Hero of the Five Points

by Alan Gratz

  Hero of the Five Points

  ALAN GRATZ

  illustration by

  RED NOSE STUDIO

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Hero of the Five Points

  Copyright

  The Hero of the Five Points

  A League of Seven story

  by Alan Gratz

  There were a hundred stories told in the streets of Five Points about the giant gangster Mose. That he was eight feet tall and six feet wide; that his stovepipe hat was actually an upside-down smokestack torn from a Cheyenne locomotive; that his fists were the size of Cherokee hams, his feet so large it took the leather of two whole cows for him to be shod. When Mose was thirsty, it was said, it took a wagonload of beer to sate him, and in the summer months he carried a fifty-gallon keg of ale on his belt instead of a canteen. For sport, Mose would climb to the top of the seven-story-tall Emartha Machine Man Building and blow airships off course. He could dive off at the Battery and come up at the beach on Staten Island, a trip that in 1853 took the submarine ferries a full twenty-five minutes; to get from Mannahatta to Breucklen, he simply jumped over the East River.

  Mose had the strength of ten men, it was believed, which he put to the greatest and most fearsome use in the battles between the Bowery Boys and their rival gangs in the Five Points. While his compatriots carried brickbats and knives and the occasional raygun into battle, Mose preferred an airship tether, which he wielded like the club of Heracles. Once, when the Dead Rabbits raided the Bowery to wreck the Boys’ headquarters, Mose beat them away single-handed. He chased them all the way back to their lairs around Paradise Square, bringing down two tenements with his fists, legend had it, before his rage abated.

  It was the real Mose that Dalton Dent had been sent to find. And, if the legends were true, to kill.

  Dalton stood in a narrow Five Points alley between a pub and a greengrocer’s, watching the Dead Rabbits fight the Bowery Boys with fists and bricks and knives. The Bowery Boys were a gang of young Mohawk men who believed the descendants of the roughly two million “Yankees” left in the Americas after the Darkness fell should be clubbed with brickbats and dumped in the choppy waters of the Hudson River, and they were happy to start with the Dead Rabbits. The Rabbits were all Yankees, both black and white, and just as happy to return the Bowery Boys’ bricks and punches with equal disdain. It had been more than eighty years since all contact was lost with Europe and the Yankees had joined what would become the United Nations of America, but here in the dismal, impoverished streets of New Rome’s slums, old hatreds found new life.

  “Do you see him, Master Dalton?” Mr. Rivets asked. The Dent family’s Tik Tok valet stood behind Dalton, watching the fray.

  “No,” Dalton said with disappointment. This was his first solo mission for the Septemberist Society, and he’d been hoping for some real action. “I begin to think this Mose character is nothing but a big, ugly gangster whose tales are taller than he is.”

  The fighting in the street was vicious and uncontrolled. The battle between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys had been raging for more than an hour, Dalton noted, and there had not been the first sign of the city’s infamous copper alloy Tik Tok policemen, the machine men they called Coppers. There was, however, another young man about Dalton’s age watching the skirmish from the shadows across the street.

  “There, that Yankee across the way,” Dalton said. “Do you see him?”

  The man looked as out of place as Dalton felt. He was clean-shaven, with neatly cut and combed hair as black as his suit, which he accentuated with a silver watch chain and a stout, silver-tipped cane. In short, he had money—which immediately separated him from the actual denizens of the Five Points and the Bowery. He seemed to be there to watch the battle between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, but his eyes had a queer, distant look to them, as though he was looking right through the tenements of Paradise Square, out across the Hudson and into Hackensack territory and beyond. Dalton found the man wholly unsettling.

  “Not the kind of gentleman usually to be found walking the streets of New Rome’s most violent neighborhood,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “Not the kind of gentleman to make it out alive either,” Dalton said. As he spoke, one of the Dead Rabbits noticed the strange man in the black suit and broke away from the fight to attack him. The man in black blinked, his eyes focusing sharply on his assailant, and he raised his cane and pressed it to the Dead Rabbit’s chest. The gangster jerked and lurched, dropping the knife he carried. The man in black pulled his cane away and the Dead Rabbit crumpled to the street like a machine man whose mainspring had snapped.

  Dalton saw a flash of crackling blue light at the end of the odd man’s cane, and then it was gone.

  “Lektricity!” Dalton said. “And he knows enough about it to wield it as a weapon. We should find out who he is. The Society will want to know.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Rivets. “But I’m afraid we have bigger concerns at present, Master Dalton. Much bigger concerns.”

  Mr. Rivets pointed. The mighty Mose had arrived.

  Dalton watched in amazement as Mose strode into battle. He was as big as the stories said, if not bigger—easily two feet taller than any of his Bowery Boy mates. He was a hulking monster, his legs too short and his arms too long and all of him rippling with muscles in places no human being had muscles. His clothes, such as they were, were an imitation of Bowery Boy fashion: he wore a white shirt that looked like two bed sheets sewn together, and blue canvas pants rolled up at the ankles and held in place by a pair of thick suspenders that might have begun life as steam engine belts. Besides his clothes and his ape-like shape, the only thing that marked Mose as even remotely human was the relatively tiny human head perched atop his massive shoulders, upon which he wore not a locomotive smokestack but a comically small stovepipe hat, much abused.

  Dalton immediately recognized Mose for what he was: a Manglespawn. The monstrous offspring of some poor, wretched human being and a Mangleborn, one of the ancient, unkillable titans the Septemberist Society was sworn to keep subdued.

  Mose swung his great muscled arms from side to side as he walked, batting away friend and foe like he was swatting at flies. The brickbats and raygun blasts scattered throughout the mob now focused entirely on Mose, but to little effect. He roared under the hail of bricks and beams, picking up an overturned steam wagon and hurling it into the crowd. It tumbled end over end, taking out Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys like bowling pins.

  “Just the Rabbits, you great goosecap. Just the Dead Rabbits!” cried a rough voice. Dalton found Mose’s handler in the crowd. Where Mose dwarfed other men, other men dwarfed Mose’s handler. Like Mose, he wore an almost comic version of the Bowery Boy uniform. His blue pants, white shirt, blue suspenders, and black stovepipe hat all looked as though they’d come from the children’s department at Macy’s, an illusion shattered by the stub of a cigar he chomped on.

  “The lamppost!” the dwarf yelled at Mose. “Use the lamppost, you big addle-cove!”

  Mose snorted like a bull, his tiny
head turning this way and that as he tried to make sense of what the little man was telling him. With brickbats and hatchets bouncing off him, Mose wrapped his giant arms around a metal lamppost and yanked it up out of the sidewalk, the copper gas pipes inside it hissing as they snapped.

  Mose roared again and brought the lamppost down like a hammer, pounding a Dead Rabbit into the cobblestone street.

  “Sir?” Mr. Rivets said. “Perhaps it’s time we took action.”

  “What? Oh, yes,” Dalton said, snapping out of his reverie. It was easy to be mesmerized by the sight of Mose. Dalton watched as a similarly hypnotized Dead Rabbit was bifurcated by the Manglespawn’s makeshift club.

  Dalton pulled out his father’s old aether pistol and activated the aggregator. Not that he thought it would do him much good. But this is what he’d trained for. What he’d been raised to do. He was a Septemberist. He would find a way to stop the Manglespawn or die trying.

  Though he really hoped he didn’t die trying.

  Dalton pushed through the mob toward the monster. A Bowery Boy appeared in front of him and slashed him with a knife, cutting his arm. Dalton spun away, confused, until he remembered he was wearing the costume of the Dead Rabbits—black pants with a red stripe down the side tucked into tall black boots, red work shirt rolled up at the sleeves, brown leather back brace and suspenders, his mustache curled up at the ends like a handlebar. He raised his aether pistol as the Bowery Boy came at him again and blasted him in the chest.

  Across the street, Mose lifted his battered lamppost over the head of Kit Burns, the Dead Rabbits’ leader. Burns had his back turned to the giant. He would never see it coming.

  Dalton glanced at the gauge on his raygun. He hadn’t collected enough aether again to stun a regular person, let alone Mose.

  “Mr. Rivets! The lamppost!” he cried.

  Metal rang on metal as the Tik Tok caught the cast-iron pole. The Dead Rabbits’ leader flinched at the sound, diving to the ground behind Mr. Rivets, and Dalton ran for him.

  Mose grunted in frustration and pressed harder. Mr. Rivets pushed back, his clockworks groaning. For a long moment the two stood frozen while Dalton knelt to help Kit Burns to his feet.

  “Don’t push, you dumb galoot,” the dwarf yelled at Mose. “Pull! Pull!”

  Mose yanked the lamppost back like a fishing rod, and Mr. Rivets went flying over his shoulder down Little Water Street. Dalton Dent and Kit Burns stood staring at the sight of the thousand-pound machine man sailing through the air like a dirigible, but not for long. Mose was already bringing the lamppost back down on their heads.

  Dalton raised his aether pistol to shoot Mose, knowing as he did that it was hopeless. Inspiration struck just before the lamppost did, and Dalton fired the raygun between the legs of the monster at the still-hissing gas pipes where Mose had pulled the lamppost out of the sidewalk. The raygun’s beam touched off the gas, and a massive explosion knocked both gangs off their feet, shattering the windows of buildings all around Paradise Square. Mose, closest to the blast, went crashing through the wall of a tenement house and disappeared.

  The ringing in Dalton’s ears as he staggered to his feet became the shrill whistle of New Rome’s Coppers, and the gangs scattered. Dalton spun in the street, addled from the explosion, until hands grabbed him and dragged him away with the fleeing Rabbits.

  Dalton stumbled down rickety wooden steps and spilled out into a low-ceilinged, subterranean beer hall with dozens of Dead Rabbits fresh from the fight. The room was windowless and smoky, and smelled of spilled beer and piss. Still dazed, Dalton pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his mouth and nose. As his other senses returned, he saw the room was filled with row after row of long wooden tables and benches, upon which the Dead Rabbits heaved their injured to dress their wounds and ply them with whiskey. Beside the purple and white flag of the United Nations above the bar was a portrait of Yankee chief Benjamin Franklin, but not, Dalton noticed, a portrait of the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who’d co-founded the United Nations with Franklin all those years ago. This was Sportsman’s Hall, Kit Burns’ three-level liquor store, saloon, and subterranean amphitheater, where pugilists, dogs, and rats fought on a nightly basis—sometimes all at once.

  A pretty Yankee barmaid in a frayed and faded blue dress brought beers and bandages to a table beside Dalton, and their eyes met briefly. He smiled almost instinctively, the recently graduated university ladykiller in him rising to the surface.

  Dalton felt a knife point in his side, and the smile dropped from his face.

  “Who’re you, then?” a gruff voice asked at his ear.

  The pretty barmaid hurried away. Dalton reached a hand for the raygun in his pocket, but the knife jabbed him again.

  “I said who’re you?” The man leaning over his shoulder had the foulest breath Dalton had ever smelled.

  “Dalton Dent,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he was.

  “Well, I ain’t never heard of you,” the man said.

  “Ask Kit Burns,” Dalton said. “He knows me.” He didn’t, really, but Dalton had saved the man’s life, and Burns knew it. That ought to be enough to establish his credibility and earn a place in the gang, Dalton thought. At least long enough to take care of Mose.

  Or so he hoped.

  “We'll do that then,” the man said. He guided Dalton across the room, his knife still in Dalton's side, to where Kit Burns sat at the bar. “This one says you got him down close, Kit,”

  Burns eyed Dalton appraisingly, and Dalton did the same to the Dead Rabbits’ chief. Burns was cut from the same cloth as the rest his gang—always-dirty, dock-strong, hungry-thin—but this one had a ratty gold brocade vest on over his shirt and suspenders and a red feather in the band of his stovepipe hat. Kit Burns had pretensions.

  “I’m Dalton Dent, from Philadelphia.” That much was true, but the rest of his cover story was not. “I steal Tik Toks.”

  “What, an’ put ‘em in your bungs?” Kit Burns said. He got a hearty laugh from the rest of the Rabbits, but Dalton had no idea what a “bung” was.

  “Your pocket,” Burns said, seeing his confusion. The Five Points gangs had a rich, complicated slang, Dalton knew, and if he was going to survive here he’d need to pick up on it quickly.

  “No. I reprogram their talent cards and disable the safeties so they’ll do anything I tell them. Including kill a man, if I want,” Dalton said.

  That made the Rabbits get quiet. Tik Toks were expensive—airship expensive—and being able to steal one by reprogramming it was a skill no one else in all of the Five Points was likely to have.

  “I don’t see you with no bolt bucket now,” Burns said, his voice hard.

  “I had one. You saw him. We saved your life from that giant.”

  Kit Burns studied him a moment longer, then made his decree. “I never seen this Sam before in my life. Ease the cove, give him his consolation, and take his trunker for a swim. That means rob you, kill you, and dump your body in the Hudson River,” Burns explained helpfully. A roar of approval went up from the Dead Rabbits, and Jack and two other men dragged Dalton toward the door.

  “Wait! No!” Dalton cried.

  “Be a shame to kill him, Kit Burns, after everything you did to save him,” a woman said over the din. The men stopped dragging Dalton to the door, and the rest of the Rabbits got quiet. The woman who stepped out into the silence she’d created was like a thing from a nightmare. She was as tall and strong as any man in the bar and had more of a beard than some. Her hair was filthy and knotted like a rat’s nest, and she wore a man’s red work shirt, black suspenders, and a ripped old skirt over a pair of hobnailed black boots. Her fingers ended in long brass claws as fierce as any animal’s, and her teeth were sharpened to points. Dalton almost took her for a Manglespawn.

  “But that’s not what—” Dalton started to argue.

  “Deeked it with my own two day-lights, I did,” the woman said. “That great beast Mose was dead set on that boy
there, ready to quash him, when Kit Burns shifted the boy and klemmed his nicker in the old poger’s side!” She mimicked jabbing a knife into Mose, a wild look in her eyes. “The picaroon dragged him along, Kit’s frumper carving a great claret gash across his gam. Would have taken his whole leg off if the Coppers hadn’t come and bounced him with a raycannon.”

  “But that wasn’t—” Dalton began to say.

  “Can’t believe you’d go to all that trouble just to hoist the cull and stifle him now,” the woman told Burns.

  Kit Burns was thinking it over. The woman’s story, hard as it was for Dalton to follow, had certainly puffed him up. Burns hitched his thumbs in the armholes of his vest and nodded magnanimously. “The dancer can linger,” Burns said. “His bolt bucket too, if it shows its brass knob. Least I can do after saving his life. You smack the Black Joke and promise to be a Dead Rabbit ‘til you croak, dancer?”

  Dalton was bewildered. Why did Burns keep calling him a dancer, and what was this Black Joke he was supposed to smack?

  “You swear allegiance to the gang, archduke?” the ugly woman asked him.

  “Y-yes,” Dalton said.

  The Rabbits cheered as lustily as they had when he’d been condemned to die, that decree apparently rescinded and already forgotten. A Dead Rabbit put a mug of beer in his hand and plunked him down at a table, and Dalton was officially a member of the gang.

  The after-riot party and medical triage hit full swing when a fiddle player and a surgeon were fetched. Dalton was just about to go searching for Mr. Rivets, fearing him lying broken in an alley somewhere in the Five Points, street urchins disassembling him for scrap metal, when the machine man ticked in through the back door.

  “Mr. Rivets!” Dalton called, and the machine man joined him where he sat. “Mr. Rivets, what happened to you? Are you all right?”

  “I am dented, but undaunted, Master Dent,” said Mr. Rivets. “I believe that is the first time I have ever flown without my Airship Pilot talent card in. It is not an experience I am eager to repeat. I am glad however that you survived the fracas, and that our plan to infiltrate the Dead Rabbits gang has apparently been successful.”