Quarantine #2: The Saints Read Online Free PDF Page B

till they’re chewing
. That was what David used to say about delivering bad news to the gang. Will would never see his brother again.
    He climbed up another flight, to the second landing, the lounge. The flat-screen TV he’d stolen from the Freaks was there, still faceup to be used as a table. The piles of library books were there too among the mismatched chairs. Their pages would be good kindling.
    People dropped wood shards and chunks of table in the center of the landing. They clattered onto the floor. The noise of it was jarring in the unnatural quiet. There should’ve been the sound of seventy-seven other kids there, going about their daily tasks.
    They assembled some of the wood and the crumpled-up pages of a pirate novel into a pile, inside a disembodied sink in the middle of the floor. Within five minutes of touching the fading torch to the paper, the whole sink was ablaze. Thethirteen sat on the floor, in a tight circle, around it. They watched the black smoke rise up the stairwell.
    The burning wood crackled. Loners stared into the flames, hoping to lose themselves in it. Now and then, they’d kick up conversation.
    “Like, if I’d gone to St. Patricks, and had to go on the run …,” Belinda said, “I-I never would have made it. I can’t run fast.”
    “I would have liked it,” Ritchie said.
    “Getting hunted sounds good to you? I’d slit my throat if I had to live like that,” Mort said.
    “I’m just saying I would have been good at it. I could’ve survived.”
    “Do you think the others are okay out there?” Leonard asked in a thin voice.
    “They’ll make it if they stay together,” Will said.
    No one replied. He kept his focus on tending to the fire.
    “Colin, cut it out!” Ritchie said.
    Colin had been scratching at the crotch of his jeans for the last few minutes.
    “What? I’m just itching my dick,” Colin said.
    “I wish you had gotten out,” Ritchie said.
    Silence settled on the group again. The knowledge that David was dead hung in the air like a stench. No one wanted to talk about it. Or maybe they didn’t want to talk about it around Will. He could see them looking at him with worry.Belinda broke eye contact every time Will looked at her. Ritchie wasn’t being an asshole to Will for once. Lucy was the worst; she looked at him like he was about to shatter into bits. He couldn’t deal with it.
    Will got up and left them all by the fire. He decided to busy himself with chores. He gathered blankets from the sleeping area one flight up, for people to have something soft to sleep on. He organized the food into neat piles in the corner. He went and opened the third floor door to the hallway so the smoke would have somewhere to go. Will kept on like that, creating little jobs for himself and completing them, while ignoring every request for him to stop and sit by the fire with the others, until the Loners had all succumbed to sleep.
    The fire dwindled in the blackened sink. Will sat by his sleeping gang mates, around the fire, watching its flames shrink, and die. When the fire went out completely, it took the light with it. Will had never been afraid of the dark, but in this darkness, this cold void, he began to panic. He needed to restart the fire immediately. He needed the light. There were some matches in his backpack.
    Will stumbled up the stairs, feeling his way with his hand on the handrail. He rounded the corner, waving his other hand out in front of him like a blind man. The stair he slept on, his stair bed, was six steps up the next flight. He counted until he was standing on the fifth step, then he crouched and patted his hands around until he felt the canvas material ofhis backpack. He picked it up. The matches were in the front pocket.
    When Will’s fingers touched the cool metal tab of the front pocket’s zipper, his mind flashed back to the first day of school, when David drove him to McKinley in his Jeep, and Will couldn’t stop nervously zipping and unzipping