Chapter Twenty-Seven

They’d tried to sleep the rest of the night on the roof. It was an impossible task. Chuck felt it was wrong to sleep while Heidi’s body cooled beneath them. Marnie kept breaking out in quiet sobs. He thought he heard Vent sniffle a few times. Mick paced about the roof for an hour, checking to see if the Melon Heads would dare return. He eventually sat with his back against a chimney and closed his eyes, going still as a statue until the dawn.

When Mick woke up, he said, “Time to go.”

Chuck needed Vent’s help to stand. His entire body ached. He felt like he’d aged a hundred years in the past couple of days. Marnie wiped her eyes and tied her hair back. Chuck dreaded going down the ladder. He spent the entire night replaying Heidi’s murder over and over, struggling hard to remember her without a throat that had been eaten away.

Mick went first and Chuck took the rear. He was shocked to see that Marnie wasn’t crying. It was Vent who said, “Dude, we can’t just leave her here.”

Heidi’s flesh had turned a color Chuck had never seen before. The tip of his sneaker touched the penumbra of blood around her. It was starting to get tacky.

“We have to,” Mick said.

“We can at least cover her up,” Chuck said. “Where’s the nurse’s office?”

“I’ll take you,” Mick said.

They didn’t speak to one another as they went to the first floor where the nurse’s office was at the end of the hall. Chuck found a neatly folded blanket in a narrow closet. When they went back upstairs, he needed Mick’s help to spread the blanket over her. They stood around her for several minutes, each lost in their own thoughts. The last thing Chuck wanted to do was leave her here, alone, waiting to be discovered. Could you still be afraid after you died? How long did it take for a soul to realize it was time to move on? He thought of her ghost crying out for them not to go, weeping and trembling with unmitigated terror. His chest felt tight. Each breath was a chore.

Marnie was the first to walk away. Mick and Vent followed. Chuck debated whether he should stay. What good was he going to be for them anyway? He was a one-armed liability going on zero sleep and nearing total exhaustion. If anything, he’d only get them killed the way he had with Heidi.

Mick surprised him by stopping and turning around. “Come on.”

Chuck shook his head. “You don’t need me.”

“Yeah. We do.”

“I’ll only make things worse.”

“Things are only gonna get worse no matter what. We do this together. For Heidi.”

Chuck took a deep breath, looked down at the small shape under the blanket, and silently said, “I’m sorry. I love you.” He thought of his parents and a black hole of loss threatened to pull him under.

Mick shocked him again by patting him on the back as they walked out of the school. “We’re gonna make them pay. We’re gonna hurt them in ways they never dreamed possible.”

The sun had cast a pink glow on the streets, the air filled with birdsong. They made their way to the van, pulling up short when they saw it had been wrecked. The hood was open, hoses and wires pulled out. The air filter was on the sidewalk. All of the tires had been slashed. Chuck noticed splashes of blood on the street.

“How the hell did they know it was ours?” Vent said.

“They have eyes everywhere,” Mick said.

Were they watching them now? Chuck looked around, hoping to catch one spying on them. They may have been to the point of breaking, but he was sure their thirst for revenge would give them the strength to catch one and return the favor. All he saw was a cat slinking along the side of the school.

“They did us a favor,” Mick said. “I’ll bet Marnie’s step-ass called it in as stolen by now. The cops’ll be looking for it.”

“We can’t walk all the way to Dracula Drive,” Marnie said. “It’s too far. By the time we get there, we’ll be ready to pass out.”

“I’ll get us a car,” Mick said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The walk to the center of town took twenty minutes. Mick forced them all to eat again, stressing how they needed to keep up their strength for just this last day. Succeed or fail, it was all going to be over by this time tomorrow. They found a McDonald’s and Chuck crammed an Egg McMuffin down his throat, each bite devoid of flavor. When Mick handed him a second one, he ate it mechanically, washing it down with big gulps of orange juice. Looking at the faces of his friends, he figured their senses were as dead as his.

A woman passed by their table with a little girl holding her hand. The girl looked at them and said, “Mommy, they smell.” Her mother ushered her over to the counter, casting a look of disgust their way.

“You guys stay here,” Mick said, gathering their empty wrappers and cups on a tray. “I’ll be back in a half hour, tops.”

“Where are you going?” Chuck said.

“To get us a ride.”

“I’m coming with you.”

Mick shook his head. “You’ll stand out, Baby Huey. I need to keep as low a profile as possible.”

Chuck pushed his chair away from the table and took the tray from Mick. “Let’s go.”

Mick peered into his eyes for a moment and said, “Fine. But you have to keep your distance.”

They left Marnie and Vent in McDonald’s, Marnie picking at the Styrofoam rim of her coffee cup, Vent tearing napkins into small pieces.

Chuck walked alongside Mick, wanting to talk to him, to apologize, to find out the architecture of his grand plan to kill the Melon Heads. Instead, he’d gone mute, every word he wanted to say getting caught in his throat. When they got to the 7-Eleven across the street, Mick pointed to a glass-enclosed bus stop. “Wait there.”

Chuck obeyed like a well-trained dog. Or a zombie under the spell of a plantation owner in one of those old movies. He practically fell onto the bench, watching Mick head to the 7-Eleven.

Is he really making a stop for Slim Jims?

It was the time of the morning when people made a quick stop for coffee. Mick made sure to keep his face pointed away from people coming and going through the front door, his eyes zeroed in on the cars. Chuck saw a man in a business suit pull up in a powder-blue Buick Skylark and jump out, leaving the car running. He’d probably done it every day as he dashed for his morning coffee, thinking nothing of it. As soon as he was inside the store, Mick sprinted for the car and took off. As he passed by Chuck he shouted, “Leepee!” That was their shorthand for Lee Park, a small playground two blocks up. Chuck got there as fast as he could, which wasn’t fast at all. No sooner had he walked to the main gate, huffing and puffing, than Mick pulled up with the passenger door already open. “Jump in.”

Chuck kept waiting for the wail of sirens as they headed back to McDonald’s. He threw worried glances out the rear window.

“No one’s coming for us,” Mick said, carefully obeying the speed limit.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I heard two guys talking when they were going into the 7-Eleven. One of them said, ‘Did you hear about the new one?’ The other guy said no, and his buddy said, ‘Second house in two days. The cops better catch whoever’s doing it before this whole town explodes.’ I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the Melon Heads struck again.”

Chuck’s stomach fell somewhere around his ankles. “Did they say where?”

Mick gave him a stony look. “I think we both know where.”

Marnie and Vent piled into the car when Mick idled by the window. Neither asked whose car it was or how Mick had come by it. What was car theft compared to being, in Chuck’s mind, accessories to murder?

Vent asked, “Where we going?”

“Want to check on something,” Mick said.

A few minutes later, they spotted Heidi’s house. It was swarming with cops and reporters and fire trucks. The top floor was puffing gray smoke, the windows bashed in. Water dropped down the side of the house. The front door was wide open with lots of people streaming in and out, all looking as if they’d seen a ghost.

That left just Vent and Marnie with parents. Chuck turned in his seat to check on them. Both had glassy expressions, their eyes looking straight ahead but actually seeing a host of horror playing in their minds.

“Check their houses,” Chuck said to Mick, leaning close to him so they couldn’t hear.

“Why? They got their pound of fucking flesh already.”

“Because they need to know for sure. Without that, I don’t think they’re going to be much good.”

Mick swung onto Maple and made a right onto Balfour. Vent’s house was fine. Nothing was out of order, at least on the outside. Chuck heard Vent exhale. They then made their way to Marnie’s.

“Damn,” Mick muttered.

The police, fire department and several ambulances were parked askew in the street. A policeman waved at Mick to turn around.

Marnie didn’t react. Maybe she couldn’t. All she did was say, “Mom.” That was it. She took in the devastation of her family as stoically as any person could. Vent reached over to take her hand, but she kept it on her lap.

Chuck heard Mick say under his breath, “There goes that.” He didn’t know what it meant and didn’t want to ask, at least in front of Marnie.

The next stop was Mick’s Airstream. The front door was wide open. It looked like animals had been inside after the Melon Heads, searching for food. It smelled like it, too. Leaves and pine needles were strewn about the floor. Marnie and Vent stayed outside, sharing a smoke, not speaking.

“I hope they didn’t fuck with it,” Mick said, kicking debris aside.

“With what?”

“Dwight’s little side business. Or what was left of it.”

They went into the bedroom at the back of the trailer. Mick dropped to his hands and knees and crawled under the bed. Chuck stared at the shredded sheets and exploded pillows. The Melon Heads were more a force of nature than human beings. They came through houses like tornadoes with teeth.

When Mick backed out, he was clutching a cardboard box. He opened the lid and grinned at the contents. Chuck angled forward so he could see as well.

“Fireworks?”

“Everything Dwight couldn’t unload by Fourth of July,” Mick said.

“What are we going to do with fireworks? Give the Melon Heads a light show?”

Mick closed the lid and put the box on the shredded mattress. “It’s easy to sell the little stuff like firecrackers and Roman candles and spinning stars. Everybody wants ’em. What’s left is the powerful stuff. It’s all mortars, M80s and quarter sticks in here.”

Chuck knew all about quarter sticks, which was short for a quarter stick of dynamite or an M100. His uncle’s friend had blown his entire hand off with one several years back during a drunken Independence Day party in his yard. Ever since then, there hadn’t been any fireworks allowed in his family. Not that it stopped Chuck from firing off bottle rockets, though always in secret and far from the house.

“Quarter sticks,” Chuck said, impressed. “How many you got?”

“A dozen. And it looks like more than that in mortars, along with some smaller stuff that still goes bang real hard and real loud.” He hurried out of the bedroom, grabbed his BB gun, and handed it to Chuck. “Take this while I carry the box.”

“All those explosives and you think this little gun is going to do anything?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

They went outside, Mick not bothering to close the door. He popped the trunk and put the box and BB gun inside.

“What’s in the box?” Marnie asked, exhaling a dragon’s breath of smoke.

“Fireworks, but only the dangerous kind.”

She just nodded, as if it were normal to return to the scene of a massacre for a box of firecrackers on steroids.

Mick slammed the trunk closed and said to Vent, “You think we can get your father’s guns?”

“No.”

“It’s actually not a question. We need them. We need the ones at Marnie’s place, but it’s crawling with cops.”

Vent folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve been gone for days. I doubt my parents are even leaving the house to go to work. How am I supposed to sneak by them?”

Mick pulled his hair back and tied it up with a rubber band from his pocket. “If you want to save them, you’ll find a way. Besides, I think you overestimate how much they care.”

“That was a shitty thing to say,” Marnie snapped. “Take it back.”

“Look, Chuck and Heidi, they had real families. The three of us, just different levels of dysfunction. If the cops are looking for the five of us, we all know who they’re looking harder for.”

The five of us. Chuck’s chest instantly grew heavy.

When Vent didn’t have anything to say, Mick got back in the car and cranked the engine.

“What the hell are we doing?” Marnie asked Chuck.

“Whatever we have to, I guess. At this point, what do we have to lose? We’ll make him spill his plan right after we go to Vent’s.”

“We better. I’m not just walking into Melon Head territory with some fireworks. If I’m going to die fighting, I want to be able to take some of them out.”

Chuck wrapped his arm around her. “You and me both.”