The harder he strained to see a face, the dimmer the room got until what he saw before him was a dilapidated classroom, but with the hospital room still hanging there, transparent, a suggestion of a room.
“David, we should go,” he heard Lucy whisper.
All he had to do was get everyone through Freak territory. Once they were on the other side, it was a short trip to the ruins. As long as they could navigate to room 1206, they could find their way to the outside. The longer he took, the less immunity he’d have against the fatal pheromones that everyone around him emitted. The less immunity he had, the more fevered his mind would become until the hallucinations drove him insane, and the meat of his lungs would unspool inside his chest.
David was dying, and it was his friends who were killing him.
David walked away from the hazy hospital room. They hooked a right into a wide hallway. The ceiling lights were burned out for the first few yards. After that, the hallway was barely lit for a hundred feet, where it ended in a T-junction. The last bit of power from the generator barely coursed through the building’s wiring. David led the Loners through the darkened section and into the pulsing light.
He heard the footsteps of a crowd. Faraway chatter. Someone was coming. David stopped and motioned for his gang to halt. At the far junction, he saw Freaks, three of them, walking through the intersecting hallway. They passed through the junction without seeing the Loners. He waved the Loners back and reversed his steps as quietly as he could. More Freaks crossed ahead. If the Loners could back up into the dark section of the hallway, they could remain undetected.
David glanced at his gang behind him.
They were all Will. A wide hallway of convulsing Wills stood gagging behind him, their eyes rolling white, a froth of saliva shaking out of their mouths.
David screamed.
“LONERRRRRS!” yelled a Freak.
A horde of Freaks flooded into the hallway and charged.
They wore black, and their faces and arms were completely blacked out with some sort of paint. The chemical blue of their hair looked even more unnatural against their charcoal faces. Some wore swimming goggles. They carried scimitar-shaped shards of shattered blackboard with handles made of desk legs. The Loners sank into fighting stances. David saw an avalanche of blue fall toward him. The Loners ran forward; their white heads penetrated the blue mass. Violence exploded through the hall. David pulled a pipe from his belt.
He prayed that whatever he swung it at was real. A blue-hair sliced his blackboard scimitar down at him. David blocked it with the pipe. The blackboard shattered, and the impact rattled the bones in David’s hand. The pain in his wrist was no hallucination. David clung to that pain. He swung his pipe into the kid’s hip. The kid fell.
David hacked away at whoever came near. He took down a Freak who swung a rope with a brick tied into its end. A blue-bearded Freak swung a two-by-four that had nails driven through it, into the back of a Loner next to David.
David saw a human skeleton weaving through the riot. It shoved people out of its way, throwing its bones into them.
It had no jaw. There was a hammer clutched in its fleshless fingers. The skeleton turned to him. Dead, empty eye sockets locked onto David. It ran at him.
A chair smacked into the back of David’s knees. He thudded down to the ground on his stomach. He whipped around onto his back. Ritchie was dragging a chair-wielding Freak away from David. David got up on one knee. The skeleton appeared above him, hammer raised high over its cracked skull. A wet, pink tongue extended out from the shadows under its upper teeth. It screeched.
David gripped his pipe with both hands and put everything into one swing, chopping his pipe up into its dead head. The front of the skeleton’s skull, its bony face, broke off and flew over the heads of the feuding gangs. The skeleton thumped down on the floor next to David. It was Bobby. He was unconscious. It took David three blinks for him to see it clearly.
Bobby wore the front half of a plastic rib cage from a biology classroom skeleton over his black shirt. The skeleton’s bony face had been his mask. David stood.
The battle still thrashed around him. Blue and white hair was now stained with red. The Freaks had pushed the Loners back, into the darkened section of the hall again. Will and Ritchie struggled against four Freaks. Loners were out-numbered by Freaks, twofold. They were giving everything they had in David’s name, but they weren’t going to last much longer.
“You want me, come and get me!” David hollered to the crowd.
The Freaks all looked at David. Time to run. He bolted away from the Freaks, around a corner and into a narrow hallway.
He slammed hard against a row of lockers. His depth percep-tion was jacked. He heard a wailing mob bottleneck through the door behind him.
The hallway was a cluttered dumping ground. The Skaters hadn’t picked up garbage for weeks. He tripped over a stack of torn-up carpet and fell into a pile of trash. He fumbled to get to his feet.
Gotta slow down.
But he couldn’t. He glanced behind. The Freaks were bearing down on him fast. He collided with a tangle of desks and leapt over a plump garbage bag to keep his footing. He careened off one object and then another, always close to falling over.
The Freaks shouted after him and threw things out of their way. The hallway narrowed around David as he ran. The walls squeezed in on him.
It wasn’t real.
All the doors were swinging open and slamming shut of their own accord. For a moment, he saw a bloodred elk running by his side. The noise behind him sounded like a stampede of screaming elephants. The noise swelled until David thought it was coming from inside his head instead of behind him.
David tripped on a gallon milk jug full of piss, and ate it into a pile of pallets. Pain. He looked back. The churning mass of Freaks was only twenty feet behind him.
David bolted up and hooked a left. There it was: the entrance of the cafeteria. It gleamed for him like heaven’s gate. He passed two Sluts taking out their garbage. Two more stood guard ahead of him by the doors.
“Hey!” one yelled.
He couldn’t explain. The guards reached out to try to stop him, but he ran through them, knocking the girls aside, and tumbled to a stop inside the cafeteria, in front of a crowd of Sluts. They rose to their feet and shouted at him.
“Shut the doors! Shut the doors!” David shouted.
Violent cut through the crowd to meet David, her face twisted in anger.
“You can’t just run past my guards like that!”
“The Freaks!” David yelled, trying to catch his breath.
“They’re coming!”
The blue-haired army rounded the corner and charged into the cafeteria. The Sluts ran at the Freaks with whatever they could grab, and the two gangs ripped into each other.
The cafeteria was pure carnage. David punched at whatever Freak came at him and kept moving. The Sluts fought to get the invaders out. There were too many bodies to discern who was who anymore. He planted his feet. The people in front of him looked like two-dimensional cutouts. He swung his pipe and bashed it against anything solid.
Another entrance to the cafeteria burst open. A hundred Freaks rushed through. The doors of a third cafeteria entrance toppled over. Throngs of Freaks flooded in. The cafeteria filled with blue-haired psychos, hundreds and hundreds of them, charging toward David. He swung his pipe wildly, smashing it into one Freak after another. For every Freak he knocked to the ground, five more would attack.
They were on all sides, they pulled the pipe from his hands.
He punched, he elbowed, he kicked. They clawed into him, tearing at his skin, biting his back.