The Burning Man by Christa Faust Page A

staggered back and to the left, as Brent followed up with a punch to the gut, and then a swift uppercut that nearly knocked Kieran’s lower jaw loose from its hinges. He fell to his knees and Tyler kicked him in the center of the chest, knocking him over on his back. Kieran turned to his side, turtling up with his arms over his head as the two bullies kicked him again and again.
    “Why you gotta be such a little snitch-bitch?” Brent asked, punctuating the question with another kick.
    “What do you care anyway?” Tyler said, kicking Kieran again. “You don’t know her.”
    “Yeah,” Brent said, with another kick. “What do you care about a skank like that?” Another kick. “She’s, like, not even a person.”
    Kieran knew better than to try to respond. Questions like that weren’t requests for actual information. They were just aggressive sounds, like dogs barking or chimpanzees grunting. Instead, he kept his head covered and stared at the tiny octagonal black and white floor tiles visible between his forearms.
    He tried to list the next ten movies he wanted to order from his Hong Kong tape trader. Or decide what to do about that eleventh chapter in his novel that had been giving him so much trouble—the one where Enigma goes back to her old home town and has to confront demons from her childhood. Or anything other than the relentless blows filling his mouth with blood and his battered body with searing agony.
    Just when Kieran thought he couldn’t stand another second, the barrage of abuse ceased. He heard one of his tormentors hock up a thick, juicy loogie, and he felt it splat against his temple, dripping down his cheek. Then he heard receding footsteps and the sound of the trash can being dragged away from the door.
    Then, nothing.
    He waited for a second, then another. Waiting to see what would happen next.
    Still nothing.
    He risked a glance through his protectively held arms. He was alone in the bathroom.
    He got slowly, painfully to his feet. His body felt like a bag of rocks and broken glass. His poor heart was thumping desperately like a trapped rabbit. His flannel shirt was stained and smeared with blood, so he took it off and threw it into the trash. He didn’t want to look in the mirror, but he couldn’t help himself.
    His lower lip was twice the normal size, with a raw, bleeding split. He had a fat mouse under one eye that was going to blacken fast, and his chest and sides were blotchy with red, shoe-shaped marks where he had been stomped and kicked. This was going to go down in his personal history as the worst beating of his life so far.
    He ran water in the sink and splashed it on his stinging face, washing away the spit clinging to his cheek and the blood crusted under his nose. But he couldn’t wash away the anger. The hot, impotent fury that made him want to put his fist through a wall and smash everything in sight.
    Particularly Brent and Tyler’s faces.
    He ran back to his room, grabbed a clean shirt and his coat and got the hell out of the dorm. No way of knowing when the bullies might decide to come back for more.
    He had a wool cap in his pocket and pulled it down low over his eyes so the other students wouldn’t see his bruised face, and headed over to the math and computer science building.
    It was one of the newer buildings, built in the late seventies. Kieran thought it looked like it had been borrowed from the set of a British science fiction series about a future utopia where people of all colors and creeds wear togas and enjoy peaceful intellectual discourse. It looked kind of like a pair of concrete igloos connected by a glassed-in walkway. Students called it “the Tits.”
    It was one of Kieran’s favorite places on campus, because guys like Brent and Tyler wouldn’t be caught dead there. They contented themselves to snigger at the building’s silhouette from the football field.
    Once inside, Kieran ducked into the empty solid geometry lab and sat down at one of the