cheeks. She stroked his forehead, pushing lank twists of blond hair out of his eyes. It was then that he saw the crimson on her fingers and knew he’d messed up somehow.
Shit.
‘Did the boy stab me?’
She nodded, her lips clamped, her chin dimpled and creased.
‘Oh . . . right.’
The fizzing, flickering strip light on the low ceiling illuminated her hair like a scruffy halo, her face a darker silhouette that was leaking a steady river of fresh tears onto his cheeks.
He didn’t remember feeling stabbed, didn’t feel the blade at all. It wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined it would be. ‘Am I . . . bleeding quite a lot?’
She shook her head. He knew she was lying. She was rubbish at that. He could feel her body trembling, her shoulders heaving.
‘Lee . . . ?’ he said.
Her face came lower, closer. He could feel the puff of her fetid breath on his face. ‘My poor little brother,’ she whispered.
‘Home,’ he said. ‘You got to go back home . . . warn them. They’re coming.’
That annoying, fizzing light above them was too bright. He found himself squinting back the brightness, then feeling his eyelids so heavy he closed them to give his stinging, tired eyes a rest. ‘Please don’t let them hurt Mum, will you?’ he murmured. ‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ she replied.
It’s just you and Mum left now. He wasn’t sure if he said that out loud or just thought it.
‘I’ll look after her, Jake.’
He had a dim memory of them carrying Dad upstairs. How heavy his body was, even between the three of them. He remembered them tucking him into bed, saying their goodbyes to him. Remembered how proud he felt of him. Dad the hero. Dad who saved them from the bad man with the knife in their lounge. He wondered if Dad would’ve been proud of him too.
He figured he would.
He smiled. That was a good feeling.
Snoop felt an insistent, irritating tug on his arm. He was scoring high on the table; one of his better totals and still had another bonus ball to play.
‘The fuck is it?’ he snapped.
‘We uh . . . we got a problem, Snoop.’
Snoop lowered his voice. Not that anyone was likely to hear them over the clatter of bells and the thud of music. ‘What kind of problem we got, Deej?’
The small boy, one of the youngest, and white, looked as pale as a ghost. ‘Fight down in the cattle shed, between Dizz and Jacob.’
Shit.
He looked around for Nathan and saw him across the stage, shooting zombies, badly, and looking drunk enough that he was ready to topple over.
He slapped a passing boy on the arm. ‘Hey, take over. I got a chart score. Don’t fuck it up for me,’ he grinned.
He turned to Deejay. ‘Let’s go.’
Snoop led the way across the floor, threading through the crowded space between machines, doing his best to look easy, smiling and knuckling the boys he passed. Finally, at the top of the stairs down to the cattle shed, he caught the eye of one of the older boys.
‘Yo, Roost!’
The lad ambled over. ‘A’ight, Snoop?’
‘The cattle shed’s closed. No one’s going down there until I say otherwise.’
‘Okay.’ Roost nodded. ‘You gettin’ some?’
Snoop ignored that. ‘No one gets past, right?’
‘Right.’
He led Deejay down the steps. ‘So what the fuck’s gone down?’
The boy swallowed nervously. ‘You better see.’
Deejay led him towards the one storage door standing open, a shaft of flickering light spreading out across the corridor floor.
Then Snoop saw for himself. Dizz-ee splayed across a mattress, soaked dark brown around his oddly misshapen head. And on the rubber-mat floor, the white boy, Jacob, sprawled amidst a large pool of blood.
A naked girl was cradling him in her lap.
Jesus.
The room reeked of shit; overpowering, like a faecal force field. The room was sprayed with splatter dots of blood. But the girl . . . the girl looked like something out of the boys’ collection of horror DVDs; her legs and belly and hands coated with the boy’s blood. The pallid skin of hers that wasn’t coated with blood was mottled with purples and browns, and her face . . . her jaw was a swollen grapefruit, one eye puffy and almost completely shut beneath a bulging eyelid that looked as full and glossy as a plum.
‘Fuck’s been going on here?’
Deejay shrugged. ‘Dizz-ee’s girl. He been working on her a while.’
Snoop stepped into the room and squatted down. A fucking mess. Dizz-ee was supposed to be in charge of the