“I get it,” P-Nut said. “You want me to stop playing it. I want to stop playing it. It’s a little on the weird side. But I’ll play it for a month if that’s what old Gates wants. I think he’s going to be one of my best customers when I open my new strip club, the P-Nut Gallery. You heard that right. Come forget your troubles with our lovely ladies, opening soon. But anyways … back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

There was a click, and Gates’s voice replaced P-Nut’s, icing Will’s blood in an instant.

“Will …” Gates’s voice was heavy, full of emotion. “Lucy is with me now. If you want to see her again, then you have to come back, buddy. I’m not mad at you. I know you think I’m mad, but I’m not. It’s not safe for you out there. I can’t keep you safe when you’re not with me. Please. I’m begging you. Come home, Will.”

Will knocked hard on the door to the cafeteria. He wore a gray hoodie that was three sizes too big for him. The front was splattered with deep brown soil stains thanks to what looked like a year or so of use as a rag for potting and unpotting the flower. The hood covered Will’s face though, as long as he kept staring at the floor. It had kept him from being identified so he could get here, and that’s all he needed from it.

The doors swung inward. A Slut with six paper clip wire hoops piercing one nostril peered out at Will. He edged his foot forward to block the door from being slammed shut in his face. It never came to that. The Slut grabbed Will by the sweatshirt just below his neck and yanked him in. Before he knew it, more hands were on him, and they were moving him fast. They dragged him into the dining hall and threw him forward.

Will stumbled and he came to a stop behind Violent, who was screaming at someone.

“Lips, I told you to—”

“Boss!” one of the Sluts that threw Will said. Violent turned and looked down at Will.

“You,” she said. Her lip curled and the corners of her mouth sunk.

“Yeah, me.”

“This is your fault.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe! Yes. What is it with you, huh? Why are you such a shit magnet?”

Will tried to stop his temper from flaring, but her words had already kicked the furnace door open.

“Why are you such a towering bitch? You can act like this is my fault, but you’re the one that’s got her walking around school like she’s bulletproof—”

Violent grabbed his hood, spun him round, and slammed him into a table. She was surprisingly strong. He felt something sharp pricking through the crotch of his jeans.

“Whoa, whoa!” he said, throwing his hands up. He looked down to the knife pressing into him. “Slow down.”

“She’s too good for you, you little bug!” Her pupils shook like the epicenters of micro-earthquakes.

It was a weird thing; despite the knife at his crotch, Will felt he could trust her.

“You love her, don’t you?” he said.

“I’ve never loved anyone.”

Will smiled. “Liar.”

He thought he saw a smile begin to arc her mouth upward just before she bared her teeth and jabbed him in the Adam’s apple with her fingers. Will couldn’t breath. He hacked and coughed, and his throat ground against itself like it was full of pumice grit.

Violent withdrew her knife. Will coughed so hard he felt the blood swell in his head. He saw spark clouds all across his vision.

“I should hand you over to Gates right now!” Violent said.

Will sucked in a desperate breath, and then another, and the cough subsided. He looked at Violent with snot dripping from his nose and tears in his eyes.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

37

SAM WAS SO CLOSE. ESCAPE WAS ONLY A FEW minutes away. He could feel his own body heat in the air around him. Sweat stung his eyes, and slicked his whole body. His right arm was pressed against the metal wall, and it was cool. Three horizontal slashes of light from the locker vent striped his face.

He spied the hall. A herd of Freaks had just passed by, whining, posing, snarling at imaginary enemies, dressed like they’d raided a party store at Halloween. He’d barely gotten the locker door closed before these Freaks came moping around the corner.

There was a time when the idea of hiding from those loser Freaks like a monumental pussy would have been something he and Anthony or Dixon or whoever would have had a good laugh about. It was Sam’s reality now, and his friends had all turned on him. They despised him like the rest of the school. When he was the Saints’ prisoner, all Sam had wanted was revenge. But now, he was free and he didn’t give a shit about any of them, what they thought, what they’d done to him, any of it. It was the greatest relief he’d ever felt in his life, and it was all because his father loved him. Sam had been losing for months, unequivocally losing, and his father still loved him. It was a feeling like nothing he’d ever known. For the first time, he was looking forward to life on the outside.

Sam pressed his ear hard against the locker vents. The Freaks were gone. There hadn’t been any sound for the last two minutes. He opened the locker door and stepped out into the dusty, cooler air. He clutched a heavy wrench to his chest and limped on, down the hall. He’d sprained his knee running in the hall, after he’d escaped the quad, and the pain had only gotten worse since then. He must have torn a muscle too. Only two short hallways and he’d be in the quad. Sam scanned every locker handle as he went, always aware of where the next locker without a lock on it was, always ready. Jumping locker to locker was how he’d made it this far, undiscovered. He’d been hiding in the ruins since he got away from Gates, waiting for the frenzy over him to die down.

Sam heard something around the next corner. Footsteps. He moved to the nearest locker and gripped the shiny metal handle. Sam opened the locker. A boy with shoulder-length black and orange hair, blue lips, gray skin, and slit wrists crusted over with blood, fell out of the locker. A dead Geek. He left it. There was no time. He went two lockers down to the next one without a lock. He tore it open. It was empty. He jumped in and pulled the door shut.

Even if it was a ninety pound Nerd girl with a heart of gold who was about to walk around the corner, Sam didn’t trust that she wouldn’t try to stab him with something, or at least scream at the top of her lungs so that other, bigger people, could come and stomp him to death. He was too close to happiness to take any chances. He choked up on the wrench in his hand and stayed perfectly still until the footsteps faded away.

Around the next corner it was only one short hallway to the quad. Twenty feet. He could feel his body charging up. The pain in his knee faded. He knew this feeling, from game nights. It was time for Sam to run the ball all the way to the end zone. This was the last second, winning play, the ultimate one he and his dad would talk about for decades to come. He’d get to the quad, he’d call for his father under the cover of night. He’d be pulled out. They’d get out of Colorado. They could start over.

Sam stepped out with all his weight on his good leg. Something big crunched under his foot, the size of a two-liter bottle. It squirmed. Sam looked down to see an animal under his shoe, its head flat on the cold linoleum and its body bent up like a lady’s high heel shoe, hind legs slipping messily. It looked like a piglet, maybe a couple weeks old.

“Yuh—” Sam said in a panic.

He lifted his leg up and stumbled away. The piglet made no noise, other than the chaotic scratching of its little hooves on the floor. It panted but didn’t scream, it couldn’t. Sam had crushed its spine under his foot, and it was in the last throes of panicky death. The little thing fought to hold on. Even in its small newly complete brain, it seemed to know that this was too soon.

“I’m—”

Sorry, he was going to say. But before he could, Sam heard a furious gallop behind him. He turned, but not fast enough. Something rammed his legs. He felt a pop in his knee. He was thrown back, away from the piglet. The wrench flew from his hand. He hit the floor and slid into a row of lockers, his head crunching into the thin metal baseboard.

Sam groaned at impact. He pushed up to face his attacker. He didn’t know what he thought he’d see, but what he hadn’t expected was another pig. A big one. A burly beast, all stomach and shoulders, with black shining hooves and jutting, bottom-row tusks on which its rubbery top lip rested like a drape. Gray-black teats swung from its belly with every nudge it gave to the dying piglet. It was the mother, that much was clear. Five other little piglets poked their snouts out from the dark of a neighboring classroom. They shuffled and pushed against each other to see what their mother was doing, but they never ventured into the hall.

Sam slowly pulled himself up to sitting. The pain in his knee was torturous. He watched as the crushed piglet’s little hooves gave one last scrape against the floor. The mama pig had her nose buried under the piglet’s belly, trying to lift it up, trying to make it move again.

He scanned the hall in search of the wrench. Too far. Sam pressed his palms to the floor and pushed through the pain to scramble to standing.

The mama pig gave one last blast of hot breath from her nostrils, a final pat on the piglet’s head to say good-bye. Then, the mama pig swung her thick muscled neck to point her head at him. She locked one dark marble eye on Sam.

He limped to the next corner. It was almost a hop. He was unable to put any weight on his knee. At the end of the short hall, through the half-open double doors, Sam could see blue moonlight shining into the quad. His father was only seconds away. So were the clacks of pig hooves behind him. He didn’t want to look, but he should have. Maybe then, he could have dodged the attack.

The pig hit him squarely in his bad knee again. She knew. His leg buckled. He collapsed like a beach chair, and fell face forward onto the floor. Hooves dug into the small of his back as the pig mounted him. Sam twisted under the pig. He would find her eyes. He’d dig his thumbs into the oversized greasy black olives and pop them out.

The pig slipped off Sam. He flipped onto his back with his hands tense, thumbs poised to stab. But the pig was faster. Her long jaws clamped down on the soft meat of Sam’s throat. She tore it away. His neck was a hole. The tubes of his throat spilled out. Sam couldn’t breathe. Blood in his lungs. The beast bit at the wound, clamping down again and tearing more of him away.