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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780446524971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grand Central Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.31(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The 200th Year
Sunday, February 22
6:44 a.m.
They'd killed him hours before, but he still had a few minutes to suffer.
He lay young and naked, his pale, poisoned body a wisp on the damp carpet.
Midnight torture had flattened him, but now, as the morning sun shone through a bay window and off his bare ass, he stirred from his nightlong coma. He knew something was terribly wrong the moment he opened his eyes.
I'm blind, he thought, too far gone to panic.
He sorted his tangled limbs and sat up with great effort. He felt the blindfold, stiff with dried toxins and his own varied secretions.
Then, as his world spun, he remembered.
The race. The rematch. The countless fists, beating him senseless. The pitiless feet, beating him a little more.
And the timeless poetry, raining rhymes from above.
Pain and pride are inseparable twins
This is where lifelong love begins . . .
Pride, buried beneath the pain. Lifelong love, nowhere to be found. A candlelit world of knuckles and shadows and boots and confusion. And orders.
You are the weak, and we are the strong
So march while we maim you, and sing us the song . . .
His legs and lips, marching and mumbling. His throat, gagging on a song and something wicked. His belly, throwing it all up.
You've failed us again, but you'll fail us no more.
Go hands, knees, and mouth-mop, and clean the damn floor . . .
His hands and knees set sloppy in a hideous scum.
His tongue, cleaning the damn floor.
Now, he struggled to his feet and listened to a distant voice-his, but not his-singing vague and pathetic bits of a jumbled rhyme he could normally sing in his sleep.
'Hell . . . yell . . . obey . . . no way . . . weakness . . .' Trailing off breathlessly, he flopped back to the floor. The cold sogginess of the rug reminded him he was naked.
And why.
Back on your feet, boys, it's not over yet
There's one bad-ass brother you still haven't met . . .
His fingers groped for something, anything stable, and found a smooth rung on the balcony rail that overlooked the first floor of the fraternity house. Hauling himself to his feet once again, he let his broken hand linger on the rail for balance, and with his good hand he battled the blindfold. He wrestled weakly with the knot itself, then clawed at the fabric, somehow forcing the cloth down his face until it hung loose around his neck.
Pausing a moment to catch his breath, he heard a subtle noise behind him, a sound of movement that, on mornings of reasonable clarity, might have registered as human and covert. On this morning, however, he was his own, polluted world. It didn't occur to him to gauge the proximity and aim of another.
Slowly, very slowly, he opened his eyes.
Sunlight slammed his eyeballs and knocked him backward into the leather chair beneath the hanging portrait of some famous guy. The leather was gummy and soaked-with what, he didn't know and, at this point, certainly didn't care. He'd swallowed enough of just about everything the night before; a topical dose of the unknown on his legs wouldn't kill him.
Something else would.
But like most who die suddenly and violently, he was oblivious to forthcoming disaster. He merely knew during these, the final moments of his conscious life, that the puddle in which he sat was stinging the shit out of his rug-burned thighs.
And that someday soon, it would all be worth it.
For someday soon, he'd be a brother.
But first, he'd be sick.
He leapt to his feet.
Way too quickly.
His sight blurred, then filled with strange colors, and as he vomited, he lurched against the railing. The varnished wood tackled him at thigh level, and without feeling the hands on his back, or knowing their intention, he toppled forward into space.
I'm flying, he thought, as the bottom dropped out of his world.
Fifteen feet later, he landed headfirst.
As he lay there very still, strangely pain-free and fearless, his world slowly stopped spinning, soon to stop altogether.
7:14 a.m.
Penny Ward pulled her battered Chevy into the ice-capped parking lot of the Sigma Delta Phi fraternity house and skidded on bald tires into her usual parking spot between the rear kitchen entrance and the big blue Dumpster. She applied the parking brake, gently put the engine out of its misery, then held on for dear life as it convulsed, sputtered, and died with a sigh. Exhaling a sigh of her own, she squinted at the chapel clock in the distance.
7:15.. Fifteen minutes late, she observed without worry. On a Sunday morning in February, the brothers of Sigma wouldn't be awake for another three hours, at least. Until then, they'd be sleeping off the previous night's sins.
And she'd be cooking for them.
Penny was the breakfast chef; nine bucks an hour commanded her to make sure the Sigma brothers got their fill of omelettes and waffles, five mornings a week. Sunday was one of her mornings.
She sighed again and leaned across the ripped vinyl seat to grab her handbag. As she did, she couldn't help stealing a quick glance in the cracked rearview mirror. The sight made her cringe. She needed a haircut and a dye job, big time. She also needed the body of a twenty-year-old who'd not yet borne children, but she knew better than to ask for miracles.
She was fifty, gray and a little heavy, but in one piece. She supposed she could live with that.
She looped a finger through the handle of her bag, threw her shoulder into the driver-side door, and freed herself from the car.
Her first step toward the fraternity house found nothing but sheer ice, and down she went, hard, smacking the palm of her hand against the rusted bumper as she fell.
"Shit!" she yelled, and immediately felt guilty. It was the Sabbath, after all. Lying flat on her back, she examined her wound and noted that it was bleeding all over the sleeve of the white leather jacket that had cost her a full month's pay.
"Shit again!" This time she meant it.
Once inside, she hurled her purse onto the cutting board, then headed for the first-aid kit in the first-floor bathroom. She stomped through the spacious dining room, thumbing her wound and wishing she had weekends off like the rest of the world.
As she entered the living room, a light, jingling sound caught her attention, and she knew what it was even before she'd looked up from her gash. Dog tags.
Sure enough, from behind one of the sofas jutted the black, beefy hindquarters of Geronimo, the slobbery mutt owned by one of the juniors who lived on the second floor. Penny generally liked dogs, but she had no place in her heart for this one; she spent a good deal of her daily time and energy shooing his voracious appetite from the kitchen. Judging from the dog's posture, Penny guessed that the beast was, as usual, licking something off the floor.
Something was obstructed from Penny's view.
Something undoubtedly disgusting.
Whatever it was, she had no desire to look.
But as she hustled past, something made her glance down and to the left, and when she did, she gasped.
On the floor, beneath the second-floor balcony, lay a naked, twisted body. It took Penny a moment to place the face, then a moment more to attach a name to the carnage. It was a pledge-Chad something-or-other; she knew that much. She also knew that this was far more than just a standard, drunken pass-out, and her heart began to pound. The pledge's body was bent unnaturally, and his skin was covered with some sort of black writing. A pool of blood encircled his head, and it was this puddle that Geronimo was lapping.
Penny backpedaled on weak feet that barely felt the floor beneath them. Her own wound forgotten, she wheeled and fled back toward the kitchen. She picked up the kitchen phone, whispered something Catholic, and tried to remember the number for 911.
(c) 1999 by Rob Kean"