The n-Body Problem

Later that night we begin the mass launch. This time the cable is thrown down the middle of main street. I watch as the cable is pulled taut down two blocks of maple-lined street. Police hold people back on the sidewalks while connections are made and tested.

I hear the anabolic shriek of table saws and clattering glottis of chainsaws. Stations are set up in storefronts for people who wish to be dismembered before they go. The first few are the most zealous and they endure the blades with eyes cast upward in frozen joy. Freshly removed arms and legs are passed across a sea of risen hands. Genitals are flung up into trees and telephone wires. The reduced torsos rolled to the cable where they bleed out in seconds. Soon blood has caught everyone. Shirtless men and women pat themselves with sticky red palms. Faces plastered with rich dark hair. Bright ghost shapes on windows. The next wave of dismemberment is not as deliberate. This wave is changing its mind having seen the first. This wave has to be pushed to the saws, held down by many hands. Some wiggle free, made slippery by their own blood. They spring howling though the crowd. Some have one arm and a shoulder spraying mist across the crowd. Some have only deep cuts and they bounce from brick walls like animated scarecrows. Order dies. The crowd no longer looks to the stage. There are too many screaming machines. Too much blood and running corpses. Whirling blenders that make their way into the crowd. They are seeking their own completion now. Dixon turns back to me. He gestures to Y. Time to go. Throw the damn switch and let’s move on.

The cable explodes down the middle of the street and hundreds of people seize up at once. Others leap on and are crunched into balls by the voltage. Blood pools blacken and are lit with fury. Several heavy men move in, driving chainsaws through backs and necks until the current finds them and they become still, still like memorial statues. Dixon lifts me and I am placed in the truck. The crowd that is still able to move moves on us. I watch the faces of people throwing themselves onto the windows. These are not the faithful anymore. These ones have been shattered, they have awoken angry and afraid. They are yelling at me. Pounding the window. We are running away form what we started. They know it.

Y shoots those hanging off the drivers’ side. Several bullets pierce glass and slip into upholstery. Dixon uses a hammer to cave in the skulls of people in his way. The truck starts and pulls forward, but the hands of the frenzy hold us back. The tires spin and burn in place. Dixon turns to me and signals the doctor to hold my case. He throws it in reverse and the wheels bounce across bodies. When he throws it into drive, we fishtail on the guts and muscle and bone. The tires burn through the skin and grab the road. We shoot forward and plough through those ahead. I hear Dixon call out like a cowboy. We are under the heavy sopping skirts of flesh blood. Torn arms and butterflied faces. The contents of stomachs, the undersides of lost heads. Dixon reverses again, this time opening a patch of sky. There is a live cable on the ground somewhere. The rubber tires protects us but the blood could conduct it. We break through the body knots and are free. Dixon guns it and we hit a light standard. The truck turns and the standard falls, pulling people down and folding them. I see flames. The crowd has ignited and the living are like freshly lit matches, their hair bright orange and yellow. The truck is heading out from the centre of town. I can no longer see what is happening behind us.

I used to have the ability to be moved by things like this. Horrified. I wonder if my emotion might have been in my arms all along, my legs, my testicles. Gone. All I care about is getting away in time. When you can’t move on your own anymore there is no such thing as a place to stay.

The windshield wipers are stirring up a pink foam. We have to pull over. We are east of Beeton on the 8^th Line. Y is taking water in a pail from the ditch and throwing it onto the car. Dixon has walked down the road. The doctor sits beside me, her head turned. I want to look back. Is the town a fireball? Are they running up the road with their heads lit up? Y gets back in the driver’s seat and sits. Dixon returns. He reaches back and flips open the front of my case.

“Can we get him out of there easy?”

The doctor reaches in and plays with the hook-up below. She nods.

“Yes. Why?”

Dixon rubs his lips hard. They must be numb. He has no feeling in his mouth. That’s the impediment.

“We’re going to change some things. No more phosters. Too much hype. I don’t want things haphening we can’t control. Who phrought the saws? Is that on any of the phosters? How did all this shit haphen?”

Y sighs. The doctor fiddles with my bottom.

“The new rule is we keep things calm. I got an idea.”

Dixon looks into my face. A look of surprise.