A switch sent current through a circuit when the drums kicked. Panels of lights strobed. Movement looked gapped.
I fell upon Boystar’s chest knees-first, swiping his headset to throw it to Main Man — the rumble of the gooze in Scott’s clearing throat failed to boom like it should have; his feed was still dead — but a keyring was streaking, Boystar’s mother’s, a blur getting thicker in the corner of my eye. I blocked it, just barely, with the hand that held the headset. The ring’s junior maglight cracked the mouthpiece on contact. An asterisk of keys splayed on Boystar’s chin. Its rabbit’s foot, yellow, made his blood look orange. The rape whistle under his nostrils chirped. His mother had the mike by the cord and she swung it. On my knees, I couldn’t dodge but wouldn’t bow, so I turned. My kidney took the blow. I saw white and she tackled me. Ten seconds in, I was already down.
Co-Captain Baxter was still in his chair, a wide-open target, well within range. Brooklyn, just north of the northern sideline, raised his weapon, pulled the balloon back, shut one eye, and aimed. And aimed.
Nakamook knelt in a V-formation. From its apex, rearmost, Benji yelled, “Barnum!” The rest of the platoon yelled, “Barnum! Barnum!” Slokum extracted a nib from his biceps. Another grazed his cheek and he cupped it and ducked.
Shlomo Cohen: hit multiply, reduced to a speedbump.
“Hey,” said Desormie, and then he said, “Hey now!” A nib from above nicked his dextral trapezius. It was meant for the mom, but June’s elbow’d got knocked. Some kids in the bleachers had started to jostle, risen robots and Israelites blocking their vistas. Most Israelites weren’t bothering to sight. They projected from the hip at Shovers in arm’s reach. The Shovers cried out, covered up, got shot more.
The tracers the lightpanels left on your eyeballs were blue and wormy if you looked at the filaments.
Brooklyn kept aiming.
“Barnum!” “Barnum!” “Barnum! Barnum!” “Clear out his lackeys!” Benji ordered his soldiers.
“Excuse me, sir, please, Mr. Mussel, sir, please, but with the height of your stature and the strength of your vision, and this kindness they are speaking every day all the day, all these boys in the band who they play on their horns on my schoolbus to practice to win your fond praise, can you find my good friend who is Beauregard Pate, please, or please to return to a seated position on the bench that you stand so I may see with my own eyes to find my friend Beauregard?”
B-teamers raced for the pushbar-door. Vincie felled the first with a nose-smashing hexnut. The Flunky double-clotheslined the other two.
The gym teacher’s soundgun was ten feet away from me, slung from his neck by a thong like a purse. I wanted to get it for Main Man to sing through, but Boystar’s mom had me pinned and was biting. Twenty seconds in, I was the only soldier down, and Israelites descending—from the bleachers, haters — were finally on their way to help me.
Before you get to the point where you don’t know what hit you, you have to know that you’ve been hit; before knowing you’ve been hit, you have to know who you are. Some in the gym knew better than others. At one extreme was Boystar’s mom, who knew all along she was Boystar’s mom: she got shot in the son and she counterattacked. At the other extreme were those Shovers in the bleachers whose bodies had yet to take any punishment: even those who noticed the cries of their fellows — to be sure, many failed to, their attention on the court — didn’t yet equate those cries with pain, let alone pain brought on by projectiles sent by Israelites out to end Shovers.
Between these extremes was everyone else who wasn’t an Israelite or on the Side. The ones who did know that they’d been hit — Slokum, for instance, who couldn’t fail to realize his pain originated from external forces (the nibs he plucked from his muscles testified); or any given Shover point-blanked in the face — were, as yet, unaware of what hit them; what, in this case, meaning who; who, in this case, being we. And as for how to respond, and whether to respond (which of those decisions gets arrived at first depends less on knowledge than temperament): even for the quickest of those directly stricken, that was still seconds away. For now, they could but duck and cover, or flee their location, or waste some prayers.
The robots, for the most part, knew who they were, and they knew the Arrangement was taking damage. Despite their lack of pain, the damage overwhelmed them, for the hits came from everywhere: kids on the floor who pulled on balloons, kids in the bleachers who pulled on balloons, the mother of a kid who’d been attacked with a balloon, and all those around them jostling and jumping, and the ones who were pushing toward higher ground, who weren’t so much looking for a spot to stand safely as searching for a view with a wider sweep.
And they, the vast majority, these everykid no-ones, these X-factors factioning at the simplest level — whether they knew it or not, they were pro or anti, on the Side or against the Side, and in no case merely on the side — they cheered in their hearts, if not yet with their lungs, for victory for this one here and the fall of that one over there, though victory for that one there and the fall of this one over here would certainly do in a pinch. As long as they got to be close to the fight.
They always liked to be close to the fight. They always liked to cheer a side and call that side the underdog; to stand, in their hearts, behind that underdog; to stand, in some cases, on their feet beside him. Yet they stood in most cases around all the fighters, siding as much with the fight itself as they sided with their underdog; their bodies bricks in walls they formed to stop robotic interference, to let it be had out.
Of course Jennys and Ashleys had flinched and moaned when Boystar’s mouth did its gory explosion. Of course most everyone, and especially the Shovers, wanted to see Bam Slokum kill Benji, or if they didn’t yet see it was Benji who was shooting, then whoever it was who was attacking Slokum. And of course it is possible that I make it too simple, that deep inside all of them were latent desires and motivations that pushed against those which these factions would (or even could) profess — that maybe the Jennys and Ashleys were relieved to see Boystar’s face made ugly, that maybe they thought his ugliness would give them a better shot at being loved by him, or maybe the ugliness freed them of their love for him, which, unrequieted, had been causing them pain, and maybe that’s why they didn’t rush the floor, but then again maybe they were just frozen from heartbreak; and maybe the Shovers (like so many others who miss the point of worship) contained in their worship a streak of envy, a desire to discover Slokum wasn’t so great as they’d always suspected or feared, and that may be why they didn’t rush the floor, but then maybe they just thought he could protect himself, just give him a second to get his bearings, Slokum the king, Slokum the beloved — but latent desires and motivations, if they do exist (I suspect they don’t, my mother is sure of it, Adonai doesn’t care), are, at least in here, inadmissable. Even if they were, in fact, present, they’d be too complicated for me to describe with confidence: I didn’t know most of these people at all.