Z by J. M. Lassen

Author:J. M. Lassen [Lassen, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597803120
Amazon: 159780312X
Publisher: Night Shade Books[Start]
Published: 2011-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Xx{P

THE

DEAD KID

DARRELL

SCHWEITZER

I

It’s been a lot of years, but I think I’m still afraid of Luke Bradley, because of what he showed me.

I knew him in the first grade, and he was a tough guy even then, the sort of kid who would sit on a tack and insist it didn’t hurt, and then make you sit on the same tack (which definitely did hurt) because you were afraid of what he’d do if you didn’t. Once he found a bald-faced hornet nest on tree branch, broke it off, and ran yelling down the street, waving the branch around and around until finally the nest fell off and the hornets came out like a cloud. Nobody knew what happened after that because the rest of us had run away.

We didn’t see Luke in school for a couple days afterwards, so I suppose he got stung rather badly. When he did show up he was his old self and beat up three other boys in one afternoon. Two of them needed stitches.

When I was about eight, the word went around the neighborhood that Luke Bradley had been eaten by a werewolf. “Come on,” said Tommy Hitchens, Luke’s current sidekick. “I’ll show you what’s left of him. Up in a tree.”

I didn’t believe any werewolf would have been a match for Luke Bradley, but I went. When Tommy pointed out the alleged remains of the corpse up in the tree, I could tell even from a distance that I was looking at a t-shirt and a pair of blue-jeans stuffed with newspapers.

I said so and Tommy flattened me with a deft right hook, which broke my nose, and my glasses.

The next day, Luke was in school as usual, though I had a splint on my nose. When he saw me, he called me a “pussy” and kicked me in the balls.

Already he was huge, probably a couple of years older than the rest of the class. Though he never admitted it, everybody knew he’d been held back in every grade at least once, even kindergarten.

But he wasn’t stupid. He was crazy. That was the fascination of hanging out with him, even if you could get hurt in his company. He did wild things that no one else dared even think about. There was the stunt with the hornet nest, or the time he picked up fresh dogshit in both his bare hands and claimed he was going to eat it right in front of us before everybody got grossed out and ran because we were afraid he was going to make us eat it. Maybe he really did. He was just someone for whom the rules, all the rules, simply did not apply. That he was usually in detention, and had been picked up by the police several times only added to his mystique.

And in the summer when I was twelve, Luke Bradley showed me the dead kid.

Things had progressed quite a bit since then. No one quite believed all the stories of Luke’s exploits, though he would beat the crap out of you if you questioned them to his face.

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