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 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 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 sirenblasts 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.
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?”
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.”
June said, “Fuck.”
“Maholtz?” said Vincie.
“Maholtz,” June said.
We’ll get drugs later, I said. Find Scott.
“Scott’s protected,” said Vincie. “Look.”
Regrouped around Main Man, in the southwest corner, was all of Nakamook, minus Benji. Big Ending was with them, and so was Western Portite. Their zone was arranged the same as the Israelites’ (to which Berman, pockets stuffed with nibs, had returned) but half the area and fortified doubly. Big Ending knelt a line holding chairs legs-forward, while half a step behind them all the other soldiers, except for the Janitor, stood a second line shooting whoever Jelly told them to. The Janitor leaned on the walls looking grey, one eye normal, the other like a frog’s, and while Ori shot footage from over soldiers’ shoulders and while his newsman kept trying to interview anyone, Main Man quit Marley for Radiohead. “Holy Roman Empire,” he sang.
“We’re winning,” said the Flunky.
The Flunky spoke truth — the gym was nearly ours — though you wouldn’t have known it if you didn’t see the corners, for the bandkids still dominated most of the court. Their dominance no longer owed to their weapons, though: whether chairs, belts, or knuckle-clutched housekeys, nearly all the combatants had improvised weapons. And it didn’t owe much to their heartiness, either: anyone who could have run (by then most could’ve; more than half of the school had done so already) and didn’t had heart. They were dominant because, in the midst of 170 other combatants, each of whom attacked anyone within reach, the bandkids would not attack other bandkids = Where the bandkids fought as 30 against 170, each 1 of that 170 fought 199.