Last of the Mighty Read Online Free PDF Page B

stretches, my insides squirming with the anticipation of doling out some serious payback. At the center of the mat, I extended my hand to shake.
    Tucker slapped it away. He whispered, “I will knock him.”
    â€œTucker!” Coach’s reprimand came out as an amused chuckle.
    I will knock him? I must be hearlucinating.
    Tucker glanced at Burns then shook my hand. Quick, impatient.
    The whistle blew.
    Game on.
    We circled each other, hunched. We grabbed at wrists, elbows. Feigning. Taunting. Each of us trying to create a crack large enough shoot the leg, lock the arm, take the other down.
    â€œLet us be patient…” Tucker’s voice was hushed, familiar even, yet much different from his last whisper. “And wear him down.”
    Okay. First the “knock” thing, and now this—the exact sentence I heard Smiler saying in The Committee a few mornings back.
    â€œKnock him!” demanded Tucker, and he was on me like a bullet.
    Strangling both my legs, he barreled forward, a tank. Low and powerful. I went down. Hard. Butt plowing into the mat, then the back of my head. I scrabbled quickly to my stomach. Man, he was strong!
    Stunned by Tucker’s speed, I snatched for anything of him I could get—a knee, forearm, ankle, foot… Nothing but air.
    He dug his chin into the gauze that covered my stitches. Pain arched me into a canoe. I growled, teeth clenched, furious.
    Whispering again, Tucker resumed the conversation with himself. “Easy, Knock, there’s plenty of time,” said his softer, slow-paced voice. “But I smell the good on him!” came a reply from the more hostile of Tucker’s imaginary friends.
    Psychopath? No. The word path implied something small. Psycho-highway was more appropriate for Tucker.
    At the edge of my vision, a crowd gathered. Other wrestlers.
    Okay. Enough with playtime. Time to teach Tucker a lesson.
    I twisted and grappled, coiled and spun, used every escape technique and reversal trick in the book. I called on all my strength and fought to bust out of his grip.
    No dice.
    The guy was iron.
    I finally managed to wriggle my arm into a position that gave me a shred of leverage. In a few seconds, I’d be free of him.
    A fist punched into the gauze on my back. Fire shot through me.
    â€œTucker!” Coach Burns warned.
    â€œOne!” said a voice.
    â€œLay ahhff Ahhg’s back.”
    One? Was I being counted out?
    â€œTwo!” boomed the makeshift ref.
    Only then did I feel my shoulders glued to the mat, Tucker wrapped around me like a python. I rocked and writhed, desperate to create the pillow of air beneath my shoulders that would save me from—
    â€œThree!”
    Whack!
    A hand smacked the mat.
    Game.
    Over.

Chapter Eleven
    I stayed in the gym for an hour. Even the showerhead’s rainstorm couldn’t wash away my humiliation, disappointment, and general pissed-offedness at being pinned.
    In under two minutes.
    I couldn’t believe I lost. Especially to a tool like Tucker.
    His face was still right there, looking the same as when he’d released me. The dead eyes. The cocked brows. The stupid fishhook hair. A mannequin grin clipped to his cheeks by the demon inside him called Smiler.
    Part of me felt sorry for him. As if being possessed by one demon wasn’t bad enough, but two... And I thought my day sucked. My sympathy for him was incomplete, though. Probably because Tucker was reveling in his newfound, diabolic strength. I don’t know, maybe I was rationalizing. To justify my yearning to shatter his brainpan.
    All my teammates had dressed and gone when a cry of “Og!” cut through the thunder of the shower. Had to be Coach Burns, telling me to get out or pay the hot water bill. I turned to face him.
    No one there.
    â€œListen!”
    The Committee again.
    I wasn’t in the mood. I preferred to carry on with the slow, wrinkling, waterlogged death promised by an everlasting