watching us like rapt bettors at the Kentucky Derby, waiting for the starting gun. There was even a zoom-lens camera on a crane to capture live video of our plight. The revolution will be televised, I thought.
'We need tools,' Julian said, stepping back in disgust from the greasy, unyielding winch. He had hurt his hand.
'We have to go another way,' said Lemuel.
Dreamily, I answered, 'There is no other way. The moat goes all the way around.'
'Then we'll swim it.'
Shawn piped up, 'No way! Look down there!' There seemed to be things moving under the slimy water. Glutinous, embryonic shapes.
'He's right,' said Julian. 'It's a death trap down there.'
'Well, what the hell we gonna do?' demanded Cole.
'I know what I'm going to do,' said Jake, looking across the field.
'What?'
'Pray.'
Alerted by his tone, we turned to see what he was looking at. Someone was coming. Someone blue.
'Oh no, man,' Hector said. 'Come on.'
It was Ed Albemarle.
He came on like a charging rhino, and we knew there would be no stopping him. There was no choice but to flee the onslaught.
'You run ahead of us,' Hector said to me. 'We'll try to hold him off.'
'Run where?'
'That gate!' said Cole, gesticulating at the men in the compound. 'They have to let us in!'
'They won't,' I said. 'They're only here to watch.'
Julian barked, 'Then we'll run in circles! Just go!'
I ran. My sandals flew off my feet, then my mud-caked booties. Barefoot, I could run faster anyway, clay smooshing between my toes as I left a trail of perfect footprints. The five boys were following in close formation, and behind them the juggernaut. For all his bulk, Mr. Albemarle barely seemed to touch the ground, legs a pistoning blur and clods of mud rising in his wake. He was a flesh-and-bone torpedo homing in.
'We can take him down if we have to!' shouted Julian. 'Two of us on each leg, two on each arm, one in the middle, and one around his neck! Be ready!'
Without panic or argument they arranged themselves into a loose flying wedge, chests heaving. Albemarle drew closer and closer, his thumping footfalls matching my racing heartbeat-I thought I could feel the ground shake. In the space of a few seconds, he went from being a barely believable threat in the distance to a drowned specter at our heels, scattering us like sheep. Hector overtook me, singled out by his stepfather and frantic to keep his lead as the rest of us peeled off to either side and closed formation behind them.
They were getting away from us; it was now or never. 'Go!' Julian shouted.
Cole and Lemuel put on a last burst of speed and closed on Albemarle, trying to tackle him around the legs. At the same time, Julian, Jake, and Shawn swept in from either side. I held back, not wanting to be crushed in the fight, but there was no fight to speak of-they never touched him. The big man slipped through their grasp with animal fluidity, barely conscious of their clumsy grabs. Fumbling after him, the boys tripped over each other and fell in the mud.
Hector knew he didn't have a chance. As a last resort, he tried to feint and double back like a jackrabbit, but Albemarle was quicker: Simple as picking fruit from a vine, he snatched the boy off his feet, cutting him off midscream with a crushing embrace, the zealous affection of a feeding anaconda. Hector's pleading eyes went dull.
'No!' I cried. 'You can't!'
Ed Albemarle opened his plum-colored lips wide and engulfed Hector's mouth and nose. As we scrambled up, he turned his back on us and moved off, hoarding his stepson's body the way a dog hoards a bone. It was not that he was intimidated by us, just that he was in the middle of something and could not be disturbed. Hector already looked dead, but I wasn't ready to believe it.
Echoing my thoughts, Julian yelled, 'We have to catch him! Cut them off at the moat! C'mon!'
The other boys, muddy and wild-eyed, fanned out. Albemarle reached the edge of the ditch and cut left. We began to converge on him, and he trotted right toward us with Hector slack in his arms. I remembered a picture in one of my mother's art books that had given me nightmares when I was little, a hideous painting by Goya called Saturn Devouring His Son, and suddenly I knew what we had to do.
'Push them in!' I shouted on the run. 'Hector's gone-we have to push them both in now, before it's too late!'
God help them, the boys were with me. I would have tried alone, but they were there at my side, all of us riding the same wave of shame and horror at what we were about to do. Albemarle hesitated as we closed in, then abruptly dropped Hector's body and rushed us-rushed me. His big hand grabbed me like snatching up a barnyard chicken, and I was hauled before that dark face. Intelligence burned there, the inscrutable grin of a cannibal idol, and I imagined I heard a voice say It's going to be okay. Then Lemuel head-butted him at full speed.
Lemuel had lost some weight on the boat, but he was still a hefty kid, and the force of his blow probably would have knocked a normal person cold. The only effect it had on Albemarle was to throw him off-balance, so that the combined momentum of the other boys was enough to shove him in the deep trench.
Falling, Ed Albemarle sensibly dropped me and seized the two biggest boys, the two athletes, Lemuel and Cole, like a climber trading handholds, but even they weren't enough to offer purchase-the dynamics overwhelmingly favored gravity, and all three vanished under a heaving spout of muck. Julian yanked me back from the brink.
'Lulu! You okay? You okay?' He was frantic, tears streaking his muddy face, and the other two, Jake and Shawn, staring over the edge, shell-shocked.
Coughing through my bruised windpipe, I tried to gather enough air to say Hector, but before I could do it, there was an explosive movement to my left. Shawn shot bolt upright, neck arching backward in a volley of popping cartilage, and began gliding away as if on a dolly. His feet weren't touching the ground! But I could see footprints and a second pair of feet underneath-it was Hector. Hector had Shawn on his back like a side of beef, throttling him from behind as he capered away.
None of us had anything left, but we gave chase.
'Albemarle was one thing, but I can take Hector,' Julian muttered halfheartedly. 'I can take him…'
But it was obvious we were never going to catch them. It is exhausting to run through mud, and we were already beat: Jake's face was blotchy red, Julian seemed delirious, and the strain was aggravating my implant something fierce-it felt like a chisel in my head. The painkillers were wearing off. If theirs felt anything like mine, we were all going to be out of action soon. And every second poor Shawn was flopping farther and farther out of reach.
Watching them get away, I finally called it quits: 'That's enough… we can't.' I sounded like I had laryngitis.
'No!' Jake yelled, still plodding. 'We have to catch them! Come on!'
Julian slumped in the mud. 'It's all over, dude. Give it up.'
'No!' But the strength seemed to go out of him, and he slowed to an aimless, broken walk. 'Don't you get it?' he whimpered. 'We're next.'
It was hard to think with my skull aching so bad. I tried to look at the whole thing methodically, rationally, in the way that always drove my mother crazy. I'm not a robot like you! she would scream during our fights. I'm a human being! I have feelings! I thought of Cowper saying, Lulu, did you look into my heart? and of Lowenthal calling me a spy.
Maybe they were right. Maybe instead of the innocent victim of circumstances I always imagined myself to be, I was a selfish, scheming little creep. Was that the only reason I had made it that far, by conning everyone, including myself? If so, maybe it was justice that it end there and then. I had gotten the boys into this-it was only right that I share their fate.
