Cold Springs(38)

“Get your lazy butts up!” Leyland shouted. “You think this is a resort? You think this is Club Med?”

The cold had been no dream. It was worse than the night in the Toyota, worse than any cold Mallory had ever known, because she'd been in it for days. Her whole body ached from shivering.

She didn't want to leave the small pool of warmth that had collected in her sleeping bag.

Fuck the drill sergeants. She wasn't going to move.

But Leyland and another instructor dragged her to her feet, tossed her a shirt that smelled like a dead animal—her own smell. They forced her to get dressed in the dark, reminding her that she was wearing the same dirty black fatigues as yesterday because she'd refused to wash them in the river when they'd told her to.

“You are here,” Leyland announced to them all, “because you have a problem.”

He walked back and forth between Mallory and the others, watching them fumble with their clothes.

“You are here because you failed your family,” he said, “not the other way around.”

Mallory's fingers were too numb to work the zipper. Her breath seeped out as mist, as if trying to expel the remnants of her dream.

The cinder block cabin that passed for their dormitory had no electricity, no heat, no running water. Mallory remembered bitterly, a million years ago, how she'd hoped to find a phone. There was no goddamn phone. There was no goddamn outside world.

“This is not about your parents,” Leyland told them. “This is not about the bad breaks you've had in your overprivileged young lives. THIS IS ABOUT YOU!”

If he only knew, Mallory thought bitterly.

She couldn't get rid of Pérez's image—those brown eyes staring straight into her like a coroner, or a dentist, someone with no interest in her beyond the point of a scalpel.

The instructors herded them outside, called out their names—Zedman, Morrison, Smart, Bridges.

It wasn't light yet, but Mallory knew it was five o'clock sharp. That's what time they always came.

A full moon glowed through the dead oak branches, making bulbs of Spanish moss look like silver fur. The air smelled of frost and wood rot, and the hills were moaning faintly, the way they did all night.

Nothing to worry about, the instructors had told her about the moaning—just a billion tons of granite contracting with the temperature drop. But Leyland had smiled maliciously, as if he knew that Mallory stayed up wide-eyed at night, ashamed to call for help, to admit that she was terrified of ghosts. How bad did Texas have to be, that even the hills groaned?

“Move it!” Leyland said.

They began to run, taking the course Mallory had come to know too well, even in the dark—a half mile through the woods, down steep timber steps hammered into the mud. The run didn't warm Mallory up. It just made her sweaty, let the cold stick to her body and the wind pierce her flimsy clothes.

The edge of the sky was turning pink by the time they got to the riverbank.

Past the obstacle course, Mallory could see her goal: the cliffs at the river, outcroppings of rock that the instructors called the Mushrooms. To Mallory, they looked like scar tissue, swollen and raw and pink.

If all four black levels made it there, across one hundred yards of hell, the instructors had promised they would never see this obstacle course again. But they hadn't come close—not yet.

How long had they been doing this—a week? Ten days?

Every day, Mallory would rebel. Every day they would slap her down, lock her up for a while, then put her right back on the treadmill.

She no longer faked cooperation. Now she tried to resist every way she could—sitting out, yelling, hitting, kicking. If she just acted up long enough and hard enough, eventually they'd kick her out of the program, call her mother and tell her Mallory was hopeless.

She knew what the body sack felt like now. She knew how many bricks made up the wall of the solitary confinement room. She knew what duct tape felt like over her mouth.

She had been mad so long that she'd started to feel like a burned-out lightbulb. Still, she had to keep at it.

The counselors stood at the far end of the obstacle course—young guys in white sweats, ready to head-shrink the kids when the physical torture was over. Mallory had seen enough TV to recognize the good cop/bad cop setup—the instructors bullied them around; the counselors played like their friends, gave the kids a little kindness, then cracked open their insides like rotten pecans.

Screw that.

But Wilson, her would-be counselor, Wilson was no longer in the lineup. She'd kicked him in the nuts at their first meeting, and he hadn't been back since. Dr. Hunter was probably still looking for a replacement crazy enough to deal with her.

“Line up!” Leyland raised the whistle to his lips.

This was the time to make trouble. To resist his command. She could run for it, or hit somebody, or just sit down and not do the course.

But her eye started twitching—remembering the body sack, the insults the other kids hurled at her whenever she made the team suffer for her bad behavior.

For every infraction, Leyland made her pay hard. But when she cooperated, even a little—he gave her perks. Five minutes extra sleep. A new bar of soap. Lemonade instead of water.

She hated it—but she felt a flicker of pleasure when he paid her even the smallest compliment, when he said, “That's more like it, Zedman,” and filled her cup with watery pink swill she wouldn't have washed her toilet with back home.