He drew back and began inching away, but I followed, not allowing him the avoidance. As we edged over the beds of needles, his back started to tremble.
‘I don’t know what to believe. It could be a trap. Look at you.’ He shoved a handful of dead needles in my direction. ‘I thought you were her and that’s why they sent you. To trick me into talking. But she’s not you because you’re fine. You’re right here and you’re fine and she wasn’t. She wasn’t fine.’
He backed up all the way to the base of a pine, pressing himself against the trunk and burying his head in his arms. I crept underneath the sharp branches, heart pounding.
‘Who, Lucas? Who are you talking about?’
He raised his head. ‘Santa’s bag. She was draped over his shoulder, all wrapped up like a bag of toys.’
‘Who?’
Lucas stared into the branches with unfocused eyes and a tremor rocked him back and forth before he swallowed and said in a plain, low voice.
‘The body.’
I saw it in a flash, a woman’s lifeless form thrown over a shoulder, her long brown hair swinging toward the ground. Obstruction of justice and an escape from the world, to a place where justice didn’t exist.
‘Lucas, tell me about her. Did you know who she was?’ I grabbed his arm and the contact yanked him from his memories and sent him reeling back, hitting his head against the pine.
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘Lucas.’ I made my voice as calm as possible, inching closer. ‘Stay with me here. It’s okay. I’m the last person in the world who would—’
Without warning he pulled my feet out from underneath me. My spine hit the ground and a rock grazed my head. The white noise of crunching needles made me roll over to see Lucas sprinting out of the trees.
Shouting for Bryce, I scrambled through the underbrush. When I broke into the clearing near the fence Lucas had already climbed three fourths of the way to the top.
‘Don’t do this, Lucas!’ I jumped for his leg, but he kicked me off and I stumbled back. ‘This isn’t the way.’
He chanted as he climbed, hoisting one foot in between the spikes, and it was only when he turned back to look at me that I caught what he was saying.
‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t. Be. Sorry.’ I grunted as I hauled myself up an iron post and locked a hand over his trailing ankle. ‘Be. Better.’
He tried to lift his body over the spikes, but I let go of the bar with my other hand and wrapped both around his foot. If he was going to escape, he’d have to haul me out with him.
A bang sounded right behind my head. I couldn’t look. ‘Bryce?’ More scrambling, scraping, a heavy breath, and just as Lucas pulled me up another foot, hoisting his torso over the top of the spikes with a Herculean effort, an arm shoved its way over my body and connected with Lucas’s shin. I don’t remember the actual contact. I saw the arm, thick and blotchy, and something clutched in the hand. A round black device, like a flashlight, but I knew it wasn’t a flashlight. Before I could let go of Lucas’s ankle, the current hit me and an overpowering clicking noise pounded the walls of my brain. Everything seized. My body turned into one solid -contraction – muscles, tendons, and nerves all fused together. I was frozen, glued to Lucas’s foot except there was no foot, there wasn’t anything except a giant master power switch that had been flipped on inside my body and the relentless click, click, clicks that shot lightning from my head. An eternity passed before someone turned off the switch and all my muscles gave out.
The dull smack of the ground was a relief. I lay on the dead leaves with my legs twisted underneath me as my senses blinked back into focus, brain foggy but blissfully quiet. Someone ran through the leaves, crunching a frantic trail away from me and a voice began shouting in the distance. I rolled over and forced my arms, which felt like I’d been carrying my weight in granite, to brace me up. When I looked toward the fence, I saw what the yelling was for.
Lucas’s body lay on the sidewalk through the bars and a spreading line of red snaked out from underneath his skull.
9
Lucas!’
I crawled to the fence and reached through the bars to shake his arm, but he was too far away. His body was crumpled toward the street and the thick gray coat prevented me from even seeing if his chest was rising. I kept repeating his name, telling him to stay with me as I worked to pull the phone out of my jeans pocket. It seemed impossible to extract. Every muscle in my body felt weak. Just as I finally worked it free a thundering of feet sounded from the sidewalk outside the fence and two security guards and Bryce descended on Lucas’s still-as-death form.
Bryce felt his throat – ‘He’s alive!’ – and then started to push him to his back.
‘Don’t move him!’
‘I’m not!’ Bryce drew back and glanced at the security guard who paced the sidewalk and checked each direction of the street every two seconds. The other one clutched a phone to his head, muttering answers to the person on the line while he stared at the blood trailing along the sidewalk. I was on the wrong side of the fence, trapped. I wanted to run to the entrance and double back along the street, except one – I didn’t dare leave Lucas alone with these guys, and two – I honestly didn’t know if my legs worked properly yet.
‘What the hell were you thinking, tasing him ten feet off the ground? You could have killed him.’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Bryce fired back. ‘You nearly let him escape. Awesome plan, Maya. They teach you that in therapy school?’
Arguing with morons was like kicking a boulder; your feet would bleed before you found a fissure, but anger with Bryce was the only thing keeping the terror at bay. Bloody feet were all I had.
‘I had his foot. You could’ve called security, or didn’t they teach you how to ask for help in kindergarten?’
We traded insults for another minute until one of the security guards stopped pacing and waved his arms in wild circles. An ambulance sped to a halt in front of us right as Nurse Valerie jogged down the sidewalk with two of Lucas’s fans right behind her. The medics and Valerie examined Lucas while the security guards fought to push back the fans who were arguing about the right to peaceful assembly and holding their phones up, trying to catch as much as they could on camera. I struggled to hear the medical team’s comments. Broken shoulder. Laceration near the temple. Multiple contusions. And then – making me release a giant breath I hadn’t known I was holding – pulse stable.
As they loaded Lucas into the ambulance I stood up and immediately fell into the iron bars. The tingling ache in my body raced into my left ankle, concentrating itself into a massive throb.
‘Are you okay, miss?’ A medic appeared on the other side of the fence.
‘I’m fine.’ I batted him off and took a lurching step sideways to prove it. ‘Go.’
‘She’s the other tase,’ Bryce said, like his only responsibility for this situation was standing off to the side making up bullshit words.
‘Follow us to St Mary’s,’ the medic ordered before climbing in the back and shutting the doors. The ambulance took off, lights and siren blaring.
‘You shouldn’t walk on that, Maya,’ Valerie was saying, but I’d already turned and begun limp-running to the building.