Chapter Nineteen

Marnie couldn’t stop the fresh waves of guilt from pulling her under every time she looked at Chuck’s sling or the slashing bruise on Heidi’s cheek. Chuck’s own face was a black and purple collage. His sling was secured to his torso with a strap wrapped around his midsection. In a strange way, she was glad his beard hid the other lasting marks from his confrontation with the Melon Head.

They sat on the hood of Chuck’s car parked under the fluorescent lights in the parking lot outside the Shopwell supermarket. The store had just closed but lights still blazed inside as the workers set about cleaning. Marnie and her friends had been there an hour, never straying far from Chuck’s battered car. A hunk of cardboard was duct- taped to the back window. All was quiet now, but that could change in an instant. The doors were left open in case they had to jump inside and burn rubber.

Vent passed Marnie the forty ounce of Crazy Horse, wrapped in a brown paper bag that all but screamed there was booze inside. Crazy Horse cost a dollar a bottle and tasted like something you’d use to clean the floor of a mechanic’s garage. The malt liquor concoction packed enough punch to make it worth the pain. Marnie took a long pull, the dull buzz just starting to kick in.

It had been three days since Chuck and Heidi had been attacked. Classes had been suspended at the high school so the police could speak to every single student. Interrogate was more like it. They’d set up a so-called interview room in the gym, putting up partitions so several kids could be interviewed at the same time. The attack on the neighborhood had been deemed a wilding incident on a grander scale than the one that had made headlines in Central Park in New York a few years earlier. The residents hadn’t gotten a chance to make out who was tearing up their street and houses, but they were all pretty sure it had to be kids. Naturally, every teenager in Milbury was a suspect. Marnie’s interview had been short. She heard a cop say to another as she was leaving, “She looks like she can barely stand up straight. I don’t peg her for this.”

She’d walked out of the gym with the slow shuffle she’d adopted since leaving the hospital. Her body was mending, at least the parts that could mend, but mentally she still felt broken. She found her hand resting on her stomach off and on throughout the day, vacillating between phantom and real pain and loss.

“I still can’t believe you didn’t tell them,” Vent said. He threw a rock into the trees lining the lot.

“Like they’d believe us,” Chuck said. His voice was nasal. His nose hadn’t been broken but it was swollen. He was scheduled to go to the dentist the following week to get a fake tooth to replace the one that had been knocked out. It hadn’t been found. Marnie wondered if the Melon Head took it as a souvenir.

“You never know,” Vent said.

“Yes, we do know,” Heidi said.

“At least you guys didn’t get the third degree from the cops,” Vent said.

Chuck backhanded Vent in the chest. “That’s because we almost got killed. I’d trade a broken clavicle for an hour of discomfort any day, man.”

Vent looked at the ground, rubbing his chest. “Whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Chuck said.

“Guys, we don’t need this,” Marnie said. The tension was wearing them down, whittling their nerves to gossamer threads. The fact that they hadn’t been able to find Mick had been a three-ton weight pressing down on them. Marnie didn’t want to assume the worst, but it was getting harder to remain optimistic. “I think we should just pick up and go.”

“Go?” Heidi said. “Like, where would we go?”

“Someplace far from here.”

“We have about a hundred bucks between the four of us. We wouldn’t get very far,” Chuck said. He winced as he made an adjustment to the sling.

“I have five hundred in a savings account my grandmother set aside for me,” Marnie said.

“We can’t just drop out senior year and leave our families,” Heidi said.

“You don’t have to. They’re not after you,” Marnie said with a trace of doubt in her voice. She looked at Vent. “Or you. But the longer Chuck and me stay here, the more people may get hurt, including you guys. Oh, and let’s not forget they’re going to tear us apart if they catch us. I’ve seen what that looks like and I sure as hell don’t want it happening to me.”

Heidi took the Crazy Horse and finished it. She tossed the empty bottle in Chuck’s back seat. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You’re going to if we stick around too long,” Marnie said.

Chuck didn’t say a word. She knew he had a lot to lose no matter the choice. He was on his way to a scholarship and getting out of Milbury for good next summer. Only there was no way they were going to dodge the Melon Heads until then. Not if the Melon Heads were willing to come out in force and strafe a whole neighborhood. Chuck had to leave with her. The moment he did, he was also trashing his future, with the caveat that he at least would still have a future.

Chuck kept his cigarettes and lighter in his sling. He lit one up and blew smoke rings that quivered and broke apart as they rose into the light like tiny, fragile haloes. “How do we know if we leave that they won’t take it out on our families? I can’t take that chance.”

Marnie hadn’t thought of that. Her family wasn’t anything to write home about. She knew people called them white trash. Despite all that, they were all she had. She felt like screaming.

“Maybe Mick was right. We should find a way to work with the Melon Heads,” Vent said.

Marnie and Heidi had gone to his trailer the day before. The door was wide open, the inside ransacked. Heidi found splashes of blood on some leaves. Dwight’s boat of a car was there but there was no sign of anyone. The whole place felt abandoned.

“You didn’t see them,” Heidi said, hugging herself. “You can’t work with someone like that.”

“Dredd did.”

“I’m beginning to think he made all that shit up,” Chuck said. “Sure, they left him alone for some reason and he knew all about that place in the woods. He could have just been lucky on the one hand and curious enough to stumble on that weird teepee thing on the other. If he was able to communicate with them, why did he run? They came for him and totally trashed his place. That didn’t look like they had an agreement.”

A dog started barking in the night, clearly agitated. They couldn’t see where it was coming from. A strip of residential homes was right behind Shopwell. Another dog joined the chorus. Marnie slid off the hood and inched her way to the open door. “Something has them spooked.”

“Everyone in the car,” Chuck said calmly. He cranked the ignition, taking no chances. It was hard to hear the dogs over the rumbling engine.

Marnie climbed out of the window and sat on the edge with her hands on the roof. She waited for the Melon Heads to crawl from the shadows. Heidi touched her leg. “You see anything?”

“No.”

The dogs settled down. Somewhere, a screen door banged shut.

How long could they live like this? They were jumping at the sound of dogs barking. Worse still, they were afraid to go home, even Heidi and Vent. Especially Heidi. She’d attacked one of them, maybe hurt it bad. Did that put her on the revenge list? She hoped not, but how could she be sure? No one had spoken out loud about it, but Marnie worried all the time. She’d rather die than lose Heidi. She had almost lost her once already.

“Maybe I should beat them to the punch,” she said to the empty lot.

“What?” Heidi said.

“Nothing. We should probably get out of here just in case.”

The car rolled into a U-turn. Marnie remained sitting on the window, feeling the cool air on her face. It helped fight the burning sensation boiling under her skin as she considered all her options. None of them were good. The only sure thing was that she wasn’t going to let those monsters get her. Not alive.

They drove around for the next couple of hours. It was getting late and they would eventually have to go home. Marnie wished for a freak storm or manmade catastrophe. Anything to delay the inevitable. At home, she would be alone and vulnerable. Her parents never got home before two in the morning.

Chuck popped a Poison cassette into the radio. ‘I Want Action’ blared from the speakers. The silly, party rock from the eighties never seemed more inappropriate.

“Turn that shit off, man,” Vent said.

“You used to love Poison.”

“Used to is the key word. Hair metal died for a reason.”

“I remember when we saw their album cover at Sam Goody. You stopped right in your tracks. You even ranked them from hottest to just plain hot because you thought they were girls.” Chuck’s laughter filled the car. In this case, it wasn’t infectious. Vent kicked the back of his seat.

“How the fuck was I supposed to know? They wore more makeup than every woman in my family combined.”

“I believe you wanted to bang Bret Michaels.”

“Dude, please shut the fuck up.”

They went back and forth over eighties metal and nineties grunge, the Crazy Horse loosening them up. Marnie half listened to their same old arguments. Grunge wiped away eighties metal because the party was over. Grunge was the perfect backdrop to their shitty lives. Even on her best days, Marnie’s soul was drawn to the haunting hooks of Alice in Chains rather than the fake cowboy hoedown nonsense perpetrated by Bon Jovi, a bunch of guys from Jersey who wouldn’t know the ass end of a horse from a car muffler.

She never wanted to leave the back seat of this car, in this moment, listening to her friends talk about the same old stuff like nothing tragic had happened…or was going to happen. She leaned against Heidi and picked at the frayed edges of the hole in her friend’s jeans. Only two things would have made this better: Mick and a couple of joints. Then she could truly pretend that she wasn’t going to die.

“I love you,” she said to Heidi.

Heidi twirled Marnie’s hair between her fingers. “I love you, too. We’ll figure something out. I promise.”

She didn’t have the heart to contradict her best friend.

Marnie drifted off to sleep, awaking when the car came to a stop. “We’ll all walk you inside,” Chuck said. She rubbed the corner of her eye with her knuckle. “I’ll even check the closets and under the beds.”

“Thanks,” she said, lifting her head off Heidi’s lap.

Vent led the way, followed by Marnie, Heidi and Chuck watching their backs. They lit the house up like it was New Year’s Eve and methodically checked every room. Naturally, Marnie’s mother and stepfather were nowhere to be seen. For once, she wished they were around.

Heidi turned on the backyard floodlights so no one could sneak up behind the house. Once they were comfortable the coast was clear, they headed back out to the car.

“Call me if you get scared or anything,” Heidi said.

“I will.”

“I’m serious. I can be here in like five minutes.” She hugged Marnie around her neck.

“What about you, Chuck? Who’s gonna check your house?”

He shrugged with his one good shoulder. “My parents are home, so it should be good. I have an axe in the trunk that I’ll take with me when I walk from the car to the house.”

“An axe?”

“Better than a baseball bat. Good night, Marns.”

“Good night.”

Vent gave her a fist pound as he walked past her. She watched Chuck back the car up and turn down the street. The night was chilly and the cold seeped past her layers of flannel. She went to close the door when a figure came up from under the porch. Marnie screamed.

“Shhh, it’s me.”

Mick hustled up the steps, furtively looking around. His brown leather bomber jacket had a couple of new rips. His hair was greasy and he smelled worse than usual, like he’d been sleeping in a dumpster.

“Where have you been?” Marnie asked once her heart settled down enough for her to talk.

“We need to go inside.” He closed and locked the door. “Your parents home?”

Marnie swept an arm across the brilliantly lit room. “Does it look like it?”

“Guess not. I’m starving. You have anything?”

Before she could answer, he was walking into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator. “When’s the last time your mother went food shopping? The seventies?” He dipped his finger in a jar of mayonnaise and licked it clean.

“We’ve been looking all over for you. Where the hell did you go? I was starting to think you were…you were….”

“Dead? Nah. Not yet.”

Something was troubling him more than the hornet’s nest they’d stirred up with the Melon Heads. He seemed manic, paranoid, and scared.

“So?”

Marnie crossed her arms and leaned on the doorway to the kitchen. She watched Mick guzzle a can of cheap, knockoff cola and gnaw on a hunk of welfare cheese that was about to turn any day now.

“I’ve been hiding.”

“Yeah, but where?”

He waved the cheese around. “Here and there. A different place during the day and a different place each night. They’re on to me. I had to keep moving.”

“They almost killed Chuck and Heidi.”

His mouth dropped open. “What?”

“They came like a mob and wrecked a bunch of houses over on Sycamore. Heidi and Chuck ran into one of the houses and a Melon Head was waiting for them. You didn’t hear about it? It’s all anyone can talk about.”

“I haven’t exactly been plugged into the nightly news. So, the cops know all about the Melon Heads.”

She shook her head. “The Melon Heads broke the streetlights. It was too dark for anyone to see. They assume it was a bunch of kids high on PCP or coke.”

He stuffed a possibly moldy slice of bologna in his mouth and washed it down with more cola. “Of course they do.”

“Have you been back to your trailer?”

For a second, he looked like he was going to either yell at her or run. The moment passed and he tousled his hair. “Not in a few days. Why?”

“It’s wrecked.”

He gave a nervous, sidelong glance. “Maybe Dwight got in one of his drunken rages.”

Marnie pulled on her bottom lip. Something about the sudden change in Mick’s vibe was making her nervous. Was he hiding something? “Maybe. But it looked more like, you know, they were there looking for you.”

“Joke’s on them. I wasn’t there.”

It was odd how he didn’t even wonder aloud if his mother was okay. Dwight he could live without. His mother, as much of a mess as she was, still mattered to him. There was something Marnie had spotted that she hadn’t told the others about. In fact, she’d been waiting for a moment just like this one. “I found a pile of animal bones behind the trailer. They were stacked against the tree with the big gash in the trunk.”

He nodded, chomping on more cheese, his labored breath whistling through his nose while he chewed.

“You’re really going through with it, aren’t you? Leaving them dead animals, hoping they would – what? Not bite the hand that feeds them? Do you know how crazy that sounds?” She wasn’t sure, now that she’d asked the question, if she wanted the answer.

“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug. “I was. One of us had to try something. I…I thought maybe I could take Dredd’s place. It would suck, but at least we wouldn’t have to watch our backs every minute of the day. I could only take down small animals with the BB gun, though. Probably was never going to be enough. Not after Dunwoody. They have bigger appetites than I can handle.” His eyes glazed over, his mind drifting to what Marnie could sense was a dark, horrible place.

Marnie’s arms broke out in gooseflesh.

“You’re not trying to be the new Dredd anymore then?”

He was quick to say, “Fuck no. It’s never gonna work. The way I see it, we either leave or we make a stand. No more running. No more hiding.”

“That’s easy to say,” Marnie said. “There are five of us and god knows how many of them. And they’re crazy. We can’t fight that.”

Mick hip-checked the refrigerator door to close it. Bottles rattled inside. “Maybe we can. We just need to know their weakness. Where they hide during the day.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find the answers to that in the library. And Shaggy and Scooby don’t come around here.”

A nervous smile played on his lips. “That’s why I kept on looking until I found him.”

“Found who?”

“Dredd. I knew the fucker wouldn’t go far.”

“Holy crap. We have to tell everyone.”

Mick shook his head. “Right now, I just want it to be me and you. I don’t want to scare him off.”

“I don’t understand.”

He walked past her into the living room. “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”