Donny flinched as the blood hit his skin, the syrupy liquid cascading across the aggravated burn along his side like a grim waterfall over the surface of a cliff. A second splash came as the uncaring bastard behind him tried to race through his application of the liquid just so he could be done for the day.
For once, the half-arsery was not due to the mandatory incompetence of the government; the man behind him was just another one of the many uncaring schlubs that infested this unfair city, his lack of effort born from the man’s ingrained anger at not having the world handed to him on a silver platter.
Donny met about a hundred of them every night when he turned the kitchen light on.
Said schlub moved on quickly, carelessly dipping a large ladle into a bucket that he carried haphazardly in his left hand, to then dump more of the precious vitae within it onto the unconscious body lying on the cot next to Donny’s. Most of it did not even land properly, wasted on the floor with neither care nor consequence, the uncaring bastard then moving on to the next patient without even having the decency of completing his one given task.
Donny could have said something, but he was just too tired, and it was not as if he knew the guy next to him. Hell, he did not even know if it was a guy lying there, the poor bastard’s body having been mauled beyond recognition. The only sign that it was not a corpse that he was looking at being the shallow and haggard rising of its chest from time to time as it tried to breathe, the inhuman wheeze that accompanied each attempt grated against several of Donny’s nerves as they entered his ear.
Besides all that, this was only the government’s ticking off of a checkbox, the minimal care needed to ensure that none of the freelancers could raise any complaints against them later on. The real health care would have to be paid for out of pocket.
A sudden, bright flash filled the large tent, many of the freelancers within then jolting upright in expectation and dread of another sudden incident in response to that burst, Donny included, the bright light much like the one that had brought them to this slaughterhouse in the first place. The city’s records keeper then fled from the tent’s entrance, a small box-like device clutched tightly between the woman’s hands as the swearing and screams of those within nipped at her heels.
It was some tool that allowed the city to somehow capture a moment within it, storing it until the alchemists could somehow embed the frozen image upon paper. Beyond Donny’s understanding, for the most part. Both the workings and the purpose of it. A single picture or a thousand words did little to enlighten people who possessed neither the interest nor intellect to look or listen—and the government was near pathologic in its preference for employing such nitwits.
His thoughts momentarily drew back to the kid in the truck and something he had said earlier…about moving pictures, but his current pain helped Donny to dismiss that annoyance; both the thought and the memory of the boy.
It took a while for the surrounding people to calm down again; even then, only doing so because of the fresh influx of survivors distracting them from their own woes. Men and women dressed in white uniforms stained in various fluids carried in stretchers from the same entrance where that record keeper had only a moment ago fled out of, the weight borne by the medical staff far lighter than they should have been, the many bodies upon those stretchers now of a lesser mass thanks to the horrors of the museum.
The new arrivals brought the total occupancy of the tent to seventeen. Patients, that is, the caregivers near outnumbering them two to one.
Both were far more than Donny would have expected for a foul-up like this, if he were to be honest.
“Gods, what a screw…Frank?!”
A nurse hobbled in, her left side supporting his ginger-haired partner, the man looking dazed and confused. Donny rose…or at least tried to, his back screaming as the motion caused his burn to reignite with pain. Managing it on the second attempt, he ventured over to the pair, calling out.
“Yeah, he’s with me. Sullivan & Cohen.”
He winced then, but not from the pain…okay, partially from it, but more so from the realisation that they were going to be adding that kid’s name to their office door from now on.
“Can you take him?” the woman gasped. “Back’s fit to break,” the nurse, nearly two feet shorter than the man she was bearing implored.
“Yeah,” Donny replied, “NO; WRONG SHOULDER—SHOULDER!”
An intricate dance broke out then as the nurse tried to pass the dazed Frank from her left side to Donny’s injured right, then to his left, then taking Frank back again, to then nearly letting the dazed man drop to the floor as she grew frustrated with the pair.
His partner hardly helped matters, Frank seemingly wanting to go his own way, the tipsy detective mumbling something too quietly for anyone but himself to hear. Donny was certain that even if Frank’s words were spoken more loudly, no one would understand what was said, the man clearly not in his right mind.
Eventually, he managed to bear Frank’s body, grabbing the man’s right arm with his left.
“You been treated?” the nurse then asked without thanking Donny for his assistance.
“Yeah?”
“Then off with you; we got more coming in who could use the space.”
“What about him,” he asked while nodding to Frank.
“He’s fine; found him wandering around, screaming about chicken feet. Dazed him to be safe…should be fine by tomorrow,” the nurse informed him, the woman then stalking off to attend to another patient.
Donny bit back an unkind remark at the nurse’s lack of care for either of them when he saw who she was heading towards, the ma…body she walked to now obviously in far greater need than either him or his partner.
Another dance then occurred as he tried to walk Frank out of the tent, his partner constantly trying to veer off back towards the museum. Probably to look for his damn chicken’s foot.
Donny did not bother to try and recover whatever remained of his shirt, nor did he even entertain the thought of trying to cover up, not with his wound as bad as it was, so he would try to get back the Beast as quickly as possible and hope for the best. If he gained the attention of some Morals Society fool on top of everything else, this day would truly be complete.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
As the two of them ventured out, Donny could not help but think of his partner’s stupid fetish, thought, his contemplation was momentarily diverted as some idiot reminding them to get checked on by no later than tomorrow—as if the two of them had not done this before!
Frank had had that thing for years, never missing a chance to go on about how he had gotten it off of some crazy shaman during his days as a flatfoot. For the life of him, he had never actually heard Frank say what it was that the foot could do, but the man’s value in the thing was such that he would have discarded everything else before risking its loss.
Just another reminder about how much they had wasted on this fool’s venture. And the government was certainly not going to foot the bill, not with so many having been affected by this mess; maybe a token payment to the more prestigious agencies, but even that would do little to cover whatever their lot had sacrificed today.
Donny considered the inevitable politics that would soon follow. It would be one thing if this could have just been finished today, that he and the rest could get up tomorrow and just get on with their lives, but he knew from past experience that this mess would continue on for months.
Even if you ignored the needless bureaucracy and its general corruption and incompetence, the government still had an image to maintain with the freelancers and the public, so there would be posturing—from both sides—maybe a threat or seven, too, as the government did whatever they were going to do to cover up this whole affair, and then whatever the various agencies would then do to counter that…and so on and and only then would the negotiations begin in earnest.
“What’ya think, Frank? Another ‘Long Betty’,” he asked his addled partner, “…or maybe they try and spin this into another astounding success?” he grunted as he heaved the man towards their ride home.
Frank just spluttered something unintelligible, the man now in a world of his own thanks to whatever spell they had used on him.
Knowing the quality of the local government stooges, they would need to get themselves cleansed, and judging by the lack of clinking from the multitude of talismans that should have been around his friend’s neck, it was unlikely that his partner had any magic left—Donny himself was certainly running on empty—so if either of them did not want whatever slapdash casting those quacks back in the tent had used on them to impact their next top-up, they would need to pay a visit to Chinatown.
“But before that, we’ll need to pop by central; see which way the wind’s blowing,” he said, mostly to himself. “…though before that, we’ll need to get checked. Damn bureaucracy.”
If it had only been one or two agencies to suffer, no one would have bothered to raise the flag—hell, most of them would have instead raised a toast for having lost some competition—but given the current situation, they would have no choice but to do so, otherwise they would collectively suffer a loss of power. The freelancers may have not had much of that precious element, and they may have been about as easy to bring together as a herd of cats at the best of times, but that just gave them all an even greater need to hold on to what little they did have.
But some battles were not worth the fight, so they would need to chat up their various connections at Central to see what-was-what before committing to anything.
Sometimes, when it rained, it poured. And this felt like one of those times.
As someone waved them through the second cordon, the strain of Frank’s weight and the pain of his burn began to pool into one insufferable swamp of agony. You needed to be fit to be in the line of work that they were in, so being able to support someone while covering long distances was practically a given. Still, it took him several times longer to cross the distance to their truck than it had taken them earlier upon their arrival.
Donny saw one of the cab doors swing open as they approached, the boy popping out to meet them.
“Right…almost forgot about him.”
‘Pouring and pouring,’ he then thought.
The boy, their new partner, ran over to help support him and Frank—mostly Frank—the kid taking up the man’s other arm then, and as he did so an intense sense of relief flushed through Donny as the presence of his partner’s weight lessened.
“This the general result of working with you lot?” the kid asked.
Donny needed a moment to figure out the intent behind those words, the kid’s tone having even less care than that of the nurse before.
If he had been to the wolf, then chances were that he was being genuine in his question rather than making some rude remark…if he went to the wolf. Donny chose to be the optimist for once.
“No, but act as if I said yes. In this business, you prepare yourself for the worst outcome, not the best,” he grunted as he and the kid tried to shove Frank into one of the back seats, the man making a fuss like a toddler being put down for a nap.
‘Not far off the mark,’ Donny quipped to himself as he gave Frank the once-over.
Catching sight of Donny’s injury as he stepped away, the kid blurted out, “Your back?!”
Donny grunted as he slammed the door shut, “Yeah, had to dive into a cauldron to escape. Fire cooked me up, well-done and then some.”
“Jesus…yeah, but you got bigger problems than that…” the kid trailed off, showing something close to a noticeable emotion for the first time.
“Yeah?”
“Your back…it’s bubbling!” the kid uttered with near horror, miming something with his hands as he did so.
“Yeah?” Donny repeated, wondering where this was going.
“Dude, your back is bubbling! Your skin?!”
‘What the hell was he…oh, right; “Kid from another world,”’ Donny remembered, rolling his eyes as he did. He was too tired to start anything, so he entertained the boy.
“Gremlin’s blood, kid. Don’t worry about it,” he advised, as he rested his head against the pleasantly cold steel of the cab’s exterior.
A moment later, he asked, “Kid, they got automobiles in this world of yours?”
“What? Yeah...,” the boy, Goodie, answered, his attention still focused on what was happening behind Donny.
“You know how to drive?”
“Uh…no?”
“Well, today you get to learn. Come, you take the other side; I ain’t fit to stay awake, let alone steer.”
“Okay,” the kid mumbled in response, his eyes still glued to the bubbling mass of flesh on the older man’s back.
The bot, hesitant to remove his eyes from the roiling flesh, slowly ventured round to the other side of the Beast, but not before opening the door to help Donny enter it.
It was awkward trying to settle into the leather seat, the position of the wound on his back not only preventing him from pressing it against the seat to support it but also from bending too greatly for fear of tweaking the nerves beneath the still-mending area.
Eventually managing to do so, Donny settled in, resting his head against the cool glass of the window to his left as he had done outside, the lower temperature soothing the migraine behind his eyes. It was a moment later that said eyes opened, Donny having realised that the kid was taking far longer than he should have needed to enter from the other side.
“The hell now?” he whispered.
He saw the boy exiting a shop several metres ahead of the vehicle, the store far enough away from the museum that whoever owned it had decided to remain open despite the possible danger in remaining here. Immigrants, judging from the strange writing on the sign out front, but that was not saying much. Technically, the city’s entire population was not native to these lands, but most were descendants, not first generations. That difference tended to create a barrier between the people struggling to adapt to a new way of life and the rest trying to maintain their own.
The boy was carrying two wooden mugs, their contents visibly hot, the steam pouring off their surfaces in barely visible waves.
“What the hell’s this idiot doing?”
Donny slowly tracked the boy’s journey with his right eye, unwilling to risk moving, watching the kid walk over to the driver’s side door, the realisation that he would need a third hand to open it then appearing on the kid’s face soon after.
The boy looked inside, the expression on his face a gentle plea for assistance, and also a short-lived one seeing that Donny was in no position to offer any, nor was the still dazed Frank.
He looked around, then went over and put one of the mugs on the bonnet, then returned and opened the door.
“You really that hungry?” Donny asked, his tone less than patient, his eyes darting to the other mug as he saw it fall off the side of truck.
The kid ignored him, looking around for something.
“No cupholders, either?” he asked Donny a moment later.
“What?”
“Nothing…this is for you anyway,” the boy replied, handing the mug over to him.
Donny looked at him for a moment, then grabbed the mug with his left hand, his position and injury preventing him from properly turning around. The smell of oxtail soup had quickly flooded the interior of the cab, and then his nostrils, the heat emanating from the contents of the wooden container radiating through the hand holding it within seconds.
“I’m suffering from a burn during one of the hottest months of the year, and I need a mug of boiling soup, why—exactly?”
“It’s what they do on television,” the boy replied.
“That being?”
“Moving pictures; they give people coffee and blankets in them.”
“Coffee?”
“And blankets,” the boy added.
“‘cause you’re all rich as sin in that world of yours?” Donny inquired sardonically.
“What? No…?” a look of confusion came over the kid’s face then, clearly not understanding what Donny was getting at.
He turned his attention from the boy to the mug of soup. It was too hot to enjoy it, the weather, even with it cooling with the coming night, near sweltering—but he had to admit, the rich, heavy smell of meat wafting off of its surface was rather pleasant.
“…why they do that, then?”
The boy remained silent for a moment, sighing deeply and visibly sagging as he did, finally noticing what had happened to the other mug.
“Hm? Oh, shock or something. Keep a victim warm, I think, so they don’t spaz out. …I think.”
Donny’s brow furrowed as he tried to process that reply, giving his head a small shake a second later as he dismissed whatever absurdity the kid was going on about. He was too tired and injured for thinking. For anything, really.
He flinched a moment later as the kid shut his side’s door with a bang, the loud sound of metal on metal sending a twang of pain up his side.
“Right then, how do I do this?” the boy asked, indicating the collection of gears and pedals used to drive the Beast.
It was not a complicated matter, the process of starting and stopping the vehicle hardly requiring a sage’s intellect to understand. The most trouble the kid had was in figuring out how to properly change gears.
They were on their way in moments, travelling at a speed far slower than that of a person walking, but that was fine. Donny used the gentle motion of the ride to help himself rest his weary mind, his body too hurt to do likewise, only staying awake enough to answer the occasional query for direction from the inexperienced driver as they rode off into the coming night.
Hopefully, tomorrow would be a better day.