The crowd shouts the word, “Enough!” in unison, throwing their fists in the air.
The force of their conviction almost knocks me over. It hits me in the chest like a wrecking ball, overwhelming me with support. I felt like I was fighting this battle on my own for so long, clinging to this person I love tooth and nail while the entire world tried to take him from me. But I’m not alone anymore.
And neither are they.
“The folks who have been murdered here by Governor Steele and his executioner are good people. They’re your family, your doctors, your friends, your loved ones. They are people who were willing to die to save someone else.”
To save me.
“They are not the enemy. Doing everything we can to help each other survive isn’t what made us weak; it’s what made us human. The real enemy is the one percent of our population who took ninety-nine percent of our resources! The one percent who almost made us go extinct because of their greed. The one percent who killed a quarter of us off through mind control to make up for the lack they’d created and then told us it was our fault for turning our backs on natural selection!”
I lean over and give the microphone to Wes’s mom, who’s watching me with glistening eyes. Hold this, please, I mouth to her.
I untie the sleeves wrapped around my waist and pull the hoodie on over my head, careful not to let my gun fall out of the front pocket. As soon as those orange bones are visible, the left half of the crowd—the side with jackets matching mine—goes wild. I take the microphone back from Rhonda with a hopeful look.
Standing back up, I shove my fist into the air, and when the entire crowd does the same, it feels like the ocean itself is rising up to meet me. Except for Q, who’s smirking with her arms folded across her chest.
“They say they want the strongest to survive? Well, I say, there’s strength in numbers! Let’s show them—”
“Shoot her!” a booming Southern voice shouts from somewhere behind me.
My head swivels in that direction, and I find Governor Steele marching across the capitol lawn, pointing at me in anger, with Officer Elliott and Flip hot on his trail. Three riot cops rush across the street to drag Governor Steele away but not before he produces a gun from somewhere inside his three-piece suit and aims it directly at me.
The brute squad drops me immediately, catching me in their heavily tattooed arms as two bullets whiz through the air over my head.
The microphone slips through my fingers.
And the powder keg explodes.
Rain
The second those shots are fired, a hundred more follow as the crowd erupts into a pushing, shoving, screaming, stampeding, mindless thing. Michelle, Lamar, and I are swallowed by the mob in an instant. People trample over Quint’s body as they push in all directions to get away from the madness. I watch as his mask goes flat under a cowboy boot, and I have to choke down my own vomit.
But there’s no time to process. I’m going to end up just like him if I don’t stay upright. With every jarring shove, every push and pull, I feel myself getting smaller. It’s like that time my parents took me to the beach, and I got sucked away from the shore by the undertow. I remember feeling so weak, my little muscles no match for the all-powerful ocean. The only difference is that if I get pulled under here, I won’t drown. I’ll have my internal organs liquefied under the stomping, panicking feet of Bonys and rednecks and newly released prisoners.
Shots ring out every few seconds, followed by more screaming, and I don’t know if the riot cops are firing at us or if we’re firing at the riot cops.
The giant ex-cons who were holding me up are able to force their way through the chaos, but when the crowd closes in behind them, it swallows me whole and forces me under, like a crashing wave.
Fight! I scream at myself. Stay on your feet!
Another ka-pow reverberates through the air as a man no more than five feet away from me topples into the crowd like a cut tree. I can’t get out of the way, and he lands on me, coughing up blood as we both go down.
I scream as I hit the grass under two hundred pounds of bleeding human. “Help! Hellllllp!”
I struggle to roll the dying man off of me as motorcycle boots and cowboy boots and combat boots and hunting boots stomp on my feet and trip over my legs and kick me in the side and crush my arms. Fear and pain hijack my brain as the assault continues. Instead of rolling him off, I pull the dying man back on top of me, using him as a human shield to protect my belly as I try to remember to breathe. Panic grips my throat and squeezes, stealing my voice as it whispers into my ears.
Weak.
Stupid.
Powerless.
Girl.
But then I hear another voice in my ear, one that sounds less like me and more like a female rapper who smokes two packs a day. Faded green dreadlocks tumble into my face as the voice chuckles.
“Bitch, how you gonna start a riot and then lie down and take a nap? That’s some gangsta shit right there.”
Two hands grab me under the armpits and hoist, lifting me out from under the now-dead body just before another surge of people tramples him as well.
I turn and find the feral, feline eyes of Q staring back at me, a smirk on her full lips and a spatter of blood on her right cheek.
“You came,” I mutter in disbelief.
“Pssh. Not from that speech, I didn’t.” She grins. “Come on. Let’s go get ya man.”
Before I can ask her how in the hell she thinks we’re going to get out of here, Q climbs the bodies around her like a jungle gym.
“Ow!”
“Fuck!”
“What the hell?”
“Come on, you little pussy!” she yells down at me, crawling on top of the angry mob like it’s her own personal magic carpet.
I do the same, but much more apologetically, and follow her every move as she crawls on her hands and feet over the undulating sea of bodies. But with the way the crowd is pushing back and forth, we take two steps forward and find ourselves three feet farther away.
“Ugh! Don’t these muhfuckas know who you is?”
Q squats on the shoulders of a bearded, plaid-covered redneck and places her fingers in her mouth. The whistle that follows is deafening and brings everyone immediately around us to a halt.
“Y’all need to get dis bitch to the front ’fore I start shootin’ muhfuckas just to make a path!”
Everyone’s stare shifts from Q to me, and suddenly, a sidewalk of hands, palms up, appears before me.
Q’s mouth twists into a self-satisfied sneer as she gestures for me to go ahead.
I give her a grateful nod and begin placing my wobbly knees and shaking hands on their open palms.
“Nah, bitch. Not like dat. Like dis.” Q gives me a shove, and I scream and grasp at nothing as I topple over sideways.
But I don’t hit the ground. The crowd catches me and carries me like a conveyor belt toward the front of Plaza Park. I blink and try to catch my breath as I wave at Q, who gives me a smug smile before slapping the crap out of the guy she’s crouching on for trying to pull her off.
From up here, I can see that droves of angry people are flooding in from the streets—probably thanks to our live broadcast—but the new rioters are only making it harder for the ones trying to flee to get out. Because the longer sides of the park are walled off by risers—which the riot cops are now standing on, firing at anybody who tries to climb up to their level—the only way in and out of the park are the two shorter sides. Folks are either fighting to get out, fighting to get in, or fighting just for the hell of it, but when I see the news van pull away from the curb, I know who’s not fighting.