Jude was queasy. The gentle swaying, rocking him back and forth in the dim light, turned his stomach. He’d never been on a boat before, and after this experience, he was sure he wouldn't rush to be on one again. He gripped the door frame tightly as he peered along the narrow room. Ansell sat on a wooden chair, oblivious to the repetitive creaking of one of the legs. His hood was looped over his face, and his eyes became lights in the dark, fixated on the blade of his hatchet, which he stroked idly.
“I hate this boat,” Jude whispered.
“It’s a barge.”
“Yeah, well, I hate it. I feel sick.”
Ansell grunted some expletives without looking up from his hatchet.
Jude felt sick, a different kind of sick. The gut-wrenching, mind-bending sick that had battered his senses since the moment he pulled the trigger and killed the guard. The man was married. He might have had a family, kids. He heaved and turned away, pushing his forehead into the cold metal rungs of the ladder up to the vessel's deck.
“I can’t do this. This isn’t me,” he whispered into the ladder. A firm hand squeezed his shoulder.
“That man would have killed you. Or arrested you and delivered you to Brunner, and he’d have strung you up in the Stadium. They were tailing Marcus. I reckon they were on to him being a Croc dealer.”
“I still did it. I still killed him. I’m still responsible.”
Ansell covered his eyes with the palm of his hand. The gesture did little to mask the frustration on his face. “You’ve killed before. What’s changed?”
“Yeah. A cannibal who I put out of his misery. Before that, two Crocheads, horrible men, thieves, murderers. They attacked me. I didn’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t have a choice with the guard, either. It was them or us.”
“How do you do it, Ansell?” How do you kill so many, so brutally, and not feel sick? Ashamed?”
Ansell removed his hand and let out a long breath. He looked down to the rotting floorboards for a moment before he spoke.
“I know what this is. You want me to tell you that I can’t sleep at night, that the faces of my victims haunt me” – he rolled his eyes – “that as the bodies pile higher, I grow nearer and nearer to insanity.”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“No, that’s not how it is. I don't care. I’m not sorry, and I sleep perfectly fucking well.” His eyes flashed as he continued, “I crave it, I enjoy it. It makes me feel better, not worse. I’m not on some path to enlightenment. I’m not going to kill my way to the realisation that vengeance isn’t the way. For me, it’s the only way.”
Jude dropped his eyes and sighed. “What are you avenging? I need to understand.”
“Shit…no, no, no. I’m going to die! Please, kid, don’t let him do this. Get me down, please!”
The desperate pleas cut the tension. Jude looked along the narrow room. Marcus hung in the air, naked and spread eagle. His wrists and ankles were bound by motorcycle chains and lashed to the four corners of the far wall. His black scales glistened in the dim lamplight, and the waxy yellow sheen of his skin looked almost translucent. An army of sweat beads charged down his body, dripping into a puddle under his feet. He opened his mouth to continue his pleas but instead wretched and coughed. Bile and vomit spilled out and poured down his body to join the puddle of sweat below.
“I need Croc. I’m withdrawing bad!”
“You remind me of your brother,” said Ansell.
“Fuck you! Just kill me,” Marcus whimpered through rolling tears.
“Not so clever now, are you, snake?” Jude snapped as he pushed past Ansell and strode towards the suspended Crochead. “Not so brave, now you’re faced with him.”
Jude ripped a punch into Marcus’ ribs. Blood spattered out of his mouth and joined the dried red mottle already spotted on Jude’s face. He followed up with two more vicious blows to the stomach. Marcus tried to vomit, but nothing came up. He coughed and spluttered. Trickles of blood left the corners of his mouth and cascaded down his neck, through the crags and cracks of his scales.
“I was following…orders,” he whispered through his sobs.
“Who ordered it?”
“Captain…Brunner…he said...kill the woman, torch the shack…I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice, you scum,” said Ansell, as he stepped forward and held his knife to the scales on Marcus’ arm. “The Conduit. I want a name,” he said, as he sliced through the scales, peeling them from the skin and allowing them to fall to the deck like a sheet of bark.
Blood and puss gushed from the wound as Marcus threw back his head and screamed. His head lolled forward and he drifted into unconsciousness.
“Get the bucket,” ordered Ansell.
Jude jumped onto the ladder and climbed to the deck. The daylight outside burned his eyes, but he was more than glad to gulp in some fresh air. The smell from the inside of the barge was hot and nauseating, his nose filling with the scent of sweat, blood, and vomit. Taking a final breath, as if he was about to submerge himself underwater, he collected the large bucket requested by Ansell and descended the ladder.
Ansell took the bucket and launched the freezing water over Marcus, who jolted to life as if hit with a thousand volts. He groaned as he looked down at the mess on his arm. He was visibly shaking now, rattling the chains suspending him in the air.
“Croc. I’ll tell you everything. I need Croc. I’m in so much pain,” Marcus sobbed. Jude didn’t feel a shred of pity. He suddenly realised how it could be possible to be like Ansell if you had enough hate in your heart.
The dull thump of boots grew menacingly louder as Ansell moved past Jude and stopped inches from Marcus’ face. He raised his hand, level with Marcus’ eyes, showing him a syringe. The liquid inside was a beautiful deep gold with floating flecks of bronze, swishing in time with the rocking of the barge. Marcus contorted and twisted in his chains, the pain in his wrists and ankles seemingly forgotten. His teeth chattered, and a thick vein running through the scales on his neck pulsed angrily.
“Speak,” said Ansel as he pushed the plunger on the syringe, allowing the liquid gold to drip to the floor.
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“Stop! I’ll talk, just stop!”
“Then talk.”
Jude interjected, “Explain that night in The Gardens and give us the Conduit, or you better believe he’ll dash that Croc to the deck and torture it out of you instead.”
“Don’t you think I know that! I saw the mess he made of my brother.”
Jude sat down on Ansell’s squeaky chair and tugged the curtain back slightly to see where the sun was in the sky. Still time, he thought as he fixed it back into place and rested his chin in his hands, ready to hear what the snake had to say.
“It’s his fault, you know. The Grey Man’s fault. He started all of this, kid. You should have shot him, not me.”
Ansell glared intently at Marcus and allowed him to continue.
“I collect a monthly Croc shipment from the Conduit and drop it to all the Shanty Lords and slum leaders, from the Northern Quarter down to the Apollo Fighting Pits. The morning of the day you shot me, I was running behind. I'd stopped for moonshine, and one turned into five. I asked Lloyd to deliver the drop to the Archway Squats, so I could make it on time to the Pits. Then he disappeared with the Croc. I thought he’d backstabbed me and gone missing with it, but no, your friend there took the Croc and butchered Lloyd.”
“A Crochead dealing Croc. He deserved to die,” Ansell scoffed.
“Maybe. But with the Croc missing, the Archway was wild. A fucking frenzy. When I got back, they were ready to riot. Withdrawals everywhere, people turning on each other. I had two choices – get more Croc or die.”
Jude stood up, impatience etched on his face. “What does that have to do with Trevor or Lisa? What does any of this have to do with the Captain of the Guard or bootlegged moonshine?”
Ansell waved Jude to sit down. A quizzical look on his face said he had already worked it out.
“Brunner needed an excuse to come to The Gardens personally to reload me. So I gave him a shitty code violation on Trevor, and I promised the money in the lockbox to the main Crocheads in the Archway to appease them. Brunner made it look like a routine moonshine seizure, but during the action, he handed me a parcel of Croc, plain as day. Made it look like payment for the tipoff.”
Jude’s head stabbed at him and his jaw ached. He staggered towards Marcus. “Brunner…is the Conduit?”
Marcus was sobbing now and shaking violently, his blood, snot, and tears smeared around his face. “Yes. Brunner, Captain Brunner is the Conduit. Brunner and Kramer, Brunner’s personal guards…it’s tight. Nobody knows outside that!”
Jude turned to Ansell. He didn’t know what he was hearing. The City Guard, responsible for all of it. For his father’s death, for the miserable lives and deaths of thousands. They were oppressive bastards. They allowed the city to fall to chaos after dark, turning a blind eye to the plight of the poor, the afflicted. He knew all this. But they were meant to be protectors. Surely they couldn’t be behind this. His world was being flipped upside down.
Ansell stepped forward once more, the syringe in his hand still held up in the light. Marcus’ eyes hadn’t torn themselves away since it was first raised.
“Explain,” he ordered.
“I don’t know everything. I swear I don’t! Brunner approached me in a cell after I got lifted for a robbery in the retail district. He knew me before The Panic. I was his solicitor, I helped him get off with a court-martial around 2012. When he asked me to do it, I jumped at the chance. Of course I did. The charges got dropped, and there was a never-ending supply of free Croc in return.”
“Why is he doing it?”
“All I know is it’s about population control. They want us all dead, so the higher-ups can come back to the country and start a rebuild.”
Ansell laughed heartily, full of sarcastic disbelief. “So it’s all just political bullshit, all of it. All the death and misery. Nothing’s fucking changed since before The Panic!”
Jude sank into his chair. “I’m lost.”
Ansell swung on him. “The higher-ups, the political bastards who evacuated when the country fell to shit – they’re behind it all. They want the lower class, the homeless, the afflicted, extinguished before they grace what’s left with their presence. Only they don’t want the rest of the population to know the murderous lengths they would go to in order to achieve it!”
“So they want it to look like the poor killed themselves by using Croc, fighting with each other, rioting...and when enough are gone, they’ll come back and take control. Blame The Panic on the dead?”
“Exactly. They can’t have the City Guard being seen as responsible, or there’d be a civil war. Everyone would join the rebels. There’d be pandemonium.”
They both spun to Marcus for confirmation. He nodded glumly. His eyes were slowly blinking shut. He was running out of will to live, but his need drove him on and he continued.
“That’s where the rumours about Russia came from. They blamed it on them, but it was our own leaders who made it and flooded our streets with it. They misjudged it, though. They thought it would pacify the unrest that was simmering, and they were losing the war on drugs. Heroin and crack were worse than ever. So they came up with Croc, got it from Russia, hoping it would be too potent, that it would kill off the users quickly. But they fucked up and it destroyed everything.”
“Brunner’s a dead man,” snapped Ansell as he pushed Jude towards the ladder. “Let’s finish this,” he whispered in his ear.
Marcus jolted to life. “Pah! Not even you can get to him. He won’t leave the Stadium until you’re caught.”
Ansell ignored the comment. Jude watched him intently. He was brimming with dark focus. If there was one man in the city – no, in the country – capable of killing Captain Brunner, it was him.
“The Croc, now! Let me die in peace. I gave you what you asked for.”
Ansell thrust his hand out to Jude, the syringe resting on the palm of his hand. “You can do the honours, as agreed.”
Jude picked up the syringe and stepped in close to Marcus with a malevolent glint in his eye. “When I was ten, my father left me, and my mother followed him. I spent years surviving The Panic on my own. Scared, vulnerable.”
He raised his other hand, parading his missing finger in front of Marcus’ eyes. “One night, starving and cold, I met a boy in a slum. Younger than me. He was alone, too. He was so weak, more helpless than I was. I put myself in grave danger and stole rations from a shanty gang to give to him. I got caught. One of the gang bit off my finger and tossed me into the gutter. When I returned to the boy empty-handed, he cried. I fell asleep, and when I woke, he was dead.”
“A sad story, kid, but I gave you what you asked for. Give me the Croc now, please, I’m begging you!”
Jude continued, unmoved. “I was inches from death myself when Lisa found me. I’d given up, resigned myself to misery. I thought of my father and how he must have felt to turn to Croc. I was on my way to find some for myself when Lisa took me in, fed me, bathed me, stitched me up. Over time, I learned to trust again, to love again, and for the first time in years, I found some happiness. Then you ripped all that away, gutted her mercilessly, and discarded her to the mud.”
Marcus groaned in frustration. He jolted towards the syringe as if he was trying to throw himself onto the needle, but the chains locked him in place.
“I’ve wanted to cause you the same pain ever since, and now I know how. I’ll take the one thing you love away from you, just as you did to me.”
Jude slammed the plunger down on the syringe as he spoke, expelling the liquid to the floor below. Marcus’ cries were unfathomable, closer to the howls of a wounded pig than any sound a man could make. Jude stepped aside as Ansell appeared in front of the wailing man.
He watched with a wry smile as Ansell shifted his weight and swooped his arm in a vicious arc from right to left. His hatchet sliced through Marcus’ skin, freeing his entrails to splash into the puddle of sweat and blood at his feet. Marcus’ eyes, transfixed to the puddle, darted back and forth, as though they were trying to find a tinge of gold amongst the murky red.
Ansell turned to him with his arm extended, a rusty black rail stake clasped in his bloody fist. “All yours.”
Jude snatched the stake and launched himself at Marcus. With his free hand, he wrenched Marcus’ chin up from the puddle at his feet and locked eyes with him as he slammed the stake through his heart. He was amazed at the ease in which it passed through his chest. Staggering back, he slipped in the puddle and tumbled to the deck, then scrambled away on his backside. Ansell wrenched him to his feet and drew him into a tight embrace. Jude sobbed and sobbed as all of his grief and anguish poured out of him.
“You did good. I’m proud of you, son,” Ansell said. He placed his hands on Jude’s cheeks and stepped back slightly to look into his eyes. “Let’s free the girl. Then it seems fate binds us once more. Brunner has to die.”