Chapter 18: Retaliation from the Magia Gang
The rain kept falling in Hell's Kitchen. Even here, where violence was ambient and routine, the cold continuous downpour had driven most of the usual street presence indoors. The sidewalks were quieter than normal, the bars on both sides occasionally leaking the sounds of arguments or shouted insults, and a few people who had consumed too much of something were slumped near trash cans with the vacant expressions of the deeply unconscious.
"We're here," Nikki said.
She led Matthew off the street and into a park. He stopped at the entrance.
The park was packed with tents. Dense, overlapping, almost no clear ground between them. Most were in poor condition; many had lost any ability to repel water a long time ago.
Several were nothing more than torn canvas and plastic sheeting pulled over whatever frame could be arranged. Matthew had no difficulty imagining what it looked like inside these when it rained. Cold water coming through from every direction, the person inside soaked and lying in pooling mud, no insulation between them and the ground. In December. These structures would not keep out the cold. Some number of the people living in them would probably not make it through winter.
"You live here?" Matthew looked at the yellow tent Nikki had stopped in front of. It sat in a low point of the ground, sitting in about ten centimeters of accumulated rainwater.
He pulled back the entrance flap.
Flies. A dense cloud of them, immediately in his face. He waved them off and looked inside.
The tent had filled with water. Floating in it was a woman, motionless. Her skin was the color of something that had been in cold water for a while. Her clothing was disarranged, the fabric bloated in places from prolonged soaking. She had been dead for some time.
On her thigh, a wound that had progressed far past infection. The surrounding tissue had broken down. It had not been treated, or not adequately, for a long time.
Near the body, a few used balloons floated on the water's surface. From the condition of them, they had been used not long before she died.
Matthew stood in the rain with the water running off his umbrella and did not say anything.
He was not a purely good person. He had never claimed to be. The world was not divided cleanly into black and white. Someone had said that in a game he had played, and it had seemed accurate enough to stay with him.
The closest comparison he could find for what he felt now was finding an injured animal on the street, deciding to help, taking it somewhere, and watching it die anyway. A different texture than indifference to a stranger's misfortune. Not grief, exactly. Something more like the particular weight of having involved yourself and still failed.
Behind him, Nikki made a sound that cut through the rain.
She pushed past him into the tent before he could stop her and threw herself at her mother's body, trying to lift her, holding onto her, crying with the total unguarded volume of someone who had not learned yet to manage it.
Matthew stood outside the tent for a moment. Then he took the bills out of his pocket, the ones he had planned to buy alcohol with, and set them on a rusted tin box just inside the tent entrance.
He turned and walked away.
He had not gone far when the argument started behind him.
"Hey! Nikki! Don't be scared. It's me, your good neighbor Roy."
"Now then. Hand over the money he left in there. Don't try to pretend you didn't see. I watched the whole thing. That idiot just pulled five hundred dollars out of his pocket and handed it over. And funny timing, because five hundred is exactly what your mother owed me for tent rent."
"Give it back! This tent was from Old Carter! I'm not paying you rent for anything!"
"I say it's mine, so it's mine. You little — aah! You bit me! You little — I'll sell you to a brothel, you hear me?"
A slap. Sharp and clear through the rain.
Matthew turned around.
A man was standing in front of the tent. The word skeletal came to mind immediately; he looked like something assembled from the visual suggestion of a person rather than an actual person, the kind of frame that made people think of things that moved in the dark in movies. He had Nikki's money in his hand and was standing over Nikki, who was on the ground where he had just knocked her.
Nikki got up. She looked at her mother's tent. She looked at the man in front of her. And then something in her went past crying and into something else, and she launched herself at him, small and soaked and completely without regard for the fact that she was a malnourished child attacking a grown man.
Roy kicked her across the mud.
He was opening his mouth to say something when the world stopped making sense to him.
Why was everything going dark?
He could not get a breath in.
Something warm. Was that his chest? Why was his head inside his chest?
In the rain, Roy's cervical spine had separated from the rest of his spine, and his skull had been driven downward into his own chest cavity, collapsing the whole structure into a shape that should not have been possible to achieve from the outside.
It had happened in the space of about a second. Roy himself had not tracked any of it. He hit the mud two or three seconds later, by which point the question of what had happened to him was no longer one he was in a position to investigate.
Matthew pulled the bills out of the fingers that had been holding them and returned the money to his pocket.
"I changed my mind," he said. The rain made noise against everything around them. His voice came through it without particular effort. "In a place like this, giving you money means someone else takes it from you. There's no point."
Nikki stared at Roy's body from the mud. Then she looked up at Matthew.
"Two options," he said. "First: get up, come with me. I'm going to open a welfare center at some point. You can live there. Second: stay here. Manage on your own."
"Choose."
Nikki sat in the mud for a moment. Then she got up, went back into the tent, and felt through the water until she found something. An old photograph, discolored and beginning to mold around the edges. She wiped it carefully against her coat until the surface was cleaner, looked at it for a second, and walked toward Matthew.
No hesitation.
Getting into Hell's Kitchen was easy. Getting out of it was something else.
Armed figures stepped out from the alley ahead and blocked the street. Matthew looked back. The exit behind them was blocked as well.
"OI! Stop right there! I've had my eye on you since you walked in!"
The man at the front of the group was bald. Enormous, somewhere above seven and a half feet, the kind of build that had been assembled over a long time with dedicated effort. A scar ran horizontally across his face from one cheek to the other. He was carrying a heavy machine gun from the Second World War, the ammunition belt draped over his shoulders like an accessory he had stopped noticing. He held the weapon without any apparent awareness of how heavy it was.
"You're Matthew Lawrence."
It was not a question.
"From here on, I ask, you answer. One answer I don't like, and all of this goes into your skull." He rattled the ammunition belt.
"Question one. Where's my brother Pete? What did you do with him?"
Matthew looked at the dozen or so muzzles pointed at him. Something at the corner of his mouth moved slightly upward.
"Your brother? The scrawny one? Not too sharp? That Pete?"
He checked his watch.
"He's fine. At this hour, he's probably locked in a room being tested on something." He looked back up at the man with the machine gun. "Looking to join him? I can make some calls and get you moved to the front of the list."