I grab my hammer and smash the flickering green light on the desk, plunging us all into a jagged, blood-red shadow.
“Midnight, boys! Bring the gas! We’re going to turn that asylum into a goddamn circus!”
Chapter
Twelve
JEX
The van is a rusted, windowless beast that smells like gasoline and bad intentions. I call it theHearse of Hilarity, but right now, the only thing funny is the way Higgins is vibrating.
He’s sitting in the back, bolted to a wheel well, the nerve gas canister taped to his thigh like a ticking tumour. Every time we hit a pothole, he lets out a sound like a punctured accordion.
“Keep it steady, Knuckles!” I shout toward the front, where the big man is wrestling the steering wheel as if he’s trying to choke it to death. “We have precious cargo! We wouldn’t want Higgins here to go off prematurely. That’s a very messy way to exit the stage, isn’t it, Higgins?”
I’m sitting on a crate of Molotov cocktails, playing a game of ‘Knife Roulette’ between my own fingers on themetal floor of the van.Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.The blade misses my skin by a hair’s breadth every time.
“Please,” Higgins blubbers, the snot running down his upper lip. “Please, I have a mom. I have a?—”
“Oh, everyone has a mom, Higgins! Even Aris had a mom, though I suspect she was a cold-blooded reptile with a penchant for taxidermy.” I stop the knife and point the tip at his nose. “Let’s play a game. It’s called ‘The Truth or the Teeth.’ If you tell me something boring, I take a tooth. If you tell me something juicy about the layout of the Soft Room… you get to keep your smile for another five minutes. Ready? Go!”
“The—the sensors!” he gasps, flinching as the van swerves to avoid a police cruiser. I don’t even blink at the sirens. We’re the ghost in the machine tonight. “The perimeter fence is electrified, but the third sector is down! Aris diverted the power to the internal security grids! He’s obsessed with the basement level! He—he’s building something down there!”
“Building something?” I tilt my head, my eyes wide and shimmering with a dangerous, emerald light. “A playground? A nursery for all his little broken dolls? Tell me, Higgins… is my Queen in the basement?”
“No! She’s still in the Soft Room on the fourth floor! But he—he goes there every night. He stays for hours. He talks to her. The cameras… he turns them off.”
I feel a surge of white-hot rage, a jagged lightning bolt that fries the ‘Joker’ smile right off my face for a split second. I drive the knife into the floorboards between my boots.Klang.
“He turns them off,” I repeat, my voice a low, vibrating growl that makes the air in the van turn to ice. “The voyeur wants his privacy. He wants to watch her break in the dark where no one can see the stains he leaves.”
I stand up, the van swaying violently as Knuckles takes a corner on two wheels. We’re hitting the main highway now, the lights of the city a blurred, neon streak outside the tiny rust-holes in the van’s side.
“Hey, Knuckles! Give the neighbours a show!”
Knuckles slams a button on the dash. Suddenly, the van isn’t just a van—it’s a mobile riot. A bank of high-intensity strobe lights I welded to the roof starts pulsing in a nauseating rhythm of violet and lime green. A set of loudspeakers, salvaged from an old stadium, begins to blare a distorted, slowed-down recording of a calliope organ.
La-la-la-la-la-la…
It sounds like a carnival drowning in a bathtub.
We roar past a line of commuters, and I lean out the side door, clinging to the frame with one hand. I’ve got a flare in the other, the red phosphorus spitting sparks into the wind.
“HEY! LOVELY NIGHT FOR A RECKONING, ISN’T IT?” I howl at a terrified woman in a minivan. I toss a handful of Queen of Hearts cards into the slipstream. They flutter behind us like a trail of bloody breadcrumbs.
“Jex! The gate!” Pip screams from the passenger seat.
I look ahead. There it is. Hillside Sanitarium. It sits on the cliff like a jagged, white tooth, the searchlights cutting through the smog. The main gate is a wall of reinforced steel and shivering guards.
“Alright, Higgins! Curtains up!” I grab thekid by the collar and haul him toward the open door. The wind is whipping his tears across his face. “Time to go home! Remember: get to the main security hub. Don’t stop. Don’t talk to the guards. Just get in there and wait for the beep.”
“I can’t! They’ll shoot me!”
“Then die with a smile, kid! It’s better for the reviews!”
I give him a heavy, unceremonious boot to the backside, sending him tumbling out of the van as we slow down just enough for him to hit the asphalt and roll toward the outer checkpoint.
“KNUCKLES! FLOOR IT!”
