Sugar & Squall by J. Round Read Free Book Online Page A

stepping into the hall and swinging for their head with all my might.

4. HYPOXIC CONVULSION
    The force I mustered up surprised me. Thankfully, he ducked just in time. His hair rippled as the hockey stick moved over it, colliding with the wall in a sickening crack.
    I realized who it was. I was on auto-pilot, though, and even while he was reeling back, almost tripping over his own legs to get away, I’d swung again with just as much force, clipping his ear in the process.
    “Wait, wait, wait,” Logan said, crouching, his arms outstretched wide in the universal sign of surrender. I must have looked all out of strike, because he brought his hand up to his ear, wincing.
    “Ah, Kat?”
    He knew my name. Strange. I found my voice.
    “How do you know my name?
    I lowered the stick and he got to his feet, looking just as surprised as me.
    “Pre-calc , remember? The roll call?”
    Right, the roll call. Good one.
    “What are you doing?” I questioned.
    “I could ask you the same thing. This is the boys’ dorm, you know.”
    He was dressed in black track-pants and a blue T-shirt that was, to my well-trained eye, maybe a size or two small.
    “Where’s everyone else?”
    He shook his head. “No idea. I woke up and they were gone. Are they in the hall?”
    “Nope,” I replied, still holding the hockey stick. “I’ve looked everywhere. There’s no one else here.”
    He was flicking his ear, probably testing it for feeling after I’d practically split it in two. I backed off. “Shit. Sorry about that. Logan, right?”
    “Right, and it’s fine. I would have done the same. You’re saying you can’t find anyone?”
    “Yeah, sorry.” It was all I could manage. Truth be told, I was nervous in his presence. He must have thought I was mental.
    “There has to be some kind of explanation,” he said, peering down the hall behind me. He stepped closer. “I didn’t expect it to be you.”
    I got defensive. “Me? What do you mean?”
    He paused, awkward. “Well, you’re new, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Me too.
    I shrugged. I didn’t really know how to take him. It’s like he was annoyed we’d stumbled across each other.
    “Look, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but let’s just look around, okay?” I suggested.
    “ Sounds like a plan.”
    I nodded , and if my heart had of been running in my chest before, now it was sprinting, half with caution and half with the thought of spending time with him – regardless of whether he wanted to or not.
    Caution won out . After all, it said, what do you really know about this guy, and why are you so fixated on him anyhow? My skin crawled at the thought of Xavier and the night before.
    Together, we scouted the rest of the school. Logan tried to make conversation. Occasionally I nodded or answered back with as few words as possible.
    He did have some interesting observations. For example, the electricity was still on. The school’s power came from a series of generators behind the main building. The ferry brought fuel each weekend for them, so the power would be on for at least another week. How he knew all this, I didn’t know, and dared not ask.
    The weekend was four days away, and thus the ferry. At least that was a certainty. He’d asked me on the way where I’d been this morning. I’d lied and said I was in bed as well. The truth was too embarrassing. I was hardly in the mood for relaying how I decided to run out in the middle of the night only to ge t drugged and wake up with a mouth full of sand.
    It took us almost into the late afternoon to check the classrooms – door by door, one by one. We were now up to the top floor of the middle building.
    “There’s an office or two up here, a bunch of storage rooms, the library and the admin office,” Logan said, pointing off to the left and right. I’d let him take the lead. There was something driving him on, like he couldn’t wait to find everyone and be free of me. My legs were lead beneath me, but he just