Spree (YA Paranormal) (2 page)

“Where’s her spirit?” I asked.

“Damned if I know,” Crazy T said. “Heaven, maybe. It’s the one place I can’t see.”

I tried to concentrate, to see heaven. Nothing came. Crazy T sensed my frustration. “It’ll come in time,” he said, “when you learn to be open to The Flow.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“The Life Consciousness that connects time, space, the universe, with feeling, events, people, and places. It’ll suck you in when it’s your time to go to hell.”

“You mean The Force? Just my luck,” I said. “I get to spend eternity with a
Star Wars
nerd.”

“You’ll feel it—in time,” he told me. “Just like you’ll feel everything your victims felt.”

“My victims? It was an accident.”

“There are no accidents.”

“I didn’t kill myself on purpose.”

He smirked again—that ugly as hell smirk. “I’m somewhat of an expert on that,” he told me. “And I can tell you that you killed yourself and these people just as assuredly as if you shot them with a gun. Trust me. I know.”

I grew quiet, just watching as kids from the high school started driving by, some even stopping. The cops talked to each other and agreed to block off the street. I got a glimpse of one of their cells.

It was 2:15 a.m. My night was just beginning.

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I said.

“But it did,” he said, “because of you.”

I shut up.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s a place I’m going to take you once this is all done, the place we all go to sooner or later.”

“Where’s that?”

“Spree.”

“What a weird name.”

“It’s a temporary teenage hell,” he told me. “It’s the greatest rush you’ve ever felt, or the greatest nightmare. It calls to the spirits of all the dead kids, and it’ll call to you. For judgment.”

“Why?”

“Everyone is summoned.”

“For what?”

“To be a Keeper or a Taker.”

“Taker?”

Crazy T pointed up. I could see these black mists circling around my friends as they were loaded into LifeStar, following after the copter as it flew off and away.

“Some help keep life; some take it,” he told me. “Depends on how dark the soul. You’re a Taker. I can recognize my own kind. That’s why I helped you die.”

I looked at the holes that were his eyes with aching curiosity.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he told me. “But I assure you, I’m the sweetest mass murderer you’ll ever meet. I never shot anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

“I wish I could say the same,” I told him. “What I did—the accident—it killed…”

“
You
killed. But you might hold off on prosecuting yourself. The other Takers will do that for you.”

I stood next to him, waiting for the inevitable. All the bodies were gone. Except two. My body and the mother’s were covered, put into the only ambulances that were in no rush to speed off. Police were calling for trucks to get rid of the totaled cars, getting workers to clean up the broken glass on the road. Even in Burgundy Hill, open roads were the priority.

“I did this last time, two years ago,” one of the officers said. “Why the hell do these kids die on my watch? The one night this week I was asked to work the late beat.”

“I’ll go with you,” the other officer said.

I’d seen them around town, but I never knew them well enough to know their names. The badges read Jameson and Deriega. I felt myself there with them, pulled like a magnet against the cool silver of night, unable to do anything but follow. They talked about what a waste it was, how one of their daughters was in an accident two months ago, but okay, about what they planned to do with their weekends, and then, as they drove down the familiar streets—White Mountain Road, then South Spring Street—about who would knock and about who would say what.

As they pulled into the driveway, the clock next to the wheel said “3:33.” I remember feeling that was ominous, for some reason.

There was a knock at the door. No answer. No one knocks on doors in the respectable town of Burgundy Hill at such an hour. Another knock. Also unanswered. A phone call. A light on in my mother’s room. I felt her presence, confused, slightly afraid, slightly irritated, but still composed, still peaceful. I’d never quite feel that in her again. She put on her slippers—these old fluffy white ones that blackened over time but that she wouldn’t throw out. They were a gift from me four Christmases ago. She made her way to the door, looked out at the window pane, wondering whether or not these were real officers, why they were trespassing on her peaceful night.

I closed my eyes as the door opened, as the officers spoke the first words.

“Ms. DeSoto?”

I didn’t listen. I just felt the immense surge of anguish, of anger, of confusion that made me first understand the beat of a truly broken heart. The pain was so much I doubled over. I tried to think sweet thoughts of comfort, tried to project images of happiness, of myself as a small baby, of anything that might soothe her pain. But the anguish was too great, an immense flood of red and black that circled around her so much so that even the Takers that hovered around the police were blown off by it. It was like a supernova of the soul. It reminded me of a picture I once saw in art class, an immense painting of pain on a canvas that would never quite come clean.

“I can see it,” I said, when I could gather the words. “I can see pain.”

“You can see emotions,” Crazy T told me, “because you can see the part of hell opening up that gives people those emotions.”

“My mother really is in a living hell—because of me?”

“A soul can escape, but it can take years,” he told me. “I don’t see her escaping anytime soon, if ever. You, I don’t see escaping at all.”

The anguish swept over me again as my mother asked for just a moment away, as she went to my room, inexplicably, and checked for me, as if this was all a misunderstanding, as if her baby might still be under the covers. I could feel her shock. It was the only thing that matched her agony. She stumbled around, searching for the light, stumbled upon an old beer cap I had forgotten to pick up after Preggers and I had a few drinks in my room last weekend. She felt the odd texture, even underneath her slippers, reached down to pick it up. As the cops called out to her, she clung to the wall, briefly, holding the beer cap in her hand. The time: 3:44.

FIVE DAYS LEFT

Chapter 2

I tried to channel this Spree, to cut the misery short, but I felt pulled towards the last place I ever thought I’d spend any of my afterlife.

It was my old school, the Monday morning after my death.

Some kids were crying; some didn’t care, shuffling along on their normal day as if no one had died. Everyone was talking about me, Preggers, and Aliya, though, even the teachers. They had been called in for an emergency meeting. They were gossiping about how they thought I’d appeared drunk in class once, but how they said nothing. I smirked. Only once? I’d gone to school drunk dozens of times. Maybe if they had said something, I’d still be alive. Maybe not. I heard Mrs. Walters, my pretty blond English teacher, say: “She was a lost soul.” I never knew she felt that way. I thought she was just trying to be nice when she talked to me. Mr. Higgins, my portly science teacher, said that I acted like a little flirt in his class, which I suppose was true, and that he felt sorry for me. Mrs. Cowell, who had these giant lips, was the school psychologist, and said that I used to be such a good student, but that I’d skipped a few times and she had been worried.

As the principal marched in, along with crisis counselors and the rest of the school counselors, I could feel the weight on his shoulders. He was Mr. Buckley, a soft-spoken, kind man who genuinely loved kids—just not the gremlins they grew up to become. He had these old-school bifocals, and he tilted them before speaking. He spoke to thank the teachers for coming in early and then laid out the plan for the day. I felt myself pulled somewhere else.

Slumped over a locker in the hallway was Zipper, real name John Chatterly. Everyone called him Zipper because he kept completely to himself and looked a little like the character with the spiky black bangs from the old
Doonesbury
cartoon. He carried this commando style bag he was endlessly sifting through when he wasn’t getting bullied. He mingled with other kids well enough, but he was weird. He insisted on being called by his nickname, even by teachers. As he grew older, his demands grew more ridiculous. He once insisted that a picture of a brick wall appear in place of his yearbook photo. I think he just wanted to erase himself out of existence.

I talked to him years ago, when he was closer to normal. He liked me then. I liked him. We were a couple, if middle school couples count as real couples at all. I never thought of him since we broke up, but when I saw him, I thought that he was nice, but bizarre and depressed. He had these three Takers in black cloudy form hovering around him as if he were some kind of ghostly portal. I guess I was number four. His aura was dark, darker than black, with occasional red flare-ups that reminded me of a gigantic black hole we once studied in science class. He had ear buds and was singing out lines from “Angry Johnny” by Poe. He had pictures from the morning paper, pictures of our wrecked car, and had other kids’ pictures in the bag, marked with gun sites. One of the pictures was mine. It had no site markings, though. I wondered how such a psycho could walk the halls freely, but then I remembered that I’d kept away from him too.

“Don’t worry,” he said, looking down at the pictures. “I’ll get you trending on Twitter.”

I could tell that he channeled some of his anger at me. His aura suggested that he was planning something that would make the news. Not necessarily a school shooting in the gun-kids-down-in-the-cafeteria sense, but something just as awful. The weird thing is, he was so closemouthed, and such a good kid who did what he was told that as obvious as all this was to me, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else. I could see a small pistol in his backpack; I could feel him handling it. But no one else ever saw him for what he was. The kid barely kept up on Facebook, unless he was stalking victims. He seldom texted and preferred to keep to a book. He was just a kid off the radar, even his own parents’ radar. He walked to school through the woods opposite Sherman Street—watered down survival training, I suppose—arriving early to print out homework at the school library. As withdrawn as the kid was, he was still smart and got good grades. He could put up a facade. For that reason, he was never in the counselor’s office, even though just being around his aura gave me an icky feeling.

I fought my Taker impulses, fought not to add my anger to his own. Something pulled me into the hospital room with Steph—something that felt like anger. She was just regaining consciousness from a night of fitful rest, just being reminded of what happened. I could see her aura—a pink, protective, loving energy with the blackness that now entered because of what I had done. A friend texted her as the friend was arriving at school, wishing her love. I knew that Steph was furious, and rightly so. She knew I’d be mourned and remembered well, that her mother’s killer would be cried over that day, while her mother would just be kept in the town’s prayers. I felt she was right to hate me. I’d hate me too.

“Pure anger,” Crazy T said. “You gotta love the taste of it.”

I didn’t know he was still around. I’d felt consumed with my own aura.

“Is it time for Spree?” I asked.

“Not just yet,” he told me. “You have a few things you must face first.”

I knew what he meant. The school kept calling to me. I could feel myself being drawn to an ocean worth of grief, anger, indignation, loss. There was every emotion I could imagine, even some I couldn’t, all swishing together in a huge sea of negativity. A few waves of red and blue swept through me, before moving on to the next kid.

Mrs. Cowell was busy hanging up these giant sheets of art paper in the halls as the kids gathered around the gym. I sensed that kids were supposed to sign them with a personal message to my mother. The principal, a few crisis counselors, guidance, and a few of the more personable teachers met the kids and guided them to the gym, as if it was a mile away. I wondered why many came to school at all, but I sensed that they wanted somewhere to meet, to hug, to grieve, in a public way, somewhere away from the cameras of the reporters who were already on site at the school.

“She was such a good friend,” Laurie Schmidt, my old friend in band, said.

I wasn’t a good friend. We hadn’t spoken in years, but I could feel that the tidal wave of emotion had consumed her anyway.

“I yelled at her just before she left,” Gretchen Wasoki said.

She hadn’t really yelled, just told me she was trying to get to her locker. I’d forgotten the comment as soon as she made it, but I’d never have the chance to tell her so.

Behind the seniors came freshmen, also crying. They knew something had happened, didn’t know me personally, but knew of me, and cried out of obligation.

After all these kids I only half-remembered, Alex came walking in. He was too cool for the bus, the star soccer captain who always had a car, even freshman year. He wore black sunglasses that matched his curly black hair, and they just barely managed to cover up his red eyes. He looked taller than I remembered, about six feet, and more muscular, with a spray-on tan. As cheesy as the image looked to me now, I knew he was the only guy I could ever say I loved. I could feel, in the subtle teals and blues that circled around the kid, that he’d loved me too. I could also sense, in the maroons that darkened his overall mood, that he was angry, irate even, at my stupidity, at my infidelity, at my death.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen told him as he walked by.

Alex looked back, said nothing, kept walking on.

He bumped into Zipper, who wasn’t watching where he was going. Alex looked at the kid and said nothing.

“Prick,” Zipper said, and kept walking.

I sensed, in the sudden swirls of green, that Alex didn’t take Zipper seriously, that he’d found joy in bullying the kid, in pounding away at the strange and unfamiliar.