Lies

couldn’t hear Jill.
    One of the boys stayed in the doorway. He was in charge. A runty kid named Hank. The stocking pulled down over his face smashed his features into Play-Doh, but it could only be Hank.
    One of the boys, fat but fast-moving and wearing an Easter Bunny mask, stepped to Derek and hit him in the stomach with his aluminum baseball bat.
    Derek dropped to his knees.
    Another boy grabbed Jill. He put his hand over her mouth. Someone produced a roll of duct tape.
    Jill screamed. Derek tried to stand, but the blow to his stomach had winded him. He tried to stand up, but the fat boy pushed him back down.
    “Don’t be stupid, Derek. We’re not after you.”
    The duct tape went around and around Jill’s mouth. They worked by flashlight. Derek could see Jill’s eyes, wild with terror. Pleading silently with her big brother to save her.
    When her mouth was sealed, the thugs pulled off their shooter’s earmuffs.
    Hank stepped forward. “Derek, Derek, Derek,” Hank said, shaking his head slowly, regretfully. “You know better than this.”
    “Leave her alone,” Derek managed to gasp, clutching his stomach, fighting the urge to vomit.
    “She’s a freak,” Hank said.
    “She’s my little sister. This is our home.”
    “She’s a freak,” Hank said. “And this house is east of First Avenue. This is a no-freak zone.”
    “Man, come on,” Derek pleaded. “She’s not hurting anyone.”
    “It’s not about that,” a boy named Turk said. He had a weak leg, a limp that made it impossible not to recognize him. “Freaks with freaks, normals with normals. That’s the way it has to be.”
    “All she does is—”
    Hank’s slap stung. “Shut up. Traitor. A normal who stands up for a freak gets treated like a freak. Is that what you want?”
    “Besides,” the fat boy said with a giggle, “we’re taking it easy on her. We were going to fix her so she could never sing again. Or talk. If you know what I mean.”
    He pulled a knife from a sheath in the small of his back. “Do you, Derek? Do you understand?”
    Derek’s resistance died.
    “The Leader showed mercy,” Turk said. “But the Leaderisn’t weak. So this freak either goes west, over the border right now. Or…” He let the threat hang there.
    Jill’s tears flowed freely. She could barely breathe because her nose was running. Derek could see that by the way she sucked tape into her mouth, trying for air. She would suffocate if they didn’t let her go soon.
    “Let me at least get her doll,” Derek said.

    “It’s Panda.”
    Caine rose through layers of dream and nightmare, like pushing his way through thick curtains that draped his arms and legs and made his every move tiring.
    He blinked. Still dark. Night.
    The voice had no obvious source, but he recognized it, anyway. Even if there had been light he might not have seen the boy with the power to fade away and almost disappear. “Bug. Why are you bothering me?”
    “Panda. I think he’s dead.”
    “Have you checked his breathing? Listened to his heart?” Then another thought occurred to him. “Why are you waking me up to tell me someone’s dead?”
    Bug didn’t answer. Caine waited, but Bug still couldn’t say it out loud.
    “Do what you gotta do,” Caine said.
    “We can’t get at him. He didn’t just die. He got in the car, right? The green one?”
    Caine shook his head, trying to wake up all the way, trying to make the trip back to full consciousness. But the layersof dream and nightmare, and memory, too, dragged at him, confused his brain.
    “There’s no gas in that car,” Caine said.
    “He pushed it. Till it got rolling,” Bug said. “Then he jumped in. It rolled on down the road. Until he got to the bend.”
    “There’s a railing there,” Caine said.
    “He went through it. Crash. Bumpety-bump all the way down. It’s a long way down. Me and Penny just climbed down, so I know it’s a long way down.”
    Caine wanted this to stop. He didn’t want to have to hear the next part. Panda had been okay. Not a horrible kid. Not like some of Caine’s few remaining followers.
    Maybe that explained why he would drive a car off a cliff.
    “Anyway, he’s totally dead,” Bug said. “Me and Penny got him out. But we can’t get him up the cliff.”
    Caine got to his feet. Legs shaky, stomach like a black hole, mind filled with darkness. “Show me,” he said.
    They walked out into the night. Feet crunched on gravel now interrupted by tall weeds. Poor old