One Way Out: Fiction About Multiple Characters

Myron stood over the dead body, unable to really take in that he had killed this person.

The other kids were cheering, but Myron felt sick. Myron blinked, and there his girlfriend was, holding up the severed head by its white hair.

Myron turned and ran. He ran to the bathroom. Inside was a staff member. A female staff member, giving a remote-control electric shock to a female student for vomiting on the floor. Myron ran into a stall and vomited, not caring that he was in the female restroom. A peaceful feeling came over him as he knelt there puking up his guts. This was one moment he had to himself, with nobody bothering him, shocking him, telling him off, threatening him, giving him dirty looks or forcing him to work. It might be the last time without torment that he would get, but it was still a time when he wasn't being tormented.

Myron stood up, kicked the flush handle and, watching as his vomit washed down the hole, began attempting to remove the belt around his stomach with the electrode attached to his bare skin that was used to shock him for misbehaviors.

He had gotten four of the five electrodes off of his arms, legs and stomach when he heard yelling from outside. It sounded like a student, thankfully. So the students still had the upper hand in this riot. It had been an hour since it had begun.

He took a deep breath and headed back out into the hall. A girl sat curled up against a wall, sobbing. He grabbed her by the arm. "Come on; let's go! Or his death would have been pointless."

The girl did not get up. "I loved him! He was my first crush and he was always kind to me!" she shouted.

"You were brainwashed," Myron tried to explain, but he couldn't think of another way to explain it. "Do you like what OTHER things he did to you?"

Five students came running up the hallway, carrying pencils like spears and broken halves of Bic pens like knives. The girl began to sob harder.

"Why are you crying?" Myron asked, trying again. This was going to be harder than he had thought. He had thought it would be so simple. They would sound the alarm and the entire student body would erupt, slaughtering their way out if they had to.

But they hadn't.

Most of them weren't even trying to get out.

And he had killed the head honcho, but instead of thanks, he was getting hatred. Except for a few people, the ones who had watched him kill the man. But they were the ones that simply loved chaos, not the ones that wanted to make a political and social statement.

Once again, Myron Jeffries, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at age five, was all alone.

Myron looked around for his one-on-one. He was nowhere to be found. Probably escaped. Probably scareder than Myron was.

Myron had no choice. He had to get back to his girlfriend and the kids that had cheered at Dr. Bobby Boler's death. They were the only people that would help him, or at least try to help him.

"The police are here."

Myron did a 180 and saw his girlfriend, Helen, coming up the hall towards him.

"But they're busy with Franz and Luigi," Helen continued, a broad smile on her doughy face. Myron could see that her electrodes were gone too, as was the backpack she had had to carry that Graduated Electronic Decelerator in all the time. She looked like she hadn't felt so good in ages. Without being forced to slouch under that ten-pound backpack, without the wires going into her shirt and skirt, even though she still weighed 200 pounds even after months of that vegetarian diet and forced exercise, in Myron's opinion she was absolutely beautiful. Bad, evil maybe, but enchanting. He knew then that he couldn't maintain the relationship with her, or she'd seduce him into evil with her unique charisma alone, despite all that extra fat.

But today he needed her help.

Because he did not know what the flying fuck was going on.

"What's the deal here?" he asked.

"They hid that corpse in a washer in the home ec room," she said calmly. "The big one, ya know? I mean, the big guy in the big washer. I don't know what we're gonna do with Boler; we might have to burn him to prevent them from finding your fingerprints on him."

"What's happening NOW?"

"We kill the rest of them that stand in our way, and get into Stevie's car, and leave." She was so calm. So damn mutherfuckin calm.

"We'll get caught."

"Do you know how many cars there are with escapees in them? Yes, some of us will get caught. But the ones that get away already have some staff with them for ransom."

"For the freedom of the oth-- the ones that get caught?"

"Yep." She smiled. So confident.

Having vomited up his lunch-- a nasty vegetarian lunch that looked and smelled and tasted like cat food, but a lunch just the same-- Myron was hungry. It wasn't that he was ready to enjoy eating so soon. He just needed the damn food so that he wouldn't throw up again. It was hard to explain. "Do we have time to go to the vending machine? Or the kitchen; whichever's closer."

"I think we can do it. If we miss Stevie, one of the others will pick us up."

"No, you go. I don't want you getting caught."

"YOU go. You're the one that killed the bastard. You need protection."

"Fine; come with me. To the kitchen."

"HEY! WAIT UP!"

Myron did not want to see, so he did not turn around. It was over now. The public and the officials would never agree to a prisoner exchange. No matter who or how many his friends would keep prisoner until they let him go... they would not let him go.

"I'm sorry, man, it's me."

Myron almost fainted with relief. It was just Jeremy. Jeremy, the kid in his class who had been shocked for asking to go to the nurse, then vomited all over his keyboard.

"I'm going to the kitchen. Where you headed?"

"I was looking for you, man! Where were you all this time?"

"In the bathroom and trying to convince people to come with us."

"Damn! We gotta get out of here NOW."

"I know. I guess there's no time for food."

But as they passed the kitchen, Myron quickly grabbed an unfinished bowl of something that looked like dog food, and then he and Jeremy rushed to the nearest exit.

What a cacophony. Police cars, ambulances, even three fire trucks. They hadn't even planned to set the school on fire, but come to think of it, that wasn't a bad idea. But there was no time now. He had a feeling the ones that stayed behind would do it, though. They would have nothing to lose. Hitting rock bottom was funny sometimes. The only way to go was up.

There were other vehicles too. Cars, vans, trucks, station wagons, buses. Their thousand friends from the International Incident Initiators had turned up just like they'd planned. Suddenly Myron felt so much better, knowing there was not one, not two, not three, but one thousand people in this world that he could trust.

It was Anything Goes now. No more "this one in this vehicle, that one in that other one over there". Jeremy, Myron, Helen and three others, including a teacher, filed onto a school bus, the multicolored psychedelic one that had probably been painted by hippies.

The bus was so full Myron had to sit in the aisle near the front. Younger children sat on older kids' and adults' laps. Others were crammed three to a seat meant for two. There wasn't enough room in the aisle for everyone to sit, so some had to stand. One girl stood holding a three-year-old because there was no space to put him down. She leant against the emergency door in the back, hoping she and the child would not fall through. It was scary to look at them. One young boy straddled the back of a seat, holding onto the ceiling, his right leg between the two fat teenagers sitting in the seat he was straddling.

Everything had to go. No space, even under the seats. One of the International Incident Initiators yelled at the rest to throw their backpacks, lunch bags and books out the windows. Soon books, pencil cases, even geometry sets flew or were passed here and there until they got to the windows and were thrown out. Then the driver started shouting at them to stop because they might cause an accident with so many vehicles and now stuff all over the road and the parking lots.

The bus finally got to the road. "It's a miracle!" someone exclaimed.

"Nope, it ain't," a kid with dreadlocks said. "Look."

Myron and the others looked. There was a great crowd of students, some laughing and some crying, some children as young as four and some prisoners as old as sixty who had been there for most of their lives. They had formed a human chain. Even the youngest and the oldest and the most disturbed did not move even when they were sprayed with gas and then Mace. They were distracting the police, then a group of teens (those three black guys from New York that had always hung out together in the Big Reward Store at the school) went and grabbed a gun out of an open police car while the officers continued to spray at the human chain.

The bus was driving so fast that some of the younger kids were screaming. Then they passed by two cars crashed into each other, on fire, and soon everyone was screaming.

But Helen was calm.

Perched on the leg of a fat person sitting on a seat, her legs in the aisle, Helen said, "You'd think that they were kidnapping us."

"Well, technically, they are," a 3--I member said. "It's not what the student wants that goes here; it's what the judge thinks they would have wanted if they were competent."

"Fuckin' shitheads!" a nearby teenager said, attempting to spit on the floor (but the spit landed in a girl's lap instead and the girl screamed and slapped him).

"WHO YOU CALLIN SHITHEADS!" the biggest person on the bus said. He had a whole seat to himself and a sleeping child lay on his stomach, which was like a shelf or table or bed, depending on what you wanted to use it as.

"Them, not us. Not you," one of the 3--I members assured him, patting his shoulder. He calmed down, but looked totally taken aback at this gentleness. He was used to getting zapped under the skin and into his muscles for lesser transgressions, like blowing his nose in class (into a kleenex, so what the problem was, Myron did not know) because it had thick gloopy green snot oozing out of it.

Myron wondered how his friends were doing in the other vehicles. Who had been caught and who was still on the run? Who was still rioting and who had been neutralized, and who had just given up? Who had managed to escape, perhaps even on foot? There was one couple, members of 3--I, that had an apartment on the same long street as the school. Surely the fuzz wouldn't do door-to-door searches, would they?

Jeremy must have been thinking the same thing. "HEY!" he shouted at the people in the back and on the sides where the windows were. "Look and see who's doing what!"

"They just got Heather!" a girl in their class said.

Even one of the captured teachers joined in, saying "They just got Bethany! They just got Lisa! They just got-- nope, he broke free again!"

"Where we going?" Jeremy, who was sitting closest to the driver, asked.

"To the Arizona desert. We're going to get into different vehicles once we get to the shipyard, then go cross some state lines!"

It seemed so unlikely. Like a dream. Jeremy opened his eyes as wide as he could, preparing to wake up and find himself in his room in the Hope House residence, under his bug-infested blanket, still attached to the GED, the backpack right there next to him and a camera watching his every move from high in the corner of the room.

Next Jeremy slapped himself. Then he bit his arm till he tasted blood.

"Jeremy, what the fuck you doing?" his friend, Lester, shouted over the din from where he sat in the front seat on the aisle, with a captured teacher next to him on the inside.

"Trying to find out if this is real!"

Then Lester started abusing himself too, trying to wake up because this really wasn't funny. Lester became angry at God for giving him this dream and thus reminding him that he could be free. He bit his lip until he tasted blood, poked himself in the eye, punched himself in the head. But he still didn't wake up, and now he had burning pains in his lip and his eye and he felt woozy.

"Let's see who can go the longest without passing out," Jeremy said, watching Lester and giving up on this being a dream.

One of the International Incident Initiators had been watching. His stomach hardened. He wondered if coming and getting these kids was a good idea or not. What if the school was right? What if the kids were safer there? He watched as Jeremy and Lester squeezed each other's necks, waiting for one of them to pass out. He watched the young man who had spat in the girl's lap yelling at the driver to stop at a place they passed that he knew was a brothel. He watched a boy shaking so hard he was rattling the seat... not from a seizure but from not taking his Cogentin, which wore off before the medication he was taking Cogentin to quash the side effects of did.

Indeed, none of the students had their medications with them, and even though most were not on medication, everyone knew that most of them should be. The school had used punishments rather than medication to keep the students in line, but the students had still been suffering in silence all along at that school without their medication. So, regardless of the fact that they hadn’t been on meds at Hope House, they needed medication.

The 3--I member who saw the guy shaking and the other kids losing it had an idea. He yelled at the driver to turn on the radio full blast, then yelled at everyone to sing along as, coincidentally, "I WANT TO BREAK FREE! I WANT TO BREAK FREEEE!" flooded the bus and even shook the windows a little.

This calmed them down, although, naturally, there was still some scratching, head banging, skin picking, nose picking, hair pulling, teeth grinding and skin rubbing. These students needed calming stimulation, not forced sensory deprivation through isolation. Why had he almost forgotten this, after a year of training with the International Incident Initiators, the best underground activist group in the world as far as he knew?

Myron was crying like a baby girl as he thought about his mother, and about probably never seeing her again, at least not for a long time. He cried as he sang I Want To Break Free. He cried as he and his friend Bartholomew took a leaf out of Jeremy and Lester's book and tried to strangle each other into unconsciousness. He cried as he "talked shop" with Helen and the driver about the inhumane procedures at Hope House and the intricacies of their plan. But then something cheered him up: he remembered that his mother had put him in this situation in the first place by sending him to that dad-blasted school.

And so he started a new game... the Bragging War. It went like this:

Myron: "My mom knew I would get shocked if I even slouched a little even before she sent me to Hope House!"

Jeremy: "So? My mom kicked me in the nuts when I tried to shoplift and she had left my GED in the car. I was on a home visit with no staff and I had taken the 'lectrodes off in the car and nobody noticed until we got in the store!"

Dannisse (girl who had gotten spat on): "SO? MY DAD raped me and my mom didn't believe me. When I told her she slapped me. When I came here I told her about the abuse here and she didn't believe me because of that. She thinks I'm a chronic liar, but I never lie! I hate liars!"

They could still hear sirens. All around them was a mixture of emergency vehicles and 3--I vehicles. A helicopter hovered overhead. At least the military hadn't arrived yet. That was something good to think about.

Everyone on the bus was speculating.

"They've got the pictures of us. They'll never let us over the state borders."

"I heard someone say we're gonna go through a secret tunnel."

"To the plains of Arizona or something."

"The desert of Arizona."

"What's there?"

"Nothing... just desert."

A 3--I member, Sharona, looked at the GPS on the phone she had confiscated from one of the teachers, and showed the student sitting next to her. "We're not going to Arizona. 'The desert of Arizona' is actually a code word we used in our planning, for 'The forests of Canada'. Remember that tunnel between Canada and the US that was on the news a few years back? They used it to smuggle drugs. Well, we've got another one. We just need to get to our private airport in the woods here. Nobody knows we have a runway and we built our plane in the woods so that nobody would suspect."

The student, Igor, was impressed.

Suddenly, there were less vehicles, and then they were in the woods. And then suddenly, it was dark.

The bus suddenly stopped. The driver got out and yelled, "YOU ALL STAY IN THERE!" The ones in front could see him passing in front of the bus and then saying "We got Boler reeeeeal good!"

Jeremy could tell it was a code sentence when the solid back of the tunnel suddenly swung open like a door and light streamed in. The driver ran back into the bus, looked behind at two cars that were also in the tunnel, then floored it. The bus shot into the light. Jeremy stood up in time to see the two cars following the bus into the light, but was quickly knocked down by the movement of the bus. Then the bus screeched to a stop again.

Myron blinked, stood up and looked out the window. They were in a long passageway, going straight ahead, and the driver of the bus was trying very hard not to knock people over. Yes, people! Twenty or thirty people, clapping and cheering, standing on wooden platforms along the edges of the tunnel. About half of them were wearing International Incident Initiators shirts. Others wore other orange clothing. Orange was the 3--I color.

Some 3--I members were also holding signs. WELCOME BACK. YOU ARE FREE NOW.

WELCOME TO THE FREE WORLD.

One even said, "We are trying to get Dr. B.B. excommunicated from the synagogue."

The two cars were unmarked 3--I vehicles. Out of them came more students and 3--I members.

Myron felt like he was in a dream as he ran to his friend Isis and hugged her and screamed and cried like what he thought only a girl could scream and cry like. She was alive! And she had made it to the hideout!

But what would happen next?

"ATTENTION!" a man shouted through a bullhorn, as if on cue. "We have been informed that we are not to wait for the rest, but to continue on to the runway and take off. We have enough prisoners and students. The rest will keep the enemy busy."

Myron grinned at Isis and Isis grinned at Jeremy and Jeremy grinned at Lester and Lester grinned at the 3--I member standing next to him. Nobody, except for nutjobs on message forums on the internet, had ever openly called Hope House or Dr. B.B. enemies before.

And so they got on the bus and drove for hours into the darkness, the headlights of the bus and the two cars being the only lights outside the vehicles.

And then there was light again. Myron jumped up and looked around, before falling on Helen's head and having to apologize. Before he fell, he saw a kid with a bloody nose, a girl with a bald spot and blood clots in her hair, a huge bump on a 3--I member's head and a bloody gash on a so-called “retarded” kid's forearm. Had the so-called “lower-functioning” students really done all that?

They were in a clearing, and everyone knew it was time to get off the bus. They jumped out through the windows and the emergency door, and the rest fell out through the front door on top of each other, anxious to get out, knowing or, in the case of some of the so-called low-functioners, sensing, that they were in a race against time and that their friends were putting their lives on the line to give them a chance at freedom.

They piled into the plane. Isis, Helen, Jeremy, Lester and Myron were separated in the chaos, but it didn't matter. This could be their last day on Earth and they were going to make the best of it.

Myron played tic-tac-toe with the so-called retarded boy, and both were crying the whole time.

Helen got up to help two 3--I members serve water and fried bannock-- they had never heard of it, but it was wonderful.

Jeremy taught a boy diagnosed with “Williams Syndrome” how to play Flatliners, like he and Lester had been playing on the bus trying to strangle each other.

Lester wrote good-bye notes to his family and sealed them in a metal canteen a 3--I member gave him. The 3--I member was walking around asking for notes to outsiders to put in the canteen. Lester was proud of what he had written. He had astonished himself with intellectuality that he had never known he had possessed. He knew that they would probably survive, but he grinned just thinking about how heroic he was acting and how he was going to be able to be even more heroic as an activist if they succeeded in this, their first mission.

Isis gossiped with Dannisse about all that had happened at Hope House. Finally, after five years of court-approved captivity, they were able to talk freely about what had gone on there.

Myron had been diagnosed with “Asperger's Syndrome”, and he knew an autistic person when he saw one. He felt a rush of empathy as he heard the autistic kids moaning and screeching and saw their hands over their ears, as the plane took off. One girl moaned, "Oh, God!", looking at them with the same expression Myron had on his face.

"It'll all be f--" Myron began, then shut up when he remembered that this particular group of autistic kids hated noise. They had all fallen to the ground in pain when they had heard the sound of another student receiving a shock at Hope House. The teacher had thought they were imitating the kid or exaggerating their pain for him hoping the shocks would stop forever. And so they had then received shocks too, and screamed even louder, and gotten frightened by their own and each other's screaming, and had henceforth walked around in a doped-up zombie daze, though they weren't doped up with anything but their own shock chemicals.

Instead of talking to the kids, Myron told a 3--I member about their problem. The 3--I member said she would see what she could do, and ran all over and came back with some cotton balls and Q-tips for that group of autistics. The Q-tips were for unblocking their ears, the cotton balls for plugging them.

Meanwhile, at the back of the plane, Sharona led some small children in a singing chant: "I don't know but it's been told!"

"I don't know but it's been told!" the kids echoed. Sharona wondered why these kids, who seemed perfectly able to follow directions, had been at Hope House. Until, that is, Myron told her they were autistics with echoalia.

"Dr. Boler's mean and cold!" she singsonged, and they repeated her.

Next was "I don't know but it's been said; Dr. Bobby Boler's dead!"

And then cheers erupted. It seemed they had forgotten to inform everyone that Myron had killed Bobby Boler.

Myron suddenly felt a panic attack coming on, ran to the bathroom and vomited. But this was more than just a panic attack... or a heart attack. His ears were ringing, he was freezing cold and shaking and he felt a huge solid dark lump of something behind his right eye. He suddenly had indigestion. He suddenly had shortness of breath. His vision blurred for no reason.

"So all you have left is your mind," Myron told himself. "What is seven times nine?" But he couldn't think of the answer. Suddenly, he couldn't move or talk. He couldn't even control where his eyes went. Was this a panic attack? A heart attack? A stroke?

He had all the symptoms of a stroke.

Yeah, he must be having a stroke.

It was the middle of the night when the plane touched down on the Runway at the Camp. There were three big structures and woods all around. There was the Runway, which nearly the entire population volunteered to cover up with sod to hide. There was the Bunker, the entrance being a door in the runway. There was also the Lodge.

Bartholomew had always wanted to live in the country, where he was free to run and yell and shout and scream and rock back and forth with nobody trying to stop him or make him feel guilty. His idiot parents had insisted on keeping him in the city for "educational purposes" and Hope house had been the result. Idiots. He was already twenty-one, and after age twenty-one if you're still at Hope House you probably will be for life. That was just the way it went.

Jeremy smiled as he looked up at all the attention they were getting. As he helped dismantle the plane to hide the pieces in the Bunker, he had heard hooting and whistling and clapping and cheering. And he saw so many signs.

WELCOME HOME.

AUTISTICS SPEAK.

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US.

I DON'T SUFFER FROM SCHIZOPHRENIA, I ENJOY IT.

3--I members hung out of the Lodge windows and overcrowded the gallery. One fell off and landed with a crack on his head, and several more rushed over to help.

Jeremy looked at the signs and by reading more of them, he could confirm that these people had mental illnesses too.

He was in good hands.

It was crap for dinner.

Well, not exactly crap, and way better than the cat and dog food from Hope House, but Jeremy wished he could have had pizza instead.

All the 3--I had been able to afford to buy for the students and themselves was dollar-store snacks. The Rice Krispies squares were good, but the other stuff turned the mess hall into a vomitorium and forced the students and their food outside while the two 3--I janitors cleaned it all up, then ran outside to vomit over the railing themselves.

Most of the kids gave their food to the fattest guy, the one who had sat on the bus with a child laying on his belly. His name was Marck, and he was quite nice, actually. He enjoyed the wafers, cheap cookies, cheap crackers, cheap candy, cheap breadsticks with cheap chocolate dip, cheap mandarin oranges in cheap water, and cheap whatever else.

"I don't understand why they're all getting so sick!" Sharona wailed. "I guess they're used to the shit they were eating at that school. I told you we should have gone hunting for them instead of wasting time making those signs!"

"How dare you call something I propose a waste of time!" roared another member in a British accent.

"Hunting takes more work. The kids were very happy with the signs. Just as happy as they would have been with meat," the driver of one of the cars said.

Jeremy, Helen, Lester, Dannisse, Isis, Igor, Bartholomew, and the boy with dreadlocks (whose name was Saul) sat around in the Lodge in the large lounge... the one place that seemed familiar to them. In a wierd way, it eased their culture shock. As much as they hated Hope House, Hope House had been very well-decorated with modern and stimulating accessories and full of plush furniture and fancy media centers.

The news was on, but none of them were watching.

"Where's Myron?" Helen asked.

"He's dead," Jeremy said.

"Seriously. Where's Myron?"

"He's dead," Jeremy repeated.

"Dannisse," Helen said, growing impatient, "Where's Myron?"

"He's dead," Dannisse said.

Dannisse never lied. Helen began to sob.

"Where is he?" Isis asked.

A 3--I member suddenly appeared in the door. "Are all of you friends of Myron Jeffries?"

They all nodded.

"Come with me."

Myron's friends went with the 3—I member. The 3--I member, Benjamin, led them across the field and opened a door in the ground, which was covered in freshly-laid grass. Inside was a stairwell, or rather, a rampwell, descending deep into the ground.

In they went. As they descended, they passed by labeled doors.

ACTIVISM LIBRARY.

MEDICAL EXAMINATION ROOM.

GYMNASIUM.

FILE ROOM.

BUNKER OFFICE.

Then they passed by a room that they could tell was very large. They could hear people screaming from within. "OPEN DA DOORS!"

Helen recognized the voice of the teacher that had shocked her classmate who had asked to go to the nurse, resulting in him vomiting over his keyboard and having to pay for a new one with the reward points he had spent a year accumulating. Helen smiled. She was happy that teacher, Edmund Brewster, was now locked up.

Finally, they reached the very bottom. The door said: MORGUE.

It was a makeshift morgue, next to the room with the generator. The ex-students filed in, looking everywhere but at the three trays with bodies on them.

Yes, there were three bodies, and two of them were unrecognizable.

"This here," the 3--I member said, "is Augustus Bjorn. He jumped in front of one of the buses on purpose."

"What's he doing here?" Jeremy asked, trying to distract himself from the fact that Myron was dead. He looked at Lester, who was trying to control his eyes, trying to stop them from continually snapping back to the slab with the recognizable body on it. The slab with his best friend on it.

"We had to move him to prevent an accident," the 3--I member said. "We also want to be prosecuted for as few murders as possible."

"You want to be prosecuted?" Isis asked. Isis had a bit of a learning disability, Jeremy reasoned, so of course she would misunderstand some things.

"I meant that we don't want to be. We want as little prosecution as possible, preferably none. But you make a good point, without even meaning to. Prosecution for taking you guys out of there could actually be a good thing. But it could work either way. The public might be sympathetic if the courts come down too hard on us. Then again, they might also be scared to do anything about it if the courts come down too hard on us."

"I'm scared," Lester whimpered.

Lester had thought it didn't get any worse than being at Hope House. Now he knew it did. He could end up back at Hope House with a criminal record.

The 3--I members let them alone with their dead friend for a few minutes before ushering them out of the morgue. "Now, do any of you need to talk to someone? Bob here is a counselor."

"I'll take you all... sightseeing a little bit while we talk," Benjamin said. "What would you all like to see first?"

"I wanna torture the teachers!" Isis said.

"I don't know about that," the 3--I member named Christolph said. "But I'll take you to see the teachers."

There came a roar of human voices as the door to the jail area was opened. No words; just sounds. It appeared that these teachers had a very low tolerance for disrespect. Yet they had wanted, and gotten, years of respect from the students... all in vain. How could a few hours locked up do so much harm to these people who had had to watch slaughterhouse movies before being accepted as Hope House staff, these people who had forced JoAnn Keston to stab herself with a knife and punished her for refusing, then punished her again even more for doing it.

These people who had applied the electrodes to Jody Blum's head when it wasn't even FDA-approved to use on hands and feet, who had caused Misha Grant to cardiac arrest in math class after shocking him for slouching? The so-called people who had punished the new student, Rudy McCall, for complaining of medication withdrawals, until Jeremy had found him dead in his bed one morning after being shocked for not waking him up.

Jeremy could not shake the thought away, and did not want to. He couldn't get it out of his head... the shocks they had given his roommate before realizing he was dead.

Meanwhile, Hope House was on fire.

Geeta was ecstatic. It was burning... to the ground.

It was all burning. Computers, chairs, desks, fancy reward-area stuff. Never again would she have to sit mindlessly typing the same answers into the computer for hours, doing the same exercise over and over because she would be shocked if she stopped for more than ten seconds.

Where would they go? Worst case scenario: jail. Geeta was excited. Jail had so many freedoms. You had the option to work and get paid, but it wasn't mandatory. There was good food in the commissary rather than Bobby Boler's strict vegetarian diet banning everything from meat to bread to grain to sugar to salt to dairy products. Even some fruit and vegetables were banned. Geeta's diet had consisted mostly of lettuce.

Geeta wanted a honey bun.

She wanted her own room. In jail she had had her own cell.

She wanted the freedom to sleep and not be zapped out of bed or zapped for sleeping in class because she had been zapped all night for breathing too loud and hadn't slept as a result.

She wanted the chance to talk to her friends.

She wanted the chance to share things with friends. Once she had gotten zapped for sharing a slice of pizza with Tory Allen because Tory hadn't earned that "reward".

Geeta knew she'd better act fast if she wanted to get out of Hope House's clutches.

She had to commit a crime.

What crime, though?

She hadn't set fire to the school. Heather and Laurent had. But she could keep the fire burning.

Geeta ran out to the road, amidst the pushing and pulling of the crowd, and started picking up the schoolbooks that the students on the bus had thrown out, to keep the fire going.

"Geeta, what are you doing?"

Geeta whirled around. It was Heather.

Geeta then realized a few books made no difference; all she was doing was making sure they wouldn't make her read those books again for a while. She felt embarrassed.

"Come make yourself useful," Heather said.

She led Geeta right into the burning building.

"What are you--?"

"We'll get out before the fire consumes this part; don't worry," Heather said. "Lisa and Alphonse are guarding the fire and keeping watch on it."

Inside, Luigi and Nikita were smashing things up. Fancy plant pots, fancy sculptures, the glass in the frames of the fancy colorful prints that hung on almost all the walls. Nikita smashed some fancy computers while Luigi attacked the fancy couches and armchairs with a knife from the kitchen.

Geeta's eyes fell on the fancy curtains and she ran over to them to rip them down.

The body of Professor Bobby Boler lay still upon a carpeted hallway floor, the head feet away from the larger piece, the two pieces linked by a trail of blood. Flames had already begun to lick at it, surrounding it on the floor. But that didn't stop Ichabod Eisenhower from bending over it and removing the wallet and gold timepiece from the pockets. Ichabod then took off his name tag and threw it into the flames, then ran outside to join the students.

It was payback time. Ichabod had taken this job for the money only, not because he had believed in Boler's cause.

He had shocked a student for asking for more food in the cafeteria because she was still hungry after eating just a half bagel filled with lettuce.

He had shocked a student for slipping and falling in the shower because his arm had been chained to the outside of the shower due to the electrode, so he had lost his balance. Yes, he had shocked Jacques Mattson while he was in the shower... and he had been electrocuted. How could Ichabod forget his name? How could he forget his face? How could he forget that he hadn't been charged, the death had been ruled an accident, and Ichabod had stayed at Hope House shocking people?

It was payback time.

JoAnn Keston, Jody Blum, and Rudy McCall's identical twin brother, whose name was also Rudy McCall (which, despite their different middle names, had thrice caused him to get shocked for things his brother had done) ran through the smoky hallway, holding hands so that they wouldn't lose each other.

There was a teacher running after them.

He was yelling and actually seemed crazed. "It's not safe! Get back here!" he yelled. "Get back here now; it's not safe!"

The three students were horrified.

"I think I'll decide for myself what's safe and what's not, thank you," Rudy said. The other two were too busy choking on the thickening smoke.

Ichabod didn't know what to do. He was trying to pay these kids back for abusing them, trying to help them now. Didn't they know that they were heading straight into the fire? Didn't they know that thickening smoke meant more fire?

"The fire is right up ahead! You need to get out! You're gonna run into it!"

The three kids stopped short and turned around, still holding hands.

Ichabod then realized something. He had given them a reason, and they had obeyed. Not because he was a teacher. That clearly didn't matter now. It wasn't his authority that had saved them, but a simple explanation.

Jeremy and Lester anxiously fixed their hair as they sat in front of the webcam. The shocks for failing to maintain a neat appearance had never quite left them.

"Now Jeremy, you go first," the 3--I member named Sharona said. "What would you like to say to the media, the government, or the people at Hope house?"

"Losers!" Lester said.

"Let Jeremy speak for himself. You'll have your turn after."

Jeremy took a deep breath.

"I want to tell my friends at Dope House, keep going! Don't stop. This is your one chance. Once it's gone, so are you."

Jeremy took another deep breath and continued.

"To the staff: We act like idiots because of you, not despite you. But yeah, maybe to spite you."

Jeremy had more to say, but he couldn't remember. There was just too much to remember. So he said that. "There's so much to remember and so I have more to say, but not now; I can't remember."

"Write it down when you remember it, for later," Sharona said.

"I will."

"Lester?" Sharona said.

Lester opened his mouth.

"You killed one of my best friends," he said. "Myron Jeffries. He probably wouldn't have died if we hadn't had to riot. Otherwise he would have died in Hope house." Lester paused. "Also, aversives are cruel and evil because they don't work BECAUSE they're cruel and evil."

"That's what I forgot to say!" Jeremy said. The two 3--I members with them beamed at them both.

"And now, Jeremy and Lester, what do you want to happen?"

"I been thinking long and hard about this," Lester said. "Starting when I was daydreaming about breaking out and being free. Who says daydreams are bad? They certainly turned out productive in this case. So this is what I want. I want us to keep at least one of the teachers prisoner here until our friends are released. And I want you to go easy on our friends. I don't want any punishments for them. Or worse, restraints. Cuz if I hear about one little asshole shithead thing you did to my friends back there, Ima keep your friend Tina Smirnoff captive for fucking ever. Do you understand?"

Jeremy and Lester had a special interest concerning Tina Smirnoff. They had visited her in the jail section of the Bunker, and she had threatened to shock them when she was freed. The bitch had always been arrogant. She had called Helen overweight in gym class when Tina had actually been fatter than Helen, and Tina had just been yelling at everyone to run faster on the treadmills while Tina had sat there eating a candy bar.

Helen was in the office with them. She left, went to the bathroom, looked at her face in the mirror. It was the face of a psychopath.

Helen hated it. Why did God have to pick her to be a murderer?

Well, she might as well get used to it and like it. And maybe even put it to good use.

"There. That's it," she told herself. "Being miserable gets you nowhere."

"Hi, Helen."

It was Dannisse, standing in the doorway.

"Uh, hi."

"We're doing the funeral in about an hour. Myron was declared dead finally."

"What do you mean, Dannisse? He was already dead when they found him."

"They did everything they could to save him. Apparently, anyways. And they laid him out for three days just to be sure."

Helen couldn't believe she had been there for three days.

Immediately, Helen felt embarrassed and ashamed. When Dannisse had told her that, why hadn't she automatically thought about her boyfriend lying on a cart in the morgue? Why had she instead thought about herself, and how long she had been at the 3--I headquarters? She was so self-absorbed!

Helen started to cry. She was a psychopath, she was no good.

Dannisse looked shocked at the tears... a further testament, Helen decided, to how psychopathic Helen must have acted up until now.

The standoff finally ended four days after it had begun.

They were scattered and separated. But they had not felt so free in their lives.

Heather had been captured by the army, Geeta by the police, and Luigi by a do-gooder firefighter who was helping the police. Nikita had left with the last group of 3--I members. There were road blocks, but luckily there was a hiding place behind the basement wall of a 3--I member that lived nearby.

Laurent had found Jody, JoAnn, Rudy and Ichabod. Ichabod, the only one who looked old enough to be a police officer, was wearing a police uniform taken from a policeman they had found in a hallway with his throat slit. He was leading the three kids toward an abandoned police car, and they were pretending to follow him. Pretending to have given up.

There were bodies in the kitchen.

There were bodies in the bathroom.

There were bodies hidden all around the school too. Laurent had helped Helen stuff one into the big washer in the home ec room and then later returned to blow the washer up; and then helped Nikita stuff one into the boiling-water vat under the steam table in the cafeteria (which they then blew up). Laurent and Nikita had worked tirelessly for four days, taking Ritalin from the school pharmacy to keep themselves awake and alert and aware and vigilant, stuffing bodies into a bank of lockers which they then set on fire, sticking one in between the pile of mats in the gym storage area and sticking two more in the cage full of basketballs before dropping the balls all around them again. Then they had set the mats and balls on fire.

They had left alone the bodies of other students and 3--I members, however. Those were Geeta's responsibility. Geeta was guarding them in the nurse's office while manning the pharmacy, doling out Ativan to anxious students who happened to pass by the pharmacy, and even to one cop who had held a gun on her.

But now the whole school was burning anyway.

Geeta didn't know what vehicles belonged to who anymore. All the students she knew were gone. Who was a real policeman and who was a 3--I member in disguise? Who was a student and who was a plainclothes policeman? Who was a paramedic and who was just pretending to be, letting cops and teachers bleed to death?

Why, that was it!

Geeta started to go around to all the ambulances to look for people pretending to be medics. If they were a real medic, they couldn't arrest her. Maybe she would get away with some 3--I members in an ambulance.

Back at the Camp, Helen watched as Jeremy and Lester gently laid the pine box containing their dead friend down on the grass.

He was her boyfriend, her special sweet best friend, and now she would not talk to him until she was dead herself, or perhaps never.

"Do you want to say something, Helen?" the 3--I member asked, climbing out of the hole in the ground and laying down his shovel.

Helen shook her head. But then she thought of something.

"He was my best friend since seventh grade in Hope House," she said. "Or as we say, Dope House, because it's full of dopey staff."

Now everyone's eyes were on her.

"He was a good person. He really was. He is the one that killed Bobby Boler. Now they're going to say that we killed Myron, that if it weren't for us rioting and escaping he would still be alive. That's bullcrap. He was already dying before we did that. It was inevitable whether we rioted or not. He died a slow painful death of discrimination and hatred from the staff there. And if he hadn't been at Hope-- Dope House, he wouldn't have even started to die, and would still be alive today."

Jeremy nodded. "It was the stress that killed him."

They passed by the pine box one by one, each placing something on it. Marck placed his court papers on it. Lester placed a newly-printed-out Patient's Bill of Rights on it. Jeremy left a copy of the US Constitution on it, Dannisse a copy of the UN's declaration on the rights of the child, Bartholomew a blank psychiatric advance directive paper, Isis a patient guide from an institution more humane than Hope House, Saul a copy of a news article sympathetic to the students rather than Boler & Company.

After the two 3--I members finished placing the coffin containing Myron's body in the grave and shoveling the dirt over it, and putting sod over that to hide it, Sharona stood up.

She held up a stainless steel plaque. "I would have placed this right there," she said, nodding at the head of the grave. "But that would have looked suspicious to anyone passing overhead. So I'm going to give it to you, Helen, to keep safe until we can give your friend a proper burial elsewhere."

The plaque said: "Here lies Myron Jeffries, 1996-2012, an Aspie for freedom."

Jeremy sat in the dorm on a lower bunk, jacking off and spilling his seed into a plastic glass.

Isis walked in on him.

"Hi, Jeremy," she said totally nonchalantly. Jeremy again reasoned that Isis was learning-disabled but was angry at her and her disability for interrupting his me-time.

But wait. Maybe he could get something out of this. She was an attractive girl.

"I can't get over this," Jeremy heard himself say at the same time Isis said exactly the same thing.

Isis nodded.

"My one consolation is you. You girls are so hot. So I think about you instead whenever I start to think about Myron."

Isis blushed and tried to control her eye movements toward the cup of semen on the floor.

"Myron had Helen, Lester has Dannisse, it's only right I should get you."

They moved closer together.

Jeremy expected more resistance, maybe some embarrassment, but Isis was handling it like a pro in no time. Jeremy realized that while Isis may have a learning disorder, she was still just as capable, and just as capable of consenting too. He had expected her to bungle it up, though he wouldn't have minded. But she was the one leading. Jeremy said, "Fuck!" He hated himself for assuming he could use her, when it was her using him. She was so smart, and he had treated her, in his mind, like she was stupid.

Isis was no object.

"I'm sorry, Isis," he said out loud.

"What?" Isis said, between kisses.

"I thought they were right about you. I was a dick to think that. I was truly brainwashed."

"I thought they were right about you too," Isis whispered, looking and nodding at the bruises on Jeremy's neck from when he and Lester had played Flatliners on the bus. "I was brainwashed too. But we're not shallow any more, are we."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" someone shouted from the doorway before dashing out of sight.

Jeremy and Isis hadn't even noticed anyone there. It was a 3--I member, a 3--I member who had almost walked in on them.

And he wasn't trying to stop them.

Dannisse had never washed dishes in her life, but now she was doing so with no effort whatsoever.

That was because they were talking, and Dannisse was interested in the subject.

At Dope house, Dannisse had been forced to do everything in silence. Even when she had had enough reward points to be able to talk to another student, the student she wanted to talk to often hadn't had enough reward points to talk to her. Yes, socialization at Dope House as a privilege, not a right. Eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, asking a question, sleeping, and being let out of the seclusion cell were all privileges too.

Even seeing a counselor had been a privilege. You had to pay to see the counselor with your reward points.

That was what they were talking about now.

"I was shocked for asking to go to the restroom," a kid named Lonnie said. "Almost shat on myself."

"So? I had to pay with my reward tokens to leave class early so that I could go to the nurse for my burns... yes, BURNS," Helen said, waving around a handful of knives she had taken from the dishwasher. Her anger was mounting. If it weren't for Bobby Boler and Hope House, Myron would still be alive today. And yes, she would still have known him. They had met in the special ed class at the regular high school before being transferred to Hope House for the trouble they had caused together speaking out against injustices. Helen threw the knives into a nearby drawer.

"I had to use mine just for a quick piss," a boy named Tony chimed in.

"I had to use mine to talk to my family on the phone!" Lester said, squeezing a glass so tight in his hand that it broke. "And then I of course didn't get a 'refund' when they refused to talk to me."

"Les, you're bleeding," the 3--I member named Dorsey said, nodding at Lester's hand with the broken glass in it. Lester dropped the glass like a hot potato, onto the floor, ker-smash, and kicked it away. He then picked up dishes from the dishwasher and threw them into the cupboards, breaking them all.

"Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Les..." Dorsey said.

Helen knew what to do.

"Les, you're not at Dope House any more," she said. "You can relax."

Dorsey took Lester out of the kitchen, gave him his extra phone he had confiscated from a teacher, and brought him to visit and take pictures of the teachers in the jail area, to taunt them and let off some steam.

There were two rows of cells, one above the other.

Lester's eyes were automatically riveted to Tina Smirnoff's. Lester registered that Tina Smirnoff was in a cell by herself while the others were packed three or four to a cell. Even the other teachers hated her.

Something was bothering Tina Smirnoff. Lester could see that. He couldn't put his finger on what, though, until Tina had no choice but to pull down her pants in front of him and sit on the toilet while he filmed the whole thing.

"This is inhumane!" she sobbed as she sat with her triple-extra-large pants around her ankles. "Inhumane."

"You're right; it is," Lester shouted. "Now you know how I felt with cameras in all the stalls in all the restrooms at Dope House!"

The other teachers were three or four to a cell and could hide the one who was using the toilet at the moment, but Smirnoff had no such luck; she was alone in a cell with nothing... no blankets or sheets or extra clothes or even a mattress to hide herself with.

Some of the other teachers were actually giggling or snorting with laughter at Smirnoff's problem.

Smirnoff then realized there was no toilet paper in her cell. "I have rights, you know!" she said, still sobbing like a bloody prima donna.

"You waived your right to be treated like a human being when you told me I had no rights by law," Lester retorted. He then filmed her using her left hand as toilet paper and then having to wash her hands with no soap.

Elsewhere in the camp, the stories of abuse also kept gushing forth, both in front of the webcam and away from it.

"They made me starve for two weeks because I was having trouble with a math problem. Then when the heath inspector came, they lied and said I was refusing to eat."

"Tina Smirnoff told me she needed to be big so she could hold me down, and that we were on that crazy diet so that we would be small and easy to restrain!"

"It backfired on them, though. It took nine of them to get me down because I'm so wiry now."

"Yeah, a lot of their shit backfired. But on me too! They kept starving me because I was getting the wrong answers on the computer, and the more I did that, the more they would starve me. I thought I was going to die."

Soon it was a common sight to see a student whipping out his journal whenever he remembered more of the abuse at Hope House. Many of them carried journals wherever they went.

There were sixty-four former Hope House students at the Compound, plus almost nine hundred 3--I members. The other students and 3--I members had been arrested or killed.

But there was a bright side.

The police and the media were bargaining with them now.

"...and then I filmed her, and there was no soap in her cell, and she couldn't wash one hand without getting the other full of shit, so she just had to run her hands under the water and that was that!" Lester finished. The whole lunch table of twenty people roared with laughter.

Isis felt that there was something wrong with this. And it wasn't that she was trying to eat without hearing of grossness. That she didn't mind. But it still seemed wrong somehow.

"Hey Lester... are you Lester? I wanna go see them. Can I come with you next time? Are you going back?" It was a tall malatto kid. Lester recognized him from the Hope House basketball team (which had always lost to its competitors, because the staff picked the players based on their behavior rather than the students picking the players based on their skill).

Lester felt this was somehow off, but he nodded and beamed and just couldn't stop himself. "Yeah, sure... what's your name again?"

"Byron. Byron Smythe." He held out his hand.

Isis got up to go to the bathroom to get some soap and toilet paper and towels for the teachers. Even for Tina Smirnoff, who had denied her her Ritalin saying she could do without it, then shocked her for not paying attention.

"Isis, what are you doin?"

It was Jeremy, standing in the bathroom door.

"What's it look like I'm doing?" Isis said.

At least Jeremy knew that she must have a valid reason for doing what she was doing. At least he was asking her, rather than saying "Noooo!" sternly and shocking her.

"Does this have something to do with what Lester said?" Jeremy said casually rather than confrontationally.

"Are you coming?" Isis blurted out.

"Okay," Jeremy said. Again, totally nonchalant and not grudging at all.

Orange. So much orange. Helen felt like she was in a prison laundromat as she loaded the dryer with everything from orange socks to orange mittens to white t-shirts with orange writing on it saying "I AM AUTISTIC; I CAN SPEAK FOR MYSELF."

"Hey, Helen. I'm so sorry about Myron. I wanted to talk to him. He's my hero."

It was a little boy about seven years old, standing in the doorway to the stairwell.

"You can still talk to him," Helen said, not knowing what else to say but knowing that she should do more talking herself. "Talk to the media. It will get to him wherever he is now."

Indeed, this was a 3--I belief that Helen had adopted... almost like a religion. They had filmed Myron's funeral and released it to the press, sending it to several media outlets. Partially because they wanted the world to see that they had some dignity left, partially because they wanted the world to see that Myron was dead and why, partially because they wanted the world to continue to listen to them. And partially because they wanted Myron to see that someone recognized he had rights. Hence the placing bills of rights on his casket.

"Come," Helen said, as she finished loading a washer with orange t-shirts and turned it on. "Sharona is a good woman; have you met her?"

The boy shook his head.

"I didn't think so. Did you tell your story yet?"

"I'm too scared they're going to punish me," the boy whimpered.

"Not if we can help it. Come on; you might actually prevent them from punishing you by telling your story if you tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let's go see Sharona and we'll make a video."

Geeta had expected life to get better when she went to jail, but one thing she had never expected was a standing ovation. She got that, plus:

"YOU GO, GIRL!"

"STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS!"

"We watched you on the news!"

So they put Geeta in the Hole. But that wasn't the end. The other inmates in the Hole started shouting. Then they clapped and cheered for five minutes until pepper spray was sprayed into the cells, and then they continued to clap and cheer and congratulate the Special Needs Kids for standing up for themselves. Some of them had special needs children, and a few of them had been special needs kids themselves.

Geeta was worried about Heather, Nikita, Luigi and the others. Were they as lucky as she was wherever they were?

Geeta grinned. Their plan had worked. At least it had for her. She was safer now than she'd been in five years.

The lineup to sign up to see the psychiatrist ran the length of the Lodge's gallery, down the stairs, across the field, past the entrance to the Bunker, and around the Lodge three times.

The 3--I psychiatrist had just arrived with a truckload of meds ordered off the internet, and half the 3--I members (as well as all the ex-Hope House-students) needed something.

The students were seen first.

It was true that Maggie Driscoll had lain in bed all day and all night when on her Risperdal (which was the only medication that worked on her), but at least she hadn't been scared something would happen to her. Maggie took her four milligrams and went to bed, happy. It seemed like a bright future for her. What was the point in doing anything else if she was going to live either in constant fear of punishment, like at Hope House, or in constant fear of the man in her head coming out of her head and murdering her, like before Hope House and at Hope House?

Hope House and its punishments hadn't taken away the voices. It had only forced her to keep quiet about them to avoid being punished.

It was no way to live. Maggie went to bed happy.

"Come on, Dee, let's play hide and seek!"

It was that seven-year-old boy, the one with so much life in him. He was in the girls' dorm, pulling a little girl out of bed, leading her out the door.

Maggie began to sob.

A life in bed was better than a life at Hope House, but she still wished she had the energy to get up and do something.

"Maggie Driscoll?"

Maggie looked up. It was the 3--I doctor. With a bottle of pills and a bottle of water.

"I just prescribed you a stimulant. I believe that the reason why they didn't give you one before was because they were afraid it would make your anger issue worse. But you told me your anger was at the little man in your head. Now that he's gone with the Risperdal, I feel it is safe and in your best interest to give you a stimulant. Here."

Maggie took one and drank the water the doctor gave her.

Then she lay back in bed, miserable, not expecting it to work.

The doctor read her mind. "It will work," he said. "I promise."

It was true that at Hope House they had been allowed either very little or no medication. It was a part of Bobby Boler's radical wellness program that every student had been forced to participate in.

Helen was starting to feel violent again, and she was one of the first people to be seen by Dr. Mendez. Mendez gave her Risperdal and a stimulant, Adderall, to counteract the negative effects of the Risperdal.

Some of the children, realizing that they would not be shocked here, had started to self-harm again. There was blood on the grass. There was blood on the floor in places. There was blood on some of the bedsheets in the dorms. One girl was found cutting herself in the shower, with hardly any blood left, and was rushed to the infirmary for a transfusion of blood pre-donated by O-negative 3--I members, then rushed to Dr. Mendez, who gave her loxapine to make her stop believing from delusions she was having that she had to cut herself and Cogentin to prevent the sometimes suicide-inducing side effects of the loxapine.

As Sharona walked around the mess hall that night at dinner time looking for a place to sit, she heard snippets from conversations of the ex-students.

"I was on sixteen at once," Marck was saying to Saul. "Then Dope House took me off all of them at the same time and I nearly died. I swear, I had a heart attack. You know how Tegretol does that when you stop it suddenly? Well, I was on 400 milligrams of that shit and I almost fucking died. Because I was on other stuff too like Ativan, which I was addicted to by then."

Jeremy was telling Isis that he had been shocked for masturbating in his room. "They caught me on camera, but there was no one in the fucking room. So I said I'd do it in the bathroom instead and they said I'd better not because they'd shock me twice the next time I did it anywhere."

Helen sat down and told Lester and Dannisse about how she'd convinced five kids to go talk to Sharona and film themselves on the webcam telling their stories and send them to the media.

Sharona couldn't help but grin. Their stories were getting out. She saw plenty of smiles in the mess hall too. And she knew then that she and her friends had done the right thing.

Sharona went to the front of the mess hall and shouted into the microphone at the podium, "May I have your attention!" She then told everyone about the new website they were starting, using their own server and satellite dish, that nobody would be able to shut down.

Then suddenly: "Breaking news."

Everyone in the mess hall looked up at the large TV on the top of the wall at one end of the room.

"Professor Robert Boler has been found dead in the Hope House ruins, and investigators have seized footage of his death, in which a male student, Myron Jeffries, decapitates him with a knife. Myron Jeffries has been said to be dead by the radical activist organization 3--I, or the International Incident Initiators. Footage of the funeral, which appears to take place in a field near a forest, was released yesterday on CNN. Investigators believe, however, that this may be a trick to put them off of Jeffries's trail. Nola Todd has the story."

"This is Nola Todd, and, as you can see, I'm in front of the ruins of the Hope House School, which burned to the ground over the last five days while police, firefighters, and EMTs watched and tried to prevent the students and 3--I activists from doing more damage. One hundred and four students are in custody as of this evening, and two hundred and one are missing. Some of the dead have been confirmed to be students but their bodies were so badly burned that DNA tests will have to be performed to identify them. The rest appear to have taken off with the International Incident Initiators to an unknown location. However, six hundred 3--I members are in custody and none of them are talking."

The screen showed 3--I members, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, boarding a bus at gunpoint. But wait... Helen recognized one of them as Nikita Norberg, a fellow student.

She must be pretending to be a 3--I member.

Helen turned excitedly towards her friends and started babbling.

"Poor thing," Marck said. "She'll be identified. At least there's no more Dope House. What other place would do that to her? I mean, shock her like they did at Dope House."

It was lucky Miriam Celente had found Ichabod and four students when she had. Otherwise the students would have had to be taken into custody.

Miriam knew about the house down the street with the secret room. If she could get there with the students, she could make fake passports for them and transport them to the Camp safely.

"Rudy, your twin is dead. I'm sorry," Miriam said to Rudy McCall.

Rudy Andrew McCall sucked in his breath.

"How did he die?"

"A month ago. Rudy Ferris McCall died from medication withdrawal. Your parents are suing the school."

"How come I didn't hear about my own brother's death?"

Miriam shrugged. "Blame it on Boler."

Sharona Connaught had done everything she could to hide the location of the Camp from the outside world.

She had over a hundred backgrounds for her interviews with the students that she sent to the media: blown up pictures of back alleys, blown up pictures of kitchens and living rooms in the former households of 3--I members, blown-up pictures of brick walls and stone cave walls and even shop windows. So now, as Sharona sat there reflecting, scores of people deliberately passed by these places in the pictures, having recognized them on the internet. Police stood guard there, having already searched the places and arrested and questioned and jailed the innocent people inside, who had nothing to do with 3--I.

The 3--I members' households were another thing. They came from all across the nation, with their truckloads of everything. Collection after collection, to be hidden in the tunnels and the Bunker until places could be found for all of it. They were to now live at the Lodge.

Igor collected the eating utensils, Bartholomew the dishes, Marck the cups and glasses. The pile of luxuries... things not needed for survival... was growing, and was to be put on tables in the mess hall for people to just take. Boxes and boxes of collections. A collection of tea sets, teddy bears, potpourri, cushion covers, fountain pens, figurines, old encyclopedias, rag dolls, action figures, an artificial Christmas tree. Collections of snow globes, fake flowers, rubber grapes on plastic grape vines, and even children's books. The Lodge was looking homier and homier. And the children were delighted to have more things to play with and read and wear. Up until now, they had had only two changes of clothes each: their Hope House uniforms they had been wearing when they left, and their orange 3—I uniforms.

The children were happy. They were not shocked, they could sleep in, and they understood why they had to learn what they had to learn, unlike their slave labor at Hope House, which had given them no explanation as to why they needed it to survive (if they needed it to survive at all... there was some sweatshop stuff going on there). Just shocks if they didn't do it.

The next day, each person lined up and made their way past each "station" in the mess hall, collecting one thing from each. A plastic or metal cup, a plastic or metal bowl, a fork, a knife, a spoon, a blanket, a sheet, a pillow, a towel, a facecloth, a comb, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste, and a backpack to put it all in, if they didn't still have the backpack their GED had been in. 3--I members and students who had been initiated into the 3--I got weapons.

Then they found homes for all the plates, glasses, glass bowls, vases, toys, perfumes, jewelry, lampshades, curtains, blinds, extra clocks, and other unneeded stuff. Extra toothpaste, toothbrushes, towels, and soap was put in the bathroom, which was now starting to look more homey what with all the different kinds of shampoo and conditioners and soap everywhere, and the different colors and designs on the towels.

The two 3--I mechanics went to work enlarging the toilet stalls and installing bidets in them that they had made themselves in a kiln with the clay from the earth and some taps and piping from the houses they had abandoned. That way they wouldn't have to buy or make toilet paper. Water, however, was free, and the resevoir on the roof of the Lodge was twenty metres deep, fifty metres long, and twenty metres wide.

The house on the same street as Hope House was surrounded by police.

Jody began to cry.

Rudy was already crying, about his dead brother.

"I hope they didn't find the hiding place," Miriam breathed.

But then, why were the police leading out two people in handcuffs? One was a student.

Either the student hadn't made it to the hiding place, or they had found the hiding place.

They were going to get caught anyway. So Laurent shouted: "Paulo! What happened!"

The student, Paulo, said "They did a door to door search!"

Miriam nearly fainted with relief. If the police had found the hiding place, Paulo would have said so. But Paulo had just been in the house, without being in the hiding place.

But then:

"They got Nikita."

Damn.

Who was in the hiding place though, if anyone?

There was no escape, unless they could get to a house the police had already searched and would not search again. But the only such houses nearby were houses they were constantly searching, due to them knowing the students and activists were trapped in that area due to the road blocks.

"I want to help you."

Laurent, Ichabod, Miriam, Rudy, Jody and JoAnn jumped a foot in the air.

"I'm going to take you to my house and hide you. My wife and I will take good care of you. All of you."

It was a policeman who had said that.

He had recognized that Ichabod was not a cop.

"Alright, you," he said to Ichabod. "Get in the front with me. The rest of you pile into the back and we'll go."

And so they went. The other cops were too busy trying to subdue the angry civilians who had taken to the street because they had nothing to do with this dad-blasted breakout scheme, so why were they being punished?

"Have you ever thought of expanding our population by having children?" Nicolette, the 3--I member, said.

"Definitely," Jeremy said. "There needs to be more different people in the world."

"Yeah... I need some company," a shy girl named Chloe said. "I'm not good at making friends. I'm anxious. Ever since that first time they shocked me..."

"Activists, man!" Marck said. "We need more. So yeah, more kids."

"I wouldn't be able to look after a normal kid," Lester confessed. "But if he had Asperger's like me, it'd be easy... I'd practically be able to read his mind."

"Why he and his all the time?" Helen said. "But yeah... we need to make enough people like us where they won't want to mess with us or the likes of us."

"I want someone to love unconditionally," Dannisse said. "If Dope House taught me one thing, it's that I wasn't treated right, and I want so badly to see just one person in my world treating someone else right. I decided that that one person might as well be me."

"Are you ready?" Lester asked Dannisse, beaming.

Dannisse nodded.

After the meeting, Dannisse and Lester went to the Bunker to have sex in front of the captive teachers.

Dannisse and Lester were open, honest people, after all.

Lester and Dannisse pushed the slop into the last teachers' cell, then stepped back to watch the teachers' reactions to it.

None of them even complained any more. And that was saying something, as the slop was made from food past its due-to-be-thrown-out date ground up and diluted with water. It was the cheapest way to go for 3--I and the rescued students, who could barely hunt, gather or shop enough to feed themselves.

The teachers drank the slop out of the tin bowls. Drank it right down; all of it.

One of them threw up into his bowl, then drank it again. Dannisse recognized him as Arnold Blum, who had shocked her for tactfully criticizing Hope House in her essay about the subject. Yes, they had all been FORCED to write the essays, and say only good about Hope House. Dannisse had said good things about it, but some bad with it. She had been a new student at the time though... new and naive, falling for the lovebombing during her first week until they had started treating her like swine. If she had been made to write the essay a week later, she would have had nothing good to say about the place at all.

Dannisse had been shocked for telling the truth.

She had told them about that boy at her residence who had been electrocuted in the shower, about the boy in her class who had died in class after being shocked, the girl who had had a seizure after being shocked in the auditorium for not looking straight ahead at the guest speaker (a radical vegetarian who had gone on and on about how all food except green vegetables was evil), about Helen being fined reward points during math "class" for going to the nurse, about being shocked herself for dropping her books on the floor once after tripping on the uneven floor in a hallway.

"More breaking news."

Maggie leapt out of bed, falling two bunks down to the floor on her ankle, breaking her ankle, hobbling off at top speed regardless, to the neighboring lounge.

She even had the enthusiasm to count thirteen 3--I members and nine ex-Hope House-students huddled around the television, sitting on the green rubber couch, standing in the doorways, lying on the floor, sitting on the tables.

"The radical activist cult 3--I, or International Incident Initiators..."

("So they're calling us a cult now?" a 3--I member named Phoebe muttered.)

"...have finally spoken."

There were gasps. This could not be good. Yes, they had spoken on the webcam, but that was no secret. Therefore, this must mean that some of the 3--I members in custody must have finally ratted them out.

And then there was a video. A video of a man with scratches on his face, not to mention a huge gash in his cheek. His cheek looked like it had been stitched back together with dental floss.

"They're in the woods," the man (whom the 3—I members in the room identified as Carlton Quimby) said in a depressed tone. "In a lodge in the woods."

"NO!" Jeremy shouted, leaping up and slopping his bowl of ramen noodle soup all over himself and the floor, the bowl clanging and clattering away across the floor. Maggie jumped too, and landed on her bad ankle again, injuring it further.

Sharona, Phoebe, Dorsey, Christolph, Benjamin, and the other 3--I members looked like they wanted to do the same thing.

"...a boathouse and large log cabin in New York State."

"That's our decoy lodge! Relax!"

"It's Mileva's grandparents' lodge, and it's empty."

Regardless, it took about half an hour for everyone to decompress after that, though in another hour they were laughing about it.

Tanya Turrett was the one that got away.

The people at the Lodge thought she had been caught, the media and law enforcement and caught students thought she was at the lodge.

But Tanya had escaped, dodging from house to house as the police did their door to door sweep.

Now the roadblocks were gone, and Tanya was at her grandmother's house in the country.

"I can't believe they'd do this to children," Grandma said as she bustled about rearranging the house for their new plan. "Let me tell you, my girl, I'll do anything in my power to keep you children out of there and safe. Mark my words."

"What can we do?"

"We'll dig a bunker," Grandpa Turrett said. "We'll hide you all in there, and we'd better start now, because soon they will recognize that you are not with them, and they will come here looking for you."

"That means we'll have to break them out of wherever they're at now," Tanya said.

"I'll find out where they're keeping them," Grandpa said. "And then I'll find out which places don't treat them well." He ushered Tanya and her grandmother outside and headed over to the bulldozer.

"They're going to eat us out of house and home!" the 3--I member named Mikelle exclaimed as they watched ten students chowing down around the table in the kitchen.

"At least they're not puking it up any more and then needing more," Sharona shot back.

Marck could not control himself. He had lost 300 pounds at Hope House, but now he had gained back 100 of that, and he had only been here for two weeks.

"It's the medications," Dorsey said. "Like for example, Marck is on Zyprexa. It makes him crave carbohydrates."

"We're gonna need to find some drug that decreases their appetite, and fast," a 3--I member named Gwen said. "We only have so much. I didn't eat at all today, because I had to give my food to a little girl... poor thing, grossly overweight, but she was starving."

"For me it's the anxiety," Dorsey said, stuffing three more cookies into his mouth at once.

"Dorsey, you are not helping matters," Gwen said in a stern, scolding tone, seeming to insinuate that Dorsey should have given his food to one of the students.

"They're all going to get diabetes," Sharona said. "But what can we do? We can't shock them whenever they reach for another cookie. That would be torture."

Bang, bang, bang.

Everyone in the mess hall looked up. It was coming from downstairs; they could hear the floor vibrating under their feet.

"Is that gunshots?" Isis asked, looking up, alarmed.

"It's just someone slamming the door over and over again," Jeremy said. "Probly one of the autistic kids."

“Or that OCD guy," Helen said, grinning. "Hey, guys, did you hear of him? That one that wears gloves all the time now? Jason, I think his name is. He washed his hands 85 times, then had to touch the doorknob to get out of the bathroom and then realized he'd have to wash his hands 85 times again, so he got angry and slammed the door 85 times."

But it wasn't Jason the OCD guy.

Gwen and Sharona ran outside and down the stairs, then burst into the girls' dorm to find a bloodied, bruised girl on a top bunk lying quite still.

It was the girl who had tried to kill herself in the bathroom.

Suddenly, though, she jerked to life, spazzing so badly she and Sharona almost fell off the top bunk. Finally, they did... onto something soft.

"AAAAH!"

"SHARONA!" Gwen shouted.

They had fallen on another child, the little girl named Dee who hung out with the seven-year-old boy who had admired Myron, the little boy Helen had taken to Sharona to tell his story on the webcam.

Gwen rushed toward them.

Sharona hurriedly disentangled herself from the suicidal girl and looked up to see if Dee was okay.

Dee was laid out on the floor with her neck at a wierd angle.

Her neck was broken.

"Don't move, Dee, or you'll break it further... I'm so sorry, honey, it's my fault, I'm so sorry!" Sharona said. "We'll get help for you."

But first, there was the other girl to deal with. She was lying still yet again, on the floor where they had fallen, next to Dee, who was screaming and crying in pain while Gwen yelled for someone to come with morphine and a backboard.

Sharona looked down at the suicidal girl.

Her eyes were half closed. Her mouth was half closed. Her hands were half closed.

She had no pulse. Wasn't breathing either. Her head was in a rapidly-growing pool of blood.

Sharona had rushed to save a sixteen-year-old girl who would have died anyway, and had broken the neck of a seven-year-old girl in the process.

NO! Not true; this couldn't be. Sharona began CPR on the 16-year-old.

"That little girl is lucky I got here the other day, or she woulda been paralyzed," the doctor said as the pine box containing 16-year-old Alizee Hortensen was dropped with a splash into its grave next to Myron.

"Ali was a real good kid," the OCD boy named Jason said as he polished the stainless steel plaque in his hand with hand sanitizer. The plaque said "Here lies Alizee Hortensen, free at last."

"She never knew freedom," her friend Mo'nique spoke up. "She was locked up all her life. They even punished her before she got to Hope House. They called her mentally retarded because she banged her head against the wall instead of using faster methods of death, because she was locked up with no weapons... how else COULD she commit suicide? The being labeled as retarded is what hurt her more than anything else."

"I tried to talk to her about it, but she was too traumatized to even admit it had happened to her," the 3--I doctor went on. "I feel her death is partially my responsibility because try as I might, I could not do much to help her. She clearly felt she was still at Hope House, or rather, just at another place that would punish her. It was all she ever knew. She could have easily got her hands on a knife, on medication, on a gun even, but she did not think she could. She thought this was another lockup. And that is why she suffered so much before she died."

The one thing Anielka liked about her new placement was that she was allowed to watch the news live, rather than in taped, censored bits. She was now on a high security psychiatric ward, along with some of her friends who had also been caught, but it wasn't as restrictive as Hope House.

After the news was over Anielka went back to her room to catch up on the years of sleep she had missed at Hope House. They had shocked her in the middle of the night almost every night for snoring, then shocked her for falling asleep in class in the daytime.

Anielka woke up to what seemed to be a dream about her friend Tanya Turrett. Tanya was standing over her. But Tanya hadn't been among Anielka's friends who had been sent here. She must have been transferred in just now.

"Hey, Tanya! When did you get here! When were you transferred in!"

"I wasn't. I'm here to get you out of here."

"How the fuck are you gonna do that?"

Then Anielka heard how. The boy with the low verbal IQ was shouting out in the dayroom. "NO! NO GO BACK! DON'T WAN GO BACK! NO NO BACK! NO!"

"We're not taking you back, silly. Hope House is burned to the ground. We're taking you somewhere safe."

The boy didn't seem to understand. He kept shouting, terrified he would be taken back to Hope House.

Anielka followed Tanya out into the dayroom to find the staff tied up and gagged on the floor, and an old man and woman with guns leading the patients off the unit.

"I'm kind of sad to leave here," one boy said to the girl next to him.

"We can't risk it," another grownup with a gun said. "They could rebuild Hope House. But if you come with us we promise we will take you somewhere safe. We know activists. We have connections."

The staff behind the desk at the mental hospital had not even had time to call for or summon help. Cornelius, the staff member closest to the button under the desk that the staff pressed to summon the Special Teams, had been darted in the hand as the group had come in, two by two, each pair asking to see a different patient, as patients were only allowed two visitors at a time. The staff lay on the floor tied up and gagged, waiting for Housekeeping to come and find them when it was time to clean the dayroom.

Grandpa Turrett and Tanya hurried the patients out the back door and across the parking lot to the school bus they had rented. Grandma Turrett was waiting behind the wheel.

The former Hope House students were grinning from ear to ear, excited about the adventure. And the second chance at escape. They had given up and decided to simply enjoy their reprieve in the mental hospital until they were sent to worse institutions or Hope House was rebuilt. Now, they could not believe their luck!

The school bus turned off the highway and lumbered along the back road toward the Turretts' farm. The students were all lost in their own thoughts, even as they chatted excitedly.

Anielka wondered where the others were, her friends. Who had been caught and who was still missing? The police had released the names on huge posters, but there hadn't been one on the unit. Myron Jeffries had been mentioned on the news, and she had even SEEN Jeremy and Lester on the news, on the run, talking to the media via a recorded message. Of the others, she did not know.

Steffi Dell had always dreamed of running free in the country and being free to yell without people calling the cops. She grew more and more excited as they went further into the country.

Donnie French, the boy who had thought the Turretts had come to take them back to Hope House, sensed that this would just make it harder. He didn't care where they were going. He didn't care if they killed him. He just wanted away from the torture of Hope House. Hope House for him had been a place where they wouldn't let him die, and where they wouldn't let him live either.

Kray Peters was happy because he doubted there would be structured schooling there and he would be able to play basketball out in the country all the time, instead of just as a reward at Hope House. He could really develop the skill he had, rather than being back at Dope House always being the fish judged on his ability to climb a tree.

After the students were safe in the bunker the Turretts had just built before springing the students, Grandpa Turrett drove the bus back to the place he had rented it from, while Grandma Turrett drove the Turretts' car over the tracks the bus had made in the dirt. She did one side on her way out and the other on her way back. Then she went to a party store, a pharmacy, and a thrift shop to shop for disguises for the students.

Wigs, glasses, contact lenses, prosthetic noses, spray-on tanner, stilts for the inside of boots, second-hand clothing. The Turretts grew their own food, so that wasn't an issue. Once the students were disguised some of them could help Grandma Turrett prepare the food. She then went to pick up Grandpa Turrett and drove home for the last time.

Forgetting for two seconds of what might become of her, Anielka stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her white skin was now brown. Her blue eyes were now brown. Her long blonde hair was now black and curly. She no longer wore the dress and flats she had been wearing when she had escaped Hope House. She now wore a business suit and Stilettos. And she would probably gain a few pounds too, what with Grandma Turrett's cooking.

But what would they do with the others? Thankfully their neighbors were miles away, but any police helicopter could swoop in on any large group of young people at any moment and ask for their ID.

They needed fake ID.

As Anielka carried a bucket of strawberries over to the bunker for the other students, she wondered where she could get it.

"No prob," Kray said, after Anielka explained the situation. "I'm in with the in crowd, baby." He jabbed his finger into something in the palm of his hand. Anielka saw that it was a phone number, written on his hand.

The cell phone number of a member of the International Incident Initiators.

Half an hour later, Tanya headed out with Grandpa Turrett to a store a few towns over, to buy a disposable cell phone.

A few minutes after the cell phone was purchased, the phone rang at the home of Gwen, one of the International Incident Initiators.

She wasn't there.

But the police were.

Gwen had left her cell phone behind because she didn't know how to turn it off or disable the tracking system.

A female officer picked up the phone.

"Hi," a boy's voice said from the other end.

The female officer, Fatima James, did what she had been instructed to do. Opening her mouth and beginning in Gwen's high-pitched baby voice, she heard herself say, "Hi, this is Gwen Sebastien. How may I help you?"

The plane was flying low over the camp.

Too low.

Everyone was panicking. Could this be a military plane?

A bipolar 3--I member named Merrie ran outside with her rifle and started shooting at it.

It went away.

But not before its occupants sent the coordinates of the Camp back to the military.

Immediately, the 3--I members called everyone to an emergency meeting.

They ate as much of the perishable food as they could during the meeting, then loaded the nonperishable food and other essentials, and then themselves, into the vehicles and drove back into the tunnel.

"Where should we go?" Maggie asked a 3--I member named Dunstable.

"I don't know. A few of the 3--I who did not go to Hope House and are thus not known are going to go and get some disguises for all of you. Then we can use their vehicles to transport you guys elsewhere. The Lodge was our headquarters though, so expect to be split up. We don't have another outpost, unless you count our office building that we grew out of. At the time we were using it, there were only about 300 of us in the Initiators. Now there are over a thousand. I lost count. Plus all of you... no way they aren't going to notice a large group of people living there. We can't disguise it as a telemarketing company anymore; not with kids and that many people for such a small building and people banging their heads and yelling."

Dear Mr. President,

My name is Lucas Guidry. I used to go to Hope House. After I graduated, I served my country in the US Armed Forces. I was shocked when I saw my school on the news.

Shocked in a good way.

Then, within hours, we were called in and once again, I was back at my school. I didn't want to jeopardize my military career, but when I saw my old friend who was still there, and she saw me, and we locked eyes, my conscience took over. I took off my uniform and joined the crowd. I boarded a bus with my weapons. The bus was full of students and teachers from Hope House, as well as members of the International Incident Initiators. I fired out the bus windows and killed three police officers. I am so sorry I had to do this. I am not writing this letter to beg your pardon. But had to are the operative words here. The children must come first.

We got caught at the highway, and I had to surrender my weapons or get killed. We were all split up and it was soon found out who I was and as of now I write this sitting here on federal death row.

Let me tell you something else: I have Asperger's Syndrome. It's a mild or just different form of autism. You recently appointed one of us "Aspies", Ari Ne'eman, to some council on disabilities, I believe, and his organization's slogan is Nothing About Us Without Us. I understand that he is about the rights of us as people as opposed to the rights of others to force us to conform, keep us at bay, and/or harm us. That is why I am writing to you... hoping you can help. Not me... I mean help the students find better placements.

There are many Aspies who went to my school, as well as others without the diagnosis and still others with full-blown autism.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Sincerely,

Lucas Yann Guidry

Merrie Dufresne sat bound and gagged in an office in the office building, praying to God that she would be allowed to choose the method of her execution.

That poem kept running through her head. The one that went "Razors pain you, rivers are damp. Acids strain you, drugs cause cramp. Guns aren`t lawful, nooses give, gas smells awful, you might as well live."

Merrie didn`t like the idea of a gun either. She hated blood.

The only thing she could do (and she prayed for a chance to do it) would be to escape from the 3--I, turn herself in to the police, and give up the names and locations of her friends, in exchange for her own life.

Merrie was bound with tape and gagged with this ball-with-a-hole-in-it thing. If only she could just un-gag herself, then she could bite her way through the tape on her legs, at least. Her arms were bound behind her back. Even better, if she could force her way through the tape first.

The door opened. Merrie expected to see her friends from the 3--I, or the leaders, but instead she found herself staring at a group of students she had helped rescue from Hope House.

"They`re going to behead you," the girl named Aelis said. “But I want to help you. I`m bipolar too, and have made worse mistakes than you have. I think your friends are hypocrites. I want to save you like you saved me. And I think I know how."

The government had made deals with the 3--I... but they were rubbish deals.

Some involved turning in some ex-students for the guaranteed freedom of the others. Some involved returning all the teachers in exchange for all the students` freedom if, and only if, 3--I disbanded and lived across the fifty states instead of all together. Others involved returning all the teachers and students in exchange for the freedom of the 3--I members.

The 3--I was buying none of it.

They were going to do this thing properly. And if they could help it, no 3--I member or ex Hope House student was going to get hurt again.

That was why they were still in hiding. That was why they were spread out in hiding between Grandpa Turrett`s farm, the old office building, and an old warehouse they had just bought. That was why they had started this whole damn group in the first place, and come to rescue the students from Hope House.

“In Massachusetts, there are about twenty Hope Houses.”

Anielka looked up from the cot she had been laying on in the holding cell. Tanya had a knack for getting crowds to listen. Before they had been caught, Tanya had done research on her grandparents' computer and found places just as bad as Hope House.

“At the Calm Compound, Lawrence Hughes was restrained with a staff member sitting on his head. Why? He was blowing bubbles with his milk.”

“You'd better not be trying to tell me we were lucky at Dope House,” fellow student Delia Hanes said.

“That sounds like Dope House to me,” Kray said from where he was standing up on the bars, peering through to try and hear what the circle of cops below him was talking about. Kray continued: “We don't need telling that Dope House was bad. Even if some of us are brainwashed, I sure ain't. I don't need no telling.”

“Shut up, Kray,” another boy said. “It's your fault we're in here. You thought you knew what you were doing when you called the cops thinking it was Gwen's number. So if you think I'll be believin' you after this, you're DREAMING, homeboy.”

“I didn't call no cops!” Kray shouted. Some of the cops outside the cell yelled at him to keep it down and moved away. “I was calling Gwen's number!”

“Are you stupid or something? The cops answered instead of Gwen and you never thought of that!”

“Did you?”

“That ain't the point. You think people should listen to you because you's so damn smart. That's the point. Do I think people should listen to me? No, I don't.”

“You sure are now.”

Kray opened his mouth to add something else, but not before the other boy, Gage, pulled him down, causing him to fall on his head and split it open.

They yelled, and yelled, and Gage kept kicking and punching until he wasn't even aware he was kicking and punching any more. The next thing he knew he was in solitary. He looked out the window in the door in time to see them carrying something covered completely in a blanket out the door. There was blood dripping from it, or rather, running off it.

To be continued

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