“That’s not true,” I said quickly. It turned out I would do just about anything to prove Paisley Wheelwright wrong.
Cassidy grinned. “See?” She stuck her tongue out at Paisley, who dismissed her with a wave. “I knew she’d like it.” Cassidy threaded the pin through the fabric of my previously plain-Jane tee.
“Go Oilers?” I said lamely. My outward show of school spirit was no doubt a surefire sign of the coming apocalypse.
As though in response to this cosmic shift in the balance of the universe, there was a ripple through the hallway. One of those invisible movements you felt like a magnetic force field. It started somewhere at the far end from which the commotion was beginning to carry. There, the crowd of people was beginning to churn like sharks spotting chum in the water.
Cassidy and Paisley turned.
“What the hell’s going on?” Paisley asked.
The current of bodies was reaching us now. Girls leaned in with cupped hands and sidelong whispers. Paisley marched up to one and tapped her on the shoulder, demanding to be let in on whatever had the attention of the entire student body. I could tell she wasn’t used to not being the first to know. I wasn’t used to caring.
Paisley’s eyebrows shot up. Her blond bob swept her shoulders as she shook her head. Cassidy and I shared a look.
The first bell rang, but instead of hurrying off to class, students were leaving the building. “Come on.” Paisley grabbed Cassidy by the arm. “That freshman told me there’s something on the building and the administration hasn’t been able to cover it up yet.” While not exactly an invitation, it was enough of one for me. “I hope it’s about Principal Wiggins.”
I ignored the first bell sounding through the intercom and followed them past the administration office and out onto the front lawn. Students snaked like a trail of ants toward the stadium, stopping short and curling around the side of the building.
A clump formed at the end of the line where they all stood staring in the same direction. There seemed to be an invisible line across which no one would step.
Finally, we joined them. Across the exit to the boys’ locker room red dripped in stringy rivulets down the side of the school building. Jagged letters scrawled across the tin door, spilling onto the brick on either side. The writing had the metallic taste of violence, as if the brush had been wielded like a weapon, and positioned below it, like an abandoned puppet, was a third body.
Someone shrieked. “Is that real?”
An arrow stuck out from the boy’s throat. Silvery netting wound around his legs and up his torso like a fly stuck in a spider’s web. The boy was small. He couldn’t have been more than a freshman, with skinny arms that poked out of baggy sleeves. His chin drooped onto a frail chest. A ring of burned flesh was carved into the scalp. His feet splayed out from the school, shoes that were too big for his body like he might have shot up next summer if he’d been given the chance. There were more screams now. Girls shielded their eyes. I couldn’t take mine away. At his sides, the boy’s wrists pointed up like a sacrifice. And he might have been sleeping or passed out.
If he hadn’t been dead.
If it hadn’t been for the missing eyes.
I stared into the hollows where the whites had been carved from the sockets and blood left tearstained streaks down his cheeks. The vacant expression leftover haunted the daylight and drained the warmth from my skin. Bloodied eyelids hung limply, half covering the empty holes.
Kids covered their mouths, and I flinched at every muffled gag that sounded from nearby. I gulped down my last memory from that locker room last night. Adam lying on the floor. Damp, water dripping. Crickets and nighttime and no one around. The thought sent a shudder through me. The spaces between my fingers grew slippery.
“Back inside!” Coach Carlson had arrived on the scene and was yelling into a megaphone. “One week’s detention for anyone that’s not in their seats in five minutes.”
The wail of sirens grew closer. A teacher shuffled in front of the students, herding them away, shooing them. She kept glancing over her shoulder at the dead body, too, and the empty sockets. Glancing and shooing, glancing and shooing, as if we were all passing by one giant car accident.
I didn’t know if it was the threat of detention or the approaching sirens or if everyone wanted to get away from a spot that felt all of a sudden unconsecrated, but the herd began to slowly turn back in the direction of the front entrance.
I took a final glance back at the glistening words, penned in dripping blood.
The Father Said Drink In The Blood & Share Ye The Resurrection.
I then flitted my eyes away, worried that the act of reading itself marked me as one of the damned.
TWENTY-SIX
The subject has lost five pounds in the last two days. His eyes are dilated. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a new energy source, with a longer half-life, is needed to sustain him or we’ll risk losing the progress shown to date in the data.