Fierro stepped forward and thanked the mortician, then turned toward the father. He looked at Fierro, his eyes distraught with sorrow, and lowered them to the floor again as the doctor wheeled the son back to the pantry.
“It had to be done” Fierro reiterated, saddling his hand over his pistol while the father moved his eyes to Sir James.
“My boy never wanted to hurt anybody” the father whispered. “He was just someone portly and klutz. Never a mean word in him. Never.” He switched his gaze to Fierro, exhaled, and under the witness of the men visibly shrunk. “It needed be done. I just thank you that it was done fast, with no injury to my boy. When you have children of your own you’ll understand some day that you don’t want them hurting, you just want them to fall asleep peacefully. I guess that was the last comfort he could give me. Going in peace. I-” he stuttered and collapsed again in tears.
Fierro placed his hand on the father’s shoulder, leaving him to sort his grievances, and stepped outside feeling none the better that Hagar, his acquaintance and town helper, was mitigated of the viral crime. He looked to the stars and brought a canteen to his lips when a child’s scream despoiled the tranquil night.
~ 64
Gabrielle sat at the dinner table in front of a dish set with rags and gnawed candlesticks. The beast sat on the table chewing a hare, pulling out flyers of meat from the throat snapped back at the neck. The young beauty looked at her plate as her stomach revolted, burning like a well of acid, when Chien entered the room and howled. She fell from her seat, pulling her placemat and trappings to the floor, and crawled to the far wall. The wolf leaped onto the diner and rested at the beast’s side.
“Is it” she began to say, feeling her voice turn to ash on her tongue as she thought about her company. The beast threw the carcass and the wolf leapt off the table, chasing the game to the steps leading out the doorway. “What” she stuttered as she came to her feet and paced to the table. “What is your, your name?” The beast raised its head. Gabrielle saw the reflection of her skeleton in one eye and her soul in damnation in the other. She brought her fingers to her bosom and said her name. It stepped down from the table and circled her, sniffing her dress, growling, paring the peace with moments of uncertainty. Then the beast ran back to the table, drew the candlestick dropped from her plate, and placed it against its ear.
“Smile” the beast repeated and returned the candle to the other side of his head. It turned toward her and bore its teeth like a patient with trismus. Gabrielle held her hands over her heart, keeping the curator from bursting from her breast. She smiled back and the despotism in its eyes vanished. It stood on its hind legs and brought her face forward in its hands. The beast pulled her hair back, turning her face by her jaw, sniffing, learning, devouring her with every sense. Then he jammed a finger into her chest and barked Chien back into the room. The wolf rose from the shadows with its teeth drawn. Gabrielle stared at Chien, watching its eyes soak into blood as it neared, feeling its tongue lap over her body and pool in her flesh.
“Please don’t harm me” she whimpered. The beast dragged Chien to her feet by its scruff, revolting and screaming, and slammed it until the wolf submitted, then wrung its head to face Gabrielle.
“Chien” the beast said as Chien pushed back, fighting to release its head from his master’s hold. The beast grabbed the ears when the wolf nipped, opening the flesh across the back of his hand, and received a volley of fists. Gabrielle fell to the floor when Chien broke free and tore outside the hall.
“Belle” the beast said as he sprung at her feet and she kicked him in reflex. The beast barked as his cheek split with blood. Gabrielle clawed at the stone floor, dragging herself to the wall. “Belle!” She stopped and looked back. The beast sat cradled on the floor, holding its cheek, watching her. Her finger sat buttoned on her lips, sewing the words to her tongue, breathless.
“Say it again” Gabrielle said in disbelief. The beast stood to its feet, picked up the candle stick, mumbled “smile”, then dropped it to the floor and left the diner. Gabrielle ran up to the window overlooking the court and saw the beast emerge from the front door with Chien. A legion of wolves poured from the forest and gathered at the gate. The beast kicked Chien and roared, charging the pack into the woods. Gabrielle looked up to the horizon, seeing the sun set into dusk, opening blood in the skies.
~ 65
Fierro looked to the stars and brought a canteen to his lips when a child’s scream despoiled the tranquil night. Chien entered the village with a pack of wolves, clouding the alleyways and climbing into rooms of children through open windows. A siren of screams awoke the village. Men turned out their doors and fell obliterate under the wolves, while women threw their children to the rooftops where they cried like gargoyles for sanctuary.
The horde charged the streets through gunfire belching hoops of smoke. Boys held fort from their windowsills and supported their fathers with musket fire, packed their cartridges, and fired again. Soil turned iron as wolves slew men to the ground, leaving sons men and vengeful, firing bullets to steam in the belt of their organs. Fire sprung from the center of the village, warming the dead in ash and blood. Wolves mingled their howls with the cry of children, then stilled as musket fire rang out. Hunters drew their bows and shot down shadows passing in the smoke, punishing more than wolves. Mothers gathered their young to conceal them in trembling arms, and fathers vowed safety then vanished in the haze, never to return home.
Willem ran down the center of the street with a torch in one hand and a pistol anchored in the other. Wolves fell from the alleyways, scraping and yipping as men pressed the beasts from the shadows and gauged them with bayonets. Willem slid where boots and paw prints lay trotted in blood, and swiveled his pistol with a shot, knocking a wolf dead over the corpse it fed on. Luzenac threw a wolf into the road and mounted it, hammering it with a roller, making the creature diminutive under his broad frame. Men piled atop a fallen beast and halved it by yanking its limbs to their farthest reach, pulling till the joints dislocated and elasticity gave way.
Fierro saw Willem running to the docks with two wolves following his trail, and pursued them. He ran from the town with smoke and the yowl of wolves rising from the village and blood staining the street like a blush vinaigrette. Fierro steadied his pistol and slaughtered the bead on a dead tree in a flatus of sawdust, and reloaded. Willem reached the docks and turned his pistol on the first wolf, wrecking it through the backbone. The other wolf yelped as Fierro drilled it through the leg, sending it sliding off the deck into the water to sink nether.
The captain bit the wick out of his pistol when another wolf slammed him to the ground. The gun discharged into a sail with a deafening pop and dismantled the bits to fall into the water. The creature snapped, casting trails of spit with jaws inches from his face, when Willem thrust a knife through its head, sending it into a stroke, legs kicking like turbines, until he ripped the knife out and popped the plate off the back of its skull in a fount of gore. He offered Fierro his hand and brought him to his knees, then continued to the harbor where the ship rocked on the waves.
“We have to hurry” Willem shouted. Fierro rolled to his stomach and vomited, then raised his eyes to the silhouettes of men scattered in the streets. Creatures leapt from the pools of darkness, swallowing the men in shadows. Dark bodies shifted shapes, from human to animal, as flames stole the night with lustrous tongues and guzzled the darkness, then faded back into the din where creature sang songs of death and men growled the profane.
Willem disappeared in the hull. Fierro entered to his coxswain pouring sticks of old dynamite from the satchel at his feet. Fierro stepped back and let the pistol dangle on his finger.
“What are you doing, Willem?” Fierro asked as Willem took the torch wrapped in turpentine from its mount.
“The beast can’t leave this place” Willem said, tangling the fuzes. “Don’t you see, captain. You see what it does. It eats men. And anyone that’s bit and doesn’t die becomes just
like it. No one can leave the island.”
“We don’t know what did that to Hagar. Anything, any animal could have given him rabies. Or it was the fever. It makes the mind sick. We’ve seen it in the trenches.” Willem smiled and shook his head, then dipped the torch. The fuse tangled in sparks.
He took Fierro by the arm and ran him off the boat. The blast soared out the side of the hull in a charge of fire. A wooden moan filled the harbor as the ship capsized in port, slamming the mast against the yard, sending a roster of water into the air as the boards walloped into chips. Tendrils of flaming debris sank from the sky like a tapestry of lava undone and scalded the pier. A second explosion took and darts of fire gyrated into the night.
“Look!” Willem pointed out to sea. Fierro strained his eyes till he found a small rowboat paddling into the void.
“What’s she doing? She’ll never make it.”
“I think that’s Philippe’s widow. And look it there. That’s Philippe’s whoreson, Wellock. Bless her for taking the babe.” Chalk pelted the pier and a demonic roar thundered across the sky. Willem took Fierro’s collar and dragged him back as his butt romped against the boards like a train derailing the tracks. The lighthouse leaned toward the ocean as the light inside swiveled, slicing the clouds with a yellow orb, then toppled against the peer in a clash of woodchips and saltwater. Boards flipped into the air, turning seawater into rain pouring down among the embers like a season in hell.
Fierro looked past the mounds of stone and fire, beyond the bones of wood beam and pools of water caught boiling in the pockets of ruin, and wondered if that woman rowing out to sea would be the only survivor of this Gehenna.
~ 66
Ash spun in the air and settled with the tears bathing mothers’ faces as they watched the fathers pull their young from the rubble, and joined the mourning that filled the dawn. Newlyweds took their yearlings from their beloved's cold arms and prepared their burial. People found devastation everywhere they looked, from the church dethroned in blood and human oblation, to the hospices where the dead laid next to their orphans holding dolls like omens of protection. Homes diffused into refuse as flames leapt from the embers, reaching for nectar on charred beams, and stags ran the streets undomesticated to disappear into the wild.
Grandfathers searched the streets for their daughters, wandering about, wanting to return their tots wearing headbands doused in aseptic ointment. People ravished their clothing, turning in every direction like a traitor’s allegiance, screaming and mumbling, clawing their skin under a spell of lunacy. Neighbors saw to their families, settling their carts with valuables, while children sat atop their horses, spitting so far as to leave behind the dust that muddled in their mouths, all desperate attempts to acquit the bloodshed and tragedies and regrets and guilt that became an intrinsic part of the town.
Fierro came into the village carrying a body on his shoulders, looking like a felon with the gallows on his back. Blackened faces stood around him; clean lines drew down their cheeks where tears raced in abundance. His eyes lost that look of certitude as people brought in their dead. Everyone watched him, a prophet who they expected to lead an exodus from the tyranny of murders. Fierro looked back at his people, awaiting their persecution once they ascertained his failure. Men crept from the fallen huts, covered in char and bruising, creatures reborn of death, and women entered the company in huddles, bringing a symphony of cries and dampened sniffles.
“Gather your dead!” Fierro shouted. The words leaped from his mouth like serpents, like devilfire, falling with the weight of stones into his heart. Bloodshot eyes rose from the ground, and a sea of confusion and hostility brewed in the crowd, readying to draw and quarter Fierro, to drag his corpse till just bloody mulch remained. “I can’t give you their lives back. I can’t restore the blood that has been shed. But what I can do is promise you more blood; the blood of the thing that did this. We are tired, and as we tire we grow weaker. But we must act while there is still strength in numbers. Never has there been such enmity between man and creature. But we must first see to the dead, our own.
“I am going to ask of you one last deed that will lash than the devil’s tale. We have lost so many, too many to prepare rites for. It’s an abomination, but we need to burn the dead. Time gives no man favor; we lose its essence like sand through an hourglass.
“I ask you, my good people, go now and gather the ones you lost.” Men groveled as they lead away the women, stumbling and faltering, tilling the soil with their tears. Grandfathers grimaced, carrying their hope dead in their arms, and dragged the streets scolded in death. Fierro turned as a chimney stack foundered in the distance, sending a plume of smoke and ember into the sky in its stead.
“Captain” Willem said. He held a child in his arms, the hair singed, clothes black as graphite, and skin cracked like pine. “I pulled her out of her bed. She was gone before I got to her.” He paused and strut his feet in the dirt. “Do we have to burn them, captain? The people are solemn as it is. What more do we need to add to their affliction?” Fierro studied him hard, grappling the urge to throw down the corpse from his shoulders and waste Willem where he stood. A foul spirit awakened in his heart and excited his body with a fiery rage working through his being like clockwork.
“Move on” Fierro ordered. Willem slumped his shoulders and pulled the innocent soul closer to his bosom. He wanted to shove the remains into the captain’s arms, to efface his honor, and yell that these people aren’t just meat that he could throw to the dogs. He wanted a commemoration to uphold some residue of human mentality, to lay the dead to peace as their families would desire. But Fierro was a soul without leniency, and Willem knew any contention would be in vain.
“Damn you, Fierro” Willem said as the captain walked past him, carrying the remains on his shoulder. People came out their doorways with their fallen and joined the train that marched to the fields. When Fierro entered the pasture he came upon men clearing the site with meniscuses. Children collected the hay to bundle, and men brought in lumber to erect a pyre. Merchants came with pitch and tar and lathered the timber, offering any accelerant they could spare.
Women placed their babes upon the altar and men stacked their mothers and wives, firstborns and their kin, and stepped away into the brush that crushed like boulders. Friends stowed their cohorts and strangers loaded the unknowns until the pyre became insurmountable.
Fierro laid the body from his shoulders, and took up a torch. He touched the end to the fodder and the chaff became animate, breathing and dancing, growing flames over the mound. Men beat their breast and widowers stood fast, making assertions of reprisal as their families incinerated before their eyes, watching their lives degrade into silt and fire bit ash. Fierro fed the flames till the bodies charred and broke into cinder, when he spotted a pair of pearl beaded spectacles in the mix. Wilma, he thought.
Little by little the crowd fell away like molt as their loved ones burned beyond recognition, their tendons braided in fire and skin flaking like charcoal to the coals. The flames ate and convulsed with serpentine laughter as one body crumbled into another, two beings breaking and falling as a single pile, becoming an indistinguishable mound of slag. Soon the crowd disappear, and the funeral mitigated to Fierro standing watch, like a phoenix exfoliating into a mound of ash, when a young man came and stood alone beside the captain.
“I would like to take my brother” the young man said, looking back to the bodies waiting to be added to the pyre. “He was sick with scurvy. We weren’t expecting him to survive the night so I dug him a grave. And I still have it open. It wouldn’t do any harm to let me take him and do what I’ve already begun.” Fierro gave his consent with a nod. The young man took the body in his arms, kissed him, breathed the words of love he would never speak again, and carried his brother home.
~ 67
On the eve of the hunt men gathered in the streets, fathers gird in weeping children, and celibates carrying their crossbows and rapiers, vowing death to the demon
beast and its fawn. Fierro waited till all the men were present, hearing doors slam in the distance, young lovers beckoning their suitors to come back inside, supplanting the call that would make boys men, and checked his satchel for a biscuit. Something wicked had pervaded the hearts of men, subverting their good intent with fear, turning their call to arms into a debase will of strife and mortification. Fierro yearned to give newlyweds leave, to allow those without sons to be omitted so that their heritage might live on. But he could spare no one, and therefore made no exemption, whether young or old, prodigy or invalid.
“Tonight may be our last day in this world, gentlemen” Fierro said. “I’ve heard your grumbles, and I’ve allotted you one last evening with your families, but now this evil has been made clear and present. If we do not stand up and take this fight, we will die. Your children perish. Your wives will flee and be hunted in the fields. Your sisters will hide till consumption drives them from their cloak, leaving only pickings for the crows, and your brothers will not see you in the heavens, because there is no call for cowards in paradise.
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