Morgan frowned, “Are you like…a superhero?”
Puck laughed silently again and shook his head. I rolled my eyes at Morgan.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “This sounds like two freak-show psychos to me. If I hadn’t known you since diapers, Lucy D., then I would have already fled for my life and called the cops.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I thought of the one question that mattered, and the one I didn’t want to ask him. Especially not with Morgan there. I didn’t have a choice though, did I? I took a deep breath, trying to still the spiky nervous feeling pricking at my skin. Do it. Just do it, Lucy.
“Puck,” I said, trying not to look at Morgan. “Am I…did I die?”
“What?” Morgan said, and jerked toward me. “What does that mean? What happened to you?”
“I don’t know—”
Puck began signing, but neither of us were looking at him. After a beat he clapped his hands together, and Morgan and I swung our heads around toward him. He pointed behind us, turned, and bolted into the shadows.
“Puck!”
The sliding glass door trundled open. Morgan and I snapped around to see Sara standing in the doorway. Behind her, the press of people were frantic, moving as one toward either the front of the house or the living room.
“Luce?” Sara asked, tentatively, staring into the dark.
I jumped up onto the porch, and I heard Morgan crunching behind me.
“What?” I asked.
“Morgan?” Sara asked.
“What’s going on?” Morgan asked.
Sara looked confused by Morgan’s presence, but she shook it off and pointed over her shoulder.
“Everything. Benny and Tyler are fighting.”
Morgan and I exchanged glances and raced through the door. Sara grabbed my hand, and I grabbed Morgan’s, and the three of us plowed through the stumbling mass.
It was like charging into a cattle drive. The press of bodies ground together, threatening to throw me off my feet, bouncing me between the unintended shoulder-checks of a dozen strangers. From the front, Sara’s baseball-bat grip welded our hands together, but from behind I almost lost my grip on Morgan three times. She eventually grabbed my wrist with both of her hands.
Everyone shouted, blaring everything from words of encouragement to insults to well-meaning but ridiculous-sounding critiques.
“Fight, fight, fight!” A classic, and I allowed myself the indulgence of wondering who the first person ever to say it was. Probably a testosterone-drenched caveman, witnessing a brawl between two forehead-heavy fellows over who will rule the Clan of the Cave Bear.
“Queer! Fucking fight him! Punch him, come on!”
Sara yanked us out of the press of people, into the eye of the storm. Benny lay on the floor, holding both arms crossed over his face. Tyler, easily fifty-percent bigger then Benny, squatted on his chest, raining fists into Benny’s struggling defenses.
Sara ran forward, and I heard Morgan behind me. Sara made it two steps before another thug, dressed remarkably similar to Tyler stepped out from the crowd and shoved Sara with both hands. She stumbled and collided with an end-table, and the guy turned and grabbed both of my shoulders and pumped. Surprising strength took me back, throwing me into Morgan, knocking her into the crowd.
I grabbed the people around me, but their bouncing and jostling made it impossible to get back to my feet. A knee smacked me in the side of the head, and white star-bursts exploded in my eyes. I looked up in shock, trying to hold a hand feebly above my head, but I realized I wasn’t being attacked, just trampled.
I pushed up against the crowd, but it was like trying to shove a brick wall. I came down hard on my hands and knees, which protested with bright red stabs of pain. Something soft but unyielding cracked into my head, and my elbows buckled, forcing me into a bastard-version of the downward dog. I shoved and struggled, but the ocean of flesh tugged me down like the worst riptide. My left hand, its fingers splayed wide against Benny’s parents’ glossy hard-wood floor, didn’t last long. A brown-and-red sneaker came down like a piston on my fingers. I heard them break before I felt them. A dry machine-gun burst of cracks, four in total.
Agony. Bile rose in my throat, and a strangled animal-scream squeezed out of my mouth. The sneaker came up, and I yanked my mangled hand out and shoved it tight to my stomach to protect it. My fingers were engulfed in flame, throwing sickening pulses of pain up my entire arm. I wanted to look at it, but some well-equipped part of my mind told me that now wasn’t the time. I tried to curl up as best as I could, to resist the crushing machine of people.
Something grabbed the back of my shirt and twisted the fabric, tugging and pulling.
Then I was being lifted by the twisting hand, yanked back to my feet. A huge arm wrapped around my waist, holding me steady against the press.
I looked up at my savior. I wish I could have felt surprised.
Zack wasn’t looking at me. He held me to him against the battering sea of blood-thirsty teenagers, but he stared off toward the center of the circle, his eyes small and calculating. It had all the imagery of a romance novel, I realized. Dashing figure, whimpering maiden, eyes cast to the sea. I would have been disgusted if he hadn’t just saved my life.
Zack wasn’t small. With one hand around my waist, he plowed through the whirling teenager death machine and got us out of the crowd in seconds.
Sara tugged me out of Zack’s arms, and I didn’t even have enough presence of mind to resist. Zack didn’t either, because I realized Sara had seen what was in Zack’s eyes the moment he burst out of the crowd.
Benny had half-turned on the floor, and Tyler’s punches were knocking the side of Benny’s head into the hardwood floor with a sick cracking sound. No one was stopping him. Why wasn’t anyone stopping him?
Zack leaped at Tyler’s back, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him away from Benny. Tyler flew. He sailed into the coffee table, which despite what I’d seen in movies, didn’t immediately explode into splinters. Tyler just bounced off of it and rolled away. Zack was already moving, but so was Tyler’s black-haired friend.
Tyler’s friend snapped a forearm into the back of Zack’s head. Zack stumbled, turned, and threw a right cross that would have made Cassius Clay proud. It connected with a crunch, and Tyler’s friend stumbled back into the crowd.
Tyler was up, I realized, coming at Zack. Something small glittered in his hand—not a gun, I realized with an all-too-familiar jolt of fear. Just a pocket knife, the blade popped out. Zack was looking down at Benny. Tyler looked confused, and afraid, but he didn’t stop moving.
“Zack!”
Zack half-turned, and Tyler’s fear turned into panic. He jabbed the knife at Zack.
I could think of nothing but a pool of yellow arc-sodium light, the rough scrape of blacktop under my feet, and the yawning barrel of a revolver pointing into my gut. The gun and the animal behind it that had killed me.
“Stop!” I screamed.
He did. Tyler sailed backward across the room like he’d been punted. I didn’t see Zack move, but Tyler was lifted off his feet and tossed over the sofa. His legs caught the back of it, and he spun and landed in a heap behind it.
His pocket knife wobbled in the hardwood floor.
The crowd, finally, came alive. Tyler’s friend tried to sway back into the fray, looking dazed, bleeding from the lip, but a dozen hands grabbed each of the combatants and a dozen bodies flooded into the gaps between. I lost sight of Zack, Benny, Tyler, and Morgan.
“Luce…”
I followed the source of the sound to see Sara sitting on the arm of a chair, rubbing the side of her head. I jumped up to my tip-toes to try to see over the crowd, but I could only make out the top of Zack’s head.