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Matt

THOSE WHO WEREN’T TRYING to flee the gym were staring at Matt, Gabby, and Addie.

Still holding the Colt on them, Rodney Campos had this shit-eating grin on his face. “I gotta admit, if you’re going to step in it and end things the hard way, there are worse places to be than between these two.”

Gabby spit up at him. “Fuck you.”

She went for his face but came up short; it smacked across the knee of his jeans. That only drew a bigger smile from him. “Spicy till the end, like any good Mexican.”

When Gabby lunged, Eli McCormick held her back. He shoved her back down to her knees and kept her there until she stopped squirming. Long enough for Stu Peterson to point his shotgun at her. “I gotta envy your spunk, but judgment is judgment. You made your bed. Don’t matter how ruffled the sheets are, you gotta lie in it.” He pulled back on the slide and chambered a fresh shell. “Time to pay the piper.”

Matt turned to him. “You killed four children. Four innocent children. You said you were sorry for that. Was that bullshit, or did you mean it?”

At first, Peterson didn’t move, then he edged the shotgun slightly to the side so he could get a better look at Matt. “So you did watch it? The video?”

“Birmingham, Alabama,” Matt told him. “September 15, 1963. Four children dead in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. KKK suspected. That was you. Don’t ask me how, but it was you.”

Peterson swallowed; guilt washed across his face. “Herman told us the bombs wouldn’t go off until that night, when the church was empty. He swore it. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. We only wanted to scare ’em a little, that was all.”

“Sunday school was in session. You killed four children between the ages of eleven and fourteen.”

“Herman said—”

“Stu, you knew exactly when those bombs would go off. You can lie to yourself all you want, but you knew then just like you know it now. You did it anyway.”

“I didn’t set ’em off. I just placed ’em. I—”

“You knew.”

Matt jerked his head toward the girl who looked a lot like Emily Pridham. “Go ahead, touch him . If you think you got some right to pass judgment on all of us, give him what he’s got coming, too. Why should he get a pass?”

She processed all of this without any hesitation, as if her brain were working on a level far beyond the rest of them. She stepped toward Stu Peterson, but he jerked away.

“That’s not the deal! That ain’t how this works!”

“Maybe he’s right, Stu,” Rodney said. “Maybe it’s time you get yours. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of things from here.”

He’d shifted the barrel of the Colt; although it wasn’t pointing directly at Peterson, he’d edged it closer. He smirked at the girl who looked like Emily Pridham. “What do you say? Maybe you and I finish this? I think you’ll find I’m a little easier to work with. Maybe we can come to some kind of understanding, and you give me a pass this round?”

Stu Peterson’s face grew bright red. “We’ve all got our station, Rodney. There ain’t no changing. There’s only the same. Over and over, the same.”

Rodney shrugged. “Maybe we make up some new rules. Feel it out as we go.”

Eli McCormick rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Rodney, just once can you play by the rules? Why you always got to muck things up?”

Rodney rolled the Colt toward him, but not before McCormick managed to fire, putting two in Rodney’s chest.

Confusion washed over Rodney’s face as he looked down at growing red spots in his shirt, then his legs buckled and he collapsed.

Dead.

Peterson glared at McCormick. “That’s not—”

Matt jumped up.

He gripped the barrel of Peterson’s shotgun and shoved it to the side as Eli McCormick twisted his weapon toward him, thumbing back the hammer.