Will tossed his empty and cracked another beer. He’d already thrown up once that night, but he’d kept drinking. Gates was easier to take when Will was drunk, and so was the crushing pain of missing Lucy.

“When’s the last time you saw the hog anyway?” Will said.

“I don’t know,” Gates said. “The party?”

“Which one?” Will said, but he didn’t really care.

“The first one, buddy. The best one, our pizza party. Come on!”

“Oh, yeah,” Will said. There was no hiding the boredom in his voice.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Will shrugged.

“Please tell me you’re not still obsessing about Lucy, man. She’s ruining your life. I told you to keep away from her, didn’t I? How many times are you gonna let her treat you like dirt?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Will said.

“Well, I do. This is my life too. And she’s ruining it ’cause if you’re in a bad place, then that brings me down.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m fine,” Gates mimicked Will with a slack jaw and a dead voice.

“What are we gonna do when we find this thing?” Will said, trying to shift gears back to the hog.

“I just want it back,” Gates said with a twinge of annoyance. “It belongs to me. It’s my pet. Why should somebody else get it?”

“Because you let it go in the first place.”

“Hey,” Gates said and bashed his spear into the nearest locker for effect. “If you were gonna be like this, then why’d you come along?”

Will had the urge to tell Gates off, but Gates was acting so odd that he felt a twinge of fear as to what would happen if he did.

“Did you hear that?” Gates said, his annoyance morphing into excitement.

“Nope.”

“Listen.”

Will tuned into the silence, and then he did hear something. It was faint like the distant sound of someone scraping ice off a driveway, but deeper, darker, wetter.

Gates eyes went wide, and for a moment, Will felt a tickle of a thrill.

“Let’s go,” Gates said, hushed, and snuck forward.

They crept up on a darkened classroom. Will and Gates planted themselves on either side of the doorway and peered inside. Just from the stink, Will had a feeling this was a Freak dumping ground. One room to pile up all the nastiness and trash from two floors of turf until the Skaters got around to hauling it all to the dump. They’d gotten lax on their garbage business lately.

A loud snort blasted out of the darkness.

“Light it up,” Gates whispered.

Will softly set down his beers and pulled his Maglite from the back pocket of his jeans. He clicked it on and pointed it into the room. The beam slipped across piles of filth, some as high as four or five feet. A miniature landscape of deflated garbage bags, wet clothes, and rotting food.

“There!” Gates said, still whispering. “Go back.”

Will traced the beam back between two mounds of black garbage bags and he saw it. “Oh god,” Will said, holding the beam in place over the massive hind region of the hog. It was on its side and its head lay flat on the floor.

Thick, coarse hair. Black. Stiff. It covered the hog’s entire body. Long white whiskers angled off its rumpled, bucket-ended snout, which glistened in the beam of Will’s flashlight.

“What’s wrong with it?” Will said.

“It’s sleeping, I guess.”

“Why is it sweating? Do hogs sweat?”

“I don’t know,” Gates said.

“It looks sick, man.”

The hog snorted again, and it sounded like a belch of air from a clogged sink. Both Will and Gates jumped at the sound, then Gates started cracking up. He covered his mouth. The hog’s breath was fast. Will felt like they should help it, but he didn’t know how to even start. He and Gates just stared at it like it was the engine of a broken-down car.

Will trailed his light across its muscled bulk. It had to be three hundred pounds. Its long thin tail waggled violently. He shined his spotlight on the tail. It was still, then flailed around with more spastic jerks. Its ass bulged.

“Oh, motherf—” Will said.

Around a dark hole in its rear end, a donut of flesh pushed out.

“The thing’s gonna have the shits all over the place!” Gates said.

The hog farted, and the slimy head of a piglet popped out. It stayed there a moment, wearing its mother’s body as a turtleneck. Then the rest of the piglet’s slick sausagelike body slid out. It landed on the concrete floor. Its flesh was pinkish where it wasn’t black, and the pink skin looked see-through, like raw chicken breast. Its snout was short and stubby, and it writhed on its side.

Gates had reached out and grabbed Will’s arm for impact. Both of them stared with their mouths wide open and their jaws jutted out.

The piglet’s little slimy eyes opened. The mama hog roared. It was a horrible sound somewhere between a lion’s roar and a volcano with bronchitis. Will flinched. His flashlight beam seesawed. When he tilted the beam back onto the hog, he nearly fell over.

She was looking right at him.

Her long, heavy-boned head was craned just far enough over that she could stare at Will out of the corner of her right eye. She had eyelashes. Soft brown ones. And the white of her eye was prominent from this angle, a crescent of brilliant white. It made her eye look entirely human. A woman’s eye in the head of a pig.

The sight of it made Will’s stomach lurch, and he took off running. He got all the way around the corner to the next hall before Gates caught up with him. He was dying laughing.

“Ho-lee shit …,” Gates said, “have you ever seen anything like that before?!”

Will shook his head. He was trying to forget about it. It all seemed so wrong. That thing didn’t belong in here. Those little things didn’t deserve to be born in this place. But they were here because of Gates and Will.

“We gotta go back,” Gates said.

“What, why?”

“Those are my little piggies!” Gates laughed, and Will recoiled. “I betcha there’s like eight of ’em coming. Dude, we could train ’em, like attack dogs. Attack hogs! How badass would that be? You mess with me, you mess with my hogs!”

“Just leave ’em be. You shouldn’t mess with its babies. Everything’s not here for your amusement, okay?” Will said.

Gates’s face drooped like he’d been the birthday boy and Will had just popped all his balloons. Will didn’t care though, he’d had enough Gates for today. All this partying and thrill-seeking, it wasn’t working anymore. He felt like he needed to sleep for a week just to think straight again.

“Fine,” Gates said. “Be a little bitch about it.”

“Whatever dude, I’m heading back.”

Will turned and strolled down the hall. He didn’t hear anything from Gates behind him. Let him stay here and stare at his piglets, Will thought. And that sounded like what he was going to do, but then Gates piped up again, and Will died a little inside.

“Wait up, we’ll go together.”

31

LUCY WAS GOING TO SLEEP WITH BART.

Lucy and Violent walked up the stairs to the library. The only noise was the jangle of Violent’s necklace made of sharpened cafeteria cutlery. They’d done this walk before, under crazier circumstances, on their way to the ruins, when David was dying by the minute. It had all gone wrong in the library.

Lucy didn’t anticipate Bart to be some rape-crazy maniac, but Violent’s intention had always been that Lucy feel over-prepared for the moment. And Lucy was definitely that. She had five condoms so Bart couldn’t pull any lame excuses. She’d been practicing her scary voice every morning with Sophia, so things didn’t have to get physical if he tried anything she didn’t like. And if he did, Lips taught her eight different ways to hit a guy in the nuts. Raunch gave her a pouch of salt in her pocket to throw in Bart’s eyes if things got out of hand. And if worse came to worse, she had her blade to cut him from neck to nuts, to use one of Violent’s more quotable phrases.

“I feel like you’re my mom dropping me off at the mall for the first time,” Lucy said. “You really didn’t have to walk me.”

“I didn’t have to, I wanted to.”

It made Lucy smile a little.

“Really?”

Violent nodded.

“Thanks,” Lucy said, and they walked the last flight up in silence.

“I heard some shit went down with Will in the lounge,” Violent said when they reached the third floor.

Lucy blushed. “That’ll never happen again—”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I heard he said he loved you?”

“Yeah, he said that. So?” Lucy said. She could feel her stomach cramp with anxiety. She got tense every time she thought about that day. Will had a bad habit of hitting her with huge emotional bombshells that put her on the defensive. She resented how vulnerable he could make her feel.

“Do you love him?” Violent said.

Lucy couldn’t believe she was hearing these words out of Violent.

“Is this another test?” Lucy said. “I can never tell when you’re messing with me.”

“Not a test. I’m just saying from experience, love is scary shit. I ran from it, and I don’t feel any better for it. I wouldn’t want you to make the same mistake.”

“I don’t love him,” Lucy said. She straightened as she did, and she faced the door ahead. “Now, are you done being a pain in my ass, or should we go find a couch somewhere and talk about our feelings all night?”

Lucy held on to her warrior face until Violent smiled.

“All right, pincushion …,” she said as she headed back down the hall. “Go get yourself stuck.”

The fire door opened. Belinda stood in the doorway. She wore a gray sweater and khakis, her curly hair was black now and shoulder length. She’d put a little weight back on, but it suited her.