It was all over five minutes later. The carnage was massive. The 50 were killed almost immediately. Trampled during the initial stampede. For the three, it was glorious. Finally, an emotion other than complete and utter numbness. A tinge of fear. A deep desire to survive. And live! But then, almost all at once, their bones broke. Their spleens were crushed. Their lives were squashed out of them. 37 others met the same end. None of them felt the same bliss as the three. 10 survived the onslaught. Crude weapons from way before subsidized time were strategically strewn about the arena. Each picking one, they attacked. Locked inside the arena with no place to hide, it was their only choice. Fight and die. Or just die. The mosquito like-bullets and spiked maces only served to exacerbate the already frenzied state of the babies. More cantankerous than ever. The contestants were maimed. They were gored. They were eaten. In moments, they were all pardoned.
The crowd was catatonic with disbelief. No one was sure. Was this part of the show or not? Quick rationalizations. It had to be. The president was known for his flair and penchant for drama so maybe the whole Gentle assassination thing was a ruse. They do amazing things with optics and illusion so maybe what they were seeing wasn’t what they were seeing. It probably wasn’t even him singing. Impersonators were everywhere. The Hengemen certainly would have all the bases and contingencies covered concerning the health of their commander in chief.
The dozen babies run rampant, slicing their way easily through the reinforced fence and gorging their almost limitless appetites, virtually disintegrating both inanimate and living alike. The audience realizes this isn’t a planned part of the show, finally lose their immobility and run haphazardly in any direction that seems away. Screaming people are scooped up and ripped in two (or more). Eyeballs are torn from sockets and chewed on like skittles. Others, mid-stride, trying to flee have their torsos nearly bitten in half before being pulped into chunky, gory stew. The feral ones have more agility and are a lot smarter than they had let on during their captivity. They are insanely fast. Despite their eternally infantile looks and proposed immature cortexes they do, like all living things, learn from hard experience. And they also have, perhaps from some deeply ingrained altered genetic constitution, a deep seated mistrust of everything and everyone beyond the walls of Re(dis)configurement. Once they zero in on someone it’s over. The air fills with clouds of red mist that sort of hang there and linger much longer than gravity normally allows. The babies seem to get bigger and more ferocious after every mini feast, after every mutilation.
The Hengemen finally come to. They are prepared for this eventuality. Modified rifles equipped to load Basic Organized Round Entry (BORE) rounds are at the ready. The babies had already been tagged and coded. The BOREs had been programmed and well within detection range. Each Hengemen picks up a rifle and aims it in the general direction of the massacre in progress and fires. The BOREs do their work, efficiently and effectively finding their targets, affixing themselves to the back of the babies huge craniums, in the middle, at the base of the skull and top of the neck, then disappearing through the bone and boring their way in and up to the center of the brain before the feral babies even realize what is happening. For a few seconds, the pain makes them cry real baby cries that anyone left alive, who still possess even a shred of a soul, reflexively trend toward empathy. Then the BOREs implode with such force that a mini black hole is created that pulls the majority of the surrounding mutated gray matter into itself before causing the massive skulls to distort into a convex vector and stopping them dead in their tracks before harmlessly disappearing into the ether of the atmosphere. A few more hapless victims are squished to death as the monstrous beasts topple over.
Deep, gnashing moans can be heard from any people unfortunate enough to have survived the slaughter. They will be whisked away on stretchers by workers in fully sealed, industrial-strength radiation suits to hospitals where they will be brought back to health then poked and prodded; basically tortured and experimented on in ‘non-existent’ medical sites until they are depleted of all use and eventually dissected. All in the name of progress and always for the good of the people.
The feral babies themselves, all except for one, which was kept for scientific research purposes, were sliced and diced, neatly package for easy consumption and sent to prefectures on the outskirts of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster - which was still leaking copious amounts of radioactive material into the Pacific ocean - and sold at exorbitant cost to the well-to-do natives thereof who glad pay with covetousness clearly in their eyes and treat the irradiated meat as the latest fad in exotic delicacy.
Emergency services were on their way to begin the cleanup. Everything will be sanitized and looking shiny and new in a matter of hours. If the ghosts of horror linger they will be left unseen and in most cases ineffectual. If there should be isolated incidents, legitimate or no, they will be minimized, trivialized and ridiculed until the bringer of such concerns questions his or her own sanity and their voice gets drown out in the wave of fervor that future RODEO-type events will surely bring.
Even though they already basically knew what happened - there were just one or two loose ends to tie up - the U.S.O.U.S will call in various other ‘official’ ONAN organizations and go through all the pomp and circumstance of an official investigation into the POONAN’s death and close the RODEO down for at least the customary two weeks, if not more but Gentle’s untimely assassination will in no way stop or slow down the momentum because the pressure pounding against the walls of the establishment had been building for some time and now that the dam had been so expertly and secretly diverted with nothing substantive to contain it there is no going back.
The Hengemen were dressed in forest-brown and hot on the trail of the ammunition’s origin trajectory and gaining ground on the bell tower and what they suspected was once a member of the separatist organization AFR who had now gone rogue.
Modified mountain-bike tires work wonders when trying to navigate forested terrain and also help by giving you a far wider range within which your center of gravity can play before you tumble over and fall if you find yourself having to wheelie-hop down a spiral set of stairs in a wheelchair at a rapid pace. He bounces up off the last stair down and crashes headlong into the unsuspecting Hengeman, leaving a nice skid mark on the obtuse forehead as he arced up and over the posse. The force knocked #642 into the rest of the group, sending them flying askew and tumbling over like so many brainless bowling pins. Landing on the other side, he quickly spun to face them and used the .22 caliber hidden inside the sandalwood hand grips of his chair to non-lethally incapacitate them. Turning again and giving himself a manual roll as hard and as fast as he can, he pushes a button that starts the ultra-quiet electronic custom 50 gigaflop power engine and rolls faster and deeper into the Concavity and to escape.
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