Kung Fu High School (30 page)

"You still can't do this," Jimmy said. He held up crimson palms. Like that was going to convince me.

"But no one else will!" My words were shrill, it didn't even feel like me talking, like something had been opened inside and was talking for me. "How can you fuckin' say that? Donnie is deader than a bucket of shit because of you, and probably a few more people too, and now one of the people that deserves it the most isn't going to get it? Fuck
that,
I'll do it myself!"

Jimmy swiped the gun from me so easily. I think I kind of wanted him to. With my hands the way they were, I could never have pulled the trigger. Not even with a thumb. It was physically impossible. All the drama wasn't strictly for Dermoody. I knew it. He was just a nice unmoving target. It was for everything, everyone. It would've been for never seeing my mom again, for never being able to see my brother again, for only seeing my father having control over half a body, for the storm of confusion that was Jimmy good and bad, for the stupid terrible fuck-up that was me.

That was when one of the doors to the quad opened behind us. Like a bad surprise. Like a fuckin' gameshow. And what do we have behind door number two? Why, the mystery guest, of course! He's head of the Whips! He's acting like a vulture, waiting for others to do his dirty work! He's cleaning up the mess, tying up loose ends, because Ridley told him to! Would those of you who can still clap please give a warm round of applause for ... Bruiser Calderón!

Jimmy and I both jumped back at the same time, ready to defend ourselves. Jimmy pointed the gun at him but Bruiser just put his hands up.

"You goin' after Ridley? Good. Go right ahead, kids. Don't let me stop you. I got a feeling his time is up." He entered the cafeteria and held the door open for us to walk through and out. Into the snow.

When he saw we weren't taking him up on his offer, he backed off and let the door close with him inside. He left two wet boot prints on the tile.

"Don't worry, I'll take care of them," he said.

Jimmy must've believed him because he broke open the stock and dropped the shells onto the ground, kicked them away underneath a far table. Then he set the gun on the floor and we backed toward the doors. It seemed like a hell of a risk to me with Bruiser right there. But as soon as the gun was unloaded and down, Bruiser stopped paying attention to us. Besides, if he was gonna do us in, it sure as hell wouldn't be by gun.

"Yoo hoo." Bruiser dipped his shoulder as he said it to Dermoody. "Remember me?
¿Recuerda mi hermano metior?
Remember what you did to him? I know you can hear me,
jefe.
I could hear everything when I was like that too. That's why this is gonna hurt a whole lot worse.
¡Vas a sufrir mucho dolor y entonces una muerte fantastical.
Because you'll know it's coming."

Bruiser leaned close and whispered the last part right into Dermoody's ear just as jimmy dragged me out the door and the air, below freezing, slid over my wounds, making me forget how hot they were for a moment. Like a clear plastic bag. Like that boy in the bubble.

We trudged out into the snow, nearly a quarter-inch deep. We did it fast. Like we were running away. Not sure what to expect. What was Bruiser going to do? Was he going to come after us with the gun once he did whatever he had to do to Dermoody and Cap'n Joe? It didn't look like it. The second we left it was like we were never there. Bruiser was talking to them, those statues, moving his mouth, strutting as he picked up each shell that Jimmy had kicked. I could only look behind me as we made our way across the quad, at Bruiser as he put the shells in the shotgun and dipped his shoulder, threw his head back, laughed. I was a water skier cruising on the wake of Jimmy's speedboat. I didn't even turn around when I heard fighting in front of me. I couldn't look away from the scene in the cafeteria.

Jimmy punched throats. Jimmy kicked ribs. I could hear it. I could see the bodies fall past me like broken mannequins failing miserably at making decent snow angels. Jimmy froze them: ice sculptures. But I still couldn't tear my eyes away from the rectangular glass entryway. In the dark, it looked like a fluorescent strip of light boxes, all lined up in a row, pouring yellow out the cafeteria entrance and into the quad around me and illuminating the falling snow. Bruiser wiped the stock of the gun, then the barrel, then the trigger with his shirt. He was getting smaller as I got farther away. The whole scene was. I couldn't tell if he was smiling anymore.

I barely felt the snow on my skin, on my hair, melting and joining my sweat. The thought of running away, running home, only briefly occurred to me as the shrinking Bruiser twisted the gun into Dermoody's hand and aimed it right at Cap'n Joe. Then POW. Even through two barriers of bulletproof glass and some twenty yards or more of distance, I could hear it like a muffled sonic boom: Cap'n Joe went over on a right angle, a tipped-over nutcracker.

Bruiser wasted no time pointing the shotgun up, maneuvering it into Dermoody's mouth, still smoking, had to be. I winced, imagining a burning hot gun barrel in my mouth, blistering my lips immediately. It would sink into my gums like that hot knife and that butter. Some things had to be seen all the way through to the end. That was my thought when tiny Bruiser must've pushed his finger into tiny Dermoody's finger and pulled the tiny trigger that I couldn't even see anymore, just had to imagine was there, and then Dermoody lost the top part of his head and then rocked but just kind of stayed standing up like an inflatable bop bag. The gun dropped to the floor beside him. Then Bruiser sat down on the bench of one of the tables.

It was like watching a play. I expected the bright yellow rectangle of lights across the quad to go out, click off, or fade down so I could be a regular audience member and clap and thank god that the tour-de-fuckin'-force was over and I could go home and purposely not think about the shit I saw. But when I heard the sound of Jimmy throwing open the door to the theater building, heard metal slam hard against brick, I knew we still had one more act.

I still hadn't completely regained my composure when we entered the drama building. But then I got wrecked. My head caught a blow right above and behind my ear: right in my parietal, right in my Germany. It definitely rang in my ears, deep down, both of them. I must've been holding my head. I was probably on the floor. Didn't really notice the difference between up and down for a moment. Was just trying to find my Rhineland.

Then Jimmy was next to me. "You okay?"

"I'm okay." I shook my melon before I said it. Everything appeared to be in the right place. Checked my head. I wasn't bleeding. Nothing was loose.

Jimmy ducked a trombone. Some Blades had just emerged from the band room to our left and must've grabbed the only weapons they could find. The only things heavy. Slightly dizzy, I pushed myself up along the wall as Jimmy took a trumpet away from a Blade and then started whacking her in the legs with it, right on the kneecaps and then he really started moving. His whole body was a storm cloud and his limbs were bolts of lightning. Seriously, there was no other way to describe Jimmy as he sped his movements up like the Bionic Man, as if everything he had done previously was actually Jimmy slow-mo: completely surrounded by five kids, he lashed out with a kick in front of him that smashed a pelvis, spun and slung out both arms in what I think were punches and both kids went down grabbing their throats, but as they were falling, before they even hit the ground, Jimmy twisted away from a lame kick like it wasn't even there and powered the Blade in front of him into the wall next to me before unleashing the most wicked roundhouse I've ever seen on the last one, fully bending the trombone into a forty-five-degree angle like it was a paper clip before kicking the kid to the ground with a speed not unlike Dermoody's shotgun blasts.

"Ready?" he asked.

I could only nod and hope that the twinge at the base of my skull wasn't about to become a gorilla-sized headache. Or worse, the old one coming back, the fist crammed into my brain stem. The tumor.

Jimmy pulled the door open and we entered the darkened theater at the back, looking down on the seats and the stage. I made sure the door didn't make any noise when it shut.

The theater itself was as old as the school, but Ridley was having it redone. The carpeting once affixed to the outer concrete walls had been completely torn out and now it was just huge curved slabs with tiny chunks of said carpet still sticking to the wall where the glue was too strong. Eventually acoustic-friendly panels would get socketed in but not until much later, not until seats'd been torn out and boxes added.

As it happened, the seating was split into four sections, with two wing groups on the outsides, and one large middle section that was cut in half by an elevated wooden walkway. It stopped just short of the abbreviated orchestra pit and led to the light and sound booth, which could only be accessed by a ladder and basically looked like a diorama designed by a six-year-old: a spray-painted black shoe box stood on its end with a rectangular hole cut out at the top that had a big black table inside, filled with buttons and lights.

Looked like whoever was in there was just learning because the trio on the stage kept getting hit with alternating hues of red and orange lighting: on, off, on, off. The stage went blue.

"Enough with the fucking lighting! Let them act!" someone screamed from the front row, momentarily shocking the actors on stage.

It was Ridley.

Ridley must've been pretty confident that everything was going to work out since he was sitting in the front row, just watching the play rehearsal, when we walked in. Act I, Scene iv of
Hamlet,
the very beginning of it, with Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus on the platform. But the platform in question was just an awful twelve-foot-tall canvas painted with big gray bricks to look like the side of an old castle but really it looked more like misshapen LEGOs. I didn't even need to see behind it to know that it was probably built like a tree-house landing.

Apart from an awful background painting of the castle throne room pushed slightly off to the side, the stage was bare. Made of the same black wood as the walkway and sound booth, it was a good-sized stage breadthwise. Lots of room for a sword fight. The actors were crowded together in the center of the stage, lit up in a wavering blue spotlight. The kid playing Marcellus looked like he was wearing plastic armor. Just fake.

The actors started the scene again. Right about the time the pain in my head reached official headache status.

"The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold," the kid playing Hamlet said. He was a Runner. I knew him. Heller, his name was, and he was actually an Uncle in his family.

"It is a nipping and an eager air," Fred said.

"What hour now?" Heller was overacting already, craning his neck and everything. He was sniffing the air too. No idea why.

"I think it lacks of twelve." Fred was real understated, just like a companion to a prince would be, I guess. He was stealing the scene.

"No, it is struck." Heller raised his voice too much, played with his gloves too.

"Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Fred's last word hung in the air.

Then the actors stopped, waited. Fred did a great little improv where he put his hand to his ear and got a silly look on his face. He knew the scene was blown.

"Trumpets! Fucking Trumpets and Fucking Ordnance!" Ridley screamed at the booth behind him. "Sound effects! Actors need cues! So does the audience!" Funny thing though, at that point, he was the only one in the audience. Apart from us.

Looked like Ridley had taken over directing duties. Or at least thought he had. He didn't throw the script down or anything, just sat there, waiting. He probably knew we were there. But it was Mock that spotted us first. He'd been leaning against the fire exit by the right wing of seats, dragging on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out the slit in the door but he didn't waste any time tossing it away.

He came at us, right up the aisle. I've got news for you though, if you're not fast enough to dodge an attack coming from someone above you, then don't go after someone higher than you on any staircase, ever. Gravity just isn't on your side when fighting upward on a slope. The consequences are pretty much disastrous and Mock learned them all firsthand. Never even had a chance. He caught jimmy's full leaping kick in the throat and tumbled down the stairs backwards making cracking noises that echoed around the theater. I swear I saw Ridley put his hand on his head when Mock flopped onto the concrete beside him.

A few stragglers followed, all three repeated Mock's mistake. Bodyguards working as shop monkeys, set designers, carpenters, whatever. Ridley had put them all to work. And they might as well have all been named Jack, because each one fell down the hill, broke his crown, and wouldn't be getting up in the morning. I slung one into the seats to my left. This Jill wasn't going tumbling after.

People jumped out of the lighting booth and ran for the exits as I followed Jimmy down the stairs. Marcellus ran for it too, scraping his plastic armor together the whole way.

"Your lucky day, huh?"

Ridley got up and walked through the orchestra pit and took the side stairs up to the stage. He was in no hurry. He was wearing a blue, white, red, horizontally striped polo shirt that changed to square lines of purplish red and all-over blue as he passed under the stage lighting.

"You forced my hand. I wasn't quite ready to go ahead with everything today but I had to, didn't I? You and your preemptive strikes. So how
is
Melinda? Is she well?" Ridley walked to the back of the stage, behind the throne room painting. "All the same, I had a feeling it would end this way. It's what I get for being disorganized. Perhaps a little bit greedy."

Jimmy and I didn't need to say anything. We crossed the pit and got up to the stage, taking up fighting positions side by side.