Chain Gang All Stars

“What the fuck just happened, babe? What the fuck just fucking happened. Oh my fucking God.” Emily had been bingeing recorded streams again. Wil had wanted to be there when she saw this part so she’d watched with him.

He’d already picked up his holophone, trying to record her reaction. The shock she was feeling had rippled through the rest of the world with the same intensity, apparently.

She watched her husband and then turned her eyes back to the screen, where Hendrix was watching this new man, this new Link she’d watched kill four people in just a few moments, move into Bells’s tent and get comfortable in a cot.

“I guess he’s fucking tired!” she said. Because she knew her husband would appreciate her saying something.

“Babe. They’re gone. This happened like a year ago.”

“I know,” she said, not having to embellish her shock at all. She knew what she was watching had happened in the past, was long gone, but it was unfolding for her then and there. She was alive with fresh sorrow. “I know,” she said.

And the sound of her own voice made her cry.

She’d enjoyed watching the backlog Sing-Attica-Sing streamcasts even more than the current Angola-Hammond casts. She’d gone back and binged, watched the highlights of the streams and the BattleGrounds. She’d come to know the different members and loved, in particular, the way Razor and Bells had loved each other. And the tag-team match when they’d both established themselves as legitimate Reapers, the way Bells had dropped her machete and pressed her lips to Razor’s mouth as Plenty Pain Percy and Herc Miss Wonder bled out at their feet. It was beautiful in the horrible way that everything about Chain-Gang was.

Wil had said he felt the same way, and she hated to agree about something like this. She also hated to admit that part of the draw for her was that Sing didn’t have the same pact of nonviolence that A-Hamm had now, and she had become addicted to the threat of violence, the sense that death could be around any corner for the Links. The Eraser boys, for instance, had dispatched a lot of weak Links without much thought or remorse. The other week Razor and Eighty had gotten in an argument with two of the Erasers and it had come to blows, but it had stopped because Bells had creeped behind the third Nazi and threatened to push her machete into his back. Both pairs of men had disengaged and they’d continued on the next day same as usual. It was absolutely thrilling to watch.

She was proud to boo at them, though she knew in her heart that she loved that they offered her a clear and obvious bad guy. A problem to be solved for the heroes, Razor and Bells, and their partners, Eighty and the one-armed Black man Singer. The Eraser boys were racist murderers and it was easy to feel that they deserved this punishment, deserved to be on a Chain. In some way their presence, what she appreciated as an obvious, simple evil, justified the whole thing.

“I know, babe, I know.”

And Wil was crying now too. She saw this and loved him fiercely. It was as if their own friends had been taken from them. Murderers, yes, but somehow they’d gotten to know these people, and now where were they?

“He’s a fucking lunatic. Simon J. Craft.”

“Simon Craft,” she said. “Simon J. Craft.” She couldn’t imagine forgetting the name. She didn’t think she’d ever forget it. She watched the screen where he slept and studied his face as the camera closed in on him. “He’s fucking sleeping. Christ. What is he?”

She scanned the cast and saw Hendrix Singer, the only remaining member of the group she’d grown to love, and felt a deep anger growing in her gut.

“He should slit his fucking throat right now,” she said. “If he wants to just fall asleep like that, fucking slit his throat.”

Wil looked up from his phone. He’d stopped recording. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking about until it dawned on her that, in the time she’d been watching Chain-Gang, she’d never called out for a Link’s death. Thus far, she’d feigned the role of moral overseer, interested, maybe even addicted, but rarely partial in that final way. She was passing through Chain-Gang, lingering perhaps, but always just passing through. And yet, here she was, tears in her eyes, her voice shaking as she screamed for the murder of a man she’d only discovered existed moments before.

“Right on, babe.”

And in her thirst for retribution the shame that usually accompanied watching people die in this circus of justice faded away completely. She brushed the hair from her face so she could watch more closely. And to her dismay there was no more death. The equation was unbalanced and this coward Singer wasn’t even trying to fix it. She felt a savory new desire. She inhaled and exhaled and felt her breath hot with rage. She realized that she was having trouble breathing.

“What is he doing! Fuck. He has to do it now.”

“I know, babe, relax.”

“Don’t tell me to relax, I—I—” She wanted badly to throw something. “You don’t get it, it’s—” She couldn’t breathe.

“It’s okay, babe. That’s how I felt when I saw it.” His arms were around her. She smelled oak and vinegar and a perfume that was unfamiliar.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, and twisted out of his grasp. He held tighter and her hands were fists and she was pressed up against him, her arms folded so that her forearms were sandwiched between their chests. She wanted to pull back and punch him, and each time she tried and couldn’t she wanted to hurt him more.

“You okay?” he asked. An insane question. These people she’d spent so much time with had been killed, basically in her own living room.

“Am I okay?” she said, willing her shaking to stop. She felt his hold soften and she allowed her voice to do the same. “Let go,” she said.

He released her, and before his hands could even find his sides she pulled back and punched him as hard as she could in the chest. He coughed and took a half step back. He coughed again. The room was still filled with the same sound that coated the woods in that blood-soaked nowhere where what remained of the Sing-Attica-Sing Chain waited—just two men. Emily stood, a violence seething through her. Wil took a careful step toward her and grabbed her by the wrists, her hands still in fists. She let him for a moment before pulling away and snatching his wrists herself. She pulled him down to their floor and kissed him on the nub of his collarbone, kissed him again, then bit hard into his salt-slick neck. He made a growling sound that grew to something gentler. She bit harder into his flesh, feeling glee even through the fresh despair and rage. A rage so big it swallowed completely what would have been an awkward fumbling of Wil’s belt before she pulled his pants down just enough.

“I l—” Wil started to say.

But she covered his mouth with her hands.

“You shut the fuck up,” she said. Her own shorts were beside them at the base of the couch. She never took her eyes off the cast and never was the death made whole. Singer sat as Craft slept in a cot that had once been Bells’s. She cried anew and fucked Wil to the sounds of crickets in some faraway night.