The Showdown, pt 4

Astra was now at the front of the battle

Previously: Things get real as the police arrive and the leftists fight back, violently.

○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn

Astra stared on as the leftists surged through the fire toward the police like a stampede of bulls, their detonation of a police vehicle filling them with a renewed sense of power. Most of the officers fleeing the van were overrun by the stampede. The ones remaining fought for their lives, clubbing the protestors back in a desperate stand. The Blue Lives Matters activists rushed back into the scene to come to their aid. They pushed the leftists back with shoves, punches, and improvised weapons.

Crowley caught Astra’s eye again from the roof of a sedan, seemingly crestfallen at the loss of the cake. She didn’t have time to question his bizarre sense of priorities: The red bandana’d agitator who had thrown the molotov cocktail was now pointing her finger at Crowley. A couple other leftists dressed in red and black took notice. All three agitators were wearing gas masks; they had already been prepared for riot police to arrive. Not good. Once an agitator egregore was active, it sustained itself by finding new enemies to rebel against. They were deciding that Crowley was some sort of police lookout. One was winding their arm back with something in her hand.

She looked back at Crowley across the crowd. “Crowley! Get down!” she yelled, instinctively. Crowley focused on her instead of the glass bottle twirling for his head. It shattered across his temple, sending him plummeting. “Shit!”

Astra leapt across the tops of cars until she was at the rear of the leftist horde. Then she thew herself from the hood of a jeep. As she fell, she reached out to the nervous systems of the protestors below her and jerked their arms up. Her foot landed on an open palm. She lunged off of it, jerking more arms up in front of her to catch her fall. Like a nymph dancing on water, Astra surged over the sea of activists toward the gas-masked agitators. The three were making their way toward Crowley, swinging baseball bats at the counterprotestors who got in their way.

There was a pop. A bullet wizzed past her ear. A window behind her shattered. To her far right, the rightwinger with the hunting rifle was adjusting his aim.

She dove into the crowd and out of the line of fire. The rifle went off again and an leftist next to her fell. As he hit the ground, his ACAB-emblazoned sweatshirt disappeared and suddenly he was wearing a barracuda mask. It was a Heathen disguising himself as a protestor. “Help,” he gurgled at Astra, seeing her Kali mask. Astra didn’t have time. She plowed forward.

Ahead, the red-bandana’d agitator lit another molotov cocktail and threw it toward the police-supporters standing in front of Crowley. They scattered from the blaze. 

Astra needed to cut through this crowd of people, fast. But a thick throng of leftists remained between her and the front line. She tapped into the broader group mind of the leftist side and felt for its salience landscape: all the major things in the fray that the herd was attending to. She read this attentional landscape like a heatmap overlay on the turbulent scene, searching its hottest spots, the ones that captured the most collective awareness. 

There was an especially hot one to her far right. She looked. Of course: the rifleman. The man was climbing the hood of a car to take better aim, protected by a pack of police-supporters and a couple policemen. He was a fitting target for the leftist throng that blocked Astra’s way. She inserted herself back into the leftist group mind and channelled more of its awareness toward the rifleman, like pushing mounds of sand into a greater mound. The leftists in front of her gazed in that direction. Then they broke into a run, speeding toward the man with the gun. She watched as they cut through the opposition in a V-formation, synchronized by their group mind. The woman leading the charge launched herself over the shoulder of a policeman and onto the car to elbow the rifleman in the jaw.

Astra was now at the front of the battle. Now it was a formation of rightwingers blocking her path. They snarled at her, daring her to step closer.

“Hey!” said the yeti mask next to her, shouting over the din. “Kali mask, nice! I saw what you did there! Messing with their egregore. Sick stuff. Serious voodoo. You deserve to––“ He was interupted by wrench strike to the mask. 

The man holding the wrench smiled under his dark aviators. He straightened his denim shirt then went for Astra next. She caught his shirt-arm mid strike and propelled his momentum to send him spinning to the ground.

“Damn, she’s some kinda martial artist!” said one of the rightwingers.

“Think she can take all of us at once?” goaded another.

“Not a chance.”

They grew denser and slowly advanced on her like a pack of wolves.

Then Astra felt a familiar presence to her left. Devi, she thought.

The devil mask nodded. Here for you.  

Astra pointed past the incoming pack. The gas-masked agitators were almost at Crowley, who was just now finding his way back to his feet. Need to clear a path.

Devi sent a mental image of a wriggling form. We can summon help.

No, not that one. Haven’t you learned your lesson? But then Astra saw the red bandana’d agitator swing her baseball bat at the last man in front of Crowley. Fine, we don’t have time, just do it.

So Devi writhed her fingers in hypnotic gestures, entraining the attention of the encroaching police-supporters. And when they were sufficiently entranced, Devi gave them to the Outsider.

Astra looked on as their eyes became screwy, their pupils dilating. Astra drew on the processing power of the surrounding crowd and funneled it into the Outsider’s presence. Hallucinatory tentacles curled out of empty space and wrapped themselves around the rightwingers’ bodies – a symbolic representation of the Outsider’s mushrooming influence over their minds.

Astra thrust past them, pulling a hallucinatory mass of tentacles with her in either hand. Just as the red bandana’d agitator raised her bat for a swing at Crowley, Astra pounced, jamming the tentacles ”into“ her mask. Her two comrades watched dumbfounded as the appendages seemed to pierce her mask’s physical boundary and swim behind her goggles. The woman screamed, pulling her gas mask off, as if that would help. 

But then her pupils dilated and she grinned. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said, turning to the others. “It’s not so bad. Try it!” She held out his hand, which had become a wriggling tentacle. Her comrades initially went to flee, but then they heard a voice in their heads full of astonishing promises. And then their comrade’s hand was not a wriggling tentacle but a portal to another realm. Wouldn’t they enjoy a realm of total freedom? A place unconstrained by material, where the greatest dreams of anarchy might finally be realized…? Their pupils dilated.

Meanwhile, Astra pulled Crowley to his feet. The two took cover behind a station wagon. She glared at him. “I thought you were renouncing your vow.”

He breathed raggedly. “Oh…yes…I still am.”

“Then why are you here?” 

“Do you know what day it is, love?” Crowley asked weakly.

Astra listened to another windshield being smashed. “May Day perhaps.”

“No. Good god, even with psi you still can’t sense a rhetorical question. It’s Easter. Your birthday.”

Astra sighed. “Hence the strawberry cake.”

“Your favorite.”

“Thank you, Crowley,” she said, meaning it despite herself.

Crowley gestured under the station wagon to the pink splatter on the roadway. “We could still lick it off the asphalt.”

Astra’s mouth twitched. She pressed her lips together as something bubbled up through her chest. A puff of air escaped.

“By Jove, I don’t believe it,” Crowley said, amazed.

“Stop.”

“You just laughed.”

“I–– No I didn’t.”

“You just stifled a laugh!” 

Astra searched for words, then dropped it as the growl of engines rose in the distance. They peeked over the station wagon to see a caravan speeding for the fray: three armored vehicles followed by a black SUV. The cars screeched to a stop. 

Riot police swarmed out of the armored response units. Like an immune system recognizing friendly cells, the police opened their line of shields to let pass the Blue Lives Matters and a few limping officers. Then they closed the line again just in time for the ACABers to smash against their shields.

Suddenly there was a series of little explosions. The air turned white.

And then both sides – cops and leftists alike – looked upward. Something strange was happening inside of them. And that something was also in the sky.

---

Next release: Lenny joins the fray.