Beneath Ceaseless Skies #160

by M. Bennardo

  But here he was, and this man—this Roach! this whatever-he-was!—seemed to cradle his life in his hands. Might Warren truly survive beyond the morning light? If he did consent to reach across that desk and take Roach’s hand in his own—

  “Well?” barked Roach. “I asked what you plan to do.”

  Warren shuddered and turned half away, trying to press down the reasonless terror in his chest. “Delope, I suppose. Discharge into the mud. I’ve no desire to kill the boy.”

  Roach sidled closer, scuttling crab-like around the side of the desk. Warren sucked his breath in sharply. The clicking—the chittering—the ticking of chitinous claws! How could anyone not hear it? How could anyone claim not to notice?

  “But could you?” Roach’s voice now took on a sickening cajoling tone. A black light shone in his eyes, and Warren was startled to realize that they had no color to them at all. They were voids of black, from the center of the pupil to the edge of the iris. “Could you shoot him if you chose?”

  Warren’s face flushed. “You can’t be serious!”

  “You needn’t kill him—so long as you can lodge the ball in him. You know these barbarian surgeons—” Roach waved a hand and grinned maliciously. “Infection, inflammation—if you can get the ball in him, we can finish the job.”

  Blood pounded in Warren’s ears. So this was to be the cost of his favor! A dishonest vote would have been bad enough. But to shoot a man? Good God! Warren shook his head solemnly and silently.

  Roach sneered, dropping back down into his chair once more as every hint of the beetle seemed to evaporate at once, leaving just an old, puffy, tired, hateful man. A man obsessed with power, obsessed with control. “Then you’ll die. I’ve no use for you if you won’t deal fairly.”

  “Won’t deal fairly...?” Stars exploded behind Warren’s eyes and blood pounded in his temples. He had believed Roach when the man had said that he could be saved. And now—the chance snatched away again! Nothing felt real anymore. Not even the earth seemed solid under his feet. “But—but this is extraordinary! Perverse!”

  Roach didn’t even look up. Instead, he began sifting through a pile of correspondence on his desk. “Your request, Senator Warren, is extraordinary. Perverse, as you say. How to keep a ball fired from a pistol by a crack marksman from entering your breast? We know how to do it—we do, we do! But it’s no easy thing, be assured.”

  Warren gritted his teeth. Revulsion and fear wrestled in his heart. Did Roach want him to beg? To debase himself? Warren trembled at the thought—and yet—and yet—

  Neither could he yet bear to turn toward the door—and to death! How could he walk out while still any chance remained? He had to say something, if only to reclaim his dignity!

  “I suppose I should have expected this,” Warren sputtered. “This kind of extortion from a slave-driver.”

  “Slave-driver!” Roach’s head jerked up, his eyes flared open—those dark black eyes! His mouth working nervously—not lips and cheeks, but mandibles again, grinding and churning above his chest. “If only it could be as simple as that!”

  “Do you deny it?” Warren was desperate to extract something from Roach now, some human reaction. It didn’t matter what—anger, doubt, contrition, hate. Anything to score any point, anything to leave his mark on Roach! “That’s what your so-called Missouri Compromise is for, isn’t it? To protect the cotton and tobacco planters. But I suppose they pay you handsomely enough.”

  “Pay?” screeched Roach, rising swiftly. Warren imagined he could see the underside of the thorax under Roach’s jacket and waistcoat now—the dappled underbelly, the coarse hairs studding the segmentation, the third pair of limbs straining and stretching to break free of the shirt and jacket that bound them to the body—

  “They? Pay us!” Reaching down into the desk, Roach yanked open a drawer and pulled out a heaping handful of gold coins. “Pay us!” His claws dipped into the drawer, flinging the coins at Warren, pelting him with a shower of gold. “We could mint a million of these if we wished! A thousand million!”

  Warren cringed before the hail of coins, but Roach was already reaching into the drawer for more ammunition. He hurled the coins with two hands, keeping up a steady and contemptuous pelting.

  “Pay us! You’re more stupid than we guessed, if you haven’t realized yet—! You, a United States senator, privy to this very club, privy to our very person.” Roach stopped pitching coins at last and leaned over the desk. “Don’t you know yet it is we who pay, and you who grub for it?”

  And the chill of death descended over Warren. All his pride, all his anger—it all dissolved into abject fear. He had dared to provoke the monster and now it stood unmasked before him!

  “Damn you,” whispered Warren. The floor was littered with coins now, and his arms and hands ached from where the heavy pieces had struck him.

  “You do what we wish because we pay you.” Roach snorted. “Why do you think these trinkets exist? These useless tokens made of shiny metal. Idiot! Why should we bother to drive you as slaves when we can place a pile of these before you, and let you drive yourselves? And harder than we should ever dare!”

  Roach slumped back into his chair again. He wiped his face with his red handkerchief, mopping up the spittle that flecked his lips and cheeks before he continued.

  “If only you knew, oh if only you knew—! The heartbreak and the frustration of leading and coaxing and wheedling your stupid kind onward, upward, out of brutishness and into something half-resembling civilization—! The strain of this, these endless quibbling and negotiating over the smallest tactics, when so much more hangs in the balance!”

  Warren pressed himself back against the wall, turning away, barely able to bear the sight of Roach any longer without shuddering in horror. Whether the man was what he seemed to be or not—it didn’t even matter anymore. He was power! He was control! And Warren had always been too weak to stand up to that.

  “What do you know of all our failed experiments? All that the greed and idiocy of your kind has ruined already? The effort gone, wasted! Egypt, Babylon, China. Greece and Rome. France and Spain and England!”

  “Why not Atlantis too?” asked Warren acidly, unable to stop himself from jabbing back, so appalled was he at the sudden expansion of Roach’s ego.

  “Yes,” hissed Roach. “And others you don’t even have names for.” He pounded the desk. “And this country, too, soon enough, if we permit you to have your way—permit you to tear it apart by passing whatever laws you like. If we permit you to throw the world back into war, back into another Dark Age!”

  Roach writhed, as if reliving the accumulated agonies of history, his face still pale but his eyes burning. “Rise and fall, rise and fall—thousands of years of darkness. Those wasted, empty centuries! If only we were numerous enough yet, if only we could dispense with you at last! If only we could take our hand off the tiller for one moment of rest after all this time, without the ship dashing to pieces against the rocks—!”

  At last, Warren found his voice. “What then?”

  Roach merely looked back with empty staring eyes, his black irises dull and wistful now, the passion suddenly drained out of them. “What then,” he whispered. “You have no inkling... You have no inkling how long we have worked, how long we have yearned. You have no idea how far we still are from the homes of our ancestors—! From bringing our brothers and sisters up here, into the light, with us—!”

  Then Roach cut off in another strangled, inarticulate sound. He still rocked slowly in his chair, but soon his fury seemed to be spent. His face went slack and his body relaxed, his human qualities returning as his emotion dimmed. His eyes glazed over as he seemed to stare into the distance. Then, all at once, he snapped back to the present and said, “I must know immediately.”

  Roach spoke dispassionately, mechanically. His voice was all coldness and hatred now, and Warren felt he would do anything the man said—anything to get out of that hole.

  “Tell me now—will you
shoot Caxton or will you die?”

  * * *

  Dawn broke over the dueling grounds at Bladensburg Grove in successive waves of grey. Warren, unkempt and unshaved, stood alone in misery under a willow tree by the riverbank. He was numb, sick, exhausted. He hadn’t slept all night, hadn’t even been to his lodgings, preferring instead to walk numbly from Funkstown straight to assigned place.

  With him, he had carried a bright ball of fear in his chest that had slowly hardened and congealed as the hills lightened imperceptibly around him. By the time Warren saw a cluster of figures crossing the field toward the dueling grounds, this fear had sunk deep into his very tissue and blood.

  Those approaching were three in number. One was clearly Dardnell, Warren’s own secretary and second. He carried a brace of pistols slung between himself and another man—no doubt Caxton’s second. And the third figure? The small leather bag and portable table he carried suggested a surgeon.

  But who could the surgeon be? The man did seem familiar, but Warren had thought that Dardnell would have insisted on Jenkins—an old, half-broken fellow who had seen mangled men beyond counting in the War of Independence and Madison’s War alike. Jenkins was a safe enough choice—not one to tell tales, even when drinking, and able to handle anything from an emergency amputation on down, if he was sober enough to hold the saw steady.

  But this fellow couldn’t be Jenkins. He was too big, too heavy. His gait was too slow. His face—

  Warren sucked in his breath as his stomach dropped. It wasn’t Jenkins at all following the seconds. No, it was that great stupid porter from the Cockroach Club, dressed now in a badly tailored suit now instead of club livery.

  And indeed, the porter was presented to Warren—incongruously! ridiculously!—in the character of assistant surgeon. The dullard set up his portable table under the willow tree and spread out his implements indifferently on its surface. Knives, lancets, saws, and vises all lay in a reckless jumble, while the false surgeon himself stood by, seemingly uninterested in everything around him, not even swatting the flies away from the instruments but merely daubing his pale face with a bright red silk handkerchief.

  Roach’s handkerchief! Or another just like it. But was that meant as some kind of signal to Warren? As if the porter himself weren’t obvious enough! Or was it just the handkerchief that went with the livery of the Cockroach Club? An oversight—a forgotten element of the costume? Warren couldn’t stop from staring at the spectacle the fool was making.

  “Jenkins is sleeping off his brandy,” said Dardnell. “But I’m assured that his assistant is up to the task.”

  Warren almost laughed aloud. What appalling artlessness! Good God, did Roach always operate so transparently? Or was it because Warren had given him so little time to prepare the scheme? Either way, the effect was blood-chilling. Years of getting his own way had evidently given Roach such contempt for the rest of the world that he barely felt it necessary to conceal his hand when tipping the scales.

  But that porter, of all people! In the open, he air looked even more like a painted clown than ever. Or like a massive, doddering beetle perched on its hind legs!

  Suddenly, Warren bit his own thumb, hard and sharp, images from his nightmare flashing unbidden before him. Those huge waxen grubs, sniffing and nosing about—but hundreds of them now. Thousands! Their pulsing bodies filling the halls of the Cockroach Club, then crowding the streets of Washington, overwhelming every house and shop, then finally, with Roach himself laughing bloodthirstily at their backs—

  “No, no, no,” Warren muttered, shaking his head and pushing the image from his mind. That had merely been a dream. The real horror was different—and far worse in its way.

  Yes, he had promised to Roach that he would shoot Caxton. And then, of course, that oafish false surgeon would step in and—

  Warren shuddered. “It would be a mercy to kill him outright.”

  “Pardon, Senator?” Dardnell was looking at him inquisitively.

  Warren suddenly wondered whether Dardnell also knew that the outcome of the duel had been pre-determined. Had Roach gotten to him as well? Or had Roach always had him? Was Dardnell following orders too, or was he an unwitting pawn in the game?

  “I only said, let’s hope we won’t need the surgeon.”

  Dardnell shook his head. “Or that we won’t need him much, you mean. I doubt Caxton will be satisfied until blood has been drawn on one side or another.”

  “Is he here? Where is he?”

  But Warren had already caught sight of a young man in an impeccable brown coat, a shock of thick black curls covering his head, standing alone a little farther down the riverbank. He had a handsome profile, a clear complexion, a serious brooding brow.

  Yes, that was Caxton. His second had left him alone for a moment, gone to pace the field, stiffly measuring out the positions where the two of them would stand as they exchanged fire.

  “Your pistol, Senator.” Warren was suddenly aware that Dardnell was handing him his weapon, which he grasped by the barrel, as he had been told to do. “It’s loaded and ready—careful not to discharge it. You won’t get another charge until after the first shot.”

  “Is it time already?”

  Caxton’s second had stopped his pacing, having plunged two stakes into the soft earth. Caxton was drifting easily out to the field toward one of them, a pistol in his hand as well. Dardnell pushed Warren gently along in the same direction, away from the safety of the willow.

  “Ten paces, is it?” asked Warren, eyeing the distance between himself and Caxton. “It looks a bit further than I expected.”

  “You’ll find it close enough.”

  Yes, Warren supposed he would. If only Caxton wouldn’t stand there, staring darkly like that, his brow knitted into a stormcloud over his eyes. Those eyes were too far away to read now, but no doubt they were still bright with anger and wounded pride.

  Caxton shifted his pistol to his firing hand. Warren fumbled about and completed the same maneuver, feeling as he did so as if all the blood in his body poured from one side to the other, every nerve from his fingertips to his toes suddenly growing sensitive and heavy.

  Next came the false surgeon up from under the tree, standing just out of the line of fire, still toying with that damned red handkerchief. Had that idiot been the one to arrange things? Or was he simply there to make sure that Warren held up his end of the bargain?

  The bargain—oh God! Warren felt a surge of horror. He would have to do it. He would truly have to do it—or face the wrath of Roach.

  “The parties will duel with pistols at ten paces,” Dardnell called out loudly. “The gentlemen shall wait for me to give the word ‘Fire’, upon which they will be at liberty to present their arms and fire one shot each.”

  Warren’s hand twitched and he had a sudden impulse to drop his pistol, but he held it firm. Time itched on slowly, with no sound but the tinkling of the creek on the other side of the willow.

  Blood Run, they called it—and blood red it had run before.

  “Fire!”

  For a moment, nothing happened. But Warren soon saw Caxton’s arm rising up smoothly, the barrel of his pistol leveling. At ten paces, the opening of the barrel ought to have been a mere speck—but to Warren it seemed a great hungering hole, immense in size.

  Barely a half second had passed. Warren himself hadn’t even raised his hand yet. Stupidly, he had stood still, watching Caxton.

  Warren opened his mouth—to speak, to protest, to apologize, something!

  But before he could think of anything to say, the pistol in Caxton’s hand barked, and a cloud of blue smoke erupted at the back of its breach. Warren gritted his teeth and shut his eyes, a line of sweat suddenly pricking his scalp. He waited for the pain or shock or whatever it was that people felt when they were struck by a ball. He imagined it would be like a white hot poker rammed home and the tip broken off inside—

  “Are you hit, Senator?” asked Dardnell quietly.

  Wa
rren found his breath again and exhaled. The ball must have passed somehow, not touching him. But he hadn’t heard it, hadn’t felt it. Had Caxton really fired?

  “I don’t think so.” Warren shifted on his feet, feeling his body move under his clothes. Everything felt right. Everything felt in place. A heavy drop of sweat ran down the back of his neck, but there seemed to be no blood running anywhere. “Yes, I’m all right.”

  “It looked like a misfire,” murmured Dardnell. “His main charge didn’t go off, but his ignition charge might still be smoldering. Even now, a lingering spark might yet fire the ball.”

  And sure enough, through the smoke at the other end of the field, Warren could see Caxton’s hand still holding the pistol up—shaking in fury and frustration. And he himself, of course, was expected to stand there! To stand and wait until either it was certain the gun wouldn’t fire or until he put his own ball in Caxton instead. Anything else would be against form—an unmanly breach of conduct!

  But surely this meant that Roach had kept his promise. The gun was dead, and would fire no balls—at least not on this charge. Warren would have time, all the time he would need. Slowly, he raised his own hand, half-surprised to find that it still clutched a pistol. He pointed the cocked flint somewhere in line with the center of the brown jacket, just under the pistol that was still pointed at him.

  “Steady, Senator,” said Dardnell.

  If he drew blood, the seconds would be bound to stop the duel. Even a non-fatal wound would do it. But no! With that false surgeon standing by, even the slightest nick on Caxton’s body would prove eventually fatal. Any shot now would be a shot to kill.

  Warren breathed deep and steadied his arm. His pistol had been jumping in all directions, but somehow he brought it under control. Meanwhile, Caxton stood like a statue, his face wreathed in drifting smoke, but his pistol still presented straight ahead, waiting in vain for the discharge that they all knew would never come.

  Warren shifted his gaze, picking out the dumb-faced porter on the sidelines, the red handkerchief pressed against his round mouth. There was no emotion on the man’s face. His expression truly could have been painted on, like a doll or a puppet. And somewhere behind him, unseen in the shadows, as behind a hundred or a thousand other similar puppets all over the country, stood Roach, desperately tugging the strings and mouthing orders.