Generation Dead (3 page)

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back when Adam gave him unwavering loyalty instead of grief.

"Somebody dead."

"Oh," Adam said. He flexed his ankle and decided he didn't like how the lace on his left cleat was tied.

"Oh?" Pete said. "Oh?" He looked over at Stavis and made the universal "I'm dealing with a moron" face. Stavis grinned and shook his head. "That all you've got to say?"

"What am I supposed to say, Pete?"

Pete frowned, because there it was again, that
attitude
.

"You don't care that a dead kid is joining the team?"

"I don't have feelings about it either way."

Pete had a temper, but he was good at riding it, turning it into something useful. He wanted to smack the kid, giant or no. Time was, Pete could have slapped him around and Adam would have taken it. But back then Adam didn't have that muscle tone, and Pete wasn't sure this was the right time to test how solid Adam had become.

"Well, Coach has feelings about it. Big time. I heard him arguing with the Kimchi over it."
Kimchi
was his name for Ms. Kim, the much beloved principal of Oakvale High.

"Really?"

"Yeah. He tried just about everything. Not fair to the other kids, practice season already started, blah blah blah. She wasn't having it."

"Well then," Adam said, getting up, "I guess he plays." Pete rose with him. "Well, I guess we get some say in that."

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Adam waited him out again.

Pete flexed his hand. "Coach wants us to take this dead kid off the board." "He say that?"

"Not in so many words," Pete said, "but his meaning was pretty clear."

Adam nodded. "I'm going to play," he said. "I'm not going in for any assassinations."

"Oh?" Pete said, a wide smile on his face. "Not like last year?

Adam stared back at him, a look of fury burning through his passive mask.

Pete showed his teeth. "Not like with Gino Manetti?"

Adam didn't reply. He gave each lace a final tug and seemed satisfied with the results.

"I don't think we can hang out this year, Pete," he said.

"Just like that, huh?"

"Just like that."

"Did I say something? Are you pissed because I was talking about Scarypants?"

"It isn't so much the things you say, Pete," Adam told him, "it has more to do with what you are."

Pete looked at him and felt the rage constrict his hands into fists.

"What I am," he repeated. "You want to explain that?" Adam picked his helmet off the bench and shouldered past Pete.

Pete called Adam an asshole under his breath, but he

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said it loud enough for just about everyone to hear.

Gino Manetti had been an all-star running back for the Winford Academy Warriors. In a game in which Manetti had already scored three touchdowns on the Badgers, Adam put an end to his season--and his career--with a late and illegal hit to the knee.

Coach Konrathy had ordered the hit.

Not in so many words, Pete thought, shucking his jeans off. But the meaning was clear. He and Stavis had put the hurt on kids before at Konrathy's request; they didn't call themselves the Pain Crew for nothing. But neither had taken somebody out in such a permanent way before.

Pete thought about that kid from Tech he'd knocked unconscious late last season. He'd laughed out loud when he read about the game in the paper the next day and found out the kid had a broken clavicle. The news had him pumped up for days.

Not Adam, though. Adam was never the same person again after hitting that Manetti kid.

"Get back in there, Layman," Coach said, pushing Adam back into the locker room. Pete noticed that if Adam hadn't allowed himself to be moved, Konrathy wouldn't have been able to budge him. Adam had changed.

"I've got an announcement I have to make, and I want the whole team to hear it," Coach said.

"This about the dead kid, Coach?" Stavis said.

"Yes, it's about the dead kid," Coach said, his tone laden with a level of sarcasm he reserved for only the most boneheaded

23

of players. "But you are never, ever to call him a dead kid if he's within earshot, understand? We are required to refer to them as the
living impaired
, okay? Not dead kid. Not
zombie
, or
worm buffet
, or
accursed hellspawn
, either. Living impaired. Repeat after me.
Living impaired
."

Pete watched the other boys in the locker room repeat the term.

"I want you to know that the decision to include this kid--" He took off his Badgers ball cap and ran his hand through his thick, close-cropped hair. "--this
living impaired
kid--has nothing to do with me. I have been ordered to let him on the team. So there it is. He'll be at practice tomorrow. Now hurry up and get your asses on the field."

Pete watched him turn on heel and start back up the stairs.

He didn't want any dirty dead kid in the locker room with him. He didn't want dead kids around him anywhere-- not in school, not in his classes, and not on his football field. He wanted all the dead kids in their graves, where they belonged.

Like Julie.

Maybe if Julie had come back, he thought. Maybe if she'd come back he'd feel differently, and he'd learn to stand them despite their blank staring eyes and their slow, croaking voices. But she didn't come back anywhere except in his dreams. And now, ever since the dead began to rise, when she returned even to that secret place, she came back changed. She wasn't the girl he'd held hands with at the lake, she wasn't the first girl he'd

24

kissed on the edge of the pine woods. She wasn't his first and only love.

She was a monster. She was a monster much like the one that was about to put on pads and a helmet and take the field with him.

25

***

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE STD PUSHED THE PHONE into Adam's chest with the hand that wasn't holding the beer.

"It's some girl," he said.

Adam breathed through his nose, catching the phone before it fell to the floor. There were oil stains on his new T-shirt from where the STD's knuckles pressed against him. Adam watched him walk back into the living room, where Adam's mom sat with one of his stepbrothers, watching sitcoms on Fox. The breathing helped.

"Hello."

"Hi, Adam," Phoebe said, "how was practice?"

Adam kept focusing on his breathing when he heard the STD tell his mom to get him some chips. The chips in the kitchen he'd just left with his second beer. God bless America.

"Adam?"

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"Hey, Pheeble," he said, "sorry. I was just having a domestic moment with the STD." "Oh, I'm sorry."

"Me too. What's up? Practice was grueling. Just got home. I was getting sweaty and sore on a muddy field playing for a man who might have been separated at birth from the STD himself. What are you up to?" His mother walked past him, smiled and patted his shoulder.

"Just listening to music, doing some homework. You know."

"Let me guess: the song playing right now has one of the three following words in its title: sorrowful, rain, or death."

Phoebe laughed, and the sound of her laughter relaxed him enough to stop using Master Griffin's breathing technique. Pete, Gino Manetti, the STD's constant harassment. Her laugh blew it all out the door.

"'The Empty Chambers of My Heart,' by Endless Sorrow, actually."

"I was close," he said.

"Death is always one of your three words, I've noticed."

"I've been right most often with it." Adam liked a lot of the music that Pheeble and Daffy listened to, the faster, more guitar-driven stuff, anyhow. The really heavy goth stuff didn't do much for him other than get him thinking about things he didn't want to think about.

"That's probably true," she said. "Hey, did Tommy Williams practice today?"

"Williams? That's the dead kid, right?"

"Yes, Adam. That's the dead kid."

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"Oh. No. Coach says he's starting tomorrow. He isn't too pleased with the idea."

"Margi said she heard him arguing with Principal Kim about it."

"I've heard that too," Adam said. His stepbrother John's car roared into the driveway. "From Pete."

"Ah, yes. Pete. He's a big fan of the idea, I'm sure?" "Why do you say that?"

"Maybe because I've watched your buddy Pete bully and mock just about everyone outside of you and his little band of cronies ever since he moved here."

"Pete has issues," Adam said. "I don't think we'll be hanging out much this year."

He heard her sigh through the phone, or at least he thought he did. Phoebe seemed awfully interested in this dead kid all of a sudden. Johnny walked in and punched him on the shoulder his mother had just patted. Adam caught him with a slap to the back of the head as he went to join the rest of the not-Laymans watching television.

"Really? Why not?"

"Pete and I are on divergent paths."

"I'm so glad you took karate, Adam." He could hear the smile in her voice.

"Really? Why is that?"

"You're different. Not different, really. But more of who you've always been. I can't explain it."

He thought she'd explained it just right, but didn't say so. "That's good, right?"

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"I think it's great. Maybe now you'll actually be able to acknowledge me in the hallways if you're with one of your little cheerleader snips."

"Don't count on it," he said. "My cheerleader snips have got pretty high standards."

"Except in men," she said, and they laughed. "So, can you drive me tomorrow?"

"Yeah," he said, dropping the volume of his voice. "The STD is letting me use the truck."

"The beat-up brown thing? That's pretty big of him. What happened?"

"Mom's been working on him. I think she pointed out that it was a little unfair for us to have six vehicles and I was the only one who didn't get to drive one."

"Yeah, your yard looks like a used car lot. Or a 'well-used' car lot, as my dad says."

He heard the amused lilt in her voice and he closed his eyes so he could imagine her expression, one green eye peeking out at him beneath a swath of jet-black hair.

"He must be pretty ticked. We're like a bad cliché." He could picture Mr. Kendall arriving home from work and frowning as he looked over from his front steps at this weeks' crop of rehab vehicles littering the driveway and yard.

"He's okay, really. If we ever get ready to move, he'll probably ask the STD to clean things up until the house is sold."

"Don't ever move, Phoebe," he said. "You might be the only sane person I know."

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She laughed. "Then you're in more trouble than I thought. Seven fifteen?"

"It's a date," he said, and hung up. A date. The idea of Phoebe moving left him with a weird feeling, a feeling that had nothing to do with Phoebe being the only sane person in his personal cosmos.

"Layman!" his older and frailer stepbrother, Jimmy, called from the other room. "Get off the flippin' phone! I'm waiting for a call."

"Okay," Adam said, and started his breathing again before heading down the hall to his room.

"About time," Jimmy said, shoulder checking him on his way to the phone. It was pathetic, Adam thought. Jimmy was half his size, but Adam had to pretend that he was intimidated by him to keep the peace in Casa de STD.

Adam lay on his bed and opened
Wuthering Heights
, the first major punishment of the school year, one that he was supposed to have endured over the summer. He closed it again after two paragraphs. There were a lot of things bugging him about his home life and the first week of school, and it took a few moments to identify which one was bothering him at the moment, but then he had it.

Phoebe cared as much about football as he did about the Bronte sisters. What was it about that dead kid?

"Is that a new dress?" Adam asked, observing Phoebe with a scrutiny only a childhood friend could get away with. He forced himself to say something, because if he didn't, he knew

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he'd be sitting there slack-jawed, his eyes goggling at her. The dress went down to her ankles, but somehow accented her gentle curves despite all the fabric. She had on her calf-high boots and a light gray vest, and her jewelry was all silver or silver-colored. He thought she looked like a gothic cowgirl.

Phoebe might dress a little weird, and sometimes she went overboard on the makeup, but there was no disguising how beautiful she was. She had wide hazel-green eyes that were mirthful no matter how funerary her clothing appeared, and her long dark hair softened her somewhat angular features and framed them in a way that made her face look heart-shaped from a distance.

He realized he might be blushing.

Her glance was quizzical, and he hoped she hadn't sensed the growing shift in how he felt about her. There was a hollow feeling in his stomach even though he'd filled it with eggs and sausage not a half hour earlier. The hollow feeling grew when he realized that the new dress probably had more to do with Tommy Williams than it did with him.

"It most certainly is," she said, brushing strands of her long black hair away from her eyes. It was one of his favorite mannerisms. "Thanks for noticing."

"And black, a completely different look for you," he said, taking refuge in the light banter that was as natural as sleep to them.

"Har-har. See, karate has made you more observant, too." "All part of my never-ending quest to be more of the person I always was."