The Rules (7 page)

“Ten!” Stacy cried, and everyone looked at her with amusement.

“Hold on a sec there, Stacy,” August said amiably. He pointed at Robin. “For the newbies, even though they did
not
realize that we run in pairs, not threesomes, there is a penalty.”

“Kill! Kill!” Cage bellowed with Larson and Heather joining in. Kyle whispered it, and Robin mock-glared at him. Pretty soon everyone was clapping and calling for the demise of the newbs.

“Beth says we
will
die horribly,” Robin told Kyle.

He exhaled soberly. The moment for confessions had passed. “There is always that chance at a party of August’s.”

“Fifteen-minute penalty!” August said as the hooting died down.

“What?”
Beth shrieked. “That’s not fair!”

“I have spoken,” August said grandly. “Ladies, keep your envelopes sealed until fifteen minutes has passed. The rest of you, begin!”

“Well, good luck,” Robin said, moving away. Kyle had a crazy impulse to ask for a good-luck kiss, but that was all it was, an impulse, and he ripped open his envelope.

Tonight’s the night!

Do or die!

In the fields of _ _ _ _ _ _ _

You will never lie.

Your prize: I know you got accepted at Cal State Long Beach. My family has connections with the athletic dept. and if you win, you will get a general athletic scholarship—full ride, my friend.

Kyle’s heart sank. He read and reread the lines about the prize. Then he moved on, mentally and physically, going in search of Heather and her untouchable fields.

Cage and Morgan were together—the jock and the cheerleader, a matching set of athletes. That left Larson and Praveen. Weird combo.

He glanced over at Robin, who was standing with her two girlfriends. Beth must have told August he’d been accepted to Long Beach, the result being the scholarship prize. Beth was nearly as pale and sweaty as that girl singer in Maximum Volume. August had pretty much crushed her in front of all their friends. He wondered what had gone wrong between them. In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change.

He was proof of that.

The band ended their set just as he and Heather found each other, putting the pieces of their clue together:

Nine o’clock from Lacrosse’s car,

when it comes to real, Kyle raises the bar.

Mirror, mirror on the wall,

who stole away the curtain call?

“What does that even mean?” Heather said nervously. “ ‘Stole away the curtain call’?”

“Well, you do always get the leads in all the plays,” Kyle said bluntly. Maybe he would like her more if she didn’t
try
to be so ignorant.

She gave her blond mane a shake. “Because I deserve them.”

Kyle just shrugged. That was what these friends were all about—lying even to themselves to get what they wanted.

“I do deserve them!” she cried.

As she sputtered and protested, he walked over to where he’d left his stuff and picked up a flashlight. The others scattered to the wind, the band taking a break. Stacy waved and laughed and wished them all happy hunting as Hiro, the drummer, gave himself a solo. Mick, the one who had almost been electrocuted, played along. But Drew the bassist stomped off by himself, using the same silk hankie he’d dabbed Stacy’s forehead with to wipe the sweat off his own face.

Kyle led the way along the seawall to the parking lot. Everyone on the hunt had parked there—he knew all the cars. Fog spilled over his ankles like freshly poured milk. It seemed to crawl up the building hand over hand, an excellent cover if you wanted to hide and then jump out and scare the hell out of someone. August had never mounted a hunt at such a sprawling, remote location.

As they moved away from the warehouse, Kyle turned on the flashlight, trying to ignore Heather, who couldn’t seem to stop talking. She was driving him crazy.

If he traced a straight line to the left from his car, it stopped at the wooden dock on the other side of the warehouse. The dock looked like it was sliding down into the ocean. In the center, the rusted remains of a twelve-foot-wide conveyer belt lay in chunks inside two large grooves in the dock. He supposed the fishing boats had tied up alongside it, and then the fish had been taken off the boat and loaded onto the conveyer belt. From there, they must have gone straight into the warehouse.

“I’m cold,” Heather said. “Can’t we do this faster?”

“
We’ll
try,” he replied.

Toward the back of the warehouse, a spiral of weathered cement stairs was attached to the dock. They led down the side of a chalky cliff, then onto more gently sloping ground. The remains of a red-and-white parking barrier tilted at the head of a narrow, twisting road pointing like an arrow to the water’s edge. Moonlight spilled onto a pitted cement ramp, a boat landing, he assumed, that sloped down and disappeared into the ocean waves.

“Do you see anything?”

He turned around impatiently and glanced up at Heather, who had been trailing behind him.

“Not yet. You can sit on the stairs and wait for me if you want to.”

“Okay.” She said it without a jot of apology.

So entitled.

As he was heading away from the buildings down toward the beach, the silvery tide splashing into inlets and cubbyholes of rock, he thought he heard someone calling his name. He paused and cautiously turned about, examining his surroundings. It definitely wasn’t Heather, who was up on the stairs, busy examining her nails. Frowning, he stopped walking and listened.

On second thought, he didn’t think it was his name after all.

It sounded like someone whispering
“Help.”

Soap on a

row your

Robin blinked. That didn’t seem like much of a clue. Beth’s envelope contained a piece of paper with the first line and Thea’s envelope had the second.

“That’s
it
?” Thea shrieked as she took the envelope from Beth and looked inside, tipping it upside down as she shook it. They had run out of the warehouse as soon as August told them their penalty was over, and now they were brought up short. “Are they all going to be this hard?”

“We’re already behind,” Beth groaned. “I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.”

“Row your
boat,
” Robin suggested. “Maybe we’re supposed to go down to the beach and find a boat or an oar or something like that.”

“I think there’s a path over that way,” Beth said, gesturing ahead and to the right.

They walked shoulder to shoulder, listening to other kids hooting and hollering. The ground was too uneven to risk moving any faster. Robin could hear the sound of glass breaking somewhere out in the darkness.

“These people party pretty hard,” she said. She’d seen the rows of glittering wine and liquor bottles in the factory, the large tub of ice and bottles of beer. If Beth was to be believed, Cage was on a steroid diet and the bass player in Maximum Volume was a major addict.

Kyle had stuck to water. That was pretty cool. Her dad had always called Kyle a straight shooter. He liked Kyle a lot. So did her mom. Whenever the team had come over for dinner, Kyle would help clean up. She imagined herself inviting him over next weekend for chicken enchiladas. Did he have a girlfriend? If he did, she wasn’t at the party.

Beth was scanning everywhere, searching for clues, although Robin wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for. Robin didn’t expect to find a boat up here. Beth was serious about winning this hunt, and Robin wondered what her prize would be should they win. She was a bit surprised at what Beth would win; apparently she wanted to get a letter of recommendation for Oberlin from August’s dad, which was the prize listed on her clue paper. Robin had had no idea that Beth had picked out a college.

Thea was mostly studying her own feet, as if she was afraid she would step on a land mine or something. There was sufficient broken glass and debris on the ground to necessitate shuffling along with intense care. Tripping up here could mean a tetanus shot.

They reached the edge of the cliff and aimed their flashlights downward. Watery light pierced through the swirling fog, revealing patches of ice plant and the outlines of a tile roof. Beyond that was forest; below, the Pacific rushed and retreated in a syncopated rhythm.

“This path is practically vertical,” Thea muttered. “This must be a false lead. August wouldn’t make us go down there.”

“Soap on a
rope,
” Robin said triumphantly.

“Oh, yeah, duh, huh. You’re right,” Beth said happily. “So, we’re looking for rope or a boat or something they have in common.”

Thea moved back from the edge of the cliff and shifted her weight. “They both have four letters and an
O
for the second letter.”

“And when we’re playing Scrabble…,” Beth began.

“Be nice.” Thea sounded hurt. She gave Robin her full attention. “What do
you
think?”

“Well, you tie a boat to a dock using a rope, don’t you?” Robin said.

Thea brightened while Beth seemed to ponder this.

“So maybe we have to find a piece of rope that’s tying up a boat, or at least by a boat. And boats are by the water. And the water is at the bottom of this vertical drop.”

“And there you have the fine mind of Robin Brissett!” Beth cried.

“Which is down there in the depths of watery death,” Robin added. “Thea does have a point.”

“Oh my God, are you channeling Edgar Allan Poe or what? It will be fine.” Beth took the first step off the cliff and down the path. “See, no slipping. No monsters. None at all.”

Thea crossed her arms. “I’ll wait up here.”

“We all have to go,” Beth insisted. “Or we’ll be disqualified.”

“He never said that.” Thea hesitated. “He didn’t, right, Robin?”

“He has spies,” Beth countered.

“Who? What if we run into some stranger and we don’t know if they’re one of the spies or some child molester?”

“Oh my God, Thea,” Beth said. “This is the real world, not some cheesy horror movie.”

Thea frowned. “Or Jackson. What if Jackson shows?”

“He has no idea where you are,” Beth said.

“But—”

“I have two words for you:
test answers.
” Beth turned to Robin with a devilish grin. “I mean, Thea dearest,
your
specific prize is a loaded credit card, and of course you and I will choose the limo for our team prize because the test answers are immoral. So, Mick Jagger’s butt on the same leather as your butt.”

Robin smiled to herself. Her prize would be coffee with Kyle. Kyle au lait.

“Your smile is freaky,” Beth said. “Is it because you’re fangirling on Mick Jagger?”

Robin smiled some more.

“
Robin,
stop it. You’re acting all weird,” Thea said.

“Ladies, we’re wasting time,” Beth said. “Thea, no one is going to try to kill us.”

“Okay,
okay
!” Thea cried. “But if we die, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I’ll go first,” Robin volunteered. “We can put Thea in the middle so if someone attacks us from behind, they’ll get Beth.”

Beth made kissy noises at Robin. “I love you, too.”

The loud wail of an electric guitar bounced off the buildings and arced overhead like a comet as they formed a line. Robin heard the distant
popa-popa-popa
of the generators.

This night is already pretty crazy,
she thought.
I wonder how far these people will go to win this game.

And then she began her descent.

CAGE’S RULE #1:
Winning is good; working for it is bad.

Morgan’s clue card read:

Taking someone else’s measure

Gives you such sadistic pleasure

Cage’s page was a series of pictures:

Cage took Morgan’s clue—the poem—and held it below his. He considered various possible solutions, none of which made any sense. Then he swapped the two halves.

“I got nothing,” he confessed.

“Me neither. I’m not sadistic. What’s
that
about?”

It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. This hunt was
hard.
He had half a mind to blow it off, get wasted, and see if Morgan wanted to hook up. He wasn’t going to win—he was stumped by the first clue, and Morgan wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist, either. But she was looking hot tonight. Sizzling. He and Morgan had gone a couple of rounds at parties, but it had been a while.

They had wandered all over the cannery and were now lumbering across the parking lot. August’s Porsche was so sick. Cage’s family was well off, but they weren’t rich like the DeYoungs. Cage drove a used Honda Accord. Not exactly a sexmobile, but he did okay.

Above the steep, weedy embankment ran the road they’d all taken to get here. They both saw the mouth of the cave at the same time, and as they approached, neon red lights shaped into capital
C
s and
M
s flashed on and off on either side of the entrance. Morgan stumbled backward and then they both started laughing.

“Guess this is our first stop,” Morgan said.

“And our last,” Cage said in a creepy stage whisper.

She batted his arm. “You’re not funny.”

The arrows went dark. Cautiously, Cage stared into the cave, then shined his flashlight into it. The maw of deep, black velvet devoured the light but shadows were moving around. August’s holographs, the bodies in the coffins, and the bats in the factory all came to mind and he braced himself for something to jump out at them.

Morgan brushed up against him. He felt her body heat, smelled her recently applied perfume, and grinned to himself. Fear was an aphrodisiac, right? That was why teenagers liked to watch scary movies.

“Something is going to jump out at us,” she said. “I just know it.”

“Guaranteed.” He waggled his eyebrows at her and moved closer, waiting for August’s jack-in-the-box to scare her right into his waiting arms. “Something really horrifying and gross.”

She pouted like a baby. “I can’t believe August said I’m into sadistic pleasure or whatever. I am
so
going to kick his ass.”

“Before or after you win an audition to become a Laker Girl?” Her prize for the win.

“After,” she said dreamily.

Shapes came into view as they entered the cave. It was packed with stacks of wooden pallets, steel buckets, and random piles of junk. A lit camping lantern had been hidden behind a battered piece of metal adorned with a skull and crossbones.

There.

He hid a smile as he visually traced the outline of a figure propped against the cave wall to his right. It was about the same height as the writhing bodies in the coffins. He subtly eased her toward it so it could jerk or moan or whatever it was programmed to do. He could barely make it out in the dark but its head was hooded and it was wearing something long, like a duster. As he watched it, he was sure that it began to move, and he herded Morgan even closer to it, unable to hide his grin.

She was oblivious. Her attention was focused on the swaths of light her flashlight painted on their surroundings. She ran the light against the back of the cave, then swept it upward.

At once, a dozen or so Barbie-style dolls dropped from the ceiling on spirals of red lights in clear plastic tubing. They were dressed like Callabrese High cheerleaders in green-and-yellow sweaters and pleated minis, and they chattered in high-pitched childlike voices. It was Alexa DeYoung’s voice, and the words were spoken through racking sobs.

“I’m too fat, I’m too fat, I’m too fat.”

Yodeling with terror, Morgan climbed up his body and clung to him. He grabbed one of the dolls and yanked it free of the tubing.

“I’m too fat I’m too fat I’m too fat—”

Morgan dug the doll out of his hand and threw it onto the ground.

“Okay, August! Whatever!” she shouted. She pulled two more dolls free and stomped on them. They kept yammering; Morgan wrapped her hands around another dangling doll body and pulled the head off. She ran forward, grabbing them and pulling them down as if they were tiny piñatas.

“What the hell?” Cage said, following her, stepping on fist-sized torsos and heads.

Then he came upon a small wooden table with a black velvet cushion on top. On the cushion was a very familiar cardboard box tied up like a present with a green measuring tape. And a small ceramic sea lion.

Cage’s stomach clenched. His jaw tightened as his heart went into overdrive. His anger was nearly overpowering—a side effect, he had been warned, of what was in the box: it contained the same brand of anabolic steroids in the same dosage that he was using. He had never told anyone, not one person, that he was on steroids. Not even his coach.

But somehow Alexa DeYoung had found out. And she had threatened to tell the world unless he got her something to help her lose weight, fast. He had been shocked. Her wrists were sticklike, and her face gaunt. She sure as hell didn’t need to drop any pounds.

She was trying to lose weight so she could become a cheerleader,
he realized, looking from the box of steroids to the doll bodies to Morgan. That’s why she was freaking out, too.

“So what did he leave for you?” Morgan snapped as she picked up the box. He grabbed it away from her. “Hey. What is it?”

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

If his coach found out he was using, he’d kick him off the team. Coach always said that the players at Callabrese High played clean or they didn’t play at all. Cage had told himself he’d take them for just one more game, then just for the season, but what about the college scouts?