There was fire after the war. From makeshift torches its touch pillaged the chiseled high harvests of man. Office buildings once glorious were left gutted and blackened amid barren business districts smoldering at the throat of death. Churches, their idols deconsecrated, lay in ruins, abandoned by the zealots who'd worshipped there in less secular times. Bridges were crashed, schools were smashed. It was over—the age of arrangement. Chaos had usurped its throne, and it ruled with fevered lunacy.
The city of Cleveland had been all but flattened during its country's intense three years of conflict. The fires had been burning ever since, with and without the aid of what destitute maniacs still roamed the streets. And as to when it would all stop, the wheel was still in spin. Sometimes it seemed like never.
***
Tonight's newest conflagration had been set in the suburbs beneath a small red picnic table next to the library—where a number of moss-covered books lay bloated in the gutters—and a museum, where Kenneth White lived with his wife and baby daughter. The table now stood engulfed. Tongues of fire writhed over their meal. Seeing it caused White's heart to fill with dread. Not an hour ago, he'd left here in a black sedan dispatched by his employer, Clabe "Beetle" Durgeon. That was by no means a very long time (especially when Durgeon wanted you for something), but long enough, White guessed, for something bad to happen.
Skirting the table proved difficult. This first night of June carried a steady breeze, spreading the flames. White was forced to go around the long way to gain access to the museum. When at last inside he sprang upstairs fast as his legs would carry him.
"Bridgette!"
Half a dozen candles flickered at the bannister. He scrambled up another flight of steps, to the rooftop—and let out a sigh of relief. Bridgette was sitting near the ledge, quiet as ever, a cigarette between her fingers. The baby lay asleep in a wicker basket.
"Christ, I thought something might have happened to you!" White breathed. Then: "Someone set the picnic table on fire!"
This last remark earned her attention. "No," she said.
"Yes! And if we don't take care of it the whole damned block'll go up!"
Bridgette muttered something as she rose from her chair—White thought it might have been "fuck" or "shit", but not being a woman of many words she often didn't speak loud enough to be heard. Together they raced to the scene of the crime.
It took half an hour to get things under control. White was about to suggest they use the last of this week's water supply (issued by Clabe Durgeon), but before he could open his mouth Bridgette turned and ran to the adjacent parking lot.
"What the shit are you doing?" he yelled.
She didn't answer. Instead, there came a sharp, squeaking noise—the noise of a rusty steel door being opened. Bridgette had found an old blue dumpster in the parking lot and was tugging something large from inside. Inspired, White rushed to help. The carpet was bulky, and still wet from a shower earlier that day, but with Bridgette's help White worked it free from the trash and carried it to the picnic table, where the flames were now bright enough to read by.
"On three!" White shouted. "One...two...three!"
The carpet flopped over the table with a hollow whumpf! sound, and the scene was pitched into darkness.
"Jump up here with me," Bridgette commanded, as her boots began to stamp the wet fabric.
Five minutes later the flames were extinguished. Fetching a sigh of relief, White leaped from the table. "Is that the first time we've ever danced?" he asked, smiling.
No longer feeding a fire, the night breeze felt like an old friend again, whispering through the snub trees and ruffling the pages of countless broken library books. Bridgette gave a curt little nod to herself before turning to head back inside. On the rooftop Cindy--the baby--was still fast asleep. With her, at least, Bridgette had never been uncharitable with words, and White was happy to see the tradition continue as she knelt to make certain no harm had been done.
"How's my little one?" she cooed. There was warmth in her gaze reserved explicitly for the child, and by the time said gaze returned to White it had gone. "She's fine."
"She has a good mother."
Bridgette stood. "I can't hear shit up here, Ken. Not when it's windy."
"You mean the vandals?" he asked, his brow furrowed. "Of course not. We're three stories up."
Her fingers ran through her auburn hair. She went to the edge of the roof, beyond which the city's ruins were spread like the broken toys around Cindy's basket. From this vantage point White could see at least two dozen other fires, and beyond, on the distant horizon, hundreds more burned around the skeleton towers of downtown Cleveland. Soon, he knew, nothing would be left. And if he and Bridgette and Cindy weren't gone by then...
But not every light hurt to look at. Tonight's meeting with Beetle Durgeon had gone surprisingly well.
"We have work then?" Bridgette asked, once he'd shared the news with her.
"You could say that. Ask me how much we were offered."
"Okay."
He named the sum.
It garnered no reaction whatsoever. Nor was this surprising. Bridgette had never been an easy woman to convince. Even her living arrangement with White (and this he knew on instinct) was more a matter of convenience than chemistry. Simply put, she didn't believe. In anything. It was an apathetic disposition White chose to blame on the war, but sometimes he wondered. Not that wondering helped. She never talked about her past.
"With that much money we could get out of this shit-hole," he brought out, reaching for straws. "We could drive to Maine like we wanted, or...wherever. No more vandals, no more working for Durgeon. No more...sightless idiots in the streets clawing at our coatsleeves. This is a real chance, Bridge."
He waited. Nothing. Her eyes roamed the landscape. This time White decided to challenge her reticence. She had to care about this, dammit! Not for him, maybe, but for Cindy unquestionably. They had to get away for her sake. Get north, where the air was still fresh and the water clean.
Was she somehow able to read these thoughts? It seemed so. For at last, with a sigh and a shrug, Bridgette asked:
"What do we have to do?"
***
Beetle Durgeon would disclose no concrete reasons for the assignment he had in mind for them, but there no questioning why all the same: The death threats were beginning to unnerve him. He wanted to trace them to their source fast and snuff them out, even it meant purging all of greater Cleveland.
Wishing to start with the most sensible target, he chose his top competitor, a man known only as Madnishnue by the diplomats who served him. Like Durgeon, Madnishnue had thrived in the decadence that followed the war, and was said to be every bit as ruthless as his cross-town nemesis. No small feat, considering how well the years had fed what White could testify to. Durgeon, for all of his political decorum, carried the reputation of a monster. He was the biggest, meanest black man White had ever known. On the streets of East Cleveland—where most of his dealings took place—they called him a modern day Vlad Drakul, which doubtless derived from his love of torture. That torture consisted of two methods, depending on the sex of the victim in question: impalement (men) and drowning (women).
“I suggest you watch yourself,” he had admonished during the meeting with White. “Don’t get caught under this guy’s thumb. The best time to get him would be this coming Friday—or Saturday morning, to be precise. He’ll be traveling by train through Cuyahoga Valley sometime between midnight and dawn—“
And who might have died, White wondered at the time, to get you that information?
“—which means you’ll need to work fast. Get on that train and get him before the goddamned sun comes up. With luck no one will even know what hit them.”
White knew a run-in with that kind of fortune was unlikely but said nothing.
“And remember: I want Madnishnue brought back alive, with breath in his lungs. He’s going to need it when he answers to me.”
There, then, was the meat of their mission. Dozens of questions still ached to be asked, but White knew from experience how receptive his employer was to such things. On top of that, he and Bridgette had a child to support—
So what did those questions matter?
Durgeon was a brute, but he had never been known to sever his end of a bargain. If he said there’d be a windfall, there’d be a windfall. As long as you worked for it, of course.
***
And that was how, some four days later, White and Bridgette found themselves atop a high hill overlooking the valley, waiting for Madnishnue’s train to come roaring on the tracks below, at which time they would board it, abduct him, and deliver him into the unforgiving bosom of Beetle Durgeon.
His crime? The death threats. Little epistles that were turning up more and more often in the vicinity of Durgeon’s home in Shaker Heights, suggesting that the addresser was at last preparing to make good his promises.
“I hope we don’t wind up having to sit here all fucking night,” White was saying. “Seymour’ll soak us for every penny we’ve got.”
“He’s worth it,” Bridgette remarked.
“I don’t know. I never quite trusted that kid watching over Cindy. He’s taken us for close to a thousand dollars over the years, and God knows—“
“Not that much.”
“Don’t be so certain. He’s a thief. A neighborhood crook.”
He expected her to protest further, but she was silent, perhaps knowing already that White’s current anxiety had nothing at all to do with the babysitter. She herself was more like a block of ice. Long abandoned lay the idea she could fear anything at all, but on tonight of all nights, White thought he would see at least a little edginess. Wrong again. Her face remained a deserted isle, the eyes twin lagoons, glimmering with nary a ripple.
“What are we gonna tell Clabe if he doesn’t show up?” White wondered. He had a pair of binoculars fixed on the tracks. They were a good distance away, but it was still obvious that Madnishnue’s train was nowhere near. Cold moonlight decorated the rails; all was quiet.
“I dunno,” Bridgette admitted.
A leather belt lay in her hand, and she was testing its durability with tug after quick, hard tug, perhaps to reassure herself. Or White.
Were it the latter, she was wasting her time. After first hearing her idea on how to board the train—three days ago on this very hill—he’d come right out and called her a lunatic. It was absurd, he’d said. They would both be killed.
“It would be crazier trying to get on from the side of the tracks,” she’d insisted with as little flare as possible. “First of all, we couldn’t do it. The train’ll be moving too fast.”
“What makes you think that?” he’d demanded.
“Second of all we’d be spotted. Do you want to get shot down while panting like a dog? No, Ken. We come in from the top.”
She’d never been so insistent with him, or so point blank as to leave him without vocabulary to shelter his opinion. Caught off guard, he’d been forced to succumb, butterflies already stirring a ruckus in his loins. Her idea really was crazy, and sleep would only come in uneasy dozes over the following nights, illustrated with dreams of plummet and death.
That unease was a comfort compared to the way White felt now. Brought face to face with the madwoman’s intentions it was a wonder he could hold the binoculars still. Sad, then, that Madnishnue was so difficult a man to pre-empt. Even the train’s destination was a mystery; the knowledge had ultimately proved too difficult for Durgeon to come by. Either that or the fucker knew and just wasn’t saying.
“Come on,” White urged, studying the tracks. “Jesus, when the hell’s he gonna get here?” He lowered the binoculars and turned to Bridgette, who’d given up tugging the belt and was now smoking a cigarette like a woman on the sunny deck of a luxury liner. “The sooner this is over with the better,” he went on, “especially your suicidal boarding stunt. If I lose my gun on the way down what am I gonna do? Huh? Christ. This is the last time, Bridge—I told you that, didn’t I? I swear this is the last time. Once we’re done we’ll collect our money and get the fuck outta here.”
“If you don’t have a coronary first.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
His eyes went back—as they had done a hundred times already—to the telephone wire. It was the longest he had ever seen, stretching from the hill all the way down to the tracks and beyond. Nor was this the lone association the thing had with the fantastic. One end of it had been driven into a tree, presumably by yesteryear’s war, leaving a black bruise around the space where it had entered the bark. Seeing it had inspired Bridgette. In half an hour she’d traced the entire length of the cable, knotting its other end to a second tree on the far side of the valley. It would hold, she’d assured; and better yet, it would equip them with the benefit of surprise. Madnishnue’s acolytes were certainly not prepared to defend the train from above, and Bridgette felt this lack of foresight was the key to the whole enterprise.
White walked to the edge of the hill and looked down. The bottom could not be seen, never mind the moon’s penetrating brilliance. If he fell there’d be no tomorrow.
“I’d like one of those cigarettes if you don’t mind,” he put forth.
She nodded, reached for one—and then froze as if poked by a stick. Springing to her feet, she joined him at the precipice.
“Can I have the cigarette or what?” White asked, confounded.
He was violently shushed. “Listen! It’s coming!”
Now he understood. Sure enough, something tainted the shadowed silence now, a rasping, clanging sound—the din of a steel factory from a mile away—that lingered over the trees.
“I’m a son of a bitch,” White muttered. The next thing he knew a leather belt was being thrust into his hand. Except it wasn’t a belt at all, he realized. It was an old guitar strap. “Where did you get this?”
“Never mind. Put your hand through the loops before you go down. That way if you lose your grip you’ll have a second chance to gain it back.”
“Um…all right.”
The sound of the train had grown much louder, rising to the brim of the hill. Physical evidence of its proximity could be only seconds away. The tension it caused White was almost painful.
“I’m going,” Bridgette said. She was the one with the belt (no safety loops for her), stretching to the very tips of her toes to sling it over the wire. “Okay!” she yelled, turning her face towards him. “After I let go you get on this thing and count to five! Understand? But not too slow and not too fast! Go one-two-three-four-five, then let go! Got it?”
He started to acknowledge, but it was already too late. She had gone, sliding away down her makeshift zip-cord.
Cursing, White threw the guitar strap over the wire and squeezed his hands through the loops. This, of course, was not what they’d been put there for, and the fit was tight. Still, it felt good, and he believed he would indeed be given a second chance should his hands slip from the strap.
The train was in full view now, a black serpent on the rails. Without looking down—oh God, he mustn’t look down—White shrieked Bridgette’s advised countdown at the top of his lungs, and let go.
Panic clutched him. The abyss of Cuyahoga Valley gaped underfoot, every bit as vast as the heavens above. Down and down he went, faster and faster. The guitar strap produced a high-pitched whine as it streaked along the wire. The wind pressed his face into a comic mask. His hands ached, his heart raced. Yet somehow he held on, all the way to the vital release point, which Bridgette informed would be about thirty feet from the train. Still screaming, he let go the guitar strap. Two seconds later the “safety loops” broke, and he was in full plummet.
“OHHHH SHIIII--!”
He hit the roof of the train on his ass and tumbled to the opposite edge, nearly falling over it, except that Bridgette’s hand appeared out of nowhere to pull him to safety. She was visibly shaken, and they were both forced to spend a few minutes collecting themselves on the cold steel of the railroad car. Dazed and giddy, White sat down with her, at which point Bridgette did a most peculiar thing: She took his hand.
“You were right,” she confessed, “that was crazy.”
“Yeah,” White gasped. “It sure worked though. Everything you said to do was pretty much right on the money. What did you do, use a slide rule?”
Five minutes later she told him that she was ready to move on. The gun she carried—a .45 caliber pistol—had found its way into her hand. “Are you?” she asked.
“More or less.”
“Then let’s do this.”
***
Madnishnue’s train was not exceptionally long. This fact carried both pros and cons. With fewer cars to search, the potentate would of course be easier to find; however, it made his pursuers easier prey as well.
At Bridgette’s suggestion they worked their way to the back of the train, hopping between cars, and entered through a door which White was obliged to break down. Blackness pressed from the other side. Bridgette clicked on her flashlight. Its beam cut a swath through the murk, splashing its way from floor to ceiling and back again. In one corner was a wooden stool. In another, a lamp with a broken bulb lay on its side.
“No one’s here, Ken.”
“Good.”
The door on the next car was unlocked. Suspicious, White pushed it open. Candles flickered on a polished oak bar table. Fluted glasses jingled from suspended holders. White stepped on the plush red carpeting of the car’s interior—
And ducked a mere instant before an aluminum softball bat whisked through the space where his head had been. Its barrel struck the wall next to Bridgette, sending a shower of wooden splinters across the floor. Without thinking, White grabbed hold of the thing before its wielder could pull it back for a second swipe and yanked it free with one hard jerk.
“You fuck-wad! Gimme that back!”
The bat had yielded with surprising ease, and no wonder: Its owner was little more than a child, a boy no older than fifteen, dressed in filthy jeans and a torn brown vest that hung on his scrawny torso. Two huge brown eyes glared at White.
“I said gimme it!” the boy repeated.
Bridgette leveled her .45 at him. “Pipe down or I’ll put a hole through your chest.”
“What’s your name?” White asked, hoping to calm things a bit. Scrawny or no, the kid had a strong set of lungs, and if he didn’t stop using them Madnishnue’s entire regiment would be beating on the doors before long.
But it seemed the child knew better than to shout when before the barrel of a loaded weapon. “Chevron,” he answered soberly, eyeing Bridgette’s gun.
“Chevron, good. That your real name?”
“Nope. But my real name sucks. Lady, don’t point that thing at me no more, huh? I’ll shut up or whatever. Jeez you look pissed.”
“She is,” White said, “all the time. Now tell us which car Madnishnue’s riding in.”
Chevron blinked and looked at White. “Who?”
Just then the opposite door was broken down with a hollow crack!, splitting the rhythm of the train’s wheels. A giant stood at the obliterated threshold, bald-headed, wearing a blue muscle-shirt. So much for the element of surprise.
“He’s got a fucking machine gun!” White hollered.
Bridgette had already hit the floor and White was diving for cover behind the bar when the air came to life with a metallic and deadly spray of discharge. Chevron never had a chance. He neither ducked nor dived, and as a result his skull was blasted apart in the rataplan. Fragments of it (hair, teeth, and bone) flew everywhere as the machine gun kept blazing away. Meanwhile White remained crouched behind the bar. He’d struck his hand on the side of it while diving and lost his gun. It was nowhere in sight. Nor, for that matter, was Bridgette. She was somewhere on the other side of the bar, dreadfully vulnerable. How long could it be before she was hit? God, was she dead already?
He looked back at the door, hoping to spot her, and instead saw Chevron’s softball bat. It too had clattered to the floor during his sprawling leap, but was still within reach. He snatched it and wriggled like an iguana to the other end of the bar. Then, while muscle-man remained busy with his gun, White lunged and brought the bat down hard as he could on the giant’s wrist. There was another crack! sound, this one of bone.
Muscle-man stopped firing and collapsed to the floor. “My arm!” he thundered, glaring at his assailant. “You busted my friggin’—“
The sound of a different gun cut the accusation short, and White caught sight of a hole appearing in the giant’s forehead as he spun to discover Bridgette, poised in one of the old-tyme target shooter positions, smoke trickling from the barrel of her .45.
There was no time for celebration; the jig was up. No longer could they hope to act surreptitiously. Voices trailed from above—commands being issued and acknowledged. The job had become a full blown mess.
Bridgette was first to voice the fact. “They’re circling us,” she observed, eyes probing the ceiling. “Walling us in. Jesus, how many of them are there?”
No sooner was the question asked than a lithe black man wearing mirror sunglasses dropped from the roof and came at White. He was brought to the floor hard, and as Bridgette was aiming to get another shot off, two more brutes appeared at the opposite end of the car, eyes burning, guns blazing. The woman was fast, but not fast enough. She managed to cut both of them down, but then the gun was flying from her hand and she was yelping with pain as a hole above her wrist spouted a fountain of red.
Over in the corner the man with the sunglasses was pummeling White with an assortment of hooks and uppercuts. But then out of nowhere, like a gift from some vindictive deity, came Bridgette’s gun, clattering to the floor just a few feet from where he lay. In a desperate gambit White brought his knee up hard as the muscles in his leg would allow, not expecting to find the other’s groin but doing so with an accuracy that verged on the miraculous. Shades was stunned, and when his grip loosened it seemed there might be just enough time to reach out and snatch the gun. When he had it he’d aim for the mother’s face and show no mercy.
This vision of glory glowing in his head, White lunged…and let loose a cry of frustration when at the last instant the gun was kicked away by what looked to be an immaculately polished dress shoe. White caught just a glimpse of it before its wearer jerked it back into the shadows.
And uneasy hush followed, broken now and again by the steady clack-clack, clack-clack, of the wheels on the rails.
White lay still on the floor, waiting for what he didn’t know. Death, likely. Within moments that would be what came. He’d heard Bridgette cry out a minute or two earlier, and the sudden memory of it, what it insinuated, made his heart go cold.
“Okay, Ben, now what?” a voice asked.
“Go and get whatshername, willya?”
“Bridgette.”
“Yeah.”
At the mention of her name White’s jaw dropped. What the hell?
“You must be Ken White,” the black man said, his face materializing in the gloom. “The brains of this operation?” When White didn’t answer he took off his shades, revealing a pair of eyes that looked highly amused. “You were fucked from the git-go, brother. We seen you comin’ all the way.”
“On the zipline?” White replied. “Bullshit.”
The other laughed at this. “Yeah man,” he insisted, “all the way.”
But White still didn’t believe him. “You’re lying. You don’t even know what I mean when I say zipline, do you? You found us because of that little prick. Chevron. He screams like a woman.”
“So does this little thing,” the other man put in from nearby. As instructed, he’d gone and fetched Bridgette. She’d been shot, White saw. Her face looked pale and feverish. “She’s got a hole in her hand and it’s gushing,” her captor went on. “I gave her my t-shirt but it ain’t helping a whole helluva lot.”
The black man looked up and gave her a wink. “You’ll survive, sweets. If we’d wanted you dead, you’d be so by now.”
“I don’t get this,” Bridgette said, stunned by more than just the bleeding wound. “How do you know us? To be identified was the last thing I thought would happen tonight. So just how the fuck—“
“Questions, questions,” the black man’s friend broke in. “Save ‘em for the boss-man. He’s waiting for you at the front of the train.”
With that, they were ushered out of the car, which by now had begun to smell quite like the abattoir it was, and brought to the fore of the coaches. Or to the very first coach, to be more precise. The engine itself was not their destination, for just as the raucous din of it was beginning to overcome that of the wheels underfoot the two men stopped.
“We’re here,” one of them said.
They were outside, standing between the first two cars of the train. At some point Cuyahoga Valley had been left behind, the scenery having given way to what White guessed had once been a warehouse district of some kind. Glimpses of Lake Erie could be seen between pulped buttresses of bland, solemn-looking structures perfectly fit for the drama of death and desolation that had fallen over the earth. No inkling of dawn yet touched the horizon, leaving White to wonder whether he and Bridgette were ever going to see the sun again.
“Boss!” the black man called, rapping on the door of the coach—a red door, White noticed with another pang of dread. “We got ‘em!”
A few seconds of silence followed. Then: “Get their asses in here, Ben! Now!”
The voice, White thought as Ben reached for the knob, was familiar. In fact, damned familiar.
If indeed the arterial hue of the door was portentous, then what waited beyond was the apocalypse its assurance stood purpose for. Here, standing in the center of a car carpeted wall to wall with azure blue, was Clabe “Beetle” Durgeon, their hard-fisted, hard-tempered employer. He glowered at White, huge black eyes more threatening than ever.
“Ben,” he said, baritone, “leave. Trashy, you too. Take Bridgette and go find Doc Preston before she bleeds to death. Now, godammit! Me and Kenny here got lots to talk about.”
This was a lie, and Bridgette knew it.
“Ken!” she called, struggling against the arms that grasped her. Crazy as it seemed, she was terrified, and when their eyes met White caught that look of love she’d stopped giving long ago. Then Durgeon’s acolytes pulled her through the door and slammed it shut.
“Ah!” Durgeon smiled, spreading his arms. “It’s just you and me again.” He waited a few moments before continuing, until the sound of Bridgette’s struggling faded. “Your lady was very frightened, Ken. I suppose she’s got it in her head something…bad is going to happen to you.”
“She’s right, isn’t she?” White replied. There was little reason to prevaricate here, or feign ignorance. He’d been alone with Beetle Durgeon many times, and on most he’d taken severe beatings. Like White, Durgeon was tall; unlike White, he was a mountain of muscle and bone, with skin dark as a Nuba tribesman and eyes like burning coal. After each of these beatings, Durgeon always promised the next one would be worse.
Now the dark giant walked to a large oak desk and sat on its edge. He wore a pair of blue jeans along with a red dress shirt, which made him look almost like a regular guy, especially in the kind luminescence of the many oil lamps burning from sconces on the walls. What betrayed the illusion was the fury—that ever present fury, in which hundreds had cried for mercy and been denied.
“I’m going to tell you why I’m pissed off. What it was the two of you were supposed to do tonight, and didn’t, and why you found me at the front of this train instead of Madnishnue.”
“I am kind of wondering about those things,” White had to admit.
“It was a test, Ken. This whole mission.”
“A test?”
“Yes. I chose the two of you—because I thought you were the best I had working for me—to undergo this complex task in order to prove your loyalty of service. Of protection,” he added in a rough bark, “and I’m outraged by your failure. It was your job to get to the front of this train tonight no matter what the obstacles, and you failed!”
“We were outnumbered,” White protested, weakly.
“