The Warriors by Sol Yurick Read Free Book Online Page A

but the guides had to linger to make sure that Honor was not offended. Movements were interpreted as being hostile, and purely defensive blows were struck. The fights kept dying down and starting up again all over the field.
    Father Arnold called his children closer together. The seven of them formed into a circle, each facing outward. Lunkface, as always, wanted to break discipline and go rushing off into the darkness, swinging, smashing, but Arnold and Hector flanked him and held him in place. They just waited for the noise and the roar to die down, hoping they wouldn’t have to fight.
    Someone, unable to take it, fired a shot. A piece of leaf fluttered down from the bush behind Ismael. Secretary tried to pull him down. Ismael, warrior and leader, disdained to cover himself. His face was composed; his cool smile mocked them and challenged their stupidity. The blue eye-disks looked at the seething, flash-lit blackness; he heard the muffled shouts, the sounds of blows, contemptuously. His calm, he thought, would have a cooling effect; they must come to their senses.
    But it had gone too far for one man to stop. The fighting was general now; peace and universal organization were irretrievable in this violent blackness. Arnold’s sons held tight, checked by Hector. Here and there other groups refused to break peace and fight, but stood firm and were bumped against in the blackness. The fighters pounded at Ismael’s men, identifiable in their icecream pants. Some of the wilder ones, the truce-breakers who had never trusted in the first place, who were jealous of Ismael, were unslinging secret chains wrapped around their waists.There were more guns than had been accounted for. The gift tokens were all shredded free of their wrappings; bright flakes of colored paper fluttered in and out of the flashes of light, candy-bright in the middle of the night. Some jokers lit firecrackers and threw them around.
    And someone tipped the cops. Maybe a passing motorist had seen it all. Or worried Youth Board Workers had sensed what was happening. A frightened warrior, or one of their women, feeling that old rumble-fear, had told. And they were coming down on them in prowl cars now. They heard a siren from a long way off, but unlike the city, now there was no place to run and hide, no doorway to disappear into; only the unfamiliar field, the blackness itself, or the bright highway. The siren grew louder; other wails joined it; the sound was a cliché—they had heard it so many times—but paralyzing. They couldn’t run—which way, where, would they go? Only Ismael’s men knew the way out. The red lights on top of the prowl cars were blinking. Police car after police car raced down both roads, flanking them. And who could have betrayed them but Ismael? Who could have gotten them there where they would all be together, easy to hand over, who but Ismael?
    And so they presented their tokens of allegiance in a different way than they had intended. From all around the field they aimed their guns at the circle of light. They fired. From those distances, and in the confused lighting, only two bullets reached. Ismael’s body was thrown back through the halo and held up by the thick stand of bushes. One hole was unnoticed in the dark material of his suit. The other shattered one blue lens so that Ismael’s face seemed to wink at them contemptuously before he slumped. The flashlights illuminating Ismael paled suddenly as a great blaze of headlights and spotlights poured down on them from two sides.
    Heaving in viscous agony, their bodies writhed, moved by theshower of light to a moment of furious action. They pounded at one another, not only at enemies, but at friends, as if only terrific motion could make them feel less frightened. Light bathed them. Even the most well-disciplined gangs wavered. Some of them broke entirely; they began to run, and running, smashed into other men and stopped to slug. Others ran in