The Freaks shouted after him and threw things out of their way. The hallway narrowed around David as he ran. The walls squeezed in on him.
It wasn’t real.
All the doors were swinging open and slamming shut of their own accord. For a moment, he saw a bloodred elk running by his side. The noise behind him sounded like a stampede of screaming elephants. The noise swelled until David thought it was coming from inside his head instead of behind him.
David tripped on a gallon milk jug full of piss, and ate it into a pile of pallets. Pain. He looked back. The churning mass of Freaks was only twenty feet behind him.
David bolted up and hooked a left. There it was: the entrance of the cafeteria. It gleamed for him like heaven’s gate. He passed two Sluts taking out their garbage. Two more stood guard ahead of him by the doors.
“Hey!” one yelled.
He couldn’t explain. The guards reached out to try to stop him, but he ran through them, knocking the girls aside, and tumbled to a stop inside the cafeteria, in front of a crowd of Sluts. They rose to their feet and shouted at him.
“Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” David shouted.
Violent cut through the crowd to meet David, her face twisted in anger.
“You can’t just run past my guards like that!”
“The Freaks!” David yelled, trying to catch his breath.
“They’re coming!”
The blue-haired army rounded the corner and charged into the cafeteria. The Sluts ran at the Freaks with whatever they could grab, and the two gangs ripped into each other.
The cafeteria was pure carnage. David punched at whatever Freak came at him and kept moving. The Sluts fought to get the invaders out. There were too many bodies to discern who was who anymore. He planted his feet. The people in front of him looked like two-dimensional cutouts. He swung his pipe and bashed it against anything solid.
Another entrance to the cafeteria burst open. A hundred Freaks rushed through. The doors of a third cafeteria entrance toppled over. Throngs of Freaks flooded in. The cafeteria filled with blue-haired psychos, hundreds and hundreds of them, charging toward David. He swung his pipe wildly, smashing it into one Freak after another. For every Freak he knocked to the ground, five more would attack.
They were on all sides, they pulled the pipe from his hands.
He punched, he elbowed, he kicked. They clawed into him, tearing at his skin, biting his back.
“David!” someone yelled from behind him.
David spun around. Will stood in front of him. The Freaks were gone. Disappeared. In the blink of an eye, there wasn’t one head of blue hair in the whole cafeteria. There were Loners and angry Sluts standing all around him. They stared at him like he was a mad homeless man shouting at a bush. He lowered his fists. He felt sick, weak, scared.
“What happened?” David asked Will in a hushed tone.
“We forced the Freaks out. Us and the Sluts.”
“And what did I do?”
Will lowered his voice.
“You kept fighting. After they were gone, you fought us.” David looked past the angry people surrounding him. The cafeteria was in shambles. Injured Loners and Sluts rocked and writhed on the ground like maggots in a trash bag. Mort clutched his blood-soaked stomach. He saw a Slut lying on a dining table with a six-inch shard of blackboard protruding from her chest. Violent was sharpening her knives and glar-ing at David, furious.
“Not part of the deal, David!” she shouted. “Not part of the deal!”
Will stared up at David as though he was expecting an order. David couldn’t be trusted to give them anymore.
David pulled Will in close.
“Will. I need your help.”
34
Will was in front, leading the climb up the stairs to the library. David clung tightly to his arm. His one eye trembled. Violent and twenty-five heavily armed Sluts were behind them, followed by the Loners, who carried any wounded who couldn’t walk. Ritchie and two other Loners carried the Slut with the chest wound. She moaned and sputtered and coughed. Ten more Sluts brought up the rear. They all climbed as fast as their battered bodies could carry them.
“This sucks,” Ritchie said.
Will agreed, but he didn’t know what else to do. The old plan was to cross the Freaks’ territory to get to the ruins. They couldn’t go back into Freak territory without another battle.
The only other way was to go to the third floor and cross over the top of the Freaks’ territory, through the library. David sold Violent on the chance of escape, so she agreed to escort them. She left half of her girls to guard the cafeteria and brought the other half with her to see if this exit was for real.
Will prayed the exit was real. If it turned out not to be, he didn’t think he would be able to hold David’s hand in those last moments, or tell him everything would be all right, when he knew it was a lie.
“Pick up the pace, David,” Violent said behind them.
“Come on,” Will whispered to David.
Violent claimed she had an arrangement with the Nerds and could get them through. Back at the cafeteria, David assured Will that he knew, without a doubt, that Violent was telling the truth and could deliver on what she said. Once in the library, they would drop off their wounded and continue through to the other side, then down the stairs and into the ruins.
“So, you saw this way out, Will?” Violent said, walking up beside him.
“I saw a dog that found a way in.”
“So, there was… what, like, a hole?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you go in the hole?”
“No.”
Violent grumbled.
If Will couldn’t find the exit, or if that dog had somehow been in here with them since the quarantine, he knew they’d all turn on him.
David spasmed as he took the next step and fell back against the wall.
“I’m gonna die!” David said.
He was shivering. His bulging eye looked like a hard-boiled egg.
“No, you’re not,” Will insisted. He turned to everyone behind them. “He’s not. He’s fine.”
Will reached out for David, but David swatted his hand away.
“They’re crushing me,” he said.
“David, just come on. It’s okay.”
“David, there’s nobody there,” Lucy said softly.
She reached out and took David gently by the hand. David looked to Will, his eye wide and helpless.
“Am I holding Lucy’s hand?”
Lucy looked on the verge of tears.
Will couldn’t believe David was this far gone already. It was a strange sensation, taking care of David. He felt like he’d been walking a tightrope and someone just took away the safety net.
The Slut with the chest wound hacked out a wet cough. It sounded bad.
“Let’s go! What are we waiting for?” Violent said.
Will pulled his brother forward while Lucy whispered quiet words of encouragement to coax David up the last
