He heard the crunch of gravel behind him. Brad and his crew had rounded the corner.
But before Leon could even turn his head, the compound itself seemed to stop him cold, and for a second he simply stared, because the stories from the cafeteria had not prepared him for the real thing. The garage was bigger than he remembered, its walls patched with sheets of steel that had been welded on over the years, its roofline bristling with vents and antennae. The blacked-out windows gave back no reflection at all, just a flat, light-swallowing dark, and the cameras at the corners moved with a slow, deliberate sweep, pausing at the ends of their arcs as if they were thinking. The winged death's head on the steel doors was painted in careful, almost loving detail, each feather of the wings picked out in white against the red, and above it the lettering arched like a warning and a boast at once. Leon had heard boys at school claim they had seen men go into that building and never come out. He had heard girls whisper that the police would not go near it without three cars. He had heard a sixth-grader swear that the men inside kept a dog the size of a pony and fed it things he did not want to name. Standing there with his lip bleeding and his breath tearing in his chest, Leon believed all of it and none of it at once, because fear makes everything true and nothing true at the same time.
Dead end, freak. Brad sneered, cracking his knuckles as he advanced, one slow step at a time, the way a boy does when he knows the chase is over and wants to enjoy the last few seconds of it. Kevin and Tyler spread out, blocking the alleyway exit, their faces flushed and grinning. There was nowhere left to run. There was only the fence, and the razor wire, and the compound behind it, and the three boys between Leon and the way back.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced Leon's chest. He looked at the bullies, then looked at the terrifying compound. His mind, which had been nothing but noise and breath and feet for the last ten minutes, did something strange: it went very quiet, and in the quiet he noticed something. To his left, where the heavy chain-link fence met the brick wall of the neighboring warehouse, the earth had eroded slightly. Rain and time had worn a hollow under the bottom of the fence, a shallow scoop in the dirt where water had run, season after season, carrying the soil away grain by grain. It left a narrow, dark gap just wide enough for a scrawny twelve-year-old to squeeze through, a gap that a bigger boy could never have used, a gap that seemed, for one wild second, to have been left there on purpose, as if the ground itself had decided to give him a chance. It was not a door. It was barely a hole. But it was a way through, and the only way through, and Leon understood, in the space of a single heartbeat, what his choice was: certain violence at the hands of boys he knew, or the unknown horrors of the town's most feared men. He thought of Marcus, with his arm in a sling. He thought of the rock skipping past his heels. He thought of Brad's hands, already reaching, and he did not think any further than that, because thinking further would have taken time he did not have.
Survival instinct took over. Leon threw himself to the dirt, scraping his elbows raw on the gravel, tearing his already frayed jeans further at the knee, and wriggled violently under the chain-link fence. The fence pressed down on his back, the diamonds of wire catching at his shirt and dragging across his shoulders. The dirt got into his mouth and his eyes, gritty and bitter, and he could hear his own breathing, harsh and ragged, and the blood pounding in his ears. The razor wire above rattled in protest as the fence shook, a thin, metallic shivering sound that seemed, for a second, louder than his own breathing. Behind him, Brad let out a shout of anger and lunged forward, his fingers grazing the sole of Leon's shoe — Leon felt the brush of it, light as a moth, and then it was gone, because he kicked, hard, and surged forward, and he was through, rolling out the other side with dirt in his hair and his shirt rucked up around his ribs and his whole body trembling so hard he thought his teeth might chatter loose.
He tumbled into the dust on the other side, instantly scrambling to his feet and diving behind a towering stack of empty aluminum beer kegs. The kegs were cool against his back and smelled faintly of old beer and rain. His elbows stung. His knee throbbed where the jeans had torn. His lip was still bleeding, and now his hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold them still. Outside the fence, Brad slammed his fists against the chain link, and the whole fence sang with the impact. "Get back out here, Stanton!" he