Crucifax (30 page)

"Why were you suspicious at first?"

"Well, I figured maybe he wanted to rip us off—the band, I mean. His offer sounded good, but… too good. Then I went home. My little brother… he started laughing at me because my mom had taken my bedroom door off, like I told you." His eyes darted around J.R., and his voice thickened slightly with emotion. "She'd gone through all my drawers, my closet. She started yelling at me, telling me they were gonna put me away, teach me a lesson, shit like that."

"When was this?"

"Last month. I figured, like, what've I got to lose, y'know? So I went to see Mace, me and the band. And I'm glad we did. We're playing Fantazm Wednesday night."

"But you'll still be in here."

Kevin looked into J.R.'s eyes then and simply smiled.

"Your attendance has been good the last few weeks, Kevin. You didn't meet any of our appointments, but you went to nearly all of your classes. I checked my records before coming over here today, though, and all of a sudden, things stopped last week. You seemed to be trying hard for a while. Now you—what, you don't care? Why?"

He kept smiling.

"Kevin, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but Mace is scaring a lot of people."

No reply.

"Something is wrong with what he's doing. Do you know Nikki Astin? Did you know a few nights ago he—"

Kevin stood.

"Wait, please, let me—"

He was still smiling, but his smile was cold as he headed for the door.

J.R. stood. "Kevin, please, you don't know what he's—"

Kevin was in the corridor, and J.R. followed him.

"Kevin!"
he snapped, reaching for Kevin's arm but missing. J.R. was quickly approached by a round man in white whose name tag read phil.

"Excuse me, but we'd rather you not shout in here," Phil said.

"Look, I have to talk to him, he's—"

"We're very careful about visitation here, sir. Apparently he doesn't want to talk to you anymore."

J.R. watched Kevin walk slowly down the corridor and disappear through one of the many doors….

A few minutes after J.R. was finished with his last appointment of the day, Jeff and Lily came to his office.They both looked tired and scared. They made an attempt at small talk, but Lily and Jeff kept exchanging quick, cryptic glances, and J.R. knew something was up.

"Okay," he said seriously, sitting on the corner of his desk, "what's going on?"

Jeff leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, and said, "Remember that thing we told you Nikki was wearing? The weird cross she called a Crucifax?"

J.R. nodded.

"Mallory was wearing one, too. They got them from Mace."

"They're all over campus," Lily said softly.

"What, the crosses?" J.R. asked.

Jeff nodded. "Today I've seen—Jesus, I don't know, maybe twenty-five. More, probably."

"Those are just the ones you can see," Lily added. "Half the girls in my P.E. class were wearing them in the shower today. I went up to Sherry Cavanaugh and touched it, started to ask where she'd gotten it, and she freaked. She pushed my hand away like I'd hit her or something."

J.R. moved off the desk and into his chair, quickly thinking back over the day, trying to remember if he'd seen any students wearing the crosses; he didn't, but he hadn't been looking for them.

"My friend Nick was wearing one," Jeff said. "We usually don't hang around together much during school. Mostly in the summertime. We haven't talked in a while, but I met him today in the caf, and he was… different."

"Different how?" J.R. asked.

"I don't know, really. He's a pretty nice guy, usually quiet. He was moody during the last weeks of summer because his parents were getting a divorce. Now he's… he's still quiet, but he's got this weird smile on his face, like he knows something I don't, and he… he stares a lot. I asked him where he got that thing around his neck, and he said a friend gave it to him. I asked if it was anyone I know, and he didn't say anything for a few seconds, just gave me that creepy smile. Then he said, 'Yeah, you know him' and walked away."

"Everything around here is different," Lily said. There was frustration in her voice, and a frown wrinkled her brow. "Doesn't anyone else notice it? Is it just me?'*

There was a burst of shouting down the hall, and J.R. listened a moment. He recognized Faye Beddoe's voice; she was arguing with a girl. He tried to ignore them.

"Different in what way, Lily?" he asked.

Glancing at Jeff as she spoke, Lily said, "Well, this weather, for one thing, and those damned crosses all over the place…. My friend Nikki, Miss Religion, starts acting like a slut… and I've got this other friend—she's bulimic —her mother's always telling her she's fat, so she throws up every time she eats, and for a while she was just wasting away."

She was one of J.R.'s students; it had been a few weeks since he'd seen her, and he couldn't remember her name, but he remembered that face, long and drawn with hollow cheeks and dark-circled eyes.

"She's gaining weight all of a sudden," Lily went on. "She's eating again, seems happy…." She shrugged as the words trailed off.

J.R. remembered referring her to an eating disorder clinic—how long ago? Three weeks? A month? Longer?— he'd even made an appointment for her himself. He hadn't followed up on it to see if she'd gone, but J.R. could tell by the tone of Lily's voice that she didn't think the change in her friend had come from any clinic or professional counseling.

"Is she wearing a Crucifax?" Jeff asked.

"I don't know. She hasn't been to… school"—her eyes grew slowly with realization as she looked at Jeff—"in a while."

She's with him,
J.R. thought.
That's what they're thinking, what they're afraid of, that she's with Mace.

He tapped a pencil on his desktop, imagining what would happen if he went to Mr. Booth with everything he knew— which was really very little—and told him something needed to be done about these crosses that were being worn around campus, that they meant something, stood for something that might cause a lot of trouble soon. Booth would chuckle.

Haskell,
he might say,
we've got kids here who put safety pins in their noses and razor blades in their ears and call them jewelry. You want me to make a fuss about some
crosses?

The shouting down the hall worsened; Jeff and Lily looked over their shoulders at the closed door.

"What do you think is happening?" J.R. asked them.

Before either of them could reply, Faye Beddoe screamed.

J.R. shot out of his chair, pulled the door open, and was in the hall in an instant, running toward Faye's office. There were hurried footsteps behind him and a scuffle coming from the office ahead. Faye's door opened, and a girl bolted out and started toward J.R., zigzagging from wall to wall as she ran. When he saw the blood, everything slowed down, way down, because he knew something bad had happened.

He'd seen the girl before: Hispanic, a little chunky, with black hair that used to fall to her waist but was now spiked. She wore a long tan coat that flapped behind her like a cape as she ran, and there was blood spattered on its lapels and on the front of her white sweater. Swinging back and forth over her chest like a pendulum was a cross with flared ends, dark red and heavy-looking, and with each swing it tossed more beads of blood over her coat and sweater, and he held out his arms to stop her, shouting, "Hey,
hey,
wait!" but she pushed by him, spinning him around and against the wall, and he almost ran after her even though there were others reaching for her, trying to hold her, but he heard Faye's voice rise in an agonized, guttural scream: "Gaawwwd! Gaawwwd!"

J.R. turned again, ran for her office, and pushed through the doorway, and his feet slid over the floor as he skidded to a clumsy halt, his arms flailing to hold his balance.

Faye's desk faced the door, and she was kneeling behind it, her arms sprawled over the desktop, her head lolling. There was a spray of blood on the wall behind her.

She was grinning.

"Faye…" J.R. breathed, moving toward her, feeling as if his feet were plodding through quicksand because something was wrong with her face, with the grin that stretched all the way up her left cheek, then he realized that her black skin was glistening, wet, and he saw teeth, so many teeth….

"Faye?" He was at the desk as she pulled herself up with a horrible gurgling sound, still grinning—

—but she
wasn't
grinning.

A flap of skin hung loosely from her cheek, jiggling as she tried to pull herself to her feet, dribbling blood over the papers on her desk. A smooth, clean cut swept up from the left corner of Faye's mouth to her mandible. She tried to speak but could only make wet sputtering noises, spraying more blood through the gash in her face. She swept her arms back and forth over the desk, knocking books and pens and papers and the telephone to the floor.

J.R. took her hand as he moved around the desk, saying, "Sit back, Faye, just sit back.
Somebody call an ambulance!
" he shouted, then: "C'mon, Faye, just sit back, now, c'mon…."

She fell heavily into her chair and leaned her head back; the lower half of her cheek folded over, revealing her writhing tongue.

"Oh, God, dear God," J.R. gasped, moving behind her and pressing a hand over her cheek, holding the flap of skin in place. He could hear shouting and scuffling down the hall but heard no one coming.

"Goddammit!" he shouted, feeling lightheaded and queasy. "Let's get some help down here!"

Faye's blood, sticky and warm, ran between his fingers and over the back of his hand…

Jeff stood in the office doorway as J.R. rushed down the hall.

"What's going on?" Lily asked behind him, her hand on his back.

"I don't—" He stopped when he saw the girl and the blood and the swinging Crucifax, stepped into the hall, muttering, "Jesus," and reached for her as she neared, snapping, "Hold it,
hold
it!" but she clenched a fist and swung her arm hard, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back into J.R.'s office, bumping him into Lily.

He rushed out the door again, gained on her quickly, and gripped her right arm firmly as she entered the front office. The girl spun around and, with an angry grunt, kicked Jeff hard in the shin. Pain shot up his leg as he loosened his grip on her just enough for her to pull away and dash across the office.

Mr. Plumley, the oldest and biggest counselor at Valley, was standing by the door that led to the main hall. He stepped in front of the girl, threw his arms around her, and hugged her tightly to his wide, round belly, saying, "Okay, okay, calm down, little lady, just hold the phone, let's—"

"No!" she shouted. "Let me go, let go! I'm going, I'm going away, going away!"

"You're not going anywhere just now, little lady, so let's—ah, Christ!" Plumley cried. "She's biting me!"

The girl had her mouth on his right wrist, and her head was jerking back and forth. Her words were garbled when she spoke: "Away… going… away…"

Plumley let out a high, quavering shriek and pulled his bitten hand protectively to his chest, stumbling backward, shouting, "Jesus Christ, she bit me!"

The girl pushed through the door and ran, her voice fading as she rushed down the hall: "Leave me alone, dammit, I'm going away…. going away…"

Miss Tucker, the receptionist, stood up behind her desk and shouted, "Stop her!" but Jeff was already through the door and running down the hall after her.

"Stop her!" Jeff called to no one in particular. "Help me stop her!"

Heads turned, but no one moved.

She rounded a corner, heading for the building's main entrance, and Jeff picked up his pace. Someone was running behind him, but he didn't take the time to look back.

As Jeff turned the corner, Dwayne Chalmers was wheeling a projection cart through a doorway into the hall, pushing it directly into Jeff's path. Dwayne always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck, white socks with brown loafers, and his face was usually sprinkled with pimples. He was not an agile person or else he might have been able to pull the cart out of Jeff's way in time; he tried, but was not fast enough.

Jeff tried to backpedal when he saw the cart but slid into it feet-first. The cart toppled and the projector skidded down the hall, spinning like a top.

"Well, that's
fine!
"
Dwayne barked. "That's
fine,
that's just
great!
"

The girl had already left the building, and the door was slowly swinging shut behind her. J.R. was running beside Jeff now, and they burst through the door together into the rain.

In the parking lot, students were climbing aboard idling buses and cars were leaving their parking spaces.

The sidewalk in front of the building looked deserted.

Jeff and J.R. stopped halfway down the steps and looked around.

"Where in the hell did she go?" J.R. exclaimed.

"Maybe somebody was waiting for her in a car," Jeff suggested, scanning the lot for a car that appeared to be leaving in a hurry.

"Not enough time."

Wind blew their clothes and hair as they stood on the steps, and rain cut through the air diagonally, slapping their faces. Jeff saw that J.R.'s shirt was covered with blood.

"Is it bad?" Jeff asked.

"Pretty bad, yeah."

"She was wearing a Crucifax."

J.R. nodded grimly. "I know."

They turned to go back up the steps and saw Lily coming through the door. She started to speak, but something splattered over her left arm and she lifted it with a start, looked at the dark fluid that was dribbling over her skin, washing away with the rain, then looked to her left over the handrail and into the shrubbery below.

Jeff's eyes followed her gaze to what looked, at first, like a miniature oil well spurting from the brush and splashing to the cement. The bushes were shifting, and as Jeff climbed the steps he heard a wet, sputtering gasp that was drowned by Lily's horrified scream as she stumbled away from the rail, covering her mouth with a palm. Jeff and J.R. rushed to the handrail, looked over the edge, and saw her.