We are thrilled to share an exclusive extract from the electric new thriller I Will Ruin You by Sunday Times bestselling author Linwood Barclay.
ONE
Richard
I was steering my students through a discussion on morality and hope in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, getting bogged down in a debate over whether the reader needed to know what had brought about the apocalyptic conditions depicted in the book, when I happened to glance out the window and see, running across the staff parking lot, a young man wearing a vest that appeared to be loaded with sticks of dynamite.
“I just want to know what caused it,” Eldon Delton had said just moments earlier. He was one of the brightest eleventh-grade kids in the entire school, but definitely a literalist. This English class wasn’t his favorite—his passions were science and computers, and in all likelihood he’d one day be the next Bill Gates—because it was all subjective. There weren’t always right and wrong answers. You couldn’t break the story down into zeros and ones. The same book could be fantastic to one person and a pile of crap to another, and that didn’t sit well with Eldon. He liked absolutes.
He continued. “Did life on earth end because of an asteroid? Was there a nuclear bomb? Vampires? Zombies? He never says.”
“Oh God, Elmo, not zombies,” said Olivia Comber, two aisles over, demonstrating what a huge favor Eldon’s parents did him giving him a name that could be twisted into a puppet’s. “If it was zombies they’d still be running around trying to eat people. They wouldn’t just disappear. And not everything has to be The Walking Dead or The Last of Us.”
“I was only saying, as an example,” Eldon said.
I stepped in, waving the tattered paperback of the novel in my hand. The book wasn’t part of the official curriculum. Most everything board-approved was out-of-date or so stripped of anything contentious that you couldn’t engage the kids. If I could get away with the late McCarthy’s The Road, I’d move on to Toni Morrison. I’d gathered up as many weathered copies from used bookshops as I could find. Some of the kids read online editions they’d either bought, or borrowed through the library.
I said, “I get Eldon’s point. When they made this into a movie, they provided an explanation, and we can debate whether that was necessary. But I don’t think McCarthy believed it mattered why it happened. What mattered was that it did. He wanted to explore what happens after, to explore what limits people would go to in order to survive when civilization collapses.”
“Like eating people,” said Andrew, who visibly shuddered. “That part really freaked me out. The cannibals. And that scene with the baby.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be such a wuss,” Eldon said.
“Hey,” I said sharply, giving him a look. Everyone was supposed to be able to express their feelings in this class without being judged. And Andrew Kanin could be a convenient target.
He was on the small side for a fifteen-year-old. I kept hoping he’d hit a growth spurt that would make him less of a potential target for bullies, or even smart-asses like Eldon. He was sensitive, bright, and several years of homeschooling had left him, at least in my judgment, ill-prepared for social interactions with the other kids, but his math and reading skills were top-notch. Full marks to his mom, who had been his teacher until tough economic times sent her back into the workforce.
“The cannibal stuff is no worse than lots of other things in books and TV,” Eldon said defensively.
“Should McCarthy have left that out?” I asked Andrew.
He considered the question. “No, I’m not saying that. It made me sick to read it, but it’s the thing I most remember, so I guess that means it worked.”
“I think it’s a love story,” said Emma Katzenback, who had, amazingly, decided to look up from her phone for a second. She had it down in her lap where she thought it would somehow escape my notice.
“There’s no love story,” said Eldon, rolling his eyes.
“Not that kind of love story,” she shot back. “It’s a father-son love story.”
“Emma’s on to something,” I said, and it was then that something outside caught my eye.
A man—for a brief moment I thought he was in his mid-teens, but looking at him for a full second persuaded me he was probably as old as twenty—was crossing the parking lot, running between geography teacher Nancy Holcomb’s green Hyundai and the three-year-old Lexus SUV that belonged to our principal, Trent Wakely.
He was decked out in camo pants, unlaced combat boots, and an olive-green vest with multiple pockets. Tucked into them, vertically, were items that looked like thick cigars, but cigars weren’t generally flat red in color. I was certainly no demolitions expert, but I’d seen enough movies and TV shows to know what dynamite looked like.
The man was striding toward the school’s west end, but only one arm was moving back and forth. His right hand was held close to his body, in a fist, as though he had it wrapped around something.
The first thing I thought of was the set of double doors our visitor was probably headed for. They often did not latch properly. Students, and even some staff, were known to prop them open with a brown rubber doorstop or wood shim so they could sneak outside for a smoke and still be able to get back into the building.
None of my students had looked out the window and noticed him. Barely two seconds had gone by since I’d responded to Emma’s comment.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Marian Gilchrist, who always took a seat right at the front of the class, not so much because she was particularly studious, but because she wore glasses thicker than hockey rink ice.
I said, as calmly as I could, but unable to keep the edge out of my voice, “I’m going to the office. Eldon, close the shades. Marian, you lock the door behind me, block it with as many desks as you can.”
The kids blinked, glanced at each other. A couple of them were forming questions.
“What’s going—”
“Why—”
“Now,” I said, and because Emma already had a phone secreted in her hand, I pointed and said firmly, “Emma, nine-one-one.”
She looked at me blankly, as though asking what it was she was supposed to say when her 911 call was answered.
“Armed intruder,” I said. There wasn’t time for specifics. And then I bolted from the room, slamming the door shut behind me, trusting the kids would do as I’d said and start building a barricade. Not a bad plan to keep a gunman out of the room, but would it be enough to save them from an explosion?
The west-end doors were at the far end of the corridor, which in the fifteen-plus years I had worked at Lodge High School here in Milford had never looked longer. The hallway was a mile-long tunnel stretching out in front of me. I needed to get to those doors before that man with the explosives strapped to his body.
I ran flat-out, shouting as I went.
“Lockdown! Lockdown!”
I sped past classroom doors, open and closed, lessons underway. Jerry Hillier, door open, droning on in front of his calculus class. The students in Rhonda Flynn’s chemistry class, visible behind the door window, conducting God knows what kind of experiments. Social studies teacher Preston Hindle, visible for a millisecond through the small pane of glass, no doubt trying his hardest to turn his kids into well-rounded citizens.
I heard doors closing behind me. We’d done the drills. You think it will never happen but know it might. And yet, despite that, no one had fixed that fucking door. Par for the course for our caretaker, Ronny Grant.
Not everyone remembered our emergency procedures. Instead of closing her door, Rhonda stepped out into the hall and called out after me: “Is this for real or just a prac—”
Somewhere, someone wiser shouted: “Get inside!”
My route took me past the office. As I flew by I caught a glimpse of our principal, Trent, and shouted, “Lockdown!” one more time.
The double doors, with a steel pillar in the center, were thirty feet away. From this distance, they didn’t appear to line up, which told me the door on the right was not securely latched.
Shit.
Twenty feet away.
And then, suddenly, there he was, in the window of the right door. Pulling it open wide with his left hand, his right hand still clenched around something, and stepping into the school.
I hit the brakes. We were practically face-to-face. It’s possible I startled him as much as he scared me. He clearly wasn’t expecting to encounter anyone, what with classes in session.
I said, “Stop.”
He looked at me and blinked a couple of times. And that was when it hit me.
I know you.
I struggled for a second to come up with a name. “Mark,” I said.
“Hey, Mr. B.,” he said. It was what most of the kids called me. Short for Mr. Boyle.
Mark LeDrew. He’d been in a couple of my classes when he attended Lodge. First time was way back in ninth grade, an English class, then in senior year, an American literature course he never read a single book for. He was a kind of benign fuckup, the kid who never remembered to bring a pen to an exam, who forgot to double-check that his locker was actually locked.
It had to be three or four years since he’d left. I wasn’t even sure he’d earned a diploma, so it was unlikely he’d gone off to UConn or Yale. A tech school, maybe. Or, judging by his garb, he’d been living in the Michigan woods with a survivalist cult intent on overthrowing the government.
Firmly, and calmly, I said, “You have to leave the school, Mark. You can’t come in here.”
He swallowed. His eyes danced.
“I got something to do,” he said.
“No.”
The half-open door had come to rest on his back. He’d tucked his free hand into his pocket, an oddly casual gesture considering the circumstances.
I kept looking at his right fist held close to his body. His thumb was holding something down. I could make out the edge of what appeared to be a red button. My guess was, a wire led from that to the four sticks of dynamite tucked into the front of his vest. Two on his right side, two on his left. And if he let up pressure on that button, they would detonate.
“I’ve got a list,” Mark said.
His head bobbed up and down ever so slightly, like his brain was keeping time to some unseen rhythm.
“A list?”
“I know who I have to get.” He appeared to be thinking, strategizing. “Need to get them in one room together. I can only do this once.”
I understood. You didn’t get a second chance to lift your thumb off that button.
“Who do you have to get, Mark?”
“That wicked Willow, fat Sally, and the fucking lawnmower man most of all.”
I was guessing he meant Herb Willow and maybe Sally Berwick, a guidance counselor. The “lawnmower man” reference made no sense to me, other than being the title to a horror movie or two.
Herb was a longtime staff member. Taught, among other things, physics and computer science, oversaw the school’s chess club, which had been dead for years but came back to life after that Netflix series made chess cool again. I’d seen Herb in the staff room this morning, but tended not to engage. Any conversation with Herb meant listening to his latest list of grievances.
“Mark,” I said calmly, “you can’t come in here. You’re a threat to others, and especially to yourself. It’s against the rules.” Like you had to tell someone that strapping dynamite to your body was not allowed.
Mark slowly shook his head.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Mr. B., or anybody else, but I will if I have to. Maybe you can help. Get everyone together in one room. Then you can leave and evacuate the school. Might get messy.”
“What I’ll do is arrange a meeting,” I said, “but without that.” I nodded at his dynamite vest. “Don’t want anyone getting hurt, especially you, Mark. What you’ve got rigged up there, it’s kind of game over for everyone, yourself included.”
Was I getting through at all? He seemed to be looking right through me.
“We get that shit off you, then we’ll have a sit-down. I promise.”
It was not a promise I likely could keep. If Mark didn’t blow us up, didn’t kill Herb or me or any of the other staff or students, he’d be arrested faster than kids fleeing a classroom when the bell rang.
“But first we need to get the right people here, deactivate that.”
“They ruined my life,” he said. “Mr. Willow, the perv.”
Was that one person, or two? What I did know was, Herb Willow was my least favorite colleague. Grumpy, lazy, irritable. Griping endlessly about thick-as-a-brick students, clueless parents, and an out-of-touch administration. One time he wanted an inquiry into who wasn’t rinsing out the coffee cups. He should have walked away from the profession years ago but hung on, I believed, out of pure meanness. I could recall Trent, in brief moments of unprofessionalism, expressing a desire to be rid of him.
“Mark,” I said gently, “this button you’re holding. You let go of that, and the dynamite goes off, right?”
“You catch on fast.”
“Is there a delay? If you let go, do we have time to get the vest off you, throw it out into the yard?”
“A couple seconds maybe,” he said.
“Can you break the connection? You let go and nothing happens? Is there, like, a wire I can cut or anything?”
“Not really.”
I wondered whether I should just run. Try to make it around the corner, down another hall. Get some shielding from the blast.
“So just talk to me. Tell me why you want to do this.”
“Mr. Willow said I couldn’t find my ass in a dark room.”
“Mr. Willow doesn’t know shit,” I said.
I sensed something going on behind me but was afraid to look over my shoulder for fear Mark would notice. Maybe the cops were here, although I’d heard no sirens, no soft footsteps of a SWAT team coming from some other direction. If there was one, I hoped to God they’d see what we were up against before someone took a shot.
“I got to where I believed him,” Mark said. “I’ve been a fuckup since I left here. So I want to tell him he was right. That he called it. Made it happen. Said I had a head full of porridge. Said he had pieces of wood in his garage smarter than me.”
I felt a rage boiling up inside me for Herb Willow.
“Don’t let one asshole bring you down,” I said, trying not to look at the dynamite but directly into Mark’s eyes.
I thought about Bonnie. I wondered how long it would be before word of what was happening here would spread across town to the school where my wife was a principal. I imagined her running out to her car now. I thought about Rachel and how much I loved her. Wondered whether I would ever see my daughter again.
Love.
“There are people who love you, Mark. You might not think so right now, but I’d bet everything I’ve got on it. Your friends, your parents, your—”
That brought a reaction. A small laugh.
“Yeah, like they give a fuck,” he said. “ ’Specially my dad.”
Then I had a memory about Mark.
“You remember Lydia?” I asked. “Lydia Trimble?”
An oddball, Lodge High’s Carrie. An outcast from a poor family. Withdrawn, dressed in hand-me-downs, a target for adolescent tormentors. A couple of tall boys cornered Lydia one day, dangling her backpack in the air where she couldn’t reach it, telling her to jump for it.
I was set to intervene when Mark LeDrew beat me to it, grabbing one of Lydia’s tormentors by the hair and bashing his head into a locker almost hard enough to knock him out, then turning to the other asshole and telling him to return Lydia’s backpack to her.
Eyes wide with fear, he did so.
But Mark wasn’t done. “Tell her you’re sorry.”
“Sorry,” the guy had mumbled.
And then, a second demand. “Tell her she looks really nice today.”
While his friend was still massaging his head, the kid said, “You look nice today.”
“Now fuck off,” Mark said, and the two assholes took off.
I related the story. Mark nodded, remembering. “I thought you were going to expel me.”
I’d forgotten the part where he realized I’d witnessed the altercation. All I’d done was mouth the word Go and let him get away with it.
“That’s who you are,” I told Mark. “You’re that guy who stood up for Lydia. Not some guy ready to blow up the school and himself. Be that other guy.”
I don’t know that I’d ever seen such sadness in someone’s face. If it weren’t for his dynamite vest, I would have taken him into my arms, hugged him. His eyes, which only a moment earlier seemed vacant, now glistened, as though he were about to cry.
He took his left hand from his pocket and wiped away a tear from his left cheek. There was a second one trickling down his right cheek. I hoped he didn’t reflexively wipe it away with his right hand, taking his thumb off the button in the process.
“Mark.”
He looked away.
“Mark, listen to me. Look at me.”
He did.
“I want you to walk out into the middle of the yard. Away from the building and the cars. And I’m going to call the police and tell them to get their bomb disposal guys here so they can get that thing off you safely. Hear what I’m saying?”
There was something in his eyes. He was really looking at me, for once. His chin started to quiver.
“I don’t think I know how to stop it,” he said.
“That’s why we’re going to call in the experts. You’re gonna let them do their thing. You’re gonna be a hero. You’re going to keep anyone from getting hurt. You just keep your thumb on that button, and when the cavalry get here, they’ll figure it out. But I need you to start moving away from the school now. Are we good?”
A minor nod.
“Great.”
I stepped closer and held the door for him so he didn’t have to push it with his body.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
He turned around. “That way?” he asked, looking out toward the athletic field and the track that ran around it.
“Yeah. One step at a time. Go right out to the middle.”
Mark took one last glance at me over his shoulder and, as he took another step, said, “Okay.”
And that was when his right foot landed on the long lace that was dangling from his left boot and he stumbled forward.
As he headed into his trip, he threw out both hands in front of him, instinctively, to break his fall.
I said, “Oh sh—”
I had half a second to turn away and run before the deafening blast.
I Will Ruin You is out 1st August.
