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Since then, hiding in the ditch under Big Bird, he’d thought about it a lot.
He thought it all the way through as the HDTV in his head played and replayed it. There was no remote to aim at it and surf away to something better and saner. To something that made any kind of sense.
Before Jake could struggle back to his feet the whole thing with Burl and Hank and the others seemed to have changed. To have ended in a way Jake didn’t understand.
The other three guys, Hank, Tommy, and Vic, had pulled the girls off of Burl and Richie. Pulled them off, fought with them, fell to the ground wrestling with them, and beaten the shit out of them. Through pain-filled eyes, Jake watched the guys punching and stomping the girls. It was surreal. Like something out of a bad movie. Like snuff porn.
Except that this was real and no matter how many times his friends hit the girls, they couldn’t put them down.
Not down so they’d stay.
First one girl would fall, knocked into the mud by a fist or foot, then another, but then they’d get right back up. With faces broken to ugliness by the blows, with teeth sliding out of their mouths on tides of black blood, with the white ends of ribs coming through their skin and broken fingers, they go right after the guys again.
And again.
And again.
Until Tommy knocked one of them down and stomped on her head. But it took five or ten kicks. At first all he did was drive the girl with the torn sweatshirt deeper into the mud. Tommy was bleeding from half a dozen bites on his hands and wrists. Then one of his kicks must have done something worse. Broke her head, maybe. Or her neck. Something. Because she suddenly stopped fighting, stopped trying to get up. Stopped everything.
Tommy staggered back, staring down at her, his face as slack as if he’d been slapped, eyes bugged. Jake could understand that. The craziness of the attack. The bites and the blood. And what he’d just done.
How could they ever explain this?
All these big guys and three teenage girls. One of them naked. Another with her shirt torn open and her bra showing. Beaten to shit so they didn’t even look like girls anymore.
What could any of them ever say that would make sense of that?
What?
What?
Tommy stood there and looked down at the girl while the other guys kept rolling around fighting.
Then Tommy spun away, dropped to his knees, and threw up.
Jake was still trying to haul himself out of the mud, still trying to remember how to breathe. He fought to get to his feet, but his knee immediately buckled and he went down again.
That’s when Burl got up.
The naked girl had left him in the mud and was fighting Richie. Hank and Vic were taking turns knocking down the girl in the windbreaker and getting bit and knocking her down again. All of them screaming and cursing.
Jake began to crawl through the mud while across the rainy field, behind the five struggling figures, Burl Hansard stood up. It seemed to take a long time for him to do it. He was so badly hurt, maybe so dazed, that he was clumsy, he looked like he was drunk. The rain slashed at him, sending crooked red lines down to the mud, making his skin look white as paper.
“B-Burl…” called Jake, but he was too far away and his voice was lost in the sound of the storms and all that yelling.
Burl paused for one moment, his pale face turned toward Jake, eyes locked; and in that fragment of time, Jake knew that everything here was wrong. Worse even than it had been. He didn’t know how he knew—it was a reaction born in the deepest, oldest, most primitive part of his brain. It was a knowledge of wrongness without any intellectual interpretation. It was simply wrong.
Burl’s eyes were open but Burl was not in there.
Even from that distance, Jake knew.
Somehow Burl was gone.
So who looked at him from his friend’s eyes?
Who, or what?
All of this burned through Jake’s head in less than a second.
