The Battle for Jericho Read online

  The contents of the fridge, however, were downright exotic. No salami and American cheese for these fluffs. There was a cellophane-wrapped pack of what appeared to be two thick, unbaked fruit pies. The label identified this stuff as “Salmon Wellington.” Two mini-chickens (Cornish hens, I would come to learn) lay marinating in a pan, all stuffed, dressed up with veggies and ready to go. Three tall, slender bottles bearing labels written in a foreign language lay in a wine rack. A small wheel of white cheese sat on a wood saucer under a glass dome. Next to that was a covered plastic tray with six petit fours covered in white icing and topped with yellow candy rose petals. A pineapple as big as my head had a shelf all its own. The fruit bin held mangoes, kiwi, and a yellowish, fist-sized spiny pod that looked as if it should have been wriggling across the bottom of some ocean. On an alien world.

  I’d found my inspiration.

  I started with the Salmon Wellington. After digging my fingers through the cellophane, I heaved the pouch-like things, one after the other, up to the ceiling. Each made a thick, muffled gloop when it struck, and they clung there for a moment before dropping to the floor, spewing out a fishy white and red filling. Delightful.

  Next, the little chickens took flight, splatting against the walls and spraying vinegary juices everywhere. The pineapple looked formidable, as though it would permanently disable your hand if you grabbed it, so I stuck my foot in and hooked it out onto the floor. It made a slight bounce but didn’t split open as I expected. Oh well.

  I took out the tray of petit fours. From the outrageously high price on the label, I understood why Mom never bought this crap. If she did, the hit to the family bank account would give Dad a heart attack. I opened the tray with the intention of practicing free throws into the garbage can. Then I decided to sample the goods. I lifted the hockey mask, left it to rest atop my head like a cap, and took a bite out of one of the little cakes.

  Hm. Not bad.

  “What in the hell are you doing?”

  The voice had a low, clipped modulation. I thought it was Mac, doing a bad imitation of my dad. As I turned, a twinge of embarrassment went through me. I figured Mac was pissed to find me snacking instead of making mayhem.

  But it wasn’t Mac. Dylan Cussler stood in the doorway to the dining room. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a rumpled black T-shirt. He was as tall as Mac and even more muscular, short blond hair sticking out in messy spikes about his head. His eyes were at half-mast, as if he was just coming out of a deep, cozy sleep, but they quickly sharpened, focused entirely on me. He obviously did not like what he was seeing.

  I dropped the petit fours.

  Dylan took a slow, determined step into the kitchen. I swear to high heaven, he seemed to swell with indignation as he moved. His shoulders and chest bulged as he squared his muscles beneath his shirt. He tensed his arms, fingers flexing at his sides, and just like that, he was ready for whatever came next. His eyes, now filled with simmering rage, never left my face; he didn’t even blink.

  I took a step back. There was no way in hell I could go toe-to-toe with this dude. Ordinarily, there would be some degree of shame in such an admission. The guy was gay, after all. At the moment, however, I was only concerned with keeping my neck unbroken.

  Dylan lunged with the suddenness of a predator striking. I was even quicker, ducking beneath his outstretched arms and giving a loud, throaty yell. That cry was intended to alert Mac, wherever he was, so he could make a hasty exit. I spun and made for the back door.

  Dylan snagged the backpack. There was a sharp pain as the straps dug into my armpits. My body flew backward, and a big, hairy arm looped around my neck. Within seconds, blackness swirled in as I began to lose consciousness. Desperate, I managed to plant my feet against the refrigerator. Getting away from this guy was the one and only thought in my head. My thigh muscles bunched, and I shoved us both backward.

  Dylan’s head and shoulders smashed against the cabinets. He released me, and I dropped to my knees, gasping and coughing. As Dylan slid downward, the stack of white and gold dishes spilled forward over him. I heard Dylan’s body hit the floor, followed by the raucous crash of shattering plates.

  “What the…!”

  I looked up. Mac, still wearing his mask, stood in the doorway. Confused, I reached up, groping at my head for my own mask. Mac rushed in, hauled me to my feet and hustled me toward the back door. I glanced over my shoulder. Dylan lay on his side, unmoving, surrounded by shards of china. There was a gash in the top of his head, and blood trickled through his hair onto the floor.

  Oh God. I’d killed him.

  “Wait!” I tried to go back to him. Mac shoved me through the door, sending me stumbling over the threshold and face down onto the lawn. I scrambled to my feet, intent on returning to the kitchen, but Mac grabbed the back of my shirt. I must have levitated or something, because the next thing I remember was going over the fence. Then we were running, as though a pack of wolves was snapping at our heels.

  Chapter 3

  “WHAT happened?” Mac asked.

  We had not dared go to either of our homes. We ran instead to Confederate Park, which was four blocks over from the high school at the edge of town. In the center of the park stood a red and blue pavilion commemorating the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate army hero who was a member and, many believed, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Originally, the park was named Poplar Grove. Last year, a resident, offended at the notion of honoring a slave-owning secessionist, started a petition to rename the pavilion. The town’s conservatives countered with a petition of their own. In the end, they collected enough signatures to keep Forrest Pavilion and give us Confederate Park as well. They were freedom-loving American citizens, by God, and the Constitution granted them the right to honor their southern heritage. What better display of good old American ideals could there possibly be than a public celebration of racial terrorism and mass treason?

  There were only a few people in the park, joggers and dog walkers. Mac and I had the pavilion to ourselves. I was so amped up on adrenaline that I couldn’t stop moving. My legs kept me briskly circling, feet thudding against the wooden planks of the floor.

  Mac had removed his hockey mask, and his face showed equal parts rage and fear. “Jerry, what happened back there?” he repeated.

  “What do you think happened?” I yelled. I slid the backpack off my shoulders and dropped it on the floor. “That fool grabbed me, tried to choke me to death! I had to fight him off!” I realized my voice was carrying across the park, and the last thing we needed was to draw attention to ourselves, but I couldn’t dial back the volume. “He’s dead, man. He’s dead.” Those gays weren’t supposed to be home. No one was meant to get hurt. That wasn’t part of Mac’s plan.

  Mac came forward and tried getting me to sit. I shoved him away. “Get off me!”

  “Man, you need to calm down,” he said firmly.

  “Shut up! Shut up, and leave me alone!”

  He did. He sat on the rail that edged the pavilion and waited. I kept circling until the fight-or-flight chemicals burned out of my system. Sinking onto the wooden steps, I slumped against one of the posts that supported the roof.

  “You okay, man?” asked Mac.

  “I killed him,” I said quietly.

  “He’s not dead, Jerry. He was still breathing. I saw it. He was just… knocked out or something.”

  I sighed, momentarily relieved. “Where did he come from? Those fags are never home that time of day.”

  “He must’ve been in the living room or something. I walked right down the hall and didn’t see him. Then I heard you yelling.” Mac began to squeeze the hockey mask in his hands.

  I looked around for my mask. It must have been lost somewhere in Dylan’s kitchen during the struggle. My fingerprints were all over the cabinets and fridge. (As I’d never been arrested, my prints weren’t on file with any law enforcement agencies, so there was nothing to match against the prints I’d left behi
nd. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realize that at the time.) Dylan had seen my face. Up close. He had no doubt called the sheriff by now. “Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it….”

  We sat in the pavilion for quite some time, silently trapped in the bubble of anxiety that had cut us off from ordinary life. Finally, Mac stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

  I looked at him as if he were a lunatic. “Where?”

  “Home.”

  “We can’t, Mac.”

  “Look. We have to go home eventually. Whatever’s gonna happen is just gonna happen. Might as well get it over with.” He tossed his mask aside and stepped off the pavilion.

  I grabbed his arm. “Don’t leave me, man.”

  Mac pulled his arm free. “Come on.” He stood there for a few seconds, waiting, but I couldn’t make myself move. He gave me a gentle swat across the back of my head. “Go home, Jerry.” He walked out of the park and disappeared down the street without looking back.

  IT WAS well after dark when I finally rounded the corner onto my street. There was no patrol car with lights flashing in front of my house. The sheriff must have come and gone, leaving my parents with the task of bringing me in. My body began to tremble as I made my way down the block. By the time I reached my porch, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get the key into the lock. I gave up and rang the bell.

  Beyond the door’s stained glass panel, a figure approached. The porch light went on, and I knew I was being observed through the peephole. The lock clicked, and the door was snatched open.

  My dad stood in the doorway. He’s tall and slender, his hair and beard sprinkled with gray. He’s an accounting professor at the State University of Nashville, and he hates the daily two-hour-plus commute so much that he constantly swears he’s going to put a sofa in his office and just sleep there until the weekend. His eyes blazed with anger tonight. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “And what the hell are you ringing the doorbell for? Did you lose your key again?”

  I raised my hand slowly, showing him my key. He looked at the key, and then looked at me again, perplexed. “What the hell is wrong with you, boy? Get in here.”

  Dad stepped to one side, and I walked in to what I figured was inevitable doom. Mom, alerted by all the loud talking on Dad’s part, came rushing into the living room. She’s a year older than Dad, but she’s petite, and her shoulder-length hair doesn’t have any gray, so she actually looks a lot younger. There was worry in her eyes as she approached, but I could see anger just beneath it.

  “Jericho, thank God. We were worried to death,” Mom said, taking me by the shoulders. She looked me over, as if to make sure my body wasn’t missing any parts. “Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”

  My cell? Damn it. I patted down my pockets. Nothing. “Oh. I guess I lost it.”

  “You guess you lost it? You guess you lost it?” Dad’s voice cracked with incredulity. “What the hell is wrong with you? You know how much that thing cost me?”

  I knew exactly. He paid all of nine bucks for my cell when he finally consented to add me to the family plan. But that was hardly the time to point out how cheap he was. I immediately dropped my chin to my chest in a show of regret, hoping that would get me a little mercy.

  “Where were you, honey?” Mom asked. “This isn’t like you, staying out so late and not telling us anything. Where were you?”

  Okay. Something was seriously wrong here. The world had been off-center since I walked out of school six hours ago, and it now seemed to take a further drastic lurch away from reality. My eyes went blank. I couldn’t think.

  Dad rapped on my forehead with his knuckles. He was not gentle about it. “Did… you… hear… your… mother… boy?” he intoned, fingers working as if signing to the deaf.

  “London, stop,” Mom said, irritated. She steered me away from him. “Jericho, this is serious. You know the rules. You’re supposed to let us know where you’re going. And you have a curfew. I called Maclin, and he said he hadn’t seen you since you left school. Now I want you to tell me where you were and what you were doing.”

  My heart started thumping in my throat. The extra blood didn’t help my brain at all. “Uh….”

  “Okay, that’s it.” Dad took me by the ear and strode off down the hall. Bent at the waist, I had to trot in his wake to keep from losing the side of my head. Dad pushed open the door to my room and dragged me inside. He pulled me slowly around, forcing me to sit on the bed before freeing my ear.

  “You are grounded, boy, until I say otherwise.” Dad disconnected my Xbox and snatched it up. He unplugged my DVD player and confiscated that. He spotted my MP3 player and nabbed it. Then he looked around for anything else that might entertain me. The place was now pretty barren. He and Mom had taken my computer out two months ago when they discovered I had bypassed the parental locks and made several downloads from the Playboy website. On my desk was a spread of cards where I had started a round of Solitaire. Dad gathered up the cards and stuffed them into his pocket.

  “You go to school, you go to church. Other than that, you’re in this room.” Dad waved the DVD player enticingly in my direction. “When you decide to answer your mother and apologize, we’ll talk about taking you off punishment.” He departed with my electronics, slamming the door.

  I waited until I figured Dad had moved out of earshot, and then I lunged across the bed for the telephone.

  Mac answered his cell on the first ring. “Jerry?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I whispered. “Where are you, man?”

  “Where do ya think? I’m home.”

  “Me too. Uh. Did the sheriff show up?”

  “No. And my folks haven’t gotten any calls, either. They don’t know, man. They don’t know about any of it.”

  “How—”

  The line clicked, and my dad’s voice broke in. “Jericho, get the hell off the phone! Go to bed!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The line clicked again, violently, as Dad hung up.

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mac replied. “Just be cool. Okay?”

  I hung up the receiver and sat there, more puzzled than ever. What in the world was going on?

  FOR the next three days, Mac and I took the long way to school, avoiding Juniper Street and any mention of our criminal acts there. I watched the local news and checked the newspaper—things I’d never done before—but there was no report of the incident. By Friday afternoon, I had cooked up a plausible lie for my folks to explain my disappearance. They bought my story that I’d been hanging out at a friend’s house, playing video games and losing track of time. Because it had taken me so long to confess, Dad said I’d be grounded for another week. The remorse I expressed was heartfelt. I was wracked with guilt every waking moment, and my dreams were filled with shattered dishes and broken bodies.

  Mac and I had dodged the proverbial bullet. As soon as it became clear we weren’t going to be hauled off to the county jail, Mac was back to life as usual. He tried out for the football team and made it. He started pursuing Gina Marie Silva, a girl whose body had morphed over the summer into a figure that made guys want to genuflect and thank God for creating eyesight. He played pickup games of basketball, went to the movies, talked his parents into getting him a gym membership. It was as if he’d had no part in the events at Dylan’s house. I should have followed his example and let things be. But I didn’t.

  The Saturday after my punishment ended, I made my way over to Juniper Street. The picketers were still there, marching in their endless circular parade. Dylan’s car, a red Camaro convertible, was parked in his driveway. Aside from a group of kids coasting the sidewalks on skateboards and a woman washing her minivan in her driveway, the street was quiet. It was just the kind of postcard serenity that drew people to the suburbs. My heart started racing, and I got so lightheaded I had to sit on the curb with my head between my knees. It took three minutes of de
ep breathing to get myself together, after which I got up and went home.

  Sunday afternoon, once church and lunch were done, I was back on Juniper. The picketers were gone, apparently taking a break for their own worship-day services. I had decided to own up to what I’d done. I had injured a man, and my soul wouldn’t let me rest until I made amends. Dylan was unconscious by the time Mac made it back to the kitchen and was thus unaware of my friend’s presence. I could confess without implicating Mac. This time, I didn’t allow myself any chance of losing my resolve. I marched headlong down the street and up to Dylan’s door, where I quickly rang the bell.

  I waited, rubbing my hands—which were suddenly real clammy—against the sides of my jeans. Movement at the window caught my eye, and I saw Dylan’s face peering at me through the curtain. The face disappeared, the curtain closed, and there went my heart jumping up and down in my throat again. “Oh Jesus…,” I muttered through my teeth. That was a prayer, by the way, not an expletive. The man was going to kill me. He was going to open his door, punch me flat in the face, and kill me for what I’d done to him

  I was so convinced of this that when the door opened, I actually flinched, my whole body tightening to accept my fate. Dylan stood in front of me. He wore only a pair of yellow sweatpants, and he had almost two weeks’ worth of beard growth on his face. A wide patch had been shaved in the top of his head and covered with a white bandage the size of my palm. Obviously, he was still convalescing. As I mentioned, I was expecting a punch in the mouth, or at the very least a good, solid cussing out, before he summoned the authorities. Instead he just stared at me, his expression cold but otherwise flat.

  Okay. The first move was on me. “Uh….” Brilliant start there. Unfortunately, my brain locked tightly after that, and I got no further.

  Dylan sighed wearily. “What do you want?”