Generation Dead (6 page)

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forward, getting all of his leg muscles into the launch. Williams was slower but he was coming up to meet the charge.

And he did. Adam was peripherally aware of the game; he noticed things at the edges of his vision, like Gary Greene on his right slipping and missing his block. He noticed that no one was helping Williams against him, something that other teams always did to keep Adam from ripping a hole open in their line.

He also noticed that he only moved Williams back about a foot.

The play ended. Greene's slip let one of the rookies through, and the rookie pressured Denny enough to throw an incomplete pass near the sideline. Adam unlocked from Williams, who turned without a sound and went back to his place on the line.

Holy crow, Adam thought. Williams had gone up against him unassisted, and Adam had barely budged him.

He looked around at his teammates to see if any of them noticed the amazing feat that Williams had just accomplished, but for the most part they were all bone tired and shuffling back to their places on the line. Adam knew that very few of them showed any real promise beyond high school--Mackenzie and Martinsburg were probably the best players besides him--and few had the sort of "field radar" that would allow them to notice the important details of the game.

Adam looked over at Coach, whose chubby face was pink with anger, his eyes narrowed to slits. He was shaking his head in disgust.

But it was what Adam saw beyond the coach, out at the

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edge of the woods, that really caught his attention.

There were a few people standing among the trees, watching them practice: three or four of them just standing like statues, watching. Adam might not have noticed them at all if it hadn't been for the big one, a black guy in a T-shirt as gray as the bark of the large oak he stood beside. Adam couldn't see the others well, but he knew from the way that they stood without moving that they were dead.

Out to watch their boy, he thought, but none of them looked familiar. The black guy had to be as big as he was, and there was no way that Adam would have missed him in the halls.

"Layman!" Coach yelled, taking off his cap and slapping it against his thigh for effect, "are you here to play, or what?"

Adam went back to the line. No one else seemed to have noticed the zombies. The living impaired people, he corrected himself. They were creepy, sure, but he couldn't let their presence distract him from the task at hand. He squared up on the line and looked at Williams. Williams looked back at him with unnerving calm.

He believed in knowing his opponents. On the next snap Adam hit him with equal force and again moved him back maybe six inches. There was no way that Williams was going to get through or around him, but Tommy didn't get knocked over like just about everyone else Adam played against, either.

The play ended with a completion. Coach called Adam a little girl and told him to put some effort into it.

Third time's the charm, Adam thought, and this time when

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he hit Williams he shifted his hips in the way he'd learned from Master Griffin. Williams flipped to the side like a gum wrapper caught in a breeze. Denny darted through the Layman-size hole and ran down the field.

Williams was flat on his back. Adam saw light--either that of the harvest moon above or from the stadium lights-- reflected in his flat eyes.

He offered Williams his hand, and the dead boy took it.

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***

CHAPTER SIX

HE LINES PHOEBE WROTE glowed with a blue electricity on the white page. She read the words a second time and the energy flowed back up through her fingertips. The feeling was something she rarely experienced when writing, despite the pages and pages of notebooks she'd filled. But when it came, the sensation was like the spark of life to her.

She really thought Tommy would not be able to get up from the first bad hit he took. The successive tackles were no less brutal, but up he rose, no worse for wear, that she could see. His resilience seemed to infuriate the tacklers, who pounded and slammed into him with renewed vigor. When he had stopped Pete Martinsburg with an outstretched hand, she had almost started clapping.

She read her poem a third time.

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Harvest moon

Above

The dead boy on the field

Trying to show us

What it means

To be

Alive

If the cheerleaders saw her smiling to herself and thought she was a bizarro, so be it. It was worth it.

Practice ended with a final whistle from Coach Konrathy. She watched as Adam passed by the bleachers. He saw her sitting in the stands and gave her the most imperceptible of waves. She waved back at him like he was a Hollywood celebrity, hoping she'd embarrass him. But if he really had told Whatsername that she was his best friend, there wasn't much else she could do to tweak him.

Phoebe looked for Tommy and saw him standing at the far edge of the players as they moved in a loose knot toward the locker room. Slower than most, he trailed farther and farther until he was a good five paces behind even Thorny Harrowwood, who was limping along after spending the previous hour being pounded into the turf like a tent spike.

Then Tommy stopped, turned, and began walking in the opposite direction, toward the parking lot.

Or, Phoebe thought, toward the woods beyond the parking lot.

Sudden impulse, perhaps the electric spark pumping

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through her blood, brought her to her feet after tearing the sheet of poetry out of her notebook and folding it into a small fringed square. Her book, pen, and iPod went into her bag, and then she was moving.

The sounds of her heels were like gunshots on the bleachers as she ran down to follow Tommy across the field.

"Get in here, Layman!" Coach Konrathy yelled, waving him over to his office door. Adam sighed, thinking that it would have been nice to have gotten more of his gear off than his helmet.

He gave Martinsburg a cold look as he passed, but Pete stared back without flinching.

Konrathy slammed the door. "What have you been doing all summer? Playing with paper dolls?"

Layman breathed deeply. Last year, he probably would have thrown his helmet at the wall if Coach yelled at him that way. There was a locker door that was bent and twisted like a pretzel, wedged so tightly in its frame that it no longer opened. Coach Konrathy had taken Adam out of a game last year for missing a block that led to Denny Mackenzie getting sacked for the first time in the season, so Adam had taken his frustrations out on his locker.

But this was the new-and-improved Adam Layman, he of the zenlike calm. The new-and-improved Adam thought before he struck.

"No, Coach," he said evenly, his pulse and breathing under control. "I was taking karate classes and working out."

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Coach Konrathy threw his hands up in exaggerated disbelief. "Karate? Karate? I thought karate was supposed to make you tougher, not make you into a total wussy."

Adam felt his breathing quicken, but he concentrated and reeled it back in. No, Coach, he thought, karate has nothing to do with making you tougher, it has everything to do with bringing more control, clarity, and focus into your life.

Focus.
When he was ready he answered his coach with a question.

"Is there something wrong with the way I practiced today?"

Coach leaned over the desk so that he was inches away from Adam, close enough that Adam could smell the breath strips that he popped by the dozens during practice.

"You tell me, Layman," he said. "You think there's a problem with your play when you can't even push back a dead kid?"

"I pushed ..."

"You didn't do squat! You're practically a foot taller than he is, and you couldn't do anything but knock him off balance! And you helped him up! What the hell were you thinking? We don't help rookies up until they make the team, you know that!"

Adam summoned Master Griffin's calm but insistent voice in his head.
Focus, Adam. Focus.

"He's hard to move when his feet are planted," he said as evenly as he could. "I think he'd be good on the offensive line."

Konrathy drew back like Adam had spit in his eye.

"You do, do you? How about instead of him joining you on the line, you join him on the list of kids I cut from the team?

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The last thing I need on this team is an attitude problem."

Master Griffin had taught Adam all about
chi
--the life force that centers all beings--in their studies. Focusing on the chi was good for the breathing. It was good for the heartbeat. It was also good to keep Adam from reaching out and squeezing Coach Konrathy by his fat red neck. Despite all this goodness, he couldn't keep his face from flushing.

"I know your grades, Layman," Konrathy said, getting in Adam's face again. "And I know your stepfather. Without football you've got no hope of getting into or paying for college."

He let his words sink in for a moment, and they sunk deep, plunging through the protective calm that Adam was trying to maintain.

"You'd better straighten up and bring your 'A' game to next practice, Layman," Konrathy said. "Now get out of my office."

There were things that Adam wanted to say and do, but he didn't. Coach was right. Without football he wouldn't be going anywhere; he'd end up staying in Oakvale all his life, working at his stepfather's garage, lifting tires and handing wrenches to his stepbrothers. Oakvale might have an "all-inclusive" approach to their team sports, meaning that they didn't cut kids from the team--but Adam could not take the risk. Excessive bench time would ruin his chances of a pro career.

Stavis snickered as he walked by to his locker. Stavis was another guy destined to be an Oakvale lifer, and if Adam didn't make it to college he'd be stuck here changing oil and replacing brakes for knuckleheads like him for the rest of his life.

He thought he'd rather be dead than live in a future like

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that. Dead without returning. Not like the Williams kid.
Permanently
dead.

His old locker, the one he'd smashed last year, was next to his new locker. He wanted it that way so that he would have a constant reminder of who he'd been and who he was trying to be. He breathed in stages, and his fists unclenched without him being aware of it.

I didn't think the living impaired were supposed to be able to move so fast, Phoebe thought as she walked through the muddy field. Her boots, as shiny and slick as they looked, weren't helping, either.

There was an economy of purpose to Tommy's movements, like he was walking the straightest line possible from his last position on the field toward his destination. His path would take him directly into the woods that surrounded Oxoboxo Lake. Phoebe's grip on local topography wasn't great, but she knew that somewhere on the other side of those woods was her house. Tommy's as well, somewhere a little farther along their bus route.

Tommy moved between two parked cars and reached the short band of grass before the tree line just as Phoebe made it to the track at the edge of the football field. She closed the distance somewhat, but she wasn't going to catch up to him before he entered the woods, as she had hoped.

The only hesitation in Tommy's purposeful stride was when he removed his helmet before stepping into the trees. The light of the harvest moon shone on his silvery blond hair in the moment before the darkness swallowed him.

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Phoebe's breath preceded her, puffs of vapor like spirits dancing in the light of the moon. It wasn't until she was in the woods and the moonlight had disappeared that she paused long enough to think about what she was doing.

The cover of Oxoboxo woods was nearly total; the canopy of leaves above was like an impenetrable shield against the moonlight.

What on earth am I doing? she thought. Even before dead kids began coming back to life, the Oxoboxo woods was a place of mystery and strangeness, a place where ghosts stories were set and told, stories that had preceded the town and the Europeans who eventually settled there.

But she knew what she was doing, deep down. Tommy Williams was in her head, his white, angular face, the ghost of a smile on his lips, and a pale light in his slate-blue eyes. She knew he would stay there until she summoned the courage to talk to him. And then ...?

Phoebe looked over her shoulder, back at the pale parking lot lights visible through the trees. Adam would be looking for her soon, right after he showered and changed. He wouldn't want to be standing around his stepdad's truck, wondering where the heck she was. And if he was too late, the STD would probably flip out like he usually did and ground Adam for the next month of weekends, and it would be her fault.

She looked into the dark shapes of the woods ahead. She could see the vague, grayish outlines of trees now that her eyes had adjusted to the lack of light. She counted fifteen steps and then stopped. The woods were so thick even here at the