Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen (16 page)

“Libby—” I jump up and toss my knife through the window. Libby leaps to avoid being sliced by it. “That's great, thank you so much, it's just I don't really have time to explain so can you just pull me—”

“Wow, you're, like, really dirty,” she says, grabbing one of my hands.

“Can you call Sherriff Staake?”

“My phone's dead. I can't call anyone!” She tugs on my good arm and I feel my feet leave the ground. “But I
did
call the Teen Tip Line before it died and left a message.” She sounds proud of herself. “So we'll be okay.”

“They probably check that, like, once a week!”

“I'm glad we're friends again. Also, Davey
just
woke up. Another thing I sort of lied to you about was that I gave a bunch of doctors my number when we were at the
hospital—what?” She grunts, trying to pull me the rest of the way through. “Don't look at me like that—they were cute. One of them called before and told me about Davey opening his eyes, but now my phone's dead—whoa, good thing you're skinny cuz this window's teensy.”

“Davey's awake?!”

I turn sideways, wriggling like a fish even though I can feel glass cutting into my flesh, and then the cold air hits my face like a million long-awaited pinpricks.

“Davey's awake.” A smile cracks my chapped lips. Libby hands me the knife I tossed through. I squeeze it in my hand, nibbling my lower lip. “He's alive.” Blood trickles down my skin.

“Gah, you look awful,” she says, flinging snow off her fingers. “What's even happening? Why did you tell me to bring this?” She picks a rifle out of the snow and holds it up like,
Hello?

I shake my head hard. I have to focus. “Dr. Ferguson shot my dad and threw us in the basement.”

“Ew.”

“Also my shoulder's out of joint,” I say, shivering. “He did that, too.”

“I'll fix it—one sec,” she says, sticking her head back in the window. “Come on,” she shouts into the basement.

She groans and pulls, leaning back on her heels.

Miss Rosa's head pops through the hole, but the rest of her is wedged tight.

“I too fat,” she says, blinking blindly at the night sky. “Leave me.”

Before I can stop her, Libby lowers Rosa back down.

“No,” I yell, pulling on Libby's coat. “He'll kill them.”

“Kippy,” Albus calls. “Your dad's asleep. You better hurry.”

“There's no time,” Libby says, handing the rifle down to Rosa.

“I help!” Rosa calls out from down below. “I shooting his butts off!”

Libby grabs my elbow and shoves my arm upright in the socket.

I scream, thinking she's broken it. But then it doesn't hurt anymore.

“There,” she says. “I do it for all the girls on the team.”

“Thanks.” I pull a shard gingerly from the soft part of my stomach. “Do you have any more weapons?”

“I've got the knife Rosa gave me.”

“Good. Okay, come on.”

I lead her around to the back porch, watching from the shadows as Dr. Ferguson tries the basement door a couple more times, then gives up and starts splitting the wood with his chainsaw. “You're better at throwing than
me,” I tell Libby. “So I'll distract him and you go around to the other side and disable him.”

She nods. “Just like with hunting deer. We'll corner him.” Before I can nod back, Libby pulls me in for a bear hug.

“I'm sorry,” she says into my hair. “I should have believed you.” She squeezes me so hard I choke. “You're crazy but not, like, chainsaw crazy, and you were right.”

“I accept your apology,” I croak, gazing over her shoulder. Inside, splintered wood hangs off the basement door like scabs. The chainsaw sputters to a stop as Dr. Ferguson takes a moment to yank the fractured pieces from the frame. “We gotta stop hugging now though.”

“So we're okay?”

“We're great,” I say, pulling back from her. “I'll be the decoy.” My teeth are chattering and it isn't from the cold. “Don't be scared,” I say, totally projecting.

She scoffs. “Oh please.” But you can tell she's nervous, too, by the way her knees knock together as she runs off.

I wait to bang on the sliding door until I see her silhouette in the kitchen. Then I thump hard until Dr. Ferguson puts down the chainsaw and looks over his shoulder.

I step back into the shadows. His eyes are right on me, but he's so backlit that he can't see a thing. Libby's got to throw the knife while he's distracted—before he
sees her. She's got a perfect shot.

He grabs his gun off the counter.

“Shit—come on, Libby,” I whisper. “Come on.”

She's just standing there in the doorway, her knife clutched at her side.

“Don't freeze,” I plead, trying to will her to go through with it.

I watch her bite the tip of her tongue in concentration, aiming, the knife gripped in her fingertips.

“Go,” I hiss, trying to will her to hurry. “Throw it.”

She takes a step forward, bracing herself—and she must make the floorboards creak or something, because he turns around and sees her.

I see the gunfire before I hear it.

Then Libby's on her knees, clutching her stomach.

I crank open the door and he whirls back around to face me. I throw Rosa's knife as hard as I can, aiming for his skull.

It lands with a squelch, buried to the hilt in his right thigh, and he hits the ground with both knees. Before he can reach for the gun I do a roundhouse kick to his face, then swipe the gun across the hardwood floor with my foot, picking it up in one hand. I train it on his head, stomping toward him.

“Don't,” he says, as I kneel down beside him. “Please.”

I press the barrel against his nose and press my foot against the knife's handle until he's sobbing. “Give me your keys,” I growl. “And your phone.”

He wrestles them out of his pocket. I yank out the knife, grab the keys, and scramble to Libby, colliding with Rosa.

“What took you so long?” I ask.

“Holes in door are small and I must wiggle.” She's gripping Libby's rifle with both hands. I offer her Ferguson's gun, handle first, afraid I might kill him with it. She takes it from me and aims both weapons at the doctor.

I fall on my knees next to Libby. “Look at me,” I plead, fumbling with the zipper on her down coat. A slowly expanding circle of blood is seeping into her sweater.

“Hey,” she gulps. Her teeth are covered in blood. “Am I—”

“You're great,” I assure her in a panicky voice, struggling with the numbers on Dr. Ferguson's cell. The buttons are swimming before my eyes. My fingers are slippery with blood.

“I am wanting for to kill you, Mister Doctor,” Miss Rosa is saying to Dr. Ferguson, wagging the gun at him while he cries. “I am wanting to explode your brains like melon on floor. You are devil.”

“Nine-one-one operator, what is your emergency?”
a merry voice inquires.

“I'm at Twelve Mirabelle Road. We're shot and beaten. How long will it take you to—”

“Now hold on, miss, slow down—”

“We're dying!” I shout, watching the color drain from Libby's face.

“Okay, now just keep talking to me, don'tcha know, we'll get EMTs on their way. Things are going a bit slow tonight, what with the Frostbite Challenge and that whole decapitation thing, but we're up and running, you betcha.”

I shake my head, unable to speak. This isn't like last time. They can't just walk me through CPR like when I found Davey. By the time they get here it will be too late.

I hand the phone to Rosa. “Here, talk to them,” I beg. I wedge the phone between her bloody cheek and shoulder.

“Hello? Is Rosa,” she says into the phone. “Soup is on.”

I race to the door of the basement and barrel down the stairs, leaping over the body of my father, who's still groaning, thank God.

I kneel down to unlock Albus, flipping through Ferguson's keys until I find the right one. “You gotta help me,” I tell her. “It's bad and I can't carry Libby or my dad by myself. We gotta get them into the car.”

“You can do it,” she says. “You can do it yourself, General.”

“No,” I snap, dragging her with me. “I'll come back for you, Dommy,” I yell as we rush past, even though he's out cold. Upstairs Rosa is still training both guns on Dr. Ferguson, who's clutching his leg and glaring at us. “Can I shoot him head?” I hear Miss Rosa asking the dispatcher. “No? Okay, is fine.”

I kneel beside Libby, trying to wriggle my arms under her body without hurting her. Her face is chalk white. “The keys to your truck are in your coat, right?” I ask her.

“They're in the ignition,” she whispers. The veins in her neck are black and pumping visibly. Her eyes flutter closed and panic hits me like lightning.

“Albus, help me!” I beg, straining to lift Libby's dead weight. I look up to see Albus smiling at me from the kitchen.

She shakes her head. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but I gotta run or they'll return me to my parents. Being stuck in Dr. Ferguson's basement was a dream come true compared to home.”

“Albus, that's—”

“Crazy?” She grabs a handful of meatloaf from a pan on the counter and shoves it in her mouth. “I love you, Kippy.” She gestures with her red whistle. “If I need you, I'll toot.”

She disappears out the back door.

“Albus!” I scream.

“Who are you talking to?” Rosa demands, covering the phone.

I keep yelling her name until Libby raises a sticky hand to my face.

“Kippy,” she says, swallowing. “Pray.”

“I don't know how.”

“EMTs say half hour!” Rosa yells. The whole room is fading. “I am powerful,” I say softly. “I am beautiful.” I unlock the front door and race back to Libby, repositioning my arms underneath her. In my mind, my feet are tree trunks growing into the floor. I have the arms of a bear and the heart of a lion. I am a dinosaur. I am Kippy Fucking Bushman.

I plant my legs and lift. My heart is pounding so fast that I can hardly feel the pain shooting through my legs and arms. Rosa is shouting something but I cannot hear her. My mind is fast and Libby is light.

“Survive,” I command Libby, who's gone now, fast asleep or worse, as I trudge through the snow to her truck. The wind whips my hair.

I look up at the stars. The night sky is so stuffed with them it looks as if it's sagging.

I open the back door.

“Please, Gah, let her survive.”

A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees  —

Life is funny. Though
of course when people say that, they mean just the opposite. Life is gruesome and bloody. From the moment you're born, the first way to check if you're alive is to make sure you can scream.

After hours in surgery, the ICU emergency team managed to put Libby's stomach back together and get her heart beating right. She woke up a few days later. Dom, Rosa, and I had been sitting in the waiting room in our various states of disarray—me in my sling, Dom in his wheelchair. We celebrated Christmas by napping on one another. At one point, Mildred came by with a gingerbread house and apologized for leading me to believe she was trying to abduct me—she just didn't want me to see the human head lolling on the ground at Frostbite. Then
the doctors came in and announced the good news to Libby's parents that Libby was finally awake, and all of us went barging down the brightly lit hall, such a motley crew.

We ran into the Frieds at the ICU a few days later. They were draped in weird wooden beads and matching motivational T-shirts—the phrase
LIFE IS FUNNY
stamped across both their chests, which I guess is how the saying got lodged inside my brain. We hugged and talked about Davey. About the good news.

For Davey, good news means that while Dom and Rosa and I were squirming in Dr. Ferguson's basement, he opened his eyes for five minutes, then for ten minutes a few days later. Then a few hours after that, he looked around the room, and according to the nurse on duty, he said my name. (She is a self-described romantic, so I gave her the letters I've been writing him, and she promised she'd pass them along.) Good news also means that it was true that his blood-alcohol level was zero the night he was attacked. Before coming over to my house that night for dinner, Dr. Ferguson snuck through the Frieds' back door, jumped Davey, and injected him with enough liquid aspirin to make a horse keel over. Then he scattered the empty beer cans, came over to our place, and sat with us like nothing happened, like a maniac. Libby might have been lying, but in a
way she was right. Whether or not Davey relapsed, he still ingested the aspirin, doctors thought. Only it was injected, not eaten—that's why the stomach pump didn't work. It was already in his bloodstream by then. He almost died.

I get to see him one night when the Frieds finally go home to sleep, during what they're saying is the biggest blizzard of the year.

At Libby's urging, I bribe the nurse who smuggled through my letters. One hundred bucks and a gas station gift card buys me three uninterrupted hours with someone I thought I'd never see again. I can't even count how many times I've wished for that kind of borrowed time with some of the people who have died on me. Mom, Ruth—even Ralph's parents, actually. But the best part about this is it's not a fantasy. And Davey is alive.

When he sees me duck through the door the look on his face is like I'm the one who almost disappeared, not him. The lights are off because he's supposed to be sleeping, but the moon is so bright in the window that I can see the stubble on his face. The snow is coming down in torrents of white fluff.

Instead of saying anything, he pulls back the covers and pats the thin strip of mattress beside him. We have never gotten to lie down together. We've never been alone like this.

I unstrap my walking cast, peel off my one sneaker, and limp toward him. We're grinning at each other—full smiles, teeth knocking teeth. His face is so scratchy that mine will be red for weeks.

They say he's going to have to do lots of physical therapy. But he can hug, and he can kiss, and he can rub his feet against mine, and trace a finger down the scar on my leg. And I'll tell you right now that when I touch him it's like every atom in his body is alive and buzzing and agile—I can feel it working.

So we both might be a little broken. But we fit together fine.

I would have happily stopped right there: content that most of us had survived, and comfortable in the knowledge that I'd testify in court in about a year—and that as a result, Ralph and Dr. Ferguson would suffer for the rest of their lives. Cloudy Meadows is facing an official investigation, and so is Green Bay Correctional Facility—for failing to update background checks on their mental health contractors (they didn't even know that Dr. Ferguson had been fired) and not having a clue about what one of their inmates was up to.

It turns out that Dr. Ferguson had gotten used to a pretty lavish lifestyle while working at Cloudy Meadows,
and after he was fired, the state-funded visits to Ralph and a few sessions per week with me weren't enough to keep him solvent. He was facing foreclosure on his house, repo on his car, and he had been getting hounded by a bunch of other creditors for at least a month when Ralph made his fatal offer.

Money makes people crazy. I can't go five seconds without being reminded that evil exists, and that I can't do anything about it. Albus's face is plastered all around Wisconsin—a picture of her grinning, mouth full of braces, with that red plastic whistle looped around her neck—the one she said she'd blow if she ever needed me. She's been missing for two weeks now. Statistically and given the weather, it doesn't look good. But Staake's not helping (surprise, surprise) and every time I bring up Albus, or try to talk about what happened that night to Dom or Rosa or Libby, they all get quiet like they don't remember. I don't see flashes of her anymore—no more glimpses of her that end up being foliage or whatever—and I'm not sure what that means.

“Is this my life?” I asked Davey. “Just running from trouble to trouble?”

He says my getting so obsessed like this is a gift. But I don't know. It feels more like a compulsion bordering on sickness. People say that I've been through a lot for my
age. But I'm starting to think that part of me must
want
to grapple with evil, otherwise it wouldn't seek me out. And what does that say about my sanity? Maybe someday I'll give in and learn how to own it a little—fall on my knees in the presence of destiny, live out whatever metaphor Davey hears when “O Holy Night” comes on.

In the meantime I've got a bone to pick with Ralph. After taking the Chewbacca head from Dr. Ferguson's basement and selling it online, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in my PayPal account, so it was no problem to dole out a thousand to each of Ralph's guards in exchange for getting me in to see him.

Per my request, the guards have Ralph strapped upright in a restraint dolly, facing me from the other side of the double-plated glass. The guys locked up on either side of him are staring at me all wild-eyed from their respective cells, licking the glass or hissing “Slut” at me through the communication vents.

Luckily I also stipulated when handing out my payoffs that Ralph be silenced. So in addition to being forced to look at me, he's gagged with this complicated-looking bite guard thing, which the prisoners have to wear if they're prone to gnawing on themselves. Between the two of us, I'm the only one who will be doing any talking.

“The social life here seems really vibrant,” I say,
gesturing at the cackling, hissing men on either side of him.

Ralph shuts his eyes like he's trying to ignore me, and I'm pretty sure I see a tear roll down his cheek.

I force myself to smile. The truth is, I'm barely holding it together. A guy fifteen feet to my left is frantically licking the glass, and another to my right is handcuffed behind his back so he won't touch himself in front of me.

I plop down on the metal chair that's been set out and just sit there for a while, forgetting everything I wanted to say. I gaze down at the shopping bag full of Whatchamacallit bars that I brought. I wanted to be mean. I wanted to torture him—I planned to eat these suckers right where he could see me until my stomach hurt because they're his favorite candy bars. But I can't do it. That's how he and I are different, it turns out, which is its own sort of relief and bad news at the same time. It'd be easier, in a way, if I could just take it out on him and feel better. But apparently that isn't how I'm built.

I pick up the shopping bag and get up, unable to look at him anymore. Outside in the parking lot, the wind screeches in my ears—and even though it's cold and awful in its own way, I remember the bars inside, and the smell of metal, and rejoice in the frigid weather, my freedom. My plans this evening are pretty typical for me lately: I'm
stopping by the sheriff's department again to see if they found Albus. (Staake thinks I'm crazy still, and in a way maybe he's right: there's not much difference between insanity and pure, unfettered hope.) Then it's back to the hospital. Libby's still stuck there, and I've been sleeping in the empty bed next to hers, even on school nights. I'm sort of afraid something might happen to her if I don't. And the truth is I don't love being alone, either.

I cross the prison parking lot to my van. In the distance, snow-covered flatlands extend into a densely wooded stretch of leafless trees. My hands are ham-colored claws, and my ears are ringing from the cold—at least I think that's what I hear.

I stop stock-still and listen, clenching my teeth so they won't chatter, holding my breath so that nothing interferes. It could be the screaming wind, like it usually is. But somewhere in that passable expanse, I think I can hear the tiny vibrato of a plastic whistle.

“Albus,” I whisper.

I shake my head. It couldn't be.

But then I hear it again.