The Instructions (142 page)

I found Brodsky’s keys and phone in his pockets, put them in mine. He said “Don’t” twice, but didn’t fight back. Berman, who knelt beside Boystar’s mother, was admiring the nib that he’d plucked from her cheek. The Israelites behind us stepped back and stepped back as Ally said my name, then said it again, and the riot of runners-cum-fighters encroached. I ordered the Israelites to move Brodsky south so he wouldn’t get trampled, and four came forward and lugged him by the limbs.

Berman, I said.

He didn’t seem to hear me, and again I laid hands on Berman to save him. We retreated two yards, got south of the scaffolding. More Israelites slicked through the chaos to join us. A bandkid popped out from the edge of the honeyspill, lunged in my direction, and, raising his sax to deliver his wallop—a wallop I 1342

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would not have been able to dodge—fell at my feet, a nib in his earhole = June was still safe, her sightlines clear. The Israelites danced on the bandkid’s torso. Berman pulled the nib, shot the kid in the guts with it, pulled it again, re-reloaded.

Thirty feet west and ten or so south, Desormie, his back to me, tried to pry Benji off Slokum. I went.

“Teachers are bleeding,” a newsman said, “while budding popstar, Boystar, under his father, hasn’t moved an iota since this mayhem began.”

By the pushbar-door exit, Vincie ordered a retreat before the expanding disarrangement could engulf them. Both halves of Portite had abandoned their posts now, and both the alarms in the gym were accessable.

“A clown who rides to town in a coffin,” sang Main Man.

Desormie, on his knees, pulled Benji from Slokum and hurled him toward the throng, bounced him off a speaker. The scaffold trembled.

Eight steps away now, I reached for my sap and my sap wasn’t there, it had slipped from my belt during one of my falls, but the twenty-odd feet I’d travelled at topspeed gave me enough momentum, I thought, and the gym teacher, standing now, couldn’t see me coming.

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Chin tucked low, right shoulder ahead of me, I cannoned at his neck… a step too late. My shoulder met his. The impact barely shook him, but its rebound floored me. I rolled like a pro and leapt back to my feet by the time he revolved, then I lunged again, this time for his throat. He sidestepped and chopped me down solid, mid-air. As I dropped, my arm hooked the megaphone’s thong. Its resistance slowed my fall and bent him forward. My shins smacked the floor, but the rest of me didn’t. I pulled on the thong to try to climb up him. The thong’s clasp snapped and I dropped once more. The megaphone landed just left of my head.

He stepped on my wrist as I tried to grab it, and he bounced hard twice before Benji chaired his thighbacks. Slokum tackled Benji, and the two blurred behind me. By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing.

I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach. I came off the ground a little, then met it prone.

My lip split wide and my chin felt chipped. My nose was intact.

My tongue was intact. The sting that was meanest stabbed from deep in my gums as half of an incisor spilled from my mouth to plop in a puddle of my very own gore. I knew it was over. I had yet to feel the ache from the kick itself: my stomach was a ghost yet, a big bag of numb, my pain receptors still too busy with my facewounds to process its messages properly.

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It’s over, I thought, and so I turned over, onto my side to see what came next, to see how the end looked, to see what he’d use, the blow that would pull me from out of my chest, if not for good, then forever.

No end was coming, though. No end came. Desormie was sitting. He was sitting right next to me, saying, “Oh no. Wait.

Hold on.” For a breath I thought: heart-attack. Then: Adonai.

And then I saw the blood. It founted in pulses from the nib in his carotid. One… two… three purple bursts, and he kept saying,

“Wait now wait now wait,” and then the scaffolding was falling and the pain hit my stomach, and a runner running over me tripped on my neck. My trampling was on. It wasn’t my brothers. It wasn’t, rather,
only
my brothers. Another runner kicked me in the back of the head.

The scaffolding, falling, stopped falling, was fallen. Metal wailed as it bowed. Flooring crunched into tinders. Snapped riggings unwound, buzzing the air, slapping each other while whipping in circles. Lightbulbs exploding inside their bent fixtures. The noise was sufficient to blot out the siren’s. Then came the cheers.

All ten of the remaining Jennys and Ashleys, each one of the ambulatory everykid no-ones, every bandkid and Shover who still had his legs: they all saw that the fallen scaffolding was good.

Pushing southward to flee from and beat on each other, they’d felled it loudly, and this random outcome—or maybe not random?

maybe some of them had actually tried to knock it down?—this 1345

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outcome, whether random or anything but, clearly struck them all as a kind of achievement, a result which they, whether knowingly or not, had toiled all along to produce, so they cheered.

But on seeing others cheering—their
enemies
cheering—they wondered if their victory wasn’t a loss, not exactly pyrrhic, but ironic nonetheless; wondered, each one, if they weren’t, after all, like the bumbling protagonist in any of a hundred blockbuster sports-comedies: the running back/power forward/pointguard/

striker who moves with all the grace of the athlete unobstructed across the field/court/ice in the wrong direction (unbeknownst to him) to score a touchdown/goal/basket against his own team.

Yet this wasn’t like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren’t fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn’t have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger.

They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, they’d been mistaken
before
: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren’t their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier—some other enemy—had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked.

Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder. This was, for the robots, none of whom cheered, no unlucky turn. Kids focused their violence exclusively on other kids, in many cases kids who’d been damaging robots.

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The force of the push to the south thus dissolved just after the fall of the scaffold.

But that push, however brief, had been a boon for the Indians: to avoid getting crushed, most of Nakamook had scattered, and those of them who hadn’t were cleaved from those they’d grappled.

Eliyahu’d lost his grip on the Co-Captain’s throat. Benji’s wrist-lock on Slokum got broken. Between these combatants, scores wedged at random. Brooklyn was swallowed by a spastic melee, and while he punched his way out, Baxter vanished in the mob.

Slokum headed east, in search of a weapon, gathering a comet’s tail of Shovers as he went. Nakamook elbowed through the fra-cas, stalking him.

The damaged near the doorways were rising, clearing out. Except for the people laying trampled on the court—most of whom, by now, had begun to crawl away—the northernmost third of the gym was all clear. Many of the robots, momentarily forgotten, were able to escape, and that’s what they did, along with some kids at the edges of the riot, but there were soon as many vectors of attack as aggressors, and there wasn’t any shortage of aggressors. By the time most kids who wanted to flee realized the exits were once again passable, the riot, like a mushroom too dense with ballistopores, had launched several mini-riots off of its stem, and those runners who attempted to weave between them were wrangled inside them as often as not.

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Desormie, on top of me—the southbound push having tipped him sideways, opposite the wound from which his blood arcs projected, thinning with each passing spurt—died. No surge of sympathy or sudden sense of loss overcame me as it would have were the world a stage, but it didn’t feel much like victory either.

Had a dead man I wished alive come alive, it would’ve been different, but a man I wished dead had merely been made dead. I hoped his final shudder was painful was all, hoped it lasted for years on the astral plane, and I tucked in as close as I could to his body, covered my head and my neck with my arms, let the gym teacher’s corpse absorb the horde’s footfalls, and that’s how I survived getting trampled and piled on.

Most Israelites, meanwhile, had zoned themselves off. After I’d left them to go kill Desormie, they’d retreated southeast, principal in tow. Their zone was a right isosceles triangle, with walls for two borders (the south and the east). Shoulder-to-shoulder, their pennyguns drawn, a line of twelve soldiers spanned the hypotenuse, all of them shooting at passing Shovers, the ex-Shovers among them shooting bandkids as well. An ex-Shover trio, commanded by Berman, held weapons on Brodsky, who was crouched in the corner, while a fourth tied his wrists and legs with cables yanked from the scaffolding’s wreckage.

Beneath the west hoop, Shlomo Cohen got cancanned. He couldn’t stop coughing. “What happened to your voice?” “Where’d your 1348

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voice go, Shlomo?” The plasterdust cloud the Five kicked from his cast: it choked him and stuck to his eyeballs and cuts. “Cuh,”

gacked Shlomo. “Give us a scream.” “Where’d your voice go, Shlomo?” “Gack.”

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters.

Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Once Brodsky was tethered securely to himself, Berman left Cory Goldman—same Cory I’d seen in the Office with Ruth on the previous Tuesday—in charge of the Israelites’ triangular zone, and went forth with six others to kick downed Shovers and gather projectiles the Side had fired. “We’ve got enough coins, so forget about the coins,” he said. “Get the nibs and the fasteners—especially the nibs, though. Every single nib that you see. They’re the best.” “What about the ones that’re stuck in people’s bodies.”

“Those too,” Berman said. “They’ll pull right out. If they’re stuck in some meat, you just pull them right out.”

His parents still writhing and rolling where they’d dropped and 1349

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then been trampled (then trampled some more), Boystar stirred, rose, fell. His tire-chain belt failed to clank—it was gone.

It was Vincie who found me, Starla by his side, Ansul trailing.

They batted back the swarm with chairs and their belts while the Flunky unpiled me and got me on my feet. Lots of parts of me were throbbing, swelling. Before Desormie’d tipped, I’d taken some stomping.

I reached for the soundgun, lost balance and fell.

The Flunky caught me, put me over his shoulder.

Megaphone, I said.

Vincie picked it up.

Get me to June.

Vincie cleared a way north, soundgun forward, putting siren-blasts into the ears of those who blocked us. Starla, behind him, spun left and right, random-launching fasteners to fend off any flank-assaults. The Flunky, who had me in a fireman’s carry, stayed close on her heels, and Ansul, on ours, walked backward to rearguard, twirling his belt like a boat-propeller.

Three everykid no-ones who noticed unbuckled.

The alarms, wide open, remained unpulled. To be near an alarm was to be near an exit, and those near an exit who weren’t being damaged were either bringing damage or escaping through the exit.

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An everykid, midcourt, was holding the mikestand, lifting it to swing on a Shover with his back turned, when Benji emerged from a nearby skirmish and rabbitpunched the everykid, wrested free the mikestand, swept the Shover’s legs with it, and headed, stand-first and vaguely westward, in search of Bam Slokum, who was half the court east of him.

Slokum was the one who’d taken Boystar’s belt. With the chain double-knotted around his ropey forearm, the padlock dangled a foot below his fist. He was standing by the east wall, north of the Israelites, catching his breath and panning for Benji and not getting shot or struck by anyone. Maholtz was gathered by his side with some Shovers.

At the corpse of his coach stared Co-Captain Baxter, eyebrows high and mouth agape. He crouched just over the dead man’s head and, on a sentimental whim, parted the lips of the dead man’s mouth with the whistle that was chained around the dead man’s neck, then fixed, by clamping with the fingers of his free hand, the lips around the whistle so the whistle would stay.

When at last he stood up, Eliyahu, before him, face wracked with disgust, said, “Boulders,” right crossed, and knocked him out cold.

“Baby!” June said, as we came up the bleachers. The Flunky set me down. June hugged me, I winced. “Does someone have aspirin?”

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No one had aspirin.

I’m fine, I said.

I sat by June’s feet.

To Vincie and the Flunky, June said, “Nurse Clyde.”

“Clyde’s gone,” said Ansul. “He entered the pipeline as soon as the scaffold fell.”