Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “Stop shooting!” the tour guide shouted, his voice on the edge of panic.

  The bodyguards emptied their weapons into the vehicle as it swerved past them. It slid between the massive storage tanks and the main building of the works—its body peppered with holes, the engine spouting steam, three tires flattened.

  It was still going near sixty miles an hour as it plowed through the supports of tank number four, grazing the massive tank. The impact slowed it enough that it rolled to a stop about thirty feet beyond the tank.

  The incident had lasted less than a minute.

  “My God,” said one of the cops.

  Their tour guide let out a long exhale. “Thank God. I have to go to operations, and get number four drained. God knows what damage that did.” He turned to Dietrich. “If there’re any bullet holes in our equipment, you have to answer for it.”

  Dietrich paid him no attention. He motioned his bodyguards and told the others, police, congressmen, industrialists, “Stay here, I have an issue with the driver of that car.”

  The tone was so cold that no one, not even the police, objected. No one would look him in the eyes. Dietrich strode the distance to the car. His stride appeared unhurried, but it carried him faster than any man should have been able to walk. Every move carried him with a repressed fury that anyone watching could sense.

  The bodyguards followed, reloading.

  2:31 PM

  Gerwazek’s response was down-to-earth and sensible. He told Nuri to call East Ohio Gas and warn them. It was his only chance to avoid catastrophe. Nuri kept telling himself that Stefan wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t ignite the tanks there.

  But each time he thought of what Melchior was, and importantly, what Stefan thought Melchior was, he knew what Stefan was going to do.

  If Adolf Hitler was in an allied city, would they firebomb the place to kill him? Would we do it if it cost hundreds or thousands of civilian lives?

  Nuri didn’t try to answer the question. He knew what the answer was. But he was a soldier, and he knew it wasn’t his decision, or Stefan’s. The people in this city hadn’t consented to the war Stefan was fighting.

  He reached a desk at East Ohio Gas after several tries.

  “Hello?” someone said. Nuri heard commotion behind the voice.

  “Please listen. I don’t think there’s much time. You have to evacuate the plant and the grounds around it. There’s going to be—”

  “You have to speak up, there’s a bit of confusion here. An auto accident—What are you saying?”

  “You have to evacuate!”

  “What?” Nuri heard the voice muffled, talking to someone else. The voice continued, “No, you’ve got to be kidding.” Nuri heard the phone rattle on the desk, and the voice moving away. Then, distinctly, he heard a different voice say, “Holy God, Number Four’s letting go!”

  Nuri heard running feet, and the line went dead.

  The clock went thunk. It was 2:34.

  2:35 PM

  No one at the Number Two Works who chose to look in the direction of tank Number Four noticed Dietrich or his bodyguards as they strode to the ruined Lincoln. They didn’t notice the ruined Lincoln, pockmarked with bullet holes and belching steam from its fiercely idling engine.

  What captured the attention of every employee who saw tank Number Four was the cloud of white fog that poured from a crack that started about ten feet above the ground and ran halfway to the top of the tank. The fog looked innocuous under the bright blue sky, like ice smoke or water vapor.

  The sight struck terror in everyone who saw it.

  The white vapor was heavy, spilling to the ground, rolling like a short cloud, spilling in a circle around the tank. All the employees who saw it began running to put as much distance between themselves and Number Four as possible.

  Dietrich wasn’t looking at Number Four, or at fleeing employees. He was looking at the Lincoln with an inhuman anger. His bodyguards followed, mindless, following his will.

  But when the rolling cloud reached the feet of the rearmost bodyguard, he looked down into the rolling white vapor. He lowered his gun, stopped moving and said, “What the—”

  If Dietrich heard him, he gave no sign. He walked next to the Lincoln as its engine finally died.

  2:39 PM

  Stefan lay inside his Lincoln, his body riddled with a dozen holes. Every strip of flesh seemed in agony as it tried to knit itself together again. He was nearly blind from the sunlight streaming through the holes in the car.

  Spots of sunlight fell on his body, and everywhere they landed was a spot of boiling numbness. He couldn’t move, and he thought that one of the bullets must have clipped his spine. He tried to force his will into his right hand, which still had a deathgrip on the stickshift, and on the switch he’d taped to it.

  However he thought, how much he willed, how much he prayed, his hand would not release the button. What he could see of its flesh was dead and white, washed in a shaft of deadly sunlight.

  “God forgive me,” he whispered through cracked and bleeding lips.

  In response, the driver’s side door was torn off the hinges, flooding the inside with the lethal sun. Stefan could feel it searing his whole body, driving the life and the spirit from it.

  The last sensation Stefan knew was Melchior dragging him from the car, hissing, “No one of the blood opposes me.”

  Stefan never even felt the tug of his hand coming free of the stick shift.

  2:40 PM

  When the being called Melchior tore free the door of the Lincoln, white fog had already crept around his ankles. He didn’t notice. All he had focus for was rage, a rage that one of the blood would still oppose him. His form was changing as he tore the door away. His arms and legs distorting with the crack of bone, his head becoming fanged and goatlike. The suit he wore tore away, revealing leathery skin that was tearing and distorting with the pressure to keep up with the changing body.

  He reached in for the one who defied him, his hand sinking deep into the chest of his enemy. He knew that this was one of the blood. He could smell it rank in the air, even as his enemy was already dying in the light. His enemy’s small will was too fragile to chain the spirit to the flesh when confronted by the sun.

  “No one of the blood opposes me,” said the thing that was Melchior. He tried to recognize the latest fool who had tried to bring him down.

  He pulled the corpse closer, but the name wouldn’t come to mind.

  As the body came free of the automobile, there was the sound of a click as a button taped to the gearshift raised back into position.

  The dynamite went first.

  It threw the goat-headed thing back toward the main building of the Number Two Works, the body still clasped in its hands. The explosion blew the tanks of gasoline into a fine aerosol that instantly ignited a rolling ball of flame that engulfed Melchior as he was still flying backward.

  Shrapnel and fire ripped from the car, tearing through all three bodyguards. Metal pierced Melchior in a dozen places before the blast had carried him six feet.

  He was still conscious, still alive, his body still repairing itself, when the fog ignited.

  Flames shot through the white cloud, and the air around Melchior turned into a searing hell as the natural gas burned. The air itself became fire. Melchior tried to will his body together as he felt the flesh turn to carbonized ash. It was too much. His breath sucked in fire that seared away his lungs. His eyes melted. His flesh was consumed and the bones beneath cracked apart with the change in temperature.

  He was dead before his remains struck the ground.

  Then tank Number Four exploded.

  2:42 PM

  The floors of the Union Terminal building shook so violently that people on the platform looked down the tracks for a collision. Along Kingsbury Run, the railroad cop who had found the head of Edward Andrassy looked up as the sky to the east turned red. In the Roaring Third, still waking from the night before, a bartender that had known Flo
Polillo thought he saw the sun set in the north before the wind of the blast burned his cheeks and cracked windows around him.

  A hellish wind tore through the Norwood-St. Clair neighborhood. Within seconds everything was burning between East Fifty-Fifth and East Sixty-Third. Telephone poles became pillars of fire, utility wires whipping tendrils of flame. The wind turned the walls of working-class houses into rippling sheets of fire. Birds cooked in the air and fell into pools of melting asphalt. Cars swerved off the road as their windows shattered and their tires blew out, seconds before their gas tanks ignited.

  In the basement where Tito, Dante, and Aristaeus had played poker, the walls turned red and black-painted windows blew in. In a few seconds, jets of flame whistled through the floorboards. In the corner of the basement where a cot sat, one of Melchior’s thralls opened his eyes. He had the briefest time to realize that the chains of blood that bound him were gone with his Master’s death. Then a house of flame collapsed upon him.

  The walls of St. John’s blistered with the heat as the windows blew inside. The black curtains burned where the wind touched them. The cross over the door fell burning to a blackening lawn. In seconds, the dry wood of the storage shed exploded in an imitation of the holocaust around it. The flames spread to the already burning church.

  Close to the plant, where liquid fuel had penetrated into the sewer system, rivers of fire followed the streets from the storm sewers and manhole covers. Inside buildings, toilets and sinks exploded and basements flooded with fire, burning houses from the inside out.

  High above, millions of burning fragments of insulation from tank Number Four rained down on the neighborhood, igniting what the blast hadn’t touched.

  Nuri had been trying to get through to the Gas Works again, when the sun rose in the north. Nuri only had time to turn around in the phone booth as the windows of the drugstore blew in. The paper posters promoting the war effort burst into flames. Gerwazek fell across the old lady, protecting her from flying debris and the contents of the shelves around them spilled to the ground as the whole building shook. The clock fell from the wall and smashed to the counter next to the pharmacist.

  Nuri pushed out of the telephone booth, into a searing wind that made him feel as if his skin was on fire. Around him the air roared as if the earth itself was dying.

  “My God,” Gerwazek said. Nuri could barely hear him.

  “We have to get out of here!” Nuri said, grabbing Gerwazek’s shoulder. “Get her to safety.”

  Gerwazek nodded, helping the old woman up. Nuri limped to the rear of the store to find the pharmacist.

  Nuri found him behind the counter, unconscious, his face cut and bruised. Fire was rolling across the ceiling as Nuri tried to revive him, and the air was almost too thick to breathe. Nuri glanced around and saw that the rear of the shop was already a mass of flames; it was no use trying to revive the man.

  Nuri grabbed the pharmacist’s arms and pulled him over his shoulder. Then he began walking to the front of the store. The air was rank with the smell of burning chemicals. As he passed shelves, he could see bottles of medicine melting into bubbling black ooze that dripped flame. Some of it dripped on to his uniform and stuck, burning all the way through to his skin.

  Under his feet, the black-and-white linoleum was yellowing, warping, and cracking in the heat. It seemed forever before he reached the entrance and what seemed to be safety.

  It wasn’t safety.

  When Nuri stepped out of the drugstore, he stepped straight into hell. Flames rolled from buildings on both sides of the street, the air choked with rolling black haze, and the light seemed to come, not from the sun, but from a thousand-foot-tall pillar of fire that burned to the north, glowing through the smoke.

  Nuri looked around and saw Gerwazek’s car burning by the side of the road, and he saw Gerwazek, hunched over with the old woman, running down the center of the street. He was one of what suddenly seemed thousands of people running through the street, away from the towering pyre to the north.

  Nuri ran into the street following the crowd, hobbling as best he could on his bad foot.

  6

  Friday, October 20—Saturday, October 21

  It would be nearly twenty-four hours before Nuri allowed himself to rest. Initially he was a refugee from the blast, but his uniform and his status as an ex-cop made it easy for him to join the rescue effort as safety officials began pouring into the disaster area. He fell to work helping people out of the rubble, rendering first aid, and helping firemen rig a feed from Lake Erie because exploding water mains had cut off water pressure to the blast zone.

  Ten thousand people were evacuated from the area, while in the center, eight square blocks burned to the ground. The fires burned out of control until early Saturday morning.

  Sometime during that morning, Nuri began finding more corpses than survivors. It may have been stress, or lack of sleep, but as Nuri worked through the night, he suspected that—despite the fact that the whole area was sealed off—the safety workers weren’t the only ones searching the smoking rubble.

  Many times before dawn, Nuri would see a set of pale men and women digging at a ruined building. Their clothes were ragged and torn for the most part, as if they were survivors of the blast, but none of the safety workers would approach them.

  Each time Nuri saw such a gathering, they were retrieving a body from the wreckage, and sometimes the body wasn’t quite human-looking. Whenever one of the safety workers approached them, one of the pale ones would stare at the intruder until he walked away. Nuri would always wonder how many of the blood had died in the blast—and how many survived.

  By morning, dozens of safety workers—firemen, police, coast guard, and others—had to be relieved due to fatigue. A large proportion of them had small wounds on their legs, wrists and necks ...

  Nuri worked with the effort until he couldn’t go any further, and then he kept at it until someone ordered him home. He got home, exhausted, around three Saturday afternoon. He smelled of ashes, and he looked as if he had worn his dress uniform into battle. Nuri collapsed into a chair and opened the Cleveland News he had picked up on the way home.

  “71 Known Dead in Gas Plant Explosion,” said the headline.

  It was conservative.

  According to the paper, about 250 homes were destroyed, and at least a thousand people were homeless. Nuri scanned the article until he reached the point where the coroner had asked the county engineer for bulldozers to help search for bodies.

  Nuri had to put the paper down.

  He sat in his new apartment, barely furnished since his return. He felt an odd sense of guilt at having survived. He slowly balled up the paper, wondering if it had been worth it, if there had been anything he could have done to prevent it.

  The bodies he left for us, the ones he wanted to be found, those weren’t a hundredth part of the blood left in his wake. And what he wallows in now is not a thousandth part of what would happen if he is granted what he seeks.

  Nuri shook his head. Nuri knew that Melchior himself was responsible for many more deaths than the explosion had taken. But he kept feeling that Stefan was wrong, that the deaths were wrong.

  If Adolph Hitler was in an allied city, would they firebomb the place to kill him? Would we do it if it cost hundreds or thousands of civilian lives?

  Nuri knew the answer.

  It was yes ...

  ... but he would never be able to accept it.

  Author’s Note

  This novel incorporates a number of actual events and people from Cleveland’s history. Nevertheless, this is a work of fiction, not a work of history, and none of the characters in this book, even those based on historical personages, should be considered as representing actual people. In particular, Eliot Ness, the Van Sweringens, Mayor Burton, and various police and county officials who appear in this book are all products of my imagination.

  While a dozen decapitated bodies were discovered in the Cleveland area around th
e end of the Depression, and while Eliot Ness was Public Safety Director through most of the investigation of the Torso Murders, the investigation as portrayed bears little resemblance to the actual events. I have also taken liberties with the events surrounding the East Ohio Gas Company explosion. And, of course, most of the events portrayed in this novel never happened at all....

  C.S. Friedman

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