The Warriors by Sol Yurick Read Free Book Online Page B

circles. Light drenched them. More police cars were coming up, rushing to the scene along the parallel highways, screeching, turning toward the field, stopping, and aiming their headlights and spots onto the field till it became unbearable. They were all naked in the light, inundated. And, slowly, their movements began to stop. They paused. They waited. A field full of panting boys were fixed in the lights, aware only of the blazing gush that poured on them, drowning them, and aware of the complete, terrifying, shore of blackness that lay beyond those lights.

July 4th, 10:45–11:10 P.M.
    For one moment everybody was still. The beacons on top of the police cars kept turning and threw patches of red into the mass of light. Ismael’s body slowly slumped, sinking out of sight, disappearing as if he were being dragged to the bottom of the sea. Some kid sobbed; the sound bubbled, startlingly clear throughout the great patch of silent brightness. Then, someone who had seen too many movies tried to frighten the fuzz with a few shots, trying that old trick of shooting out a light. The head-busters replied with a warning on the bullhorn. But the wild man, some uninvited psycho, safe among the mass, had to show off his heart and fired again; the bullet caught one of the spot-lights and shattered it, but it seemed to have no effect on the blaze at all. The fuzz fusilladed warnings this time, trying toscatter the bullets widely over all their heads. The bullhorn kept roaring and echoing, warning. But a panicky cop, trying to shoot low enough to really frighten, fired into the mass of boys and someone—shot—screamed.
    The scream started them. The mass roared and they began to run. Some of them ran from side to side and back again, smashing into one another. Gangs began to fall apart. One warrior held the end of a honed-link bicycle chain and, grinning madly, swung and swung around, safe in the center of a ten-foot, silver radius. Most of them took off in the directions they thought they had come from. Some of them ran to the south and collided with police detachments working their way through a field to cut them off across their flank. A small mob, trying to make their way westward, to the Broadway subway line, blundered into a line of cops and cars. The cops waded into them and began clubbing wildly, driving the kids back into the field. A loudspeaker kept saying, “Stand perfectly still and you won’t get hurt. Stand perfectly still and you won’t get hurt.” Another speaker said, “Line up. Hands up. Line up.” A mass charged to the east, ran into the glare, got caught at the police line and were beaten off, but some got through and into the darkness; the police didn’t bother to follow. A detachment of kids tried to pretend they were surrendering, and then, when they got close, charged the cops. But a few bullets fired in front of them broke their discipline and they stopped. More prowl cars and paddy wagons were arriving. The fireworks hadn’t let up.
    Motorists were pulling up and getting out of their cars. Cops were trying to move them on. Traffic was beginning to stop and jam. Onlookers crowded behind the police lines to watch the fun. A handcuffed, hair-banded Muslim being led to the paddy wagon, palm-pushed by a thick-faced shover, saw the O-eyed audience and went a little crazy, broke loose and plowed into the suckers, screaming because he was made out such a fool in frontof their eyes. He knocked down an old lady and was biting into someone when the cop banged him to the ground and kicked him along the asphalt, scraping his face bloody while someone said, “The little savage, give it to him.” Ismael’s chauffeur tried to tank his car through to pick up the Leader, who he didn’t know was shot. He knocked down and killed a surrendering Seraph, brushed a policeman, and bogged in a soft patch, furiously miring himself deeper till the busters pulled him out and