Macy rushed over to them. “Stop it! What the heck is wrong with you two? Can’t you see you’re wrecking that minivan? Your mom will go nuts! God, what’s wrong with you two?”
Mike scratched his sandy-blonde hair. “Mom said we could.”
“ Yeah,” Matt agreed, “that’s what she said.”
Macy just shook her head. “Oh, I’ll just bet she did.”
“ It’s none of your business,” Mike said. “You better go.”
“ Mikey…”
Matt stared at her and his eyes were funny. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here!”
As Matt said that, Mike was behind her, too close for Macy’s liking. And what he was doing…this is what made her jump away and give Mike a shove that planted him squarely on his ass.
He’d been sniffing her.
Like a dog.
Sniffing her ass.
Mike got up, looked like he was fighting against something. “Maybe…maybe you better just go, Macy. Things are different now. Things can happen.”
“ That’s it,” Macy said, reaching out and snaring Matt by the wrist. “You’re coming inside right now, the both of you.”
But Matt yanked his wrist free.
Macy took a step back when she got a real good look at what was in his eyes. Neither of them had ever been openly defiant like this, but now they were not just defiant but almost savage. Their freckled faces were damp with sweat, hair plastered to their foreheads. And those eyes…so intense and hating, almost reflective like black glass.
Macy suddenly felt a shift of power around her.
The boys were not afraid of her. Not in the least. In fact, they were looking at her with no fear whatsoever and something even deeper and more caustic like absolute hate. They looked like animals, like they wanted to take her down with teeth and claws, guts her right there on the sidewalk.
“ You guys…you better go in,” she said.
Mike grinned at her. “Fuck you,” he said.
“ What?”
Macy stepped forward to grab him, even though the idea of touching the boy was suddenly repulsive to her. She stepped forward and Matt kicked her in the shin. Mike punched her in the arm. And then they both took hold of her and she had to fight with everything she had to throw them off. Her books went one way and she went the other. She made it maybe ten feet when the first rock struck her in the back. Then another glanced off her brow, slicing her open.
“ Stop it!” she cried. “That hurt! You better stop it right now!”
But they weren’t going to stop and she knew it.
They had gone crazy, the both of them. Something in them had just snapped and she could not only see it in their eyes, she could smell it wafting off of them in a hot, pungent odor. Trying to reason with them now was like trying to reason with wild dogs that were intent on taking you down. Another rock hit her in the stomach, another in the crook of her arm and hard enough so that it went numb right down to the wrist.
Macy ran.
The boys came after, flinging stones at her with everything they had. Rocks glanced off her back, whistled over her head. She outdistanced them quickly, vaulting over the hedges and running right up to Mr. Chalmers’ porch. The boys hopped the hedges and then skidded to a halt when they saw him.
“ What the hell’s going on here?” Mr. Chalmers said. “Why’re you boys chasing this girl? That you, Macy?”
“ Yes,” she panted. “They’ve gone nuts! They’re pegging me with rocks!”
“ They are, eh?” Mr. Chalmers tucked his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and set his paper aside. “What the hell’s got into you boys?”
“ We were throwing rocks at her,” Mike said.
“ Yeah, we were going to kill her,” Matt added.
Macy felt all the spit in her mouth suddenly evaporate.
There were no words to adequately describe what went through her head at that moment. Fear and shock and horror, too many other things. It all left her feeling weak and hopeless.
Mr. Chalmers stood there, hands on hips, appraising the situation. Though he was in his sixties, he was still a large, well-muscled man with broad shoulders and a thick chest, the result of his twenty years in the Army as a paratrooper with both the 82 ^nd and 101 ^st Airborne Division. He still had the requisite thick neck and bristly crewcut, though now gone white.
“ Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “There’s something happening here. I don’t know what. But some kids at school went crazy like this and attacked a teacher and the janitor. They killed them.”
But Mr. Chalmers was not interested in that. “You boys want to kill this girl, don’t do it in my yard, you hear? This is my territory! My territory! I marked it with my scent and you better not cross my scent, you understand?”
Macy was shaking her head from side to side.
Mr. Chalmers, too.
It was in his eyes like it was in the eyes of the Hack twins: that seething, primal emptiness. That blankness that was without bottom.
“ How’d you mark your territory?” Mike asked. “We want to mark ours, too!”
Mr. Chalmers laughed. “Like this, boys. Just like this.”
And as Macy watched, he unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out. Still smiling, he proceeded to urinate on the steps, washing them down so all would know the boundaries of his territory.
When he was done, the boys sniffed it, recognizing his smell and remembering it.
Macy let out a scream.
“ Get her, boys!” Mr. Chalmers said. “Run her down! Whichever one takes her down first gets her! ”
Macy took off running, the twins in hot pursuit.
She darted down the sidewalk and then cut between two houses, ducked behind a garage. The twins came running, looking around, and then jogged away down the alley. Macy hid there, panting and sweating, something broken loose now in the back of her mind.
She saw the twins in the distance.
They had stripped off all their clothes now.
They were pissing on trees like dogs.
Macy tried to catch her breath, tried to hold her world together before it flew apart.
It was some kind of mass insanity, she decided, that’s what it was. That’s what had made those kids go crazy in Biolab and attack Mr. Cummings and Sully and that was what had made her go after Chelsea Paris. It was like some kind of insanity bug.
And now it had the Hack twins and Mr. Chalmers.
I have to get out of here, Macy found herself thinking. They could be everywhere. The whole town could be crazy…
And that was a possibility, she supposed.
She calmed herself the best she could and crossed the alley, slipped through a couple yards and thankfully saw no one. She didn’t know what was going on. But what she kept thinking was that if she had snapped out of it, maybe the others would, too. What amount of damage would be done by then she could not know and did not want to guess at “ Hey, Macy,” a voice said. “How’s my favorite girl?”
Macy turned, flooded with fear, and then for maybe two or three seconds she relaxed. She breathed. Why, it was only Mr. Kenning who lived up the block. Mr. Kenning was a Boy Scout troop leader, he announced football games for the Greenlawn High Wildcats, and he sold cars for a living. A nice man who loved sports and kids and his Irish Setter, Libby. He always had a few kind words for Macy.
Except…this was not that Mr. Kenning.
This Mr. Kenning was standing in the back yard, completely naked and covered with blood. Neither of which
