Adam Levin - The Instructions

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 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.

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 wristlock 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 fracas, 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.

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.