Pale: 1.z - Interlude
Author: Wildbow

Interlude

Gabriel chewed on his pen.  The website, the same color as the flyer, was open.  Unlike everything else on the site that was badly formatted, badly structured, or indecipherable, the submission box was right there on the page.  Clear, inviting.  He’d already typed his name in.  He hadn’t submitted.

He’d started with the idea that this was a multi-platform game with a lot of people contributing to it, improv or acting combined with video, recordings, and various websites.  When photos were shared, they were original.  He couldn’t see any errant pixels or JPEG artifacts, there were no easy explanations, no images he recognized or could find with a reverse image search.  When there were voice recordings, there wasn’t a single voice that felt inorganic, like someone acting badly, and he had a good ear for that.  When there was distortion, it seemed real, and not like something put there by a computer.  The same was true for those limited few recordings he’d found online.  As an experience, it was really well done.

This, as much as the supposed prize, was perfectly tailored to him.  His own background, his inclinations.  He was already thinking of how he might contribute to it, when and if he got around to making something for the fake mythology of it.

But that illusion was falling away.  The idea it was a game.

He clicked around the website.  After the flier had been taken from him, he’d been frustrated.  He didn’t know how Lucy Ellingson had known he had the flier, he’d even revisited that spot in the lunch room and tried to find if there were hidden cameras, after Lucy’s friend Verona had quizzed him before lunch.  No cameras, Lucy hadn’t been there that day, and coordination with other students would require her to secretly collaborate with students outside her friend group.

Both of the two girls had been cagey, too.

He’d waited until the end of the day and all through school today for the next step in the game.  If he’d been set up to be a participant, then there would have to be people showing up to quiz him, to say more, to give that trail of information he could follow.  They’d have to sell him on the next stage in things, while someone watched the interaction with their phones set to record.

The longer it went without that happening, the more he’d felt like he’d missed out on something.  Worse, it was tailor made to him.  Aimed at him.  It felt that perfect for him, yet anyone could have seen that folded up paper wedged between the lunch table and the wall.  If any part of it was real, it spoke to him and promised a prize perfect for him.  If it wasn’t… the fact he knew about computers, video editing, sound editing, and he was a good actor, it made getting involved feel so right.

When the premise had felt so right, each passing hour without someone following up or leading him to the next part of the narrative felt more and more wrong.

He really didn’t feel like it was a game now.

He clicked around the website.  He hadn’t remembered it -the website address was long and nonsensical- and it hadn’t stayed in his computer history, but he’d had the flier since lunch on Friday.  He’d spent the weekend digging into the lore, and had found a site where people were talking about it.  The site had cleared itself from his web history, somehow, but the research he’d done hadn’t.  He’d traced his way back, found a page with the link, and he was back, even without the flier.

His mom was baking downstairs, and it smelled amazing.  It made his anxiousness increase, as he continued navigating the site, looking for angles, possible hidden text.  Nothing lined up, the site design wasn’t intuitive, and there were numerous instances where sections of the site that felt like they should be main pages were separated by multiple clicks, where one click might lead to a broken page, another might lead to a gallery of distorted images with the link easy to miss between two images, and yet another might require horizontal scrolling for thirty seconds before the link appeared at the bottom, easily missed.  All in an outdated interface from twenty-five years ago, on an ugly website the same color as the flyer.

He opened up the source code and found a mess.  He looked through it, searching for anything in numbers, letters, and characters that might be a pattern, then closed the sub-window.  People way better than him had dug into it, studied it, and given their analysis, and they’d concluded that what was on the site didn’t match what was in the code.  The other site behaviors didn’t line up with what was in the code.

He’d tried to copy-and-paste text to a notepad file so it was easier to put together, but only got gibberish and broken characters.  He’d painstakingly tried to copy it over manually, the website on one screen and notepad on the other, and then the notepad file had crashed.  Notepad.

So he’d tried to copy it over by hand.  Simple words for a ritual to be voiced aloud, nothing fancy.  The further he got, the more he found he was transposing words, or misspelling.  When he went back to check earlier stuff, he found more errors he hadn’t even realized he was making.

That one was hard to shrug off or explain away.

Frustrated at the lack of progress or new information, he minimized the window.

A beep made Gabe jump.  He glanced back toward the door, looked back to the computer, and found the notification.  Peyton was online.  One of his friends from school.

Peytowin: o hi
Peytowin: I saw ur movie

Gabriel007: How did you like it?

Peytowin: it was good!
Peytowin: the lion cub was cute!
Peytowin: & u were so cute as a kid!

His smile dropped from his face.

Peytowin: u did a good job!!

He’d been in a movie when he was nine.  It hadn’t made it to major theaters, but it hadn’t been small either.  A lot of the time, according to his cousin, it was shown in Christian summer camps on movie night.

He’d wanted to keep acting.  His parents had supported him, paying for lessons in acting, his parents had paid his aunt and uncle for room and board so he could go to Toronto and go to an acting school for a semester.  They’d paid for singing lessons and lessons in piano and guitar.  There had been a few close calls with other opportunities.  A ‘we’ll call you’ that had actually sounded interested, followed by their production shutting down.  There had been a thing for a TV show, and the director had liked working with him, he’d had good chemistry with the actors, he hadn’t messed up once, and people had even said they were impressed, and then ninety percent of his stuff had been cut in the editing room.

He had told boys in his class about minor celebrities he’d met and events he’d gone to, and they hadn’t believed him.  The friends he’d made outside of class had been equally skeptical, except for Peyton.  Peyton was nice.  Peyton was cute.

Gabriel007: You could be in a movie
Gabriel007: Your cute

Gabriel007: Do you want to do something this week? You & me?

Peytowin: umm maybe…
Peytowin: when?

He looked at the minimized tab with the site still on it.  He maximized it to see his name lying there in the white space, unsubmitted.  It would be a scheduling conflict if Peyton wanted to do something.

Gabriel007: Tomorrow night?

Peytowin: I got plans with vince & dylan

He itched to type something in response to that.

Vince and Dylan were other guys in their friend group and they were the guys who stuck to Peyton a lot.  They got kind of hostile and crabby, especially if Gabe was hanging around for more than a couple of days in a row, and especially if Gabe was talking to Peyton a lot.  He’d had his one and only blow-up fight with Peyton after he told her he thought they were toxic, and that she should stop hanging around with them.  He was pretty sure that it had been their idea for Peyton to go silent for nearly a week after.  It was only after he found a chance to talk to her without them around that they hadn’t been able to stop her from letting him back into the group.

Vince and Dylan had been hard to get along with since.  Ganging up on him, getting mad at the slightest excuse, and even taking seats next to Peyton so he couldn’t sit next to her.  It was childish.

Childish and frustrating.  It wasn’t like the guys in his own class really talked to him, and his class was all grade eights and nines; when the boys in his class rejected him, they talked to other people in their grades and shut him out.

Peytowin: I think I have to have dinner with my family.
Peytowin: I’m busy a lot of nights sry

Peytowin: umm
Peytowin: we’ll talk about it when its closer 2 then
Peytowin: no promises
Peytowin: I g2g
Peytowin: I got on to play a game before bed
Peytowin: if I wait 2 long my dad will make me log off mid game & I’ll rank down

Gabriel007: GLHF
Gabriel007: shoot me a message before you log off and let me know if you won

He waited a minute for the response, and then closed the conversation window.

Things hadn’t been the same since Vince and Dylan had stuck their noses in.

He clicked around the sites some more.  Most of his attention was on the preparations page.  A list of things to do before one of the rounds of the ritual.

Rest… he hadn’t slept super well last night, with the ranker thing and the flyer getting taken from him.  Hydration… he could do that.  Clothes…

He got up and went to his closet.  He had a faux leather jacket that he was pretty sure could take a beating.  Jeans were tough.  He had hiking boots.  He also had some old rollerblading stuff in the closet, from back when he’d started at this school.  He’d thought about rollerblading to school every day, but on his first day Alayna had made fun of him for how he waved his arms around while rollerblading around, and after rollerblading home that day, he’d never really taken it out of his closet.

Having poise and posture and presenting himself the way he wanted to was important to him, after so many acting classes, and being made fun of for doing the opposite cut too deep.  Thinking about it gave him a bad feeling, and he felt like it would linger.

If he wore the pads and wristguards and stuff along with the jacket, he suspected it would start to hamper his movements.  Which was better?

There was a knock at his door.

His mom opened the door.  She had a plate of beignets, apparently jelly filled, and some cookies that might have been shortbread, dusted with icing sugar.

“Brought you a treat,” she said.  She crossed his room and placed the plate on the corner of his desk.  “I remember you said you liked these, and this is a cookie recipe I got from Sharon.”

“Thanks,” he said, eyeing the plate at his desk.  He still stood in front of his open closet.

“What are you up to?”

“I dunno,” he said.  “Trying to decide on some stuff.”

“I was going to ask if you wanted tea,” she told him.  “Or if you want something else.”

Caffeine was something the later parts of the preparations page talked about.  Caffeine and other drugs.  It was hard to strike the right balance with some drugs, but people were pretty positive about caffeine.

“Please.  Thanks,” he said.

She walked up behind him and ruffled up his hair.  Her hand touched his arm.  It was thin, despite his efforts at doing pull-ups and pushups.  He’d had a huge growth spurt, and he was trying to get his body fat down.  He felt like he was getting the worst of all worlds, and at the same time, his mom was getting all anxious at him.

“Are you still bothered about the phone thing?” she asked.

The ranker.  He’d sat at zero with four other boys.

“I was trying not to think about it,” he said, a little more bitter and snappish than he meant to be.

“Sorry,” she said.  “I was thinking of talking to the school about it.”

He shrugged, his back still to her, the closet still in front of him.

“I know you said they didn’t make the phone thing, but they should talk to students and stop people from using it or talking about it.”

She rubbed his arm, a concerned look on her face, then dropped her hand.

“I’ll get your tea,” she said, quiet.

“Thanks mom,” he said.  “Love you.”

“I love you too, Gabriel.”

He sat down heavily in his chair, and ate the powdered beignets with raspberry filling, and the powder-dusted cookies.  He smiled at his mom as she brought the tea, and when the door was closed, looked up Peyton on social media, finding pictures and saving them to a folder.

He stepped into his bathroom, adjacent to his room, to wash his face and hands of the powder.  He looked up at the mirror, his face lit harshly from above, dripping with beads of moisture.

With wet hands, he pushed his hair back and away from his face.  He was trying to grow it out so that if there were any auditions or anything, he could go long or tell them he was willing to cut it.  Right now it was in an awkward middle stage where it poofed up, especially on one side.  It took a lot of hair gel to get it to cooperate, and the gel didn’t last most of the day.

A year or so ago he’d started growing up, with an emphasis on the up.  He wasn’t the cute kid he’d been anymore.  His face was taking on a weird shape.

It was feeling more and more like food was an enemy, and it wasn’t playing fair.  If he couldn’t be a kid actor, he needed to fit other molds.  There were guys with weird faces who did really well, but they were also pretty fit.  Having a six pack like they did seemed to be impossible, when it required super low body fat, and he couldn’t even fathom how they did it where they had a six pack and bulging veins all the time.  Not when that kind of muscle required protein, which required eating more.

He felt like he was fumbling along, struggling to find the right answer, while a hundred conflicting expert voices told him different things, and non-expert voices like his mom pushing other food at him.  Everything was unnecessarily hard.  Sleeping, when he was thinking of the phone app.  Eating, when he felt like he was doing something wrong no matter how much, how little, or what he ate.  With Peyton.  With his classmates.

When he’d done the thing for the app, he’d told himself he would do badly, but that internal voice had had a nudge and a wink, like he’d be surprised.  He was an actor, he was thin, he was tall, he dressed nice.  He might even be middle or upper-middle of the list.  That it would open doors and girls could fight over him, and things would be better.

The result hadn’t validated that small part of Gabriel that liked himself.  It had given proof to the insidious and constant voices from the big, ugly part of himself that didn’t.

He had powdered sugar on his shirt.

He pulled it off.  Whatever he did tonight, whether he went to bed or clicked that button, he’d need to change.

Gabe stared at himself in the mirror.  His body hair was starting to come in, but it had started at his nipples, making them look like daisies with black hair instead of white petals.  He had more hairs misplaced in the middle of his chest, halfway between nipples and belly button, and they weren’t even short, they were long and scraggly like the nipple ones.  His face was a weird too-broad shape, his hair was in a weird middle stage, his arms and torso were disproportionately long, and he didn’t have a six pack despite his efforts.

He felt like the person in the mirror was the enemy.  If that person in the mirror could be better, maybe Peyton would accept his offer for a date.  Not just hanging out one-on-one as friends like he’d offered tonight, but an actual date.

Staring at the almost unrecognizable person in the mirror, he felt his expression twist without his wanting it to.  He smeared a wet hand against his reflection, to mar the image, and then picked up the cup.

He drank water, cup after cup.  He was still working on drinking when he opened the cabinet, searching for medications and stuff.  He searched for ‘the pink stuff’, as the website had called it, and had it.  Anti-emetics.  They settled the stomach and stopped people from throwing up.

Nothing.  He’d have to ask his parents, and he didn’t want to field his mom’s questions about his diet and stuff.

Besides, this wasn’t two hours before.

He moved on.  He was acting as if it were a certainty that it would work, he knew.  Because it had to work.

He got dressed, choosing the jacket and a pair of jeans.  He laced up the boots and then walked over to the bathroom where he hadn’t yet put away his old first aid kit.  They took it camping when they went, but in the off-season they kept it in his bathroom.  He found gauzy bandages and wrapped them around his neck, then his forearm.  There were more bandages that were for other kinds of injury, like splints and wrapping sprains, and he used those on his other forearm, where he trapped a magazine against his forearm.  He did the same with his shins, and then his midsection.

He couldn’t wear everything from his rollerblading kit, but he could wear the wrist guards, buttoning up the jacket sleeves around them.  His hand mobility was still okayish.

Then he stretched.  Joints popped and he worried he was doing more harm than good, but he followed the advice.

There were parts of the website that were barred, only for paying members.  In the main chat, they said it was to screen out the people who weren’t committed, and to help keep the site running.  Obviously, though, Gabe didn’t have a credit card.  He wondered if he could ask his mom for one without being suspicious.

No, he’d see if it was for real first.  If it was, it would go for eight nights, spread out across three weeks.

He went to the site, and he read over the ritual while continuing to stretch, going over it.

He finished stretching, and grabbed his rollerblading helmet.  Then he sat down in his computer chair.  It didn’t feel like the next logical action after all the prep, and he almost lost all momentum.  His body was stiff with the bindings and the protection he had strapped on, and he felt overly dressed and overly equipped for the act of dicking around on his computer.

He stared at the screen for a good minute, checked the discussion chat, which was emptier than it normally was, and then returned to the screen.

He had no idea what he was supposed to do if it didn’t.  He needed an answer, an escape, a way to make things make sense, even he had to distort reality a bit to do it.

Gabriel felt like an idiot.  The feeling only got worse as seconds passed and nothing changed.

There was a bloop as Peyton messaged him.  She didn’t always before logging out for the night, even with reminders, but it would be a quick ‘night’ before logging off.  If she’d finished this soon, she’d probably lost right away.  Too bad.

He didn’t have the heart to look.

He’d get involved on other levels.  It was a cool idea.  He could do videos and contribute to the mythology, he knew.

He still felt devastated.

Had the timing been wrong?  The analysis and collaboration site had said it didn’t matter, but that had never made sense to him.  Had he waited too long in the evening?  Was it better to do it at sundown?

He looked at his alarm clock by his bed and jumped a bit.  The number and arrangement of digits didn’t fit the normal spots or slots for characters on his alarm clock, too numerous, and too crammed in.

It read ‘367.15’ followed by three numbers that were changing so rapidly he couldn’t follow them.  The last two digits after the decimal point could have been seconds, but they didn’t seem to go down at a measured or usual pace.  Faster than seconds.

When the .15 lurched their way down to zero, it changed to 366.75 and continued ticking down in inconsistent amounts and speeds, sometimes three seconds at a time, sometimes one.

He looked back at his computer, and opened up the message from Peyton.  A short word in gibberish, aligned to the bottom right, not the top left.  The gibberish looked like what he’d seen when copy-pasting the text from the website to a notepad file.

And her portrait, shown in the top left of the conversation window.  Her face was missing.

Disconcerted, he closed it.  Behind that window was the open folder with all the social media pictures he’d downloaded of her.  Each one was different, modified.  Faces gone.  He closed that too, his heart racing.

A few clicks told him that websites were now impossible to navigate, like the website he’d submitted his name to had been.  Text was unreadable.  The clock in the bottom right of his monitor lurched downward, a little slower than his alarm clock at first, then racing forward to catch up and surpass it.

It lined up with what he’d read.  They had from midnight until dawn, or until the ritual finished, whichever came first.  Nevermind that he hadn’t clicked the button anywhere near midnight; the time available was supposed to always be midnight to dawn.

And the time that counted down didn’t go by normal rules.

He got up and crossed his room, helmet under one arm.

His house smelled strange, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.  It didn’t smell bad, but it didn’t smell good either.  Dusty, maybe, mingled with an overly human smell.

He headed for the stairs, and something big came at him.

Scrambling back, he bumped into the table at the end of the hallway.

“Ah!” he cried out, half in surprise and half in pain.

His eyes widened, his hand clapping over his mouth.

Too late.  They appeared, tearing out of his parent’s bathroom and from under the table.  Children, a girl with overalls and her hair in braids, and a messy looking boy who was only wearing tighty whiteys and a long-sleeved shirt.  The girl pushed the boy out of the way, sending him sprawling, and grabbed Gabriel’s wrist.

He pulled away, but she was stronger than him.  Her mouth opened, and her broken teeth bit into his elbow.  Her bite strength was enough to get through the jacket, the magazine he’d trapped against his arm, and ground into or through the bone of the elbow in a way that made pain jolt through his arm, back, and the upper right of his chest.

If he hadn’t had his hand clapped over his mouth, he might have made another noise, or swore.  His eyes went wide and his arm jerked.

The ‘miss a word’ rule.  Crying out counted, it got punished, and the result tended to make people cry out more.

She let go of him, snatched the helmet from his hand, and with the pain at his elbow, he didn’t have the hand strength to resist.  She backed away, bumping into the pantsless boy, who growled resentfully at her.  The two children -waifs- backed away, one retreating into one of the side rooms of the hallway, the other further down the hall.

Gabe was cornered, because to his left was the thing in the stairwell, and to his right were the children in the hallway.

The thing ascended the stairs.  It wore his mother’s clothes, it had his mother’s hair, but it didn’t move like her, and like Peyton’s pictures, it had a giant hole instead of a face.  Also like Peyton’s, the hole was framed by teeth, like a mouth stretched open as wide as it could go, teeth large, stretched out from forehead to chin.  The interior was like a mouth’s, but darker.  Small streams of drool leaked out from between teeth and over the lip, making the front of her dress wet.

Not his mom, but one of the Witnesses.  That was on the website too.  They were supposed to be harmless, but people hadn’t figured out everything.

She moved like she was sleepwalking, ascending the stairs, walking past Gabe as he pressed himself backward against the wall.

He hurried downstairs, being mindful of the steps, and pulled off his jacket as best as he could with the pain at his elbow.

Stupid mistake, Gabe, he thought.  You get one.  Only the one.

He used the bandages he’d already wrapped around his arms to bind up his elbow.  Gauze, and then the splinting bandage to secure it in place.  It throbbed more from the pressure.

A waif was in his living room, sitting on the back of the couch.  A long-ish haired child of indeterminate gender, wearing a shirt with a skull on it.  Just next to the child was the back of Gabe’s dad’s head.  His dad’s face had the mouth-shaped hole, and the way it bent back suggested his head had hinged back at one point, the lower half at a different orientation to the upper half, so the mouth lolled open.  The thing’s teeth were ordinary size, but there were two rows of them, in too large a number, with the occasional tooth wedged into the mix so it stood up and out.

The child watched, expression blank, legs kicking against the back of the couch.  Behind the child was the glowing television that provided backlight, displaying a distorted non-channel, like what showed on cable when clicking up into the upper nine-hundreds, flickering, blurring into itself, the colors changing.  The clock by the television marked the countdown.  349.45, with three more numbers after that changed too fast to follow with the naked eye.

Gabe retreated back, stepping into the dining room.

The dining room table was gone, replaced with a counter with laundry.  The washing machine and dryer were side by side instead of the washer being stacked on top, and laundry was folded.  An ironing board and clothes rack were set up against the wall.  A dehumidifier groan-hummed in a corner, its display not reading the current humidity level, but the countdown.  348.15.

The kitchen had changed too.  Some of the tools and storage stuff from the garage and basement had been moved here.  The stove was gone, replaced by a secondhand television set.  Tools sat scattered on the counter.

He opened cabinets as he passed them, looking up as a child entered the room from the other door.  Her clothes were old fashioned, her hair dyed with a stripe of green, her mouth ajar.  When he walked around the room, he kept the central workshop table between himself and her.

They weren’t supposed to attack if he didn’t break a rule, but it was hard to let his guard down around a strange kid who stared at him, especially after one of them had attacked him.  He kept one eye on her as he kept investigating.

The contents of the cabinets had changed.  No more cereal, no tuna, no oatmeal, nothing canned.

No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates.

He picked up an especially long screwdriver with a wedge tip.  There was a bang and the sound of things falling to the ground.  The child on the other side of the table was gone.

He backed up as she came tearing through and past the storage boxes beneath the table, too fast.  One of her hands seized his wrist, the other the screwdriver.  Her eyes were wide open, intense, her breathing hard.

Have no knife, he thought.  He relaxed his grip on the tool.  She took it and immediately backed off.

Not punished with a bite unless he actually used the ‘knife’, or held onto it for too long.  According to the field reports, such a thing tended to involve picking up and using improvised tools in the spur of the moment.

He checked out more of what was supposed to be the kitchen, and then let himself out the back door, into his backyard.

The lawn had been replaced with gravel.  There was no garden.  There were no bugs flying around the decorative light by the back door.  No birds in the trees, which looked more like concrete than wood.  There was a waif sitting on the fence.  A girl wearing a baseball cap and oversized jersey, with bare feet dirty and raw.  She smiled as she saw him, biting her lip at the same time.  Her eyes were hidden by her cap.  The shadows danced slightly, as if they were beneath a stuttering light.

The moon flickered, like it was trying to hold ten or twelve different positions in the sky at once, the positions close enough to touch one another or overlap, but never sitting still.

Now that he was outside, he could hear the singing, faint, echoing over Kennet.  He could identify the direction that the bulk of it came from.

He turned, heading for the gate so he could get to the main street.

His heart leaped as he heard more scrambling, that mad rustle, with feet crunching through gravel.

Hands seized his pants leg.  The girl with the cap.

He couldn’t speak, but if he could, he would have told her he was going, he had to go through the gate to get there.

Other waifs poured out of the house.  One jumping from the window of what should’ve been the kitchen.  Ten or twelve, including the ones he’d already seen, like the girl with the stripe in her hair and the old fashioned dress, the child of indeterminate gender with the skull shirt, the boy with the underpants, and the girl with the overalls who had blood around her mouth.

More hands gripped him.  If he pulled with all his strength, he could pull them off the ground, or get them off balance, but they refused to release him, and they pulled him off balance.

He grunted as he hit the ground.

Grunts were fine.  He was glad of that.  The rule they’d worked out on the site was that it couldn’t be anything that could be mistaken as part of a word.  ‘Ah’ and ‘uh’ counted.  Grunts and whistles didn’t.

He had to keep that fact in mind as they roughly dragged him, grabbing his clothes, the boy without pants on grabbing the hair at the back of Gabriel’s head.  It was all he could do to keep from having his face driven into the gravel.  His narrow waist made it hard to keep his pants up, so he had to fight to grab his belt.  They took him in the most straightforward direction, straight to the fence, where half of them scrambled up, balancing or hanging off the top, the other half holding him.  They passed him up like he was some inanimate object, got him over the top, the upper edge of the fence scraping against his jacket and pelvis, and then roughly dumped him onto the other side, before leaping down onto and around him.

He tried to get to his feet, but they didn’t care to let him.  Hands with fingernails ranging from the ragged to the black-painted grabbed him and pulled him off balance again, dragging him across more gravel, then concrete.  He heard a splash before he even saw water, and gulped in a large breath.

They dragged him into the neighbor’s pool.  The water was salt water, not chlorinated, and stung his eyes.  He was dimly aware of them jumping in after him, grabbing him while he was under, so he could barely flounder.

They tugged at him intermittently rather than cleanly dragging him, as the air in his lungs began to run out.

Don’t form a syllable when you gasp, he told himself.  He was aware that his ‘armor’ was water-logged, now.  The magazines he’d bound around his shin had come free, and floated out of his pants leg and into the water as he kicked his leg in an effort to get forward.  If I get a chance to gasp.

They tugged and pulled, working as a group, dragging him over the raised concrete lip at the pool’s edge.  He coughed and gulped in air with his mouth wide and tongue stretched out, but he managed to avoid making more sounds.

They were out of the neighbor’s yard and halfway across the street before he managed to get his feet under him and stand up.  The baseball cap girl held onto his sleeve, marching toward the destination, and because of her height, she pulled him down so he was forced to stoop, his back bent.  Another one walked closely enough in front of him that he kept kneeing the boy in the back and stumbling.  The kid didn’t seem to care.

The music grew louder as they got closer.  It reached its peak at the town center, which wasn’t far from school.  The movement through places didn’t seem to follow logic much more than the traversal of the website had.  It was fast, rough, with abrupt changes between environments.

There were Witnesses.  Tons of them.  Standing outside stores.  Standing in the middle of the street.  Sitting in driver’s seats, in cars with the engines off, giant mouths instead of faces.  Messed up teeth.  Sometimes with tongues lolling out of mouths, and sometimes drooling.

One Witness for every person who would have been out this evening.

He couldn’t even guess at the number of the children.  They stood at the edge of rooftops, sitting on cars, in groups.  A few that were close to him as he was pulled along reached out to try to get a grip and add their strength to things.  One succeeded, latching onto Gabriel’s ear, bending him into an even more stooped position.

All together, they let go of him, and he dropped to his knees, soaked, dirty, scraped up and breathing hard, one hand at his ear.

There were five more people present, gathered into a loose circle.  They ranged from a black-haired girl Gabriel’s age to a guy with a beard and belly who could have been a dad.  The nervousness of the group was palpable, with one skinny, older teenager with tattoos pacing, and the beard guy was fidgeting and looking up at the clock a lot.

The intersection they were in formed a T-shape, and the biggest building at the intersection was the town center, big, concrete, with a gazebo-like structure on the tower, which also featured a clock.

There were four hands of the same length on the clock, and they all moved clockwise at different speeds, in fits and starts.  The moon was behind the tower, still flickering violently.

There’s supposed to be eight of us, Gabriel thought, as he undid the buttons at his wrists, temporarily removed his wrist-guards, and adjusted the wraps, getting rid of the most waterlogged magazines that weighed him down more than they offered protection.

Headlights illuminated their group.  Weaving around and through witnesses, the children in the street backing out of the way, a car pulled up to their group.  The door slammed.

Gabriel recognized the girl from his school, even though he didn’t know her name or anything much about her.  Just a face he’d seen.  She always wore sunglasses, and wore them now, along with a real leather jacket and jeans.  She’d strapped on something like a hard wrap of leather around one arm, and the other arm had a covering that extended out over the hand, studded with metal.

She was halfway from the car to them when a child reached out, grabbing the armor at her hand, latching onto it.  She reached down to unstrap it, and left it with the child as she continued walking forward, frowning.  The hand the armor had been covering had only two fingers and a thumb.  She pulled off her sunglasses, and one of her eyes was missing.  She’d drawn on the skin where her eye should be, a winking eye, like a half circle with radiating ‘eyelashes’.

He’d seen that winking eye as an avatar on the site.  He got her attention, then ‘knocked’ the knuckles of one fist against his shoulder.  His elbow protested, every movement pulling torn skin tight, while reminding him that something had chipped or cracked the bone.

She smiled, knocking her shoulder.

Of the seven people present, three more repeated the gesture.  The ones who didn’t were the girl with black hair and the beard guy.

Five of them who’d done research and seen the site, then.  Gabe, Wink, Tattoos, a heavier girl with a big jacket, and a guy who might have been First Nations, who looked pretty ridiculously fit.

Why would you do this if you were already that perfect? Gabe wondered.

The music began to get softer.  The guy with tattoos who was doing all the pacing looked at them, making a hand gesture to be quiet.

There was distant muffled screaming that steadily got closer and closer.

Children dragged someone else.  A woman.  Her screams were muted by her own hand at her lower face, and her other hand held something wooden that the children were grabbing and pulling on, helping with the dragging process.

They dropped her at the edge of the rough circle.  Their eighth contestant, who fell in a heap.  She sobbed, her hand over her mouth, snot at one nostril, tears all down her cheeks, her hand still holding onto a wooden crutch.  A child leaned in, intent on biting her fingers, and she snatched her hand back.

The crutch was taken away.  She continued to sob, stopping only to scream, hand at her mouth.

She was missing a foot, with only a stump terminating halfway down her leg.  The other foot was prosthetic.  Her arm was bare, and she had six circles on it.  Six phases of the moon for six rounds of this ritual.  She hadn’t worn layers, and the narrow strap of her top made her messed up shoulder pretty obvious.  It had ridden up, and the part of her stomach that hadn’t been scraped up by being dragged was red, scarred and dimpled, like serious cellulite covered in burn tissue.

With her arrival, the singing around this weird, altered Kennet had ceased entirely.  It was silent, except for her ongoing sobbing.

His heart pounded, looking down at her.

She screamed again, and he stepped toward her, bending down.  The guy with the tattoos snapped his fingers twice in quick succession, and when Gabe looked at him, shook his head.

Gabe hesitated, partially straightening.

‘Wink’ stepped over the girl, put a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and led him away.  She held up a fist in front of her chest, then ‘knocked’ her shoulder.

He looked back at the screaming, sobbing woman.

‘Wink’ tapped his shoulders to get his attention, then made the cooperation sign before holding out her good hand, all fingers and thumb extended.

Cooperation part five.  Injuries.  The website had given instructions.  What to take care of and how.  Injuries changed after the night was over, becoming more like birth defects or injuries they’d had since they were babies.  Memories and attitudes changed to compensate.

And if one person’s injuries got bad enough, they were supposed to leave the dead weight.

The website had made it sound so reasonable.

It didn’t feel reasonable now, but…

He nodded.  Survival came first.

The woman ‘knocked’ at her shoulder.  Cooperation.  One finger extended on her bad hand.

Cooperation part one.  Roles.

They quickly split up the roles.  Wink took leader, and nobody really seemed upset about it.  Tattoos was designated ‘forward’, Beard Guy and the Big Coat girl that was between Gabriel and Wink’s age were given similar roles.  Gabriel and a rather built teenage guy were tasked with the flanks.  The black haired girl Gabe’s age was designated for the ‘fence’ role.  Gabe got a glimpse of the marks at her arm.  The girl with black hair didn’t really seem to know the hand signals, maybe because she hadn’t found or thought to look for the websites, but she had two marks at her forearm, near the elbow.  She’d done this before and had interacted with this group.

More hand signals.  Cooperation, part two.

People had driven in and some of the cars nearby were theirs, and they’d brought stuff.  Netting, plastic fence, and mesh.  Tattoo had two orange plastic containers of gasoline, and began to pour them out onto the ground.

The woman lay there near the middle of the intersection, sobbing, as they prepped.  Gabe watched as Wink wordlessly demonstrated how to hang and set up the barriers.  It had to be easy to collapse if they needed it collapsed.

Gabe finished one corner as best as he could with only his left hand, then moved on.

As he rounded the corner of a building to help with the next bit of fence, he saw people looking out to the side.

Three figures were approaching.  They could almost be mistaken for the children that were scattered everywhere, but they were too animated, and too curious about their surroundings, looking around and looking up at the moon, where the children of this place were focused wholly on the ritual’s participants.  They couldn’t be Witnesses, because they had faces…

Animal faces, two of them wearing wide-brimmed hats, the other with a cord tying her hat to her neck.

The cat-faced girl had shadow clinging close to her cloak, to the point it was hard to make her out in the dark, not helped by the dark fur of her face.  Her eyes flashed violet as she looked over everyone and everything.  Her cloak was pulled over her hat, brim and point swept back, and made the hood more pointy behind her head.

The one with the fox’s face was literally smoking, the smoke flowing down her body and cloaking most of it, forming a whorl at her feet.  When traces of the smoke graced her orange-furred face, the glowing of her red eyes extended to the smoke.  Her hair did something similar, fox’s fur becoming long, tight curls with a faint red tint, the ends of the hair impossible to distinguish from the rising smoke.

She set those glowing eyes on Gabe, staring him down, until he looked away.  He almost missed seeing her throw something down at the ground.  When he looked up, he could see that the smoke that rolled off her and down to the ground had helped cloud a figure standing behind her.  A scary looking guy who carried a heavy-duty gun.

Children immediately reached out, seizing the gun.  The man kicked one, hard, saying something Gabriel couldn’t make out, and the children backed off, growling.

The third girl was quicker, moving from a point behind the other two, catching up, and skipping easily over the four-foot high fence of thick plastic netting, finer nets, and the barbed wire that Tattoos was stringing up.  A long cape fluttered behind her before she landed in a crouch, a hockey stick resting against her shoulder.  She hurried forward to the woman who was sobbing.  Her face was a deer’s, with antlers.

Children came after the hockey stick.  She stuck the end of it out, catching one in the shoulder, and it looked like the child had been hit by a car.  The kid went flying, and the stick cracked a bit lengthwise.

She hopped up to grab the railing of a second floor balcony, where the kids couldn’t easily reach her.

“We have questions,” the Cat said.  She climbed onto the roof of the car and used that as a jumping off point, landing on the road on the other side of the fence.  She walked over toward her friend the Deer.

The Fox continued to stare Gabriel down.

Gabriel placed his hand flat over his mouth, shaking his head.

“You can nod or shake your head.  We can play twenty questions.”

Gabriel hesitated.  It was a complication in an already dangerous situation.  A distraction.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.  Tattoos.  It was a guy he’d seen around the highschool, maybe a graduate from last year.  Gabe could see the scarring at the bend of the older one elbow, the circles marking the three rounds he had participated on the other.

The scarring would be from drugs.

The website had said drug users sometimes participated.  A different kind of consumption, maybe.

The older teenager with the tattoos pulled Gabe away from the three girls.

“Don’t be stupid, Gabriel,” the Fox said, the soldier standing behind her.  “Don’t be stupider than you’ve already been.”

She knew of him?  He felt like he should recognize the voice, but every time he tried to put a face to the sound, he could only picture the fox’s face.

Tattoos snapped his fingers twice to get Gabe’s attention.  He pointed up at the clock.

As far as he could interpret it, they’d already used up half of their allotted time, somehow.

Nervousness gripped him.  His hand went to his elbow, which still hurt.  There were so many children nearby.  If he had to guess, there were one hundred and fifty to two hundred.  An assembled crowd.  Maybe thirty witnesses.  The three strangers with animal heads.

But they had to mind the time.  The field had been set.  That was part two of the order of things.

He walked away from the Fox.  After a short delay, others followed.

They had to focus on this.  It required everything.  Mind, coordination, concentration, memorization, fitness…

People formed a loose circle once again.  Fence girl stood a little back and away.

With hand signals, Wink pointed at herself, then slowly went clockwise around the group, pointing at each person in turn.

Gabe nodded.  People nodded.  Even the sobbing woman with the two kids behind her.  Gabe felt Tattoos’s hand pat his shoulder.

He’d never thought he’d be so gratified to get that kind of support from someone so different from him.

Wink turned her face skyward.  To her right, her injured hand was shaking so badly it was twitching, almost closing into a fist.  Her left hand did something similar.

Her nervousness was contagious, everyone’s was.

Gabriel found himself doing the same.

Her voice was high and sweet, the words drawn out, the notes perfect. “A song for your supper.”

Small hairs on Gabriel’s arms and neck stood on end.

“A morsel for a melody,” Tattoos sung.

“A ballad for your board,” Gabe sung.  He was pretty proud of his singing voice, even if the lyrics of the ritual song were simple.

“A chorus for your collation,” the sobbing woman’s voice was broken with emotion.

“A tune for your tuck,” the Beard Guy had a deep voice.

“A refrain for your refreshment,” Fence girl sung.

“A piece for the potluck,” Big Coat rejoined.

Repeat, Gabe thought, his heart pounding.  Do not forget the damn words.

“A song for your supper,” the muscular teenage guy who might have been First Nations sang.

They all sang together.  “A morsel for a melody.  A ballad for your board.  A chorus for your collation…”

At the one part of the fence they’d left undone, there was a snort.

“…A tune for your tuck…”

A bull with short, glossy brown hair entered through a gap in the fence.  The girl they’d given the fence role to gave it a wide berth, still singing, and closed up the netting behind it.

“A refrain for your refreshment…”

Tattoos put his hands to his head, the fear and stress apparent on his expression.

A bull was bad.  From some of the examples on the site, it was not one of the worst possibilities.

“A piece for the potluck.”

He’d thought the little variations would be the snarl here.  The difference between ‘a melody’ and ‘the potluck’.

“A song for your supper,” they sang, all together.  Tattoos kept moving his lips, swearing without actually forming the words as the bull passed by him.

But the bull was huge.  Probably not unusually large for a bull, but its shoulder came up to almost where Gabe’s chin was, and it seemed like it had more muscle than twenty Gabriels might.  He could see the muscles moving beneath the short hair, which was already damp with sweat.  The horns were off-white, and a good foot and a half long.

Wink put her hand up.  She sang, voice high, “If the tune is merry enough, will the dish be sweet?”

Fence ignited the gasoline, creating a fire barrier, then jogged over to the next patch.

Gabe almost jumped in with the next line, but the hand she’d raised had dropped, and she was indicating the Beard Guy.  Part of her job as leader.

“If the song is jolly enough,” the Beard Guy sung, voice deep, “will the plate be neat?”

The Deer was avoiding kids, who seemed intent on the hockey stick.  The Cat, meanwhile, was crouched low, her dark cloak partially extended around the woman who had been sobbing, hiding her.  They conversed quietly.

The voice in the background was distracting, threatening to throw Gabe off his rhythm.  He had no idea how the woman could sing, listen, answer, and nod without messing up, especially with the bull so close.

The muscular guy sang, “And if the ballad is lively enough, can we hope for meat?”

That’s the starting gun.

The bull had just reached the center of their little circle.  It reared, snorting, and charged Tattoo.  Flame roared as Fence girl ignited another patch of gas.  Gabe gasped, almost saying something.

“A song for my supper!” they sang together.  Next verse.

It heaved its bulk around, charging for a gap in their lines.  The website had said they should cluster, trying to get that initial, crucial bit of damage in.  Not so easy, here.

Big Coat started forward, hesitating as the horns swept in her general direction.  She jabbed out, scraping with fingernails for the bull’s eye.  Missed.

It shifted position, jerking sideways, and bowled her over.

There was a sharp whistle to Gabe’s right.  He turned his head, only to hear that heart-stopping series of feet slapping against road.  Wink had been trying to signal him.

His line- he was stuck for a half-second, and he was already late.

The children latched onto him, fingers grabbing at his belt and pulling his pants partway down, while teeth sank into his hip.  The pain froze the air in his throat, and she bit again- a third time.

“How shall we cut it,” he sang, his voice strangled.  The child released him. He hiked up his pants again, his leg twitching in reaction to the damage further up.  “If we have no knife?”

“With our teeth, and with our nails,” Fence sang.  She ignited the last patch of gasoline.  The fox-faced girl and her gun-toting guardian had stepped inside the fence, and the fire was to their backs.

“Digging in, and singing out!” the muscular guy sang.  He was trying to get close to the bull, but it was rearing around, its back to a corner, horns sweeping, looking for the most likely threat.

Gabe joined his voice to the others, his voice strangled, as they all sung, “How glad we are to dine!”

He was anything but ‘glad’.

They weren’t doing enough.  The bull was practically untouched, and the ritual was not that long.

“A song for my supper!” they sang together.

Gabe tried to stand, and the damage to his side made it too hard.  He dropped to all fours, landing with his hands on the ground, and the pain at his elbow nearly made his arm give out.

“I’ll come to the table,” the woman without feet sang, her face tear-streaked.  “Every phase this moon.”

“And ne’er again find myself picking-!” Tattoos sung, as he tried to duck under the horns while the bull was distracted.

The bull hit him with head, not horn.  Tattoos stumbled back, and the bull followed up, hopping forward, head dipping sharply down, then up.  The horn-tip sank into Tattoo’s chest.

Gabe was stunned, seeing the man die so very easily.  The horn came free with a wet sound.

“-up a spoon!” Wink finished the line, her voice strangled, expression twisting.  She indicated Gabe again.

“Nor fork, nor blade!” he sang, his voice hollow.

“Nor plate, nor cup!” Fence sang.

Gabe was supposed to fill in the gaps.  He managed to get to a standing position.  The girl with the heavy coat had thrown herself at the bull’s neck, so the horns were beneath her and point out to her side, and it was strong enough to lift her up so her feet weren’t touching the ground.  She grunted, scrabbling to try to get her fingernails past the short fur while keeping her grip.

“Oh I’ll have stayed fully supped,” the Beard Guy sung, “and sated since this tune.”

The bull was trying to lift its head with the girl’s full weight resting on its head.  It reared up a bit, trying to dislodge her, and she slipped, her body sliding along the horns.  In another move like that, she’d have her full weight on the horn-points.  He wasn’t sure if the coat was tough enough to withstand that kind of force.

Gabe stumbled forward, his one leg weak, and he knew he didn’t have it in him to jump up.

“A song for your supper!” they all sang, Gabe’s voice a grunt.

The girl on the bull’s neck hadn’t sung, she was so busy trying to stay in place.  Children leaped down from one of the nearby rooftops, landed on her back with a two impacts that made her slide down the horns, and bit into her.

“I shall not miss a single beat,” the woman who was with the Cat sung.  “Or else I’ll offer tonight’s treat.”

“I shall not miss a single word,” the muscular guy sang, as he closed in.  He and Gabe each approached the bull from one side.  “Or else I’ll be the one who’s served.”

Gabe tried to grab one of the bull’s forelegs.  The bull reacted to the muscular guy doing something similar, and pulled back, out of Gabe’s reach.  Gabe collapsed onto all fours, right in front of the beast.  Partially blind, head weighed down, the bull’s head was down near Gabe.

He jabbed at its eye, hard, and it snorted, making a pained sound.

They don’t think the animals are real, he told himself.

“And we’ll tell you,” Wink sung, “that on these nights.  Oh, we shan’t fail to take a bite.”

“To you alone,” the Beard Guy sung, voice low, “I’ll share this…”

The guy grabbed some of the fencing, and started to drag it around, clearly intent on wrapping up the bull.  Children closed in, snarling, teeth bared, and he abandoned the idea.

“If a single meal I miss…”

Threatened, the beast backed away, got close to the smouldering fire from the gas, and reversed direction, charging forward.  Gabe, halfway to his feet, did his best to meet the bull, throwing himself at its leg.

“Then I shall be but skin and bone…”

There wasn’t enough time.

“…And I will be a mess,” the Beard Guy finished.

He was supposed to sing, Gabe realized, at the moment of impact.  The bull was huge, and he imagined the impact was like being hit by a car as it pulled out of a parking space.

Gabe grunted, heard the others singing in unison, while he didn’t have the air in his lungs to join them.  If it hadn’t been for the magazines he’d wrapped around himself, he might have cracked ribs.

“Oh, this shall be a mess!”

He didn’t hear the children coming, between the sound of the big-coat girl’s cries -she’d missed words too- or the snorting and huffing of the bull.  Children were already on top of her.  His voice was late.  “-Be a mess!”

He felt hands grip his leg.  Teeth bit through his shoe and into his foot.  Pain made his leg buck, and the kick tore what the teeth hadn’t fully bitten through.

Missed a damn beat, Gabe, he thought, as horror ran through him.

How was he supposed to get through the rest of tonight and seven more nights like it with only part of a foot?

“Oh god,” the Deer said, somewhere behind him.  “They all need to eat it.”

He barely had the breath to do this, let alone sing.  He held onto the bull’s leg, trying to limit its movements.  Blood pouring from his foot made traction hard. He twisted, desperate strength driving him and giving him the strength to put his shoulder in its armpit, his leg by its leg.  The coat girl was still holding onto its head, and the muscular guy was at the others  side, doing something.

It stumbled, hoof not meeting the ground flat,  and dropped to one knee with an audible crack.  For a moment, he thought it would fall on top of him.

“A song for your supper!”

“A ditty for some din!”  The voice was close.  Someone grabbed him, pulling him away.  Wink.  She jumped to helping the girl who had been bitten a dozen times, who still gripped the horns and neck.

Now that he was further away, he could see that the muscular guy had grabbed on at the other side, and had bitten deep into the bull’s neck.

Others piled on.  Wink, the Fence girl, the guy with the beard.

“By when?  How long?” the fox-faced girl asked, her voice overlapping with the muscular guy singing, his face pulled away from the wound, bloody, almost gurgling as he tried to get the words out with his mouth full , “A crooning for some chow.”

Gabe tried to block its legs from kicking anyone, wedging himself between body and the knee.  He waiting for his chance to eat.

“How long do these guys have!?” the Fox raised her voice.  “Some of these people aren’t in a position to eat!”

He gave her a head-shake.

Not long.  They were about two-thirds of the way through.  He sang, “A helping for a hymn.”

“A song for your supper!” Wink sang, before tearing in as best she could, fingernails and teeth trying to sever a bit of raw meat.  Once she had it, she rolled over, her weight still on the bull’s neck.  Fence girl pushed past Gabriel to get at the wound.

“A morsel for your melody!”

In the chaos, he could barely tell who was singing.

The bull lurched, throwing some of them off.  Fence girl slipped.  The bull, lurching forward, managed to kick Fence girl, and caught her in the side of the face.  She fell against Gabriel, more like a doll than a person.

These are the closing verses.

Gabriel looked at the woman who had been sobbing.  She looked more at peace than she had been, at least this close to the end.  She nodded, in response to a question from the cat.

“A ballad for your board!”

Gabriel felt a flutter of panic in his chest.

The rush that gripped him let him put his weight on his injured foot, even if it didn’t function as well as it should, mechanically.  He hobbled forward, his pants leg soaked from hip to ankle with blood from the earlier wound.

“A chorus for your collation!” he sang, voice raw.

The bull, head low, horns level with Gabe, was in just as bad a shape as he was, one leg twisted with hoof held up off the ground, blood pouring from a neck wound.

He thought of the prize.  Simple, multifaceted.

If someone with the prize wanted food, it was easy to get.  Winning products for life, restaurant owners offering them food free of charge.

“A tune for your tuck!”

If a winner didn’t want food, they didn’t have to eat.  Gabe had paid particular attention to one woman who modeled, with a body that didn’t move from her ideal whether she ate nothing at all, or glutted herself.  It became impossible to starve.  The body disconnected in every respect from what it took in.

Addicts found their ‘sustenance’ freely available and didn’t ever have to worry about overdose.

“A refrain for your refreshment!”

Put at its most basic, never needing to worry about what one took into their bodies ever again.

It would be, he knew, one less thing for him to worry about.  One less futile struggle.

Making one thing easy in life, in a way that other things followed.  Of the five winners he’d read about, all had gotten money.  Inheritances from long lost relatives, payouts from class action suits, other things.  Two of the five had figured out how to keep the money coming.  So long as they spent it on indulgences, particularly food, they kept getting more.

He headed for the bull, hobbling.

He looked back, seeing if he had help.  There was only the Deer girl, her dark blue cape fluttering behind her.  In response to a shout, she twisted in the air, and caught a flying object, wincing as she caught it.  Another object hit the ground to her right, and she scooped it up as she ran past.

She didn’t have the hockey stick anymore.  She brushed her hand along her cloak, and it straightened, going flat and hard.

“A piece for your potluck!”

Children mobbed her.  They dropped off the roof, darted out from across the street.  She leaped forward in sharp horizontal bounds, clearing ten or more feet at a time before her feet touched the ground.  The children were faster.

Gunfire ripped out.  The man with the gun.  He picked off the kids as they got closer to the deer-faced girl.  A few of them managed to get their fingers on her cloak, tugging and breaking her momentum, just in time for her to be in the bull’s reach.

A flash, brilliant, shone out from behind Gabe.  He saw the bull react, its good eye closing, head twisting away.

A gunshot hit a kid in Gabe’s way.  He looked back to see the Fox holding a gun.

Bullets were still flying and hitting children within arm’s reach of the Deer, the noise of it so loud it rattled Gabriel’s brain in his skull, the Deer met the bull’s horns with the edge of her rigid cape, and the edge of the cape bit into the horn, embedding there.  It didn’t really stop the bull so much as it gave her something to hold onto that was between her and it, so its forward thrust pushed her back instead of impaling her.  Twisting, she reached out, grabbed, and tore off a tatter of flesh at the neck.

He ducked under, and grabbed his own bit, stumbling and falling.  Children around him were getting to their feet.  They’d been shot, but only the impact of the bullets seemed to matter.  They hadn’t died or even been appreciably hurt.

He looked up to see the Deer standing over him, using the edge of her rigid cape to cut her bit of meat in half.  Seeing he already had some, she turned and dashed away.

“A song for your supper!”

The words were drawn out more than ever before.  To buy time.  Him and the sobbing woman and… who else?  Had the girl with the big coat eaten?

He gulped down the bloody rag, practically inhaling it in his desperation.  He almost choked.

The bull had no fight in it.  It huffed and snorted as he walked back to the main group, but it didn’t charge him.  Blood continued to pour from its neck wound, running down its neck to its leg.

The girl with the big coat sat against a wall, bleeding a pool of blood that expanded beneath her, but she had blood around her mouth, which suggested she’d had something.  It didn’t look like the horns had gotten her, but the kids had.

The fence girl lay face-down on the road.  Wink stood over Tattoos, who had a hole through his chest.

“Come moons eight, I’ll be surfeit,” Wink sang, emotion thick in her voice.

The Deer girl leaped, and her forward bound was uneven.  She fell, rolling hard.

He followed, hobbling, one eye on the bull.  People standing near the Deer girl didn’t offer a hand.

Have to let the dead weight go, Gabe thought.  It felt wrong.  The girl who’d been crying and talking to the Cat didn’t even have feet at this point.  How could she help, next moon?

He skirted around rather than get involved.

I have to do this for seven more nights?

The children mobbed the Deer, clutching at her cape.  The Fox and the man with the heavy gun opened fire, shooting to try to get rid of them, or keep them from getting that far.

“Full even when I’m emp-ty,” the Beard Guy sung.

“Take the ring off!” the Fox called out.

The children backed off, stepping away.  The Deer got to her feet and started running again, her cape no longer rigid.  She didn’t bound or leap.

The Deer reached the woman who had been sobbing.  She gave her a scrap of meat that was visibly covered in hair, even on the meaty side.  The woman gobbled it down.

“Don’t growl at us,” the Fox told the children nearest her, drowning out some of the final verse.  “Teeth, nails, and diplomacy are fair game.  She used diplomacy.”

The woman on the ground gagged, trying to choke it down.

Gabe, shaky, hurting, his guard entirely down, gagged sympathetically.  The taste of the raw meat he’d consumed was rich in his mouth.

He gagged again, and it became more than a gag.  His meal slipped out of his mouth, splattering onto the ground, amid tea and cookies.

Eyes fell on him.  People stayed where they were.

He dropped to his hands and knees with a force that might have broken something in his wrist if he wasn’t wearing the guards.  At the same time, his accumulated bite wounds made him sprawl when he’d meant to crawl.

People were more fixated on themselves, grimacing and wincing as their arms smoked, new circles burning their way into their flesh, to mark their night’s success.

He scraped with fingernails, digging into the road, trying to find the meat amid his own puke.

The girl with the deer’s face and antlers ran toward him, her hand cupped.  She still had something.  Even a morsel would do.

He could hear his group singing, like they were very far away.  The last words of the ritual song, inaudible.  They’d drawn it out as much as they could, but they’d reached the end.

With tears in his eyes blurring his view, he knew he didn’t have the time.  He mashed his face into his own vomit, sucking, trying to consume what he needed.  He gagged.

As the Deer girl ran toward him, she had ended up somewhere that wasn’t where he ended up.  It was like she had faded away.

No mark surfaced on his arm.

Beneath a flickering moon, Tattoos and the Fence girl screamed.  They’d been dead, he was almost positive, and now they weren’t.  Children fought one another for the chance to claw and bite at them.  Flesh came away like meat from the tenderest rack of smoked ribs.

The others.  The Deer, the Fox, the Cat, the other participants, they were gone.  The bull was there, but it was turning to smoke.

The song was picked up more than a hundred children who weren’t close enough to grab a meal.  More than a hundred small voices.

“Come moons eight, they’ll be surfeit.”

A narrow, small arm that was covered in what might have been temporary tattoos was pulled from the meaty mess, pushed aside in the mob’s haste to get to the rest of their meal.  Food was swiped away where it dangled from chins, stolen from hands on the way to mouths, dozens of children fighting for an opportunity to eat something.

“Full even when they’re emp-ty.”

Children saw him, and they made their approach.

“Or else I’ll be…” he joined his voice to theirs as they sang, though they said ‘they’ll be‘ instead.

The first children reached him, grabbing him.  He fought back, pushing them away.  A losing battle against hundreds.  He couldn’t sing as he struggled, only listen.

“…forever a waif, barred from the horn of plen-ty.”