Disclaimer: S.E. Hinton owns The Outsiders. Meatloaf owns Bat Out of Hell. I am making no profit from this story.

Chapter 9

"And wherever you are and wherever you go,
There's always gonna be some light . . ."

He wanted to put his hand through the fucking wall. No, what he really wanted was to put it through those guys' faces. Every one of them. Repeatedly.

By the time Chris was done describing his ordeal, he was unsuccessfully fighting back sobs, and Bob was shaking.

Bob gritted his teeth. "I will kill them. I swear to God, Chris, I will find them all and put their fucking heads through the grinder!" He slammed a fist into the dresser, where his fingers then wrapped around a glass knick-knack that met an untimely fate, shattering against the far wall.

Chris, unaccustomed to the sound of profanity, winced at the string of curses his brother spit out.

Bob took a slow breath, clenched his fists, and closed his eyes. I will kill them.

He opened his eyes again to look at Chris, whose face gave away everything he was feeling – fear, shame, humiliation. Bob took one more slow breath to clear his senses and regain control. "I'm sorry. You okay?"

Chris nodded.

"Here, lay down." Bob pulled the covers of Chris' bed back, let his brother crawl under, and set the ice pack on his cheek. "Just keep that there. Okay? Stay here, and keep that on your face for a while. Mom should be home soon. Just pretend you're asleep if she looks in. And when she does see the bruise, tell her you got hit by a ball in gym class. She doesn't need to know about this." More importantly, Bob knew, Chris didn't need to repeat his whole story to a police officer. He'd melt into the floor if he were forced to tell it all again to a stranger. Besides, even if the cops found the guys, they wouldn't do much more than toss them in a cell for a few weeks.

Chris wrapped his hand around Bob's arm. "Are you leaving?"

"Yeah. I'm going out to find those guys."

Panic flitted across Chris' eyes, and he nearly started crying again. "What if they come here? What if -"

"Chris, they don't know where you live. Right? They have no idea who you are." But they'll know who I am, that's for damn sure.

"Don't leave."

Bob tilted his head back and sighed. "I'll tell you what – Frank will stay here. He'll stay here until Mom gets home. Okay?"

Chris considered before nodding. "Don't tell them. Don't tell anybody what those guys did."

A wave of gentle nostalgia replaced Bob's anger for an instant. Chris was still a baby, as far as he was concerned. If Bob had his way, his younger brother would never have to know how horribly cruel the world could be. "Alright," he said, pulling the covers up further. "I won't tell anyone."

Bob left Frank to watch whatever was on TV, and he and Randy picked up David and Charlie before heading up to the north side.

"What's Frank gonna tell your folks when they get home?" Charlie asked.

"That your car broke down and we went to give you a lift from the shop. Chris gave me real good descriptions of these guys," Bob said. "There were three of them."

David leaned forward from the back seat. "What'd these assholes do to him?"

Bob, in the passenger seat because Randy had decided it would be better for Bob to look out for the guys, turned sideways. "They hit him. And they humiliated him." He closed his eyes, wishing the images Chris had put there could be burned away forever from both their minds. "They scared the shit out of him, is what they did." He opened his eyes and turned to his buddies. "And I swear, when we find these guys, we are going to put the fucking fear of God into them."

#

"Hey, man, we'll find them today."

Bob nodded to Randy, who slid his tray onto the lunch table and sat down. "Yeah. We will." They hadn't gotten home until almost midnight the night before, with no luck. He wasn't giving up that easy, though. Bob planned on walking to the ends of the earth to find those greasy bastards if he had to.

"Frank said he can't come today, but he'll be around tomorrow if we need him."

Bob took a sip of his milk and nodded as he stared, unfocused, into the sea of students whose chronic chatter filled the lunchroom with a noise you could hardly even brand as language. He was almost glad they hadn't found them last night. Now, he was focused. Now, it wasn't just raw anger driving him. It'd had time to fester. He could almost see himself tearing through those idiots, splattering their blood and making them cry. He'd even squeezed in some extra time in the weight room, just to get the adrenaline pumping full force.

He twisted the onyx ring on his right hand. It was the first ring his grandfather had ever made. The other two were nice – more ornate, in fact – but this was the one that tied in directly with his memories. Bob could still picture it on his grandpa's great hand, the smooth and steady hand of an artisan.

The stone was smooth as glass, but the metal edges were crisp, and the corners sharp. Bob had wondered about that ring many times – what Grandpa had been thinking about when he made it; whether it meant more to him than all the other jewelry he'd crafted afterward; whether he, like Bob, had stared at it when he was bored, catching the sunrays and watching the blackness inside light up like a rainbow. Now, Bob had a new question running through his head as he stared at that ring.

Had Grandpa ever ripped somebody's face apart with it?

#

They'd all cut their last two class periods to get an early start. Chances were, the guys who had harassed Chris weren't in school, anyway.

That had been three hours ago.

"How about them?" Frank asked, pointing.

Bob scanned the group of greasers who stood, smoking, watching the mustang with wary eyes as it slowed and passed by. "No. It's not them." He could almost picture two of them, just from Chris' detailed descriptions. Their jackets were important. It wasn't like they'd have a stockpile of jackets at home to choose from, or that they'd be sharing their outerwear with each other. He knew he'd recognize them when he saw them.

"You know," David said in a hesitant voice, "it's getting kind of late. Close to dinnertime."

Bob pounded a fist sideways into the door, prompting instant silence from everyone in the car. We will not stop until we find them, he wanted to say. Chris did not deserve to be hurt the way they hurt him. This is not something he can ever go back from.

But Chris was his brother, and his friends had already put aside their lives to help him out. How much was he supposed to ask of them? Were they supposed to drive around for weeks, searching for three specific greasers on the streets of the city? What were the odds?

Bob leaned his head back and sighed. "Just find one. Any one. Next greaser we come across is gonna be our example, so we'd better make it count, boys. These people will learn that it is a bad idea to mess with us."

#

As luck would have it, the next greaser they came across was alone. Bob would have preferred if there had been two of them, just to make the point stick more, but one was good enough.

The kid didn't realize at first that they were trailing them. He cut across the street and stepped into an abandoned lot.

"What's he looking for?" Randy asked.

The kid was kicking around in the grass, bending over every so often for a closer look and then moving on.

"Maybe this is where he hunts for his dinner," Charlie suggested.

David laughed. "Rats 'n snakes."

"Enough," Bob said. "This isn't a goddamned joke." He watched the kid for another few seconds as Randy inched the car forward. "Let's go. Before he finds his gun or whatever the hell he stashed here."

Randy pulled up to the curb just past the kid. The four of them were out of the car and surrounding him before he had a chance to run.

"Taking a walk?" Bob asked, picking a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Adrenaline surged through him, along with thoughts of Chris crying into his hands, face bruised and trust shattered. Bob smiled. He never felt more focused, and the world never looked more vivid, than just before he got into a fight. As counterintuitive as it was, he never felt so calm.

The kid, dark hair hanging almost to his eyes, put his hands in his jacket pockets and didn't say a word.

"It's a nice afternoon for a walk. David, don't you think it's a nice afternoon for a walk?"

His boys all chuckled. "Yeah," David said. "Nice day for all kinds of things."

The kid wants us to think he's cool as a cucumber, but he's shaking in his boots. Bob pulled a lighter out of his back pocket, lit the cigarette, and took in a lungful of smoke, then blew it out slowly. He had to give the kid credit – he did look tough. If it was just him and that kid in a dark alley, he'd probably be counting the odds even, even with the kid being smaller. He was probably agile. He probably had good instincts. And he'd probably been getting in street fights half his life.

Randy made eye contact and raised his eyebrows, so Bob grinned. "I was thinking, that far end of the lot looks like a fine place for a stroll. What'd you think, Frank? Should we head over there with our little friend and get to know each other better?"

The kid tried to make his getaway at that point. Again, Bob had to give him credit: even scared, he'd figured out who the weak link was. He shot past David, who'd been behind him no less, before Charlie tackled him to the sidewalk and got him in a full nelson. Bob walked over to stand in front of them. "Don't. Do. That." He held his lit cigarette a quarter inch from the kid's cheek and watched his eyes go wide. "Again."

Even after that, the kid put up a struggle. Charlie was way bigger and stronger, but the kid almost got away from him twice. The first time, Charlie just wasn't holding him tight enough. After pulling him down by the arm, David gave the kid a solid punch in the face that sent blood gushing before passing him back to Charlie; but even then, he managed to wriggle out of his denim jacket and almost got away again. Clearly frustrated by that point, Charlie just got mean and held him so tight, with one arm twisted back at an unnatural angle and a chunk of his hair clenched in Charlie's fist, that the kid nearly squealed.

Between the four of them, they managed to manhandle him back across the street and deep into the empty lot. There were enough trees and tall grass so that nobody in the houses across the street should be able to tell what was going on, or hear it – if they even cared that one of their own was getting the crap beat out of him.

Bob pulled out a switchblade, flicked it open, and held the knife over the flame of his lighter. "Remember," he told Randy in a lowered voice as they watched David and Charlie start working the kid over. "The fear of God."