The War Game by Crystal Black Read Free Book Online Page A

to the first hole.
                  I went first. It took me nine embarrassing strokes to get the ball in. He took three very precise shots. Each time he took a swing, he made a big show about lining the ball just right with his club, and hitting it with the exact amount of pressure to enable it on its destination.
                  We hit that little ball over a bridge, over hills and a small stream of muddy water, through tunnels, and through a windmill.
                  We were about to approach the seventh hole (beside a ten-foot tiki face) when we noticed something half-buried in the dirt. Something I recognized from my anatomy book.
                  My brain told my legs to move but they couldn’t. I happened to glance over to the next couple of holes on the course and saw several large patches of dug-up grass with dried flowers thrown on top.  Then I notice how bumpy the ground was underneath me.
                  John slowly dug a little in the dirt with the golf club. Part of a scapula bone (a shoulder blade) was hidden underneath.
                  “Looks like he or she has been dead here for quite a while,” John said rather calmly. No matter how many dead bodies I see, it freaked me out inside. But not as much as it used to.
                  “Let’s go now,” I said, leading the way out.
                  Some big-nosed guy with a waistline hanging over his belt caught up to us as we were exiting the miniature golf park. Any hint of a jelly roll or muffin top was a tell-tale sign of a newbie. A newbie is one of those who were recently outed and sent packing for camp. Also, the fact that he had a real belt and not a piece of rope was also a giveaway.
                  When he saw our faces, pure white I’m sure, he frowned. “Hey, yeah, I was just going to warn you about that.”
                  “It’s all right, man,” John said calmly.
                  The man dug around in his pockets and pulled out a couple of strips of arcade tickets from his pants. “I was also going to give you these.”
                  “For what?” John and I were clueless.
                  “Some of the people here are setting up a store. You use these tickets like money to buy things. It’s the one that’s near the front gates, next to the big water fountain.”
                  “All right, cool. Thanks.”
                  “You’re welcome.” The big-nosed man took off.
                  John was awfully calm for having just uprooted a dead human being. I felt tingly all over, like when I saw that guy’s intestines a while back. 
                  “How many tickets did he give us?” I said, in an attempt to shift the mood hanging over us to a lighter one.
                  John counted the tickets by two and came up with the answer really fast. “Forty tickets. So we each get twenty.”
                  “How did you do that?”
                  “Do what?”
                  “Know how many tickets there were without counting them all?”
                  “Multiplication. You have four strips of ten, so that’s forty.”
                  “Yeah, I don’t get it. I didn’t get to go to school for very long.”
                  “Maybe I can teach it to you sometime.”
                  “Do you want to go check the store out now?”
                  “Sure,” he nodded in agreement.
     
    ~~~
                 
                  The store still wasn’t ready to go. All that was there to eat were ketchup sandwiches, pretzel salt, and tart lemonade. The pickles were gone.
                  So John and I were sitting on the swings, waiting for people to make their way to the theater for the