Generation Dead (7 page)

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perimeter that they seemed to swallow sound as well as light. She was aware that there weren't birds or insects making any noise, and how strange that was.

She sighed and stood there a moment, imagining each breath as a piece of her soul, and then imagining each soul fragment rising toward the impervious roof of leaves and seeking a way out to the sky beyond. There was no way she could tell which way Tommy had gone through the forest.

What on earth am I doing? she thought again. A cold wave of fear shuddered through her. She decided that pursuing Tommy through the Oxoboxo woods was a bad idea. She turned around.

And the dead boy reached for her, his pale eyes glowing in the darkness.

Thornton was the only kid left in the locker room while Adam laced up his sneakers. He was standing in front of his locker with a towel around his waist, admiring a huge red bruise that ran the length of his rib cage.

"Wow," the younger boy said, wincing, "I really took a beating today."

"You got up, though," Adam said. "That's the important thing."

"Yeah, I guess I did," Thornton replied, grinning from ear to flapping ear. The poor kid looked like the guy from
Mad
magazine, but without the missing tooth. Adam smiled to himself, thinking that the season was still young. Thornton walked off to the showers whistling, and Adam thought the kid

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wouldn't have been any happier if he'd thrown a hundred dollar bill at him.

With great power,
he thought. The Spiderman clause. Grandmaster Griffin had spent the whole summer drilling that into him, teaching him that being a foot taller and twice as strong as everyone else were not rights, they carried certain responsibilities. He taught Adam that he possessed gifts that could be of great benefit to society or, if abused, could cause great harm to all, including himself.

He was still thinking about that when TC, Pete, and Harris Morgan stopped him in the parking lot.

"Hey, Lurch," Pete said, "where's your zombie friend?"

"I'm not in the mood," he said, waiting for Pete to get out of his way.

"Whose team are you on, big guy?" Pete said, stepping closer instead of aside. "The living or the dead?"

"I play for the Badgers, Martinsburg, same as you. Get out of my way." He looked over his shoulder where his truck was parked but he didn't see Phoebe, which was good. He didn't want her to see this.

And deep down, he knew he didn't want them to see her, either.

"That zombie is coming off the team, one way or another, Layman," Pete said.

Adam was trying to decide if he could take all three of them. TC was the biggest, but Harris and Pete weren't small, and Harris at least was faster than he was. He figured if it came to a head, he should probably try and drop Pete as

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quickly as he could, because then the other two might lose the heart for it. In fact, Morgan didn't look much like he had the heart for it anyway. Adam was willing his body to stay loose when Pete, either sensing where the situation was heading or having made his point, moved out of his way.

Adam moved past him, his eyes not leaving the senior's sneering face as he walked by. He threw his duffel into the bed of the truck from ten feet away.

"Pick a team!" Martinsburg called after him.

Adam got into the cab of the truck and slammed the door. The engine came alive on the third cough of the ignition, and he turned the radio up. He hoped his three teammates would be gone by the time Phoebe showed up.

Phoebe gasped as the dead boy's hand reached out to touch her hair and let the black strands run through his fingers. She was motionless when he brought his hand away and held it in front of her face. He held it close enough so that she could see the leaf he had removed.

Now the only sound was of her breathing. Tommy dropped the leaf, and she watched it hover momentarily before it disappeared in the dark.

"I ... I was following you," she said, instantly regretting speaking. Her whisper reached her ears like a fire alarm in the silent woods. He was living impaired, not a moron. Of course she was following him, why else would he pull the stealth act and sneak up on her? She wondered if his eyes--eyes the color of rain clouds in the dull fluorescent glow of the classroom, but

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reflective, like those of a cat--could register the heat she felt radiating from her cheeks.

"I wanted to talk to you," she told him. "I wanted to tell you that I thought you were brave for doing this. For playing football, I mean."

Tommy didn't say anything, which heightened her embarrassment. He was tall, his shoulders broad. He held his helmet at his side by its face mask. What kind of idiot was she to chase after a living impaired kid anyhow?

Maybe all her common sense had flown away along with her breathing. She was aware, as if from a great distance, of reaching into her pocket and withdrawing the square of notebook paper.

"I also wanted to give you this."

She held the square out to him and watched him regard it with his glowing eyes, his face without expression. There was a moment of agony as he looked at the square without moving, and all Phoebe could think about was the time in seventh grade when Kevin Allieri refused her invitation to a couples' skate at a party in the Winford Rec Center.

But then Tommy reached out and took her poem. She inhaled him when they touched; the smell was like a morning breeze drifting across Oxoboxo Lake.

They stood there without speaking for a minute, each passing second a moment of awkwardness that she felt as acutely as the boys on the field felt their tackles and hits.

"Well," she said, her ears ringing as she was unable to bear the silence any longer, "I've got to go get my ride. Good night."

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He didn't say anything--anything at all. Her eyes were downcast as she turned and started walking toward where she thought the parking lot was. But standing in the forest with Tommy, giving him her poem, it was so surreal, so bizarre that she wouldn't be surprised in the least if the Oxoboxo woods, lake and all, went spinning off the surface of the earth and into the stratosphere. Whatever electrical magic she'd had was now engulfed by a cold inky wave of embarrassment and fear. She was about to collide with a tree when she thought she heard her name.

She turned. All she could see of Tommy was a pale shimmering outline and his eyes, two pale disks of moonlight, about fifteen feet away.

"I think," he said, his voice soft and flat, more like the memory of sound than sound itself, "you are brave, too."

The tiny moons disappeared and she was alone. There was darkness all around her, but it no longer flowed within her. She was smiling when she joined Adam in the warm cab of his stepfather's truck.

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***

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE WEEKEND MOVED ALONG with a tired languor, as though time itself had become living impaired. Phoebe spent long hours sitting on her bed listening to music with her notebook and pen on her lap, writing nothing and talking to no one. Friday night had been confusing in so many ways, but part of her wanted to hold on to that confusion a little longer and analyze it.

Margi called Saturday night, but in typical fashion, the hour of conversation was focused mainly on Margi. Her history report, the show she was watching, the shoes she was planning to wear on Monday, her thoughts on the new Zombicide downloads. Phoebe didn't mind; having a Margi-centric conversation was always entertaining, and it allowed her to not talk about what was on her mind--
Tommy
....

She almost gave herself away when Margi asked her if she

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was able to accomplish much at the library--she'd forgotten her cover story completely.

"Oh, sure," she said, but really she had just drawn some cartoons in her notebook and flipped through a book she found on the Spanish Inquisition.

"That was convincing," Margi said. "You know, I wish I'd let you talk me into staying, because I'm really having the hardest time doing this history report. Of course, Mr. Adam Lame Man probably wouldn't have driven me home. I swear, Phoebe, he has been crushing on you since the third grade."

"I didn't move here until the fourth grade."

"Well, he probably crushed on you in a past life. Do you ever see him roll his eyes when I tag along?"

"That's ridiculous, Margi."

"Yeah, I know. I'm way hotter than you," she said, and then laughed.

Phoebe had long known about Margi's fascination with Adam, who was the first friend Phoebe made when she moved to Oakvale. They'd hit it off because Adam hadn't known any other girls who liked comic books, and she was a better swimmer and Frisbee player than he was. He didn't acquire his size, or "inflate," as Phoebe liked to tease him, until middle school. Then his taste in athletics started to lean toward contact sports--sports that she had no interest in, despite having a decent outside jump shot.

Adam was a year older but had stayed back in the second grade, so now they were both juniors. High school took them down different paths--Adam was one of the popular ones,

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Phoebe drifted on the edges. Neither made a big deal of their friendship at school because the incongruity of it confused their individual circles of friends.

That incongruity, as much as the length of their friendship, was what made it so special. Phoebe still felt that there was no one she would rather play Frisbee or go swimming with in the Oxoboxo.

It was special enough that Phoebe knew neither of them would ruin it with more complicated feelings. She thought Margi was the one who was crushing, but for some reason would never admit it.

"You
are
hotter than me, Margi."

"Right. Is there anything you tell the truth about? You've got the height, the good skin, the cheekbones. What have I got?"

"The wardrobe? And the ..." "Don't say it."

"Well, you do. I think they get more attention than my great cheekbones."

More banter, and then they hung up when Margi's father yelled at her to get off the phone. Phoebe went back to scratching in her notebook.

Adam instant messaged her on Sunday night when she was surfing around looking for the latest news on the living impaired. He asked her if she wanted a ride to school on Monday, which was weird because he never asked that. She typed back
Sure
and punctuated it with a goofy emoticon that was the Weird Sisters' trademark, a round, horned smiley with

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eyelashes, a tail, and tongue wagging moronically out of the side of its open mouth.

Cool
, was his return message, unadorned.
Seven?

Yu
p.

We should play Frisbee sometime
. Then he signed off.

That, she thought, was really weird. The only time they tossed the disk now was when one of them needed someone to talk to. There were things Phoebe couldn't talk to Margi about, and there were things Adam was reluctant to share with any of his friends on the football team. They were an odd pair--but odd pairs were what kept life interesting.

That sentiment instantly brought Tommy to mind. When she switched off the light she imagined his faintly glowing eyes in the darkness of her room, and this time she had no fear at all.

Adam arrived at her house at seven sharp, the STD's pickup coughing in the driveway while he walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a banana. Phoebe, the last one out, wrote a note for her mother telling her not to hold dinner and then locked the door behind her. "Thanks, Adam. How'd you get the truck?"

"The STD's got Mom's car today," he said. "He brought her into work so he could change the oil. We've got time to get a coffee, if you want."

"I'm okay, but you can get one."

He shrugged. "I like the streaks of red. You do it yourself?"

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Phoebe reflexively touched the spiked tips of her hair and thought of falling leaves. "Of course. Thanks."

"Yer welcome."

He backed the truck out of her driveway and took a left, which meant he was going the long way, around the lake. "Soooo ..." she said, "what's up?"

She now realized how quiet he'd been since Friday. A fair question that night would have been, "Hey, Phoebe, what the heck were you doing in the woods?" But he'd never asked it. He hadn't noticed, and Adam noticed most things around him. She realized she'd been so preoccupied that she hadn't even realized how preoccupied he'd been.

He shrugged again. "Later. I just want to drive around a little."

"Sure, Adam. Driving's good. Smell that clean lake air."

He laughed, and she knew him well enough not to pry it out of him. He would talk to her when he was ready.

The Oxoboxo woods looked different by daylight, and from the outside. She always thought the trees there were set more closely than in other forests, as if they were huddling together to keep secrets from the world outside their sylvan borders. She and her friends had spent a great deal of their young lives in the woods and the lake. The Oxoboxo was a place where one never felt a hundred percent safe, and that was what made being there so exciting.

Exciting, at least, until Colette died there.

"So you never told me how practice was," Phoebe said, turning to look out the windshield. "How was it playing with the corpsicle?"