Boys of Blur (17 page)

When Sugar came to a stop outside the stadium fence, the teams were already in the locker rooms for halftime and the first band was marching onto the field. Rows of girls in flowing gold pants led them, flags snapping and twirling in their hands.

The crowd was restless, angry, the mood wrong for halftime. Too few people laughing, too few heading for the concession stand. Sugar looked up at the scoreboard. The game was close. It didn’t make sense.

The announcer’s voice crackled through old speakers. “Behold! The ladies of elegance …”

Flags arced high and were caught again. Sugar scrambled up the fence and dropped inside. The whole place smelled like the bathrooms had overflowed, like Porta-Johns had been upended under the bleachers.

“Aren’t they elegant?” the announcer asked as the crowd started raining insults down on the girls.

Sugar frowned and jogged toward the locker room. He needed to find a coach with a phone and Mack’s number. On the opposite sideline, he saw two cheerleaders fighting. The others joined in. Then one of the flag girls turned and broke her flag across another girl’s back. The music staggered and struggled. A trombone was kicking a saxophone. A bass drum knocked a smaller drum flat. In the bleachers, fights were breaking out. Someone was thrown over a rail.

All around, cops were springing into action, racing toward the brawlers. As they ran, Sugar saw a shorter fat cop pull his gun and shoot a faster lean cop in the leg. As the fat one passed the wounded man, he threw his hands in the air in triumph, like the winner of a race. He got a baton across the kneecaps for his trouble and tumbled to the turf.

At the far end of the field, beneath the scoreboard, Sugar saw Stanks pour over the fence and race across the grass toward the stands.

On the field, one little drummer was still drumming. Every other human in the stadium turned and tried to run.

Benches tumbled. Rails bent and broke.

Sugar sprinted for the locker rooms.

Mack had turned off the road that ran through downtown Taper, and they were coming up on the stadium. The glow was just ahead. Soon, he would glimpse the scoreboard and the score of the first game that he should have been coaching. Soon, he would have to decide what to do next.

Natalie was now in the passenger seat beside him. Molly was awake in the back, writhing in her car seat, fighting straps and buckles.

Natalie began to sing quietly, and her voice made Mack ache. Molly calmed in the back. Her breathing grew slow and steady.

Mack’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He dug it out and tossed it to Natalie. She looked at it and nodded, still humming. Mack pushed a button on the steering wheel and a voice barked through the car speakers.

“Mack?” It was the assistant coach.

“I’m here, Steve,” Mack said. “You hear anything from Charlie?”

“Hear anything?” Steve said. “I
saw
him, and so did every other person in town. He chased a panther across the field just before halftime. A full-grown panther, Mack. Sugar turned up, too, and he’s trying to tell me some crazy story about monsters and dead people and all sorts of stuff I don’t have time to hear.”

Natalie grabbed Mack’s hand. “He’s all right? Charlie’s all right?”

“Don’t know about that,” Steve said. “Depends on
whether he caught that panther. Pray he didn’t, I guess. He’s gone now.”

“We’re outside the stadium,” Mack said. They were approaching the parking lot, and passed a checkpoint and four cop cars with their lights spinning. But no cops in sight. “Get back to the guys. I’ll be there in two ticks.”

“No!” Steve said. “Stay in your car. Steer clear. That’s why I was calling. There’s a riot going in the stadium, man. Chaos. We’re locked inside the locker room. Big Surge is holding the door. I … ev—” Steve’s voice was swallowed up by shouting.

Mack turned into the parking lot and stopped. People were flooding over destroyed turnstiles, fighting on the roof of the concession stand. Boys were standing on cars, stomping in windshields. A few of them looked up at Mack’s headlights. They jumped off and started toward them.

Mack threw the car in reverse and backed into the road. He spun the car around, shifted, and punched the gas.

Molly began to cry.

“Steve!” Mack yelled.

“Getting rough in here,” Steve crackled. “Couple hurt. Idiot kids.”

“Did Sugar say where Charlie was going? Did he have any idea?”

“To kill some mother,” Steve said. “But mostly he’s jabbering about Stanks or Grens or something and how
they’re making everyone crazy. Hey, hey, hey! No! You two shut your mouths—”

The line went dead.

Mack stepped on the brakes.
Gren …
He’d heard that word. Like everyone who’d been a kid in the muck, he’d heard some crazy stories. And he’d had dreams that Mrs. Wisdom had blamed on the moon. On the wind. Or some smell.

There was a memory in his mind somewhere, blurry and distant. A bad memory.

A panther. He knew who had panthers. That much was encouraging.

“Mack?” Natalie’s face was stone. Mack called it her game face.

“You have your phone?” Mack asked. His wife nodded as she handed his back. Mack kissed her. He kissed his fingers and twisted around to rub them on Molly’s cheek in the backseat. “Lock the doors and keep moving. Stay on the edge of town, but in the light. I might need a ride in a hurry. Don’t let anyone near the car. Not even cops. No one.”

“What are you going to do?”

Mack opened his door and stepped into the road. “Charlie was just here. Wait for my call.”

Natalie slid over the console between the seats and dropped in behind the steering wheel. Her eyes were wide, but her jaw was set. She nodded. Mack kissed her
again and shut the door. Molly watched him as the Rover rolled away.

Two hundred yards behind him, cop cars were being smashed. He could hear the helicopter returning.

Mack left the road, hopped a ditch, and cut through the tall grass, jogging toward the stadium.

Charlie had watched the Mother disappear. He had watched the one remaining Gren grab Lio’s body by the ankle and drag it through the brush after her.

The stink had lessened, but it wasn’t gone. And so he had held still, the panther beside him. But he wasn’t here to hide. He was here to find. To hunt.

And then he heard it—cane crackling behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw stripes of red fire between the stalks. The stink suddenly grew and quick, muddy feet with jagged toes slid around the corner of the field. A rough hand was plunging a torch into the low cane leaves as the feet ran.

The panther slipped quickly forward and out of the field. Charlie flinched back, deeper into the cane.

The torch dove in beneath his face and then was gone. Dry leaves sprang into fiery life and quickly formed a wall. Heat billowed around Charlie as the cane popped and the wet leaves above him hissed and steamed.

Charlie wasn’t a rabbit, he couldn’t run from this. He
threw his arms over his face and plunged through the fire, tumbling onto the road beside the canal.

Farther down the road, the Stank with the torch had stopped and was watching him. He was wearing a hood of skunks and rats and snakes over baggy mud-caked jeans. He was skinny. Young. In one hand he held the torch, and in the other a long wooden spike.

With a start, Charlie realized his shorts were on fire. He jumped to his feet and slapped them out.

Across the fields, over by the church, he heard shouts and then a gun fired twice. A third time. Charlie looked around and saw that this was not the only field burning. Everywhere, smoke and steam were rising. The tallest flames of all were licking the church.

The young Stank bent his knees and crept slowly forward, as if Charlie couldn’t see him.

Charlie backed away, unslinging his bag. “I can see you. I can. You’re not sneaking up on me.” He pulled the long bone knife out of the cloth and out of his bag. It was hot against his skin.

Charlie dropped the bag and slid a little closer to the canal. “Come on!” he shouted. “Do I need a red cloth or something? Let’s go!”

Between two heartbeats, the young Stank charged.

Charlie had a simple plan. Drop to the ground. Kick the Gren with both feet. Flip him into the canal. He managed to drop onto his back. The Gren raked the torch
across his bare shins and stepped around Charlie’s kick. He plunged the thick spike down at Charlie’s chest. Charlie twisted clear of the blow, shoving the bone knife up at the Stank’s mud-covered stomach.

An engine roared and lights flashed. The Stank turned as a red truck with lights lining its roll bar bounced out from between two fields and slid almost to the canal. The driver jumped out and climbed onto the roof of the cab. He was wearing a denim jacket and a trucker’s cap. A shotgun was strapped to his shoulder, and he carried a hunting rifle with a scope. Long, stringy hair hung out of the back of his hat.

He aimed and fired back into the fields at something Charlie couldn’t see. Aimed and fired. Aimed and fired. The Gren above Charlie snarled and ran at the lights and the noise.

“Look out!” Charlie shouted as the Gren leapt onto the hood. The man spun and his rifle cracked. The Gren tumbled to the ground, his fur hood snagging on the truck’s fender. The man turned and fired again, back into the field.

Charlie ran forward. He grabbed the still-moving Stank by the ankles and dragged him out of his hood, toward the canal. Without the rotting animal skins, the Stank was suddenly very human—a filthy, skinny teenage boy, furious and confused.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Charlie said. “You didn’t want it, and if you did, you shouldn’t’ve.”

The Stank saw the water and his confusion disappeared. He jerked a foot free and kicked Charlie in the jaw. He twisted onto his hands and knees and tried to run, but Charlie landed on his back. He hugged the young Gren’s arms tight to his sides and drove his face into the ground.

“I saw her,” Charlie said. “She’s not your mother.”

The boy twisted and kicked but Charlie held on.

“The water will take it away. It will all stop. You won’t belong to her.”

The man on the truck was shouting and his gun was firing and fields were burning, but all Charlie cared about was one boy who didn’t have to be a monster.

The Gren stopped fighting, his body seeming to shake with the effort. Then, as quiet as a ghost, he gasped one word into the earth.

“Please.”

Charlie rolled with him over the bank and into the canal.

In the cool water, Charlie let go. His feet found the bottom and he kicked up to the surface. The boy surfaced beside him. He didn’t speak. He didn’t claw for the bank like the old man had. He looked at Charlie. His eyes were at peace. And then they closed.

Metal crunched and screamed. The red truck slid sideways toward the canal—the Gren were flipping it. The man on the roof jumped for the water as the truck rolled up and over.

Charlie grabbed a breath and dove. Bright lights on a roll bar exploded past his face. The cab roof slammed him down, pinned his legs to a log, and pinned the log to the bottom.

A gator wriggled out from underneath the log, jerking and thrashing to get its tail free. Charlie felt its back against his own, its claws against his arm, and then it was gone. But he wasn’t.

I’d rather die than not try
.

Charlie bubbled his lungs empty. He fought, but fighting was pointless. It was a truck. He stared past his legs at the lights, wondering how long they would keep shining. He already wanted them off. So he shut his eyes.