Read Quarantine: The Loners for Free Online

neck as he clutched the wooden shard planted deep in his throat. That was when the school truly changed.
    It happened following a violent drop in which David saw a freshman get his leg broken so severely that a jagged piece of bone tore out of his shin. Two sophomore girls had clawed deep grooves into each other’s faces over a rare bottle of moisturizer.
    When the drop was over, everyone had retreated to the sidelines to go hide their haul somewhere. Sam and six other guys from the football team had joined forces that day. They’d gone so far as to give their little gang a name, Varsity. Working together, each Varsity member secured twice as much as they would have alone. Varsity was the talk of the quad.
    Everyone wanted to form a little group of their own before the next drop.
    The Varsity guys were carrying their shares toward the exit, but Sam lingered by his own pile, right in the middle of the quad. He was eating a strip of beef jerky. Torn cardboard and trampled packaging littered the area around him. It was a brazen act to eat in public. No one did it anymore, unless they wanted to get robbed.
    “If you distract him, I can get his food. We’ll be set till the next drop,” Will said.
    “Are you nuts? We’re not stealing his food.”
    “It’s not his food, Dave,” Will said. “He’s just standing next to it.”
    David watched Sam tug on the jerky with his teeth. He hoped he choked on it. David was still burning from their run-in, but that didn’t mean it was okay to rob Sam. Slashed jeans were one thing, but Will thinking assault and robbery was a swell idea troubled David. Danny Liner, one of the remaining seniors, strode across the quad and planted himself between Sam and his food. They were too far away for David to hear their conversation, but the situation was clear soon enough.
    Danny slapped Sam across the face with a heavy hand. Sam toppled backward onto the ground, amid the fractured wood of the supply pallets.
    Will clutched his stomach and laughed loud enough for the entire quad to hear. Sam’s face flushed red. He got up, with a shard of wood in his hand the size of a railroad spike, and he buried the thing in Danny’s neck, right under the Adam’s apple.
    “Whoa,” Will said.
    All noise stopped. Conversations died midsentence. The crowd collectively forgot what they were doing or thinking or saying, and they watched Danny squirm and twitch on the ground. His neck was a fountain of blood, spraying a rasp-berry stream with each heartbeat, each stream arcing lower in the air than the last. Moments later, Danny Liner was another corpse lying in a blood puddle.
    No one spoke. There had been ruthless competition, fights, robberies, and injuries, but never murder. Sam looked nearly as surprised as everyone else. He stared at Danny’s body with confusion. There was a line of Danny’s blood across Sam’s face, like a drizzle of chocolate syrup over a scoop of ice cream.
    Sam’s gaze moved from Danny to the disturbed crowd, who still struggled to make sense of this. Something switched.
    Sam began to stalk around Danny’s body and stare into the crowd like he was challenging them to meet his eyes.
    “That’s right!” Sam said.
    David moved Will behind him out of instinct.
    “Nobody takes my food! You hear me?”
    Sam panned across the gaping faces until he settled on David. He held his stare.
    “Nobody!”
     
     
     
    “This is all your fault,” Will shouted at David as they ran. Five members of Varsity chased Will and David through a dirty, cluttered hallway. David ran by a crying boy who threw a brick into the last functioning ceiling light above him. The fluorescent tube burst into a puff of glass powder, and that section of hallway went black.
    “It’s ’cause of your bullshit.”
    “Shut up!” David said.
    David yanked Will into a girls’ bathroom by the collar of his shirt. Inside, three girls crowded around a fourth who was sitting in a desk chair and had her head tilted