I watched from my perch on the roof. Blackhat Roy, his body covered in soot, moved closer to them. He cocked his head slightly as if considering the visitors.
It was one thing for the breachers to attack one other. That was accepted. That was the nature of the place. It was our nature. But this was something different. Outsiders, the few we got, were usually left alone. It was a precarious balance that worked out most of the time. On the one hand, breachers normally preferred to roam the dark woods rather than the overly bright downtown streets. On the other hand, most residents from neighboring towns stayed away from us during the full moon out of a superstitious fear of the town’s reputation. But sometimes there were exceptions in both cases—the habits of breachers were broken, and the mythologies of the town were forgotten by the outsiders.
I might have warned them. I might have called down to them to get back into their car and drive away. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.
The five of them were out of the car, some still pointing, some laughing with gaudy, wide mouths, some revolted. That’s when the other breachers emerged from around corners and from the dark of alleyways. They came out, naked all, and surrounded the travelers.
Two of the five were girls, and they didn’t like what was happening. They got back into the car and begged the three boys to take them home. But the boys continued to laugh. “A town full of retards,” one said.
“Please!” the girls said from inside the car. “Please come on!”
But then something strange happened. From my height, I could see that the breachers, led by Peter Meechum, who had hopped down from the gazebo roof, were closing not around the travelers but around one of their own, Blackhat Roy.
It was a sign of dominance, territoriality. I understood it instinctively. Instead of attacking the interloper, attack one of your own. Put on full display the untamed wildness of your power.
By the time Roy saw what was happening, it was too late to run. I could see, even from my height, the panic in his eyes. His head turned around, wondering from which direction the first attack would come.
“It’s gonna hurt, Roy,” I could hear Peter saying. “You know it’s gonna hurt.”
But then something occurred to Blackhat Roy. Instead of defending himself, he turned on the travelers, the boys laughing and pointing from their car.
“What do you fucking know about hurt?” he said to the boys. “You and yours. I’m gonna teach you something about hurt.”
Roy advanced on one of the boys, going up close and sniffing his neck as a dog might. Then he said something to him, low in his ear, and I couldn’t hear what it was. But the boy wasn’t laughing anymore, and he was no longer hypnotized by the naked bodies all around him—he just wanted to get away.
Roy wouldn’t let him. He grabbed the boy and flung him to the ground, then seized him by the arm and dragged him into the middle of the park. The crowd of breachers separated to let him through—Roy was giving them something to be hungry for.
“Tear him,” Marina Anderson said, breathless, to Blackhat Roy. “Rip him.”
“Rip him,” the others started to say. “Bleed him.”
The other two boys tried to run to their friend’s aid, but the breachers fell on them, too, beat them and tore off their clothes and rubbed themselves lewdly against the whimpering boys.
Then they came back to the car for the two tearful and screaming girls.
I watched.
I was stirred.
The breezes blew, and I wondered how much awfulness had to be released from one location before you could smell it on the wind.
The girls had locked themselves in the car, but they didn’t have the key to start the engine. I could hear their muffled shrieks as the breachers stalked around the vehicle, trying all the doors, pressing their hungry faces against the glass. Blackhat Roy slapped a bloody handprint on the windshield. It was impossible to know whose blood it was.
“Open your eyes,” he called to the girls. “Open your goddamn eyes!”
The breachers rocked the car back and forth, some climbing up the hood and onto the roof. The girls screamed.
Finally someone brought a cinder block from the alley and threw it through the windshield. Then it was just a matter of reaching in and dragging the girls out by their fragile, flailing limbs.
*
In the past, the infrequent attacks on outsiders hadn’t been so bad. They could be explained away, mollified with sympathetic fictions. A troubled local youth gone off his medication. A traumatized girl, escaped from her abusive foster home, taking out on innocents what had been perpetrated on her for years. In the daylight, the breachers could be brought forward to apologize, which they did with all true sincerity. They had not meant it. They were full of regret.
Truth be told, even during the full moon, breachers could sense the difference between themselves and others. In general, there was no joy in preying on those who did not stink of nature and violence. The outsiders usually came away with maybe a bruise or a busted lip. Maybe not even that. Sometimes just the uneasy fright of witnessing a naked figure running across the road in front of your car and howling at you as it passed.
The sheriff from the next town over might visit our mayor. There may have been jolly slaps on the back, amicable chuckling, head shaking with regard to the moral abandon of teenagers these days. What was to be done? Mutual shrugs. It was a brutal time we were living in. Sad nods. But the children would survive and be better for it, as the two men had. Reassured stares skyward.