Hot nights prick dreams of blood out of their panting, heaving sides, tongues grown too big for their mouths, chins wet with slobber. In the warehouses, the revolutionaries stockpile guns, toys against tanks, the pitiful arsenal of the civilian, but in Dallas paw hits pavement and sizzles as they run. A wild, airless night, humid and heavy, full of frogcall and the thrum of cicadas, the night sky pressing against the city like wet rope, and they hunt.
They have carved names into the leather they wear around their necks, their wrists, their ankles, crisscrossed over the almost human curve of their chests: fascists, bootlickers, scabs, all the doomsday men in ill-fitting suits and ugly haircuts that have gathered to chant and wave torches. They circle the crowds, picking off stragglers, the slow moving, the drunk, the fat hunters with Wyoming tickets in their pockets, the Saturday warriors in their polyester camo. The alleys grow slick and sticky.
In the morning there will be empty seats, abandoned hotel rooms, empty book depositories. The air will roil with copper, iron, the black bodies of flies, the hope of a storm on the verge of breaking. They will return to work, collars tucked coquettishly beneath apron straps, but tonight they are free, and roused, and revenged.