Then looking squarely at Theresa, he added, “Whatever happens, I want to thank you. Thank you for teaching an old man a thing or two about heart, and spirit, and passion for a game that he thought he already knew . . .”
The umbrella was dismantled, the various thunders descending on them.
Theresa still disliked the man. But despite that hard-won feeling, or maybe because of it, a lump got up into her throat and refused to go away.
* * *
The kickoff set the tone.
Man o’ War received the ball deep in the end zone, dropped his head, and charged, skipping past defenders, then blockers—l-l-2041s, mostly—reaching his thirty-five-meter line with an avenue open to Tech’s end zone. But the Wildman slammed into him from the side, flinging that long, graceful body across the sideline and into the first row of seats, his big-cat speed and the crack of pads on pads causing a hundred thousand fans to go silent.
State’s top receiver couldn’t play for the first set of downs. His broken left hand had to be set first, then secured in a cast.
Without Man o’ War, Theresa worked her team down to the enemy’s forty. But for the first time that season, the opening drive bogged down, and she punted the ball past the end zone, and Tech’s first possession started at their twenty.
Three plays, and they scored.
Mosgrove threw one perfect pass. Then the Wildman charged up the middle twice, putting his shoulders into defenders and twisting around whatever he couldn’t intimidate. Playing ABM, Theresa tackled him on his second run. But they were five meters inside the end zone, and a referee fixed his yellow laser on her, marking her for a personal foul—a bizarre call considering she was the one bruised and bleeding here.
Man o’ War returned, and on the first play from scrimmage, he caught a sixty-meter bullet, broke two tackles, and scored.
But the extra point was blocked.
7-6, read every giant holo board. In flickering, flame-colored numbers.
The next Tech drive ate up nearly seven minutes, ending with a three-meter plunge up the middle. The Wildman was wearing the entire State team when he crossed the line—except for a pure-human boy whose collarbone and various ribs had been shattered, and who lay on the field until the medical cart could come and claim him.
14-6.
On the third play of State’s next drive, Theresa saw linebackers crowding against the line, and she called an audible. The ball was snapped to her. And she instantly delivered it to Man o’ War, watching him pull it in and turn upfield, a half-step taken when a whippetlike ABM hit the broken hand with his helmet, splitting both helmet and cast, the ball bouncing just once before a second whippet scooped it up and galloped in for a touchdown.
Tech celebrated, and Theresa trotted to the sidelines. Rickover found her, and for the first time all year—for the first time in her life—her coach said, “That, young lady, was wrong. Was stupid. You weren’t thinking out there.”
21-6.
State’s next possession ate up eight minutes, and it ended when the Wildman exploded through the line, driving Theresa into the ground and the ball into the air, then catching the ball as it fell into his chest, grinning behind the grillwork of his helmet.
Tech’s following drive ended with three seconds left in the half.
28-6.
Both locker rooms were at the south end. The teams were leaving in two ragged lines, and Theresa was thinking about absolutely nothing. Her mind was as close to empty as she could make it. When a student jumped from the overhead seats, landing in the tunnel in front of her, she barely paused. She noticed a red smear of clothing, then a coarse, drunken voice. “Bitch,” she heard. Then, “Do better! You goddamn owe me!” Then he began to make some comment about dog cocks, and that was when a massive hand grabbed him by an arm, yanking him off his feet, then throwing his limp body back into the anonymous crowd.
The Wildman stood in front of Theresa.
“She doesn’t owe you fuck!” he was screaming. Looking up at hundreds of wide eyes and opened, horror-struck mouths, he shouted, “None of us owes you shit! You morons! Morons! Morons!”
* * *
Halftime needed to last long enough to sell a hundred happy products to the largest holo audience since the Mars landing, and to keep the energy level up in the dome, there was an elaborate show involving bands and cheerleaders from both schools, plus half a dozen puffy, middle-aged pop entertainers. It was an hour’s reprieve, which was just enough time for Rickover to define his team’s worst blunders and draw up elegant solutions to every weakness. How much of his speech sank home, Theresa couldn’t say. She found herself listening more to the droning of the bilge pumps than to the intricacies of playing quarterback and ABM. A numbness was building inside her, spreading into her hands and cold toes. It wasn’t exhaustion or fear. She knew how those enemies felt, and she recognized both festering inside her belly, safely contained. And it wasn’t self-doubt, because when she saw Man o’ War taking practice snaps in the back of the locker room, she leaped to her feet and charged Rickover, ready to say, “You can, but you shouldn’t! Give me another chance!”
But her rocketback beat her to him. Flexing the stiff hand inside the newest cast, Man o’ War admitted, “I can’t hold it to pass. Not like I should.”
Rickover looked and sounded like a man in absolute control.
He nodded, saying, “Fine.” Then he turned to the girl and said, “We need to stop them on their opening drive, then hang close. You can, believe me, manage that.”
Theresa looked at the narrowed corners of his eyes and his tight little mouth, the terror just showing. And she lied, telling him and herself, “Sure. Why not?”
* * *
Tech took the opening kickoff.
Coach Jones was grinning on the sidelines, looking fit and rested. Supremely confident. Smelling a blowout, he opened up with a passing attack. The long-armed Mosgrove threw a pair of twenty-meter darts, then dropped back and flung for the end zone. Theresa stumbled early, then picked herself up and guessed, running hard for the corner, the whippet receiver leaping high and her doing the same blind, long legs driving her toward the sky as she turned, the ball hitting her chest, then her hands, then bouncing free, tumbling down into Man o’ War’s long cupped arms.
State inherited the ball on the twenty.
After three plays and nine meters, they punted.
A palpable calm seemed to have infected the audience. People weren’t exactly quiet, but their chatter wasn’t directed at the game anymore. State supporters tucked into the south corner—where the piss-mouthed fellow had come from—found ways to entertain themselves. They chanted abuse at the enemy. “Moron, moron, moron!” they cried out as Tech moved down the field toward them. “Moron, moron, moron!”
If the Wildman noticed, it didn’t show in the stony, inflexible face.
Or Theresa was too busy to notice subtleties, helping plug holes and flick away passes. And when the Wildman galloped up the middle, she planted and dropped a shoulder and hit him low on the shins.
A thousand drills on technique let her tumble the mountainous boy.
Alan fell, and Theresa’s teammates would torpedo his exposed ribs and his hamstrings, using helmets as weapons, and sometimes more than helmets. One time, the giant man rose up out of the pile and staggered—just for a strange, what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment. A river of impossibly red blood was streaming from his neck. The field judge stopped the game to look at hands until he found long nails dipped in red, and a culprit. Tech was awarded fifteen meters with the personal foul, but for the next three plays, their running back sat on the sideline, his thick flesh being closed up by the team’s medics.
Tech was on the eleven when he returned, breaking through the middle, into the open, then stumbling. Maybe for the first time in his life, his tired legs suddenly weighed what they really weighed. And when he went down hard, his ball arm was extended, and Theresa bent and scooped the treasure out of his hand and das
hed twenty meters before one of the whippets leveled her.
For a long minute, she lay on her back on that mangled sod, listening to the relentless cheers, and trying to remember exactly how to breathe.
Tech’s sideline was close. Pure-humans wearing unsoiled laser-blue uniforms watched her with a fanlike appreciation. This wasn’t their game; they were just spectators here. Then she saw the Wildman trudge into view, his helmet slightly askew, the gait and the slope of his shoulders betraying a body that was genuinely, profoundly tired. For the first time in his brief life, Alan Wilde was exhausted. And Theresa halfway smiled, managing her first sip of real air as Marlboro Jones strode into view, cornering his star running back in order to tell him to goddamn please protect the fucking ball—
Alan interrupted him.
Growling. Theresa heard a hard, low sound.
Jones grabbed his player’s face guard, and he managed a chin-up, putting his face where it had to be seen. Then he rode the Wildman for a full minute, telling him, “You don’t ever! Ever! Not with me, mister!” Telling him, “This is your fucking life! It’s being played out right here! Right now!” Screaming at him, “Now sit and miss your life! Until you learn your manners, mister! You sit!”
Four plays later, Theresa dumped a short pass into her running back’s hands, and he rumbled through a string of sloppy tackles, all the way into the end zone.
State tried for a two-point conversion, but they were stopped
The score looked sloppy on the holo boards, 28-12.
Tech’s star returned for the next downs, but he was more like Alan than like the mythical Wildman. In part, there was a lack of focus. Theresa saw a confused rage in those giant, suddenly vulnerable eyes. But it was just as much exhaustion. Frayed muscles were having trouble lifting the dense, over-engineered bones, and the pounding successes of the first half were reduced to three-meter gains and gouts of sod and black earth thrown toward the remote carbon-fiber roof.
State got the ball back late in the third quarter. Rickover called for a draw play, which might have worked. But in the huddle, Theresa saw how the defense was lining up, and she gave Man o’ War a few crisp instructions.
As the play began, her receiver took a few steps back.
Theresa flung the ball at a flat green spot midway between them, and it struck and bounced high, defenders pulling to a stop when they assumed the play was dead. Then Man o’ War grabbed the ball, and despite his cast, heaved the ball an ugly fifty meters, delivering its fluttering fat body into waiting hands.
Rickover wanted to try for two points.
Theresa called time-out, marched over to Rickover and said, “I can get us three.” It meant setting up on the ten-meter line. “I can smell it,” she said. “They’re starting to get really tired.”
“Like we aren’t?” Man o’ War piped in, laughing amiably as medics patched his cast.
The coach grudgingly agreed, then called a fumbleroosky. Theresa took the snap, bent low, and set the live ball inside one of the sod’s deep gouges. And her center, a likable and sweet pure-human named Mitch Long, grabbed up the ball and ran unnoticed and untroubled into the end zone.
28-21, and nobody could think for all the wild, proud cheering of pure-humans.
* * *
State managed to hold on defense.
Mosgrove punted, pinning them deep at their end with ten minutes left.
Theresa stretched the field with a towering, uncatchable pass, then started to run and dump little passes over the middle. The Wildman was playing linebacker, and he tackled her twice, the second blow leaving her chin cut open and her helmet in pieces. Man o’ War took over for a down. He bobbled the snap, then found his grip just in time for the Wildman to come over the center and throw an elbow into his face, shattering the reinforced mask as well as his nose.
Playing with two pure-humans at once, Theresa pitched to her running back, and he charged toward the sideline, wheeled, and flung a blind pass back across the field. She snagged it and ran forty meters in three seconds. Then a whippet got an angle, and at the last moment pushed her out of bounds. But she managed to hold the ball out, breaking the orange laser beam rising from the pylon.
Finally, finally, the game was tied.
Marlboro called time-out, then huddled with his 1-1-2041s. There wasn’t even the pretense of involving the rest of the team. Theresa watched the gestures, the coach’s contorting face. Then Tech seemed to shake off its collective fatigue, putting together a prolonged drive, the Wildman scoring on a tough run up the middle and Mosgrove kicking the extra point with just a minute and fifty seconds left.
35-28.
Rickover gathered his entire team around him, stared at their faces with a calming, messianic intensity. Then without uttering a word, he sent eleven of them out to finish the game.
The resulting drive consumed the entire one hundred and ten seconds.
From the first snap, Theresa sensed what was happening here and what was inevitable. When Man o’ War dropped a perfect soft pass, she could assure him, “Next time.” And as promised, he one-handed a dart over his shoulder on the next play, gaining fifteen. Later, following a pair of hard sacks, it was fourth and thirty, and Theresa scrambled and pump-faked twice, then broke downfield, one of the whippets catching her, throwing his hard little body at her belly. But she threw an elbow, then a shoulder, making their first down by nothing and leaving the defender unconscious for several minutes, giving the medics something to do while her team breathed and made ready.
Thirty meters came on a long sideline pattern.
Fifteen were lost when the Wildman drove through the line and chased Theresa back and forth for a week, then downed her with a swing of an arm.
But she was up and functioning first. Alan lay on the ground gasping, that wide elephantine face covered with perspiration and its huge tongue panting and an astonished glaze numbing the eyes.
Tech called time-out.
Mitch brought in the next three plays.
He lasted for one. Another pure-human was inserted the next down, and the next, and that was just to give them eleven bodies. The thin-skinned, frail-boned little boys were bruised and exhausted enough to stagger. Mitch vomited twice before he got back to the sidelines, bile and blue pills scattered on the grass. The next boy wept the entire time he was with them. Then his leg shattered when the Wildman ran over him. But every play was a gain, and they won their next first down, and there were an entire sixteen seconds left and forty meters to cross and Theresa calmly used their last time-out and joined Rickover, knowing the play that he’d call before he could say it.
She didn’t hear one word from her coach, nodding the whole time while gazing off into the stands.
Fans were on their feet, hoarsely cheering and banging their hands together. The drunks in the corner had fashioned a crude banner, and they were holding it high, with pride, shouting the words with the same dreary rage.
“MORON, MORON, MORON,” she read.
She heard.
The time-out ended, and Theresa trotted back out and looked at the faces in the huddle, then with an almost quiet voice asked, “Why are turds tapered?”
Then she said, “To keep our assholes from slamming shut.”
Then she gave the play, and she threw twenty meters to Man o’ War, and the clock stopped while the markers moved themselves, and she threw the ball into the sod, halfway burying it to stop the universe once again.
Two seconds.
She called a simple crossing pattern.
But Coach Jones guessed it and held his people back in coverage. Nobody was open enough to try forcing it, which was why she took off running. And because everyone was sloppy tired, she had that advantage, twisting out of four tackles and head-faking a whippet, then finding herself in the corner with Alan Wilde standing in front of her, barring the way to the goal line.
She dropped her shoulder, charging as he took a long step forward and braced himself, pads and her collarbone driving i
nto the giant man’s groin, the exhausted body pitched back and tumbling and her falling on top of him, lying on him as she would lie on a bed, then rolling, off the ground until she was a full meter inside the end zone.
She found her legs and her balance, and almost too late, she stood up.
Alan was already on his feet. She saw him marching past one of the officials, his helmet on the ground behind him, forgotten, his gaze fixed on that MORON banner and the people brandishing it in front of him.
Some were throwing small brown objects at him.
Or maybe at all the players, it occurred to her.
Theresa picked up the bone-shaped dog treat, a part of her astonished by the cruel, calculated planning that went into this new game.
Carried by a blistering rage, Alan began running toward the stands, screaming, “You want to see something funny, fucks? Do you?”
Do nothing, and State would likely win.
But Theresa ran anyway, hitting Alan at the knees, bringing him down for the last time.
A yellow laser struck her—a personal foul called by the panicked referee.
Theresa barely noticed, yanking off her helmet and putting her face against that vast, fury-twisted face, and like that, without warning, she gave him a long, hard kiss.
“Hey, Alan,” she said. “Let’s just have some fun here. Okay?”
* * *
A couple thousand Tech fans, wrongly thinking that the penalty ended the game and the game was won, stampeded into the far end of the field.
In those next minutes, while penalties and the crowd were sorted out, the 1-1-2041s stood together in the end zone, surrounding the still fuming Wildman. And watching the mayhem around them, Theresa said, “I wish.” Then she said it again—“I wish!”—with a loud, pleading voice.
“What are you wishing for?” asked Man o’ War.
She didn’t know what she wanted. When her mouth opened, her conscious mind didn’t have the simplest clue what she would say. Theresa was just as surprised as the others when she told them, “I wish they were gone. All these people. This is our game, not theirs. I want to finish it. By ourselves, and for ourselves. Know what I mean?”
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