Everything Breaks (3 page)

I thought it was a bit strange that I was hearing no music, but I couldn't hold on to that thought. What I
did
hear was plenty of raised voices, lots of shouting, lots of raucous humans being raucous humans on the last October Saturday night of the year.

I kept trying to stand and stay standing, and finally, I made it. I started my lurching run through the darkness with flickering bonfire shadows animating the trees on my left and party noise coming at me from far below, on my right.

Party noise that surely didn't, if I'd been sober enough to notice, sound anything at all like carefree and music-filled party noise. Now, I realize I was hearing screams.

I settled into a sort of half jog, ignoring the clanging in my ears and the way the dark road undulated and heaved like some long black rug Janet had taken in her strong waitress hands and was snapping viciously free of grime. The stars bore down on me like leaks in the black sky.

Then, straight ahead and ghostly, were the five white highway markers that warned of that sudden sharp turn. The moon clearly picked out each one of them, but . . . something just wasn't
right
.

I pushed closer, then stopped, panting, my hands on my knees and my eyes squinted in disbelief. The white posts had always been as straight and upright as five little soldiers standing at attention, but now they were splayed crazily at strange, uneven angles. They were . . . broken or something. A couple of them might even have gone missing.

Then suddenly this huge, dark
thing
sailed across the road a few yards in front of me, blocking out the stars for maybe four seconds as it flew from high up in the trees on the left side of the road to land in a patch of darkness between two of those messed-up posts!

Was it some gigantic bird? A flock of big birds? The quick but loose way the thing had moved through the air was somehow unnatural, like a shadow or a dark mist.

I fumbled for the small LED flashlight I keep dangling from my belt loop. I focused its intense beam on the place between the two messed-up posts where I'd seen the thing land. At first there was nothing but bare, weedy grass with twinkling stars in the background. And then, as I watched in total disbelief, this . . . this
dog
began to appear. I mean, it just slowly, well,
materialized
there in the grass between those two posts!

The dog was large and sleek, a black dog about the size of Ringo, our old golden Lab. No, it was actually bigger than Ringo. Much bigger.

It looked straight at me with its tongue out in that eager way dogs look at you when they're waiting for you to feed them or walk them or something. It seemed so friendly that I would have tried hard to chalk up all its strange actions to my being wasted. But there was one thing about it that would have been as hard for my aching brain to make up as it was for it to forget. The dog had too many heads. Two too many. Three in all.

I dropped to my knees, staring in openmouthed disbelief, confused and afraid. The dog took that as a gesture of friendship, grinned a doggy grin—three doggy grins—and began moving toward me in a sort of slow-motion lope.

It got so close I could see the details of its large, luminous eyes, and I heard myself give a little whimper. Something was swimming inside each of the six of them! I groped with numb fingers for my forgotten flashlight and dared to aim it directly at the right eye in the dog's closest head. It had no iris. Instead, a tiny spiral was slowly whirling around the eye's dark pupil.

This had to be a hallucination or
some
thing. I closed my own eyes tight as I could and hammered my forehead with my knuckles until I could feel those thuds through the numbness in my brain.

When I dared to open them again, the dog was gone without a trace.

But the posts hadn't come back into the straight, even line they had to be in.

The moon came out from behind a cloud so suddenly that I almost screamed. It gave a blast of light to the white posts and I saw several loose and tangled lengths of the thick, corded steel wire that usually held the posts upright and taut, making them into a safety barrier it would be hard to break through.

Those pieces of useless, broken wire were now bobbing gently in the night air like the windblown stems of gigantic, flowerless plants.

I got up, stumbled to the nearest white post, held on to it and looked down.

Everything in me went electric and I dropped to a sit, pushed off and slip-slid down that nearly vertical limestone bluff. I got hung up two or three times on little trees that grew straight out from the stone. Maybe I felt my flesh ripping along the way, tearing like the denim of my jeans was tearing. Maybe I felt it, or maybe I didn't. I can't remember. All I remember is that my eyes stung with the rising smoke of burning gasoline when I was partway down but I couldn't close them for even a second because I had to watch and watch and watch like in a nightmare you have to watch and watch and watch.

Directly below that switchback curve and down the beach a little way from the bonfire, the burning Mustang was planted up to its windshield in the gravelly sand.

III

THE FIRE W
AS MORE ALIVE
than anything I'd ever seen. It was a wildly beautiful creature made of flame and with the mindless energy of a demon, and it had pounced directly on Trey's car and was sinking long claws and razor fangs deep into the steel and glass and the smoking tires.

When my feet hit the sand, I started running blindly toward the thing, screaming Trey's name, yelling at him to throw it into reverse and give it the gas and get out of there. My legs were numb and uncoordinated and the sand got hotter the nearer I came until I could feel the soles of my feet blistering right through my boots. But I somehow thought that I could pry open the burning doors and pull them free so they could run clear of the fire, maybe bruised and bumped around a bit, but still . . . themselves. Yes, I pictured myself freeing my friends, then all four of us would run to safety, propping each other up and laughing in a horrified, slaphappy way about the too-close call.

For a while, the police didn't notice me any more than I noticed them, I guess because they were busy keeping most of Clevesdale's junior and senior class behind sawhorse barricades along the beach. I managed to get really close to the Mustang, so close it hurt to breathe. I put my arm over my nose and mouth and moved even closer, then through the wall of smoke I actually glimpsed Trey, his hands on the wheel. Yes, his hands on the wheel! He might yet give the engine some gas and get out of this. Trey was famous for successful last-ditch efforts. Eking out a D-minus on a final exam he couldn't afford to fail. Charming some girl's parents into believing he'd brought their daughter home two hours late because of a highway detour. Getting the very last tickets for a concert everybody thought was sold out. Trey's luck was legendary.

“Hurry, man!” I screamed to him, though I couldn't hear my own words. The fire itself was deafening, and there was a sort of high screeching sound coming from the car. “Trey, gun it!” I yelled. “Get out of there, man! Give it all you've got, do it
now
!”

The car began giving off puffs of fire from somewhere deep inside itself, protesting its death by spewing clots of solid flame. Blast furnace heat arose from all directions. I smelled my eyebrows and eyelashes scorching.

And then, just before the fire exploded upward to completely engulf the car, the black smoke around the windows became white and nearly transparent and I had a much clearer view of Trey.

But I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing.

If I'd stayed a few seconds longer, I probably would have gone up in flames myself, but my shirt was grabbed from behind and I was yanked several yards backward by what turned out to be a policeman. “What do you think you're doing?” he screamed when we were clear of the worst of the heat. “How'd you get over here on this side of the vehicle?”

He shone his flashlight in my face.

“I . . . came down the bluff,” I said. I doubted if he could hear me. All the sound in the world was being sucked into what had now become the death roar of the car.

“You're making no sense, son. Nobody can come down that bluff! And look at your boots! How'd you get gasoline on them? Or wait . . . is it blood?”

But I couldn't look at my boots. Though I could no longer see anything of Trey through the new clouds of black smoke, I could see a bit of the trunk of the Mustang. I had to stand watch, to keep vigil, to keep my eyes on Trey's fine car for as long as I could see any small part of it.

Another policeman came out of the darkness behind us and took my right shoulder while the first one gripped my left elbow. “The paramedics need to check this kid out,” the first one yelled across to the other one. “I'm pretty sure he's in shock, and he's bleeding from somewhere. I think his legs have been injured.”

They turned me toward the beach, which seemed almost like a carnival with its many flashing lights—yellow ones on the sawhorses, red ones and blue ones atop the ambulances and police cars. I watched over my shoulder as the fire exploded upward to become a towering monster with the Mustang lost somewhere deep inside its gut.

A distant siren quickly went from loud to deafening as Clevesdale's yellow fire truck came speeding down the narrow beach road with its bells clanging and its lights whirling. It idled at the barricades just long enough for workers to scramble opening them, then it swept toward the burning car like a dragon with lidless halogen eyes.

I turned away then, from the car, from Trey. I had no choice.

A man in a yellow raincoat ran up. “We found a second body,” he told the two policemen in a rushed, grim way. “Thrown from the car like the other one we found. Looks like they went down the bluff headfirst. One's probably the driver.”

I couldn't feel my mouth, but I heard a strange version of my own voice saying to them, “The driver is still inside the car. His name is Trey.”

Two yellow rubber tarpaulins covered something on the ground right beside the first ambulance. A breeze from the lake came up and rippled them, made it look like the long, thin bodies beneath were twitching impatiently, trying to get up and call it all a joke.

Like Zero was about to untangle his legs and rise to do a little bobbing, bent-kneed dance with his cutoffs ragged around his knees and his elbows high and aerodynamic.
I told you I could fly from this bluff like an eagle, dudes!
Like Steve was going to sit up and push his hair into sweat spikes as he scouted around for his lost clarinet case.
Hey, guys, doncha remember I told you to watch my instrument?
He'd get up off the ground, surely, any second now, give the crowd a boyish smile, swat the dust from his jeans, and begin sauntering out of here with his well-worn Memphis cowboy boots.

One of the policemen stepped in front of me, blocking my view. When I tried to see around his shoulder, he took my arm and held it, hard, stopping me.

“You're gonna have to come to the station to tell us what you know about this, son,” he said, quietly and gruffly. “But first let's get those legs of yours cleaned up.”

A fireman ran up to talk to the other policeman. They were speaking in low voices with their backs to me as the first policeman led me away. I wasn't supposed to hear what they were saying, but I heard all right. I could hear everything—some of the kids from my class acting hysterical, others acting like they were too cool to act hysterical, the yellow flashers on the barricades clicking on and off and on and off, the gravel squishing under the gum boots of the firemen and policemen, the lake moving, the fire moving, the stars moving in the faraway black sky.

“With a fire as hot as this one, glass and metals bond to other objects, including human remains,” the fireman was saying to that policeman. “When that thing burns out, it'll be hard to tell who or what anything used to be.”

I closed my eyes and saw Trey against my lids, Trey as I'd seen him when the smoke had cleared for that half second, Trey's head and arms flailing around like he was playing his drums at a gig with his band. Yes, that's what I'd thought I'd seen for that crazy half-second, Trey drumming. Now, I understood he'd been blown into jittery mock life there behind the wheel by the force of those vicious flames. His long red hair had been a glowing halo around his face, but he'd only been a puppet, a dancing and lifeless puppet. His hair had been on fire and his flesh was already becoming . . . charred.

“Here we go, son,” the policeman said, and I jerked in a breath and went with him to the nearby ambulance, the one with the two yellow tarps on the ground beside it. A young guy with a fauxhawk jumped down from the back of it and headed toward us.

“I'll be back,” that policeman said, then patted my shoulder and walked away.

“Hi, I'm Larry,” the paramedic told me. My eyes were on those tarps as Larry cut what was left of my jeans out of the way. He gave a grim whistle and started using some sort of long-handled something to pick out the stuff that was embedded in my legs.

“Bet this smarts,” Larry observed after a while. “You got enough cedar needles in you to go as a Christmas tree for Halloween next week, pal. Lots of dirt, rocks, and who knows what all. Expect a bunch of stitches when you get this all properly treated at the clinic, too. That better be tomorrow, by the way. I'll give you some painkillers for tonight, but you don't want this mess to infect.”

A real wind came up, and the corner of the tarp nearest the ambulance lifted and folded itself in a neat triangle that ran diagonally about halfway across Zero's chest.

That's when I saw Zero's face. What was left of it.

“Aw, crap,” Larry said, going to fix the tarp, this time battening it down at the corner with a heavy metal box from the ambulance. “Gross, huh?” he added as he walked back to me. “Just be glad it was him and not the
other
guy you saw. Nightmare stuff. You never really get all that used to it.”

Larry gave me a pair of navy blue sweatpants with
POLICE
printed down one leg and told me to change, and when I changed, he took my shredded jeans and put them into a yellow plastic bag that also had
POLICE
printed on it and handed it to me.

Then the policeman returned and led me to his squad car. He put his hand on my head as I ducked into the car, just like in the movies. For a second I had a vague, hopeful notion that this
was
just a movie. I'd been sober since the moment I saw that car down on the beach, but I could barely walk or talk or remember to breathe every so often.

“Stop! I mean, we've gotta wait. We can't go yet! Where
are
they?”

He turned to me with droopy eyes and a sad and exhausted expression. “Son, they're not coming. Your friends aren't here and you're confused. Don't think about it.”

I clutched the bag to my chest and tried to stop shaking. “But . . . where's the dog?” I asked under my breath, turning to stare out the window while something chilly and dark started rising in me from the feet on up.

• • •

I hoped the police would leave Janet out of it, but apparently that's not allowed when you're seventeen. She was in the waiting room at the police station, dabbing her eyes and pushing back strands of her hair that escaped the bobby pins that hold back her yellowish ponytail. She was still in her waitress uniform, and when she saw me, she jumped from her chair and started crying for real, which is exactly what I was afraid she'd do. I tried to send her a reassuring smile, but the muscles for that wouldn't work. She cried harder and moved to put her arms around me, but I sidestepped that. “I'm filthy,” I murmured.

Then they led us into this small green room.

They had my old DARE officer from fifth grade ask the questions. Officer Stephens asked me how it started and I thought about that awhile, then told him with Trey honking for me and me running to the Mustang like about a thousand times before.

“Tucker and Trey have been best friends all their lives,” Janet added. Her voice was trembling. She was gripping my hand between both of hers, squeezing it so hard I heard my knuckles pop. “I made both of them costumes the Halloween they were in third grade. They both wanted to be rabbits.”

Trey didn't want to be just any rabbit, though, he wanted to be the Evil Trickster Rabbit. At school he modified his costume in the restroom, covered it with rips and nasty slogans and fake blood. I gave a snort of a laugh, thinking about that, and when I looked up, everybody was staring at me with the same strange expression on their faces.

I clasped my hands, leaned forward, and looked down at the floor, waiting for Officer Stephens to ask something else. There was a little green caterpillar down there, curled up tight into a spiral. A spiral much like the ones in the black dog's eyes, except that those spirals whirled. Steve had a spiral tattoo on his ankle, and we stayed up half of one night in Zero's funky little backyard talking about why he'd got it and what it . . .

“Was there drinking involved?” Officer Stephens asked.

I shrugged but didn't look up. “Beer.” After a while I added, “Because it was the last bonfire of the season.”

Why would they send my old DARE officer to do this? If they thought they were doing me a favor because Officer Stephens had a reputation for relating to kids, well, they weren't. He was the last person I wanted to talk to about the convenience store, the borrowed ID and the two wrapped packages, the zinc mine fields. Why should I explain to him that there was beer at the bonfires each and every time? Let Officer Stephens and the rest of them think what they thought. What difference could it possibly make now?

He asked a few other things and I stared at the spiral caterpillar and said what I said, I really can't remember what that was. Then finally he asked a wrap-up question. “Can you remember the last thing the driver, Treyston Hughes, said to you?”

“No,” I answered. It was
don't you dare puke in my car,
but there's no way I would have told Officer Stephens or anybody else that. It was mine, those words. It was
ours.

It wouldn't have sounded friendly or natural if it hadn't been us saying it and hearing it.

I was so glad to get out of that small green room. It smelled like flop sweat, like the kind of sweat people sweat when they're stringing together lies.

It was nearly 2 a.m. when we got in the Taurus and Janet started driving us home. She had a bit of trouble because the chamber of commerce always strings a dense web of small orange lights in the shape of jack-o'-lanterns across Main Street in late October.

“All this light clutter drives me absolutely nuts,” she complained in a hollow voice that didn't sound the slightest bit like her voice. “I can't for the life of me see how people pick out which are the regular old stoplights in time to stop.”

By then she'd run one red light and had slammed on the brakes just in time to stop at the one where we were then stopped. From the corner of my eye I saw she had a shaky death grip on the steering wheel. She wasn't looking at me and I wasn't looking at her. She hadn't even asked about my police sweatpants or about the yellow sack in my lap.