The Mean Brother cast a long shadow in the torchlight. He towered over the surrounding bloodcrazed onlookers. They screamed and cried out and yelled, anxious to see the Mean put through his paces. Not one of them thought for a moment that they were in any kind of danger. There were so many soldiers around that the Mean Brother didn't stand a chance of escape. All he was to them now was the star of tonight's show. He would put out a good performance, maybe a classic, and then-, like all the others who performed that night, he would die. But the final curtain was many hours off yet. The night was young.

The Mean looked around him coolly. He looked from howling face to howling face and firmly marked this one and that one for death. When the fighting started, the Mean had every intention of taking a few dozen of his captors, his tormentors with him. They couldn't tell what he was thinking: if they could have, a lot of them would have foregone tonight's show and taken themselves away to a nice safe place, many miles from the Mean's dispassionate stare.

Farkas stood up and held up his hand for silence.

Gradually the crowd settled down. The boss wanted to speak.

"Okay," he said, "settle down . . ." He waited expectantly for silence. "Okay," he said finally, "this is how it is. What we got here is one class A-type freak. Anybody ever seen a specimen like this before? Turn 'im around so the folks can get a look," he ordered. A couple of Devils approached and prodded the Mean Brother with rifle butts. The Mean, who had been given back his dignity by Bonner a long time before, refused to budge. The Devil dug at him with their shooters, slamming the Mean's rock-hard flesh. Still he refused to move. It was as if he was cemented to the spot.

"Okay," said Farkas, "I guess you can all see him ..." He mentally added a horror or two to the stubborn giant's soon-to-be-painfilled end. "Anyway, we're gonna have a little fun with our big friend here, maybe a little rough but he looks like he can put up with some rough stuff, don't he?" It was a joke and everybody laughed as they knew they were supposed to.

Farkas shifted on his feet. "Now, I don't know that I personally would call this big freak a man, but I can only see one set of feet, and he is standing on them, so 1 guess we gotta assume that he ain't no animal."

The crowd laughed again. Farkas once again held up his hand for silence.

"However, it just so happens that we got ourselves a beast just as big as this one here and bein' that this one we got has four legs I guess we gotta believe it's not a human been. But what we don't know is who's tougher. You decide. And may the best thing win."

With that the ranks of Devils parted and a black bull, a raging, snorting beast with the fire of a life or captivity shining in its crazy eyes came thundering through the crowd.

The Mean Brother had just enough time to crouch and set his feet firmly in the dirt before the bull thundered down on him. The head was lowered, the horns out and aimed at the Mean. The man stepped out of the way of the rushing creature. As it passed, the Mean Brother smashed his big fist into the solid jawbone of the roaring beast.

The bull's hooves tore up a two-yard furrow in the hard ground. He stopped on the edge of the crowd and stood quivering with rage, staring at the Devils that swarmed around him with sharpened poles. The bull tossed his head and turned.

The bull had identified the Mean Brother as the enemy. He pawed the ground for a moment then charged again. The Mean Brother set directly in the path of the huge animal, then smacked it again as it pounded past. This time, though, he had struck the bull on the back of the neck, where the skull meets the spine. The bellowing animal staggered a few steps, then plunged into the crowd before him, tossing a helpless Devil on his horns. The man flew screaming into the air and then fell with a thud at the bull's hooves. The bull dipped down his great head and tore a ragged hole in the man's side. He screamed in terror as he watched his blood pumping out onto the gore-sodden, tom-up ground.

A crew of twenty Devils descended on the animal prodding it with their poles, trying to push it back towards the Mean Brother.

"Go get the big fucker," yelled one of the Devils. The bull appeared to do a little dance on the bleeding body of the fallen Devil. The man was crushed and broken in a dozen places. Sharp shards of bone sliced through his skin. His mouth was open, but no sound issued from his tortured lips. His pain was beyond expressing.

The smell of blood got mixed up in the hot fury of the animal brain. He turned, ready to claim the Mean Brother.

Both man and beast knew that this pass would be the last for one of them. There was the pure, white-hot desire to kill in each other's eyes. In a few seconds one of them would be dead. The bull pawed the ground and advanced, slowly at first, then gathering speed. The massive head went down, the evil points of the horns strained forward, ready to tear ghastly, bloody holes in the Mean Brother's big body.

Just when the bull was upon him, the Mean Brother reached out and grabbed the murderous horns in his superhuman grip. Then he launched his huge form off the ground, arching over the bull's head, pulling the creature to one side. As the Mean hit the ground, he kicked with all his might at the bull's forelegs, knocking those granite hard pilars out from under the big beast. The bull fell over, his hind legs kicking into the air.

The Mean was on top of him in a flash, pounding the bull's high ribcage. The bull tossed his head, trying to free his horns. But he couldn't break the grip of the Mean Brother. The Mean wrenched the big head to one side, forcing the slathering mouth onto the bloody ground. The bull tasted death.

Then the Mean flexed his muscles and threw himself into the air, dropping his huge weight, knee first, onto the jawbone of the bull. There was a sound like new timber cracking. The bull's eyes bulged. Froth shot from the animal's tortured mouth. A great plug of snot poured from the flared nostrils. Then the head lolled back.

There was silence from the crowd which a second before had been screaming.

"He broke its fuckin' neck," whispered someone. The crowd stared, as if not quite able to believe what it had witnessed.

The Mean Brother jumped off the warm carcass and stood looking defiantly at Farkas. Then the big man walked to the edge of the circle of onlookers and drew a knife from the sheath that was strapped to a Devil's thigh. With that he carved the tongue from the bull's mouth, holding the bloody foot-long piece of flesh up for all to see. Then he tossed in into Farkas' lap. It landed with a warm, wet slap on the big man's lap.

Farkas jumped-to his feet. "You motherfucker!" A stain of blood six inches across soaked his pants at crotch level.

"Kill the fucker!"

A dozen Devils jumped into the ring, each carrying a club or a length of chain. They marched toward the Mean Brother.

One wanted to be a hero. He swung his chain in a furious arc, hoping to succeed with one blow where a seven-hundred-pound bull had failed. The Mean reached out and grabbed the chain and reeled in the Devil, pulling the man up to his face, so the soon-to-be-dead tough guy could get a good look at the Mean Brother's face and know as he expired that he never, never, stood a chance.

The sledgehammer fist that capped the Mean Brother's right arm smashed into the Devil's throat, making a confused, bruised, and useless hash of that bundle of windpipe and veins. If the Devil lived, he would never speak again. But he wouldn't live. The sharp cords of his larynx had penetrated the carotid artery. He would lose enough blood in the next few minutes to pass out. A minute after that, he would die.

The others faltered for a second.

"I said kill the fuck," screamed Farkas. "I'm gonna personally shoot any man that leaves that ring alive!!"

Jojo hardly heard Farkas' screams. This was one hell of a night. Jojo considered himself something of a sports connoisseur. He didn't react when the 'lep behind his chair, nudged his shoulder trying to get his attention.

"Boss," he rasped.

"Don't bother me," snapped Jojo.

The 'leps had heard it, but no one else had. Almost as one man, they unslung their weapons and put a fresh round in the chamber.

The Mean Brother had felled another of his attackers with a cruel blow to the balls. The man's testes had been crushed to paste and his wailing split the night.

The Devils figured that there was only one way to bring down the Mean and that was to rush him, all at once. Clubs and chains flailing they came at him. The Mean took an arm-numbing blow to the forearm, but he brushed it off. He could not allow pain to get in his way. He was fighting not just for survival, but for something much more important than that. He was fighting for vengeance and there was nothing more crucial in his life than that simple commodity.

The Mean punched out at a Devil, laying him out with a single blow. As the man fell. The Mean Brother snatched the man's weapon from him, a chain. Thus armed, and with his huge arms working like pistons, the Mean struck down two more of his enemies. With each crack of steel against flesh the Mean seemed to become stronger. It was as if he robbed his enemies of their life and took it to himself, using their strength to kill more.

The chain was slick with blood and flesh and the Mean stood in the midst of a heap of writhing bodies, each cringing and crying out from the force and shock of hideous wounds.

The Mean had taken some punishment, too. Blows had rained down on his head and shoulders, stripping large patches of hairy skin from his huge form. He streamed not just with the blood of his enemies but his own, too. In this he felt ashamed. He had never been challenged so. That he was winning was not enough. He had to win with ease. It was a Mean Brother credo that no enemy was worthy, no enemy capable of inflicting pain.

That thought pulsed through his brain as a white-hot fury seized him. To those watching, it seemed as if the already massive Mean Brother grew in size. The desire to kill had so completely suffused him that it gave him new strength.

His attackers, more fearful of the Mean Brother than Parkas' bullets saw the change come over the man-giant and they drew back.

The crowd, Farkas, Jojo, were suddenly scared. The Mean looked around him, as if choosing where next he would strike.

"Wha . . . what's he gonna do?' stammered Jojo.

"Kill the fuck!" bellowed Farkas. "Shoot him down!"

Only the 'lep on the balcony reacted to the suggestion fast enough to bring their weapons to bear. The Mean Brother reached down scooped up a couple of the broken bodies at his feet and flung them into the knot of 'leps. The Radleps staggered back and fired wildly, just as the Mean Brother dove into the mixed crowd of Devils, overseers, and slaves who had been watching the show.

The chatter of automatic fire from the maddened leps cut through the crowd. Bullets splattered into a dozen bodies adding to the already horrifying body count of the evening.

The Mean Brother swam into the darkness.

"Find him!" screamed Farkas, "kill him. Kill him!"

The parade ground became a confused crush of men and women screaming, dashing for cover, crying out for help, nursing wounds. The men in the towers peered at the crazy crowd wondering who to shoot at.

"Boss," hissed a 'lep in Jojo's ear, "boss, we're gonna be attacked. Engines, we heard engines."

"Engines? What engines?" demanded Jojo.

It was at that moment that Bonner's car crashed through the front gate of the slave farm. The long bloody night would go on for a lot longer, and get a lot bloodier before it had run its course.

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