“If I can get him to eat it,” Tom chuckled.
Mrs Uganda looked rightfully aghast.
“When I say it’s fish, it’s fish,” the woman said.
Tom nodded, bowed his thanks, and left her to her mild outrage.
*
MRS UGANDA’S POT weighed awkwardly in Tom’s arms as he quit the building a short time later, confirming he’d left nothing worth keeping at his old home. The day was rapidly turning overcast, temperature dropped a few more degrees, and two men argued like a pair of drunks on the street corner accompanied by a yapping dog held on a leash by the troopers questioning the breach in City policy against making pets from the feral hounds which consistently found a way into the sanctuary zone. Tom felt nothing but bemusement at the fracas, though his expression hardened when he spied a stunted-looking pair of not-quite-teenagers also enjoying the show.
The two Urchins sat where they’d loitered on past occasions, across the way under the shadow of the security wall among the traders and no-hopers who set up there daily. One of the boys had a dark mane of hair, his pallid complexion mostly upholstered by ragtag winter clothes. His companion shivered in a t-shirt and vest, taking tentative pulls from a street cigarette badly kept together with improvised rolling paper.
Things certainly had changed in the neighborhood in the course of a week. Tom headed towards the boys, able to avoid their scrutiny until he blocked their line of sight in the last few yards of his approach.
Tom switched on a deliberately casual smile. The pot he carried told nothing about the Colt Python against the small of his back. The boys caught his intrusion and blinked to themselves like they’d come out of a daze, and Tom’s smile only widened at the sight of it.
“Hey, fellas,” he said and let his greeting sink in a moment. “Is that their dog, or what?”
“I think so,” the second boy said. He watched Tom hesitantly, like someone who needed permission to talk. His thin hand scratched at his flaking afro, sores across his temples and around his mouth.
Tom took a deep breath and fought off unprofessional sorrow. Although better dressed against the coming elements, the other young Urchin was as miserably thin as his friend. But his clever blue eyes burned brightly. He thrust out a chin at Tom.
“You’re not here to talk about dogs,” he said.
There was an air of challenge to it. The white boy couldn’t help himself a glance to his friend, and that’s where Tom registered his authority. If he was a year older than the eleven-year-old in the vest, it only showed in the coldness around his eyes.
“It’s no big deal,” Tom told them. He’d worked with younger offenders before and saw the imminent hostility as par for the course – though these youths had probably faced horrors a thousand times worse than old-world street kids and the children of drug addicts. “I just wondered what you knew about them missing doors?”
The second boy deferred completely to the first. And the first boy only watched Tom for several seconds, mouth moving almost imperceptibly as if adding up math.
“Wasn’t us,” he said finally.
“Didn’t say it was,” Tom replied.
“Thought it, though.”
“You’ve got the time on your hands.” Tom motioned with his free hand and tried to smile again as he said it, no intended judgement in his words. The boys again checked in with each other. They also glanced at the pot.
“We should go,” the younger kid said.
The older one nodded. He pushed long hair out of his eyes like it was a losing battle, focus still on Tom.
“Listen, you two,” Tom said to halt them. “When’s the last time you were fed?”
“Fed?”
The older boy’s nostrils flared.
“I’m not some creepy sex offender,” Tom said to him. “It upsets me to see you guys out here, no one taking care of you –”
“Who says we need fed?” the boy replied. “Look after umselves, we can.”
Tom nodded. The boy’s alien grammar emerged unselfconscious, natural to him, completely clear to his pal.
“Yeah, I get that,” Tom said, trying to take the tone of a man who didn’t fear a knifing if the conversation went wrong. “Still though, you’ve seen me around. I have children, right?”
Tom paused for the acknowledgement and didn’t quite get it. The Urchins were far too good at giving away very little, as required by anyone likely to survive such a crisis as they had.
“You won’t understand this,” Tom said and sighed. “I just thought you might want something to eat.”
“He wants somethin’,” the darker boy hissed.
“Course he fuckin’ wants somethin’,” his elder snapped back.
“I don’t, really,” Tom said.
The older boy only shot back daggers.
“Course you do.”
And it was true. Tom might be clueless about his own motives, but the boys knew they existed, even if not knowing what they were.
“Well, I guess I just. . . .”
He smiled again, not pausing for the sake of drama, but because now he had to lie.
“It just upsets me, I suppose,” he said. “And I don’t have much, but I thought you might like this?”
Tom held out the pot and gently angled the lid ajar. The boys eyed it like a rattlesnake.
No deal. He couldn’t blame them. He slowly smiled.
“Look,” Tom said. “I have a bullet in my pocket that could get us a meal from Einstein each, if he’s still working breakfasts . . . and maybe if you said yes, I thought you might treat the people in the building inside a little more nicely, you know?”
“Got nothin’ on people in there,” the older boy said.
“You don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you, deal?” Tom said. He motioned with a thumb towards the building as if it didn’t trouble him much. The troopers dragged the squirming dog away, briefly drowning out his rejoinder as Tom added, “I know one of you or your friends killed that man and dumped his body in there a couple of weeks back. You probably know who took the doors, too. That’s nothing to do with me.”
The boys relaxed, but it wasn’t by much, and it didn’t lessen their watchfulness.
“My name’s Tom.”
The pair regarded him a moment longer. The younger boy looked to his friend, letting something slip in the exchange, made worse for the older boy’s cool blue-eyed gaze staying on Tom, who crinkled his eyes just a touch – a deliberate disclosure that he’d seen something, some kind of knowledge, pass between them.
“I’m Dega,” the older boy said. “This is Jamon.”
“Cool,” Tom replied. “Food?”
Neither moved. Tom almost felt weary for all his smiling.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
That disclosure achieved nothing either. Tom dropped his masquerade.
“I’m not going to try to mess you up, either,” he said. “Breakfast will give you time to tell me what the hell’s going on in this neighborhood and maybe reassure me my friends are safe.”
“They’re not your friends,” Dega said.
“True,” Tom agreed. “It’s a bit like watching skinny boys starve. I feel some kind of obligation to the other people in the building.”
Jamon drew back in confusion.
“What’s a ‘obligation’?”
“And it’s not your building anyway,” Dega said. “We saw you move.”
“Funny that you’d pay attention to that,” Tom said.
The older boy caught his own error. Dega’s anger at himself would’ve sparked Tom’s pity if not already drawn by Jamon’s sorry-hearted ignorance. Tom sighed quite mightily, his fake-it-till-you-make-it sympathy for the pair finding its full expression.
“For god’s sake, let me get you something to eat,” he said to them. “And no, I’m not a religious crackjob either.”
Jamon again narrowed eyes at him.
“‘Crackjob’?”
Tom chuckled, acknowledging m
omentary defeat. He resisted miming with an imaginary bowl and spoon.
“Let’s eat, yeah?”
*
IT FELT ODDLY satisfying to trade one of his .38 rounds for eggs and “streaky bacon” on sourdough tortillas – or maybe that should be “sourdough tortillas” too. The gray breakfast wraps tasted better than they looked. Tom ignored the weird look of Einstein’s disapproval and retreated his young companions with him to one of the upright bench tables that littered the mostly deserted market. Out beyond the interlocking marquee tent flaps, pinned upright a year or so back and left there ever since, the midmorning crowds moving to and from The Mile added their clamor to the backdrop as Tom settled into their sheltered corner near one of the market’s upright beams. He set Mrs Uganda’s hot pot on the ledge, then pushed the offensive-smelling thing out of reach.
The boys ate the breakfast hungrily, grease trickling over their knuckles from the instant meal they tore into like it was a knife fight. Tom maintained his aura of benevolent calm, patriarchal and reliable, ignoring his own breakfast as he quietly spoke.
“I have children,” he said. “And we survived out there, too. I know some of the things people have gone through. It’s probably the same for you – same for all of us.”
Dega was first to finish. His eyes strayed to Tom’s meal and Tom passed it across. He’d already struck a deal with Einstein for a side of beef, the pantomime of the bullet trade of a few minutes before probably adding to the misgivings the ornery trader kept shooting Tom’s way. Tom hand-signaled for peace and swiveled back towards Dega and Jamon as they ate.
“Everyone’s done things to survive,” Tom said. “I’m not going to bust your ass for that. I’m no saint.”
Jamon glanced Tom’s way again, though he didn’t voice the question this time.
“What I mean is,” Tom said, “we’ve all done things outside we’re trying to put an end to, now we’re in the City.”
“Sound like a trooper,” Dega said.
“Is that what they say to you?”
Dega shrugged. Jamon nodded. He finished his breakfast and cast a surreptitious look his partner’s way which Dega studiously ignored.
“Stuff like that,” Jamon said and sniffed.
“Still hungry?”
“Always hungry,” Dega answered for him.
“OK, I’ll get something else in a minute,” Tom said.
“What do you want from us?” Jamon asked.
“Nothing beyond what I’ve said.”
Tom scanned through his thoughts to make sure he used simple language since the boys’ upbringing half in the wild hadn’t included a classical education. The age they were, Tom wasn’t sure if the boys would’ve ever set foot in a school anyway.
“If you can tell me why you scope out that building where I was living, maybe I can tell you better what I want,” Tom said. “What are you willing to say?”
Now when the pair exchanged looks, it was just mutual confusion. For just a second, they seemed like ordinary boys again.
“We work for Fagin,” Dega said. Jamon added his nod.
“Fagin, seriously?” Tom answered and smiled, though of course the boys hadn’t grown up between bookshelves like he had. It was Dickens or Twain in Tom’s childhood, if he’d wanted to read anything at all and not go mad with boredom.
“Yes, Fagin,” Dega said.
Neither understood the reference, so Tom let it go.
“And why’s Fagin have you scouting above the bike shop?”
“People downstairs owe.”
“They owe Fagin?”
“Yes.”
“Which people?” Tom asked. Neither looked ready to answer. Jamon sat essentially muted by the older boy anyway. Tom prompted them, “The people on the ground floor?”
“Yes,” Dega replied. “Tucker. Tucker’s people.”
“They’re into . . . moonshine, or something,” Tom said.
He didn’t remember much about his conversation on the topic with the scrounger Hairball. His contribution wasn’t enough to eke much more from the Urchin pair.
“Tucker?” Tom asked. “What’d he do?”
Again, neither spoke.
“OK then, why’re you watching me?” Tom asked. “What’d I ever do?”
The boys swapped looks. Jamon folded his arms, but Dega was more low-key trying to drop out of the conversation.
“We just see stuff, you know. . . .”
Tom shrugged, said, “Cool,” for about the dozenth time, then drummed his fingers along the table’s edge and cleared his throat.
“Maybe next time Fagin wants to send someone a warning, he doesn’t endanger so many other innocent people, huh?”
Dega and Jamon watched him cautiously for an extended moment, then slowly nodded their assent. Tom drummed his fingers like he had to finish the next few bars, then nodded back to the boys and turned about to go get them some more food.
*
AND LIKE A bastard, Tom patiently waited until the pair left the Night Market before he stepped back from the lee of one of the outer awnings and fell into pace behind them, at least another twenty people pressing into the gap as they joined the visitors to The Mile.
The throng poured into the avenue proper, people coming and going from the tributaries to the mile-long strip that was as much Moroccan bazaar as dystopian fleamarket, laneways and broken crannies in walls and improvised pathways that became entrenched over time between the tent awnings and plastic sheets and reworked fencing and vineyard netting and sheet metal architecture jammed into every available space. The bobbing heads and the boys’ height meant Tom had to force his way through to keep them in sight as Dega and Jamon moved of their own accord ahead. The boys lingered at a stand where a toothless man had a half-dozen cleaned-up revolvers laid out on a card table, but they were just sightseeing more than anything else. The pair continued slowly away from the direction they’d come, Tom watchful and ready to duck down if needed, and at their unhurried pace he followed several more ye olde city blocks to where the break into a side street had spawned yet more unexpected City institutions – one of which had evolved during the past year into something like a tavern, though the wooden posts which kept the whole place standing were so thoroughly covered in notes and assorted pieces of paper that at first they resembled tarred-and-feathered men bound upright for everyone’s scorn. Motley furnishings filled the whole place. The roof was mostly old carpets, so there wasn’t much head room, but that didn’t trouble the thirty-or-so people within. As they moved between tables, drinking and engaging in various discussions, they’d long since adapted to their new environment. And Dega and Jamon moved unerringly towards a svelte figure slumped talking with a group of men while wearing an out-of-place silver-gray business suit and jaunty neck scarf to keep him warm.
As they went straight to the one they called Fagin, Tom feared they might turn back at any moment to point at him lingering outside, potentially spot-lit by the daylight coming through a rare patch of the surroundings not already covered by roofs, shade cloths, and old tarps.
Tom hovered for the merest moment, but that proved long enough. The man they called Fagin motioned irritably for Dega to whisper directly into his ear, and when the man moved, he shifted into better light.
Tom caught sight of Finnegan Locke’s shark-toothed smirk and withdrew at once, a wild sense of danger hammering through his veins.
He hurried away from the tavern trying to fit the pieces together as fast as he could, intuition already telling him that Locke and his tamed feral children conducting surveillance on his former home wasn’t just a coincidence.
Before he could get much into the logic of it, another youngster on a bicycle tore past him. The small-framed BMX almost clipped Tom’s legs as he walked.
The sandy-haired rider stood on one pedal and looked back as if to offer some kind of apology, which turned into a wave as his son’s friend Kevin recognized him and offered the shyest, most hesitant smile before he was
also gone, absorbed into the noise off The Mile.
Brotherhood leader Edward Burroughs murdered
by Odo Geirhart
CITY troopers have confirmed Construction manager and Brotherhood figurehead Edward Burroughs was found dead on East Beck Street.
Troopers are treating the controversial and outspoken City critic’s death as murder.
A City Administration officer with knowledge of the incident said Burroughs was found with multiple stab wounds, including a mercy wound to the head.
No suspects were yet identified.
The Herald’s source said the alleged murder had all the hallmarks of a revenge killing.
Burroughs made waves for his strong views arguing the City’s reconstruction efforts must include strict demarcations in the roles assigned to males and females.
He was imprisoned by the City last month, but later released with an apology after evidence showed the Brotherhood had no direct role in last week’s Uprising.
Burroughs then pledged the support of his members in maintaining law and order, with the Brotherhood crucial in backing up the City’s depleted Safety patrols.
The Brotherhood’s Aaron Sandler said tensions within the group were unlikely to be a factor in their leader’s death.
“We were wrongly accused of plotting against the City when in fact Edward was a strong leader who had views that differed from the ruling elite,” Mr Sandler said.
“In truth, Edward was 100 per cent behind the City’s mission – we just don’t agree with the methods.
“The true culprits were revealed and basically eliminated in the Battle of St Mary’s,” he said.
“Brotherhood soldiers supported City troopers in bringing that matter to a close. We should be thanked, not tarred with the same brush as the Lefthanders.
“Maybe now the Council will take a better look at the issues Edward raised, which is his legacy.”
However, Brotherhood members were behind several retaliation attacks while Burroughs was imprisoned that claimed the lives of five City troopers.
Mr Sandler declined to comment on what repercussions followed those attacks.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 10
