Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

Author:Poppy Z. Brite [Brite, Poppy Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The black van cruised Missing Mile for an hour. The town was so small that they passed the same places four or five times. Nothing sat with his face pressed to the window. Zillah lay on the mattress for a while, still dazed from the blows he had taken.

Nothing thought guiltily of how he had hurled himself across the room and thrown Zillah against the wall, how it must have hurt. He hadn’t even thought about doing it; he had just seen the bat in Zillah’s hands, about to come down on Ghost’s skull, and he had known that Ghost’s death would be lodged in his heart forever if he didn’t do something fast.

Now maybe Zillah would abandon him on the highway Somewhere, or maybe all three of them would kill him, their teeth and tongues burrowing into the soft parts of his body as he had done to Laine. Nothing found that he didn’t much care. He had fucked up. He had tried to have everything he wanted, all at once, and now it was all swirling down the drain.

After a while Zillah propped himself up and stared moodily out at the dusty storefronts, the gas station with its wooden facade and old-fashioned pumps, the psychedelic red-and-blue whirligig in the window of the Whirling Disc record store. Soon Zillah’s head drooped forward onto his knees. When Nothing tried to hug him, Zillah pulled away.

Nothing had seen his friends back home use such behavior on one another. When one of Julie’s previous boyfriends got her twentieth-row Cure tickets for her birthday instead of the tenth-row ones she had wanted, Julie appeared to undergo a grieving process of major proportions. She sat in her room reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Six pounds melted from her already skinny frame. When anyone at school tried to talk to her, she would stand dramatically silent for several seconds, then slowly shake her head and walk away. In short, she sulked for a week.

Now Zillah was doing the same thing. Nothing was only a little angry at being manipulated; he deserved it for getting Zillah hurt. What made him angrier was that it worked.

He was responsible for the pall that had been cast over the day. Zillah’s beautiful face was all torn up, and that alone made Nothing feel as if he’d pissed on the Mona Lisa or something. No one was tripping anymore, and no one had started drinking yet.

The van’s usual air of carnival was gone, and the mood that replaced it was flat, subdued.

Nothing wondered, not for the first time, how old the others were. He had thought them older and more sophisticated than he, but right now they were acting like a bunch of teenagers who are mad at each other but aren’t sure why.

The third time they drove past the record store, Twig slowed the van and pointed out a sign taped to the window. “Hey kiddo. Look at that.”

Nothing looked. The sign was a grainy photocopy like the gravestone on the Lost Souls?

tape.

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