Teancum Read Free

City?”
    Pratt laughed.   “You drop your hook into the fishing hole hoping there’s a big trout
down there in the darkness somewhere,” he said.  
    “I have a hook,” Poe said.   “I have to try.”   The fact that Pratt had realized he was being probed and cut off the
line of conversation didn’t mean that the guess about the canopic jars being a
power source was wrong, of course, but it didn’t confirm the guess,
either.   He sighed.   It was so much easier to write a clever detective than actually to be one.
    “What you don’t yet realize,” Pratt continued, “is that the
fishing hole is home to a terrible monster.”   He gestured to the Pinkertons.   “Hit him a little bit, but don’t kill him.   If he tries anything—anything at
all—kill her .   After you’ve all had your fun, throw
them in with the others.”
    Pratt handed his Pratt Enkindler to the nearest Pinkerton,
turned and walked away.   The
Pinkerton, a heavy man in a bowler hat, sneered and shoved the muzzle of the
weapon into Roxie’s side.
    The first fist rammed Poe in the belly and knocked him
against the plascrete wall, only a foot from where the Pinkerton’s skull, now
embedded in the ruined material, smoldered away.   The blow kicked all the air out of him and triggered his
coughing reflex at the same time, so Poe gagged and sucked in and choked on
air, his stomach retching up bile and his lungs forcing out blood in the
effort.   Punches to the face
prevented him from even spitting out the polluted fluids, so the sour vermilion
mess bubbled from his lips and spattered all over his chin and face and shirt
as Poe went down, unresisting and defenseless, with his eye fixed on Roxie.
    Her face was dark with despair, and she looked beautiful.
    The plascrete floor filled his vision and then pressed
against his face.   The blows didn’t
stop, and blood, phlegm and bile oozed betweens his lips and puddled warm and
sticky around his head.
    After a while, Poe breathed again.
    He was picked up and dragged, knees scraping on the
floor.   Blue light globes whizzed
by him impossibly fast, and he thought they might be stars.   Was he in the ether, then?   Was he stung to death by the Scorpion
and racing around the outline of its celestial body, waiting for the abyss to
take him?   Then there was a
door.  
    Had he come a million miles?  
    A hundred feet?
    He was hauled through the door and dropped to the plascrete
again.   Slam!   A
buzzing noise, and for a time he drifted.   It was the first day of creation, he decided, and if the world was
without form and void, then the buzzing sounds must be the Spirit of God
hovering upon the waters.   He knew
that if he waited long enough, he would eventually hear the Lord’s first words
and then the firmament would divide the waters.
    “I think he’s awake,” turned out to be the creative
incantation.   That didn’t seem
quite right to Poe, but with the words came light, shaky, elusive and painful,
but enough to see by.   Light and a
plain of stone.
    “Mrarmgaaaarble,” he tried to say, but failed.   Creation responded, though, in the
firmament that seared his body, throwing a violent mass of blood and sputum
from the waters below into the waters above and out upon the dry land.   Poe didn’t feel able, in clean
conscience, to pronounce creation good.
    “Ick, he’s in bad fookin’ shape, though,” was the second
mantra of creation.
    “Poe?”   He
recognized Roxie’s voice.  
    “Mmmmmmalive,” Poe managed to mumble.   His lips felt like they had been
flattened under hammers.   Man,
created in the images of the gods after having been run over by divine
steam-trucks.   “I’m alive.”
    “Worse luck you,” complained another voice that Poe now
recognized as belonging to the Irishman O’Shaughnessy.   “I was hoping you were dead, for your
sake.”
    *    *    *
    Pffffffft-ankkkh!   Pffffffft-ankkkh!
    The two Striders trundled along at a surprisingly