Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “First we fix the honky motherfucker that did this, then we tell the cops and TV people,” Marvin said late that Saturday night. “We tell them now, they won’t be enough room to move around here.” The gang had followed orders. Natalie had stayed with them through Sunday afternoon, repeating her edited description of Melanie Fuller’s powers again and again, then listening to their war plans. The plans were simple: They were going to find the Fuller woman and the “honky monster” with her and kill them both.

  On Sunday night, the snow falling heavily, she stood on the sidewalk while trying to support the semiconscious bulk of Rob Gentry, and pleaded, “There are people after us.”

  Marvin made a motion with his left hand. Louis, Leroy, and a gang member Natalie did not recognize jumped from the porch and faded into the night. “Who’s after you, babe?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  “They be voodooed like the honky monster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Same old woman be the one doing it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But Rob is hurt. There’re people out there after us. Let us in. Please.”

  Marvin had stared at her with those cold, beautiful blue eyes and then stepped aside and motioned them in. Gentry had to be carried to a mattress in the basement. Natalie had insisted on calling a doctor, or ambulance, but Marvin had shaken his head. “Uh-uh, babe. We got two dead we ain’t telling nobody about until we find the Voodoo Lady. No way we bringing the Man down on us for your hurt cracker boyfriend. We’ll get Jackson.”

  Jackson was George’s thirty-year-old half brother, a quiet, balding, competent man who had been a medic in Vietnam and who had finished two and a half years of medical school before dropping out. He arrived with a blue rucksack filled with bandages, syringes, and drugs. “Two ribs broken,” he said softly after inspecting Gentry. “Deep cut there, but that’s not what broke his ribs. Half inch lower, inch and a half deeper, and he would have been dead from the puncture wound. Somebody’s been chewing on his hand for sure. Probable concussion. Can’t tell how bad without some X-rays. Look out, please, so I can work on the man.” He had proceeded to staunch the bleeding, clean and dress the deeper cuts and lacerations, tape the broken ribs, and give Gentry a shot for the bite that had almost chewed through the webbing on his left hand. Then he broke a capsule under Gentry’s nose, bringing the sheriff awake almost instantly. “How many fingers?”

  “Three,” said Gentry. “Where the hell am I?”

  They had spoken several minutes, long enough for Jackson to decide it was not a severe concussion, and then he had given Gentry another shot and allowed him to float back into sleep. “He’ll be all right. I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

  “Why didn’t you finish med school?” Natalie asked, blushing at her own inquisitiveness.

  Jackson shrugged. “Too much bullshit. Came back here instead. Keep waking him up every couple of hours.”

  She had wakened Gentry briefly every ninety minutes in the curtained corner of the basement where Marvin let them sleep. Natalie’s watch read 4:38 when she shook him awake for the last time and he gently touched her hair.

  “Bunch a strange dudes around this neighborhood,” said Leroy.

  A dozen of the gang members sat around the kitchen table, dangled legs from the counter, or leaned against cabinets and walls. Gentry had slept until two P.M. and awakened ravenous. By four the war council was convened, and Gentry was still eating, nibbling on Chinese food he had paid one of the young members to bring back. Natalie was the only female in the room except for Marvin’s silent girlfriend, Kara.

  “What kind of strange dudes?” asked Gentry around a mouthful of Moo Shun pork.

  Leroy looked at Marvin, received a nod, and said, “Strange white po-lice dudes. Pigs. Like you, man.”

  “In uniform?” asked Gentry. He stood at a counter, his taped ribs and ban daged side making him look bulkier than he was.

  “Sheet no,” said Leroy. “They in plainclothes. Real subtle motherfuckers. Black pants, windbreakers, them little pointy Florham shoes. Fuckers blending’ in with the neighborhood. Hah.”

  “Where are they?”

  Marvin answered. “Man, they’re all over the place. Couple unmarked vans each end of Bringhurst. Got a phony telephone truck been in the alley off Greene and Queen for two days now. Got twelve dudes in four unmarked cars between Church and here. Whole mess of them hangin’ around on second floor of some buildings on Queen and Germantown.”

  “How many all told?” asked Gentry. “Figure forty. Maybe fifty.”

  “Working eight-hour shifts?”

  “Yeah. Dudes think they invisible, sittin’ out there near the Laundromat on Ashmead. Only honkys on the fucking block. Punching in and out like they work for fucking Bethlehem Steel, man. One dude does nothing but run and get doughnuts for them.”

  “Philadelphia police?”

  The tall, thin one named Calvin laughed. “Shit, no, man. Local pigs wear that Banlon suit, white socks, orthopedic shoes . . . all that shit when they on a stakeout.”

  “Besides,” said Marvin, “they’re too many of them. All of vice and hom i cide and local narcs with the kiddy cops thrown in don’t put fifty of them on the street. Got to be like the federal narcs or something.”

  “Or FBI,” said Gentry. He rubbed absently at his left temple. Natalie noticed the slight wince of pain.

  “Yeah.” Marvin’s eyes lost their intense focus for a few minutes as he pursued a thought. “Could be. I don’t understand it, man. Why so many? I thought, like, maybe they were after Zig and Muhammed’s and everybody’s killers, but no, they don’t give a shit who offed some niggers. Unless they already after the Voodoo Lady and the honky monster. That it, babe?”

  “That could be it,” said Natalie. “Only it’s more complicated . . .”

  “How come?”

  Gentry moved up to the table, his upper body stiff. He laid his bandaged left hand on the table. “There are others with the . . . voodoo power,” he said. “There’s a man who is probably hiding somewhere here in the city. Others in positions of authority have the same power. There’s a sort of war going on.”

  “Man, I love the way you talk,” snorted Leroy and imitated Gentry’s slow, soft tones. “Theah’s a saht of wah goin’ ohn.”

  “I find your patois equally agreeable,” drawled Gentry.

  Leroy half rose, scowling fiercely. “What the fuck you say, man?”

  “He say you shut the fuck up, Leroy,” Marvin said softly. “Do it.” He shifted to look at Gentry. “OK, Mr. Sheriff, tell me this . . . that man who’s hiding, he white?”

  “Yep.”

  “The dudes after him, they white?”

  “Yep.”

  “Other dudes might be in this. They white?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They all as rat’s-ass mean as this Voodoo Lady and her honky monster?”

  “Yes.”

  Marvin sighed. “It figures.” He reached into the loose pocket of his fatigue jacket, extracted Gentry’s Ruger, and laid it on the table with a solid thunk. “Fuckin’ big piece of iron you carry, Mr. Sheriff. Ever think of putting bullets in it?”

  Gentry did not reach for the weapon. “I have extra cartridges in my suitcase.”

  “Where you suitcase, man? It in the squashed Pinto, it gone.”

  “Marvin went back to get my bag from the alley,” said Natalie. “It was gone. So was the wreck of your rental car. So was the bus.”

  “The bus?” Gentry’s eyebrows show up so high that he winced and held his head. “The bus was gone? How soon after we got here did you go back?”

  “Six hours,” said Leroy. “We gotta take babe’s word for it that you was chased by a big, bad city bus,” said Marvin. “She says you had to shoot and kill it. Maybe it crawled off into the bushes to die, Mr. Sheriff.”

  “Six hours,” said Gentry. He leaned against the refrigerator for support. “The news? It must be on the national networks by now.”<
br />
  “No news,” said Natalie. “No TV coverage. Not even a sidebar inside the Philadelphia Inquirer.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Gentry. “They must have incredible connections to clean it up and cover it up so fast. There must have been . . . at least four people killed.”

  “Yeah, man and SEPTA be pissed,” said Calvin, referring to the transit authority. “I don’t recommend you take any mass transit while you here. Killin’ their buses really piss off ol’ SEPTA.” Calvin laughed so hard that he almost fell off his chair.

  “So where’s your suitcase, man?” said Marvin.

  Gentry shook himself out of reverie. “I left it at the Chelten Arms. Room 310. But I only paid for one night. They would have picked it up by now.”

  Marvin swiveled in his chair. “Taylor, you work in the old Chicken Arms. You get into their storage room, man?”

  “Sure, man.” Taylor was a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old with dark scars of acne on a gaunt face.

  “It may be dangerous,” said Gentry. “It may not be there at all, and if it is, it’s probably watched.”

  “By some of the voodoo pigs?” asked Marvin. “Among others.”

  “Taylor,” said Marvin. It was a command. The boy grinned, lowered himself from the counter, and was gone.

  “We got other business to discuss,” said Marvin. “White folk can adjourn themselves.”

  Natalie and Gentry stood on the small back porch of Community House and watched as the last of the gray winter light faded to night. The view was of a long lot filled with mounds of broken, snow-covered bricks and the backs of two condemned apartment buildings. The glow of kerosene lamps through several begrimed windows showed that the condemned building was still occupied. It was very cold. Occasional flurries of snow were visible around the solitary undamaged streetlight half a block away.

  “We’re staying here then?” asked Natalie.

  Gentry looked at her. Only his head was visible outside of the army blanket he had thrown over his shoulders in lieu of a jacket. “It makes as much sense as anything for to night,” he said. “We may not be among friends, but we have a common enemy.”

  “Marvin Gayle is smart,” said Natalie. “As a whip,” agreed Gentry. “Why do you think he’s wasting his life with a gang?”

  Gentry squinted at the dirty twilight. “When I was in school in Chicago I got to do some work with city gangs there. A few of their leaders were jerks— one of them was a psychopath— but most were pretty smart individuals. Put an alpha personality in a closed system and he or she’ll rise to the top of what ever represents the most competitive power ladder. In a place like this, that’s the local gang.”

  “What’s an alpha personality?”

  Gentry laughed but stopped abruptly and touched his ribs. “Students of animal behavior look at pecking order, group dominance, and call the top ram or sparrow or wolf or what ever the alpha male. Didn’t want to be sexist so I think of it in terms of personality. Sometimes I think discrimination and other stupid social roadblocks breed an inordinate number of alpha personalities. Maybe it’s a sort of natural selection pro cess by which ethnic and cultural groups affirm their fair places in unfair societies.”

  Natalie reached out and touched his arm through the blanket. “You know, Rob, for a good-old-boy sheriff, you have some interesting thoughts.”

  Gentry looked down. “Not terribly original thoughts. Saul Laski discussed something similar in his book, The Pathology of Violence. He was talking about how downtrodden and often unlikely societies tend to produce incredible warriors when national or cultural survival depends upon it . . . sort of specialized alpha personalities. Even Hitler fit that description in a sick, perverted way.”

  A snowflake landed on Natalie’s eyelid. She blinked it away. “Do you think Saul’s still alive?”

  “Logic suggests that he shouldn’t be,” said Gentry. He had told Natalie about his last few days during a long talk after he awoke that afternoon. Now he tugged the blanket tighter around him and rested his ban daged hand on the splintered porch rail. “But still,” he said, “something makes me think he is still alive. Somewhere.”

  “And somebody has him?”

  “Yeah. Unless he was able to drop out of sight completely. But he would have warned us.”

  “How?” said Natalie. “You and I left messages on your phone machine that somebody erased. How could Saul get through if we couldn’t? Especially if he’s on the run?”

  “Good point,” said Gentry. Natalie shivered. Gentry moved closer and enclosed her in the blanket. “Thinking about yesterday?” he asked.

  She nodded. Every time she began to feel in the least bit secure, some part of her remembered the sensation of Anthony Harod’s consciousness in her mind and her entire body shuddered as if recalling a brutal rape. It had been a brutal rape.

  “It’s over,” he said. “They won’t get at you again.”

  “But they’re still out there,” whispered Natalie. “Yes. Which is another reason we probably shouldn’t try to get out of Philadelphia to night.”

  “And you still don’t think it was . . . Harod . . . who made the bus . . . who set them after us?”

  “I don’t see how it could be,” said Gentry. “The man was truly and sincerely unconscious when we left. He may have come to ten minutes later, but he would’ve been in no shape to do mental gymnastics. Besides, didn’t you say that you got the impression that he used his . . . voodoo power . . . only on women?”

  “Yes, but that’s just a feeling I had when he . . . when he was . . .”

  “Trust the feeling,” said Gentry. “Whoever was siccing those folks on us last night used men too.”

  “If it wasn’t this Anthony Harod, who was it?” It was dark now. Somewhere in the city a siren howled. The streetlight, the dimly lit windows, the low-cloud reflection of the city’s countless mercury vapor lamps, all seemed unreal to Natalie, as if light had no place in the canyons of dirty brick, rusted metal, and darkness.

  “I don’t know,” said Gentry. “But I know that our job right now is to hunker down and survive. The one good thing about yesterday is that now that I’ve thought about it, I’m almost certain that whoever was after us wanted to keep us here but didn’t want to kill us . . . or at least not kill you.”

  Natalie’s mouth opened in surprise. “How can you say that? Look at what they did! The bus . . . those people . . . look at what they did to you.”

  “Yep,” said Gentry, “but think of how they could’ve handled it in a much simpler way.”

  “How?” Even as Natalie spoke she realized what Rob was going to say. “If they could see us to chase us,” said Gentry, “they could see us to physically control us. I had a gun the entire time. They could have made me use it on you and then turn it on myself.”

  Natalie shivered under the blanket. Gentry put his right arm around her. She said. “So you think they weren’t really trying to kill us?”

  “That’s one possibility,” said Gentry and stopped abruptly.

  Natalie sensed that he did not want to complete the thought. “What is the other possibility?” she pressed.

  Gentry pursed his lips and then smiled weakly. “The other possibility— and this fits the evidence too— is that they’re so sure we can’t get away that they’re having a little fun and playing with us.”

  Natalie jumped as the door crashed open behind her. It was Leroy. “Hey, Marvin say you two get in here. Taylor’s back and he got your bag, man. Louis back and he got some good news. He and George and them, they found where the Voodoo Lady live and track her down, wait ’til she asleep and get her, man. Honky monster, too.”

  Natalie’s heart pounded against her ribs. “What do you mean they got them?”

  Leroy grinned at them. “They killed them, woman. Louis cut the old Voodoo Lady’s throat while she asleep. George and Setch, they got the honky monster with their knives. Ten, twelve times, man. Cut him to shit, man. That fucker not gonna cut on Soul Brickyar
d people no more.”

  Natalie and Gentry looked at each other and followed Leroy into a house filled with the sounds of celebration.

  Louis Solarz was heavyset and light skinned with large, expressive eyes. He sat at the head of the kitchen table while Kara and another young woman worked to clean and ban dage his throat. The front of the young man’s yellow shirt was dappled with blood.

  “What happened to your throat, man?” asked Marvin. The gang leader had just come downstairs. “I thought you say you cut her throat.”

  Louis nodded excitedly, tried to speak, managed only a croak, and started again in a hoarse whisper. “Yeah. I did. Honky monster cut me before we did him.” Kara slapped Louis’s hands away from the cut and set a dressing in place.

  Marvin leaned on the table. “I don’t get it, man. You say you get the Voodoo Lady while she asleep, but the honky motherfucker had time to cut you. Where the fuck is George and Setch?”

  “They still there, man.”

  “They OK?”

  “Yeah, they OK. George want to cut the honky monster’s head off, but Setch say wait.”

  “Wait for what?” said Marvin. “Wait for you, man.”

  Natalie and Gentry stood near the rear of the crowd. She looked at Rob with a questioning look. He shrugged under the blanket.

  Marvin crossed his arms and sighed. “OK, tell it again, Louis. Whole thing.”

  Louis touched his ban daged throat. “This hurts.”

  “Tell it,” snapped Marvin. “OK. OK. George, Setch, and me, we out talking to people just like you say, and we thought we had enough, like nobody seen nothing, you know? Then we on Germantown when she come out of that store on corner of Wister.”

  “Sam’s Deli?” said Calvin. “Yeah, that the one,” said Louis and grinned. “It be the Voodoo Lady herself.”

  “You recognized her from my photo?” asked Natalie. Everyone turned to look at her and Louis gave her a long, strange look. Natalie wondered if women were supposed to keep their mouths shut in a war council. She cleared her throat and said again, “Did my photo help?”