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Then Burl took a step. Heavy, lumbering, like he didn’t quite remember how to use his feet. He pulled one work boot out of the mud and took a step, but it was more like falling forward than walking forward.
Not toward Jake.
Burl turned toward the knot of struggling figures. A step, another.
He reached out to help pull the naked girl away who kept trying to bite Vic even though he had her by the hair and kept punching her in the face. Burl grabbed the girl and hauled her away, and Jake expected him to start wailing on her. But he didn’t. Instead he simply shoved her aside and with a rush and a yell that was as loud as it was meaningless. Then Burl grabbed Vic’s face, taking it in both of his hands the way a grandmother does when she’s going to kiss a kid on the lips.
Except that’s not what was happening.
Of course it wasn’t.
Burl pulled Vic forward, tearing him free from the mud, crushing him close, and then he bit down, tearing into Vic’s nose, crushing it, ripping it. Blood exploded against Burl’s face and it seemed to incense the man. He growled like a dog and began tearing at Vic, worrying at his face the way a dog does. Vic screamed and screamed. He beat at Burl, punching him with the same red, swollen fists he’d been using with similar futility on the naked girl. The fists bounced off of Burl’s massive frame. Vic brought his knee up into Burl’s balls. Once, again, and again.
Nothing.
And it was then, at that moment, that Jake lost all hope that there was any way to understand this. He’d been in fights. He’d given and taken shots to the groin. Some guys could cowboy through it, biting down on the pain, bulling through it, but even the toughest of them reacted. You had to react. It was your balls.
Burl didn’t twitch. All that happened was a jerk of his body with each impact, but there was no more reaction to it than when somebody brushes your shoulder on the subway. Less. It was nothing. Dead meat being hit.
That was it.
That was all.
Burl never stopped biting.
Vic’s face.
Vic’s cheek.
Vic’s throat.
Then Vic stopped screaming; he stopped kicking. Someone turned on a power hose of red in Vic’s throat. Blood showered Burl’s face and chest.
Jake lost it then.
He could hear past his own screams.
His eyes seemed to switch off for a moment as if they refused to see any of this.
Time punched him senseless and each second was like a brutal fist against his brain. The sounds and sights of what was going on broke apart and flew off into the storm.
Tommy and Richie were still fighting. One each with a girl.
Then Tommy was down and the girl with the windbreaker knelt on his chest. There was one little, final flap of Tommy’s hand. After that, nothing.
Richie picked the naked girl up and flung her away from him. Then he looked wildly around as if trying to decide how to react, failed, and then simply ran.
Badly.
The mud and the rain and the damage brought him down within two steps.
“No!”
The cry was torn from Jake. It was not the first time he’d yelled, but this one found a hole in the storm where there was no thunder, no howling wind, no screams. A flash moment of quiet into which his one word stabbed.
Every face turned toward the sound.
Toward him.
