The psychovore hoodie lurked
menacingly on the table beside his cot. God, thought Jason, how I hate that thing. It
was the perfect combination of ugly, uncomfortable, and impractical. It killed his peripheral vision when he was
hunting, it made him sweat like a hog, it was impossible to keep clean, and it
smelled like the inside of a fish.
It’s
not about me, though, he thought. What would Will think, if you stopped
wearing it? What would―his heart skipped a beat―what would Emily think?
They’d think he regretted saving them, of course. They’d think he didn’t care about them. That he didn’t love them.
Jason stooped to pull on his
athletic boots, the ones with the crude metal cleats. But I
do love them, he thought. Will, who took a spear through his heart,
and then refused to do the same to me.
He’s made of mercy and miracles.
His soul flies like nothing I’ve ever seen, and he can reincarnate
faster than anyone we’ve ever heard of.
It’s not even hard for him! What
sort of person must he have been?
And
her. Yes. Her. Beautiful.
Smart. Fearless. The perfect woman. How can she not know how incredible she is? How can she waste herself on the likes of
Ammerman? She could do anything, be
anyone! Everyone loves her! I love-
And Jason thought of a golden ring
with a blue stone in it. And he thought
of a smear of blood on that stone. Not Emily, Jason thought, his teeth
gritting.
NEVER Emily.
So he made himself think about
someone else. About Will! Today was about soccer! Today was his little bro’s introduction to
the Beautiful Game! Today, Will would
learn about the purest, truest thing Jason had given this community. And Will would be a star! Jason just knew it. Will would harness the ability which had made
him so unbelievably fast in soul-form, and the grandstands would cheer him, and
he’d look at Jason and smile in gratitude.
And the crowd would cheer for Jason, too, remembering that when Will had
come to Haven, it had been Jason who’d saved him.
Everyone
will be happy. Jason beamed as he laced up his boots. This is
gonna be a great day.
This
is gonna suck, Will thought.
In the week since his second
incarnation, Jason had been overcompensating.
He had turned his desire to make up for killing Will into something of
an obsession. In truth, Will didn’t hold
the incident against him―at least, no more than would have been the case for the
victim of any accidental homicide. If
you really looked at it, Will figured, the whole incident had been mostly his
own fault. But Jason doesn’t see it that way, thought Will, ruefully.
Jason feels guilty. And when
Jason feels something, he doesn’t feel it halfway. He’s going to make it up to me if it kills
him. And me. Again.
Jason had decided, in the days
since the town meeting, that Will was his “little bro.” Hence, it was important that all Jason’s
friends be Will’s friends as well. And
Jason being Jason, his friends were everybody, whether they liked it or not. Jason hadn’t so much introduced Will around
town as rammed him down the throat of everyone they came across. It had become kind of terrifying. People Will hadn’t met yet would see the two
of them coming down the street and flee, as if they were an inbound natural disaster. Every night, Will went to bed sore from all
the backslapping, noogies, and other borderline-fatal gestures of brotherly
affection.
Today’s episode of the Jason
Redemption Tour promised to be a doozy.
Jason was, of course, a ridiculous athlete. The
only thing that makes him happier than sports, Will had thought, is killing things. Well, things other than me. And it so happened that the single thing that
Jason remembered from his terrestrial life, the single precious memory that had
etched itself upon his soul, was soccer.
He was the only person in Haven who remembered the laws of the game in
their entirety. Within weeks of his
arrival, he had trained a compliment of referees in the game’s rules, and had
introduced the community’s better athletes to its finer points. Will gathered that the players themselves
were quite fond of the game; the reaction from the community as a whole was
less unanimous. In any event, today, at
Jason’s insistence, Haven would celebrate Will’s incarnation with a soccer
match, and Will and Jason were to serve as co-captains of the Blue team.
Looking out at the players warming
up on the field, Will’s doubts about the wisdom of the scheme were beginning to
grow. There weren’t many residents of
Haven who rivaled Jason in stature, athleticism, or sheer bloody-minded
aggressiveness. Those people, however,
had all showed up to play. There were
Corey and Dave, for instance, recent arrivals, a pair of big, loveable
long-haired galoots who had arrived in Haven remembering nothing except how to
play electrically amplified musical instruments. Finding those in short supply, they had taken
up killing things as an alternative, and had picked up the skill with
astonishing speed; it was as if they’d been doing it all their lives. There was
Antonia, and Orson with his horrible teeth.
Buck was there, smiling broadly as always, as was the recently
resurrected Yvette. There were Big
Nancy and Big Jeff and Really Big Angus, Red Dan the Poet and Ed Moriarity, Savage
Randall and Hideshi, One-Eyed Dick and Blond Tanya and Black Joe. Even Mean Drunk Ed, who lacked even the most
basic social graces, but who was celebrated for his ability to hit things with
a stick, had put in an appearance. Will
wasn’t the smallest guy on the pitch, but he wasn’t far from it, and he
certainly wouldn’t have cared to take on any other participant in a bar fight.
Seeing Will standing on the
sideline with a concerned expression on his face, Jason came jogging over to
reassure him, and gave his little bro a pat on the back that sent him
sprawling. “You’re gonna LOVE this,
man! There’s nothing in the world like
sports. You never actually know what
you’re capable of until somebody else brings it out of you. And only the best opposition can make you
YOUR best. I mean, look at those guys
over there!” He gestured to the team in
dyed red wool on the opposite side of the pitch; together, the two of them
watched Antonia launch a split-kick that could have decapitated a horse. “Aren’t they AWESOME? I gave them all of the best players just to
make it more fun for you!”
The referee signaled the
twenty-four players to their places, sparking a wild round of apathy from the
twenty-three people in the grandstand. A
little bald fellow with a Swiss accent had made an attempt to collect money for
admission; the latest update from the doctors suggested that his prospects for
recovery were excellent. Looking at his
teammates, Will reflected that even their uniforms hadn’t worked out according
to plan; the dye had run badly, creating a sort of two-toned effect with a navy
swatch to the left, a pale blue swatch on the right, and a crooked line
dividing them. The players took their
positions, the referee blew his kazoo and dropped the inflated pig bladder, and
Jason skillfully volleyed it back to Manuel, starting the match.
The plan, as Will understood it, was
to maintain possession in their own half to start things, which proved successful
right up until someone made the fatal mistake of kicking the ball to him. He bent over to pick it up; Jason’s shouts
of “No! No!” reminded Will of his rules transgression,
but his desperate, clumsy kick downfield was intercepted by an onrushing Orson,
playing for the red team. He volleyed to
the other side of the field, where Dion from Ammerman’s workshop was making a
run. Dion was speed personified,
possibly as fast on his feet as Will was in soul form. He was almost all the way to the corner flag
before Corey, playing defender for the blue team, wandered over and sort of randomly
hip-checked him into a drainage ditch.
Corey kicked the ball long, and now
the counterattack was on. Moving swiftly
into the path of the ball, Jason deftly touched it sideways to Manuel, the
feebleminded drunkard from Luther’s, who had suddenly and inexplicably morphed
into a slender young athlete of almost poetic skill. He fielded the ball off of his chest, evaded
a clumsy tackle from Antonia, let it drop to his foot, and went on a mazy,
zig-zagging run through two sprawling defenders, then booted the ball skywards. Darrell was moving underneath it; he crossed
the halfway line just in time to drop into his crouch and catch the ball with
both hands.
Popping out of his crouch, he fired
the ball on a line to Buck. The throw
was low, but the big man gracefully scooped it from the dirt, faked a throw
downfield, then lateralled it to Red Dan.
Mustachios bristling fiercely, Dan spotted Jason making a run down the
middle, marked by Moriarity; he wound up and fired the ball sidearm. It took a funny dip at the last minute,
evading Moriarity’s diving attempt to deflect it; Jason caught it in the clear,
raced in on goal, stiff-armed one goalkeeper, dodged the other, and ran
straight between the posts, where he touched the ball to the ground, then
raised both arms in triumph. The referee
twirled both white flags, signaling a goal, and Black Joe immediately took off
from the corner flag towards first base.
Joe may not have been the biggest
man in Haven, or the fastest man in Haven, but he was definitely the fastest
big man in Haven. As he rounded second
base like a runaway freight train, Will was sure that his team was on its way
to a second goal. But Hideshi was
quicker than he had any right to be; he plucked the ball off the ground where
Jason had laid it and fired it over to the infield. By the time Joe rounded fifth base and headed
for home, Mean Drunk Ed was waiting for him at the plate with the ball in
hand. He fired it directly into Joes
legs, sending him to the box for two minutes, caught the ball as it caromed
back at him, and flung it ahead to Moriarity, who was already making a run at
the basket attached to the right goalpost.
Will was running hard to intercept
Moriarity―not that he’d have had any idea what to do with him had he caught him―when
he saw Orson in his peripheral vision, making a blocking run at him. Jason, seeing his little bro in peril,
immediately abandoned his defense of the basket, shouting, “OH NO YOU DON’T!”;
as Moriarity streaked to the hoop and dunked the ball through it for two goals,
Jason went careening into Orson, both of them going down in a tangle of arms
and legs.
By the time Will had recovered from
his near-death experience and looked up, it was clear that the blue team’s
carefully composed game plan had degenerated into chaos. Leroy had gone running in way too quickly, as
always; Gerard wasn’t making any attempt at all to defend the keystone against
the other team’s racquetmen; Really Big Angus had abandoned the field entirely,
and was eating a chicken leg on the sideline and chatting up a spectator. Even as a newcomer to soccer, even as an
inferior athlete, Will was appalled. What about tactics? What about subtlety? People have no appreciation for the cerebral
side of this game.
Suddenly there was a roar from the
crowd, or at least a vague murmur of interest.
A terrified-looking young man in yellow had come running onto the field,
a strip of yellow leather dangling out of the back of his pants. The snitch was loose! Moreover, he was angling away from the
players pursuing him towards the opposite side of the field, where there was no
meaningful threat to him, which was to say, where Will was standing. Will gritted his teeth, lowered his head, and
charged in recklessly; he reached out his hand towards the flag in the back of
the kid’s pants, and made contact just as the pursuit caught up to the runner
from the other side. Will felt a
shuddering impact and everything went black.
When Will regained consciousness,
the referees were still in the process of untangling the pile of bodies, which
were infinite in number and all directly on top of him. Slowly, gradually, the pressure eased, the
light increased. Finally, there was only
Will, flat on his back on the ground. A
massive cheer erupted from his teammates as they spotted the yellow flag, still
clutched in Will’s grimy and possibly broken hand.
“Snitch catch! We win!” roared Jason. He hoisted Will up onto his shoulders, where
he flopped around limply, emitting an occasional gasping squawk of
triumph. At length, as the two teams
celebrated together and the spectators wandered off in search of something more
interesting to do, Will was returned to the ground. Jason grabbed him in a bear hug and shook him
vigorously, intensifying the concussion which would leave Will in an infirmary
bed for the next two days, and shouted, “What did I tell you, little bro? Isn’t soccer GREAT? I swear, there’s no sport like it anywhere.”
My God. They play Calvinball in Haven?
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