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Authors: Anthony Flacco

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BOOK: The Last Nightingale
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A score of major fires now burned unchecked in every direction. Full daylight barely penetrated the shroud of smoke swelling over the ruined city. Blackburn lost large chunks of time in guiding his men around the worst of the damage and the emerging fires. The streets were so choked with obstacles that a hike which should have taken less than half an hour consumed nearly three. They only sustained that modest speed because they were marching under a firm order not to stop for any rescue work, no matter how vital it might appear to be. His confidential order from Chief Dinan was simple:

Nothing gets priority over saving the city from a rampaging outbreak of the Black Death.

The desperate focus of that order became plain when the same sea breezes that were feeding the fires began to lift the smoke
clouds. Blackburn hated what his eyes told him. As far as he could see in all directions, the city's large buildings were in various states of collapse. The few that were still standing amid the billowing smoke swayed with every new aftershock.

Some of the city's able-bodied survivors had recovered enough of their humanity to begin working to rescue trapped survivors, but there were others who made no attempt to disguise their looting. From time to time, Blackburn fired over their heads to scatter them, but it was clear that they would only move on and strike again.

There were three different occasions when he actively interfered with events by ordering one of his armed men to chase and shoot at gangs of looters. But each time, he remained within his orders by keeping the group of inmates moving while his assigned officer made sure that the perpetrators either took a bullet or were frightened away.

It never slowed the group down. When he marched his men past one half-buried victim who stood trapped below his waist among twisted iron beams, the young man begged to be shot before the advancing flames could reach him. The approaching fire proved that his fears were true. Blackburn didn't even have to issue the order—his corporal quickly stepped forward and shot the man through the back of the head. The convicts watched, astounded, and felt themselves reminded that the penalties today were swift and harsh. They fell into step with added determination.

In the absence of recognizable landmarks, Blackburn's group lost direction several times. They were picking their way across the crumbled remains of the Emporium Building before he realized that they were at the corner of Market and Powell streets. He ordered the men to take the slight left turn onto Powell, and corrected their course whenever he spotted something familiar. Still, by the time they reached the intersection at Jackson Street, a stone's throw from Portsmouth Square, it was already a quarter past ten—and they were off course again.

He glanced around at the beautiful neighborhood's simple houses. The modest family homes were still standing, built with flexible wood beams instead of rigid bricks and mortar. He found himself hoping that the prevailing winds would change, just so these simple homes might be spared the swarming fires.

But just after his men rounded the corner and began to head down Jackson Street, he heard a woman's screams. The sounds stopped him cold. Piercing, deathly screams were coming from inside one of these peaceful-looking houses. The screams were as primal and intense as anything he'd heard yet that day, an equal mix of terror and pain. The unreal aspect of it was that they were coming from somewhere inside an untouched house. No motion could be seen in the home, and the neighbors either did not hear or were choosing not to react. The entire neighborhood was otherwise silent.

But Blackburn had already marched his men past so many other miseries, there was no time to investigate this one. Portsmouth Square was getting close, and the sour-faced inmates were starting to look as if they realized how heavily they outnumbered their captors.

He took a last glance back at the peaceful-looking house. Exhaustion pulled at him, and the main work detail hadn't even started yet. There was nothing else to do but make a mental note to come back to that place later on, and try to check into the source of those terrible, out-of-place screams.

If he ever got the chance.

CHAPTER TWO
10:15
A.M.
FIVE HOURS AFTER
THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE

A
T THE SAME TIME
that Blackburn marched his men away from the house on Jackson Street, twelve-year-old Shane Nightingale was inside, curling his thin frame tighter inside the small kitchen pantry. He tried not to listen to what was going on just a few feet outside, but the words stabbed into him like nails.

“It's the end!" the stranger's voice hissed. "A day of atonement for you. You're starting to appreciate that now, aren't you? My job is to empty you out! But don't worry. We'll take all the time we need.”

The sounds coming out of Shane's adoptive mother had mostly dissolved into infantile shrieks and babbling, while the madman responded to Mrs. Nightingale with icy precision, mimicking the sounds of her deathly terror. He did it with such energy and skill that he seemed to be playing to an audience.

To Shane, it felt as if the killer somehow realized that there was a terrified and helpless twelve-year-old boy hiding only a few feet away, and was taking additional pleasure in his torments by drilling the event deep into Shane's mind, toying with him until the moment came to throw open the pantry doors and drag him out to suffer with the others.

Then abruptly, Mrs. Nightingale went quiet. The room took on a silence as thick and sour as old buttermilk. It was several long
moments before the stranger began to speak again. This time he kept his voice to a reverential whisper.

“Ah! Now you're perfect! Safe from any more sin! The sins of that arrogant man you people call husband and father.”

All of the horrors laid upon Mrs. Nightingale were still not enough to satisfy the maniac, even though he had surely killed her. Shane felt a vague sense of relief that she had finally come to the end of her suffering, and that the lovely lady who adopted him out of St. Adrian's would endure no more of it. Shane knew that she had been the one who influenced the family's decision to rescue him from that place. Her husband and daughters would have passed him by and left him there. Even though she didn't allow any real closeness, he had always loved her for saving him.

His relief sank under an overwhelming flood of guilt. Shane knew perfectly well that even a scrawny kid of twelve was expected to find the strength to fight off such a monster. Instead, from the moment that the brutal attack began, his terror had owned him. His legs went numb and useless. His throat seized shut. He couldn't even control his bladder.

How long had it been? He could barely see inside of that darkened place, but the pocket watch that he won by pitching pennies now hung from a little hook on the back panel. He had placed it there when he moved in because he could read it by a thin beam of light that penetrated the slight warping of the door frame. Now when he craned his neck to see it, the watch showed that it was almost ten-thirty

Early that morning, when Father Nightingale saw that nobody in the family was injured, he ordered everyone to get out of the house and into the safety of the front yard, just in case another aftershock rolled through. Then he shouted that his dry goods store was at the mercy of looters, and he hurried away in the family's four-seater buggy, carrying his shotgun and a sack full of 10-gauge shells. The last that they heard from him was when he called over his shoulder for everyone to stay outside until he returned.

The family obeyed him for a while, but eventually both girls convinced their mother to go back in and set about putting away the toppled things in the parlor and kitchen. It was as if they all agreed that the earthquake was the worst thing that could happen that day; the rest was simply a matter of cleaning up. Once they finished, Shane had persuaded them all to return to their rooms and rest, then he had gone straight into the kitchen and crawled back into his makeshift retreat in the pantry, where he fell into an exhausted sleep.

He awoke to the sounds of the girls screaming and Mrs. Nightingale hollering in protest, and of people being brutally dragged downstairs. The intruder sounded like he was searching through the house, bellowing, "Where's your husband? Where is he?" Mrs. Nightingale cried over and over that her husband was out guarding his store, but the intruder was determined to search the whole house himself. Shane could only lie paralyzed. He knew that his grim hiding place was sparing his life.

Early on, Mrs. Nightingale had screamed Shane's name twice. She kept herself mercifully quiet about him, after that. The killer made no reaction to the name, as if he either had not heard her or was already convinced that nobody else was around.

Shane wondered if perhaps she hoped that he had somehow escaped and run for help. Maybe she thought that by keeping quiet, she was giving herself and her girls a chance at rescue.

The girls never had the chance to put up any defense. When they were dragged into the kitchen in the first place, each one had only managed a couple of wordless screams before they were silenced. But he recognized those brief sounds. He knew them from his days at St. Adrian's. There, unsuspecting children who got themselves targeted for punishment frequently had the experience of a Helper coming up from behind and grabbing them—snatching them up off of the ground by an arm or leg, pulling them like a sack of grain. Sometimes the Helpers would yank so hard that the child
made the same kind of involuntary yelp of shock and fear that Shane heard from both of these two girls.

Back then, there was never anybody around to help either.

Amy and Carolyn had grown up in a loving household and had no powers for battling such cruelty. Shane wondered if mere shock had sealed their lips; his own terror, after all, was keeping his voice silent and holding him as still as cold plaster.

The intensity jumped higher when the perpetrator began a nonstop diatribe about his motives, to explain and justify his actions. Since there was no way for Shane to ignore the dreadful harangue, he was a captive audience at a demon's lecture.

The hanging watch told him that it had been nearly three hours since the invader took Mrs. Nightingale and her girls captive. Obviously, the killer felt no concern about making a quick escape. In the general chaos that was surely going on all over the city, he was gambling that help was unlikely. It went on and on, long after the woman of the house stopped making any sound. When Shane finally realized what the madman was actually talking about, he had to bite his teeth into his tongue to silence himself. The man was actually asking his two surviving victims to agree with him, to tell him that what he was doing was all right. He wanted to hear them concur that his reasons were sound.

Amy and Carolyn began kicking out at the floor, against the cabinets, against their restraints.

At that point everything became more than Shane could take in. His need to escape the lunacy overtook him and his brain began to shut itself down. His eyelids turned to lead. He plunged into a sickened and delirious blackness. The ability to rouse himself was nowhere inside of him.

Later, when Shane felt himself coming back, his eyes were already open. He blinked hard and blinked again, stunned that the world had not somehow gone away.

Now it was quiet. An amber split of lantern light bled through
the crack above the pantry door, and the thin beam showed his pocket watch: nearly straight-up midnight. A whole day, gone. He wanted to think that Father Nightingale had somehow returned and vanquished the demon, and that it would now be safe to crawl out from hiding. Before the thought could fully form, he realized that of course the man of the house never came back. The sounds of struggle would have roused him. Shane wondered whether he could have made himself burst out of the pantry and somehow join in the fight.

But it had never happened, and now the awful sounds were beginning all over again. The demon was killing Amy. Shane's blood pounded so hard beneath his skin that it felt as if it could burst through his flesh. The demon rendered her unconscious again and again. Each time, he revived her at the last instant, godlike, and granted her another few minutes of life before starting the process all over. It was happening to sixteen years’ worth of beauty and charm bundled into a feminine form so lovely that Shane had spent his entire first year in that house trying to avoid falling in love with her. He had always squelched his feelings, never doubting that if he gave himself away the entire family would judge him perverse. Amy would have been repulsed. They might have even sent him back.

Any worthy young man would leap from the pantry, determined to fight like a warrior, all in the nick of time to save beautiful Amy. But Shane's legs wouldn't take him anywhere. He couldn't even feel them.

Briefly, he wondered if he could at least do something as simple as to cry out. Could he buy Amy a few more moments of life that way, while the startled killer left her side to search for the source of Shane's voice? He began with a quick swallow, in hopes of opening up his parched and swollen throat a little bit wider. Then braced himself to scream with all of his power.

“Stoooooooooppp!”

Only a hiss of dry air came out. It was not enough to penetrate
the simple wooden doors. The sounds outside the pantry never even slowed down, and soon were more brutal than anything that anyone should hear. Shane lay on his back and positioned his numb forearms to cover his burning ears. Amy's degradation was private. He would not listen to any more of it. The powerful swirl of torment spun inside of him until it carried the rest of him away once again and pulled him deep into a trance.

More time passed.

When Shane finally came to, he snapped back to consciousness at the sound of the terrible voice-

“Time to wake up!”

The monster had found him. Shane's heart slammed hard in his chest as he fought to focus his eyes inside the dim pantry—and then he realized that it was still dark in there. The doors were still closed.

BOOK: The Last Nightingale
13.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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