Rash (13 page)

“Not bad, nail,” he said. “Looks like you took out Rogers.”

Back in midfield the Goldshirt I’d kneed was holding his hand to his nose. The front of his shirt was bright red with blood.

“It was an accident,” I said, my heart pounding not from fear or exertion but with exhilaration.

Hammer kicked the football back downfield.

“Do it again, Marsten,” he said. “Go have another accident.”

I trotted down the field to the ball. I’d gotten past them once. I could do it again. And Hammer had called me by name. That had to be good, right?

I picked up the football and turned around, feeling cocky, but the rules had changed. It wasn’t just three Goldshirts this time. It was all six of them, Fragger in the lead, grinning, running straight at me.

I came
to looking straight up at a patch of bright blue sky framed by a ring of faces staring down at me. It would not be the last time.

“His eyes are open,” somebody said.

“I must’ve not hit him hard enough,” Fragger said.

“Hey!” He toed my shoulder. “You awake?”

My mouth moved, and something that might have been a sound came out of it.

“I think he said something,” said Rogers, his nose stuffed with bloody tissue paper.

Hammer’s face appeared in the center of the patch of blue.

“Talk to me, kid,” he said.

“Get bonked,” said my mouth.

Silence. Hammer blinked and stared down at me for a few seconds. “You’re shook up, kid, so I’ll give you that one for free. Can you stand up?”

I tried. I tried again. On the third attempt I managed to roll over onto my hands and knees.

“All the way, kid. I want to see you on your feet.”

I got my feet under me and stood up. Everything seemed to work.

“Your legs feel okay?”

I nodded.

“Good.” He pointed toward my fellow inmates sitting against the side of the building. “Use ’em to walk over there and sit down.”

I wobbled across the field in my shredded and soiled paper coverall.

Hammer kicked the ball back down the field.

“Okay, nails,” he said. “Who’s next?”

I saw more brutality and violence in that next half hour than I had ever seen in my life. Of course, I’ve seen much worse since.

In the end only two of us succeeded in running the ball past three Goldshirts: me and Rhino. By the time the tryouts were over, there were six kids in the infirmary—including three Goldshirts.

Rhino was the reason those three Goldshirts got bonked. When it was his turn to run the ball, he strolled down the field ignoring Hammer, who was yelling at him to “Get a move on, Lardass!” Rhino picked up the ball and turned to face the three Goldshirts.

“C’mon, Lardass, bring me the ball!” Hammer shouted.

Rhino tucked the ball under his right armpit—it disappeared beneath folds of flesh—and began to run. At first it looked as though he were walking, but within a few yards we could see that he was slowly picking up speed, like a freight train starting from a dead stop. His feet
thumped the packed turf, thick arms pumping, his entire upper body sloshing and jiggling with each footfall. He looked like a running sack of Jell-O. The three Goldshirts were laughing. I’d have been laughing too, if I hadn’t thought that Rhino was about to get slaughtered.

By the time Rhino reached midfield, he had reached the blistering velocity of maybe five miles per hour, or as fast as your average grandma runs to catch a transport. The first Goldshirt to meet him, a guy named Bullet, was moving twice as fast. They hit head-on, Bullet’s broad shoulder driving straight into Rhino’s gut.

Bullet
bounced
.

Rhino didn’t even slow down. If anything, he sped up. Bullet tumbled head over ass, ending up flat on his back, senseless.

Gorp, the second Goldshirt to make contact, employed a different strategy. He circled around and leaped on Rhino’s back. His idea was to use his weight and momentum to send Rhino face-first into the dirt. It should have worked. Gorp was a big guy, maybe 250 pounds. But Rhino just reached up with his left hand, grabbed the back of Gorp’s shirt, and
flung
him.

When Gorp hit, we all heard his collarbone snap.

The third Goldshirt, a red-faced kid named Rush, was a relative midget at only 200 pounds. He tried to tackle Rhino by diving into the back of his knee and wrapping his arms around one of Rhino’s massive legs. It almost worked. Rhino kept moving forward, but he was seriously slowed down by the kid attached to his left leg. After dragging Rush about ten yards, Rhino stopped, reached down, peeled him off like a dirty sock,
tossed him aside, and continued his journey.

Hammer accepted the ball wordlessly, staring first at Rhino, then at the three incapacitated Goldshirts. The first one was still unconscious, Gorp was holding his shoulder, moaning piteously, and Rush was simply sitting on the turf staring at Rhino with a mixture of bewilderment and awe.

Rhino lumbered over to the building and sat down beside me.

“You think I made the team?” he asked.

“
Made
it? I think you
destroyed
it,” I said.

That night neither Maddy nor Karlohs made an appearance in my dreams. Instead I was being chased by Goldshirts, and I fell and they were on me, jumping up and down on my back. I woke up with a shout. My mattress was alive, pounding into my spine.

“Okay, okay!” I said, grabbing the head rail to keep myself from flying off. “I’m awake already!”

The kicking stopped.

“You were making weird noises again,” Rhino said.

I sat up. My back felt as if it had been stomped by a dozen Goldshirts. “I was having a nightmare.”

“Yeah, I figured that out all by myself.”

“Next time how about you don’t kick so hard.”

“Sorry. You dreaming about your old girlfriend again?”

“I dreamed I was being chased by Goldshirts.”

“Oh.”

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds, then Rhino spoke. “Hey, Bo? You think any of those guys I hit got hurt bad?”

“I think you broke Gorp’s collarbone.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“You are. You went through those guys like a locomotive.”

“They were in my way. I didn’t mean to hurt them.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t want anybody to be scared of me.”

“But you want to be a Goldshirt, right?”

He thought about that, then said, “I wouldn’t mind eating Frazzies for a change.”

The next morning, two hours into our shift, a blueshirt pulled Rhino and me off the production line.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” said the blueshirt. He led us out of the production area, past the mess hall, down a dim corridor, and through a set of double doors to a locker room. There were no actual lockers—just a row of benches, places to hang clothing, and a shower room—but I could tell it was a locker room from the distinctive aroma of sweat and toe jam.

The blueshirt led us to a steel door.

“Go on out,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”

They were
waiting
? I didn’t like the sound of that. Rhino and I just stood there.

“Get a move on!” The blueshirt gave Rhino a shove with his baton. The stick sunk several inches into Rhino’s side but failed to move him. Rhino turned his head and gave him a look. The blueshirt quickly withdrew his baton and took a few steps back.

Rhino shrugged and pushed open the door. A flood of sunlight blinded us. I followed him out, shading my eyes. The door slammed shut behind us. We were outside on the field, surrounded by a ring of fire. I blinked, and my eyes adjusted. It wasn’t a ring of fire, but it might as well have been—we were surrounded by Goldshirts.

All of them. I looked back at the door, and somehow I knew it would not open. Rhino let out a soft grunt, spread his tree-trunk legs, and tucked his head turtlelike between his massive shoulders. I scanned the circle of grinning faces, looking for a way out. Gorp, wearing a sling, stood front and center. Fragger was right next to him, tossing a football from one hand to the other.

I braced myself for the beating of a lifetime.

Instead they all smiled and began to clap.

We’d made the team.

Being a
Goldshirt meant better food, extra sleep, and plenty of respect from the paperpants, which was what we called the other inmates. I didn’t have to worry about getting beat up or forked by Fragger, and, of course, I got to wear the gold T-shirt and denims. I put mine on the first day. Rhino’s had to be ordered special, on account of his enormity.

Being a Goldshirt wasn’t all Frazzies and sack time. We had to work just like everybody else. They pulled me and Rhino off our pepperoni team and sent us to shipping and receiving, which was where all the other Goldshirts worked. For eight hours a day we boxed and crated frozen pizzas, unloaded supply trucks, and performed various other tasks that required lifting, pushing, pulling, and pounding.

It was part of our training.

After a short Frazzie and Pepsi break we had another four hours of training. That meant weight lifting, calisthenics, drills, classroom time, and scrimmages. The Goldshirts, it seemed, were all about football. We were Hammer’s boys, and there was nothing Hammer liked
better than to watch a good rough-and-tumble game of tackle football.

The whole idea of actually playing a contact sport like football probably sounds pretty crazy. Any sport in which players smash into one another while running at full speed has got to be insane. Believe me, it is—and doing it without pads, helmets, braces, masks, or gloves is flatout psychotic. We averaged about three injuries a week. During my first two weeks as a Goldshirt we had a concussion, two broken bones, a shoulder separation, two dislocated fingers, and a broken nose. Lesser sprains, bruises, and cuts were counted in the dozens.

The first few times I hit the field I was terrified. Hammer was determined to teach me to catch. Fragger kept passing the ball to me. The idea was to catch it and run it down to the end of the field. Problem was, there was this wall of Goldshirts charging me. I kept dropping the ball. Didn’t matter. They tackled me anyway.

I went to bed every night exhausted, bruised, and aching, and I woke up feeling worse. But I learned. I learned to find that ball in the sky, and forget about the rest of the world for that one crucial second. Just me and the ball. I learned to avoid getting hit so often and so hard. I even got used to the idea of getting hurt. And here’s the strangest part of all: Every day we beat the crap out of one another, but we still became good friends. We were all on the same team. We learned to trust one another. Even Fragger turned out to be an okay guy—if you were a Goldshirt.

Naturally we had our disagreements. Like the time I got into it with Bullet.

Hammer had divided us into sides. I was offense. We were running a trick play called the “flea-flicker.” Fragger, the quarterback, handed the ball off to me, I ran it toward the line of scrimmage, then stopped and tossed the ball back to Fragger, and he passed it downfield to the wide-open Sam Rogers.

The play worked perfectly, but I didn’t get to see Rogers make the touchdown because one full second after I’d tossed the ball back to Fragger, Bullet slammed into me, hard.

It was a wrongful hit. He knew it and I knew it, even as I was flat on my back gasping for air. Bullet, standing over me, offered a hand.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “Thought you had the ball.”

I managed to get a lungful of air and stood up without his help. “That’s okay,” I said. Then I let him have it—a perfect shot to the jaw. I heard his teeth clack together; he staggered back.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “I thought
you
had the ball.” Then I hit him again, a hard right to his gut.

After that, things didn’t go so good. Bullet was no Karlohs Mink. He came back at me with a flurry of blows to my face, chest, shoulders, and neck. I fought back—at least I think I did—but after those first two blows I didn’t do much damage. If they hadn’t pulled us apart, I think he would’ve killed me.