The Loop E-Book

Jeremy Robert Johnson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Winner of the 2020 Wonderland Best Novel of the Year award "Unputdownable…Fans of The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and Stranger Things will be especially thrilled.", Publishers Weekly, starred review Stranger Things meets The X-Files in this heart-racing conspiracy thriller as a lonely young woman teams up with a group of fellow outcasts to survive the night in a town overcome by a science experiment gone wrong. Something sinister lurks beneath the sleepy tourist town of Turner Falls nestled in the hills of central Oregon. A growing spate of mysterious disappearances and frenzied outbursts threaten the town's idyllic reputation until an inexplicable epidemic of violence spills out over the unsuspecting city. When the teenage children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and hyper-aggressive, the strange signal they can hear starts to spread from person to person, sending anyone who hears it into a murderous rage. Lucy and her outcast friends must fight to survive the night and get the hell out of town, before the loop gets them too.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Vector / Insertion

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two: Dark / Drives

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Three: Class / Warfare

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgments

About the Author

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.co.uk,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

The Loop

Print edition ISBN: 9781789097252

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097269

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: April 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© Jeremy Robert Johnson 2021. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To the ones who didn’t make it throughAnd to the ones who acted with wisdom and kindness despite it all

No man is free who cannot control himself.—Pythagoras of Samos

Paint “No Rules” on the water tower.—Aesop Rock

Transcript Excerpt, Nightwatchman Podcast Episode 251, Uploaded 6/1/21, 03:47 a.m.:

Welcome to another broadcast for the thinkers, drinkers, freaks, geeks, smokers, jokers, fornicators, freedom fighters, and other fuckups who populate these early hours. As always, you’re listening to the Nightwatchman, the only man brave enough to tell you the truth, the one media source you can depend on, throwing you the life preserver of legitimate facts in this ever-stormier sea of lies we call the big ol’ US of A.

Now I know our listeners are chompin’ at the bit for some follow-up on the Adam Colson case and what Brazil’s sudden willingness to play ball and extradite a dual citizen means for the other war criminals currently sipping caipirinhas on the sandy beaches of Ipanema. And we’ll get to that. I promise. But first there are a couple of particularly questionable items in the news that we want to shine a light on tonight with the return of a little feature we call the Yeah Right Roundup.

First, we’ve got the discovery of a new, even-more-insidious security-breaching “back door” on your phone, thanks to the undeletable MoonLite trashware app installed on most every device regardless of manufacturer. Now, I know regular listeners would never walk around with an off-the-shelf version of Stalin’s Dream in their pocket, but maybe you’re a newer listener who thinks these back doors aren’t being exploited by the government and/or corporations in tandem. Maybe you think, They’d never track me. They’d never listen to me. And to that I say…

Yeah, right.

If you want a way to close these back doors, or find hardware that’s built for clean, encrypted communications, stay tuned through the end of the show and we’ll have some solid, NW-endorsed products to tell you about.

Next up we’ve got grimmer fare: a murder-suicide that seems ‘bout as fishy as a deep-sea trawler. Open your ears for me and listen to this article from Turner Falls’ local paper, the Observer, and tell me if any of this makes a lick of sense to you.

“Mother, Son Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide

“Turner Falls, OR—Police are investigating a possible murder-suicide that left a young man and his mother dead.

“Officers found the pair just before eight a.m. Saturday in the 1700 block of Kensington Avenue.

“Police said they received a 911 call from a concerned neighbor who heard a struggle and checked in on the family only to discover the bodies of the deceased. First responders pronounced both the mother and son dead at the scene.

“‘This is an incredibly difficult situation for everybody involved,’ said Sergeant Bill Remar, Turner Falls PD.

“Police are investigating the case as a murder-suicide. Remar would not describe any injuries or possible cause of death, or release the names of the deceased citing the pending notification of next of kin and the ongoing nature of the investigation.

“The Turner Falls School District has confirmed the youngest victim attended Summit Ridge High School. The district released a statement saying it was heartbroken to learn of the passing of one of its students.

“The extended family of the deceased were contacted but gave no response.

“Update: The sheriff’s office said Saturday that the victims are seventeen-year-old Brady Miller and forty-two-year-old Julie Miller, both of Turner Falls. They are survived by estranged father and husband Samuel Miller, a development lead for local medical supply manufacturer IMTECH. He is not considered a subject of interest in the investigation and could not be reached for comment.

“Update/exclusive: The Observer has obtained a statement from Constance Logue, the neighbor who discovered the deceased. Logue said, ‘I heard yelling, and a car door slamming. Then the Millers’ dog wouldn’t stop barking, which isn’t something we’ve ever had a problem with. We’re friendly, so I walked over to check, and when I noticed the front door was cracked open I knocked to let them know I was coming in. I tripped over some luggage in the foyer and noticed that a vase full of flowers in the entryway had been knocked to the floor. Something about that, and the dog… I got goose bumps. You could feel something was wrong. Then I walked around the corner into their living room, and I found Brady and Julie. That poor boy… lying on the couch, a pillow still smashed over his face. And Julie was lying on the floor near him with an empty bottle of her heart pills on the coffee table. I thought about CPR, but I could tell by the way they looked that I couldn’t help them. I ran back to my house and locked the door and called 911. While I was waiting for them I couldn’t stop thinking that this didn’t make any sense. Julie loved that boy. So did Sam. Even when they were splitting up, he was their little angel, you could tell. I can’t picture either of them hurting a hair on his head, and I… They only ever wanted the best for him. It’s senseless. It just breaks my heart.’ ”

So that’s where it stands right now, listener. Obviously it’s sad, and it’s tragic, and at first glance maybe that’s all it is. You can imagine a mom at wits’ end, under some insurmountable pressure—maybe a husband who’s about to take full custody—doing something like that. Because it happens. It does. People break.

But… BUT… longtime listeners know that we’ve had our eyes and ears on Turner Falls for a while now, ever since half the companies in Big Data simultaneously decided to build their largest-ever centers on the edges of the quaint little tourist-trap ski town. You can go all the way back to episode two thirty-five and give it a listen again for the full details… There was no specialized workforce, no environmental benefits… but all of a sudden the world’s billionaires can’t get enough of that high desert real estate. It. Doesn’t. Track. AND the Nightwatchman’s crack research staff are taking a look at some other business, shall we say, quirks, in the area, and that includes this Samuel Miller’s company, IMTECH. There’s definitely something else going on, and we’re peering as hard and deep as we can into that darkness to see the whole picture. So listen—you’ve got to be patient with us before we can report on that, because we like to rely on a little something the dying breed known as journalists used to call FACTS.

But, folks, even without all that, even if there were no other reason to give Turner Falls the old suspicious side eye, there are still enough things in this article to get your antennae up, aren’t there?

We’ve got an estranged husband who is somehow NOT a person of interest in the kind of case where the husband is always the first person of interest. What does the Turner Falls PD know about this man that we don’t? We’ve got a neighbor reporting signs of a struggle and the sound of a car door slamming, which could be a third party fleeing the scene. We’ve got luggage packed at the entry to the house. Now let me ask you, who packs up for a trip just before killing their child and themselves? On top of that we’ve got a forty-two-year-old woman overwhelming and suffocating a healthy seventeen-year-old male, who the neighbor describes as positioned on a couch like he was napping and not fighting for his life. And then we’ve got an overdose by heart medication, which, you know, we’ve researched, and that’s not something people do. You go mixing nitrate drugs with something like Viagra, then sure, you could vasodilate yourself to death, but killing yourself with heart pills alone… wildly unlikely and uncommon. Now, we know that the murderers in murder-suicides have a tendency to leave the room where they’ve just killed, especially in family cases. The thinking is that the remorse pushes them away and drives their suicide. Most common place to find the murderer is the backyard, separate from what they’ve done. But here they find mom laid out next to her son…

You want to write it all off to madness, mental illness. Something. But when you’ve got this many questionable facts being reported, and a possible perpetrator who’s been cleared with almost unnecessary expediency, you start to wonder… And I can tell you from years of shining the light that there’s a pattern to this sort of senseless thing: you watch where these multinational corporations land and operate, and you watch for these kinds of deaths that simply do not feel right, and, pardon my French, but they go hand in fucking hand. You run out of pushpins mapping these things.

So when I look at this incident and the companies flooding into the area I start to wonder about Turner Falls: Is this just the case of a fractured mind committing an inexplicable tragedy? Or is it the beginning of something worse? Do I need to get my pushpins ready for whatever is next?

Folks, I know I’m sounding a little ghoulish here, but after a while you feel like you’ve seen too much. Learned too much. Honestly… it does make you a little crazy, and you don’t want to be right about the worst things, and it hurts when you are. So I want to believe this is an anomaly. I want to believe that these massive companies have the people’s best interests in mind. Maybe they’ll create a beautiful symbiotic relationship and jobs and money will rain down like mana and our corporate benefactors will usher in a new golden age of peace and prosperity.

It sounds nice, doesn’t it, folks? But I can picture you out there, shaking your heads as you listen, and I know what you’re thinking…

Yeah, right.

PART ONE

VECTOR / INSERTION

CHAPTER ONE

A REPORTABLE INCIDENT

Lucy wrote “Fucking animals!” on a piece of notebook paper, and around those words she drew arrows pointing in every direction.

She wanted to rip the page from her binder and slide it to Bucket, but he was stuck two rows over, separated from her ever since Mr. Chambers caught them giggling at the absurd photoshopped pics on Bucket’s phone.

Lucy missed sitting next to Bucket, and more with each passing week. He was the only other brown kid in class—hell, one of only four at the whole school—and it was calming when he was with her. She didn’t feel so… examined. Bucket would never dare to touch her hair, or say he was “jealous of her tan,” or worse yet, call her “exotic” and make her feel like a creature at the goddamn zoo.

But now he was across the room, face buried in his textbook, and she was alone, and she wished she’d never laughed at that picture of Wilford Brimley riding a manatee into an old-timey western sunset, yelling something about “diabeetus.” If there was a dumber way to lose access to her best friend, she couldn’t think of it.

Honestly, they could have been in worse trouble with the phone event. If Mr. Chambers had swiped deeper into Bucket’s image files instead of turning the phone off and placing it on his desk, then he might have found the dozens of pictures where Bucket had pasted shots of himself into screencaps from lesbian porn: in some he gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up; in others he sipped on a cup of tea, pinkie out, or casually sat between two women who were about to, according to the film, “try kissing a little, just to see what it’s like.”

Bucket claimed his obsession with the videos came from his “model girlfriend back in Cali who totally went both ways,” but Lucy had her doubts. Still, she wanted to understand Bucket’s fascination. She even tried watching a clip from his favorite site—notjustroommates.com—but found the footage did little for her. She spent the day in a funk after that, hoping some switch would flip in her head and allow her to like girls. Seemed like that would be easier, somehow, especially once she went to college and left the uppity bitches at Spring Meadow High far, far behind.

But no—it was still Nate Carver’s big hands and wide back and perfect smile she thought of when she rubbed against her pillow at night. Even worse, Nate was one of them: he lived on Brower Butte in a house so big it gave her vertigo if she looked up to its peak, and like most of the other rich kids in town his parents were both employed at St. Andrews—the hospital and IMTECH were the only two places in Turner Falls for making serious money, at least until the data centers opened. That hospital money meant Nate got a brand-new car for his sixteenth birthday. When he posted up on the basketball court, he wore custom shoes, which he bragged had to be insured before they could even ship. His brother was at Harvard, and Nate claimed he was headed there himself. Said his grandpa’s name was on a plaque at the library. “I’m a slam dunk.”

Lucy knew at least twenty kids smarter than Nate, but none came from money, and zero percent of them would ever feel comfortable describing themselves as “a slam dunk.” So when Lucy thought about Nate, she wished for two very different things at the same time: his beautiful body on top of hers, and his beautiful body utterly destroyed in a fiery accident involving his fancy new car and a telephone pole.

Lucy tried to focus on Mr. Chambers at the front of the room, but the dull hum of something about partial derivatives was interrupted when Ben Brumke unleashed a bone-rattler of a belch and the kids around him in the back corner moaned and raised their sleeves to their faces, anticipating the gut-rot stink of Ben’s homemade protein shakes. Bucket, who often made the mistake of expressing his feelings aloud, said, “Brumke’s eating roadkill again,” and a few in the class laughed. But then Ben threw his pen at Bucket and said, “Shut your face, Sandy,” and Mr. Chambers cleared his throat in a way that let everyone know they needed to calm down or face a lecture.

Half the kids at school called Bucket “Sandy,” ever since they found out he came to the States from Pakistan, and all the kids knew what was really being said. Lucy got her share of nasty bullshit too—plenty of “Loogie” and “Go back to Mexico” and “taco bitch” and “donkey fucker,” and after a while she didn’t even care enough to tell them she was actually from Peru. She didn’t feel like they deserved to know any true things about her, and she could imagine all the Paddington jokes at her expense. More than that, she didn’t want them being able to research why she had been adopted by the Hendersons in the first place. Lucy Henderson had it bad enough—god only knew how they’d treat Lucia Alvarez, especially if they knew what her birth parents had done…

Lucy looked back at Bucket, the way he was holding in his anger. Their sophomore year had been so bad that they both ended up needing bite guards at night to save their teeth from grinding. Bucket’s jaw was clenched now, his hands white-knuckled around the edges of his desk. Bucket made eye contact with her and Lucy did her best to send a message with her face.

This is temporary. One more year, and we both leave this podunk hillbilly bullshit town forever.

Turner Falls, Oregon, in the rearview mirror. Middle fingers up as we drive.

We leave these fucking animals behind.

Bucket took a breath. He released his death grip on the desktop.

Mr. Chambers sensed the tension and turned toward the class. “I know it can be tough to focus this close to the end of the school year, but we’ve got one more chapter to cover before the final on Thursday, and then we’re done for the year. Can we keep the insults to a minimum, Mr. Brumke?”

“Sure.”

“And Mr. Marwani?”

“Ben’s the one who’s belching right in—”

“Mr. Marwani?”

Bucket huffed. “Sure.”

The class fell into a lull then. The too-brief excitement had drifted to nothing, and Mr. Chambers’s monotone continued to recite the magic terms all the students would need to memorize before their next shot at the SAT’s, and the school’s meager, outdated cooling system did what it could to battle the desert heat, which transformed their big beige brick of a school into a low-key oven. For a moment the room drifted into a kind of soporific peace.

It was so surprisingly calm that it took a few minutes before anyone in the room even noticed the way that Chris Carmichael was twitching at his desk.

*   *   *

Jake Bernhardt sat right behind Chris, a few desks back from the front of the room.

Chris’s family lived way out in Cascade Woods, a ramshackle assemblage of manufactured homes and trailers notorious for their meth lab explosions. You did your best to not take a wrong turn in Cascade Woods, lest you end up with some ganked-out tweeker shotgunning your ass with rock salt (or worse—rumors said there were bodies buried in the deep boonies).

Jake’s family hailed from Brower Butte, and their property was so sprawling that they’d devoted a huge chunk of their backyard to an elaborate racetrack for Jake’s remote control cars. At Jake’s house, you did your best to jump from the roof outside Jake’s window to precisely the right deep spot in the pool, lest you end up with a busted ankle like the one that cost Bradley England his senior football season.

So of course Jake always took an interest in Chris—he’d never scored such easy laughs before.

Chris doesn’t shower for a week. Jake holds his nose, pretends to pass out. “Somebody forgot to take out the trash!”

Comic gold.

Chris wears the same shirt until a hole tears in the back. Jake flicks pennies into the hole and makes the field goal symbol with his arms.

Are you guys seeing this?

Chris’s dad ends up in county jail on petty theft charges. A week later, Jake asks him if he has any big plans for Father’s Day.

Classic!

Lucy never laughed, but she didn’t always say something either. Jake’s cruelty was a spotlight you didn’t want swung your way—last time she told Jake to leave Chris alone, he ended up binder-checking her after class and sent her history notes flying across the hall. When she was on her hands and knees gathering her papers he said, “Clean it up, Loogie. Practice for my house.”

What a crack-up!

High fives were had at her expense. Did Lucy notice Nate Carver laughing at her? She pretended she didn’t.

Now Jake was back at it, holding up limp-wristed hands and mimicking the way Chris’s body was shaking in his seat. His cronies chuckled. Jake bent his head to his desk and pretended to snort a line, then sat back up with exaggerated tremors. The laughter got louder.

Mr. Chambers rotated toward the class, and the laughs cut short. Lucy read Mr. Chambers’s expression: Please—I’m so close to being done with all of you. Be decent for once. Just finish this class so I can start my summer and I’ll only have to see a handful of you at driver’s ed training.

Something in the back corner caught Chambers’s eye. “Ms. Dufrene, can you turn off your phone or does it need to spend the rest of class on my desk?”

Patty Dufrene’s thumbs were a blur, a concerned look on her face. Chambers walked closer and spoke louder. “Ms. Dufrene, can I have your attention?”

No response.

Chambers walked over and placed an open palm directly between Patty’s eyes and the phone. “Hand it over. You get it back at the bell.”

Patty held her phone long enough to power it all the way down, then handed it to Mr. Chambers with an aggrieved whine. Her eyes followed the device to its resting spot on Mr. Chambers’s desk.

Chambers scrawled more sample problems on the blackboard, his chalk tapping out a robotic rhythm. Loud and persistent as that sound was, Lucy was distracted by a new noise—Chris Carmichael’s desk was squeaking. It reminded her of the time she drove to San Diego with the Hendersons to visit her “aunt” Molly. They’d checked in to a Super 8 at the halfway point down I-5 only to discover that their motel neighbors were having an epic screw session. Lucy remembered how embarrassed her adoptive guardians, Bill and Carol, had been, but mostly she remembered how steady and fast the springs were squeaking and how the woman’s moans sounded more like something she was doing to pass the time until the man finally stopped thrusting.

Honestly, Lucy had thought the whole event was kind of funny, and the sound of Chris Carmichael’s squeaking desk brought that all back.

She was about to laugh until she saw the way Chris’s body was moving.

Something was wrong with him. Very, very wrong.

His narrow frame was slumped, pinning his weight against the metal support tube running from chair to desk. Lucy leaned forward and noticed a thin string of drool hanging from the corner of Chris’s mouth. Sweat was beading on his forehead and soaking through his greasy black locks. His left leg was jerking back and forth at the knee while his foot pressed against the tile flooring so hard the sole was scuffing.

He’s… fighting something. Like he’s trying to force himself to stay at that desk.

Mr. Chambers finally caught on and turned to look at Chris.

“Mr. Carmichael, what’s…”

And then Chris’s neck bent back and he was staring at the ceiling and he yelled, “You promised you’d delete the picture, Ginny. Stop being such a bitch!”

Patty Dufrene stood bolt upright. “Shut your mouth, Chris. How do you…”

Chris kept yelling. “Why am I seeing this? Where am I? I don’t want this!” and then he fell quiet, but the spasms in his body amplified, causing his desk to rock and lift and clatter against the floor. His head swiveled, eyes wide and panicked as if he were trying to see in the dark.

Have his eyes always been so blue?

Lucy swore that Chris had hazel eyes, but now they appeared blue and rheumy. Lucy wondered how that could be, but the thought was interrupted when his back and knees popped so loudly the sound echoed against the ceiling tiles. Lucy recoiled, imagining how that must feel inside Chris’s body—his joints grinding and locking, unable to stop all that shaking.

Mr. Chambers was at Chris’s side then. “We need to give him room until this passes. The key, is to, uh, to keep him from hurting himself. Megan, run down to the office and tell them to call 911.” Then Chambers bent over Chris’s thrumming body and rattling desk. “We need to get him as flat and stabilized as we can. Jake and Michael, you get his legs, and I’ll lift under his shoulders.” The teacher said, “Chris, can you hear me? I need to move you,” and he laced his hands behind the boy’s neck, and that’s when Lucy realized she must have fallen asleep in class, because she swore that at that moment she heard something under Chris’s hair squeal and then Mr. Chambers was backing away with a bloody hand, screaming, “What the fuck?”

And then Jake, forever dull and cruel and incapable of reading the goddamn room, tried to get in one more joke. He leaned toward the back of the class and said, “Chris is shaking harder than his mom’s vibrator!”

But no one laughed. Even Jake’s victory chuckle was cut short because within seconds Chris had erupted from his desk and was on top of Jake, had him trapped in his seat, and in a series of spasms Chris managed to raise one hand and plunge his right thumb directly into Jake’s left eye.

Then in Lucy’s nightmare she saw Mr. Chambers afraid to move forward but yelling, “Chris, get off him now or I’ll have to report this,” as if they were still in a situation where something like the rules of a high school might apply, and Jake began to bleed from the corner of his eye as he unleashed a slaughterhouse squeal and tried to bat Chris away with his arms, and then Chris’s eyes rolled back in his head and a flat, even voice fell from his mouth saying, “Override protocol failed. Ops dispatched.”

Mr. Chambers didn’t seem to understand where the voice was coming from because he turned toward the door of the classroom, looking for the people who might be coming to restore order. After a few seconds ticked by, he must have realized that task fell to him, because he rushed over to his desk and pulled out a small black canister of pepper spray and said, “You have to stop that now, Chris! Stop or I’ll spray you!”

If Chris heard, he paid it no mind. His thumb pressed farther into Jake’s skull. Jake made noises that no one in that room would escape dreaming about.

Mr. Chambers stepped toward the boys and sprayed Chris’s eyes and then aimed the stream directly into the mouth of the young man.

Mr. Chambers gained Chris’s attention.

Chris untethered from Jake’s coiled, screaming body and stood. Blood dripped from his thumb to the tile. The class sat paralyzed, coughing and gagging and trying to breathe fresh air through folded hoodies or sleeves. A crowd had gathered at the door to the classroom, some filming with their phones, some running when they saw Jake’s body shaking its way into deep shock.

Chris straightened and looked at Mr. Chambers, then at his red, slick hand. “This fixes it. What I did. What you did to me. The signal…” His voice started to fade, airway tightening against the pepper spray assault. Chris shook his head from side to side and coughed. He blinked through hideously swollen eyelids. “It’s not so bad, Mr. Chambers. They said I would be smarter, but they lied to me. They lied to my mom. But you—you really helped me. After all this time.”

Then Chris bent forward, his movements finally smooth, and he picked up his precalculus book from the floor. He lifted the thick, sharp-cornered book up in the air with one bright red hand.

“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”

Then Chris Carmichael took two swift strides toward the front of the room and swung the textbook down into Mr. Chambers’s face.

Mr. Chambers lost his legs and rag-dolled to the floor and then Chris was on top of him with the book raised high and he turned toward the class to speak.

“This makes it stop. This is real.”

He brought the textbook down, using both arms this time. Something crunched.

“I could see it all before, too much, but now I’m here.”

Another swing down. This time the arc of the book splattered the white tile ceiling with tiny red drops. Lucy could swear she saw something pulsing on the back of Chris’s neck as his hair flopped forward.

“We are going to be okay, you guys.”

Another swing. Mr. Chambers’s hands fish-flopped on the floor, his wedding ring ticking against tile, his moaning buried beneath the sound of gargled blood.

“We are all going to be okay.”

And then Lucy leaned forward in her desk because her vision had filled with tiny blinking stars, and she fought to stay conscious because there was a murderer in the room and she could barely breathe from the pepper spray and it was far too late for “Locks, lights, out of sight.” She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do. Part of her wanted to jump from her desk and restrain Chris or knock him off Mr. Chambers, but everything was moving too fast.

She heard men yelling in the hallway. Something rolled into the classroom next to Mr. Chambers’s awfully quiet, immobile body, and Chris didn’t even stop to acknowledge the purple smoke coming from the object because he was still swinging his book.

How can he hold on to the book with so much blood on his hands?

Lucy felt oddly guilty for thinking such a thing, but then her thoughts were wiped clear by the smell of the noxious purple smoke and the sudden, thunderous sound of close gunfire and then the sight of Chris’s face slumping loose from his head and slapping against his chest.

The air was toxic with pepper spray and gunpowder and atomized blood.

Screams ran through the room at full surround.

Chris’s body gave one last tremor and collapsed onto Mr. Chambers.

Then the school bell rang.

It was the final shock Lucy could bear. Some distant part of her mind thought, School’s out, and she slid into static, then nothing.

CHAPTER TWO

ESCAPE ATTEMPTS

Lucy’s alarm sounded from the dresser across the room, waking her for another day of playing pretend.

“Yes, I’m fine today.”

“No, I didn’t have any nightmares.”

“Yes, I care whether or not there are fresh blueberries at breakfast. The simple pleasures are important! Where are we without our day-to-day niceties?”

“No, I don’t want another appointment with Dr. Nielsen. And there definitely aren’t any details about that day that I’m concealing from her so she won’t have me committed.”

“Yes, I’m dealing with everything just fine.”

“No, I didn’t have a dream where I posted a picture of Chris Carmichael’s exploding face to my account and then I pushed my phone down between my legs and rubbed up against the flood of buzzing notifications. Because that would mean that something is broken inside of me, right? And I’m doing great!”

“Yes, I think graduating is still important, and yes, it might be good to change schools. But didn’t Nielsen say I needed to confront what happened on my own time? Thank you for being so patient with me. Thank you for reminding me every day that you’ve got my back! Yes, this is our challenge to face together.”

“No, I haven’t had any suicidal or self-destructive thoughts. Trust me, I’m going to be okay.”

We are all going to be okay.

*   *   *

Lucy knew the Hendersons’ every action came from a place of love. She knew how lucky she was to have Bill and Carol in her life, and how they were afraid she’d go back to being the near-catatonic little girl they’d adopted after the tragedy in Peru.

That being said, there were times after “the incident” when their love felt like a lead fucking apron on her chest and she couldn’t breathe from all the goddamn heartfelt care and protection.

That afternoon she texted Bucket: Dying here. Bill and Carol treating me like a baby deer. Please come pick me up. Let’s go to The Exchange.

*   *   *

The Marwanis did all right. They didn’t pull St. Andrews or IMTECH money, but Bucket’s dad had his own dermatology clinic, and his mom worked as a dental assistant, so they weren’t hurting. They could have forked over enough cash to put Bucket in an older used sedan, but they wanted him to earn it, so he worked part-time at Culbertson’s Grocery. As a result he always smelled like fresh-baked bread when he came to pick up Lucy.

She dropped into his front seat and inhaled deeply. “I love it!”

“It’s bullshit, though. They don’t even bake the bread on-site. They just pump in this smell to make you think they did.”

“I don’t care.” Lucy sniffed closer and closer to Bucket, like a dog following a trail. “Smells so fucking good!”

“All right, all right. Cool your jets, weirdo.”

“It’s making me hungry, dude. Can we grab some big pretzels before we go to The Exchange?”

“I’ll stop there, but I don’t want anything.”

“Your stomach still all jacked up?”

“Yeah. I mean, I eat, but I don’t feel hungry. My nerves are kind of off now… you know?”

“I know. Can we not talk about it, though?”

Bucket gave a nod and boosted the volume on his stereo. Bass flooded up from the trunk and replaced Lucy’s bad vibes. She couldn’t make out most of the lyrics to the song, aside from some guy with an auto-tuned voice singing, “rub that yayo on your pussy/get that booty numb.” The music hit the right dumb/dead spot in her mind, and she smiled a real smile for the first time that day.

“This is good.”

“Yup. You want mall pretzels or you want to hit the corner market?”

Lucy thought about all the other kids who might be at the mall. Could be Chris Carmichael’s friends. Could be Brady Miller’s friends—Lucy barely knew anybody from Summit Ridge, but they’d had the prior week’s hot tragedy, holding a candlelight vigil for the loss of their classmate. Supposedly he’d been killed by his own mom, which triggered feelings in Lucy that made her ignore the news about that crime in its entirety. Even if they didn’t have to see people directly related to the awful things which had happened, other students would be there, and Lucy thought about how they’d pretend to be interested in her so they could drill down and ask about what had happened in Mr. Chambers’s classroom.

I can’t answer those questions. I don’t want to. I’m not even sure what I really saw.

Dr. Nielsen spoke with her about the way adrenaline affects memory, and how slowly the truth might float to the surface and find its place, and how some of the things she may think she saw were only visions filling in the gap until her true memories were ready.

But there was something on the back of Chris’s neck, right?

She hadn’t yet saved up the courage to ask Bucket what he might have seen.

Her smile dimmed.

Enough of this. Enough thinking. And no mall.

“Corner market’s fine. Can you turn up the music?”

“Sure. AC on or windows down?”

“AC, bitch, so I can keep smelling this crazy-good bread smell.”

She sniffed at him again, closing her eyes, pulling exaggerated amounts of air. Then they both laughed and shared the smallest moment outside their haunted lives.

*   *   *

The Exchange was cool because nobody went there. Music stores had become halfway museums, the only clients being people so computer illiterate that they still used CDs, and a mix of hipsters, DJs, and old-timers who worshipped at the altars of vinyl.

Lucy liked the quiet mustiness of the place, and the feeling of slowly flipping through their vast rows of records.

Bucket liked it because one of the clerks was a twenty-five-year-old named Toni who was rumored to also be an exotic dancer over at the Boiler Room. She was covered in tattoos and had bright purple hair and big blue eyes, and one time she’d even asked Bucket his real name.

“There’s no way you’re actually called ‘Bucket,’” she’d said. “Nobody is called ‘Bucket.’”

“It’s my name.”

“Yeah, listen… I know it’s not. I can feel it. I’ve got a few names myself. I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my names first, then you tell me yours, and we’ll be good, right?”

Bucket squinted. Lucy had been impressed by how he’d stood his ground against Toni’s charms.

Toni leaned forward across the counter. “The truth is, I have three names. There’s Toni. It’s what everybody calls me. And then there’s the name my parents gave me, which is Antoinette—way too fucking fancy for me to use on an everyday basis.”

It was Bucket’s turn to lean forward. She’d suckered him in by dropping that f-bomb. She wasn’t talking to him like he was a kid. He loved it.

“Then there’s my third name, and I only use that in one place.” Bucket’s eyebrows raised. Lucy knew what he was thinking—The rumors are true! Toni really is a dancer. “So this doesn’t go beyond here, but sometimes I go by the name Amity.”

“Wait… Amity? Like in Jaws?”

“Well, that’s not where I got it from, but sure. I like it because it sounds cool to the clients I work with, but I really like it because of what it means.”

“Friendship?”

“Yeah. That’s what my other job really is. My clients think it’s one thing, and it can be that, but a lot of times they don’t see what I’m really giving them. They need someone to say, I’m here for you, and I’m open to you. You can trust me. I can listen to you. I will look at you because you matter. I’m your friend. People are lonely, you know?”

Lucy looked over at Bucket’s puppy-dog face and thought that this woman deserved to be called something fancy like Antoinette.

“So those are my names. Now it’s your turn.”

“Fine. It’s not very interesting, really. It’s Bakhit. Bakhit, that’s all.”

“Bakhit. I like that. Kind of, I don’t know, exotic.”

Lucy riled. Exotic. Always fucking “exotic.” It’s a common name where he’s from.

Bucket smiled, putty in Toni’s hands.

Toni asked, “So why Bucket, then?”

“Oh, I don’t…”

“Come on! Nobody’s been in this store for the last three hours. The store cat’s got fucking diabetes. He lies there all day.” Toni pointed to a mound of tabby cat lumped in one of the store windows. “Please. Tell me something interesting.”

“Okay. It’s what my little brother Dalir called me, back when we lived in Pakistan. He couldn’t get ‘Bakhit’ quite right. He’d follow me around saying, ‘Bucket! Bucket!’ and we’d all laugh.”

“Oh my god—that’s so cute.”

“Yeah, but, uh…” Lucy saw something pass over Bucket’s face—maybe the realization that she was listening, or that he was about to talk about a part of his past he kept closed away. “My little brother, he, uh, passed away. He got some kind of fever that made his brain shut down… and after that my parents were so sad for a long time. We barely spoke. And when they came out of that they decided that we had to move, to get away from… everything, I guess. So then we ended up in California, before we moved up to Oregon. And once we moved up here, I noticed they’d started calling me Bucket instead of Bakhit. At first it really bothered me, but after a while I kind of figured it was part of… You know, it came from my brother. So I was cool with it.”

“Whoa. Damn… I’m sorry.”

“It is what it is, you know?” Bucket tried to lighten the mood. “Besides, this name is easier for me. Now I only have to spell out ‘Marwani’ when I’m on the phone. But everybody gets ‘Bucket’ right off the bat.”

And with that, Lucy had learned more about Bucket than she’d been able to discover in two years of friendship. She figured the FBI should hire dancers to run their interrogations.

But Toni wasn’t working at The Exchange today, and Lucy noticed Bucket’s disappointment after he scanned the store. Diabetic cat? Check. Rows of dusty old albums? Check. The woman Bucket hoped he’d one day marry? Negative. Judah was working, and he was nice, and always smelled like beer and cigarettes, and it was fun to ask him about the band patches all over his jean jacket, but still… no Toni/Antoinette/Amity.

Plus, Lucy’s corner-store pretzel tasted like it had been on the rotating rack since the days of the pyramids, so it was a rough outing so far.

At least I’m away from the perpetually concerned faces. At least I’m not answering all those carefully phrased questions meant to help me along the path to healing.

One thing about raising yourself as the child of two raging alcoholics was that you developed an allergy to being nurtured. Lucy liked that about herself, but it really fucked with the Hendersons’ parental instincts.

Lucy ditched her shitty pretzel in the store trash, keeping one small piece, which she offered to the store cat. The cat opened an eye, batted the pretzel chunk with his paw, gave the offering one lick, and then fell back into its diabetic stupor.

C’est la vie.

Album zone-out time—flipping through row after row of vinyl, breathing calmly through her nose, giggling at the occasional album cover, maybe even holding up the worst ones for Bucket to dig. Bucket was fine hanging out—she caught him checking the front door for Toni’s arrival, though she never came.

Lucy wondered who Toni was with at that moment. And what did her name mean to them?

She looked at Bucket again. He saw her looking, and pretended to browse through a stand full of sleazy old comic books. But it wasn’t long before his eyes drifted to the door again.

People are lonely, you know?

After an hour, Lucy finally felt her shoulders drop for the first time in too long. She let her fingers drift across some slip mats mounted to the wall and felt them pull against her, and she felt a rare moment of longing for the forests near where she was born, for the rough bark on the trees and the way it abraded her skin and made her hands feel open and alive. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the smell of that place, the way it had felt like home before the authorities came to take her away and place her in the orphanage and put her name and picture in the adoption database.

It was no use. That place—the good in it—felt lost to her. This was her world now—sharp, brittle, sticky juniper trees and frigid desert nights where the air felt as empty and mean as the faces of the white boys who laughed at her and lusted after her at the same time. A place full of kids with no money and kids with all the money, and every once in a while, a kid with a goddamn bloody textbook raised above his head talking about signals in his brain.

Her shoulders were back up to her ears.

Goddamnit!

Time to go anyway. Bucket had work at Culbertson’s the next morning. The Hendersons wanted Lucy to have a session with some grief counselor, even though she told them she was fine.

“I trust you, Lucy, but I’m having a hard time believing you’re fine.”

On top of having to deal with that overbearing grief bullshit, there was a rumor that the district was going to push for three more days of attendance, despite the tragedies at each school. Supposedly some of the more influential parents in the community demanded that the district still hold a graduation ceremony. If that was true, it meant that Lucy and Bucket actually had some homework to complete.

She tried to imagine sitting at the kitchen table and working on her differentials.

“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”

Then that crunching sound as Mr. Chambers’s face collapsed.

Fuck the grades, she thought. They can give me a pass.

Bucket was up at the front counter, joking with Judah about buying a sticker for his car that read “Pipe Layers Union.” He said, “I like it because it’s subtle.”

“Really? That strikes you as subtle?”

“Sure. I mean, if I got an honest bumper sticker, it would just say, ‘10-Inch Pussy Wrecker.’ But this sticker lets the ladies know I can take care of business without being so direct.”

Judah laughed. “You must be packing some serious heat.”

“Well, I’m not going to talk too much about it. It’s not really your business. But I can say that my girlfriend in California—”

“Oh, shit. Here we go,” Lucy said.

“Pay her no mind. I was saying, I had a gorgeous girlfriend in California, before my parents moved us to this shitbrick city. No offense.”

Judah held up his hands, palms out. “Hey, I’m not the mayor. And this town blows.”

“So this girl, she was a model, so beautiful, but so skinny, you know what I’m saying?”

Judah nodded.

“And since I have what I have, it was tough for her. I’m going to be a gentleman about it, but I can tell you that I had to stick four fingers in her to loosen her up before she could take the D.”

Judah laughed and shook his head. Lucy wondered why boys instantly lost fifty IQ points the moment they started talking about sex.

“So, anyway,” Bucket said, “I better buy this sticker.”

“You got it, buddy. On the house.” Judah pulled the sticker from under the glass and passed it to Bucket. “I’ll charge it to my employee account.”

“Thanks, dude.”

“No problem, kid. I could listen to you run bullshit all day.”

Bucket beamed.

“Besides,” Judah continued, “you two seem like good kids. Especially compared to what I put up with from some of those little Brower Butte bastards. Shoplifting shit, even though they have the money. Fucking with the cat. Little creeps. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff they say to Toni.”

Lucy instantly recalled the litany of names and gestures she and Bucket regularly endured—how easily those boys said things like “goat fucker” and “jumping bean”—and her eyes dropped to the floor. She looked over at Bucket and saw he was clenching his jaw.

Judah must have been watching them closely. “Yeah… you guys know, right? That shit never changes. Even when I was a kid. Different guys, same attitude. I lived over past Westerhaus, if that gives you some idea of how I was growing up, and I’d look at those kids and imagine having what they had, all those opportunities, no serious worries, and I was so jealous. And later, when I was selling a little weed, those guys wanted me around, so I’d hang with them. Their cars were cool, I guess. Sometimes I got laid rolling with them. But I was always nervous. Just something about them that felt… off.”

“Like you’re waiting for them to be mean?” asked Lucy. The few times she’d tried to be social with the Brower Butte kids, she’d felt like either an accessory—“My Ethnic Friend”—or a curiosity to be studied like a bug under the magnifying glass until they got bored and decided to start pulling off wings.

“Yeah. Sometimes it did turn mean. Like one night, I’m walking with a bunch of those guys, coming back from a party at Roake Falls, and Justin Norris sees a cat. Total stray, ribs sticking out. And Justin squats down and starts making little noises to the cat and holding out his hand like he’s got food, and you know the other guys are making jokes right away. ‘Justin thinks he can gets some pussy.’ That kind of shit. So finally the cat kind of slinks over, hesitant, but he’s hungry, and the moment he gets close enough, Justin grabs him by the back of his neck, picks him up, and then drop-kicks the thing as hard and far as he can.”

“What?”

“Yeah. So I heard it yowl, and hit a tree, and behind me they’re all, ‘Holy fuck, Norris!’ and, ‘Oh my god!’ and laughter. Mainly laughter. That was the worst part. Like this was the thing that finally lit them up and made them feel. But there was something underneath it, like they were scared too, I guess. Before that, they seemed so bored. I was always too busy working or worrying to be really bored… but these guys… I remember seeing Todd’s freezer once, out in his garage, packed with fucking food, and he looked at it and moaned and said, ‘I hate all this shit.’”

Lucy looked at Bucket, trying to figure out a subtle face that would say, Dude’s got issues.

Bucket didn’t look over at her. Instead he asked, “So what happened to the cat?”

“We could hear it howling out in the trees. And I remember Todd saying, ‘You smashed that pussy, Norris!’ and then for whatever reason we all started walking toward the sound. And when we found the cat, it was wrecked. Back leg bent the wrong way, bone sticking out. Blood coming from its mouth. So right away I grabbed the closest rock I could find and I bent down and finished it off. Fast and clean. One hit. I told myself I was saving the cat from more pain. That coyotes would have come. But the truth was that I could feel it, like in my bones, that those guys weren’t done with the cat. That things were going to get worse.”

Lucy pictured the way boys’ faces would change when they were in a group together. It happened with girls sometimes too. Whatever was wrong in them, it was lined up like dominoes. Only took one falling over and the rest went bad.

Judah continued. “So… yeah. That was my last time rolling with that crew. I wondered what would have happened if I had told the police the next day, but my family always taught me that we don’t talk to cops, and besides, Justin’s dad was on rotary, and he owns, like, half the bullet factory. Plus, they would have flipped it on me. ‘Judah freaked out and killed a cat.’ All their voices against mine.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s weird is I see Justin now, in town. He’s over at St. Andrews, in pediatrics. Sometimes I see him out at the bars with his friends. Most of ’em got fat, had kids, that whole route, and they still look so bored. And it kind of creeps me out, because I look at them and I wonder what they’re doing these days that makes them laugh the way I heard them laugh back then.”

There was a long silence.

Lucy said, “Maybe they grew out of being like that.” This had long been a secret hope of Lucy’s, that time and age would make people better to one another.

Judah took a sip from his huge mug of black coffee and looked at Lucy. “Yeah. I hope so. But then I see their kids and they have that same look in their eyes. I don’t know… My girlfriend says I’m classist as shit, but she grew up with decent money. But it’s like their parents passed on a sickness in the genes. Or it’s the money. I don’t know… And then you have what happened over at Spring Meadow. That Carmichael kid was poorer than dirt, but obviously he was a psycho too. I’m friends with his uncle Scott, and he said it doesn’t make any sense at all. That family’s definitely got issues, but Scott said the kid didn’t have a violent bone in his body. So what the hell? And the Miller kid… He always seemed nice when he came in, one of the good ones despite the money, the world lined up in front of him, and his own mom mercs him in his sleep? Jesus… What the hell is going on in this town? Sometimes it feels like things are fucked up in every direction, you know?”

A thick, wet-sounding ululating noise came from near the entrance of the store, pulling their attention away before Lucy or Bucket could say a word.

Judah looked at the clock on the wall and made an alarmed face as he was pulled from his soapbox into the now.

“Oh, shit—Blumpers!”

“Blumpers?” Lucy asked.

“Store cat. I’m late for his shot. Damn it.” Judah bent behind the counter and rose with a small hypodermic needle in his hand. “He gets all crashy and weird without this. Falls off whatever he’s lying on. The meds make his shit smell like that liquid smoke you use when you’re making jerky, but I guess that’s better than him dying. Sort of.”

Blumpers mewled out another sad, strangled noise from his window seat, and the sound made Lucy think of that other cat, the one from Judah’s story. She imagined how it must have felt in those last moments—hopeful, and confused, and soaring through the air, and crushed.

Then killed.

Rocks slamming down.

Textbooks slamming down.

Screams and purple smoke. Gunfire and blood.

Her anxiety rose. Her heart sped, skin hot across her chest and face.

What happened that day? What did I see?

Judah looked at her. “You all right?”

“Yeah… I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t, and she felt tears coming, and she guessed that if she started crying she might not be able to stop for a very long time, so she ran out of The Exchange and into the cool air of the early evening.