“Idiot,” the officer said. “Just grab her.”
The two sailors hefted her up onto their shoulders. She kicked and squirmed and smashed her head against the young one’s temple. She contracted her stomach muscles and made them both stumble as they carried her out onto the catwalk.
For a terrible moment she thought they meant to throw her over the side. Maybe that would be better. At least then it would be over quickly.
Did they mean to hand her over to the chanting mob? They had caught sight of her, the others standing on the catwalks, and soon a new chant began.
Join us! Join us!
They weren’t angry words, but the chant grew ever more intense. From encouraging to angry to hateful.
Join us!
It was a curse.
Join us!
It was a threat.
They hustled her down the stairs and through the now-enraged crowd. People spit on her. Someone punched her, then others. Her shirt was ripped. Someone pounded her calf repeatedly.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” she screamed.
Someone in the crowd punched her in the mouth and various voices y
elled, “Shut her up, shut her up, join us, join us!”
The officer and the two sailors were now having a hard time getting through the mob. KimKim slipped and Minako fell hard to the floor, crashing on her neck. A kick caught her shoulder. Feet were stomping all around her.
KimKim bent over her, shielding her with his body. He was scared, she could see it.
“You’re all crazy!” Minako screamed, on automatic now, as caught up in the madness of the moment as the fanatics around her.
“My friends!” a huge voice bellowed.
“It’s Mr Charles!” some cried out. “The Great Souls!”
The amplified voice repeated, “My friends! My friends! Calm yourselves! Calm yourselves!”
The kicks and punches lessened and the legs receded around Minako. But she did not stop screaming, “You’re all crazy!”
The sailors manhandled her up off the floor and half carried, half dragged her to the elevator lift. She saw the legs, the two and the one, and suddenly she was deposited at their feet, at the feet of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.
Charles’s voice boomed again as the lift began to rise. “My friends, do not hate this girl. She is simply unenlightened, as are too many in this sad world. But never fear! Our time is coming. The future belongs to us!”
Cheers rose like a tide all around her, and yet still she screamed, “You’re all crazy!”
Benjamin’s foot moved. The toe of his shoe was against her side. He pressed his weight down and ground the skin of her waist against the metal.
Minako heard Charles say, “We don’t have a twitcher aboard, brother.”
“So much the better,” Benjamin said. “The old ways, then. The old ways.”
“Where the hell is Burnofsky?” Bug Man asked Jessica. Back in the hotel room in Crystal City. Back to just the two of them, claustrophobic, the walls closing in again.
Go limp. The president was doing whatever she was doing. Writing her crazy eulogy.
Bug Man was doing nothing.