Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  The thing opened its black jaw and keened at him. The sound was filled with an unnatural pain. Nuri could hear the hunger in the sound. He couldn’t separate the noise into words; he suspected the thing had no tongue, but he could almost understand what it was saying.

  Let me feed.

  Nuri scrambled backward, away from the thing.

  It tried to follow, but it moved slowly, pulling itself along the ground with the single arm. The other arm hung loose at its side, little more than blackened bone. Nuri outdistanced the thing and reached his gun. He kept backing into the darkness and kept the gun trained on the thing.

  Nuri managed to get a dozen yards away, and the thing stopped moving. It began keening again, louder than ever. It seemed to have lost track of him.

  Nuri was about to stand up, as soon as his heart stopped racing, when the voices approached. Nuri looked toward the dying fire, and saw four silhouettes walking toward the corpse through the rain. The one in the lead carried an ax.

  Instead of standing up, Nuri lowered himself flush with the mud, hiding in the ditch where he found himself. He watched the quartet approach the still-keening corpse. Even though the thing still moved, splashing around itself with its single arm, none of the four showed any reaction. They walked on, businesslike, as if an animate corpse was no big deal for them.

  In another flash of lightning, Nuri could see the face of the lead man, with the ax. It was Simon Aristaeus, the man who had shot him in Van Sweringen’s train car. He led three other men whose faces he still couldn’t make out in the darkness.

  “What a frigging mess,” he heard one of the anonymous ones say as they closed on the still-moving body. “We lost, what, four?”

  Aristaeus shook his head and said, “And we got five. Six counting him.” Aristaeus waved the ax in the direction of the corpse. “Not a bad night’s work.”

  Another one of Aristaeus’ followers said, “And at this rate we’ll never get them all. And burning everything is damn messy. What if the cops see us?”

  “Then we have to kill some cops,” Aristaeus said, walking around so he was behind the thrashing creature. The thing had become even more animated, as if it knew what was coming. Unfortunately for it, the more frantic its movement, the less effective it was. It seemed to have lost not only its one arm, but most of its legs. It couldn’t move more than a foot before Aristaeus stepped up behind it and placed his foot in the center of its back. The weight pushed the blackened skull into the mud, muffling the thing’s cries.

  “Besides,” Aristaeus said, as he handed the ax to one of the others, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeves, “if the Master has his way, soon the cops will be emptying these hoovervilles for us.” He traded the jacket for the ax.

  “Why would the cops do that?” one of the others asked.

  “They’re looking for a maniac who’s lopping off people’s heads, don’t you read the papers?” With that, Aristaeus swung the ax in a wide arc down toward the corpse. Nuri couldn’t tear his gaze away as the blade descended on the pinned thing’s neck. The ax came down with such force that the creature’s neck barely slowed its progress, its momentum continuing its arc on the other side of the body.

  Aristaeus rested the ax on his shoulder, and stepped forward to kick the head away from the body. It rolled a few feet before stopping, its eyeless sockets pointed at the sky.

  The corpse was now only a corpse; it neither cried nor moved.

  “So why would they roust the hobos around here?”

  Aristaeus walked over to the head and crouched by it. “They can’t identify any of the bodies, and the ones they could are from the Roaring Third. They’re sure that their maniac takes his victims from the worthless garbage around here. If they don’t find their maniac, and they panic enough, they’ll end up rousting them. Incidentally rousting the last hiding place for the Master’s enemies.”

  “Almost ironic,” one of the ones in the dark said.

  “Tito,” Aristaeus said, “I didn’t picture you as one for such big words.”

  “Fuck yourself,” came the response.

  “This is one less bloodsucker who’s catching a train out of town.” Aristaeus bent over and picked up the head. It was now completely inert and more skull-like than ever. He turned it so it faced the others. “Fire,” Aristaeus said, “the great equalizer.”

  “I still think it’s a frigging mess.”

  Aristaeus stood up and handed the skull to the speaker. “That might have belonged to someone over two centuries old. You think we could have taken him without torching everything?”

  “If he was old and powerful,” said the man now holding the skull. “For all we know he could have been turned yesterday.”

  Aristaeus laughed and took back his jacket from the one he called Tito. “Well if he’d been turned yesterday, I doubt he’d be moving after we torched him. Besides, that’s what an equalizer means; we don’t have to care about things like age and power—now let the zombie get the body.” Aristaeus craned his neck so he looked past his first two companions at the one who hadn’t spoken. “Come over here.”

  The last member of the quartet walked forward, reached down, and grabbed the body by the shoulders. In another flash of lightning, Nuri saw his face.

  It was Stefan.

  Nuri sucked in a gasp and tried to push himself flatter into the mud. Pale and drawn, wearing a blank expression, but it was Stefan. Somehow they hadn’t killed him, they had taken him. Nuri wanted to do something, to intervene, but fear rooted him to the spot. In his gut he knew he wasn’t looking at a normal set of hoodlums. His gun would be useless against them.

  He stayed motionless until they had carried the body away.

  After giving them enough time to leave, Nuri stood up and walked back to where the fire had been. All that was left was smoldering ash. He looked for bodies, but they were gone, and any signs of blood or flesh had been washed away with the rain.

  6

  Friday, April 8

  “I don’t believe you,” Ness said, “and I don’t believe this.”

  Nuri stood there, in Ness’ office, unable to say anything coherent in defense of his report.

  “You sound less lucid than the tramps you’re supposed to be taking stories from.” Ness paced around his office, circling Nuri. “I don’t know what went on back there, but it wasn’t what you wrote down in this report.”

  “It’s what I saw—” Nuri started.

  Ness sighed, “And that’s supposed to make this better? I expect stories like this when a witness walks off the street, or I talk to a drunk who’s lived under a bridge and in a bottle for the past five years. Even Ryzard, after he started cracking, had a superstitious immigrant background.” Ness stopped pacing and faced Nuri. “I expected more of you. You went to college, you’re supposed to be smarter than this.”

  “Sir—”

  Ness held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it. It was a shame that you were teamed with a man right before he went around the bend. It couldn’t have been easy. But I expected you to straighten out. You’re convincing me otherwise.”

  He picked up thin folder from his desk and waved it at Nuri. “You know what this says to me?” Ness said, “It says that you listened too well to the tramps’ ghost stories, and probably drank something you shouldn’t have.”

  Ness walked around and sat down behind his desk.

  “The ashes are there, you can see where everything burned.”

  Ness nodded. “No doubt. Like I said, you might have seen something, but not this. At least I hope not, because I don’t want to believe that one of my detectives, when seeing someone dismembering a body, would cower and hide. According to your own report, you had your gun drawn and they were armed only with an ax.”

  “It was Aristaeus and he was ...” Nuri couldn’t finish the sentence because it would have sounded absurd in the light of day.

  Ness nodded, completing the unfinished sentence, “Undead? Do you know how ridiculo
us that sounds? I allowed Ryzard some slack because of seniority. He was an old hand and, unlike half the cops I found in this department, he was clean. I made a mistake. I won’t repeat it. I will not have a detective who refuses to confront suspects because he thinks they might be the bogeyman.”

  Nuri felt his gut shrink inside him, but all he could do was nod. Ness was right.

  “Aristaeus may have gone dirty, and he might have even shot you—though I have to say that when I heard about that debacle, I was half-convinced that Ryzard was the one who shot you—but that doesn’t justify your behavior.” Ness opened up the file and said, “If you strip away the eyewash about a moving corpse, what you have here is a report of two bent cops and a pair of Sicilian hoods chopping up a body—presumably killed by them—and carting away the evidence. While you sat by and watched.”

  Ness closed the file. He looked up at him with piercing eyes, and, for some reason, Nuri thought the Safety Director looked older now. “Do you realize that I have another victim of this maniac, a woman’s leg floating down the river? And out of half a dozen officers I had in the field last night, you’re the only one who saw anything—and it’s all garbage.”

  Ness tossed the file back on the desk. “I’d transfer you to the traffic division if I wasn’t trying to clean that department up.” He folded his hands. “As it stands, you’re going to be doing paperwork for a while, a long while, and maybe you should think about your choice of career.”

  Nuri didn’t have an adequate response. Even though he thought he didn’t have a choice at the time, somehow, in retrospect, he had screwed up.

  Nuri turned to leave the office, and Ness added, “The only reason you’re still on the force, Nuri, is because you’re honest. For all my work, it still seems a rarity.”

  Nuri nodded and mumbled, “Thank you,” as he left.

  7

  Thursday, July 14

  “So what were their names?”

  The gentleman drinking across from Nuri hemmed and hawed until Nuri slid another few bills to his side of the table. The two of them sat in the back of a small bar a few blocks away from East One-Ten and Woodland, the Bloody Comer where so many of the Porrello family had been killed.

  The gentlemen taking the money was part of a more recent, and more violent organization. An organization that seemed to have very tenuous ties back to Eric Dietrich.

  Nuri sat back and waited, sipping his drink. He felt something like an outlaw himself, even if he wasn’t doing anything illegal, yet. He was still officially desk-bound, but over the past two months he had been conducting his own private investigation, trying to track down Aristaeus and the goons who he’d seen with him. Eventually, he hoped to find Stefan.

  He still didn’t know what he’d do if he found any of them.

  “Yeah,” his dinner companion said, “Tito and Dante Marcello—Them the ones I saw with the Greek—”

  “Aristaeus?”

  “Whatever the fuck his name was.”

  Nuri nodded, “So you know where I can find these brothers?”

  “They used to hang down on Mayfield, though as far as I know, they don’t hang anywhere anymore.”

  “You know where they’re likely to show up.”

  The man drank from his glass, and looked nervously around himself. “You know that people who get in the way of these people tend to disappear or ...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or they become these people.” He polished off his glass. “I don’t want to know what happens. Tito and Dante were supposed to hit Eric Dietrich. Now they work for him—though work for might be too weak a word for it.”

  “Where can I find them?”

  “You might see Tito driving a sedan around St. Clair after dark.” He pushed the glass away. “That’s all I’m going to tell you. The stories I’ve heard about these guys make me sick and nervous, and I’ve blinded deadbeats with an icepick.” He picked up his hat from the seat next him and put it on, casting shadow across his face. “If you fear the Devil, stay away from these people.”

  He left Nuri sitting there. After a while Nuri emptied his own glass.

  8

  Tuesday, August 16-Wednesday August 17

  It was a fetid day, and flies were alive all through the trash heaps along Shore Drive. The wind off the lake did little to mitigate the heat of the day. Men in ragged clothes poked through the rubbish looking for something salvageable.

  One man waving away the flies from one section of trash stopped still for a long time. He stood still long enough to draw the attention of his anonymous fellows. A few walked up to where the man stood, staring, no longer waving the flies away. Some held their hands up to their mouths even though they were used to the smell of the garbage and the sour lake smell that covered the area like a blanket.

  One turned away and vomited.

  In front of them, covered by flies, laying in the detritus like just another piece of garbage, was a human torso, blackening with decay.

  Some ran to get the police. Even as they did so, a crowd gathered like a storm. The news broke from the shoreline like a sour wave off the lake. When the police cars sped up to the scene, there was a waiting mass of spectators, and a few photographers still taking pictures.

  The scene transformed. The men there were no longer the ragged scavengers, but uniformed police, detectives in cheap suits, and the mass of the public from the offices downtown. The police tried to keep the crowd back from the scene, clearing the rubbish for hundreds of feet in either direction.

  It wasn’t far enough. To one side, within the mass of the crowd that stood amidst the rubbish to watch the police’s ghoulish work, came a disturbance. A ragged circle formed in its midst like an air-bubble on the surface of dirty water. The men on the edges of that circle wore suits and hats, but wore expressions not too distant from the sick faces of the scavengers. They held their hands to their mouths, holding handkerchiefs to their noses.

  Police converged on the spot within minutes, hoping to find the missing pieces of the corpse. What they found was a new corpse entirely.

  The bodies were number eleven and twelve before the coroner even looked at them. The story had flowed through the city flooding bar after bar, office after office, until the evening papers could only provide a footnote to the ocean of rumor.

  The next day, Mayor Burton stood in front of Ness’ desk and said, “This has got to stop.”

  He said it flatly, with little emotion. All the impact in his words came from the fact that he stood in Ness’s office when he said it. Having the mayor stand there was unusual enough to emphasize everything he said.

  Ness stood as well, out of deference, and motioned to a chair, “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  Mayor Burton didn’t seem to hear. The door was still closing behind him as he dropped a copy of the News on the desk between them. The torso killings were front page news. Fingerprint is Lone Torso Murder Clew, though Ness knew they would be extremely lucky if they could line up a match for the victim’s print.

  “We’ve had to clear people out of the morgue,” Burton fumed. “Over a hundred people today trying to get to see Gerber’s autopsy. This is becoming a ghoulish circus act.” He paced a few times in front of Ness’s desk and repeated, “This has to be stopped.”

  “We’re expending every effort—”

  Mayor Burton shook his head. “Not every effort. I told you after the last victim how I wanted this handled. You’re going to handle it now.”

  “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  Mayor Burton nodded. “I am asking for every single policeman, every single detective, I am asking you to raze his hunting ground and to do a house-to-house search of the Third. You’ll either find him, or put such a fear of God into this demon that he’ll quit this city forever.”

  Ness glanced down at the paper, and wondered how the mayor’s orders would be reported. He looked up at Mayor Burton and asked, “Are you sure you want this?”

  “I was elec
ted because I wanted to end the crime and corruption that’s marred this city since Prohibition. This is the ultimate corruption, Ness. I’m thinking how the future is going to judge us over this case. You’re young yet, you have a reputation and a future. Think of where you want to be after this, and think of how it would be if you had this—” Mayor Burton waved at the newspaper, “—as an unsolved albatross around your neck.”

  Ness looked down at the paper and nodded. At least this way the papers could point at something to say that there were things being done.

  Judgment had fallen on Sodom.

  That was the thought that kept running through Nuri’s mind. Wagons of police, firefighters, and detectives drove down into the flats, followed by carloads of reporters. Everyone, it seemed, carried an ax, a sledgehammer or a crowbar. Nuri had no clear idea how many there were, but it felt like an army.

  It didn’t seem a modem army though, nothing like a scene from the war in Europe; this was more like a force contemporary with the pharaohs, a Judgment writ in wood and steel.

  Nuri rode in the back of one of the open trucks, seated on a wooden bench at the head of a line of uniformed officers. There was an awful anticipation in the faces of the police. Some laughed and joked to each other, but to Nuri it all seemed hollow.

  They were anticipated. Even before the officers stepped out of the lead trucks with their megaphones, dirty men in ragged clothes had stepped out of their rough-built hovels to stare at them with clouded eyes.

  Several officers with megaphones called out that everyone was under arrest, and there was to be an orderly file to the waiting wagons. There was little reaction at first. The ragged men stared at the new invaders to their realm as if they didn’t quite believe they were there. Then the lead officers waved at the open trucks, and the policemen began to dismount off the rear.