Brutal Youth (3 page)

Horse-toothed Simms picked up the other jar. “Holy shit, this guy’s pickling dead critters!” he cried, and Mullen shoved aside the layer of papers, books, pens, and pencils in Clink’s bag to reveal a dozen more jars. He extracted one—an embryonic pig—and held it out. “Whatever this is, you’re going to hell for it, sicko.…”

Vickler’s mind went numb. An eternity passed. He had been trying to do something good, something merciful, but now he saw his collection with the same horror as the boys around him. There was nothing he could do, no explanation that would make sense. He heard the words
psycho, freak, disgusting,
and began to cry, squatting over his scattered papers, gathering them blindly.

Mullen stuck the specimen jar against Vickler’s face. “Wait’ll the girls find out what you did to P-p-p-porky Pig!”

That’s when Vickler’s groping hand found the ballpoint pen.

Before he even realized what was happening, Vickler was slicing it through the air, puncturing Mullen’s cheek like a marshmallow.

Mullen screeched, and Clink seized him by the throat, shoving him backwards with blind fury and slamming him against the boys’ room door as Mr. Mankowski pushed it open on the other side, crushing the teacher’s sinus cavity and toppling him to the ground.

Clink tossed the bleeding, braying Mullen aside and grabbed his bag, yanking the strap over his shoulder as he fled out the door.

The first-floor hallway of St. Mike’s yawned before Vickler like a giant stone throat. He was dimly aware of figures around him, two blurs—one giant and blue, the other small and insignificant—standing a few feet away, and a man—Mr. Mankowski—rolling in agony on the floor beside the lockers.

Horse-toothed Simms rushed out of the bathroom, hefting a jar with a floating tapeworm inside, and hurled it at Vickler, who shoved past Davidek and sprinted into the stairwell, up one floor, then another, until there was no one around him except the stunned-looking janitor standing beside a ladder leading to a square of blue sky.

He began to climb, terrified, thinking maybe he could hide, and realizing too late he was trapping himself.

With unwitting help from Ms. Bromine, Vickler soon learned he had trapped everyone else, too.

*   *   *

When the janitor became separated from his fingers, he plunged down like a pile of old clothes and smashed against the stairwell floor, squealing as he clutched the red nubs of his knuckles. He might have shattered his spine if Mr. Mankowski, staggering beneath the ladder with his bruised face, hadn’t softened the fall.

Ms. Bromine tried to remain calm. She took a step back as the janitor’s crimson-spritzing fingertips spray-painted the floor. The gym teacher was hysterical, whimpering beneath the crumpled janitor, his collarbone fractured. Davidek stood with the crowd of other gawking students and faculty as the two wounded men gibbered madly at the foot of the ladder. “This is going to be bad for enrollment,” Davidek heard one of the teachers say.

Ms. Bromine, suddenly aware of the audience, tried to clear people away, but the crowd was too large for anyone to go anywhere. People in the back were yelling, “Sister Maria is trying to come through! Clear a path!” and Davidek looked over the railing to see the old woman on the stairs below, poking through the mob.

Bromine drew back against the wall. She couldn’t be seen presiding over this chaos.

The red handle of a fire alarm was beside her. “We need to get everyone
out of here,
” she said as her fingers reached for the switch.

*   *   *

On the roof, Colin Vickler, also known as Clink Vickler, also known in grade school as Creepy Colin, seventeen years old, still without a driver’s license, pale-skinned, a prospect-less virgin, and utterly friendless, felt power for the first time in his life as he listened to the electric howl of the alarm and watched waves of his schoolmates gush out of St. Michael’s arched entryway.

They were afraid. Of him.

Some turned their faces up, squinting against the sunlight, their expressions bent into question marks as they tried to see him. A few who’d witnessed what had happened were crying, not looking back—others were spreading the news, passing along a contamination of lies: Clink had been murdering animals, dismembering them, and hiding the remains in glass containers. One of the boys from the changing room said he’d looked into the bag and saw a human hand in one of the jars. A few visiting eighth-graders overheard a teacher say the boy on the roof had cut the school janitor’s throat.

The actual truth was bad enough. Vickler knew he wasn’t coming down again. There was no crawling back through the hatch. There was no apologizing. There was no explaining. He was over. Colin Vickler was gone. Now, he was just Clink. Weird. Psychotic. Dangerous.

But he kind of liked that last part.

The boy lifted his bag onto the ledge and ran his grubby fingers over the tops of the remaining jars, counting ten. He hefted one in his hand, looked down into the parking lot, and surveyed his targets.

*   *   *

From the outside, St. Michael the Archangel High School looked like a building that might devour other buildings. The style of traditional collegiate Gothic architecture seemed to have been fused with primitive battle fortifications to create an imposing, redbrick edifice that bulged up from the earth like some thorny, stone-shelled titan. Davidek looked back at the building as he fled with the other students. “Rubberneck later, man. Now you better run!” someone said, pulling him forward. It was the boy with the scar on his cheek, the one who had helped him in the hallway earlier.

The boy on the roof heaved a jar toward the crowd, smashing a spiderweb into the windshield of a red Buick in the parking lot. Davidek and the scarred kid bolted together through the scattering mob as the second and third jar of scientific specimens exploded against the ground behind them.

Ms. Bromine stood in the center of the evacuation, conducting the mayhem to the street. A shuffling, heavyset kid, gushing sweat in his St. Mike’s uniform, nudged in front of Davidek, huffing as he lurched forward, like a bull trying to run on its hind legs. A thin red tie drifted over his shoulder as a flash of light streaked out of the sky and exploded against the back of the chubby kid’s skull. The glass jar had made a hissing sound as it cut the air, and the fat boy made the same noise as he faceplanted against the pavement.

Davidek tried to stop, tried to reach down and snag the fallen kid’s shoulders, but the other students pushed him forward, with no time for anyone’s rescue but their own. Davidek and the scarred boy reached the edge of school property, where cars cut back and forth along the street, honking furiously at the herd of students fleeing across the blacktop.

That’s when Ms. Bromine began to yell, “Stop!
Stop!
”

For a moment, everyone did.

“No one … can leave … school grounds,”
she said, the crowd swirling around her as she turned. Her blond puff of hair was wilting with sweat. “No leaving without a … a … permission slip.”

The students of St. Mike’s gawped at her. They began to argue in discordant unison. Then another jar streaked from the rooftop and sent them scattering for cover behind parked cars.

The school principal, Sister Maria Hest, was among the confused and cowering. She crawled through the hiding crowd, demanding information. “What’s happening?… Why is the school being evacuated?… Who is throwing things from the roof?” Everyone tried to tell her at once, so she understood none of it.

Ms. Bromine did not speak up right away. She was formulating justifications. She wondered who, if anyone, had stayed behind with Mr. Mankowski and Mr. Saducci.

A UPS truck squealed smoke from its tires and jerked to a stop inches from some scampering freshmen who’d decided to ignore the rules and run off the property. As the driver drowned out his own obscenities with the blast of his horn, Bromine and Sister Maria saw more refugee trails of students flowing across the street, out of range from the boy on the roof.

The guidance counselor snapped her fingers at two of the other teachers. “Grab those kids. Keep them on school property! We can be sued if they get hurt in this traffic!”

A blond girl in gym clothes broke away from the group and stood her ground in the middle of the street, right in front of Bromine. Her kinky hair was tied up in two madwoman pigtails. “Are you a total fucking idiot?” the girl snapped. “What if we get hurt
on
school property?”

Bromine became aware of many eyes turning toward her. Her throat tightened. “Don’t curse at me,” she said.

The blonde raised two middle fingers at the guidance counselor. “How about some sign language, then?” she said, turning her back to leave. Bromine darted into the street, seizing the girl by one frazzled pigtail and dragging her back to the sidewalk.

A smattering of rocks fell against the cars at the far end of the parking lot. The boy on the roof was throwing chunks of broken brick at them now. Bromine ducked behind the trunk of a beat-up green Plymouth, still gripping the blond girl’s hair. At the other corner of the lot, a cluster of boisterious seniors stood on the hood of a silver Honda, chortling piggishly as they pretended to shoot the projectiles out of the sky with invisible shotguns.

In the center of the parking lot, lying motionless in a widening pool of blood, was the unconscious boy who had charged in front of Davidek before getting beaned on the skull. With everyone else hiding, this still figure was now the easiest target for the boy on the roof.

Thuck. Thuck.
Chunks of brick began to thwack against the facedown kid.

Davidek and his new friend with the scarred cheek were both crouched beside a Jeep, just a few spaces away. They could see glass mixed with blood on the back of the unconscious boy’s head.

“Someone should help,” Davidek said.

The scarred kid nodded. “You know, if that kid hadn’t shoved us aside, maybe me or you would be lying there with our head split open.… You think he’d run out to save
us
?”

Davidek shrugged. “He’s bleeding bad.”

The scarred kid looked around doubtfully. “I’m not sure doing the right thing is the way to survive at this place.” But Davidek was already edging out, getting ready to spring toward the wounded kid. “I could have grabbed that crazy kid in the hall, tried to slow him down,” he said. “But I didn’t. I just got out of the way. I was scared.”

“Guilty conscience?” the scarred kid said with a laugh. “You’re perfect for Catholic school.” He put a hand out. “Hey, tough guy, before we charge into battle … my name’s Noah Stein. My family calls me No for short. No Stein. That’s weird, right?” Davidek said he guessed it was and shook the kid’s hand distractedly.

A monstrous, skinny shape, tall and bent like a streetlamp, cast its long shadow over them. It was one of the teachers, a young guy with a stretched, gargoyle’s face. “If you boys are planning a distraction, I could sure use one,” he said, moving forward toward the school without stopping for a response. “Go, Mr. Zimmer!” the girl with the yellow pigtails screamed as Ms. Bromine’s gripped loosened and she pulled free. Bromine staggered forward, watching her colleague steal the credit for saving the day.

*   *   *

Mr. Zimmer had been a student at St. Mike’s more years ago than he cared to remember. He’d been a good kid, a quiet kid, one who never got in trouble—except once. Since he had long legs and stretchy arms, some guys had dared him to climb one of the brass waterspouts on the corner of the school building. The trick was to hold on to some of the brick outcroppings, but no one else could reach them. Nobody except Andy Zimmer and his praying mantis limbs.

Getting up through the rooftop hatch was impossible—the janitor had proved that—but that old waterspout was another fast way up, provided Vickler didn’t notice until he was already over the ledge.

The sound of sirens rose in the distance. Police. Firefighters. Zimmer didn’t want to think about what the cops would do if the boy on the roof started shoving statues over on them, too.

On the other side of the Jeep where Davidek and Stein were taking cover, a chubby black boy poked his head up. “Hey, I’m Hector. Hector Greenwill,” he said, extending his hand, although neither boy was going to move from their hiding spot to shake it. “I’m another eighth-grade visitor, like you guys.” He was dressed in tan pants and stuffed into an orange-and-black striped sweater. “When you do your thing, I’ll help cause another distraction, try to draw his fire,” he said.

Stein shrugged. “Perfect, dude. You
are
dressed as a bull’s-eye.”

Greenwill got into a squat, ready to run. “Just don’t make someone else have to rescue
you,
all right?” he said, and lumbered off in the opposite direction from Mr. Zimmer, toward the grassy green field beside the school, where the burned-down church once stood.

“Okay, hero,” Stein said, putting a hand on Davidek’s back. “Let’s go pretend we’re the good guys.”

A pair of sapphire-clawed hands seized them both by their collars. “You’re too close!” Ms. Bromine growled, pulling them back. “Get down! Now!”

Davidek squirmed, pointing to the lifeless heap in the center of the lot. “We’re going to help that kid!” Bromine peered in the unconscious boy’s direction. “Carl!” she barked. “Carl LeRose! Stand up now and get over here!”

The boy was lifelessly disobedient. Davidek kept trying to pull away, but Stein was looking for something to distract her. In the same instant, the fat boy in the black-and-tangerine sweater made his move—running and yelling and waving his arms in the wide grassy field, drawing the attention of the boy on the roof, along with everyone else in the parking lot. On the opposite side of the building, Mr. Zimmer put one hand over the other and began to methodically climb the waterspout.

This was their moment. Stein watched Davidek struggle helplessly as the guidance counselor held him in place. He reached out and grabbed the blue lady’s face between his hands, thrusting his face against hers in a smacking kiss.