Hero of the Five Points

by Alan Gratz

  Mr. Rivets’ indignant subroutine raised his chin. “Such an abomination would be a discredit to the service, sir,” he said.

  “I don’t think he cares, Mr. Rivets,” Dalton told him. “Come on.”

  Dalton raced for the lektric generator, letting Edison escape to his airship. Dalton scanned the machine looking for some way to switch it off, but he knew nothing about the operation of such things.

  “If you would allow me, sir?” Mr. Rivets asked.

  Dalton backed away, and Mr. Rivets spun one of his heavy brass arms like a windmill, smashing it into the generator. It exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke. Dalton hurried to the edge of the roof. He was just in time to see a hulking, bulging creature ten times more monstrous than Mose had ever been lope off into the shadows of the Five Points’ backstreets. Above them, Edison’s airship turned in the wind and followed it. Across the street, the untended Mantotohpa Tannery collapsed in on itself in a heap of burning timbers.

  “Not my best day ever, Mr. Rivets,” Dalton said.

  “No, sir,” said Mr. Rivets.

  Mose did not make another appearance in the coming days, even in a fight between the Bowery Boys and the Shawnee Roach Guards of the Five Points. The evidence of his escape from the well was impossible to ignore though, and all through the Sixth Ward the gangs whispered rumors about where he had gone, and what he had become. If the legends about Mose had been tall before, they were colossal now. When the treacherous rocks of Hells Gate tore a gash in the side of a submarine bound for Acadia, it was said to have been bitten by Mose, who took it for a passing minnow as he lurked in the harbor. A crumbling tenement on Canal Street had collapsed when Mose tried to sit on it. Mose had set the tannery on fire to light his cigar, which itself was the size of the Emartha Machine Man Building. Such was the gangs’ growing fear of Mose that the Roach Guards had broken and run from their battle with the Boys at the mere cry of his name.

  Dalton was shocked to see a handful of Roach Guards at the Sportsman’s Hall when he came in with Mr. Rivets one night. Even more surprising, the Roach Guards were staring warily across the room at another handful of Powhatan belonging to the Chichester gang. The Cherokee of the Plug Uglies and the Muskogee of the Charlestonians glared at each other from either side of a long table, hands on their rayguns, and the Seminoles of the Forty Thieves and the Illini of the Shirt Tails gang watched everyone from the shadows. With the half a dozen or so Yankees of the Dead Rabbits about, they almost had all the founding tribes of the United Nations, Dalton thought wryly. Though by the looks of it, this meeting would end far differently than the one Brant and Franklin had orchestrated so long ago.

  “What’s going on?” Dalton asked Agatha as he slipped into a booth.

  Agatha set a mug of beer on the table for him. “Meeting of the Five Points gangs,” she whispered. “Kit Burns called the scratch, but it was Maggie give him the notion.”

  “Surely this cannot be a good idea,” said Mr. Rivets.

  Dalton agreed. He took his beer with him to stand with Hellcat Maggie in the corner.

  “You’re to thank for this insanity?” he said.

  “Aye,” she growled. “This can’t continue. Mose is a jack-cove. It’s all bob you can’t stubble the old poger, so we’ll quash him ourselves.”

  “You must be joking,” Dalton told her. “The Rabbits and Uglies couldn’t even put out a fire together!”

  “Because of that slubberdegullion!” Maggie spat.

  “The Five Points gangs will be too busy ‘quashing’ each other to bother with Mose, and you know it,” Dalton argued. “Listen, I saw Mose do something strange the other day that might give us an angle on him—”

  “You all know why we’re here, and it’s time we jobbed it,” Kit Burns announced, calling the room to order. “I’m proposing a temporary alliance between the Five Points gangs. A truce. Just until we give that jazey Mose his consolation.”

  That prompted murmuring among the gangs, and Kit Burns let them hold their powwows.

  “Look, even if they agree to this, how will you do it?” Dalton whispered to Maggie. “You’ve tried rayguns and brickbats. I drowned him. Edison lektricuted him. Nothing’s worked. But Mose has this doll, and I was thinking—”

  “Kit Burns is right!” Maggie said, launching herself into the larger conversation. “Let’s pig together and quash the cove!”

  “That would certainly be a waste,” said a smooth voice from the doorway. Thomas Edison stepped into the room, black suit, silver watch chain, black cane, and all.

  A Dead Rabbit slid out of the shadows behind him with a knife.

  “Don’t!” Dalton warned, but he was too late. Edison spun and put the tip of his cane to the Dead Rabbit, lektrocuting him. The Rabbit fell writhing to the floor, and the gangsters around Edison stepped back.

  Mr. Rivets ticked up behind Dalton. “I see Mr. Edison carries a spare cane,” he said. “Shall I dispense with it too, sir?”

  “I mean no trouble,” Edison said, raising his arms in mock surrender. “Quite the opposite. I come with what I think will be a profitable arrangement for all of us concerning the monster.”

  “Don’t listen to him! No good will come of anything this man tells you,” Dalton said.

  “This is my bar, and my gang,” Kit Burns told Dalton. “I call the shots here. We’ll cheese what the cove has to say. Then we’ll quash him and take all his dots and dibs.”

  That got a laugh from the other gangsters. Even Edison smiled.

  “It’s your establishment, and your territory, as you say. But instead of killing the beast, I was hoping you might capture it for me instead.”

  Kit Burns looked around wide-eyed at the other gangsters. “Oho. You was hoping we would capture it for you, was you? And just why would we do that?”

  “Because,” said Edison, “I will pay the person or persons who brings the monster to me alive the sum of ten thousand dollars.”

  You could hear a cotter pin drop in the Sportsman’s Hall as Edison stuck a piece of paper to the community board. “I am leaving the address of the pneumatic post office box at which you can contact me, should you manage to subdue the creature. I have also taken out classified advertisements in the New Rome Times and the New Rome Sun. Send word when you have him, and I will come to collect—and to pay.”

  Edison left, but hardly anyone paid attention. The gangs all had their heads bent together, discussing the prospect of ten thousand dollars in their pockets. Hellcat Maggie could feel the room slipping away.

  “We still ought to mob together!” she told them. “No one gang can do it alone!”

  “And who gets the cove’s honey then?” one of the Roach Guards said. “The Dead Rabbits?”

  “They probably knew about it already,” a Charlestonian said.

  “Was that your game all along?” a Shirt Tail asked. “Use us to do the grabble for you, then get fat on the flash-man’s mint when you turned the monster in?”

  “No!” Maggie said. “We need to quash him. He can’t be caught!”

  “The Dead Rabbits can catch him, just you see,” Kit Burns told Maggie, and all hope for her plan was lost. She had told Kit Burns what to do in his own bar, with his own gang, and Kit Burns was his own man and made his own decisions, even if they were foolish ones that were going to get him killed.

  “Just see if we don’t nab him first!” said a Plug Uglie.

  A Cherokee pushed a Muskogee, a Powhatan punched a Shawnee, and Sportsman’s Hall was suddenly a battlefield. Chairs flew. Knives slashed. Rayguns flared. Those who didn’t fight sprinted out the exits to spread the word: catch Mose, earn a cool ten thousand dollars.

  “Don’t! Stop!” Dalton cried, trying to be heard above the melee. “Edison’s a madman! He wants the monster to experiment on. To make more monsters! You can’t help him!”

  Dalton barely dodged a flying brick. Agatha grabbed him and pulled him beneath a table.

  “It’s no use,” she told him. “In an h
our, every gang in Five Points will be moving on the Bowery Boys. It’ll be all-out war. New Rome will burn!”

  “We have to get to Mose first,” Dalton told her. “If we can kill him, they’ll have nothing to fight over.”

  “But how?” Agatha asked. “What are you going to do, drop a building on him?”

  “No,” Dalton said. “No—but that does give me an idea. Come on.”

  It took far less than an hour for word of Edison’s offer to spread through the Five Points. By the time Dalton had found the right dress and wig for Agatha, open warfare had descended on Paradise Square. The Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, the Shirt Tails and Forty Thieves, the Chichesters and Charlestonians and Roach Guards, they all met at the crossroads of the Five Points with their arsenals of bricks and knives and hatchets and aether pistols, and the cobblestones ran red with blood. And they weren’t the only ones touched by the madness—from every hovel and tenement, every poorhouse and slum came the wretched masses, for whom the promise of ten thousand dollars was like a golden airship hovering just out of reach, ready to fly them away from the miserable desolation of their lives.

  Dalton pulled Agatha by the hand past cutthroats and looters toward the heart of the Five Points.

  “Dalton, can this really work?” she asked him. “Do you really think Mose will follow me just because I’m dressed up like his dolly?”

  “I wish I knew,” Dalton told her. “The brute has a brain the size of a peanut—which might mean he’ll conflate the two of you and think you’re his doll. Or it might mean he’s so stupid he can’t make the connection. If he does see you as his doll, lead him up to the roof of Nokosi’s Department Store, and we’ll knock him off with the crane they use to unload airships.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Agatha asked.

  “Run,” Dalton told her. “Fast. I’m sorry, Agatha, it’s the only way I can think to kill him. But we have to try. If we don’t he’ll kill everyone in the Five Points. Worse, if Edison gets his hands on him—”

  “I know, I know,” Agatha said. “I said I’d do it.”

  At Skenandoa Street they found Mr. Rivets tossing buckets of water on one of a dozen buildings the mob had set fire to.

  “Mr. Rivets! Where are the police? The city’s Tik Tok firemen?” Dalton asked.

  “They have erected barricades around the Five Points, sir, and are permitting no one in or out.” Mr. Rivets paused to bat away a hatchet-wielding Shirt Tail, then continued. “They seem to be willing to let the inhabitants of the Five Points slums exterminate themselves and burn all the tenements down.”

  “Zeus’s beard,” Dalton said. “There are thousands of innocent people in the Sixth Ward! And do they expect the fires to just politely stop at the edge of the Five Points and burn no farther?”

  “It does stretch credulity, sir.”

  “Has Mose put in an appearance yet?”

  “I believe you’ll find him taking a stroll in Paradise Square, sir.”

  Dalton, Agatha, and Mr. Rivets pushed on to the center of the Five Points, where Mose appeared to be taking on the entire Sixth Ward at once. People in the streets attacked him with whatever they had—bricks, bottles, shovels, pitchforks, butcher’s cleavers, hatchets, aether pistols—but Mose batted them all away. He moved through the square like a tornado, smashing and bashing and stomping anything in his path. The lektrical shock had unhinged something in him, Dalton guessed. Broken that small part of him that had been human. He operated now like a terrible machine of war, killing indiscriminately.

  The Five Point gangs stood the best chance of tackling Mose together, but they fought separately, sometimes even against each other, all in hopes of winning Edison’s bounty. Mose killed them all. Not at once, but slowly, methodically. Caving in their skulls and stomping out their guts and cleaving them in half as they came at him. Dalton watched as Mose pulled Kit Burns’ arms from their sockets one at a time.

  “Together! We have to mob together!” Hellcat Maggie cried, but no one was listening to her. A Seminole woman of the Forty Thieves jumped her from behind, and they tumbled through the street, gouging and biting at each other while the Five Points burned.

  “All right,” Dalton said. “Let’s see if we can get Mose’s attention.”

  Agatha grabbed his arm. “Dalton, the children! Look! I moved them out of the tunnels into the Old Brewery on Cross Street, and it’s on fire!”

  Agatha ran for the building, and Dalton and Mr. Rivets followed her. The Old Brewery was three stories tall and built like an Iroquois longhouse, stretching out over two city blocks. Its thatch roof was on fire, and flames poured out of an open doorway on the first floor. Children hung out the third floor windows, wailing and coughing and crying out for help.

  “Help! Oh, help! Someone help!” Agatha cried out to the warring mob in Paradise Square, but no one listened. She tried to go in herself, but Dalton pulled her back before the flames scorched her.

  “Oh, Dalton—it’s my fault!” she said, burying her head in Dalton’s shoulder so she wouldn’t have to watch. “I told them to hide inside and not to come out for anything, and now they’re going to die!”

  “Allow me, miss,” Mr. Rivets said. “My brass gears can survive more exposure to the conflagration than your organs can.”

  Mr. Rivets marched into the burning building and was swallowed by the flames.

  “I’ll find a fire engine,” Dalton said. He turned to run and found himself face to knee with Mose. Dalton froze, wondering what it would feel like when Mose plucked his arms and legs from their sockets, but to his surprise the giant only batted him away and strode toward the door of the Old Brewery.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Agatha said. “Mose, you stop right there!”

  The hulking giant turned on her, eyes wild, nostrils flaring like the steam valves on a locomotive.

  “Please,” Agatha added meekly.

  The wild look in Mose’s eyes softened, and he put a hand to the pocket of the ragged, misshapen pants he still wore.

  “The doll,” Dalton whispered. “He’s making the connection!”

  “You—you leave those children alone,” Agatha said.

  Mose swung his head around to look at the children screaming in the windows. His brows furrowed in anger again, and he charged into the burning building, knocking an enormous hole in the wall where the door had been.

  “No!” Agatha cried. “No—Dalton, he’ll quash them! He’ll quash them all!”

  Tihkoosue, Mose’s tiny companion, came running up to them from Paradise Square. “Did I just see that dromedary run inside a burning building?”

  Dalton turned on the dwarf. “He’s going to kill the children!”

  “Kill the children?” Tihkoosue said. “Are you cranky?”

  Mose burst back through the hole in the wall, startling them all. His skin was charred black and his hair and pants were on fire, and he was hunched over something protectively. He went down on one knee in front of Agatha and opened his massive arms, and five little children spilled out. Three of them were unconscious from the smoke, but otherwise none of them were hurt.

  “He—he saved them,” Dalton said.

  Agatha bent to tend to the children, tears of relief running down her face.

  Mose turned to go back inside.

  “Don’t, you big knuckle-dragger!” Tihkoosue cried. “You’ll burn up!” The dwarf wrapped himself around the giant’s leg, but Mose plucked him off like a tick and set him aside before disappearing again into the fire.

  Mr. Rivets came out next, carrying a single child in his arms. He handed him off to Agatha, his brass hull ticking. “I’m afraid I’ll have to wait some time before I can go back inside,” he told them, “or else I’ll be too hot to safely carry a child.”

  “I’ll fetch some water to cool you down,” Dalton said.

  He needn’t have bothered. Before Mr. Rivets was cool enough to go back inside, Mose had brought out two more armloads of children, his naked body burned more an
d more horribly each time. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, like a golem, he did the same thing over and over again, always without thought or concern for himself.

  “That’s the last of the children who were inside,” Mr. Rivets said when Mose deposited his most recent armful, and Agatha did a quick headcount to confirm it.

  Mose turned to go back inside the building.

  “Hey, you big booby!” Tihkoosue said. “Didn’t ya hear ‘em? There’s no more squeakers inside! You don’t have to go!”

  “You did good, Mose,” Agatha said gently, like she was talking to a child. She still wore the blue dress and the blond wig, which seemed to soothe the monster. She reached out a hand to touch him, but drew back from the awful red blisters all over his skin. “You did real good. But you mustn’t go back in there again. You’ll die.”

  Mose didn’t listen. Or perhaps he was too far gone to understand. Lektrocuted, mutated, and brain-addled, blistered and burnt and scarred, Mose dragged himself slowly, wearily, back into the Old Brewery. Tihkoosue clung to him, weeping and begging him not to go back inside. Mr. Rivets had to pull him off to keep him from being swallowed up with Mose in the firestorm.

  They waited in the street for what seemed like an eternity—Dalton, Agatha, Tihkoosue, and the children—but Mose never reappeared. Timbers snapped and cracked, the roof folded, and the Old Brewery fell in on itself in an avalanche of cinders and fire and ash.

  Dalton and Agatha held each other, surrounded by the children Mose had saved. Mr. Rivets removed his brass bowler hat. Tihkoosue sat down in the middle of the street and sobbed.

  “The big dumb galoot,” he said through his tears. “That Mose was the only friend I ever had.”

  There were a hundred stories told in the streets of the Five Points about the giant gangster Mose. That he was fifteen feet tall and ten feet wide; that he walked the streets naked, for an entire bolt of cloth could not clothe him; that he had the strength of a hundred men. Mose had single-handedly cleaned up the gangs of the Five Points and the Bowery, making the Sixth Ward safe again. Mose had tricked an Astor Place dandy out of ten thousand dollars. Mose had saved a beautiful cigar girl from molesters in a back alley. Mose had rescued a hundred babies from a burning hospital, carrying them out in great armfuls a dozen at a time. Mose became a folk hero to the Sixth Ward’s poor and destitute, the star of musicals that played to packed houses at Astor Theater uptown. Mose the Fireman. Mose the Bowery Boy. Mose the Hero of the Five Points.