The Instructions (141 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

tripped me when I fell onto Kelly.” Actual sly-gropes were happening, too. Big Ending reunited behind the sitting bandkids, exchanging high-fives, and huddling to plot. “I’ve got to reach Mt. Zion,” sang Main Main.

“You fantasize, infantalize, romantacize what I mentalize: it’s not your eyes, girl, it’s not your eyes.” This was the last of Boystar’s whispers. Half another measure and the speakers went dead: running from the soundboard to the northeast exit, Chaz Black kicked cords and wires tore out. “Jah put I around,” sang Scott. Starla spotted her boyfriend and jumped on a Jenny crushed by the avalanche, ran up the sideline, achieved Western Portite, got pecked on the cheek and pinched and armed. “This thing won’t hit who I aim at,” said the Flunky. “…what look to be coins,” one newsman was saying. “…writing on their foreheads,” the other one said. Ori the cameraman: back on his feet.

High-speed currency deflecting off seatpads sounds like knuckles getting cracked through sleeves. In an effort to overcome the bulwark from a distance, Western Portite and Nakamook tilted their weapons like infantry archers so their shots would rain down from above on the Indians, but Benji and Vincie were both out of nibs, and while a few of the fasteners and coins reached their targets, their impact was weak, and the damage inflicted was minor at best, though Maholtz, when crown-struck did yelp “Jeendzus!”

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I was brandishing the monitor’s claw at the principal. Before understanding, he reached for it—
thwick
—and then he was cradling his wrist.

What’d I say?

“He’s our prisoner,’” Berman said. “And I know, but he was trying—”

No he wasn’t.

“Well he isn’t cooperating.”

He was just about to.

“Stop this, Gurion.”

“See?” said Berman.

Don’t—

Bad shadow. I grabbed onto Berman and brought us down sideways, twanging my humerus. The base of the mike-stand splintered the hardwood—Boystar’s mother, back like a slasher.

Big Ending shoved a teacher and the teacher said, “Careful.” They shoved him again, and he told them, “Watch out.” Beauregard Pate warned the teacher, “You should fear us,” and the teacher turned away, as if he hadn’t heard. Big Ending rammed the teacher into another. Both teachers fell on three bandkids and Mussel. All six involved hit the floor in a heap, the clattering instruments bruising their softparts. Next to the heap stood the atheist seventh-grade Shover, Trent Vander. Vander extended his pointer and laughed, and Seamus Fitzsimmons, who played the bassoon, who the Shovers, since the fifth, had called “Faggot 1334

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Shitzlemons,” stood where he’d sat on the bottom bleacher: above moaning friends atop their bent horns, over bandleader Mussel who’d always brought donuts, before the pointing Shover para-lytic with mirth. Seamus held his woodwind by the boot-joint and swung it. When he pulled it back to swing again, its reed was chunked with earlobe. Vander blacked out and dropped on the heap. Thirty-odd bandkids understood they held weapons.

The mother hauled back to swing once more, got stopped from above by a nib through the jaw muscle. Instant bloodstar under the hairline. Holding her cheek, she began to sit down, and the stand, as she collapsed, dropped from her grasp, and its base struck the foot of the principal edgewise, right above the tongue of his shoe. He buckled, went fetal, and let out a choked sound. Snapped was the tendon connecting his bigtoe. My girlfriend the deadeye showed me a powerfist. I showed her the palm on the arm that wasn’t fizzing = Stay high, I love you, keep sniping, protect us.

Berman crawled over to see the mother’s face.

The untapped rage of the bullied musician, mounting for years, suddenly loosed.

Seamus Fitzsimmons led his band upward, stalking for Shovers in the western bleachers, but anyone who stood in their way got clouted, and anyone clouted who dropped got stomped, and anyone stomped who kept laying there… stomped.

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Mangey caught an elbow from a runner in the forehead. Ronrico dragged the runner to the floor by the shirt. A Shover bolted over to help them kick the runner. They pinned him to the wall between the doors of the locker-rooms, the lightswitches mounted there got flipped to ON, and the whole gym was lit by the overhead fixtures. Ronrico cracked the Shover on the eye while Mangey held him. “Do not try to be us.” “Do not try to be us.” “Do not try to be us do not try to be us.”

When the lights came up, Seamus and a flautist, atop the western bleachers, along their eastern edge, held a broken Blake Acer by all four limbs, and Acer shrieked, “Please!” and he was louder than anyone. Nearly all of the spectating everykid noones* revolved to locate the source of the shriek, yet few of their eyes ever got to Acer; the trail of the stomped left behind by the bandkids captured their attention first. That trail was becoming wider and wider, and except for the wealth of bare necks among the stomped (or, inversely, the scarcity of scarved ones), there was nothing more conspicuous than the spatters of blood that beaded the brass and stained the white bibbers: nothing more striking than who was stomping except for who it was that was getting stomped. The implications for the everykid no-ones were huge.

* To be clear: such spectators were, as yet, legion. If that’s failed to come across, blame Genesis and Exodus for training my narrative eye on action, for training it away from relative stasis. Despite the avalanche and the multiplying skirmishes, and despite the attacks on the Shovers by the Israelites, the movement of at least half the kids in the bleachers—before, that is, the bandkids got their snat up—was still dedicated to blocking robotic interference in the course of manuevering for vistas.

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Under whose gaze hadn’t
the bandkids suffered the undeserved enmity of Shovers? No one’s. Yet who’d ever protected a bandkid from a Shover? Who’d ever defended a bandkid but a bandkid?

Who’d ever done other than laugh when one fell, let alone offered a hand to help him up? No one and no one and no one and no one.

The everykid no-ones fled the bleachers in droves.

In the meantime, Bam had discovered his advantage. He turned his chair over, legs forward, said, “Guys!” and when the rest of the Indians turned their chairs over, he led them forth crouching in lock-step, a phalanx, and at last Benji Nakamook did what needed doing. The platoon close behind him, their fists at the ready, he pocketed his weapon and charged northeast. Seeing their approach, Bam halted his march and stood higher to strike, to cut Benji down. At three steps distance, Benji sprung. He went horizontal, body turning mid-air, and clipped three Indians at once at the neck. Lonnie and Maholtz, who’d been flanking Bam, hit the floor loud, chairs flying, skidding. Bam dropped his chair and caught Benji on impact. They went down together, a T-shape, Bam-first. Nakamook barrelled through the gap Benji’d opened. Eliyahu came sprinting off the wall to help. Main Man remained in the southwest corner. “Never give the power to the baldhead,” he sang. Slokum, half-stunned, still their T’s crossbar, groaned beneath Benji, who blindly reached down the length of his torso, feeling around until he found nose, and swatted with the heel of his palm, saying, “Hi!” He swatted twice more—“Hi!

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Hello!”—and then planted the hand that had done the swatting on the mess of Bam’s face, now slick with blood, and started to push, attempting to rise, but Bam turned his head, and Benji’s hand slipped, and Salvador Curtis, in the midst of a fists-forward superman dive—the gym teacher’s gabardined bulge the bullseye—clipped Benji’s temple with the toes of both shoes, and Benji’s weight shifted to Slokum’s advantage. Bam got an arm free, got leverage, turned sideways, cracked Benji deep in the ribs with an elbow. Benji curled up. Bam flipped himself prostrate, then bucked to all fours. Benji, thrown, hit the floor coughing, and Brooklyn, who was grappling with Co-Captain Baxter, using the kid’s own tie to strangle him, took a step back to anchor the choke, landing a heel on Benji’s kidney. Benji thrashed and cursed and coughed more. Brooklyn flailed and lost his purchase, used both hands to break his fall. Baxter wheezed and clutched his throat. On Slokum someone dropped a chair. It wasn’t the first chair to be mismanaged, nor should that fact come as any surprise. Most people can’t make a good fist when the time comes (their snat floods too early, boils them rubbery), let alone apply any kind of strong grip—their barrels wobble, their cudgels slip—

and the Aptakisic Indians, in this, were unexceptional. Not even one had swung his chair more than once, let alone aimed for anyone’s head. The chairs they didn’t drop were pried from their hands or shoved in their guts, the dropped ones pitched from the fray by Jerry Throop while Leevon and Dingle mashed faces with their foreheads, and Jelly bit a B-teamer in the middle of 1338

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the forehead, and Fulton checked Maholtz, who’d just gotten up, then kneedropped Lonnie, who hadn’t gotten up, and Desormie, in child-pose, struggled to recover from Curtis’s sackblast, and Curtis came around and kicked him in the crack, and Shlomo Cohen hobbled toward the pushbar door, and Eliyahu, crawling toward Co-Captain Baxter, tripped Gary Frungeon by yanking his ankle, and Frungeon, falling, brought Curtis with him, and Benji and Slokum kept trying to rise.

You’ll be okay, I said. I’m not here to hurt you. None of us are, just—

Brodsky dry-heaved.

That’s nerves, I said. You aren’t really sick. You’re nothing like dying. You’re doing that to yourself. Now I’m just gonna empty your pockets, I said, and I’m gonna be gentle, I know you’re in pain, I can see that your foot hurts, but I can also see that your foot will be fine—there isn’t any blood there, no bones poking through, you don’t have to keep contorting, there’s nothing to
see
—but these guys who are standing behind me, watching, they’re wound really tight, and they’ve all got weapons, so please don’t make any sudden movements. Please just don’t even move at all. If you can just breathe deep and stop with the contortions, you won’t get hurt more. You have my word. This isn’t about you. This is just how it is. Okay? Okay. I’m reaching in the pocket of your jacket now. You don’t have to say bubkes. I’ll find what I need.

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Seamus and the flautist had thrown Acer on those Israelites who’d gone to the gap to repel fleeing Shovers. Five of the six so dropped upon had crumpled, and just as the two least injured got up, the mob from the bleachers ran them back down. Now robots and kids tripped on robots and kids, and a hill of writhing bodies that was one, then two, then three feet high, grew wide in the gap til it was nearly impassable. Many in the gap continued pushing forward, and a few of them got out, however bruised, to flee the school through the pipeline. Others turned south to escape the bottleneck and go out the northeast- or the pushbar-door-exit, but pressing as they were against those who were northbound, this only caused the bottleneck to clog up more. It is true that some managed to keep reason intact, and they headed sideways, under the bleachers, to proceed toward either of the other two exits, but while many of those who went first escaped, the pushbar-door-exit itself soon bottlenecked.

That exit was narrow as a classroom door, and runners on their way to it who didn’t get shot or smacked down by Western Portite kept stumbling on the B-teamers who the Flunky had clotheslined, seeding a pileup to rival the gap’s. The northeast exit was unobstructed and, despite all the blows Eastern Portite administered, the first hundred who’d initially fled there got out, but by the time that the runners who’d tried the other exits first (roughly four hundred) and could still ambulate (roughly three-hundred-fifty) realized they had to head to the northeast one, the powerdrunk bandkids had descended like berserkers 1340

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and kids were hitting kids to get out of their way, and those hit hitting back, and robots too, and the throng pushed south toward the least resistance, slowly but steadily, creeping like a honeyspill across a tilted plane, the honey sipped by Samson from the lion’s tilted brainpan.

Benji sitting up, Benji holding his ribs. Slokum in a three-point stance, Slokum lunging. Blurring bodies colliding around them.

In a room full of people you’ve known for a while, when somebody’s elbow jams sharp in your sternum, it’s hard not to take that personally; it’s hard to believe that you could’ve been anyone. It’s harder yet, when you find yourself thrilled by the damage
you’re
bringing, to believe you don’t have your own good reasons. “Call
me
fat, slut? You ruined third grade.” “On the bus with your motherfucken jerkoff spitballs!” “You don’t tell girls they can’t go to the bathroom!” “Who’s crying now, huh? Who’s bleeding now?” “I don’t show my work cause I do it in my head!” The further south the throng went, the more reasons it discovered. Vendettas once sworn for half-forgotten offenses were remembered and invented with each passing blow. Everyone felt like a conduit of justice.

The Janitor, bashed in the orbit with a trumpet, got dragged from the mob by Mangey and Asparagus.

The Indians/Nakamook ruction had atomized. Mano-a-manos 1341

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now thrived unimpeded: Baxter/Brooklyn (choking, clawing), Frungeon/Jelly (biting, pleading), Lonnie/Leevon (dukes up, boxing), Maholtz/Dingle (slapping, spitting). Fulton, Throop, and Salvador Curtis divided between them what remained of the B-team (pinning, leglocks, chicken-winging). And Slokum and Benji were tangled again: Benji’s thumbs, Slokum’s temples; Slokum’s forearm, Benji’s throat. A-teamer X extended a hand; the gym teacher pulled himself onto his feet.

“
Your
family’s ugly.” “
Your
brother’s gay.” “
Your
juicebox, friendo—I’ll drink it!”