by Неизвестный
The second mistake Mean-Dog made was to get mad and go charging into the shed. We watched him enter and we both jumped as he fired two quick shots, then another, and another.
I don’t know, even to this day, whether one of those shots clipped her chain or whether Sophie was even stronger than we thought she was, but a second later Mean-Dog came barreling out of the cowshed, running at full tilt, with Sophie Kilpatrick howling after him, trailing six feet of chain. She was covered in blood and the sound she made would have made a banshee take a vow of silence. They were gone down the alley in a heartbeat, and Pat and I stood there in shock for a moment, then we peered around the edge of the door into the shed.
The lower half of Razor Riley lay just about where the cow had been. Killer Muldoon was all in one piece, but there were pieces missing from him, if you follow. Sophie had her way with him and he lay dead as a mullet, his throat torn out and his blood pooled around him.
“Oh, lordy,” I said. “This is bad for us, Paddy. This is jail, and skinny fellows like you and me have to wear petticoats in prison.”
But there was a strange light in his eyes. Not a glowing green light—which was a comfort—but not a nice light, either. He looked down at the bodies and then over his shoulder in the direction where Sophie and Mean-Dog had vanished. He licked his bruised lips and said, “You know, Pegleg . . . there are other sonsabitches who owe us money.”
“Those are bad thoughts you’re having, Paddy my dear.”
“I’m not saying we feed them to Sophie. But if we let it get known, so to speak. Maybe show them what’s left of these lads . . . ”
“Patrick O’Leary, you listen to me—we are not about being criminal masterminds here. I’m not half as smart as a fence post and you’re not half as smart as me, so let’s not be planning anything extravagant.”
Which is when Mean-Dog Mulligan came screaming back into Paddy’s yard. God only knows what twisted puzzle-path he took through the neighborhood, but there he was, running back toward us, his arms bleeding from a couple of bites and his big legs pumping to keep him just ahead of Sophie.
“Oh dear,” Pat said in a voice that made it clear that his plan still had a few bugs to be sorted out.
“Shovel!” I said, and lunged for the one Catherine had used on her aunt. Paddy grabbed a pickaxe and we swung at the same time.
I hit Sophie fair and square in the face and the shock of it rang all the way up my arms and shivered the tool right out of my hands, but the force of the blow had its way with her and her green eyes were instantly blank. She stopped dead in her tracks and then pitched backward to measure her length on the ground.
Paddy’s swing had a different effect. The big spike of the pickaxe caught Mean-Dog square in the center of the chest and, though everyone said the man had no heart, Pat and his pickaxe begged to differ. The gangster’s last word was “Urk!” and he fell backward, as dead as Riley and Muldoon.
“Quick!” I said, and we fetched the broken length of chain from the shed and wound it about Sophie, pinning her arms to her body and then snugging it all with the padlock. While Pat was checking the lock I fetched the wheelbarrow, and we grunted and cursed some more as we got her onto it.
“We have to hide the bodies,” I said, and Pat, too stunned to speak, just nodded. He grabbed Mean-Dog’s heels and dragged him into the shed while I played a quick game of football with Razor Riley’s head. Soon the three toughs were hidden in the shed. Pat closed it and we locked the door.
That left Sophie sprawled on the ’barrow, and she was already starting to show signs of waking up.
“Sweet suffering Jesus!” I yelled. “Let’s get her into the hills. We can chain her to a tree by the still until we figure out what to do.”
“What about them?” Pat said, jerking a thumb at the shed.
“They’re not going anywhere.”
We took the safest route that we could manage quickly, and if anyone did see us hauling a fat, blood-covered, struggling dead woman in chains out of town in a wheelbarrow, it never made it into an official report. We chained her to a stout oak and then hurried back. It was already dark and we were scared and exhausted and I wanted a drink so badly I could cry.
“I had a jug in the shed,” Pat whispered as we crept back into his yard.
“Then consider me on the wagon, lad.”
“Don’t be daft. There’s nothing in there that can hurt us now. And we have to decide what to do with those lads.”
“God . . . this is the sort of thing that could make the mother of Jesus eat meat on Friday.”
He unlocked the door and we went inside, careful not to step in blood, careful not to look at the bodies. I lit his small lantern and we closed the door so we could drink for a bit and sort things out.
After we’d both had a few pulls on the bottle, I said, “Pat, now be honest, my lad . . . you didn’t think this through, now did you?”
“It worked out differently in my head.” He took a drink.
“How’s that?”
“Mean-Dog got scared of us and paid us, and then everyone else heard about Sophie and got scared of us, too.”
“Even though she was chained up in a cowshed?”
“Well, she got out, didn’t she?”
“Was that part of the plan?”
“Not as such.”
“So, in the plan we just scared people with a dead fat woman in a shed.”
“It sounds better when it’s only a thought.”
“Most things do.” We toasted on that.
Mean-Dog Mulligan said, “Ooof.”
“Oh dear,” I said, the jug halfway to my mouth.
We both turned and there he was, Mean-Dog himself with a pickaxe in his chest and no blood left in him, struggling to sit up. Next to him, Killer Muldoon was starting to twitch. Mean-Dog looked at us, and his eyes were already glowing green.
“Was this part of the plan, then?” I whispered.
Paddy said “Eeep!” which was all he could manage.
That’s how the whole lantern thing started, you see. It was never the cow, ’cause the cow was long dead by then. It was Patrick who grabbed the lantern and threw it, screaming all the while, right at Mean-Dog Mulligan.
I grabbed Pat by the shoulder and dragged him out of the shed and we slammed the door and leaned on it while Patrick fumbled the lock and chain into place.
It was another plan we hadn’t thought all the way through. The shed didn’t have a cow anymore, but it had plenty of straw. It fair burst into flame. We staggered back from it and then stood in his yard, feeling the hot wind blow past us, watching as the breeze blew the fire across the alley. Oddly, Paddy’s house never burned down, and Catherine slept through the whole thing.
It was about nine p.m. when it started, and by midnight the fire had spread all the way across the south branch of the river. We watched the business district burn—and with it, all of the bars that bought our whiskey.
Maybe God was tired of our shenanigans, or maybe he had a little pity left for poor fools, but sometime after midnight it started to rain. They said later that if it hadn’t rained, then all of Chicago would have burned. As it was, it was only half the town. The church burned down, though, and Father Callahan was roasted like a Christmas goose. Sure and the Lord had His mysterious ways.
Two other things burned up that night. Our still and Aunt Sophie. All we ever found was her skeleton and the chains wrapped around the burned stump of the oak. On the ground between her charred feet was a small lump of green rock. Neither one of us dared touch it. We just dug a hole and swatted it in with the shovel, covered it over and fled. As far as I know, it’s still up there to this day.
When I think of what would have happened if we’d followed through with Pat’s plan . . . or if Mean-Dog and Muldoon had gotten out and bitten someone else—who knows how fast it could have spread, or how far? It also tends to make my knees knock when I think of how many other pieces of that green comet must have fallen . . . and where
those stones are. Just thinking about it’s enough to make a man want to take a drink.
I would like to say that Paddy and I changed our ways after that night, that we never rebuilt the still and never took nor sold another drop of whiskey. But that would be lying, and as we both know, I never like to tell a lie.
Dead in the Water
Richard Larson
The Mary Celeste was dead, but by then I was used to dead things. My lovely Elizabeth had been sketched by a street artist against the backdrop of New York Harbor, only weeks before the cough, the fever, the long night cast in shadow—the sketch which I kept now in my pocket for nights when cheap whiskey forced memories I preferred not to confront by the light of day. And Elizabeth would have insisted I stay back and recover, but I would rather burn our bed than sleep in it without her. So I took a job onboard replacing a cook taken suddenly ill, anxious to leave land behind, and something about the Mary Celeste made me feel at home, the way a ghost feels at home in the place where he died.
We shared a kinship early on—the way she ambled listlessly through the harbor between ships still clinging to life, ships still imagining a future in a sea where everything hasn’t already been found, claimed, and plundered. For me it was all gone, and I knew that the Mary Celeste, too, rode the black waves, in need of neither food nor drink, sleep nor sun. Someone else with a history of unfortunate collisions. I didn’t want to live, but I also knew it wasn’t a choice anymore. And I saw the change, first in Captain Briggs and then the others: the way their skin changed colors overnight, growing sallow and jaundiced, then curdling like milk left in the sun. After that they kept to the darkness of the Mary Celeste’s cabin, the slow churning of the angry sea a call back to some ancient rhythm, some kind of shambling, a constant starving for something none of us had ever tasted.
We’ve tasted it now. On a ship already cursed to kill its captains, Briggs never really had a chance, but he took out two others—biting at their faces, ripping open arteries in their necks with his own mouth—before Richardson took him down, sank him in the sea after tying him to a temporary anchor. But then Richardson, too. I kicked him overboard myself, yet still he thrashed even after death, clawing his way down to the sea gods. I took the lifeboat as the others scrambled after me, falling uselessly from the deck like prisoners walking a plank. But I know she’ll catch me. I see her back there, loping through the choppy waters, always hungry—my Elizabeth, too, hungry to the last, long after the fever claimed her, her teeth still grinding together even through all the bindings I used to keep her down. She bit me, once. And it’s been slow to get to me, maybe because so much of me was already dead, but I feel it claiming me now, the Mary Celeste herself just biding time back there in less treacherous waters, hungry for anything that might be left behind.
For the dead are slow, but they always catch up.
Starvation Army
Joe McKinney
From the window of his abominably small second-story room, Jonathan Nettle could see the alleyway where he’d found the body earlier that morning. He’d stumbled on the corpse by accident, while he was wandering the huge, unending slum of London’s East End, looking for the homeless shelter on the Mile End Road where he was to take up his new post as assistant minister. He’d smelled the noisome stench moments before he came across the homeless man’s body, and he’d spun on his heel and vomited all over the sidewalk when he saw the black, iridescent flies swarming around the mouth and eyes. After that, he’d stumbled out of the alleyway and grabbed the first policeman he saw. He babbled and pointed and grunted until, at last, he made himself understood enough for the policeman to follow him.
The policeman looked at the body, at the bruise-like splotches on the skin that weren’t bruises, but lividity, at the emaciated, rail-skinny arms and legs, and merely nodded.
“Yer an American, ain’t ye, sir?”
“Huh?” Nettle said, the back of his hand against his lips. “Uh, yes.”
“What are ye doin’ here in the East End?”
Nettle told him he was looking for the homeless shelter, and the policeman merely nodded. “The peg house yer lookin’ for is over there,” he said, and pointed over Nettle’s shoulder.
Nettle could barely take his eyes off the body, but he did long enough to see the tumbledown, soot-stained building the policeman pointed out for him. He looked back at the policeman—at the bobby, he reminded himself—and said, “What . . . happened to him?”
“This bloke? Prob’ly starved to death’d be my guess, sir.”
“Starved?”
“Aye,” the bobby said.
Nettle had said nothing to that, only nodded as he tried to take in the wonder that a grown man could starve to death in the middle of the largest city on Earth, in the heart of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He tried, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
His stay was supposed to be brief, only long enough for him to get some experience with the great things William Booth and his “salvation army” were doing for the poor here in London, so he could take those practices back to his Methodist ministries in New York and Boston. But he could already tell that the “problem of the poor” that such great orators as the Reverend Merle Cary of New York had spoken of so eloquently to audiences up and down the New England seaboard all that preceding summer of 1875 was far worse than he had been led to believe.
Just then, almost as if on cue, several men began lugging bags of garbage out of the hospital across the street and dumping them on the sidewalk below Nettle’s window. The bags split open on the ground and soon there was an almost liquid pile of corruption festering in the open air. Nettle watched the pile grow into a shapeless mass of rotten vegetables, scraps of meat, orange peels, and bloody surgical rags and blankets. The street was a miasma of squabbling and obscene yelling and fighting, and yet no one said a word about the garbage. Indeed, after it had been sitting there for a few minutes, children converged on it, burying their arms in it up to their shoulders, digging for any kind of food they could find and devouring it on the spot.
One boy, a stunted little runt of perhaps six years old, came up with something black that might have once been a potato, and tried to steal away with it. Several older boys surrounded him, punched him until he fell, then kicked him until he gave up the nasty potato thing he clutched near his groin.
For Nettle, it was too much. His sister Anna had snuck a dozen oranges into his luggage as a treat for him. Fully aware that indiscriminate charity is cruel, he made up his mind to be cruel. He collected the oranges in a paper sack and went down to the street.
“How old are you, son?” he asked the boy.
“Twelve, sir,” the boy said.
Nettle blinked in shock. Twelve! And he had envisioned the boy a runt of six. How this place must beat them down, he thought.
He handed the boy the oranges, and the boy’s eyes went wide, like he’d just been given all the jewels in Africa.
“Go on,” Nettle said. “Enjoy.”
The boy was gone faster than the sun from a November day, and Nettle, feeling a little better, went back up to his room to write a letter to his sister in New York.
The porter’s name was Bill Lowell. He was a weathered, bent-back old man whose job it was to watch the door to the shelter and tell the poor wretches who came there for shelter when there was no more space available. Most nights, there was room for between twenty and fifty people, depending on the shelter’s food stores and what work needed to be done—for the cost of a bed indoors and a hot meal was a day of hard, hard labor.
“We open the doors at six,” Bill said to Nettle, who’d been told he’d work at each job in the shelter so he could better learn its overall operational strategy, “but the line’ll start formin’ ’fore noon. By four the blokes’ll be lined up ’round the corner.”
“Even when there’s only room for a few of them?”
Bill shrugged. “We’ll need to search ’em as they come inside,” he said
. “Sometimes, they try an’ sneak tobacco inside in their brogues, and they ain’t allowed that.”
Nettle glanced through a window next to the door, and sure enough, a long line had already formed and was snaking its way down the sidewalk and around the corner. Word had gone out earlier that there was only room for twenty-five, and yet no one in the line seemed to want to leave his spot.
The faces he saw all looked hollow, the eyes vacuous. It wasn’t until several days later that Nettle learned why everyone he saw shared the same corpselike expression. London law didn’t allow the homeless to sleep outside at night. The idea was that if the homeless weren’t allowed to sleep outside at night, they would find somewhere indoors to sleep. To those who only saw the problem from the stratospheric heights of wealth and power, it was a clear example of give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. The reality, though, was a homeless population that was constantly driven from one doorway to the next by the police, forced to stay awake by the toe of a boot or the bite of a baton, resulting in an expression of slack-jawed exhaustion that stared back at Nettle from every pair of eyes he met.
Bill himself had nearly shared that fate, he told Nettle. He had had a family once—a wife, three daughters, and a son—but had outlived them all. His wife and daughters he’d lost to scarlet fever, all within a month of each other, but the son survived, and had helped Bill in his work as a carpenter in days past.
One day, Bill had been carrying a load of nails that was too much for him. “Something in me back just broke,” Bill said. His load of nails had spilled, and he’d ended up flat on his back, unable to get up. He was taken to a hospital, but they refused to admit him, telling him, essentially, to “walk it off.”
This he had tried to do, but two hours later was on his back again. He was taken to a different hospital, and this time spent three weeks in bed. He emerged a broken man, unable to do the hard labor that was, unfortunately, the only kind of work that he and most of the men like him were qualified to do, only to learn that his son had fallen from a rooftop and died the week before his release. The boy was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked, along with a dozen others.