Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  That was when the chaos started. The sight of the ranks of police and firemen, all armed with clubs, pickaxes, sledgehammers, prybars ignited something in the spectating crowd. Some advanced on the waiting wagons, as they had been told. But many looked at the forming line of police, and fear filled their eyes.

  Those ran.

  The police descended.

  The light seemed to fade from the sky as the world around Nuri seemed to erupt into anarchy. He followed the officers; his duty was to somehow note any suspects or leads as they passed through this little shantytown. Thrust into the midst of this riot his duty seemed laughable. The line of officers descended on the small army of transients and hobos, with a viciousness as if it was the fault of these that the torso killer had descended on Cleveland.

  The police fell upon them with clubs, the handles of axes and sledgehammers. They pulled them down by the arms, the legs, by their hair. Following the police, the firemen brought the city’s wrath down upon the little shacks that these people had made their homes.

  Tarpaper shredded, wood snapped, and tin whined in agony as the firemen attacked the flimsy structures.

  Then they burned.

  Suitcases and trunks were trampled in the melee. The storm raged around and past Nuri, and as it passed him, it left little in its wake. Nuri stood on a trampled plain as the violence passed him by. There was nothing left that could be called a shelter. Broken wood and clothing littered the ground with no discernible pattern. Smoke rose from pyres that used to be people’s homes.

  Near Nuri’s feet lay a small silver frame, broken in half, glass ground to powder by a fireman’s boot. Torn and waterlogged with mud was a picture of a little girl, her face obliterated by the footprint.

  Nuri looked away from the picture. It made him feel sick.

  He looked upward and saw the sun about to set.

  9

  Thursday, August 18

  While darkness fell over the city, a dark-paneled truck followed in the wake of the police. It drove slowly, two men in dark suits hanging off the sides, watching the remains of the shantytowns they passed.

  Stefan sat in the cab with the driver, Aristaeus. He stared ahead at the road, a river of black. The truck’s lights were out. Occasionally the truck would hit a bump and the weight in the back would shift. When that happened, Stefan winced, but not greatly enough for the driver to notice.

  “There,” called out either Tito or Dante, riding the sides in back.

  Aristaeus slowed the truck to a stop, silent except for the crunch of gravel. He opened the door and stepped out, and he pulled Stefan after him. Stefan moved without resisting.

  Tito and Dante had already dismounted. One carried a shovel, the other a pickax. Stefan could sense dimly what the others felt, the presence of one of the blood, somewhere near here. Aristaeus grinned and waved the two over into the debris-covered field that used to house a few dozen homeless men, and maybe one or two of the fugitive undead.

  Tito and Dante walked straight to a pile of charred and splintered wood near the center of the flattened shantytown. Tito began moving the ashes aside with his shovel, and Dante stood aside with his pickax raised. Within minutes, Tito had uncovered a mound of loose dirt.

  Aristaeus walked up to the scene. Stefan followed because it was expected of him. This wasn’t the first time he had witnessed this tonight, and it wouldn’t be the last. Not until the back of the truck they rode was filled. They were finishing off some of the last of the Master’s enemies in this town. They were uncovering the few who were trying to hop a train unseen from the shanties along the tracks. The Master had choked off most of the other routes out of town.

  Aristaeus nodded, and Dante let the pickax fall on the mound, the point of its blade sinking its full length into the soft earth. In response, the earth screamed. It was a sound torturous and brief, more felt than heard. It tore out a chunk of what was left of Stefan’s soul.

  Around where the pickax had fallen, a trickle of black tarlike blood emerged from the ground.

  Tito began clearing away the earth, revealing the creature that had buried itself to protect itself from the sun. The face was revealed first, eyes staring, mouth packed with dirt. He was unremarkable, the face almost anonymous except for the contortion of pain left on it.

  Tito cleared off all the dirt from around the body, revealing Dante’s pickax embedded deep in the chest. While this was going on, Aristaeus had been staring at his watch. A little after all the dirt was gone, Aristaeus nodded at Dante and said, “Ten minutes, long enough. He won’t get up again.”

  Dante pulled out the pickax, slowly and with difficulty. The body raised a few inches with the blade before it began sliding free from the wound. When the body let it go, finally, with a wet sound, it thudded back into the dead earth.

  “Okay,” Aristaeus said to Stefan.

  Stefan had been here enough times that he didn’t need elaboration. He reached down, grabbed the corpse by the shoulders, and began dragging it back toward the truck.

  Meanwhile, the trio moved on to another mound of debris.

  The process seemed endless. When it seemed that they had finally come upon the last transient village, there was another to be razed. Events seemed more and more detached from reality the deeper into the night it progressed. News of what was happening spread, and occasionally they would come to a collection of shacks that had been abandoned earlier in the evening. Even so, things progressed the same way. The officer with the megaphone would announce that everyone was under arrest, and then the police would descend on the empty shantytown, and the firemen would burn the place down to the ground.

  It was one of those near-empty towns where Nuri was ambushed. He was in the lead, with a collection of officers, kicking open doors, checking for anyone hiding from the advance of the police. Not for the first time Nuri was feeling like an officer in the German SS, checking a village for undesirables.

  Then, suddenly, the police were set upon by twice as many dirty men. The attack caught all of them off guard. One moment they were walking in the midst of a forest of empty tar-paper hovels, the next they were surrounded by angry hobos armed with bricks and broken planks of wood.

  The two groups fell on each other as if they were both in the middle of a war. An officer fell by Nuri’s feet, blood streaming from his temple, and Nuri reached for his gun.

  Before he reached it, he felt something slam across the back of his head. The impact was blinding, and he stumbled forward. Even the sounds around him seemed blurred as the world turned to a dark mush around him.

  By the time he recovered from the stunning blow, he was on his knees in the mud, retching. Nuri waited for the dizziness to pass before he opened his eyes and looked around.

  There was no sign of the melee around him. He had the disorienting realization that he didn’t know where he was. From his memory, he had only stumbled a few feet from where he’d been struck, but from a look around at the unfamiliar ground, and at how much darker the night was, he must have been wandering for much longer.

  He pushed himself upright from the sour pool by his knees and tried not to collapse from the sudden wave of vertigo. After swaying a few moments, he checked himself out.

  His hat and his jacket were both gone, but his gun still sat in its holster. The back of his head was a sore bloody mess, but his hair was matted. The blood had had time to clot.

  When he took a few steps, he realized that he had lost one of his shoes in the mud. He cursed and took off the other one so he could walk.

  As he made his way to the road, he could see signs of the war that Eliot Ness was waging on Cleveland’s transient population. Beside him, he could see the remains of razed dwellings where he had passed earlier in the night. Both sides of the battle were gone. The police gone toward the next collection of hovels, the inhabitants fled or in police custody.

  It was empty, and almost silent.

  Almost.

  Nuri walked, listening to noises that seeme
d to come from around a bend in the road. His stockinged feet slid silently on the bricks in the road as he made his way toward an area darker than the rest of the night. Around the bend, the road ran under one of the dozens of bridges that crossed the Cuyahoga. The bridge was a railroad trestle, and its girders were a dark spider-web against an overcast sky.

  Coming from the darkness beyond, the source hidden by the corner of an abandoned warehouse, were the sounds of shoveling earth and shifting debris. Nuri also heard the sound of whispered voices, too low to make out individual words. When he reached the corner of the building he heard a soft, solid thud followed by a brief agonizing scream that abruptly cut off.

  The sound seared through Nuri, causing him to close his eyes so tightly that color shot through his field of vision. The sound didn’t even last half a second, but Nuri’s head throbbed with it.

  He drew his gun, already knowing what was around the corner from him. The darkness beyond was more than just the shadow of the bridge. His face and hands were slick with sweat, and his breath came in slow shuddering gasps. He wanted to run, to abandon this place. But he kept thinking of the time he had seen Stefan and had done nothing but hide.

  He eased his way around the corner of the building, holding his gun before him. The first thing he saw was a dark silhouette of a panel truck, similar in size to the one he’d been riding. The back was covered, so he couldn’t see what the truck carried.

  Beyond the dark truck, he could see figures standing in the midst of one of the ruined shantytowns. He could see the edge of a shovel and the end of a pickax. As he watched, one of the figures drew the pickax out of the ground.

  Nuri walked slowly to the side of the truck opposite the figures. Every step was an effort against a building well of fear. He knew what he faced. He could almost smell it. And he didn’t have anything that could fight them. He had the gun, but he had seen the uselessness of it twice now. A bullet couldn’t stop them....

  Nuri reached the other side of the cab and looked around the front of the vehicle. He saw another figure dragging what could only be a body from where the figures had congregated. The others walked away from the hole they had made.

  They can die, Nuri told himself. He had seen them dead by fire, by sunlight, and by decapitation. He had no fire, and sunlight was hours away, but he dwelled on decapitation. These things still had brains, and they couldn’t function without them....

  Nuri took a few deep breaths and began a crouched run from the front of the truck, around the debris, circling upon the three shadowy figures. The terrain tore at his feet, but he kept running, closing on them.

  He was only a few dozens yards away when his foot slipped on a broken piece of wood. The three of them stopped and turned. Nuri could recognize Aristaeus immediately, even in the darkness.

  Aristaeus held out a hand, as if to silence his two companions. The one carrying the pickax looked directly at Nuri with a stare that froze the blood in his veins.

  Nuri swallowed his fear and braced his gun with both hands.

  Aristaeus waved his hand, wearing an expression near a smile. Nuri was sure he saw him, and recognized him.

  In response to Aristaeus’ small wave, the other two ran for him. Nuri felt the impulse to flee, to run as fast as he could, get away even if there was no way to outrun them at the speed they were going.

  Instead he brought the gun up to point at the face of the one with the pickax. As that one brought the pickax to bear against Nuri, Nuri fired, twice.

  When Nuri fired they were only separated by about five yards. The shot was impossible to miss. The pickax fell to the ground as its bearer’s head snapped back with two holes erupting in its face. The whole back of the skull seemed to have evaporated. The body dropped to the ground.

  Before the body hit the ground, Nuri could see a shovel swinging at him. He dropped and rolled out of its way, barely fast enough. The blade grazed his head, hard enough that he almost blacked out.

  Nuri rolled, pointing his revolver upward, toward his attacker. The shovel was coming downward as his gun fired. One shot missed, throwing sparks as it glanced off the blade of the shovel, the other shot found its home in his attacker’s forehead.

  The shovel still came down, but slowly enough for Nuri to dodge it. The blade buried itself into the ground next to Nuri’s right shoulder. The body followed, face-first into the ground next to the shovel, the back of the skull a soft, dark mess.

  Nuri pushed himself away from the body, scrambling upward to face the last of them, Aristaeus.

  He turned on Aristaeus and saw a gun pointed at him. Aristaeus hadn’t moved from where he stood, and he was much too far away for a sure head shot. Nuri saw all this in a moment and dived behind a pile of broken wood.

  He dove just in time, because he heard Aristaeus’ gun fire, and he could swear he felt the breeze as the bullet passed between his neck and his shoulder.

  He landed on a pile of shredded tar paper, nails tearing into his legs and his left arm.

  Aristaeus called out to him, “Good job, Lapidos. Those two will be out for a few minutes, at least. Probably never get their minds back, such as they were. But that’s just an almost. What do you think your chances are now? I can see out here like it was full daylight, I can smell your blood now, and my reflexes are twice yours.” Nuri could hear the crunch of Aristaeus’ footsteps as he closed on his hiding place.

  “I know exactly where you are,” he kept talking. “If you move, I can put three bullets into you before you aim. But I’ll make you an offer. Toss out your gun, offer me your blood, and you might have a new life.”

  Nuri swallowed. His throat felt dry.

  “I’ve wanted both of you since the train, Lapidos. I didn’t have to miss just then.”

  The gun in front of him was shaking. Blood was soaking into his clothes from the wounds tearing into his arms and legs, blood also dripped from his head, blurring his vision. Nuri’s breaths were beginning to sear his throat.

  He was going to have to dive out there and try to shoot Aristaeus. He didn’t have a choice.

  He tightened his grip on the revolver, and prepared to spring out from his limited cover. Then he heard something.

  Aristaeus was still talking, but beneath the sound of his voice was something else, a rustling sound, as if the ground were shifting. At first Nuri thought it was Aristaeus, but as the sound became louder, Aristaeus stopped talking, as if he’d just noticed the sound.

  Whatever the distraction was, Nuri took the opportunity to spring from his cover and level his gun at Aristaeus. But when he saw Aristaeus, he didn’t fire.

  Aristaeus was only ten feet away from him, but he had turned away from him. Aristaeus was facing something that was rising from the ground, clawing its way from a mound of earth. He wasn’t talking to Nuri anymore.

  As Nuri watched, Aristaeus fired four shots into the shadow clawing its way out of the earth. The thing showed no sign of being hit. It pulled itself upright in front of Aristaeus, dirt crumbling off of its shoulders. From the mid-chest up to its head, half of it was frozen. Half its face, and the right side of its chest was a twisted, pale representation of a human body, milk-white and frozen in a contortion of agony.

  The other half was out of a nightmare, fanged like a demon, one arm as long as Aristaeus’ body and ending in a taloned claw. It stared at Aristaeus with a face that was half a human corpse, and half a gargoyle. The human eye was pale and clouded, staring at nothing, the other eye was red, and as deep as hell itself, and stared directly at Aristaeus.

  Aristaeus’ gun shook and he pulled the trigger again.

  The gun clicked home on an empty chamber.

  The thing’s arm swung up toward Aristaeus and clamped home on his neck. Aristaeus dropped the gun and his body began changing. Nuri could hear the sound of stressed bone, and the sound of flesh tearing like canvas. But whatever was happening to Aristaeus was happening too late to do him any good.

  The demonic arm lifted Aristaeus off
of the ground, and Nuri could see blood flowing from where the taloned fingers were crushing Aristaeus windpipe. Aristaeus clawed at the arm, kicked at the open air, and made strangled bloody noises. In a few moments he wasn’t moving and the body had regained a semblance of humanity.

  Nuri didn’t move.

  The half-thing drew Aristaeus’ body toward itself and turned its monstrous face so its half-muzzle could smell the corpse. Its face wrinkled, and it tossed the body aside as if disgusted by it.

  Then it turned its attention to Nuri. Nuri raised his gun to level on the animate half of the thing’s face, but its one living eye held him in an iron grip impossible to break. Nuri fell into that one blood-red eye as if he was falling into a sea of fire.

  Its taloned hand grabbed its opposite shoulder, the one that was human flesh, from which hung a dead human arm. It grumbled something, almost unintelligible through half of a nonhuman mouth.

  In the grip of that thing’s stare, Nuri could understand the words.

  “Useless,” it said. “Dead already.”

  It drew closer, and the smell of rot almost dropped Nuri to his knees. It looked down at Nuri, its body rearranging with the sound of breaking bone and tearing skin. Fangs and talons withdrew. As its arm came away from its shoulder Nuri saw that the dead human part of its body was pockmarked with sores that wept a fluid that smelled of rotting meat.

  “Too far gone,” it said as it grabbed Nuri’s shoulder with the arm that had killed Aristaeus. The arm was human now, and the face that was within inches of Nuri’s own was now fully human, half trapped in a putrefying death-agony, the other half twisted in a expression of frustration and despair.

  “I cannot drink with half a mouth,” it whispered, and closed its one demonic eye. When the stare left him, Nuri was able to move again. He backed quickly away, the thing releasing its grip on him.

  It collapsed before him. “Too shallow,” it whispered.

  Nuri backed away from the thing that now was only a naked human corpse. He had only taken a few steps when he felt something grab his shoulder. He spun around and fired.