Newt faced the wall, his back to the departing guards, to the front entrance, to his new posse, to the world. He fumed as silently as possible, aware that the spectacular anger he felt was beyond irrational, but still unable to do anything about it. Every breath hurt his chest, only filled half his lungs. The decision he’d made to leave his friends and the Berg had been almost impossible, unbearable—but the right one. How could they place this burden on him, forcing him to make that same decision again? He shook with rage, cradled the Launcher in his arms like a baby, considered turning it on himself to snap him out of these spiraling thoughts. It wouldn’t kill him, after all. But it sure would wake him up.
“Newt, you okay?”
Jonesy. How had Newt chosen to cast his lot with someone like Jonesy instead of relying on his best friends on the planet? He really was losing his mind. No , he berated himself. He’d done the only thing he could. Having the Flare was bad enough. Having Tommy and the others around to remind him of just how sad that was… He couldn’t take it. He simply couldn’t. There was no going back.
“Newt?” Jonesy again.
“I’m fine!” Newt yelled. He turned his head to look at the sallow face of his bodyguard, framed by that ridiculous greasy black hair. “Just leave me alone!”
Jonesy’s girlfriend—Newt couldn’t remember her name and was pretty sure he never would—lay flat on the ground just a few feet away, groaning after a dose of the Bliss. Newt had never wanted to take the medication so badly as he did in that moment. But his head was muddled enough. He couldn’t risk lapsing even further and making a decision he might regret. What could be worse than going back with his friends and then deciding to leave again ?
He turned back to the wall. Lowered his head. Closed his eyes. Tried to suppress the anger that welled up in him like a surge of acid, like gasoline, lit with a spark, burning and burning. Why had they come back! Why!
Some time passed, his entire body feeling suspended in space, floating in a bubble of hot rage. It might’ve been an hour. It might’ve been five minutes, he didn’t know. But it took every ounce of his willpower just to keep himself from erupting at anyone within a hundred feet of him. More than once he had to push down the urge to shoot someone else with the Launcher, just to make himself feel better.
“Newt,” Jonesy whispered from a few feet away, the harsh kind of breathy whisper that anyone nearby could hear. “The Munie guards brought those people back here! The ones you ran away from!”
Newt’s head snapped around. He looked at the front entrance of the bowling alley just as Minho walked into the building, his face shadowed by the outside light behind him. But there was no mistake. And then Tommy entered, right behind him, holding Brenda’s hand like a child.
Newt turned back to the wall so quickly that a dizzy spell buzzed his head. He’d caught a glimpse of Jorge right before he’d swiveled.
They’d come for him, anyway. Despite everything. Despite the note he’d written Tommy. Despite the note he’d left in the Berg. Despite the message he’d sent back with that stupid Munie guard. They’d come. A fury came over him that was like a fog of poison gas. On the inside. On the outside, prickling his skin. He shook with it, couldn’t stop it. His heart hurt so badly. What was happening to him? Was this what it was like to push past that final barrier of the Flare, into the mad world of the Gone?
“They’re almost over here,” Jonesy whispered fiercely, panicked for the first time since Newt had met him several days ago. He probably didn’t want to lose his new prized possession to its prior owners.
Newt sensed his friends. He heard Minho’s breathing, heard the pattern of Tommy’s footsteps. He knew these people better than anyone. And for some reason he wanted to yell at them and beat them to a pulp. I really and truly am slipping , he thought. At least I don’t have to dread it, anymore .
It finally spilled out. Newt screamed when he spoke, trying to remember the odd words they’d used in the Glade like a badge of rebellion against their captors. “I told you bloody shanks to get lost!” His pulse took on a life of its own, thumping almost unnaturally in his temples, in his neck, in his wrists, in his chest. He could hear it. He swear he could hear it.
Thump, thump, thump . A pounding in his ears, in his brain.
“We need to talk to you.”
Minho said this, definitely Minho, though Newt could barely hear him over the rancid drumbeat in his mind. Like someone pumped acid through his heart along with the blood, all of it with a powerful machine, the regular surge of it getting louder within.
Newt sensed a shadow creep over his shoulder. “Don’t come any closer.” He tried speaking calmly but with vile. “Those thugs brought me here for a reason. They thought I was a bloody Immune holed up in that shuck Berg. Imagine their surprise when they could tell I had the Flare eating my brain. Said they were doing their civic duty when they dumped me in this rat hole.” Words rushed out of him in a spasm of lies and deceit, truth no longer mattering. He needed them to leave, at any cost.
Tommy responded, a voice that felt like ice in Newt’s ears. “Why do you think we’re here, Newt? I’m sorry you had to stay back and got caught. I’m sorry they brought you here. But we can break you out—it doesn’t look like…”
The words faded into a roaring static, a buzzing that hurt Newt’s skull, all of it kept to the relentless beat of his pulse, which refused to stop, refused to quiet itself to sanity. Newt had the strange sensation that he was deaf, though noise came from everywhere, from inside and out. He felt a panicked loosening of his hold to reality, as if the entire bowling alley were fading from his existence. Movement was all he could do to latch back onto it.
He turned on his butt to face them. He gripped his Launcher like a lifeline.
Minho threw out his hands, said something that Newt couldn’t decipher over the roaring in his ears and mind. His old friend took a step back, almost tripping over Jonesy’s zonked-out girlfriend. More words, like ants trying to break through the wall of noise.
Newt heard something about the Launcher, asking him where he’d gotten the thing. Newt responded, slurring out a phrase or two, unsure of what he said. Some kind of lie. His hands shook so much he felt the rattle of the weapon through his bones. This obviously wasn’t going to work. He forced himself to gain a grasp, to push away the haze of rage. Just a little. Just enough. Anything it took, now. They had to leave. They had to. How much longer could Newt take this?
He pleaded, threw every ounce of his concentration into speaking sincerely but firmly.
Anything it took.
“I’m… not well,” he said. “Honestly, I appreciate you buggin’ shanks coming for me. I mean it. But this is where it bloody ends. This is when you turn around and walk back out that door and head for your Berg and fly away. Do you understand me?” Every word was an effort. His hands trembled with frustration.
Minho was speaking. “No, Newt, I don’t understand. We risked our necks to come to this place and you’re our friend and we’re taking you home. You wanna whine and cry while you go crazy, that’s fine. But you’re gonna do it with us, not with these shuck Cranks.”
Newt leapt to his feet, feeling a strength in his legs that wasn’t there seconds before. Tommy must’ve seen something crazy in his eyes because he stumbled backward and almost tripped. Newt pointed the Launcher at Minho and unleashed more anger.
“I am a Crank, Minho! I am a Crank. Why can’t you get that through your bloody head? If you had the Flare and knew what you were about to go through, would you want your friends to stand around and watch? Huh? Would you want that?”
He wanted them to argue. Fight him. Give him an excuse. But they only looked back with stunned expressions.
Newt lowered his voice and poured all the venom he could into his next words. “And you , Tommy. You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here and asking me to leave with you. A lot of bloody nerve. The sight of you makes me sick.”
Thomas’s face melted in sorrow. “What are you talking about?”
Newt suddenly saw himself from above, almost magically. His craziness. He lowered his weapon and looked at the floor. The rage had reached something like an even boil within him.
“Newt, I don’t get it,” Thomas continued. “Why are you saying all this?”
“I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry.” The apology barely escaped his lips. This was unbearable. All of it. “But I need you to listen to me. I’m getting worse by the hour and I don’t have many sane ones left. Please leave.”
Thomas started to answer but Newt didn’t let him, held up a hand of warning and shouted, “No!” Then he tried again to let the words pour out of him, say anything to appeal to their senses. “No more talking from you. Just… please. Please leave. I’m begging you. I’m begging you to do this one thing for me. As sincerely as I’ve ever asked for anything in my life, I want you to do this for me. There’s a group I’ve met that are a lot like me and they’re planning to break out and head for Denver later today. I’m going with them.”
I can help Keisha and Dante , he thought. I can’t help you . He was able to breathe again, let the anger simmer. He was standing his ground, and that was enough to soothe him. A little.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” he continued, “but I can’t be with you guys anymore. It’s gonna be hard enough for me now, and it’ll make it worse if I know you have to witness it. Or worst of all, if I hurt you. So let’s say our bloody good-byes and then you can promise to remember me from the good old days.”
“I can’t do that,” Minho said. Far too calmly. With far too much confidence.
This set Newt off again. He screamed something that his mind forgot as each phrase came tumbling from his mouth. Trying to still his trembling hands, he held onto the Launcher so tightly his veins popped out. “Get out of here!”
The situation was a powder keg. The situation was a disaster.
With one finger, Jonesy poked Thomas from behind, who spun around only to be poked again, this time in the chest. The other members of Newt’s gang of Cranks piled up behind Jonesy, like water at a dam.
“I believe our new friend asked you people to leave him alone,” Jonesy said.
Thomas didn’t back down. “This is none of your business. He was our friend way before he came here.”
Jonesy slicked back his hair, the virus having turned him into a storybook villain. “That boy’s a Crank now, and so are we. That makes him our business. Now leave him… alone .”
It was Minho’s turn. “Hey, psycho, maybe your ears are clogged with the Flare. This is between us and Newt. You leave.”
The powder keg sprung a leak; a match ignited and grew closer.
Jonesy raised a hand, a shard of glass squeezed tightly in his grasp, enough to make him bleed. “I was hoping you would resist. I’ve been bored.”
The powder keg met the flame.
Jonesy the fool lashed out with his weapon, tried to gash Tommy across the face. The world tilted right before Newt’s eyes, but it was only Thomas falling to the ground to avoid the sharp piece of glass. But Brenda had stepped up, knocked Jonesy’s arm with a hard chop; the glass flew out of the man’s hand and shattered against the wall. Then Minho barged in, tackled Jonesy; they both crashed to the floor, right on top of the drugged-out girlfriend. Bliss or no Bliss, she screamed a gurgling scream, kicked and flailed at anything that would move. Enough punches landed to begin a brawl; Newt couldn’t tell whose arms and legs were whose.
Then his vision clouded, a white fog pouring into his eyes, and the storm of noise returned. The buzzing. The roar. The thump, thump, thump of his impossible pulse. He screamed, although it seemed to be within a long tunnel, forever echoing.
“Stop it! Stop it now! Stop or I’ll—” He didn’t know how he finished the thought. He had lost control of himself, distantly felt the Launcher in his hands, sweeping back and forth as if he sprayed the bullets of a machine gun. He shook with unspeakable rage, losing his mind to it. Not knowing what else to do, how else to expend the incredible energy building inside of him, he pulled the trigger.
Through the cloud of white he barely saw the Launcher grenade strike Jonesy and explode in blue flashes. Newt heard nothing but his own noise. Tendrils of lightning danced across Jonesy’s body as he collapsed, writhed, drooled.
Newt held it together by a spider’s thread, hoping it would be over soon. Whispering, he said, “I told him to stop. Now you guys leave. No more discussion. I’m sorry.”
Minho tried to say something but all Newt heard was noise on top of noise.
“Go.” Newt strained to speak. “I asked nicely. Now I’m telling. This is hard enough. Go.”
Minho said something about all of them going outside to talk. Newt pulled up his Launcher into firing position, stumbled a step or two toward his old friend.
“Go! Get out of here!”
Thomas and Minho spoke to each other. Newt heard nothing, but more words leaked out of his own mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m… I’m going to shoot if you don’t go. Now.”
They turned to leave, unspeakable pain on their faces.
They were leaving him.
He wanted them to.
He hated them for doing it.
Tommy. Minho. Brenda. Jorge. Walking away. Out the door.
Newt fell to one knee, knowing he couldn’t have lasted another minute. He spoke aloud to anyone who might listen.
“Chase them. Make sure they don’t come back.”
He collapsed to the ground and tears poured from his fogged eyes, though it had nothing to do with madness.
