Looking down, it was a long way down the slope to the bottom of the pit. Chunks of gravel were embedded in the sides of the bowl of earth and they glittered in the Saturday noon daylight like bits of diamond mixed with stone. Quartz was everywhere. There were ragged trees on the far side of the pit’s top, with tattered leaves torn to bits in fierce winds. The sky was an orange maelstrom of bleeding color. Dennis Prager was alone in the world when he was out here by the pit. There was no one who could touch him, no one who could harm him.

But they had followed him here. The seven bullies.

The fat bully was the leader. He had freckles and a scowling face. He wore a red sweater even in this heat and red pants. He emerged from behind an abandoned farm tractor, and led the six other bullies to where Dennis stood, gazing serenely out at the drop.

“Hey, Prager!” the fat bully shouted. “Didntcha think you’d get away so easy? Didntcha think you’d be homefree out here in this dump?“

Dennis Prager shivered. He could tell by the coughing and the shuffling of feet that there were lots of them. And only one of him. Prager wasn’t a tough kid, but he was resilient. He had already gotten in a fight with one of the school’s many bullies and pulled off a coup: he’d emerged with a little blood on his cheek, and had fought off the bully through sheer desperation. Now that bully was back, standing there near the rear of the pack, his eyes homing in on Dennis like twin laser beams. “Naw, he’s mine,” said this bully.

The fat bully turned to argue. Dennis Prager took that opportunity to step away from the pit and to the right, farther from the bullies. “Watch him!” one of the other bullies shouted. “He’s gettin’ away!”

Dennis Prager broke and ran.

He headed for his bicycle, which was locked around a medium-size sapling. When he got to the bike and the lock, he cursed the time it would take to unlock it. As he was popping the lock, the first hefty forearm draped around his neck, dragging him back.

“Lookit what we caught here!” a bully chortled. “A landfish! A crawdaddy on dry land! Does it squeak when you poke it?”

Another bully rammed a stiffened finger into Dennis’s stomach. The pain was excruciating. But Dennis made no sound.

“I think this is one of them silent crawdaddies,” the first bully said, smiling toothily down at Dennis from his superior height.

Then — before it could get any worse than this — a car crunched gravel near them. Adults! Blessed saviors! Dennis Prager practically wet his pants with relief. The metallic sound of a car door opening. Heavy feet on the stones — two pairs of them.

They were South Asian men in security uniforms. The car had the GARDAWORLD logo plastered on it. One of the men had a turban. The other wore his black hair free and short. The South Asians were looking at the white boys curiously.

“This is private property,” the turbaned man intoned with a strong accent. “You and your friends cannot play here.”

“I wasn’t playing! I was –” Dennis Prager shouted, then yelped in pain as an elbow was thrust in his gut.

“Sorry, mister,” said the fat bully with a smile for superior force. Although the two men were unarmed, they had radios and could easily call for those with guns. Not that they’d shoot a kid, the bullies figured, but you never knew. Their philosophy was pick on the weak, avoid the strong, eschew the adults. Now here were the adults, live and in the flesh. The fat bully’s mechanical thinking process went over the few variables he had available and came up with a solution.

“Our buddy here just got lost,” the fat bully said grandly, spreading red-sleeved arms wide. One of the other bullies hissed at Dennis to stay shut up. Dennis was too afraid to speak. If he had dared, it might have saved him. But he didn’t dare. He wasn’t a coward; he was outnumbered and socially intimidated. The two South Asian men looked at each other. “We’re helping him get home,” the fat bully concluded.

“All of you, leave by the main road,” the turbaned man intoned. “Don’t come back here.”

“Come on, punk,” another bully whispered brutally to Dennis Prager. “Come with us.“

Dennis Prager shook his head and let loose a scream, finally breaking his hypnosis. The bullies looked at one another uncertainly. Dennis screamed a second time, then pointed wildly at his surrounding bullies. “They’re after me!” he shouted at the grown-ups. “Help me! Please help me!”

The bullies separated themselves from Dennis, their feet shuffling in the dust. Gradually they returned to the main road, a paved two-lane highway where their seven bikes were parked. The security guards watched them go incuriously.

The thing that everybody ignored was that Dennis Prager was a beautiful kid. He had flawless skin and soft green eyes. His hair was light blond and faded from direct sunlight exposure. Dennis had a nose like an arcing-up ski jump, lightly freckled. His lips were full and sensuous. The man in the turban looked at him consideringly.

Dennis was about to experience the worst run of luck of his young life.

The man with short black hair said something in Punjabi to his coworker. The man in the turban laughed, then rubbed his belly definitively. The men cut their eyes from the car to the sun in the sky to Dennis Prager standing there all alone.

“It’s okay,” the turban-man said softly. “Everything is going to be good now.”

“Yeah,” said the short haired one. “Excellent in fact.”

“Are you a virgin?” the turban-man asked. “You look to be around twelve, thirteen. I’m guessing you’ve never been with someone else. Man or woman.”

“Yeah,” echoed the short haired one, his eyes glazed and hungry-looking. “No pleasure for you. Not of woman, not of man.”

Dennis Prager felt a thickening in his throat and all the moisture dried up in his mouth. He blinked twice, like a buzzard on a fence over a cow carcass, confronted by gunmen-ranchers protecting their meat.

“I… uh… well, I gotta go. My ma wants me home early for dinner and — you know, thanks again. I really appreciate it. Okay, bye.”

Turban-man gripped him by the arm. He was smiling. “Where are you going off to, Sonny? We were having a pleasant time talking to you.”

Short-hair was smiling too. “Yes, it is ever so pleasant to speak to nice Canadian boys. Are you from North York? Did you know we’re just on the boundaries of North York? South of North York is all of Downtown Toronto, the big city. But here we’re in the countryside. No one can hear us scream. If we should scream.” Short-hair giggled.

“What do you want?” Dennis whispered.

Turban-man kept his grip on Dennis; it was getting painful now, with his arm wrenched half out of its socket. He leaned forward, breathing spicy curry in Dennis’s face. “We want you.“

He picked up Dennis. Dennis began kicking his legs. Short-hair grabbed him by the legs and stopped that. The two men carried Dennis Prager around the side of the vast open-air pit. The gravel was everywhere in the pit. Grasses waved gently in the strong wind blowing from the direction of the city. The two security guards found a dirt path winding down the extremes of the pit, gently leading to the bottom. They carried Dennis down, down, down… into a hell he never knew could exist.

After three hours with him, the men went to pee in the bushes. Their urine contained traces of free floating sperm which had been ejected from the testicles but not ejaculated yet. Dennis was sitting on the bottom of the pit, his knees hunched up, his pants ripped to below his ankles. There was blood on his bum. He shivered, but didn’t move as the men did their business. When the men came back, Turban-Man was whistling.

“Where do you live, Canadian boy?” he asked casually. “We might have to write a report about this.”

Dennis Prager said nothing. His teeth chattered. It was getting cold down here.

Short-hair nudged him with one security-guard boot. “Speak up, Sonny. Where do you live?”

“I’m staying at a homeless shelter,” Dennis said in a low voice, deathly afraid, the spark of life stomped out of him. “My mom and me’re homeless.”

Turban-Man stopped whistling. Keenly, he looked over the boy’s half-naked form, the lower half exposed to the world. “You can pull up your pants now,” he said dismissively. We’re done with you, was the implied message.

Dennis looked around at the pit. The ground was level and not the least bit bumpy. Hard clay was exposed at the skin of the world. The pit went for a mile and then ended, its sides soaring up to the heavens and the slightly irregular ground at the top. The trees up there looked tiny, dwarfed by distance. The skies had gone from orange to blue in the time Dennis had been at the bottom of the pit. There were a pair of yellow bulldozers facing each other in the dust across the way. Their black upholstered seats were ripped and torn. Dennis imagined himself driving a bulldozer over all the rapists and bullies of the world one day. His heart beat with a passion for vengeance, while simultaneously sobbing with pain.

Dennis felt slick on his ass where he’d bled. He was loath to put his clean white underwear over that bloody mess, but he had to get dressed or people would stare at him in the city.

While he struggled to buckle his youthful-size belt, the two men stared down at him from an imposing height. “Sometimes kids get lost in pits,” Turban-Man said. Short hair looked at his friend with an arched, questioning eyebrow and an open expression on his face. “It’s tragic, but it happens.”

Dennis began to get really scared for the first time since the two men swapped his body between themselves.

“We like you, though,” said Short hair. “Right? We like him?”

“We’re late,” Turban-man said brusquely. “Let’s radio in. Leave the boy down here. Boy, don’t crawl out until nightfall. If we’re still around when you crawl out, we’re going to kill you. We’ll cook your body and feed you to the dogs.”

Dennis swooned.

Turban-Man left the area. Followed by Short hair, they climbed the dirt path that was seven feet wide up to the top of the pit. It took them 10 minutes. Dennis sat on the clay, knees hunched up to his chin, mind awhirl with catastrophic thoughts. He thought he was going to have to hyperventilate. As the men breasted the lip of the world, Dennis thought, Hate you. Fuckers. Hate you. A single tear descended down his boyish cheek with peach fuzz on it.

It was too distant to hear the sound of the Gardaworld car starting up. A pair of crows flew down the pit and landed on the hot metal of the bulldozers, walking gingerly, strutting before Dennis. White fluffy clouds drifted across the sky, high, so high overhead. So far from God, so near the bullies of the world.

Time passed. At first Dennis thought it was hours, then he checked his watch and saw that it had only been 40 minutes. Time dragged so slow, like molasses. The birds were gone. They had exited the stage at some point when Dennis hadn’t been watching. Now, Dennis was alone in the deadness of the pit. Dennis walked up to one of the bulldozers. He stepped up the adult-sized steps with difficulty. Sat down in the cockpit of the better-upholstered ‘dozer. Fell asleep, blood drying to a caked mess on his rear end.

In his dream, he was confronting not seven bullies, but seven hundred. A small city of them were in front of him, bunched up. The fat bully held a megaphone in front of them all. He spoke into it:

“We just want to radio you in. You’re a good boy for bullies and rent-a-cops everywhere. We just want to radio you in.”

Dennis moaned in his sleep.

Real police cars drove up to the seven hundred bullies, and doors in his dream popped open. They opened with a metallic scream-noise. Cops came out. They looked seriously at Dennis Prager, spotted a huge pool of blood on his pants’ rump and pointed at him and laughed. They nudged each other and laughed. Then the bullies picked up on it and noticed too, and began laughing alongside the cops. Everyone — a thousand people — were all laughing at the boy, the world was laughing at him.

Dennis jerked awake. It was dark. The bulldozer had a confining feel to it.

The city lights killed the stars, but the fat moon was out. It was almost full. Dennis emerged from the cockpit and slid to the ground. He scraped his elbows coming down.

Something was here.

The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

Dennis was sure he was no longer alone, and that what was with him was not human. There was a threat menace to the bullies and the security guards, but for all that, they were human. This wasn’t human. And it was hungry for his blood.

“Mom?” Dennis said in a low, unmanned voice. “Am I alone, mommy?”

The dark sky had infiltrated the bowl of the pit. It was barely possible to make out where the path upward lay, cheek and jowl against the gravelly sides. Dennis hurried toward the path. There was a sound behind him, not footsteps and leather or synthetic materials on clay, but the bony sound of talons and claws on resistant earth. It was an irregular sound. Sometimes it went quick, but mostly it slithered on up you. Dennis was running now, running up the side of the pit. He fell once, then picked himself up breathing with silent terror, his hands dirty with clay and punctured in places by small loose stones.

The boy ran for it.

The sound of talons or claws on earth grew louder. There was a rumbling sound like a giant clearing his throat.

Dennis had time to wonder if the security men were still there, if they would cook his bones slowly or quickly, if they had their own dogs or would find dogs to feed his remains to.

Then he was nearly up and over the edge of the pit.

He reached out a hand, grabbing a sturdy super-weed in the ground, and pulled himself out.

A hawk gliding overhead in the dark cawed. It floated on thermals as lofty as man’s architectural dreams in the big city. Dennis sobbed with relief. He crawled on hands and knees to his bicycle. The tires had been slashed. By the Indian-men. Weeping, Dennis began the long walk home.

the end