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  “What the hell’s happened to your concentration, Parker?”

  The coach charged forward, a man big enough to make even Rhino look small. An ex-linebacker, he had not let his age overcome his physique; if anything, age had only made him meaner. “Are you staying in training, or are you sneaking out at night?” he bellowed.

  Jonathan flashed his best phony smile. “Staying in training, Coach. Swear to God.”

  Coach Cooper eyed him for several long seconds. Rhino used the opportunity to blend in with the crowd. Jonathan held on to his smile as long as he could, showing mostly teeth. The coach reached for him and Jonathan flinched instinctively; but instead of some assault on his person he felt the coach’s huge arm drape itself around his shoulders.

  “You know what?” the coach asked sweetly.

  Jonathan shrugged. “Depends on what is what, I guess.”

  “You could be one for the record books, Jonathan. You could be one of the big boys, be a star. You came up the hard way, and you’ve got great potential, and the guts to go for it. But you know what else?”

  Jonathan cocked his head to indicate he was listening. The weight of the coach’s arm was becoming heavier by the second. “What?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve got greatness in your blood. I understand that you don’t know who your mother and father were, and that you were adopted.”

  “Put in foster care,” Jonathan said, uneasy with this.

  “Foster care, adopted, put on a doorstep in a wicker basket. The point is, we don’t have the advanced technology to analyze blood to see if there’s something floating around inside called greatness. You have to show the world you’ve got what it takes. You have to concentrate your will on greatness.” His arm fell away, and he stepped back. “See, if you don’t concentrate, if you don’t keep your mind inside your helmet instead of using it to throw kisses to the crowd, you’ll never be great. You look away, and somebody creams your ass for you.”

  Jonathan nodded, still disturbed by the coach’s knowledge of his background. It was true that he had been found wandering and lost thirteen years ago. It was true that the courts had put him in a foster home. But it was also true that it was his business and nobody else’s.

  Coach Cooper’s face softened. “Look, Jonathan, I’m just saying you need to concentrate a little harder, stand above the crowd.” He pointed at the flock of students in the bleachers. “Like that girl over there with no shirt on, poor thing.”

  Jonathan’s head jerked to follow his finger. A moment later a tremendous slap on the helmet sent it thumping to the ground.

  The coach smiled his evil sweet smile. “That’s what I’m talking about. And use your chin strap, for God’s sake.”

  He stalked away. “Won’t happen again, Coach,” Jonathan called after him, knowing it was futile. The coach merely jerked a thumb up, telling Jonathan to get back in the game. Resigned, a bit chagrined, Jonathan picked up his helmet and trotted back to the line of scrimmage. He knew he wouldn’t be embracing the world tonight; all the good and happy feelings were deserting him fast.

  “Same play,” the quarterback shouted. “Parker, cut right like you did last time, only don’t screw it up like you did. Pay attention.”

  Swell, Jonathan thought bitterly as he put his helmet on and snapped it tight. Tell the whole frigging world. He dropped down into stance and found himself eyeing Rhino. “Don’t say anything,” Jonathan muttered. “Just don’t say a word.”

  Rhino responded quickly: “A word.”

  “Told you not to say it.”

  Rhino looked up to the fourth-row bleachers, then back down to Jonathan. “You look like you’ve been up all night screwing.”

  Jonathan snorted. “Just can’t sleep lately.”

  “Maybe if you tried sleeping alone?”

  “Ah, eat shit.”

  “You get more ass than a toilet seat, Jon. Don’t lie to your good buddy Rhino.”

  Jonathan cocked his head to look at Rhino’s feet. “Shut up and tie your laces before you get killed.”

  “Huh?” Rhino looked between his legs; at the same instant the quarterback took the snap from the center and jogged backward, waiting for an opening. The linemen slammed into each other, pedaling furiously, uprooting grass. Jonathan jumped over Rhino and sprinted to the twenty-yard line, already looking for the pass. It sailed in a beautiful rainbow arc and plopped into his hands. He charged toward the goal line, his blood pumping loud in his ears and an involuntary smile spreading across his face. At the ten-yard line he turned and shouted to Rhino.

  “Where there’s a will there’s a way, big boy!”

  He turned again and poured on the steam, laughing, once again in command of his world.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the girl. She had stood up. She was wearing tight Levi’s and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up to her elbows. The sun seemed to sparkle in her auburn hair. Her face was radiant as she smiled at him.

  He turned his head and smiled back. God, but was she pretty.

  He turned back to the business at hand in time to see the bright galvanized steel of the goalpost an inch from his face. He collided with it going perhaps twenty-five miles an hour. In the short contest between man and post, post won. Jonathan careened backward seeing stars, comets, the Crab nebula. He dropped in the grass like a sack of wet cement.

  Rhino ran to the rescue while Jonathan pondered the nature of the universe. Rhino got two hands under his shoulders and lifted him upright. “Hey, man, are you okay?”

  “Never felt better,” Jonathan mumbled, not sure if what he was seeing was Halley’s comet or Han Solo’s Millenium Falcon. Everything was black and white and—red. All of it tinged with red.

  “Great,” Rhino said, and pulled his hands away. Jonathan stood there swaying, a young man of twenty who had perhaps indulged in too much beer; that, or been run over by a bus.

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Yowza.” The red was deepening, growing thicker. It seemed to run down the field of his vision in scarlet lines, like paint down a television screen. He could almost smell it, and it was not a good smell.

  “Up to you.” Rhino walked off just as Coach Cooper raced over. He seemed ecstatic.

  “Wow! Wow! That’s more like it, Parker! That’s concentration! That’s using your will to greatness! And using your head, too! Wow!” He stared at him for a while. Jonathan was trying to decide which way was up and which way was down.

  “Parker? Jon?”

  Jonathan gurgled something in reply.

  “Off the field with you, Jon. Take the rest of the day off. Okay?”

  Sure, it was okay. An order to run sixty laps would have been just as okay. An order to stand before a firing squad would have been okay. Everything was red and okay.

  He stumbled off the field as a student-trainer ran up with a warm-up jacket. He tried to drape it over Jonathan’s shoulders, but Jonathan shrugged it away. The trainer was a small man, but tough. His real name was Roy Stuart, but everybody called him Pac-Man for reasons known only to the inventor of nicknames. He was rapidly becoming pesky.

  “You might have a concussion, man,” Pac-Man shrieked. “Brain damage! Occipital lobe damage! I’m taking anatomy this semester. Blood clot on the medulla oblongata! Cerebral cortex inflammation! Getting a B, too. At least so far. Frontal lobe trauma! Hypertension! Polemic—”

  “Shut up,” Jonathan grunted.

  “S’pose I could.”

  He wandered off. Jonathan reached the sideline as his bench-sitting replacement hustled onto the field, leaving an open spot on the end of the bench beside a card table loaded with Gatorade and paper cups. Jonathan raised his head woozily and saw the pretty girl stepping down from the bleachers, coming toward him, smiling. He gave her back a crazy grin while the world rocked and rolled under his feet.

  She came to the bottom row and said something. Jonathan leaned forward to catch it. The world tilted upward and the card table hit him on the fa
ce guard. Suddenly he was wet and smelling like oranges, and the card table was broken in half. Things sloshed and splattered. Jonathan was just along for the ride.

  Hands were all over him. He slapped them away. Somebody turned him over to face the brilliant late-afternoon sky. Jonathan used some inventive language to make them back off. Then someone else loomed over him, a face framed in auburn hair.

  “Are you going to live?” she asked, frowning at him.

  Jonathan tried to raise his head. It wasn’t worth the effort. “Do I know you?”

  “Name’s Alison.” She stared at him. “Alison Clement. Coming back yet?”

  He let his eyes fall shut. She reached over his face guard and slid his eyes open with two very soft and fragrant fingers. “I sit next to you in chemistry, Jon. Okay?”

  “Whuzza?”

  “We’ve been dating on and off for a year. Didn’t you recognize me when you smiled?”

  Jonathan sighed, still puzzling the mysteries of heaven and earth. “Say who?”

  “Alison. You told me once you wanted me to bear your children. Remember?”

  Jonathan started up on his elbows. “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Bear my children. Maybe you should call them. I want to see our family before I go …”

  She giggled. “We haven’t had any children yet.” Leaning closer, she whispered, “We haven’t even slept together.”

  This was puzzling. “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t let you.”

  “Goody. I want to be respected as a person first.”

  She smiled at him, looking very motherly. “I’ll help you home.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Take my hands.”

  She extended them. Jonathan didn’t need much convincing. They were warm and soft as she helped him up. Much softer than the goalpost, and easier to look at.

  He decided he liked this Alison chick a lot. Perhaps someday they would really get married and she could bear those children. Perhaps he and Alison would tie the knot and stay together forever. Thinking these thoughts was better than kissing the goalpost, anyway.

  But that, too, would change.

  Chapter •

  Two

  It was nearing sunset by the time Alison and Jonathan found their way to Grant Street, where Jonathan’s tiny studio apartment was located. The sky was a deep and lovely red above the rows of houses, deepening to purple at the horizon; rooftop antennas seemed to reach for this colorwork like black skeletal fingers. Other pedestrians of little Maryville were scuttering about their business as if afraid of ghosts, wanting to be in the safety of their homes before night came and another family met its savage end. The fact that the killer, up to now, had performed his butchery only once every month didn’t carry much weight for those most prone to terror: the elderly, the single mother with a houseful of children, the young father who would not submit to the humiliation of needing a gun in the house. But for the tapping of shoes against sidewalk cement, stillness hung over Maryville like a black shroud.

  They had stopped for pizza, Jonathan with stars in his eyes that had nothing to do with smashing into a metal goalpost, Alison demure and kind, and a fan of anchovies. Ooky-ooky, Jonathan had thought, but gamely ate the salt-laden delicacy without so much as a hint that he hated anchovies the way most people hate snakes. The hours drifted by, the remaining pizza slices turned cold and dead-mozzarella ugly, the ice in their Coke glasses turned to warm water, and at the crucial moment Jonathan realized he hadn’t brought any money. His wallet was in the locker room at school.

  Alison paid the tab with more good grace than Jonathan would have believed, scraping down to the last bit of change in her coin purse. Standing guiltily behind her at the cash register, Jonathan noticed once again the luster of her hair, and the sweet smell of something—perfume? shampoo?—that she carried with her, and the way her Levi’s curved in all the right directions. Slim hips, fabulous legs, at least a C-cup’s worth of goodies under her sweatshirt, a face that could kill the staunchest sailor. Amazing.

  Now on Grant Street, walking arm in arm, Jonathan dangled his helmet from his fist while Alison wrapped her warm fingers securely around his arm. Jonathan found himself wondering how he possibly could have dated this Alison girl before without falling instantly in love. Had the collision with the goalpost scrambled his brain, or had it straightened it out? Was he really here, calmly walking toward his apartment with this gorgeous babe, or was he dead on the football field, transported to heaven with his skull wrapped around a piece of galvanized pipe?

  Don’t be stupid, his inner voice told him. You are where you are and she is what she is. You are perfectly fine.

  At which point he stumbled over an invisible crack in the sidewalk and nearly went sprawling. His helmet thunked to the cement, and then Alison was pulling him upright.

  She touched his head. “Straight to bed with you. Either that, or you wear that helmet while we walk.”

  He put on a smile. “Straight to bed? Now we’re talking.”

  She smiled back. “You know what, Mr. Jonathan Parker? You are quite possibly certifiably nuts.”

  He ran a hand through her hair. “That’s why you like me. You do, don’t you? I know we’ve been out on …”

  He stopped suddenly, puzzled. It was as if his inner voice had told him something barely audible, yet extremely important. Concussion? Brain damage, as Pac-Man had said? Or just a screwball side effect from too many anchovies?

  Alison looked at him curiously. “Something on your mind?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “Something.”

  He made a move to cross the street, with Alison still clutching his arm. It seemed darker now. The red and purple sundown was gone, replaced by a turbulent and angry sky. The wind kicked up, blowing cast-off rubbish along the gutters, making the trees above scrape each other and whisper secrets in the dark.

  He looked up. All the streetlights were dead. The air seemed colder and somehow heavy, thick with the smell of salt.

  Salt?

  He took a step, feeling Alison’s hands fall away from his arm. In the new darkness he was able to see faint blue light through the windows of the houses that lined the street, and above the hiss of the wind the familiar strains of the national anthem wafting out of the houses.

  Midnight, then. Or … later. How the hell?

  He heard Alison whisper. “Jonathan? Where are we?”

  He rubbed a hand over his head, frowning. “I was raised on this street. My foster parents still live here with that Bobby kid, and that new girl they adopted after I left. And there’s …”

  The blue glow of lights flicked off in unison, leaving ghost houses with blank eyes for windows. Jonathan’s frown deepened. He heard distant thunder, deep and strangely echoing. In the dark he could make out the angles of a familiar house.

  “That’s where I used to live,” he said, pointing. The wind gusted and he blinked his eyes against the dust. When he opened them again he saw the dim outline of a white van parked in the driveway.

  He stepped closer, squinting. The van had a crudely hand-painted sign on its side. Pinker’s TV Repair—Service in Your Home.

  He walked around the van to the front door, hearing Alison’s unsteady footsteps behind. Inside a short front porch carpeted in screaming green Astroturf was the main door to the house, the door Jonathan himself had opened and shut a billion times in his thirteen years there as a foster child of the Parkers, Don and Diane, two of the finest people ever to raise a child they couldn’t call their own. Jonathan peered into the dark, trying to make sense of the dim and jumbled images. Yes, there was the door, but it was open and swinging on its hinges in the wind, the hinges giving out a faint but familiar squawk. Behind the door was nothing but darkness.

  “Alison,” he whispered over his shoulder, “I don’t think you ought to be here. There’s something, something …”

  He turned his head.

 
Alison was gone. A dwarf tornado of leaves swirled past, skittering along the pavement. The dead houses across the street seemed to stare at him with their black window eyes.

  He turned back, still thinking of Pac-Man and his woeful predictions. Concussion. Blood clot on the brain. Dislocation of the think-bone. Hallucinations of the weirdest sort.

  He started up the three stairs that led to the front door. The hinges creaked and creaked as the door performed its slow back-and-forth progress, perhaps a warning, perhaps an illusion, perhaps too real to be believed.

  He came to the door and put an end to its noises. He stepped inside the house he had called home for thirteen years.

  Someone had laid a flashlight on the floor. Its pale white beam showed nubbles of carpet that flowed to dimness and a wall.

  Someone was holding it. Better said, someone had been holding it.

  Bobby, recent foster addition to the home, was dead on the floor, still wearing his pajamas. Blood was spreading in a slow pool beneath him. The fallen flashlight showed that three of his fingers had been broken, ruined, mercilessly twisted to new and impossible angles.

  Jesus, Jonathan thought as a disgusted and somehow lurid horror piped through his veins like ice. The kid’s only fourteen!

  He knelt beside the boy, stunned and barely able to think. “Oh, Bobby,” he whispered miserably. “How could anyone, how could anyone have done …”

  But Bobby was gone.

  Jonathan got to his feet, realizing that yes it was a dream, oh yes it was, because only in dreams and nightmares do the living and the dead vanish before your eyes, only in dreams can the impossible seem plausible. Bobby was gone and soon Jonathan would awaken to a new day and a new sun and a thousand years of girls and football and fun.

  He saw bloody footprints leading to the stairway and the upper bedrooms, as if some fool had danced in this blood of dreams and shambled away to finish his dream-business upstairs. The tracks of the left foot were long and smeared on the rug, as if this particular dream-devil had gotten himself a bum leg in some previous nightmare and come back to inquire about a prosthetic device or a possible murder or two. Oh boy, Jonathan thought, oh boy. When we wake up this will be one to tell friends over a cold beer. Whatta rad dream.