Crazy House Read online

  I glanced around his rapt audience. Several people were frowning angrily, and the murmuring increased. Then I got it: The Provost was turning the people away from anyone who disappeared. He was making it not real, not a problem.

  My voice rose up and burst out of me before I even realized it. “That’s not true!” I yelled. “My sister isn’t an Outsider! She did disappear!”

  Heads turned in surprise. Several of my neighbors looked at me in confusion. But I couldn’t stop myself.

  “She’s not just some kid!” My voice seemed to have frozen the whole square. “You keep saying these kids! But her name is Becca! Rebecca Greenfield!”

  Ridiculous Rebecca.

  The Provost peered out into the streetlamp-lit gathering, as if he heard a mosquito buzzing and wondered where it was coming from.

  “You be quiet, girl!” said an older woman, shaking her finger at me. “How dare you speak like that!”

  “Don’t interrupt the Provost!” a man said angrily. “Unless you’re an Outsider!”

  I took a step backward in shock. “I’m not an Outsider! I’m Cassie Greenfield!”

  “Cassie,” said a woman, and I turned to see Mrs. Tanner, my grade three teacher. “This isn’t like you. I know you don’t mean to make trouble.” Her eyes were sympathetic.

  “But Becca’s missing!” I told her pleadingly.

  After another long look at me, she simply turned away and faced the Provost.

  These were my neighbors and fellow cellfolk. And none of them were going to help me. Were they… were they all heartless jerks… or were they scared?

  21

  INSIDE, I WAS SHAKING. I’D never had people look at me like that before. I was the good twin. With everyone frowning at me suspiciously, I turned and headed to the moped. Becca was missing, and I had maybe just broken the law. I had to get out of here before my heart pounded through my chest. It was getting close to curfew, anyway.

  When a finger tapped me on the shoulder, I spun, my hands up, ready for who knows what.

  But not ready for Nathaniel.

  Tall, good-looking Nathaniel Allen was the son of the Provost. We’d been in school together since kindergarten. And I’d hated him for just about that long. In kindergarten I’d seen him clobber another kid with a wooden truck. He hadn’t improved since then.

  “What do you want?” I snapped, getting on the moped.

  “I just want to say… well, I’m sorry about Becca.”

  My eyes narrowed. For the last twelve years he’d tormented Becca and me, pretending to not be able to tell us apart, calling us by the wrong names. He’d been a ponytail-puller, a lunchbox-cookie-stealer, and a bully. If he weren’t the Provost’s son, he’d be considered a bad citizen.

  “Well, I’m sorry you’re… an asshole,” I said, and pressed the ignition button. I had just spoken out in public, I had waved a broken bottle at someone a few hours ago, and now I was swearing. Losing my sister was turning me into someone else.

  Nathaniel opened his mouth to speak, but just then the roar of motorcycles drowned everything out.

  Motorcycles were even more rare than trucks. I’d never seen one in real life, though I’d heard about them—as really souped-up mopeds.

  There were two of them, big and loud, with two people riding them, wearing leather jackets and helmets with dark faceplates. If the cellfolk had been shocked when I spoke out, they were about nineteen times more shocked now. The cyclists vroomed through the crowd, making the cellfolk draw back and press together like sheep. The Provost at his podium gestured to one of his aides, shouting an order that I couldn’t hear.

  Then, as the cyclists passed in front of the Provost again, they pulled out guns.

  I gasped, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Even over the sound of the engines I heard a faint pop! pop! and the Provost staggered backward.

  More than one woman screamed, and I had my hand over my mouth, stunned. Two police cars, lights and sirens blaring, screeched around the corner. The cyclists gunned their engines, the growling rumble seeming to mock the quiet electric police cars as they all raced away from the square.

  In the silence, all eyes turned toward the Provost, but instead of lying on the ground in a pool of blood, he was standing upright, furiously shouting at his aides and several other cops who’d run up. Spoiling his fancy suit—no worker’s overalls for him—were two bright green splotches.

  He’d been shot with paintballs.

  The paint had splattered up over his neck and face, and was dripping down his legs. He looked like he’d had a run-in with an angry salad.

  Using every bit of self-control I had, I managed to get several blocks away. Then I had to pull over and stop just to process the image of the Provost covered in green paint. Oh, my Lord. This had been a weird day. A horrible day. And I was no closer to finding Becca than I’d been this morning.

  Which reminded me. With just eight minutes left till curfew, I made a hard right on Weaver Road, and soon pulled up at a horribly familiar house. Coming here made acid rise in the back of my throat. But he was my last hope for finding Becca. He always knew where Becca was. And for all the wrong reasons.

  I leaned the moped against the fence and went to ring the doorbell.

  “Are you home, you jerk?” I muttered, trying to peer into the window.

  There was no answer. I wanted to pound on his door, wanted to yell in frustration. But I had to accept the fact that I wouldn’t be able to confront Mr. Harrison until tomorrow. Scowling just thinking about him, I went back to the moped and raced toward home.

  At twelve. Freaking. Miles. An. Hour.

  22

  BECCA

  THE GUARDS HAULED ME THROUGH the big gray metal doors. The effects of the Taser were wearing off, but static still bounced around my brain, making it hard to think. Warden von Strepp had told them to take me to “the ring.”

  What the hell was “the ring”? Like, a running track?

  It wasn’t a running track.

  It was… a boxing ring. There was a raised canvas floor, and ropes making up the four sides of the ring. Technically, it should be called a boxing square. I plan to write an angry letter about that.

  The guards pushed me forward, and cheers broke out. The bleachers were full of kids. Prisoners in bright yellow jumpsuits. Jeez. Okay, so I was here to watch some stupid fight. I started to shuffle toward the bleachers, but the guards stopped me.

  “You’re not a spectator, scum,” one said.

  “You’re the main event,” said the other one, and I decided my brain must still be scrambled from the Taser.

  “Here! Quick!” A tall girl with dark hair shoved something at me. Instinctively my hands shot out to grab it.

  “What the f—” I began, looking at it, but the girl interrupted me.

  “Take off your jumpsuit and put this on!” she ordered. “Fast!”

  Yes, because ordering works so well on me.

  “No?” I tried, and then I recognized her. “Kathy? Kathy Hobhouse?”

  “Yeah,” she said shortly. “Surprise. No time to chat. Okay, it’ll be worse with the jumpsuit. But whatever.” She grabbed my shoulders and spun me around, dropping something heavy over my head. It was… armor. Not fancy, knight-in-shining-armor armor—more like someone had taken a couple of garbage-can lids and riveted straps to them.

  “What in the name of—” I started, but again Kathy shushed me. I stood there like a dummy while she fastened a helmet onto my head.

  “This will be bad,” she said rapidly, hooking pieces together. “Just try to get through it. They always start with the one to break you down, so go ahead and get broken down. But the two of you will be stuck in a tiny room together afterward, so don’t piss him off.”

  I understood each individual word, but strung together like that, they made zero sense. And I was still shocked to realize that I wasn’t the only one from our cell here.

  “Who else is here?” I asked her. “How long have you been her
e? Who took you?”

  “I saw Livvie Clayhill a month ago,” she said quickly. “But she’s gone. Now quit talking. And keep your tongue in your mouth. I mean, literally. Last week some poor schmuck lost his tongue.”

  I stared at her. “Lost his—”

  Kathy jammed my hands into something like a cross between boxing gloves and a robot hand. I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers. Finally she gave my helmet a couple of sharp raps, and met my eyes for the first time.

  “Sorry,” she said, almost looking like she meant it. “Just… try to get through it. We’re all going to die soon anyway. Doesn’t matter if it’s now or later.”

  She pointed to the steps. Feeling like I was swimming through a bizarre, disturbing nightmare, I climbed up them clumsily and stepped between the ropes. I stood uncertainly on the canvas, giving it a couple of experimental bounces.

  The crowd roared as my opponent stepped into the ring. Clamping my jaws shut so I wouldn’t scream, I stared in horror. It was a guy, and he was almost as tall as Mr. Butcher’s prizewinning wonder horse. He was probably as broad, too. Maybe weighed about the same. This was who I was supposed to fight.

  Time to die, I thought.

  23

  FIGHTING GOES AGAINST THE GROUP work ethic, so it’s strongly discouraged in the cell. However, I’d had a lifetime of not taking kindly to people teasing Careful Cassie for being a lily-livered chicken. So I braced my feet and scanned my opponent for weak spots.

  Um, apparently none. And that was the last semi-coherent thought I had for quite a while.

  As soon as the bell dinged, the guy lunged at me. He was huge, but I’m fairly nimble, so I ducked and tried to punch him in the kidney. In an instant, he spun the other way and gave me an uppercut to my jaw that lifted me clean off the ground, then laid me flat. The ref stood over me, counting, while I blinked up at the black stars spinning over my head. I tried to breathe and couldn’t. I tried to move my jaw and couldn’t. I couldn’t feel my face. My mouth tasted like blood, and blood filled my nose, making me feel like I was drowning.

  As the crowd screamed the countdown with the ref, a white-hot surge of fury made me scramble awkwardly to my feet. I had a moment to see surprise in the guy’s eyes before I roared and walloped his head as hard as I possibly could. He staggered.

  “You asshole!” I screamed, and spat blood onto the canvas. “You goddamn son of a bitch! I’m going to kill you, you shit-eating asswipe!”

  Bruiser hesitated, then his eyes turned to steel and he came at me. That’s when I found out what the girl had meant about it being worse with the jumpsuit on. The guy had claws on his gloves, and he raked them down my arm, shredding my sleeve. The fabric got caught and he gave a sharp tug. The hateful yellow cloth ripped as he yanked again and again, pulling it off me. The seams cut into my skin, my shoulders, the tops of my legs. It felt like he was tightening tourniquets around me, scraping my skin raw. I tried to break his grip, punched at his hand and his arm and anything else I could reach, but he was determined. Soon the jumpsuit was gone and I was there in my underwear and a bunch of rough-edged armor. My skin was scraped and bleeding, my nose was trickling a mixture of snot and blood, and now that I could feel my jaw again I could tell that one of my teeth was loose.

  The next mouthful of blood I spat right into his face. His eyes flared, and after that it was no holds barred—not that there had been any holds barred before. He was, as the girl had put it, breaking me down. I punched and kicked whenever I could, but he was so much taller and stronger and more of a douchebag than I was, and he kept slugging me long after he had clearly won.

  An eon later I heard the bell ding, followed by the muffled roar of the crowd. I was lying facedown in a puddle of blood, feeling like every bone in my body was broken. Blearily my gaze wandered past the ropes to see Deputy Warden Strepp standing there, frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest.

  That gave me enough of a spark to struggle onto my hands and knees. A tooth had actually been knocked out, and I took a deep breath and spit it at Strepp. It barely made it to the edge of the canvas.

  Her eyes narrowed. “There’s something wrong here,” she said.

  I stared at her. “Yeah? Which part? The fact that I’m in prison? That all the prisoners are kids? This freak show of a fight with a muscle-bound moron? Like, be more specific!”

  Strepp nodded briskly at the guards. “Take them to the pen,” she said.

  The girl had said that the guy and I would be stuck in a small room together after the fight.

  So, just great.

  24

  MS. STREPP

  HELEN STREPP KNEW WHEN TO speak and when to keep silent. You didn’t get as far as she had without that skill. So Strepp waited patiently while Warden Bell finished what she was doing. After several minutes, during which the Warden didn’t hurry one bit or even acknowledge Strepp’s presence, she finally looked up.

  “Yes, Ms. Strepp?” Those three words were enough to make a lesser person tremble, coming out of the Warden’s hard slit of a mouth. She was the scariest, most imposing woman Helen had ever met. Even the Warden’s thinning white hair, cropped into a crewcut, seemed to stand straight at attention. Her large, fleshy body overpowered her desk chair, her bulk spilling over the sides. Helen tried not to mentally calculate its weight load, tried not to picture the metal legs bending slowly and then snapping.

  Actually, the chair probably wouldn’t dare, she decided.

  “There’s a problem.” Ms. Strepp made her face carefully expressionless, admitting neither guilt nor concern.

  “Do tell,” the Warden replied, lacing her thick fingers together on top of her desk. Her cold black eyes waited and watched, like a spider’s.

  Ms. Strepp breathed in slowly. She knew not to prevaricate, not to pretty it up, not to use words like might or seemed. Instead she spoke firmly, meeting the Warden’s glittering gaze.

  “We took the wrong twin.”

  25

  THE WARDEN LOOKED AT MS. STREPP with a coldness that seemed to penetrate Ms. Strepp’s very bones.

  Resolve, Ms. Strepp thought. You knew this wouldn’t be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is.

  After a moment, the Warden spoke, her voice sounding like car tires rolling over gravel. “Refresh my memory, Ms. Strepp. I know we’ve gathered several sets of twins for our… experiments. Of which twin do you speak?”

  “Cassandra Greenfield. We have Rebecca Greenfield instead. From B-97-4275. The agricultural community. The girls must have switched vehicles that day.”

  The Warden drummed her fingers on her desk as she digested this information. “Well, fudge,” she said.

  Again Ms. Strepp waited.

  The Warden sighed and moved some papers from one pile to another. Birth certificates, death certificates, autopsy reports, experiment data. It all piled up.

  Then, having reached a decision, she shrugged. “Execute her. Get the other one.”

  “That was my thought exactly, Warden,” Ms. Strepp said. “Then I thought, what if I use her as an example to the others? Her testing scores are dismal, as you know. Her fighting ability is pathetic. But if I whip her into shape, if she starts to perform as expected… well, the other prisoners would see what was possible. Even with clay as unpromising as Rebecca Greenfield.”

  “Hm.” The Warden looked at her shrewdly. “Don’t get attached to this girl, Strepp. She won’t be with us long. You know that.”

  “Of course!” Ms. Strepp looked offended at the very suggestion. “That’s why we’re here. That thought is foremost in my mind at all times, Warden. I see this as simply another experiment.”

  The Warden gave a brisk nod. “Very well then, Ms. Strepp. Carry on.”

  “Thank you, Warden Bell.”

  Ms. Strepp lost no time leaving the office wing of the prison and returning to her own domain. She was grateful that the Warden was allowing her this experiment. It was going to be very interesting indeed. Of course, first she had to whip Rebecca into
shape. With real whips, if necessary.

  26

  BECCA

  THE PEN WAS A SMALL box of a room, about four feet across and four feet deep. No bars, just solid concrete walls and a metal door with a tiny window in it. There was no furniture, no benches, no nothing. Into this pen they put me and Bruiser, together, only minutes after he beat the stuffing out of me. Too late I remembered the gist of the girl’s words: “Don’t piss him off—you’ll be locked up with him later.” Well, maybe he hadn’t taken offense to me calling him an asshole and a son of a bitch and whatever else I had said. Maybe me spitting blood in his face was all water under the bridge.

  One thing was for sure: in this little pen, with no armor, this guy could end me in about two seconds. And maybe that was his plan.

  The door clanged behind us with chilling finality. Bruiser and I stood there and looked at each other. My swollen, abraded hands automatically clenched into fists, not that they would help me at all.

  The guy stuck out his hand and I instinctively flinched. When he didn’t touch me I gave him a quick glance. He was waiting there, his hand held out. “I’m Tim,” he said.

  Quickly I replayed the last several minutes in my mind: (1) Forced to fight, check. (2) Got totally and completely “broken down,” check. (3) Had my tooth knocked right out of my jaw by this hulking freak, check. (4) Was now locked in a pen with him, check. (5) He had just introduced himself and offered to shake hands, double check.

  One of those things didn’t fit.

  Shaking my head, I blinked a couple of times, as if that would help snap me back into reality.

  “What?” I managed, and wiped blood off my face.

  The little window in the door slid open, and a yellow jumpsuit was pushed through it. Then the window shot closed again.

  I was now thrilled to see the garment that I had detested so heartily just an hour ago. The crazy-house uniform. It hurt to bend down to pick it up. Leaning against the concrete wall, I shakily put one leg in, then the other. Trying to get it up over my shoulders and my arms into the sleeves was the worst pain I’d ever felt, and all I wanted to do was groan loudly, like a horse foaling. But I wouldn’t give Bruiser the satisfaction.