CHAPTER 91
1831, New Orleans
The trail of chaos led a quarter of a mile up Powder Street, battered and split wooden kegs spilling liquor on to the ground and penniless vagrants clustered around each one, eagerly filling their cupped hands.
They passed a woman with a broken leg howling for a physician, an overturned baker’s wagon that had spilled loaves across the track and a trapper’s bundle of beaver pelts and deer hides scattered across the way, ruined and torn by hooves and wheel rims, before finally finding themselves looking into the gated courtyard and stables of a brewery.
‘The cart came from here,’ said Bob.
A crowd of brewery workers had been drawn out to the courtyard from inside a two-storey brick building, and were gathered around something. They could see workers turning away ashen-faced, doubling over and retching. A woman screamed and ran from the courtyard past them.
‘Excuse me? Miss? What just happened?’ asked Sal.
The woman shook her head and gabbled something about ‘the devil’s work’. Then she was gone, hurrying away as fast as her feet could carry her.
‘This is the contamination event,’ said Bob.
‘Aye. Come on, we should go and have a look.’
They crossed the courtyard, heading towards brick-built stables. They could hear the horses inside, distressed, the clattering of circling restless hooves, snorting and lowing behind the stable doors.
The crowd of people were gathered around
‘… witchcraft …’
‘… work of the devil …’
A man with a loud voice was busy castigating the brewery workers on the evils of drink … and that
They pushed their way through the crowd to get a better look, not difficult since the gathered crowd was reluctant to draw any closer to what it was on the ground that had drawn them round.
Finally Liam, Bob and Sal could see for themselves what it was — the cause of the disturbance, the cause of the runaway brewery cart. Liam stopped where he stood, queasily covering his mouth with a hand.
‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph …’
Sal took another step closer and squatted down beside …
‘Don’t touch it!’ screamed one of the crowd of people. ‘It is a creation of evil! A demon!’
She ignored the warning and reached one hand out carefully towards
‘Is that
It was as if a slaughterhouse had dumped a day’s worth of off-cuts and refuse into the courtyard. Amid the glistening purple and bloody gristle she could see the hindquarters of a horse, still flexing weakly, kicking spasmodically. But worse still — the stuff that she was sure would fuel a lifetime of future nightmares for her — the blood-spattered head, shoulders and upper torso of a man welded to the flanks of the same horse, or perhaps it was a second horse. As if God had decided to construct a centaur and in a moment of frustration and irritation had given up and hurled the failed mess down to Earth.
Her hand gently touched the dead man’s head.
His eyes flickered open.
CHAPTER 92
2001, New York
Maddy and the other prisoners were seated on the ground fifty yards away from the horseshoe trench, guarded by only a handful of British soldiers. It was clear to them that there was no fight left in the small ragged huddle of Union and Confederate soldiers.
She watched them processing the bodies of their own first. Checking for signs of life before pulling regimental collar tags from their necks and carrying the corpses down towards the river’s edge where they were being loaded aboard the landing rafts.
She noticed nearby a particularly dense mound of bodies with crimson tunics, busy with orderlies squatting among them feeling for signs of life. And there — as a body was disentangled and carried away by a couple of them — she saw Becks.
She got to her feet and started to pick her way across the battlefield.
‘Hey! Miss! Sit back down!’ shouted one of the British soldiers guarding them.
Maddy ignored him, drawn to the pale face staring up through its own nest of bodies. She pushed her way past an orderly and squatted down on the ground beside Becks’s cold, still face. Dark blood caked the right side of her face, trickling down from a gunshot wound to her temple.
‘Becks?’
The orderly, a young man with freckles and jutting ears, looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know this woman, miss?’
She said nothing.
‘By the look of it, whoever she was, she put up one hell of a fight.’
His voice sounded far away. She barely heard it. Instead she gazed curiously at the spatter of a tear on Becks’s left cheek, for a moment wondering whether a support unit could actually cry. Then she realized it was one of her own. She wiped her eyes beneath her glasses and sniffed.
‘Becks?’ she whispered. ‘Becks … I’m so sorry.’
Maybe. Maybe she was sorry about that. But then again wasn’t it better not to treat these things as human, as
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again, stroking one of Becks’s dark eyebrows. The one she’d made a habit of raising every time she had a question she wanted to ask.
She was vaguely aware that the orderly was remonstrating with the guard who’d come after her, to give her some space, that she wasn’t about to run anywhere, escape.
‘Becks, I’m sorry that we never just … you know, never just
Like Liam did, like Sal did. Both of them quite comfortable with the idea of hanging out with Bob and Becks as if they were just like them, human.
She traced a line down Becks’s cold cheek. Quite dead. Beneath the bodies lying across her were injuries she didn’t need to see — didn’t
The raised voices in the background were a million miles away. Muted. Some other place. This moment was hers alone. A chance to say goodbye. Her own time and space.
But the voices increased in number, and raised in pitch and urgency. Voices all around her.
‘Good God!’
‘What is THAT?’
