American Hippo

by Sarah Gailey

  Archie crowed as Rosa crowded beside Abigail and Ruby. “That makes ten times I ʼave saved your life, ʼoundstooth! No more of this nine-and-a-half nonsense, eh?”

  “Where’s Betsy?” Houndstooth asked her. Archie pointed to a small brown smudge on the other side of the water—Betsy had gotten herself out of the fray. Houndstooth blew an exasperated sigh. The hippo would have to be retrieved. As he watched, the smudge made its way onto the bank across the water from the sentry tower.

  “Archie,” he said slowly, “I think she’s got the right idea. Getting onto land.”

  As he spoke, a small bull with gleaming tusks just a few meters in front of them tore into its neighbor, then cast its head around, hungry for a fight.

  “You are both right,” Archie replied. “We ʼave to get to ʼigh land.”

  The bull seemed to hear her voice. With incredible speed, it detached itself from the frenzy of fighting, roaring hippos and turned on them. Houndstooth felt at his pocket—the only knife he had left was his ivory-handled switchblade. Archie’s hammer hung at her waist, useless in the melee. They looked to each other, exhausted, out of options—but then, in a final, miraculous rescue, four bobbing shapes slapped into the furious little bull and toppled it.

  The buoys.

  Archie and Houndstooth stared at the buoys as they bobbed by, knocking the feral bull under the water each time he attempted to surface. Archie turned to Houndstooth.

  “I thought they all blew? I thought … I thought Travers moved all of them to the dam?”

  Houndstooth gaped. “Oh, my God, Archie. No. He found sixteen of them.” A smile began to spread across his face. “But Hero made twenty. ‘Always have a backup plan.’ I told them we didn’t need a backup plan, but … they knew better. And they made twenty, and they put four of them on a separate … thing. Frequency. So they wouldn’t go off right away.” He was a little out of breath from pain and the explanation. “They made twenty. And those are the last four.”

  Archie let out a whoop. “Twenty! Twenty, goddamn it, ʼEro, twenty!” She laughed, full-throated and gleeful. “Come on, ’Oundstooth, while the ferals are still fighting each other! If you ever want to thank ʼEro in person we’ll ʼave to follow our Betsy and get out of this mess!”

  Together, with Abigail tucked between them, Archie and Winslow struggled across the narrow, feral-infested passage. They dodged teeth and pushed past battling pairs of grey, bloodied hippos. Pressing forward, always forward, they finally scrambled up onto the land alongside the Gate.

  “Inland?” Archie shouted over the rushing water and the bellowing ferals.

  “No,” Houndstooth yelled back, wheeling Ruby around by her harness and pointing to where Betsy was waiting for them. “Upstream!”

  They rode alongside the water, watching as more and more ferals swept past, carried by the current. They rode until they weren’t deafened by the ferals’ fighting anymore. Archie immediately dismounted and helped Houndstooth to slide off of Ruby. He sat on the ground, his hand pressed to his still-bleeding side.

  “ʼOundstooth, you’re so pale—how much blood ʼave you lost?” Archie said.

  “Never mind, now, Archie. I’ll be fine. Where’s—” He gasped as a fresh wave of pain overtook him. “—where’s Abigail?”

  Archie looked around. Betsy stood a ways off, farther inland, panting; there were a few new cuts marring her flank, fresh battle scars to join the old ones.

  “Je suis désolé, ʼOundstooth, I don’t know, she was right there between us, I don’t know ʼow she could ʼave slipped away.” She scanned the water, but it was a froth of feral hippos, and she knew there was no use—but then, there she was. Abigail, surging her way up the current toward them. She scrabbled up the slope toward them, slipped; Archie grabbed her harness and gave a mighty heave. Between the two of them, Abigail made it onto the bank. Ruby nosed at her, and the two hippos wandered toward Betsy, who had sprawled, exhausted, on the ground.

  Archie gave Rosa a nudge. “Go on,” she said. The hippo snorted at her, unmoving; Archie rubbed her bristly nose and murmured to her. “You ʼave done so well, my Rosa. Go on. Go and rest. You ʼave earned it.”

  Rosa lumbered off to join the other three hippos where they lay in the shade, exhausted from the battle. Archie settled herself next to Houndstooth on the muddy riverbank.

  “Well,” she said. “We are trapped, mon ami. We cannot get overland with the ladies over there—the Gate extends too far inland for Rosa and Abigail to cover the distance, and I think Ruby might not be in good enough shape right now for the journey anyway. We cannot take them through the ruins of the dam, not safely—and we certainly cannot take them into that,” she said, gesturing to the roiling mass of furious ferals. “So. What do we do now? Smoke a cigar and call it quits?”

  Houndstooth was still out of breath, his face very pale; but when Archie eased his shirt away from his side, she saw that he had nearly stopped bleeding. He gave a little laugh and considered her.

  “Hero was too smart for me, you know. They had so many plans; so many contingencies. ‘Just in case,’ they kept saying; and I kept asking ‘in case of what?’”

  Archie watched Houndstooth, frowning. “Are you alright, friend? You seem—”

  “Ah, I’m fine,” he said, waving her off. “I’m telling you what we do next.” He patted at his vest, then reached to an inside pocket. He pulled out a little leather pouch, sealed with wax; then, he handed her his ivory-handled knife.

  “Miracle I managed to hang on to both of these after that fall. But then, it’s a bit of a day for miracles. Be a love and open this, won’t you, Archie? My hands aren’t too steady.”

  Archie slit open the wax and tipped the contents of the pouch into Houndstooth’s waiting hand.

  “‘Just in case,’ they said. ‘Just in case.’” He held up the little black detonator. “Just in case the charges don’t blow, let’s have a backup, they said. Just a few buoys that could start the chain, in case things go wrong. But of course the first round of bombs worked perfectly,” he laughed thinly.

  Archie looked from the detonator to the Gate; to the swarm of ferals that frothed against the Sturgess Queen, pressing the buoys right up against the riverboat. She looked up at the tower, where Travers leaned against the railing, watching the chaos below, still laughing with his hand pressed to his mangled face.

  “Four buoys left undetonated, Archie,” he said with a weak smile. “How many sticks of dynamite is that equivalent to?”

  Archie grinned. “I ʼave no idea, ʼOundstooth.”

  “Shall we find out?”

  Archie put her hand over his. They pressed the button together, and sat back, side by side, as the four backup buoys exploded in a glorious display of fire and fury.

  A few moments later, the flames from the buoys reached the half-saddlebag of madre del Diablo that had been left unused. The Sturgess Queen cracked open in a thunderous explosion of fire and splinters. Archie and Houndstooth toppled over under the force of the shockwave. The Gate blew back in a gust of shrapnel. The blast sent feral hippos flying—several of them bowled into the ranger’s tower. The tower gave a mighty groan.

  It creaked.

  It tipped.

  It fell.

  Archie and Houndstooth watched as Travers, tiny at such a distance, clung to the railing of the sentry post for a long moment before dropping into the water. They watched as the ferals that had survived the explosion, recovering but shaken, swarmed him.

  They were too far distant to hear his screams, but they could see his body flying through the air as the furious feral hippos tossed him between each other.

  “I told you,” Houndstooth gasped. “I told you that he would suffer.”

  “That you did,” Archie replied. They couldn’t hear his screams over the sounds of the ferals, but it was enough for both of them to simply watch as the ferals destroyed him in the water next to the wreckage of the Harriet Gate.

  “Well, ʼOundstooth. I would say t
his caper was a raging success, no?” Archie asked.

  “It wasn’t a caper,” Houndstooth mumbled just before he blacked out.

  Archie patted his chest as he lay on the ground beside her. “I know,” she murmured. “It was an operation.”

  She sat next to him as the water calmed. When he woke, she knew, he would want to go after Adelia. He would want to beat Gran Carter to her. He would want to go find Hero, and together with them, he would want to see justice served. But for now—just for a few hours—she decided to let him rest. He would need it.

  The sun rose higher in the sky overhead, and the day grew hot. Houndstooth and the hippos slept; and Archie watched as the ferals, unconstrained by dam or Gate or raging current, took the Mississippi.

  Epilogue

  Gran Carter rode up to the dock of a little clapboard house a mile outside the Harriet Gate astride a borrowed Arnesian Brown hippo named Pauline. Hero was in front of him, tied at the waist to keep them upright.

  He dismounted and hauled Hero up to the back door of the house, leaving Pauline beside the other hippos at the gated dock. Carter’s nostrils flared. He smelled the air and shook his head—by some miracle, Hero was not putting out the familiar septic battlefield stench of a gut wound. There was only the clean, hot smell of blood in the air.

  A miracle.

  Or was it? Carter rapped hard on the door and waited for the doctor to answer, hoping he’d be at home. While he waited, Carter reflected on the facts.

  Fact number one: Adelia Reyes was, without question, the deadliest, most ruthless contract killer of the day—possibly of all time.

  Fact number two: Adelia Reyes had hit Hero with two knives. The first had been aimed at Hero’s heart, but had struck their sternum just softly enough to lodge there.

  Fact number three: The second knife had been aimed at Hero’s gut, but had managed to avoid nicking their bowel, their liver, their gallbladder. Carter touched Hero’s forehead lightly—it was only slightly warm. Feverish, sure, but not frightening. Infection hadn’t even begun to set in yet.

  It didn’t add up. Either Adelia was losing her touch—impossible—or she had let Hero live on purpose—even more impossible.

  Before he could try to resolve the matter, the door swung open. A tall, dark-haired man stood in the doorway, wiping blood from his bare hands.

  “What’s this?” he asked, looking at Hero’s limp form. “What’s happened here?”

  “Stabbed. Twice. Gut and chest.” Carter watched the doctor’s face begin to set into a practiced bad-news expression, and hurried on. “But the woman who stabbed them missed. She missed … everything, doc. Please, can you help them?”

  The doctor leaned inside and called for help. A young white woman, stout and muscle-bound, appeared in the doorway to carry Hero inside.

  “One more thing, doctor, please—” Carter pulled a photo out of his pocket. “Have you seen this woman? She may have come through with minor wounds from a feral fight?”

  The doctor smiled broadly, revealing carved-ivory teeth, straight and white and shining. He did not look at the photo. Carter sighed, and pulled a small bag out of the same pocket, handing it to the doctor. The doctor weighed it in his hand before looking at the photo.

  “No, can’t say as I’ve ever seen her. I’d remember that tattoo, I reckon.”

  Gran tucked the photograph away. “Worth a try. I’d best be going, but your patient will have people coming along for them shortly.” He tipped his hat and sprinted back down the dock to Pauline.

  The doctor watched Gran go, then eased inside, shutting the door behind him and turning the dead bolt. He rested his back against the door for a moment, his eyes closed. When he opened them, she was standing there, waiting for him. Her eyes glittered in the half dark of the room.

  “You’d best tend to your patient, Doctor,” Adelia Reyes said with a small smile. “It’s as Agent Carter said: they’ll have people coming along shortly.”

  TASTE OF MARROW

  Chapter 1

  Ysabel would not stop crying. She spasmed with grating, earsplitting screams every few seconds. Her face, knotted and purple, jerked every time Adelia tried to maneuver her nipple toward the baby’s mouth.

  “Maybe she doesn’t like you,” Hero said mildly.

  “Babies don’t have opinions,” Adelia replied through gritted teeth.

  “Nobody told her that,” Hero muttered. They turned their attention back to the kneeling saddle on the ground in front of them, and continued working grease into the leather of the pommel.

  “Ysa,” Adelia murmured in a pained singsong. “Ysa, mija, please just—there.” She winced, triumphant, as the screaming stopped and the baby latched at last. “You see? All she needed was—ah!” She cried out in pain as the baby startled at nothing in particular and pulled away from her breast without letting go of the nipple. Her cry made Ysabel startle again, and the baby’s face began to scrunch in preparation for another piercing wail.

  “Good luck with that,” Hero said. They eased themself upright, grimacing, and braced their hands on their lower back for a cautious stretch. They walked into the trees, away from Adelia and the screaming baby, without waiting to hear a response.

  Hero knew that they’d need to start a fire soon, before dusk turned to dark. They’d wait until Ysabel had stopped eating—the sound of wood splintering was sure to startle the baby again. In the meantime, they made their way through the scrubby, moss-hung trees to the murky little pocket of the Catahoula where Adelia’s hippos, Zahra and Stasia, were dozing. Hero squatted to wash their grease-smeared hands in the warm water, watching the surface of the pond for ripples more out of habit than worry. They watched the scum that floated away from their skin in the water and an idea drifted through their mind: a system to send rafts of nitroglycerin floating to waterlocked targets—but how to prevent a trailing wick from getting waterlogged? A remote detonator, or a system of watertight tubes that could protect a lit fuse, or perhaps a flaming dart shot across water, or perhaps …

  They let their hands trail in the water for a while as they mentally troubleshot the concept. Hero couldn’t remember the last time they’d allowed their attention to wander so close to the water’s edge. But this was a safe place for them to let the ideas blossom. It was a pleasant, secluded little spot off the banks of the lake that Hero and Adelia had chosen to set up camp, well away from the Mississippi and the marshes and far from the reach of the ferals in the Gulf. Hero missed their Abigail—they’d been borrowing Stasia, and it just wasn’t the same. But otherwise, it was a fine camp. They were surrounded by scrubby brush and gangly trees; it was out-of-the-way enough that no one was drawn to them by the sound of the baby crying. Hero wondered how far Ysabel’s wails carried, and they allowed themself a moment of satisfaction at Adelia’s struggle. Serves her right, they thought, ripping up a fistful of marsh grass to scrub their palms. Still, they couldn’t help wishing that the baby was a little less of a squaller.

  But not for Adelia’s sake. It was just because Hero had to be stuck in the company of the little creature all day and all night, and their sanity was suffering from the constant barrage of noise.

  Hero started to stand, but a flash of pain above their navel knocked them back and they sat hard. They yanked the hem of their shirt up and pressed a wet hand to the fat rope of scar tissue there, feeling for the unbroken skin. There—there was the scar, and they looked down at their hand and confirmed that no blood filled the creases in their palm. “It’s okay,” they whispered to themself. “It’s okay. It’s just a phantom pain. You’re fine.”

  They sat there on the pebbly sand with their palm braced against their belly. They were fine. But the “fine” was so new—this was the first day that Hero could truly say they felt healed, and even that was tentative, raw. The wound was relatively fresh, in more ways than one. It was the wound that Adelia had given to Hero just a few weeks before Ysabel’s birth.

  Hero took a slow, deep breath and took their
hand away from their stomach, letting their hem fall back into place. In the distance, the baby had stopped screaming. A clutch of ducks drifted silently by on the water—a welcome signal that the ferals, who would have eaten anything that moved too slowly back on the Harriet, hadn’t made it to the Catahoula yet. The night was almost peaceful now. Hero closed their eyes and tried to remember their last time they’d felt almost-peaceful—the day that a handsome man rode up to their door astride a pitch-black hippo and asked if they’d like to join him for one last job.

  They’d said yes at the time. They would have said yes again in a heartbeat.

  But Hero hadn’t seen Winslow Houndstooth since the night before Adelia’s knife had made that scar on their belly. Since her knife had nearly killed them.

  Hero fidgeted with the third button down on their shirt. They wouldn’t unbutton it to feel the scar there—the twin of the one on their stomach. It hasn’t disappeared since the last time you looked at it, they told themself irritably. But it bothered them, and they fidgeted in earnest as they went over the questions they’d been asking every day since they’d woken up.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Hero liked things that made sense. They liked diagrams and switches and sensible arrangements of wires. They liked dosages and measurements and titrations. Adelia was … a thicket. A tangle of intentions and motivations that Hero really could have done without.

  But they had to figure it out. Adelia could have killed Hero so easily—but instead, her knives had struck the only places on Hero’s body that could look mortal without actually killing them. Hero knew the exact amount of coral snake venom required to make a person quietly suffocate due to paralysis, and Adelia knew exactly where to aim her weapons. Both of them had too much experience to make stupid mistakes that would let a target walk away.

  Hero knew that they’d been allowed to live intentionally. They just didn’t know why.

  Hero had woken up with no idea where they were, and there was Adelia, changing the bandage on their abdomen with steady hands and intent focus. Hero had tried to startle away from the woman who had stabbed them, but a white-hot stripe of pain had flattened them before they could move. It took them weeks to recover—weeks of Adelia’s focused attention and care. Whenever Hero tried to ask why Adelia hadn’t killed them, she pursed her lips and changed the subject.