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With considerable effort Ben sat. Pain arched through him like electricity. He stood and shuffled to the bars.

"Karen's dead," Barbara whispered.

Ben's stomach tightened; he was hungry. The pain in his forehead groped out from his dreams and buried itself into the real. He could not see the guard's expressionless face as he sat flipping through channels, one after the other:

"…I HAVE A DREAM…"

"...TIMES THE MASS GIVES YOU THE PRODUCT..."

"...OF HIS CREDIBILITY IN THE FACE OF THE ONSLAUGHT..."

"...TO THIS LITTLE THEORY OF HYSTERIA..."

"...IS ASSIGN THE MASSES TO..."

"...OUR PRODUCT THAT IS A..."

"...HYSTERICAL PRODUCTION OF...."

"…BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY…"

A sickening smell filled the cell, the odor of rotting flesh. He knew it; not the slaughterhouse stink but the human one. Ben gripped the bars and screamed. There was an idea that was slipping away out of the hole in his head, an impossible idea that had saved him and them all but which was falling into the vanishing point and as it went the world somehow turned black and white.

"Mass hysteria!" Harry snarled, crouching down before the television. "What do they think-we're imagining all this?"

"Shut up!" yelled Ben, who fought hard that night and didn't give a damn, watching his already scarred world collapse, feeling an intense satisfaction as he blew a gaping hole into Harry's chest with his shotgun, damning the eternal world as he helplessly watched Barbara being dragged out the door and ripped apart and devoured.

He felt like a coward hiding in the cellar. If it weren't for that one sharpshooting, whiskey swilling, KKK card carrying son of a bitch piece of shit who heard Ben move through the blood stained stinking house up to the window, and who said to himself just before pulling the trigger, "Just a nigger," he would just have gone on and on to feel all the pain and remorse and terror of the living world.