Bonechiller Read Free

girls, just kind of rolling my shoulders and stretching my neck to loosen up.
    “Go easy on the cherry,” Sarge was telling my opponent, who was stepping into the ring. A cherry is a ring virgin, never had a fight. I winced a little at the name, hearing a spatter of giggles.
    Shorter than me by a couple inches, slim but wiry, the other guy was no cherry. He stared at me with intense dark eyes, the left one ringed by an old bruise, yellow at the edges. A Band-Aid stretched over the bridge of his nose. Couldn’t see much of his face. Spiky black hair stuck up from the open patch at the top of his headgear. He was wearing a T-shirt with the emblem of the 441st Squadron—the head of a black fox grinning with hungry white teeth. Below was the squadron’s motto:
Stalk and Kill
.
    Great, a hardcore brat.
    “Protect yourself at all times,” Owens shouted. “Got it? Good. Touch gloves, and get it on.”
    I can do this, I told myself. I’ve got a couple inches and maybe twenty pounds on him.
    We touched gloves. I stepped back and we started to circle each other.
Focus on the jab
, Sarge had said. So I closed in, guarding my head with my left and striking out with my right.
    My jab hit empty air, where the brat’s head had been a millisecond ago. And then—
    Then I was staring at one of those mysterious stains on the mat. Up close, because my face was resting on thecanvas. I didn’t remember anything in between. No impact, no falling. Didn’t even see the punch.
    “On your feet, soldier.”
    I heard the voice past the ringing in my ears. The brat stood over me. His eyes were black pits.
Stalk and Kill
.
    My eyes rolled over to the girls, some wincing sympathetically, some shaking their heads. Get up, I thought. But I couldn’t tell which way
up
was—it was like the floor and ceiling had reversed themselves. I clung to the mat to keep from free-falling toward the glare of the lights on the ceiling.
    Hardcore helped me up, heaving me vertical and leaning me on the ropes. I expected him to lay me out again with another shot. I tried to lift my gloves, but they hung like dead weights.
    “You’re all right,” his voice echoed inside my shattered skull. “Just breathe. In. Out. In. Out.”
    “You okay, Blondie?” Sarge called.
    I tried nodding, but that sloshed my brains around too much. “Uh-huh.”
    “Rest up a minute,” Sarge said. “Then hit the showers.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    I looked from him to Hardcore, who was yanking off his headgear. I blinked, my eyes going wide. He was a
she
.
    “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked, a thin smile stretching her lips.
    I stared at the hand she stuck in front of my face. But she still had her gloves on. How many fingers? What?
    “It’s a joke,” she said.
    “Uh-huh.”
    She laughed at me a second, then took my arm.
    “Come on, killer. Walk it off.”
    So that’s how I met Ash. Concussion at first sight.
    She’s toying with me even now, on our night run down the gravel road back to the lake. Ash lets me close the distance just enough to get my hopes up, then pulls away again.
    The crescent moon is hiding behind the clouds. It’s not like in the city, where the sky never goes completely dark, just a deep gray. Here, I can barely see the road. Only the paleness of the snow keeps me from falling off the edge into the deeper shadows of the runoff ditches that border the road. Those ruts are filled with tangles of bushes and tumbleweeds of trash frozen in the muck.
    All I can see of Ash up ahead is the white blur of her running shoes.
    “Move it, Danny!” She’s not even winded. “Catch me, and maybe I’ll let you cop a feel.”
    I let out a wheezy laugh. Reaching deep down, I gather up enough juice for one burst of speed and close in on those flying white sneakers. I stretch my arm out and just graze the back of her jacket with my fingertips.
    Then my motor dies. I stagger to a stop.
    Gasp. Wheeze. Gasp. Wheeze.
    Her shoes keep going, eating up the road. I