The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

crowd broke. It grew more vocal, more collectively responsive; it shifted with more unity, it roared with more certainty. An agreement was implicitly reached. A single plastic water bottle was thrown in an arc, splattering onto the clear riot shields and then spinning away fizzing under booted feet.

—“You call yourself citizens!”—“That was someone’s daughter!”—“Take off your masks!”—“Show your badge numbers!” More water bottles created a rain of objects, most plastic but some metallic, chrome, along with balloons filled with paint. In response the army of police began to do snatch-and-grabs, performed in a regimented, almost ritualistic, manner. First the heavily armored ranks in the front would open up and out would sprint a pack of more lightly armored cops bearing batons. The crowd would react like all prey throughout life’s history has reacted, surging away as those nearest tried to outrun not the cops, but the other fleeing people. The pack of police would home in on the unlucky, the unwary, the slowest, or one of the really hard-core professionals who wanted to be arrested and so stood waiting, making a peace sign, and then the baton would take them behind the knees, or at the shins, and the protester would be swarmed over like an obscuring pride of lions swarming a gazelle. A moment later the handcuffed protester would become visible again as they were dragged back behind the police army’s line. Then the crowd of protesters that had surged away would refill the gap, moving right back up against the row of shields. Maybe on the thirtieth or so snatch-and-grab Kierk and Mike literally bumped into each other as they ran from a raid. They had left objectivity a while back so they ended up right at the front, chanting and screaming in a chorus with all the others.

—“SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!”

The cops’ gas masks made them into armored bugs, things carrying death-wands, multilimbed. They began to move as if driven by the mask: it led them, they swiveled in unison, they beat their batons against their shields in unison, they stepped in unison, they breathed in unison. They closed ranks like centurions locking their shields together and then would push forward into the screaming, biting, shoving, crying, fighting mass of the crowd. By then Kierk had a serious antifascist psychological response going on and ended up getting too close, and so he didn’t notice that from the back of the army a few dozen armored horses bearing masked riders had all been maneuvered up behind the front line. Mike and Kierk were both right up front when the ranks of the cops opened up to clear space and from merely twenty feet away a cavalry wedge of two dozen horses charged the crowd.

“Oh fuck!” Kierk managed to get out, before he turned and grabbed Mike by the arm and the two of them were sprinting away, the thunder of hooves behind them. Leaping over a row of hedges, they ended up clear of the charge, but turned in time to see a backpack-wearing man whom they had raced past be trampled by three of the horses, his body and backpack flapping around like a rag doll. The girl next to them kept up a high, continuous scream. Then the cavalry wedge wheeled around and was absorbed by the waiting shield wall. There was a shocked, low silence, but still the protesters regrouped, re-congealed. And over and over the same series of events repeated themselves as the protesters were slowly, one foot at a time, pushed out of Queen’s Park and into the Toronto streets.

The two of them ended up separated from the rest of the protest by a series of police rushes and advances designed to carve up the main mass. They were together with maybe three hundred protesters on a tight little street. It felt boxed in because the only exit was the far terminus of the street, what seemed like a world away, where cars were peacefully passing. The sides were a flat wall of buildings. At first everyone relaxed. The rest of the cop army kept streaming past. Some of the protesters in the little group tried to keep the energy up but everyone felt splintered, cut off, they couldn’t even see any of the other groups, just the endless passing legion of police. Then the thin strip of cops guarding the entrance of the street suddenly got a whole group of reinforcements, tripling their numbers. As the legion kept streaming past, the armored cops at the mouth of the street began to beat their batons against their shields and advance. Kierk suddenly felt that everyone in the crowd was thinking the exact same thing—There’s only one exit to this street in the far back and if any of these passing police circle around and block it off then we’ll be trapped in here and we’ll all be beaten and arrested and so we have to get to that end of the street before they block it off and wall us in because they are probably circling around right now. The thought raced across the crowd like a neural pulse through a web of synapses, everyone sparking off at once, and in about five seconds suddenly all three hundred people were surging, running, forming a stampede. The line of police followed the running protesters at a jog, banging their shields like they were flushing animals. As the stampede gathered force there were calls for everyone to stop, to slow down, but by then it was too late because people were now running just to keep from being trampled, their eyes wild and rolling. And over the moving mass of bodies, within it, everywhere and nowhere all at once, hung a single feeling, felt by each person, yes, but also all on its own, a dull beast experiencing fear and existing only for a few minutes.

Kierk saw someone go down in his peripheral vision, and then in front of him a bicycle stand, and with no