Lex Thomas - Quarantine - The Saints

BOOZE WAS EVERYWHERE. IN THE TURBULENTglow of the bonfire, Lucy saw countless orange faces with ink black shadows, glugging it, pouring it, swaying from it. Falling, vomiting, and cheering. This was the real stuff. Not some homemade swill that tasted like gasoline and Pez. Beer in cans and bottles, wine, wine coolers, liquor, goofy alcoholic lemonades, the works.

The whole thing was a wonder, and Lucy, for one, was speechless. Bart returned to her, holding up a bottle of vanilla vodka. The skate dangled from his hip.

“I got this for you,” he said, and placed it in her hand.

The cool glass felt great in her hot palm. Lucy lifted it and took a big sip. It tasted wonderful. Pure vanilla sugar. A swarm of kids with lit sparklers ran past. She saw a lot of groping in her peripheral vision. The burn of the alcohol rolled down her throat, and then bloomed in her belly.

“Come on…,” he said. “Let’s find Peter and your friend.”

Lucy nodded with a smile, then took Bart’s hand. They pushed through the crowd, past a slip ’n’ slide made out of a greased-down roll of black trash bags. Slippery, shirtless people slid across it and crashed into a kiddie pool. There was a line of twenty or so microwaves, each on its own desk along the north wall, and they were all plugged into extension cords running into classroom windows. Kids would grab individual-sized, thawed-out, frozen pizzas from coolers nearby and cook them up, before moving on to hang with their gangs.

Lucy and Bart walked past a slurry of music made by the cell phones of stumbling, slow-dancing couples. Over the course of a few strides, they went from hearing Top 40 to country to R&B to metal. Beyond the couples, there were jam circles. Kids played new guitars and bongos and other instruments, while others lay on the ground, wrapped in blankets, and listened. It seemed like every sixth person was hooking up with the seventh. There was a circle of dudes standing around telling jokes. Lucy watched a girl eat chocolate espresso beans by the handful and then do a drum solo on her boyfriend’s back. A group of laughing Freaks chucked batteries at each other, and in the fire’s light it looked like they were throwing fireflies. She heard the faraway sound of a girl puking, and then the comforting words of her girlfriends. Footballs flew through the air. Frisbees too.

Lucy hated to admit it, but this party had lived up to the hype. There was a kind of joy and camaraderie in the air that dwarfed anything she’d seen at Geek shows. Even if she was wary of Gates’s tactics with the parents, what was happening here was good for everybody. Lucy looked up to the dark sky. She didn’t see any parents, but it was so dark. At least one of them had to be posted guard up there. They always were.

“Let’s go to the fire,” Lucy said, and pulled Bart toward the massive flames.

The fire was eating the tower of wooden pallets and lumber. It was pure destruction, but it was beautiful. Lucy walked two steps closer than everyone else. The heat pressed into her. Whipping, snaking, furious tongues of fire filled her field of vision.

“Can I get a sip?” Bart said.

He took the bottle from her and tipped it back. Orange light twinkled off the vodka that clung to the crevasses of his lips. A gust of wind blew clouds of sparks off the fire. The sparks spun past Bart. He handed the bottle to Lucy and smiled.

Diagonally across the fire from her, Lucy noticed a big crew of Sluts. Raunch was among them, hooking up with her boy. Lucy pictured herself cutting loose like that, just losing herself to the pleasure of the moment. It didn’t seem so farfetched.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Lucy said. “How lucky do you feel tonight?”

Bart’s eyes widened, clearly surprised by how forward she was being.

“Pretty lucky,” he said.

She laughed.

Movement in the crowd distracted her. The Saints were approaching. Kids from other gangs shook their hands and slapped them on the backs. They’d come a long way since their shaky start in the school. Now, they walked through the quad like they were a real part of McKinley. Like they’d always been there. They look excited, giddy even.

“Move back!” they shouted.

A really young-looking Saint girl, maybe thirteen years old, walked up and ushered the Sluts back. The Sluts complied since everyone else did, but they were surly about it. The Saints moved in two lines, pushing back at the crowd until the middle of the quad was cleared into one long strip, from one end to the other. The crowd had been split into two halves.

Gates came bursting out of the crowd, riding a wild hog. The animal was giant and muscular and ugly, and it didn’t like having Gates on its back. He held tight to a leash that was choking its neck and he smiled like he was on an amusement park ride.

“I love this guy,” Bart said.

Gates only made it about ten feet into the clearing before he fell off the snarling beast. The hog ran away, back into the crowd, squealing, and snorting. The crowd parted wherever the hog ran.

Gates got up, still grinning. From where Lucy stood, Gates was framed by the column of fire behind him. He wore a blue pinstripe suit with a crisp white shirt, although they were both stained with dirt now. He pushed back his long white hair.

“Welcome to the party, everybody. You guys like my new pet?” Gates hollered.

The cheering was immediate, and it hurt Lucy’s ears.

“That’s nothin’. Are you ready for the big surprise?” Gates said.

The party cheered again, but they were drowned out by a loud, nasty, echoing gargle that came from deep in the school.

“We got a special delivery last night. Top secret. And, it’s a good one,” Gates said.

The Saints laughed and nodded to each other.

The awful noise rattled like an angry chest cold, like a monster at the bottom of a well. It got louder. Closer. The crowd started to worry, and Lucy was right with them. The wretched, booming growl closed in on them. People backed up further, without urging from the Saints, making the gap in the middle of the quad wider.

Then Lucy saw it. A blur came ripping out of one of the hallways, and rocketed across the cleared dirt road, blowing a froth of dust into the air behind it. For a fragment of a second the speeding comet was right in front of Lucy, and she could see it clearly.

It was Will on a motorcycle.

The hallway was the barrel of a rifle, and Will was the bullet. He crushed his fingers around the Harley’s handle grips. He’d crossed the quad in a flash, and sped right into the opposite hallway. People scattered ahead. Terrified faces bolted past him, bodies leapt out of the way, kids flattened themselves to the lockers like they were standing on the slim ledge of a high building. The hallway ahead shook in his vision. The bike was alive, vibrating underneath him like a giant buzz saw.

The hall ended at a T-junction with another hallway, and the hard wall rocketed toward him. Will fumbled with the brake, but couldn’t get his fingers around it. He strained, hooked his fingers around the brake lever and the clutch, and squeezed, but he turned the bar a little as he did it, and the bike began to wobble underneath him. He suddenly wished his motorcycle-riding experience was more than playing with his cousin’s dirt bike one weekend. He painted squiggles of rubber across the linoleum floor. The tires shrieked like a hurt animal. Will shifted his weight to right it, but the motorcycle was too heavy.

The bike bucked, angry with him, and threw Will off. He crashed to the floor and the bike crashed on its side right behind him. Will and the bike skidded down the hall like air hockey pucks. His hoodie and T-shirt ripped away and the slide should have torn his skin up too, but Will had wrapped his entire upper body in duct tape, down to one inch strips around each of his fingers and fingertips.