Strike (2 page)

“Gross.”

He trades his sleeping bag for my flashlight and leads the way
down a narrow hallway with flimsy wood paneling peeling off the wall. Normally I would be too scared of getting in trouble or falling through the floor to walk into an abandoned, dangerous house in the dark. Now I'm checking for hiding places and escape hatches, should Valor come for us. After a few more turns and lots of weird crap that I barely see, we end up in a decently clean room that smells like cigarettes and weed. There's a squashy sofa in the corner that might sprout mushrooms at any moment and a big pile of records spilling out of sleeves beside an army of empty liquor bottles filled with ashes.

“You and Mikey, huh?”

“Good times,” he says, kind of bittersweet, kind of sarcastic. “But no one ever came out here, not a single time. And this room is the only one that doesn't leak. So there's that.”

He arranges the sleeping bag, pulls another flashlight out of his backpack, and hurries outside for more stuff, and I sit down on the sleeping bag and poke fries into my mouth and try to remember how to chew. Matty creeps close on her belly, her head on my knee, like she wants to apologize for all my trouble. Wyatt tromps back in with Monty's aquarium and hurries right back out. I keep eating. I go throw up in a cardboard box, just to make things interesting, because the floppy French fries remind me of dressing my ex–best friend's corpse in my own shirt and hat tonight. Amber's arms were floppy, just like the fries.

When Wyatt comes back, he drops his bag and hurries to my
side. I'm curled up in a ball, shaking, making a weird keening noise. Soon he's a big spoon, making me into the little spoon, holding me tight against his chest, murmuring stupid shit to me and raising my body temperature back up to the land of the living.

“It's okay. Shh. C'mon. It's going to be all right.”

That makes me snort. “It's really not.”

“Is this . . . ? I mean, is this the usual stuff, or something different?”

“Wyatt, if you ask me if I'm on my period, I'm going to literally murder you. And you know that's kind of my specialty.”

His hand stills on my stomach. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I guess. It's the best I can do. And it's all the usual stuff. I thought I would feel better now, and I don't. Nothing feels real or okay or better. It was supposed to be over, and it's not over. I can't go home.” A sob catches in my throat, and I ride it out, tucking my head into his shoulder. “I can't go home.”

“Nope. You can't.”

“You pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger, and it's got me all messed up, because I know what that feels like, and I thought I was hard inside. I want to be hard. But I'm all squashy and tangled. All it takes is a bullet in the wrong place. It's over so much faster than it is in the movies. All the blood. And the eyes.” I dig my fists into my eyelids. “Jeremy's eyes. God, they—he was Jeremy, and then all of a sudden, he wasn't. And I was me, but now I'm not anymore. So who am I?”

“You're you. And it's not your fault.”

He's so solid and real and honest that his words just double me up harder, and I am full of so many feelings that I can't hold them all, and I'm going to explode, because seventeen-year-old girls shouldn't have to kill people, and I have. A lot of people. They said that if I did what they told me to do, I was supposed to be able to go back to real life, to my house and my mom and my job and school, but here I am now, on the run. With nothing. Just a boy and a dog and a snake, lost in the woods. It was supposed to be worth it. I was supposed to get my life back.

But it's gone. Just as if I really were dead.

I keep crying.

I cry until lights flash through the window, dancing across the peeling wood walls.

Someone else is in the woods.

My hand tightens around the gun.

I never let it go, you see.

My tears stop falling, and my chin stubbornly sets. I don't know how to deal with the aftermath of killing, but I'm pretty good at the actual murder part.

“You think it's Valor?” Wyatt whispers in my ear.

“Who else?”

“Second Union again, maybe?”

I hadn't thought of that—that Second Union might still be sending their own assassins after the kids, like me, who got tapped as bounty hunters for Valor. I can't believe we ever trusted banks. They sent my best friend, Jeremy, after me, and now he's dead. What else can they possibly do?

I snort. “Either way, they're going to die.”

Wyatt's big body uncurls from around mine, leaving me cold. Iron seeps into my veins. I check my clip, even though I know it's full. This is my dad's gun, the one Valor didn't know about. Wyatt reaches into his backpack and pulls out Jeremy's Glock, the one stamped
SECOND UNION
in glittering gold. He nudges Roy's shotgun so that it's on the ground between us, and he nods and clicks off both of our flashlights, which were fortunately pointed low instead of lighting up the windows like idiots. The light from outside dances in my eyes, and Wyatt dives for the ground and pulls me with him, our shoulders smashed together and my arm around Matty.

“Shh,” I murmur. “Good dog. Don't get us killed, 'kay?”

Voices chitter in the night as a beam of light cuts the darkness overhead.

“Is it safe?” says one—a young guy. Funny—that's the same thing I asked.

“Oh, for a haunted house in the middle of a creepy forest, it looks pretty safe,” says another guy, smooth as butter. “I've hung out here before. It's cool.”

“Idiots,” hisses a third. A girl. “Shut up and point the light down. Could you be less obvious?”

“They're kids. So, not Valor,” Wyatt whispers.

“Doesn't mean they don't want us dead,” I whisper back. And we're both thinking about Jeremy and Roy, sent by Second Union to kill us for reasons we still don't completely understand.

“They're going to the front door.”

I grab my flashlight and silently rise to a crouch. “Then let's go tell 'em we don't want any damn Girl Scout cookies.”

Wyatt goes first, hurrying down the hallway. It's dark as death, so I grab the back of his hoodie and try not to step too heavily. I'll never forget the sound of that thug's foot breaking through a rotten step in Sharon Mulvaney's house. Was that really only three days ago that I got in a gang shoot-out in a meth house? I shake my head. If I can survive that, I can survive this.

White light shoots overhead as a face appears in the window by the front door.

“Amateurs,” I mutter.

A high whine reminds me that Matty is at my side—stupid, loyal, doesn't-understand-guns Matty. We should've locked her in a bathroom or something. Overweight Labradors suck in gunfights. I guess she's an amateur too. It's too late to lock her up somewhere safer—I just have to hope we can end this quick, whatever it is.

My heart is in my throat again. But then, did it ever leave?

They're all on the porch now, and fingers scrabble around the floorboards.

“You said there was a key,” says the young one. Baby Bear.

“There used to be,” says the smooth, cool guy. Papa Bear.

“Again, you guys are idiots. The wood's rotten. One kick and the whole fucking house will fall down.” Sensible Mama Bear.

“You probably shouldn't—”

The door bangs open, and I step into it with my gun up and my flashlight on.

“Can we help you?”

God, I sound like a badass. But inside I'm screaming. Matty starts barking like crazy, and Wyatt grabs her collar and pretends to hold her back, his gun pointed alongside mine. I can barely see them in the single beam of light. They're just ragged, desperate shadows in the night. Whoever was holding the flashlight on their side? They drop it.

I smell piss and gun oil, and then Papa Bear is cocking a pistol like it means something. “Yeah, you can help us. We're hiding here. So you can leave.”

“Wrong answer. Go hide somewhere else or get shot.”

My jaw is so tense that my teeth are about to crack like popcorn, and I can hear these kids breathing, because they're kids—they're our age or maybe even younger—and Papa Bear's gun doesn't waver and Matty is barking and when Baby Bear goes for his waistband, I spit, “Goddammit,” and shoot him before something seriously stupid happens.

But I shot him in the leg, so I guess I'm learning.

It wasn't meant to be a killing shot this time.

He squeals like a baby and falls over, and Wyatt lets go of Matty and slaps a hand over the kid's mouth to stop his screaming.

“Jesus! You shot him!” says the girl. She fumbles for the flashlight and shines it on whoever the hell I just shot, and oh my God, I didn't shoot a teenager. I shot a ten-year-old, maybe. A rat-faced little kid in boat shoes, and his pants are a wet splatter of piss and blood, but at least the blood isn't gushing out, so maybe I'm not going to hell forever.

“You come knocking on somebody else's house after dark, you got to expect bad things to happen,” Wyatt mutters. “She warned you.”

With a deep sigh, he pulls off his hoodie and ties it around the kid's leg. I can only stand there, numb, gun flopping at my side, hating myself and feeling like shit. At some point, the kid stops shouting and passes out, and the girl is fussing around with him, shooing Wyatt away, and the weird slurping sound I hear is Matty licking Papa Bear's gun hand. It's too dark to see much, but he's leaning against the door, cool as a stupid cucumber, staring at Wyatt.

“Sup, Beard?” he says.

Wyatt's head snaps up, and he stands, suddenly twice as tall as he should be and exuding menace as he gets in Papa Bear's face. “Do I know you?”

“Haven't seen you since Mikey's funeral. You don't remember me? I'm hurt.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember now. You used to have a shaved head. Pretty sure I got drunk every time we hung out because I couldn't stand you. What's your name again? Chance?”

“Cianci. But Chance is good enough for the apocalypse. Yeah, let's go with that.” He tucks the gun under his shirt against tight abs and slumps against the door. “Chance,” he says to himself. “And who's the chick with the itchy trigger finger?”

“I think you mean the chick who still has fourteen bullets,” I say.

He just laughs like that's adorable. Which pisses me off even more.

I ram my gun against his belly and say, “Dude, I will totally blow you a new butthole. Just pick up your friends and go away.”

He shakes shaggy, dark hair out of his eyes, which are just shiny black pits in this light. “They're not my friends. And no.” I think he's reaching to hold my hand, but he does something with the gun, pushing it smoothly out of my grip before I can react. Holding it up, he grins. “Tonight's not New Butthole Night. It's actually Thursday. And you should never touch somebody with a gun unless you're going to pull the trigger, because you never know who spent a lot of time in juvie practicing disarming techniques.”

Still holding my gun, he walks past me and into the house, whistling.

Wyatt and the girl drag the kid I shot
(The kid. I shot.)
into the house and onto our sleeping bag. Turns out my bullet
(My. Bullet.)
went right out the back of his thigh, leaving a clean wound that didn't
hit anything major. Which makes me a monster but not, at least, a monster who murders little boys.

“I don't blame you, Zooey. I wanted to shoot him, too,” Chance says, settling in on the squashy sofa and splaying out in the way of boys who want to seem bigger than they are. “But Gabriela wouldn't let me. So here we are. And now I ask you: Do you have any food? Because I'm dying here.”

“My name isn't Zooey,” I say.

“I don't want to know your real name, and you look like Zooey Deschanel's trailer-trash sister, so we're going with that.”

“I wish I'd shot you instead.”

His grin is so annoying that I click off the flashlight.

“Lots of people say that, Zooey.”

Gabriela grabs my flashlight and props it up with hers so she can inspect the kid. It's not a pretty sight. Wyatt and I are standing just outside the hallway, watching and incompetent, and it's horribly awkward. Not as awkward as that time I wasn't wearing pants and he got a pajama boner while trying to slash my throat with a steak knife, but close.

“We can take him to the vet tomorrow,” I say, and Wyatt shakes his head.

“We can't go back there. And we're broke. Except for the card.”

“But a vet wouldn't turn away a bleeding kid. Hippocratic oaths, right?”

Chance sits forward, a gun in each hand, his and mine. “Zooey, do you honestly think oaths mean shit in this world? All contracts are void, and God bless Valor.”

I stare at him, hard. “Were you . . . ?”