The Blob Read Free Page A

Flagg the world twirled around, away, and then, with an abrupt lurch and a splash, he found himself at the bottom, lying in a thin trickle of water, the motorbike on top, pinning him to the muddy clay. Wetness spread through his trousers, sopping them, and he struggled to get up.
    “You not only let me down,” he said to the Indian, “you rub my nose in it. What kind of faithful companion are you?”
    The cheers from the high school football game seemed to mock him.
    Then closer applause came from above. Flagg looked up. The Can Man was peering over the edge above, a big grin on his stubbly face. He started to wheeze with laughter.
    Flagg shot him a glare, then began to wiggle out from beneath the bike.
    The Can Man chuckled a little more as he polished Flagg’s discarded Coors can and chucked it with a clank into his plastic sack. The mutt whimpered away.
    Flagg sighed and finally pulled himself free.
    The Can Man turned and followed his dog.
    Flagg shook his head morosely. God, the humiliation! He couldn’t have suffered this failure alone, he had to have Jimmy Nick the Can Man witness it. Like that saying, If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it really make a sound? If Brian Flagg gets chucked into the mud by his bike, does he feel embarrassed unless someone sees it?
    Well, he felt damned embarrassed. Maybe that meant he had just proved something, though hell if he knew what. It wasn’t as if the old Can Man was going to go and blab his story all over town. The Can Man didn’t say diddly to most people, and he didn’t exactly hang out with the boys on the general-store porch. So why did it bother him?
    Flagg knew why.
    The Can Man didn’t use his mouth much, but sure as hell he used his ears. He knew Brian Flagg, and sure as shit he knew the boy’s troubled history. Trouble, trouble, trouble, was the theme here, with no happy endings, just a couple of stretches in juvie hall, getting “reformed.”
    The old Can Man was probably thinking: Typical. Typical Flagg move. Trouble. He thinks he’s so cool, and he ends up wallowing in a ditch.
    Brian stood and brushed his pants off. He pulled the bike up and pushed it toward a dry area so it wouldn’t get messed up worse. He loved his bike. It was cheap transportation, cheap freedom, and Brian Flagg cherished freedom deeply. Now more than ever, since he’d been deprived of it a few times. He just had to work out the kinks, that was all. He’d get it running right again; he was a pretty good mechanic, used to his machine.
    Still, as he parked the bike, the memory of the Can Man’s derisive clapping and the cheering in the distance lingered in Flagg’s mind. A low heat of anger simmered deep as he knocked some of the mud off the bike.
    People could be real jerks, all right. They peg you for something, and then that’s what they stick you with. He remembered when he was just a kid, he’d hear the whispers behind his back. “Hey . . . that’s Josh Flagg’s boy, isn’t it? Like father like son. Blood will out. Following in his daddy’s footsteps.”
    God, that had hurt. All his memories of Joshua Flagg had been good ones. At least up until Joshua Flagg had embezzled that money and skipped town, abandoning son and wife. That was a pain that Flagg didn’t think about much, but, of course, it never really went away. And ever since his dad ran off, the whole town had been waiting for him to turn bad too. All Brian had ever wanted was to be somebody, to be different. He’d made a few mistakes, sure. And the way he acted, the way he dressed—yeah, maybe it wasn’t exactly in the regular social mode of Morgan City, USA. But it was him, it was Brian Flagg, and to hell with them all if they couldn’t take a joke. Right?
    Damned right.
    He’d show them all. Soon as he could get some money together, get some prospects someplace else. He’d be outta here, leave this stupid little nowhere town, dumb old Morgan City with its cheesy ski resort and