Maybe if they see I’m wearing a flight suit, Lou tried to convince himself, they’d stop for me.
“Goin’ somep’ace?”
The voice was like a knife through him. Lou jerked around, startled. A scrawny kid, dressed in rags, was grinning toothily at him.
“Coin’ somep’ace?” he repeated.
“Uh… I’m lost. I’m trying to find my way—”
Another voice called from the darkness across the street, “Whatcha got, Pimple?”
“Buck in a funny suit, sez he’s losted.”
A trio of kids stepped out of the shadows and crossed to where Lou stood, frozen.
“Funny suit,” said the one in the middle, the shortest of them all. None of them came up to Lou’s shoulder. They were all wearing rags, barefoot, gaunt, scrawny, with the hard, hungry look of starving old men set into the faces of children.
The one in the middle seemed to be the leader. He eyed Lou carefully, then asked, “Got a pass?”
“What?”
“Yer on Peeler turf. Got a pass t’go through?”
“Well… no…”
The leader broke into a cackling laugh. “Humpin” right you ain’t! Nobody gets a pass, ’cept from me, and I don’t give ’em!” All four of them laughed.
Then the leader asked, “How much skin on ya?”
“I don’t understand…”
“Skin, leaves, pages, paper, bread--”
“Oh, you mean money,” Lou realized. He shook his head. “Nothing. I don’t carry…”
Something exploded in the small of his back. Lou sagged down to his knees, pain screaming through him. The leader stepped up in front of him. Lou had to look up now to see into his hard, glittering eyes.
“I…”
Smiling, the leader rocked back deliberately and then swung his fist into Lou’s mouth. One of the other boys kicked Lou in the chest and he toppled over backward gasping for breath, his mouth suddenly filled with blood, tiny bright lights flashing in his eyes.
He felt their hands on him, ripping open the zips of his suit, tearing at the fabric. They rolled him over, face down on the filthy sidewalk. They pulled off his boots.
They were talking among themselves now, muttering and giggling. Lou’s mouth felt numb and puffy. His back and ribs flamed with pain when he tried to move, but he forced his breathing back to normal, fought his way back up to a crouching position.
“Honest buck, ain’t cha?” the leader said, grinning. “No skin, tol’truth. But boots is somethin’ ta howl for. Big fer me, but I’ll stuff ’em with paper or somethin’.”
Lou stayed in his crouch and rubbed at the fast-caking blood on his chin. The four boys were ranged in a half-circle around him, looking very big now as they stood over him.
“Okay,” said the leader. “How we gonna get rid of ’im?” The kid on Lou’s left flicked a knife open and started giggling.
Lou uncoiled and slammed straight into the leader, bowling him over, and raced away. He pounded down the darkened street, rounded a corner, and ran as fast as he could, blindly, away from them. Something sharp bit into one bare foot but Lou kept going, heart pounding, sweat pouring all over him. “A hunt, a hunt!” he heard someone shouting from behind him.
And then the leader’s unmistakable voice, “Peelers! A hunt!” Other voices shouted up ahead, and from a side street too. Lou pulled up short. There was an alley to his right. Dead end, most likely. He walked, slowly and quietly now, past the alley and toward the corner of the street up ahead. He could feel himself trembling. The pain was buried now beneath the fear. From down the street he heard the scrabbling sounds of barefooted kids walking swiftly toward him.
“Try that alley,” somebody said, half a block behind him in the darkness.
Lou turned the corner and started running again. He lost track of time. Minutes and hours blurred together. Lou only knew that he was running, hunted like a rare gazelle—or more like a meat animal being chased by a pack of wolves. Whenever he stopped, he heard their voices behind him, off to the side, ahead, out of the shadows, everywhere.
He tried to get into the buildings, but the doors were locked.
Many of them sealed with heavy metal screens. Some were electrified, and Lou picked up a handful of burned fingers before he stopped trying the darkened doorways.
“Hey, head ’im off… don’t let ’im get across the avenya!”
Lou looked up ahead. There were lights glowing a few blocks up the street. One of the main avenues, still lighted? Lights meant civilization, and civilization meant safety. Lou started running toward the lights.
“Hey, there he goes! Get “im!”
Feet were pounding behind him, getting closer. From around a corner, two boys appeared, knives in hand. Lou swerved out into the middle of the street. When they raced to meet him, he cut back again in his best touch-football style. One of the boys slipped trying to reach him, and Lou planted a running kick on the other one’s midsection so hard that the kid bounced halfway across the street.
The lights, the lights. He had to get to the lights. They were right behind him. A knife whizzed past his head and clattered on the trash-strewn pavement. Lou’s lungs were in flames, his heartbeat a deafening roar in his ears. Something grabbed at his waist. He swung around and backhanded viciously. A little kid, no more than eight or nine, spurted blood from his nose as his head snapped back from Lou’s blow. He looked afraid and angry and surprised, all at once. Lou grabbed him by the hair and pulled him off, tossed him into the next teenager coming at him, and then sprinted out into the brightly lit avenue.
“Hold it!” roared the leader. “Stop. Don’ cross th’ line.”
Lou stood in the middle of the broad avenue, chest raw and heaving, ears bursting with the hot drumfire of his pulse, legs shaking with fatigue. The kids of the gang bunched together on the sidewalk.
“Good run, funnyman,” said the leader. “Lotsa luck.” Then he raised his hand.
Lou saw a knife in that hand, saw the leader snap it forward in a quick throw, saw the knife fly through the air toward him. He jumped back, toward the far side of the street. The knife hit point first on the blacktopped street and stuck there, quivering. Now the other boys were slowly reaching for their knives, getting ready to throw.
Stumbling, nearly unconscious from exertion, Lou backpedaled and then turned and staggered to the pavement on the other side of the avenue. Back away from the lights into the shadows of a doorway. The kids merely stood on the opposite sidewalk, laughing and standing there, as if waiting for something to happen.
A pair of hands grabbed Lou’s arms. “Whatcha want, pinkey?”
Lou never thought he would do it, but he fainted.
5
Lou woke up. He was in a room, on the floor. A single, naked bulb up in the ceiling glared at him. A half-dozen kids were standing around him. Black kids. Another gang.
He pulled himself up slowly to a sitting position. Every part of his body ached horribly.
The only furniture in the room was an antique wooden school desk and chair, battered and carved with hundreds of initials. On the wall behind the desk was some sort of old poster showing a huge lion leaping through a ring of fire. The top of the poster had been ripped away. Lou could make out the words …EST SHOW ON EARTH, APRIL 15 to 29. It didn’t make any sense to him.
And then he focused on the black man sitting at the desk. He was immense, the biggest man Lou had ever seen. He must have weighed three hundred pounds or more. And he wasn’t fat: just huge, giant muscles on a mountainous frame. He looked completely out of proportion to the rickety desk as he sat squeezed in behind it, looming over it and Lou. The only clothing Lou could see was an open vest. His black skin gleamed in the glare of the overhead lamp. It was hard to tell how old he was he could have been in his early twenties or ten years older.