My hands on the handlebars looked strange, unfamiliar. I felt vaguely numb, and wished there was some way to wash away that feeling.
Jean Paul was probably still laughing. Sophia hadn’t even tried to intervene. My only solace was that I would probably never see either of them again.
Bright lights and voices on a side street caught my attention. I took a right and rolled by a little crowd lounging outside a freshly painted storefront with big windows. It was an art opening. Christ, there were still art openings uptown.
What the hell. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to hear Colin ask “How’d it go?” I didn’t want to recount the humiliation that even now made it hard for me to look passing strangers in the eye. I needed to get lost in distraction for a while. I pulled onto the curb, chained my bike to a street sign, and wandered in through the wide open door.
The gallery was a dimly lit, cavernous room that had once been a dairy, or an auto showroom, or something like that. A line of ghostly, featureless, emaciated figures made of papier-mache were mounted to the high concrete walls. The figures were all facing the back of the gallery, and were posed as if they were moving, marching toward some faraway destination that they did not have the strength to reach. It was an eerie scene, lifelike despite the otherworldly look of the anonymous figures. They reminded me of my tribe, and made me wonder what I was thinking, coming to this part of town thinking a SCAD woman was interested in dating me.
There was a commotion at the front of the gallery. I turned to see a priest standing in the doorway holding an assault rifle in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. He looked like he was part East Indian or Arab. His dyed white hair was set in a sumo wrestler’s bun.
“Outside. Everyone outside,” he said, waving the rifle in a sweeping motion toward the back of the room.
The people nearest him scurried away. I retreated into the shadows at the back of the gallery. There were stacks of folding tables and chairs in the corner—I considered trying to hide behind them, but it wasn’t much of a hiding place. A woman cried out.
“Everyone out the back door!” the priest said.
The back door flew open and everyone poured out. I followed, into a dark alley.
There were two men waiting in the alley wearing round gas masks over mouth and nose.
“Against the wall,” one shouted, gesturing with a gas gun. He was dressed in an old-fashioned army officer’s uniform—epaulets on the shoulders and color-coded commendations embroidered on his chest. The other was dressed in a mailman’s uniform. I stood facing the brick wall.
“What’s happening?” a woman sobbed.
“Shut up. Turn around. Face the wall,” the mailman said. He wasn’t really a mailman—I’d heard stories about a gang, a violent political movement called the Jumpy-Jumps, who dressed in outfits and hurt people, and these guys fit the bill.
I heard the guy dressed as a priest come out the back door. He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman lined up closest to him. She murmured something back.
I only had three dollars on me. If these guys were robbing us, I wondered if they’d be angry that I didn’t have more. I didn’t have a watch or a ring, nothing of value.
I jumped at the sound of a gunshot. Others cried out, startled. I looked over and saw the woman crumple to the pavement, blood leaking from her temple. I turned my head the other way, pressed my cheek against the rough brick and stifled a sob.
“God, what is this?” a man said. I couldn’t see him; I was afraid to turn and look. The priest said something to him, low and emphatic.
“What?” the man against the wall said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. I don’t understand what you want.”
The priest said something else.
“Please. I don’t understand.”
I heard the squeal of a gas gun. Then someone falling, and strangled vomiting. People screamed. Someone was trying to answer a question from one of the other men with guns.
I didn’t understand what was happening; it sounded like they were interrogating people, but not giving them a chance to answer.
The priest walked passed me, went to the person next to me—a black guy in his forties. I strained to listen to what he was asking the guy. If I knew what the questions were, maybe I could figure out the right answer, the response that would convince him not to kill me.
Part of me knew there were no right answers. This was just how they did it, to make it more awful.
I risked glancing around, to see if I might be able to run for it. The alley was long and desolate. They would have plenty of time to shoot me before I reached cover.
“How many graves are in Saint Bonaventure Cemetery?” the priest asked.
“I don’t… please, don’t kill me,” the black guy said.
The priest walked away. He came back a moment later carrying a bucket.
He stopped beside me.
“How many graves?” he asked. His mouth was close to my ear, his breath tickling my neck.
I wanted to tell him he’d made a mistake, that he had been questioning the guy next to me. He poured the bucket over my head. It stank—it was piss, or sewage.
He took a step back, looked me up and down. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“East Jones Street,” I said quickly. I was relieved to know the answer. I wanted to cooperate. I craved his approval.
He raised the gas gun, held it to the side of my nose.
“How many steps is it from here to the Oglethorpe Mall?”
“I don’t know what the right answer is.”
“Are you ready to die?”
“I don’t want to die.”
The blast from the gas gun was coming. He was almost finished with the precursors, then he would push the black mask on the end of the gun over my face and pull the trigger. I tried to think of some way to stretch it out, to get him to ask me more questions, to switch to someone else, even if only for a moment. I didn’t want to die. Through my terror I found myself trying to grasp that this was real. There would be a very painful few moments of dying, and then my life would end.
“Eat this.” He held a plastic lid up to my face. There was a stringy, slimy, whitish thing on it, with lidded eyes, little arms curled in toward a torso. It was a fetus, maybe a rat fetus, or a cat. I lifted it off the lid with my tongue, and I ate it. It was horrible; it was chewy and slimy. I bit what may have been the head, and felt fluid squirt across my tongue. I swallowed dramatically, so he’d know that I’d done what he told me.
“How many cats prowl this city?”
“I’m not sure,” I whimpered.
He smacked me in the back of the head, hard. “Run away now,” he said. “We’re not killing mice in rags today.”
I was running before his words fully registered, my shoulders pulled toward my ears, waiting to feel bullets rip into my back. I sprinted out of the alley, turned down the street with the rush of wind in my ears and a horrible taste in my mouth. I was making some sound as I ran, a sound I didn’t recognize and before this moment wouldn’t have believed was within my vocal range.
A few blocks away I spotted two police officers on horseback. I waved and shouted to get their attention.
“They’re killing people, behind an art gallery!” I pointed back up Abercorn.
“Where?” a female officer asked.
I pointed. “Three blocks up, I think, then right—”
“That’s not our jurisdiction.”
“No, but three men with guns are lining people up in an alley and shooting them! Right now!”
“Get lost,” the officer said. She made a clicking sound, kicked her horse in the ribs. In a nonchalant tone she picked up the thread of whatever conversation they’d been having when I interrupted.
