Chain Gang All Stars

The Deane boy had leapt over the barricade. He’d yelled something to the people closest to him and they’d pulled him over. This was the work happening in real time.

The father Deane ran to his son, his face awash with anger. He knocked over a cylinder of hand-spun Dreamcream and lunged for his eldest son, who jumped out of the way of the first grab, his ribs leaning over the metal, pressing into the barricade.

Neither father nor son made much noise except for grunts of movement. The father tried again to reach for his son. The boy pressed himself out into the crowd, a hand stretched, saying, “Help me.” And the protestors pulled him over, right in front of his father, who watched him with dread that swiftly morphed into a palpable rage. His whole body clenched as he screamed at his son, holding one of the boy’s sneakers in his hands.

“If you don’t get back here right now—”

“Fuck that!” the son yelled back, on the other side of the barricade. The crowd screamed with him with a new victorious energy, but there was also a new tension radiating through the rest of the protestors and marketgoers. A ruckus was always a concern, especially when it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening.

“Get your ass back here now,” the owner of the ice-cream establishment said, and in his anger, his frustration, his embarrassment, he pulled back and swung his fist over the barricade, hitting a woman holding sage directly in the temple. The punch snapped through the general noise, a sudden, singular pulse. A trigger.

There is a space in time when violence tears through from imagined to physical—and if that physical is met with more physical, then the violence can become both the vehicle and driver for all that comes after, and what has escaped can be incredibly difficult to contain.

Hands got thrown. The barricade of linked metal fences fell as a woman leapt forward and met the father Deane’s chin with her fist. Protestors flooded into the farmers market. Some grappled with Deane, some moved on so as not to be trampled. The patrons inside the farmers market, out of either fear or anger or some sense of purpose, began to throw punches, and of course, the violence grew and spread. The truest human virus multiplied through the masses. The violence took control.

Parents ran their children away to the edges, to the exit, which was no longer an exit but just another space for people to flood through. Where there had been order, now there were bodies running, flailing, standing, blocking. The protestors tried to help their comrades. The patrons of the market fought whoever was in front of them as they tried to escape. Some people urged calm, for the others to resist the violence, but the unified chanting was over; no one voice cut above the rest. Now all that could be heard over the chaos was the commands of the soldier-police, who called from their tanks’ speakers, “All agitators will be arrested. Evacuate peacefully.”

Inside the market, caught in the scrum, a soldier-police guard kicked down a man, who screamed, “What the fuck are you doing? I work for CAPE.”

The officer helped the man up and he scrambled to find an exit as the same officer pointed his weapon at a woman in black and fired a round of rubber bullets that exploded into her clavicle.^[*] The ammunition broke her bone; she shrieked and fell and several of the protestors pulled her into their cave of bodies. “Protect our family!” they screamed. This was just one of many huddles that had formed, each of them holding an A-Hamm Link, as if the Links were captains of teams about to take the field. The woman with the shattered clavicle screamed at Sai Eye’s feet and Sai Eye kneeled in the circular wall of arms and legs around both of them.

“Hey, mama, breathe through it, you’ll be okay,” they said, although they had no idea at all if that was true.

In a different huddle of protection, a forced reprieve from the chaos and a pocket of resistance against the chaos, Thurwar and Staxxx crouched in the few feet of space carved out by the people around them, who’d linked arms in a circle, protecting them. Nile, Mari, Kai, two other members of the coalition, and a few more men and women. Thurwar tried to stand every couple of seconds to look about, to find her family, A-Hamm.

“You two get down. You’ll get to everyone after it clears out.” The sound of weapons firing poked holes in any calm that might have been had, but still Kai’s words to the two women had been heard. Thurwar kneeled down. Staxxx sat cross-legged.

“So, what are you guys doing after this?” Staxxx said. She had to scream the words to be heard over the chaos outside.

Thurwar watched the nervous smiles form. To be surrounded by brutality and possibly death and have Staxxx at your side trying to crack a joke. That was what it was to be a Link on A-Hamm. These people were getting an exclusive experience. Thurwar would have laughed, had she not been distracted by the young woman from Vroom Vroom. She stared at the truth-bringer.

“Just chilling, maybe protesting some more, you know. What about you?” Nile said, holding a wide smile. His smile: a lie they all accepted gratefully. Thurwar realized then that this was the young man who had been in Vroom Vroom as well. She could tell, looking at him and the others, that none of them knew about the information the young woman had given her.

“Sounds good,” Staxxx said. “Probably hanging out with this beautiful lady. Fight planning and whatnot. Got to check in with the gear guys, do some fine-tuning. You know, the usual.”

“Right,” Nile said. There was a loud bang. The huddle shifted harshly to the right before correcting itself, leaving Thurwar and Staxxx in the middle, untouched. Mari looked over her shoulder. Plumes of white smoke were tracing through the air toward them.

“For now, we’re here,” Mari said, and the group agreed in nods. Thurwar looked at the young woman and then at Staxxx and wondered how long it had been since she’d felt protected by anyone other than herself and Hass Omaha, or Staxxx and LoveGuile, or Sunset and that lucky sword of his. She realized that if Mari hadn’t been there in front of her, she would not have said anything. She would have chosen to pretend. She knew that had the world not forced this meeting she would have let the days play out as if she had never learned what was coming. But watching the young woman, a terror deeper than any desire radiated through Thurwar’s body. She could not let another woman tell Staxxx that they would meet in the BattleGround. She pulled Staxxx’s ear to her lips. She felt herself cleaving open. She gripped the ridiculous apron on the grass because she had to hold something and she spoke to Staxxx and only Staxxx, knowing that she was ending the part of her life she enjoyed best.

“Next fight, after our double. They’re going to make us kill each other. They’re changing the rules,” Thurwar said. “Once you make Colossal, it will be over. They’re going to do it. Any two Colossals on the same Chain have to see the BattleGround against each other. It’s coming season thirty-three.”

She was grateful the people huddled around her couldn’t hear the words she was tucking into Staxxx’s ear, but she imagined the girl who had given her the truth to tell knew exactly what she was saying.

Thurwar was crying now, harder than she’d known was still possible. She was crying not just because something was ending, but because she was throwing this harsh new world on the woman she loved. And so she felt a thrill of confusion when Staxxx looked at her, not harshly or cynically, but honestly, with her eyes and lips, and cupped her hands around Thurwar’s ear so only she would hear this story, and she said, “Let me tell you what happened to Sunset.”

* Kinetic impact projectiles, or rubber bullets or rubber baton rounds, typically have a metal core. Rubber is a minor component. “Rubber bullets,” which are used in “crowd-control situations,” often result in permanent disability or death.