Wolf in White Van Read Online Free Page A

would drop out of play, and then the winner would announce, in a breathless voice that suggested he couldn’t believe his luck: “I’m the sole survivor!” It held my attention. As a child I wanted everything to be insome way concerned with endings. The end of the world. The last Neanderthal. The final victim. The stroke of midnight. So children playing a game called Stay Alive on a beach with nobody else around, that spoke to something in me, something I’d maybe been born with. Of the many logos for imaginary products I would come to design throughout high school, Trace Italian was the first. I’d gotten the name from dry days in history class during a lesson on medieval fortifications: anything that involved the word
star
always sounded like it was speaking directly to me. The
trace italienne
involved triangular defensive barricades branching out around all sides of a fort: stars within stars within stars, visible from space, one layer of protection in front of another for miles. The
World Book
preferred the term
star fort
, which I also liked, but in idly guess-working
trace italienne
into English I’d stumbled across a phrase that had, for me, an autohypnotic effect. TRACE ITALIAN . I would spend hours writing and rewriting the name in stylized block capitals, reticulated line segments forming letters like the readout on a calculator. On notebook paper rubbed raw with erasures, the evolving logo resembled a department store’s name spelled out in dots and dashes on cash register tape: RILEYS UNIVERSITY SQUARE . The driving image for my game involved people running for shelter across a scorched planet. There was something on fire in the near distance behind them. Their faces looked out from the page toward their goal. The Trace Italian represented shelter, and it was shaped like a star. That was all I had.
    It was later, lying supine and blind for days, faced with the choice of either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit, when I started to fill in the details: how theplanet had been ruined (reactor five); how the cities had been emptied (mutant hominids from sea caves seeking out coastal cities for uncontaminated flesh, and continuing to move inland, spreading disease and killing innocents); where and how the surviving humans had built the Trace Italian (far inland, with their bare hands, from available materials cut and tumbled and hewn and polished over generations for several hundred years). How it rose from the landscape, bigger than its medieval counterparts, a shining structure on the plains, protecting the sprawling self-contained city underneath it, a barrier against the outside world and a sign to would-be intruders that its architects were people of great vision and design. Thinking of games as a way to kill time in history class had been one thing, but filling out the map and telling the story of every spot on it by myself, in my head, on my back: it was a refuge for me. I identified with the people I’d created to populate the barren landscape. I shared their goal: to find the location of the Trace Italian. Work through the ant-leg limbs of the star layer by layer until you find the shining heart. Get there at last. Stay there.
    I identified with the seekers to the point of imagining myself as one among their numbers. Pushing myself against the wall-rail down the hall to the shower room, I would picture myself scurrying shirtless through the few gutted buildings that remained in the slumping cities, whistling signals to the others who crawled across the crossbeams; served lunch, I would imagine that I was foraging for untainted canned foods, coughing through dust that rose from the shelves of a grocery store on an empty block in a long-depopulated city. Lying in my bed, I would think: I have been wounded en route to theTrace Italian. I am going to have to heal myself, or limp to safety. Get up. Get up. Get up.
    One day one of the nurses caught me sketching a dungeon, one of