Never sleep, p.26
Never Sleep, page 26
“Toward the front,” the Prophet said to her.
It seemed that the factory owner, Mr. Webb, had let his workers have a day off to see the president-elect’s procession. But Mr. Webb’s fellow Palmetto Guardsmen knew better. The factory faced a narrowing of the street that would be part of the parade route from one train station to another. It was the perfect spot for an ambush. At the end of the long aisle of candle-making machinery lay a storefront display for the retail of finished products and pots of potpourri and such. A wide window faced the roiling surge of the crowd outside.
Around Hattie, men unholstered their pistols and cocked their rifles. The Prophet felt the edge of the counter in the display room and ducked out of sight from the street beyond. The others took similar positions.
“Mrs. Wilson, give the order,” the Prophet purred.
The Prophet crouched right below her, his bald spot right in front of her face. All she had to do to end this would be to point her pistol at it and fire. She would undoubtedly die next, cut down by gunfire from every angle, but at least she could redeem herself by dying for a just cause.
The First Lady’s carriage horses began to clop patiently into view. In front of them, an argument had broken out between two wagoners about who had the right-of-way, and this had stalled the procession. Even at this distance, Hattie could see handsome young Robert Todd Lincoln at the window, pensively smoking a cigar. One of the vast unwashed passed by his elbow, and Hattie heard him yell, “Say, Bob, how’s your old man?” at which Robert quickly retracted his arm inside the carriage and let the window curtain fall shut.
“Mrs. Wilson?” The Prophet’s voice grew sharp, spit sparks.
Then there was a commotion in the back of the factory, a series of shouts. Hattie recognized Mr. Dawson’s voice. The Prophet’s men started to swivel their attention away from the window. This was her chance, she realized, and patted her skirts, and patted her skirts—and realized then that in her daze she must not have picked the pistol up again after she had been relieved of it back at Gunner’s Hall.
Lady Detectives: My last advice to you, as I go to my final reward, is that it is generally best not to get captured. If you are captured, it is best to have a confederate among your captors. If you do not have such a confederate, it is best to have sequestered something of value on your person with which to bargain for your freedom. If you have nothing of value sequestered on your person . . .
A harsh laugh drew Kate’s gaze upward to the stone steps that formed the ceiling of her coop, and she heard the thud of men’s boots on those stairs.
“Time to get the steamer at the Hooper Pier ready,” she could hear the Prophet’s right-hand toady, the one with the caterpillar mustache, say from the stairs above her.
“What about her?” one of them asked.
At the bottom of the stairs, the footfalls stopped. “I’ll bring her with me when I join you. I have a couple of things to straighten out here.”
“Like what?”
“Like fuck your horse, if you had a horse. You just head over to the grog shop at the edge of the Hooper Pier. And don’t you worry about me.”
Kate held her breath.
The first shadow fell on the ground just outside her slatted door.
Lady Detectives: If you do not have something of value sequestered on your person, then wait for the first opening and fight like hell.
Tobias’s eyes went wide when he saw the wild look in Kate’s. He tried to point his Butterfield in her direction but did so far too slowly. She was past the barrel before he could extend his arm out to fire. Kate lashed out at his face, the two iron nails that Edgar Poe had pulled out of the loose slats in the wall of the coop jutting between the fingers of her fist, jagged rusty points facing outward.
She didn’t get Tobias’s eyes the first time she punched him, but she did the second time, and the third. And the fourth.
She didn’t punch a fifth time. She didn’t need to. The goo of his eyeballs was streaming freely down his cheeks now. Tobias dropped the Butterfield to try to gather what was left of them with both hands, but the streaming bloody tears of gore just gushed through his fingers.
Kate heard the tromp of footsteps above, drawn to the man’s screaming. She snatched up the pistol and snapped out its cylinder to make sure all five chambers were occupied. There was no thought in her mind except a roaring void. Her sleeplessness had narrowed the edges of the world around her to a razor’s keenness.
Kate grabbed Tobias by the back of his shirt with her free hand and pitched him face-first into the cellar outside. His cries were answered with thunderous gunshots from above that erupted across his back and knocked him to the floor as if swatted by the hand of God.
Her entire nervous system was now given over wholly to her reflexes, which propelled her just far enough out of the cage to point the Butterfield upward at the National Volunteers on the steps above. They had no time to aim their weapons before she opened fire. The Butterfield kicked in her hand, and the hat of the uppermost night rider flew off his head with his brains and half of his skull inside it. He keeled over off the stairs and right toward her, but not before she fanned the Butterfield’s hammer at the man standing next to him. This man kicked back out of her field of vision like a poor performer yanked from the stage.
Kate ducked back under her cell just before the other dropping body could fall on top of her, crashing instead onto Tobias’s still form.
She waited. She listened. She could not hear anything but the sound of her breath. She lunged back outside, pointing the Butterfield skyward, but the steps were empty. So was the Butterfield, so Kate relieved the corpse lying on top of Tobias of his Colt Army.
Lying beside the dead man was another six-barrel pepperbox—what on a ship would be called a duck’s foot pistol—a single-fire weapon with a half-dozen simultaneous shots. She knew it had to be at least a half-century old. These motley Volunteers had been so inspired to join the Prophet’s crusade that they had taken ancient muskets from above their mantles and dusted off their grandfathers’ curiosities to take up arms against the hated Northerners.
She took up the duck’s foot in her left hand, the Colt in her right. She stole up the steps and into the drafty, cavernous main room of the slaughterhouse, Colt outstretched. She was like a wire humming in the wind, attuned to every fluctuation around her. Her mind was a ticking telegraph repeating the same uncoded message over and over:
I am at the door
But not to guard it
I am the panther
I am the fucking panther
An aproned Bloody Tub charged her from behind the open door to the cellar, his long two-handed sword of a meat cleaver raised high over one shoulder. The door slammed shut, and he swung the cleaver at her once, twice, in a wide chopping motion. He had gotten close enough that Kate could smell his breath. With his next swing, the cleaver chopped down with a heavy thud into the ribs of a hog carcass dangling just behind her, where it stuck. Kate pressed the duck’s-foot gun to his chest with her left hand and pulled the trigger. With a cloudburst of gunpowder and an ear-ringing roar, the pepperbox discharged and sprayed her with fat, blood, and scraps of muscle torn out of the Bloody Tub’s chest as he was hurled away.
Then she felt a sharp pain in her side, then two. Another Bloody Tub had appeared next to her and stabbed at her ribs with a long, jagged shoemaker’s awl.
With a cry she backhanded him with the Colt, knocking him far enough away from her that when he charged with the awl again, she could raise her arm and shoot him in the teeth. She dropped the now-empty duck’s foot to free her hand and cover the wounds on her side, where she could feel her life oozing out between her fingers. To her right she was aware of daylight, the sizzle of raindrops, and an open doorway. Each step made pain bark in her abdomen, but she managed to limp toward escape.
Outside, she found a yard entirely enclosed by a high brick wall. Rain slashed down harder than she had expected, forming a sea of brown mud on the ground. Pigskins were stretched on racks around the square perimeter. A group of old men and boys cowered beneath a sad lean-to on the other side of huge noxious vats of tanning liquor. At first, Kate had no idea what made the men tremble until, turning back inside, she caught a glimpse of herself in a puddle: covered with pink blood from crotch to crown, deep bags under her eyes, clutching a pistol that steamed where the raindrops hit it. Kate was the picture-perfect image of a vengeful banshee, terrifying even to her.
She went back inside looking for a way out, but a gunshot slammed into a carcass hanging directly to her right and brought her to her knees. She scampered behind the pig and peered around it, briefly catching sight of two men rushing toward her, firing in her direction. They ducked behind the next row of dangling swine, reloaded, then cocked and fired again.
Kate rolled to her side under the butchery table to her left. Her hand landed on a shoemaker’s awl that had fallen there. She snatched it up.
The lead man emerged from the end of the row of pigs; he had no idea where she was. When he got within a step of her hiding place, she stabbed him through the foot with the awl. He screamed and struggled to free himself, but she had pinned him to the wooden floorboards.
The second appeared, and Kate grabbed the first off the ground to use as a shield. Kate and her assailant both emptied their pistols at each other. Kate missed her mark entirely, but her enemy thoroughly perforated the chest of the Tub she held. The dead man dropped his Springfield .58 and keeled over, the dead weight of his body finally tearing his foot free from the awl in the floor. The remaining National Volunteer rushed for the gun, his own now empty, but Kate yanked the awl out of the floor and slashed wildly at him, forcing him back. He bobbed up under her reach and managed to get both hands around her neck. He picked her up by her head and smashed her against the brick wall. Spots swarmed before her eyes from the pain, but she stabbed him blindly in the cheek and head with the awl until he had to let her go.
Kate kicked her feet against him and sent both of them sprawling across the blood-slick floor. She landed within arm’s reach of the Springfield pistol carbine. They both scrambled to their feet, but she had the gun in her hand. She shot him twice in the chest.
He stumbled back away from her, partly from the jerk of the bullets and partly under his own power, until he turned and stumbled headlong outside into the tannery yard, where he tripped over his boots and fell into the sunken poison pool of tanning liquid outside, pulling free an edge of the tarp covering it and getting himself all tangled in the cloth, his feet sticking out and flailing as he grabbed the edge of the tub and strained to lift himself out of it.
She did not let him. She dropped the carbine and got hold of both of his flailing feet and lifted them upward, forcing his head down into the foul-smelling elixir, smoky with burnt tree bark. He kicked and he thrashed and he smashed his heel into her mouth in his desperate attempts to get away, splitting both her lips open in the process, but ultimately this stopped. It all stopped. She didn’t let him go until she saw the wide whites of the cowering tanners across the yard watching this blood-soaked Fury nearly nod off while holding on to the still legs of a dead man.
She let go of the Volunteer’s ankles and let him sink beneath the cider-colored tanning fluid, then staggered back inside, her head still pounding from where she had been shoved up against the wall.
Kate reclaimed the carbine and searched for a way out. She finally found a large side door that she yanked open, trudging through the live hog pen toward the street. The swine grunted at her, but they let her go past. Their hooves trampled the gold buttons glittering in the mud, buttons that bore the US stamp of her country’s military, once attached to a Prussian-blue artillery officer’s uniform.
“What is this? What is going on here? This is not where our eyes should be,” the Prophet roared as some Volunteers dragged Mr. Dawson forward, his arms pinned behind his back.
“This one was lurking where he shouldn’t,” said a Volunteer. “Thinking you were up to something sharp, were you?”
“Mr. Wilson?” exclaimed one of the remaining Perrymansville Volunteers.
Hattie cried out as the Prophet closed one claw over her shoulder to use her as a post so he could stand up. “You! I knew I smelled copper on you from the start, and even now I can smell it! Damn me for not listening to my own instincts, but bless the Lord for giving me a second chance. Mrs. Wilson . . .”
The Prophet seemed suddenly to realize that he was asking her to turn his gun on her husband, and he fell into a rare confusion. She took the opportunity to twist out of his grasp, and she grabbed a handful of wooden matches from an open tin on the sales counter. She had lost her pistol, but she was not entirely unarmed.
“Come back here,” the Prophet hollered. “Let me rid you of this traitor who does not deserve you!”
Howard, the futures man, stood up, throwing his jacket open. He drew the Colt from his waistband and shot into the air. “All right, drop your irons, Rev! I am an agent of Pinkerton’s National Police Agency, and I am placing you all under arrest!”
The pronouncement had the exact opposite of its intent. They were all on their feet now, shouting, most turning their guns on Howard. The First Lady’s carriage was still visible through the window, but no one paid it any mind.
“Hattie?” the Prophet called. “Where are you, girl? You are mine and I command you to return to my side—”
Hattie had scampered behind a nearby worktable and located an oily rag. Backing up into a corner, she managed to light it on fire with her second match.
Howard spotted her and cocked the pistol in her direction. “Drop it, you loopy bitch! You gunned down a lieutenant in the United States Army in cold blood and I’ll see you swing for it if it takes my last breath.”
The Prophet swung his blind arm around and shot Howard right in the chest. Dawson dove behind a candle-making machine as a flurry of bullets was unleashed in his direction as well.
But now Hattie had the rag ignited. She found a stirring stick waxed at one end with paraffin and set that afire too. She stood near the kegs of paraffin and screamed out an incoherent cry.
Every pistol was now turned on her. Her eyes burned brighter than her torch, and she stood before them like a pagan priestess of fire. For the first time, they were looking at her, not the guise, not the quiet Mrs. Wilson, not the right hand of the Prophet, but the real Hattie MacLaughlin.
At last, this is me, the real me, she thought in words that burned. I have never been more real than I am now.
The Prophet was the only person in the room not looking at her, and she addressed him now. “August Defoe!” she cried. He turned toward her, looking baffled and hurt. “August Defoe,” she repeated, “I return you to hell!”
With that, she ignited the kegs of paraffin. The white explosion rolled through her and everything around her, consuming the deserving and the undeserving alike until there was nothing left, not even regrets.
Kate heard him before she saw him, the scrape-thunk of his gait rising above the wharf-front cacophony, the creak of hulls, the lap of brackish water, the rebukes of gulls.
She had suspected this to be his ultimate destination since she had overheard the National Volunteers and Bloody Tubs arguing above her coop. She had come straight here after escaping the abattoir and discovered a single youth in overalls streaked with coal grease standing watch over a steamer on the wharf. He had been whittling something obscene from a loose bit of dock when she staggered up the gangplank. Her hair glistened with rain and was streaked with bits of someone else’s flesh. She had been dipped in blood starting at her shoulders and her dress was a vivid scarlet at its bosom, fading to light crimson around her waist. Her mouth was black from wounds not yet healed, and it cracked into a gruesome smile when she saw him.
“They’re dead,” she said to the junior Tub. “They’re all dead.” Then she laughed.
The teenager didn’t question either the message or the messenger. He dropped his knife and pushed past her and ran down Hooper Pier as fast as his legs could carry him.
She put a hand on the wall of the wheelhouse to steady herself. She dared not sit down. She was sure if she did, she would not stand up again.
Then she saw him, poling himself along with his walking stick, his wide-brimmed hat drooping on his head, hunched over like some derelict Odin. He was blackened like Friday-night catfish, and even the tips of his white mustache were singed. The rubber that lined his vulcanized raincoat smoked slightly as if he had pulled it up over his head rushing headlong out of the Pit. He didn’t see her, not at first, so she had time to push herself upright against the wheelhouse.
Seeing the Prophet walk the dock unaided gave her a cynical grin—had he been feigning blindness all along? Oh, no: he was touching the tops of the pilings with the end of his stick to verify their existence. But when he looked up, he seemed to see her, gun in hand, in between him and his escape vessel. He cried out, “Lift high praise to heaven, Mrs. Wilson! If you and I were the only ones to escape that inferno, I would consider myself mightily blessed.”
He chuckled as he poled closer to her, squinting. “Do not think one such as me has never had reason to curse the Almighty. As much as I fear him, I see no harm in back-talking the Heavenly Father in moments of great stress. The burden he entrusted to me is awesome. Had any lesser man been asked to carry it, his spine would have been long since snapped under its unfathomable weight. And up ’til now, I must unhappily report, I have been surrounded by lesser men. ’Tis a pity they are made of such brittle clay that so little lasting can be made from them. That greasy Italian ran off, along with the other pretenders like that railroad foreman Broddle. They are the children who go home when called by their mothers after playing at revolution all day. What about Tobias, Mrs. Wilson? Did he make it on board too?”
