit because crying felt good.

She had to stop. She knew that when she opened the door to the cafeteria and walked back in, she had to show them that she was a Slut, and unafraid. Those girls still lived by Violent’s persona, whether it had been real or not. She’d never tell any of them what Violent shared with her last night. Violent wouldn’t want that. Lucy wiped her slick cheeks.

“Pull it together, what the fuck,” she said.

She let her breathing slow down. She turned to face the cafeteria doors and assumed as confident a posture as she could manage. She grabbed the door handle.

It was locked.

She pulled again. It wouldn’t budge.

“Hey,” Lucy said loudly.

She knocked. Silence.

Lucy paced. “Very funny,” she hollered.

She was greeted again with a longer silence. She knocked harder. Again, there was no response.

Something caught Lucy’s eye in the trash pile.

The cardboard sheath she’d made for David’s machete, the one she’d had with her when she’d joined the Sluts, poked out of the trash bag that she had just thrown into the pile. Lucy rushed to the bag and pulled out the sheath. The words
THE LONERS
were still written across it in silver thumbtacks, just like she had made it. She recognized something else in the garbage bag, her old, dirty gray sneakers. Lucy pushed them aside and began rifling through the bag.

It was full of everything she owned.

HILARY WAS FILTHY. SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW
long she’d been down in the basement, knee-high in the school’s trash. Everything seemed like a blur since Lucy had flushed her tooth down the toilet. Maybe she shouldn’t have dragged this Freak girl down to the basement and yanked out her tooth. Maybe she had gotten a little carried away. Just thinking about Lucy now had her grinding her jaw. She had to calm down.

She paced amid the garbage. Something jabbed through the sole of her flats and poked her heel. She jumped and lifted her foot. A giant piece of glass had sliced through and ruined her shoe.

“Shit!” she said.

Why was this happening to her? She couldn’t go back to the gym with ruined shoes, a filthy dress, and stinking like a gutter person. She’d already lost people’s respect when Terry
had taken away her privileges, like her private bedroom and her solo swim. The Pretty Ones would laugh at her. And once they started laughing at her instead of fearing her, she would never get them back under her thumb.

Hilary honestly couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten into this situation.

“I mean, is it me?” she said. “Did I do this?”

Hilary turned and looked down at the Freak girl on her back, still strapped to the tipped chair. She was passed out. Her gag was stained brown with old blood. The new, raw gap between her teeth made her look thirty. The bags under her eyes weren’t helping either. But just because she was ugly, didn’t mean she had no brain. Hilary squatted down over her, lifted her head up, and untied her gag. The girl’s eyes fluttered awake. When she saw Hilary over her, she flinched.