William couldn’t help but stare; he’d seen Tommy light cigarettes that way.
“Hey, guys,” William said with an easy smile, pointing to the Mitsubishi Lord. “You know you’re double-parked?”
His heart beat triumphantly. That was a cool thing to say, and he’d delivered it perfectly. Eyepatch Girl smirked. Zippo Man let smoke leak from his nostrils. Then he pushed off from the car and drove his gloved fist into William’s solar plexus.
William felt air rush from his lungs. He doubled over and made a hoarse sucking sound. Somebody shoved him hard from behind, and he stumbled over Zippo Man’s outstretched leg. The sidewalk came up fast. The unseen person at his back dug a knee between his shoulder blades and pressed him into the cement. The pressure on his spine made him lie completely still. The message was clear: struggle and pop a vertebra.
His body forced him to gulp oxygen, but he was unable to fill his lungs. He was ashamed of the sounds he was making. A hand gripped him by the hair and pulled his head back so that he was looking straight ahead into a forest of black boots.
He thought of Melissa, a block or two away. Daniel might be close by. But Daniel couldn’t fight twenty people by himself. Probably better that he wasn’t here, or he’d be facedown on the sidewalk too.
If he had Melissa’s smartwatch, he could bring Otto to life with the “go” command. He had a vision of screaming Get ’em, Otto! and everybody cracking up at the kid and his pet car, the crowd losing its collective shit at how dorky that was.
But surely Otto could see that he was in trouble?
Turn on your brights! Blast One Direction! Anything!
Otto remained an impassive silver shell. A harmless parked car.
Eyepatch Girl got down low and placed her phone in front of his face. The video was dark, but there were hints of motion, the camera tracking forward progress. It looked like footage from a deep-sea exploration sub. Then the screen lit up, and William’s heart sank. There was Rainmaker, running for her life, enveloped by the glow of Otto’s headlights. The video was taken from above, some infantry sniper crouched in a window. Rainmaker stumbled. Otto stopped just short of crushing her, and the unseen sniper said Holy shit. Dust swirled. Eyepatch Girl pulled the phone away, and her good eye regarded him.
“Everything you do follows you, William Mackler from Fremont Hills, New York. There’s no such thing as a lack of consequences.”
It struck him that Eli and Rainmaker had really good friends, people who’d wait by his car on some random street in Nashville. What if he’d never come out of the hotel? Would they have hung out by the car all night, smoking cigarettes and revving engines and shooting dice or whatever?
I was the one who saved her life!
He couldn’t speak because the boot in his back was mashing him into the sidewalk. Up close, Eyepatch Girl’s face looked like it had been splashed with molten lava. She lingered for a moment, letting her words sink in. Then she stood up. He watched her boots join the others. The weight on his spine shifted. Something cold and metallic pressed against the back of his head.
There was a voice in his ear: “Double tap, bitch.” Somebody snickered.
William managed to choke out words. “Go ahead.”
Stillness. The guy probably expected begging, crying, pleading. Anything but Go ahead. The cold steel vanished and the boot eased up.
He waited to hear the grating rumble of street-racer engines, then he sat up. Porsche, Audi, and Corvette disappeared down the block, unmuffled combustion lingering in his aching gut. The Lord prowled the street, creeping slowly past Otto before gunning its engine. Even now, there was something gorgeous about the resonance of a twin turbo. The hot tang of scorched asphalt settled over the street. William took a few shallow breaths and glared at Otto.
“Thanks for the help back there, buddy.”
Otto’s window slid down. Music was playing inside the car. A spiky guitar lick ushered in Morrissey’s baritone lilt.
William, it was really nothing.
Ninth-grade modified tryouts. Smell of fresh basketballs, squeak of high-tops on the buffed gym floor. Even as a seventh grader, Daniel knew most of the other guys. Their faces took on babyish dimensions that tugged at his heart. There was Kevin “Hangman” Howe, who already looked like he’d started shaving and was a lock for power forward. Beside him as always was Kevin “Crane Kick” Olmstead, the freakishly tall Second Kevin who’d probably be the starting center even if he didn’t possess so-so motor control and ability. Daniel had been comfortable among the shoo-ins for the starting five. Not a bad year, seventh grade.
He drifted through shootaround, warm-ups, layup drills; hovered like a roving eye above the half-court scrimmage, weaving in and out of man-to-man coverage. He remembered how determined he was to be ferocious and not come across like someone who practiced jump shots in his driveway by himself for hours without ever learning to mix it up in a game. A long three won him a Nice shot, Benson, from Coach Quinn, who had a face like a scrubbed and fleshy Muppet.
Against the gym wall, folded bleachers loomed. In their resting state, the bleachers formed a massive block of wood like some fallen rustic signal tower. They cast a long shadow that advanced across the court as the scrimmage wore on into the afternoon.
But that was all wrong! The gym was a huge windowless box of a room, forever untouched by natural light.
Daniel tried to run from what was coming, but the unreal shadow of the bleachers crept across that first day of tryouts, and he knew the Dread Army had discovered an unguarded tunnel. The shadow mutated and slid across the gym like a curtain and ushered in a new setting: the locker room.
His privacy shroud
