“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m more used to my foot than you are your leg.”
There was so much to be said, but I’d pretty much said it all that other time when I thought I might be headed toward certain death. I had no time to waste. I climbed down the ladder, walked forward several feet, and saw Adam’s body.
I don’t mean his dead body. I apologize for startling you if that’s what you thought. He was lying on the ground (not in raw sewage or anything like that; it smelled nasty down here, but it was more of a rock tunnel than a river of poo).
Mr. Click was on top of him, hands sort of flopping around as if he was trying to get them around Adam’s neck.
I hurried over there and shoved Mr. Click off of him. I quickly grabbed Adam’s arms and dragged him back toward the ladder as Mr. Click scooted toward us, moving with surprising haste for somebody with no working arms and only one leg.
“Get back!” I said, kicking him in the face as hard as I could.
Mr. Click rolled onto his side and pulled himself into the fetal position. Adam coughed and rubbed his throat, even though he hadn’t actually been strangled.
“How the hell did he get you?” I asked.
“I dunno. I guess I tripped over him.”
Sometimes no rude comment can suffice, so I returned my attention to Mr. Click.
He looked sad.
Scared.
Like a wounded puppy.
“Mr. Click?”
He flinched at the sound of my voice.
“Mr. Click, I’m sorry I kicked you like that, but you sort of tried to strangle Adam, right?”
Why was I talking to him? I had a tight time frame to avoid lakes of fire!
He just looked so.sad.
“Don’t go getting all sympathetic,” I told him. “You were a creep. You made my life miserable. You falsely accused me of cheating.” Mr. Click’s eyes had gone all teary.
“We never meant for this to happen. We just wanted your leg to hurt. I’m so sorry about what we did. It was an accident. Well, no, not an accident. It was on purpose, but we didn’t think it would have anywhere near that much impact.”
Mr. Click’s mouth opened, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t. He was probably trying to assign us more homework. “He looks sad,” said Adam.
“I know he looks sad! What do you want me to do about that? I can’t help it if he looks sad!”
Maybe Mr. Click wasn’t such a bad teacher. Maybe everything he did was to encourage his students to achieve greatness. What if he’d gone home every night, sipped a cup of tea, and chuckled about how he was keeping those crazy kids on their toes? “Someday,” he’d say, a warm smile on his face, “those kids will have jobs that they love and true inner happiness, and I’ll have helped them, if only a little.”
Or maybe he was an evil jerk.
Either way, my heart broke for this sorrowful, frightened, pathetic creature squirming around on the ground, even if he had just tried to strangle Adam.
“Maybe he wasn’t such a bad teacher,” said Adam. “He sort of inspired me to do better. I didn’t do better, but there were lots of times where I thought I should. Maybe this was just his teaching style. When the gypsy lady mentioned Chef Ramsay, that made me think about all of those reality shows where the host is really mean to the contestants, but he’s really just trying to make them be the best they can possibly be. And yeah, also to boost ratings, but I don’t think Mr. Click would’ve cared about TV ratings. He was above that sort of thing.”
“Can we get him out of here now?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.”
Kelley slowly came down the ladder, wincing with each step. “Ow,” she said. “Ow,” she said again. “Ow,” she said once more. But it was a brave, strong “ow,” not a whiny “ow.” My admiration for my girlfriend knew no bounds. If it weren’t for the fact that this relationship was always going to be a she-dumps-me-and- not-the-other-way-around type of deal, I would have known at that moment that I would never break up with her.
“Oh, good, he’s right there,” said Kelley. “Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awful that his arms are broken and his leg is gone, but it does make him easy to keep track of.”
“That’s really morbid,” I said. “But accurate.”
Then Kelley looked the way she did when we went to see kittens at the humane society. “Oh, look at him. He looks so sad. I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but I never thought he was all that mean.”
“He was horrible!” I insisted.
“He was good at what he did. Maybe public speaking wasn’t really his thing, but he knew the information, and he could always answer questions, and I think he truly cared about each and every one of us.”
“He hated us!”
“He hated it when we didn’t apply ourselves. He hated it when we didn’t strive for excellence. He hated when he didn’t think we were being good citizens. But to him, there was no teacher’s pet. We were all his pets.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I’ve never seen such sad, soulful eyes.”
“I know,” said Adam. “They’re haunting.”
“He was the best teacher we’ve ever had. No other teacher cared as much. After we get out of here, I’m going to start raising money for the Mr. Click Memorial Library. I think he’d like that.”
“Or maybe you could put a bunch of books he liked on an e-reader,” Adam suggested.
“That works too. But we have to do something to honor him.” “I miss him,” said Adam. “Even though he’s right there, I miss him. When you stop and think about it, who is the real monster: the mean history teacher or the kids who turned him into a broken zombie? It’s gonna be hard for me to face the mirror for a while.”
“Can we please get him up the ladder before I burn in hell?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” said Adam. “Sorry.”
“Well, well, well,” said a familiar voice. It was not Kelley, and it was not Adam, and it was not Mr. Click. It also wasn’t Zeke,
Mildred, Glenn, Franklin, Donna, or Donnie. (Donnie was that guy from the beginning who cheated off my test, whom I confronted at his locker but he wouldn’t admit it.)
It was Ribeye.
He was pointing a gun at me.
“Man, I’ve been walking around these tunnels forever. I didn’t expect to find you again.”
“Shouldn’t you have just gone up the ladder to the junkyard?” I asked. “That’s where I left you.”
“I would have done that, except I wandered around in a daze for a while. You busted my head up pretty good. I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Your gun’s empty,” I said.
Ribeye shook his head. “I had an extra clip in my pocket.” “Prove it—no, no, don’t prove it. What do you want?” “What do you think I want?”
“Peace for all?”
“Not quite.” He looked down at Mr. Click. “You really messed this dude up. What’d he do to you?”
“Nothing. It never should have happened.”
“Maybe I’ll put a mercy bullet in his head after I kill you,” said Ribeye. He squeezed the trigger.
And then Adam jumped in front of me.
CHAPTER 27
Adam was not quick enough. The bullet sailed past him.
And past me.
And hit Kelley in the chest.
She fell to the ground.
Ribeye squeezed off another shot. Adam tried to dive in front of this one as well but missed again, and this bullet nicked my shoulder.
It felt like a mosquito bite delivered by an eight-hundred- pound mosquito.
Ribeye was about to fire a third shot, but then Mr. Click grabbed his foot.
“Oh, you want to play, huh?” asked Ribeye, grinning. “Play with this.”