Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

Ransom clambered to his knees in the blackness, and he remained in the water when the woman and eldest child, sharing flames, leapt into the muddy sewage together to save themselves. Ransom aimed and fired, putting a bullet through the woman’s brain when suddenly he was hit with a powerful blow to one leg where another child had stabbed him. The final child leapt on his chest and tore at his face with its knife, slashing wildly even as Ransom pounded the little hyena in the face with his gun.

Ransom sustained cuts to his cheek, forehead, leg, and the wound to his left shoulder. The three remaining fiends had regrouped somewhere in the black tunnel beyond the water’s edge. It seemed, for the moment, that he owned the water and they owned dry ground. Where the infant might be, dead or alive, was anyone’s guess. It flashed through Alastair’s brain that one or more of the other may’ve succumbed to a liking for young human flesh just a little too much.

As the water began to rise, a chilling cold came over Ransom. He’d bled out badly at several of the wounds, particularly the one dealt him by the alpha wolf-the father. It flit through his mind that the cold in his bones could be the onset of trauma, that he could pass out at any moment, and this would leave him victim to the deadly children, and not one of them would show him any mercy whatsoever; in fact, if he passed out, they’d be feeding on his body for a long time. He was as good as dead, as good as Logan.

He gave a momentary thought to Behan. Where in hell’s Behan? Can I count on Ken? Or is he dead as well down here in this hellhole?

He imagined Thom Carmichael’s headline in the papers: three of cpd’s finest found dead below the fair. How fitting…

How will Philo Keane get through life without me, he wondered. Then he thought of the future he will have lost with Jane, of watching Gabby mature, marry and have a child of her own some day. But all such thoughts were dispelled when his instincts took hold on hearing the animals in the dark begin a slow-building keening, a kind of animal mantra, preparing to strike again.

The cane, he thought. Need to get to my cane.

He struggled to his feet, stumbled, weaved, his dizziness threatening to take him. But he made it to his cane, and he grabbed hold of it. The firmness of it, the solid shaft and silver handle gave him a grounding that filled him with a sense of something in this nightmare to hold on to. Still, his head swirled, his mind gyrated, and his ears rang out with a silent cry from his soul.

Somehow, Ransom fought off the disorientation and the inner turmoil that wanted to bring him down. He slowly gathered up every ounce of remaining strength and charged into the black, inky passageway where he could hear them but not see the remaining three beasts with long knives. The one who’d leapt into the water afire, while badly burned, had joined his siblings, one of whom had the long hair of a girl, Audra, he wondered. Ransom rushed in at the feral children screaming and madly swinging his cane, the deadly silver wolf’s-head hoping to tear into the trio of vultures. At the same time, Ransom blindly fired his gun nonstop, hoping to further even the odds.

He saw winking deadly blades reflected by each gunshot flash, and he felt a glancing blow to the head where another knife struck out at him, then another cut him in the side, and a third jabbed him in the back as the whirlwind of maniacal children dodged his cane and survived his bullets and somehow got past him and were splashing down the tunnel in the water, escaping .

He wheeled and reloaded and fired and fired until his gun clicked empty again. Then he went to his knees again, the cane crumbling under his weight, and Alastair Ransom passed out, his blood running the incline and mingling with the two dead adult cannibals in the sewage.

Ransom’s last thoughts were of Jane and Gabby and how much time and pleasure of their company he will have lost. Dead here…cold and alone and dead, he thought.

“I’m dying in this rat’s nest,” he muttered aloud in a final attempt to call out to Behan or anyone within hearing. Ransom then rolled over onto his back, his watch in his hand, thinking One more thing to do before giving in…passing out…

Alastair was unconscious when they found him, his rescuers locating him by the sound of chimes playing the old English tune “Green Sleeves.” When Jane, Gabby, Behan, and Fenger, and the uniforms got to him, they saw his watch had been opened and thrown toward dry ground.

And in fact the first uniformed police to locate him had followed Logan’s original route because he’d heard the music, unsure what it meant. Jane, who’d heard the chimes before, had shouted, “It’s him! It’s Ransom!”

What they came across after the watch terrified Jane and Gabby, for at first what was left of Jed Logan, everyone took for what was left of Alastair Ransom. All this excitement happened before officers, led by a shaken Ken Behan, pushed ahead, finding Alastair bleeding out. These officers encircled Ransom’s inert body half in, half out of the water, with lanterns, and Behan shouted back to the others, “Down here! It’s Ransom! He’s here!”

Behan had dropped to his knees there in the water, tearful, his nerves shot, seeing the big man bleeding and dying on top of having seen his partner, Logan, butchered like a ham on a spit. “Dr. Fenger! Come quick!”

Everyone getting a first look at Alastair assumed from the blood loss and his position that Ransom was dead, until Ken Behan, soaked and leaning in over Ransom, placed his hands on Alastair and felt life. He erupted with the news: “He’s alive and breathing!”

Behan continued shouting for medical help. Other officers had held the civilians, Dr. Fenger, Jane, and Gabby back, but now they burst down the lantern-lit corridor to where Alastair lay soaked in blood and sewage in the rising water. Someone estimated that if he hadn’t been found, that he’d’ve surely drowned in the next few minutes, proclaiming Behan a hero for having turned him over and having gotten his head out of the water when he did-all exaggerations Behan tried to deny. Others waded in and weighed in, the CPD closing ranks for one of their own, and together they heaved their huge cargo onto the dry floor.

Jane took in the fact that two other bodies floated in the water, both shabbily dressed adults, one woman, one man. She mentally reconstructed what had happened here, seeing that Fenger was doing likewise. She imagined how Alastair had been attacked by the dead couple in the water, and that just before he gave into his blood loss and faintness, Alastair had had presence of mind to open his chiming watch and toss it as far down the corridor as possible as a kind of beacon to others who might come in search of him.

With a great deal of disgust and outrage, Mike O’Malley and other officers worked the other bodies to dry ground, pronouncing both dead, the woman badly burned, gunshot wounds evident in both. The two dead people appeared a wretched pair indeed, from clothing to the lice crawling over them. In a moment, someone produced a huge curved knife with a hilt, the sort of thing one imagined pirates to use. “No telling what else we’ll turn up from these two,” said one officer.

A second held up a cleaver and said, “You think Ransom got the Leather Apron here?”

“Ransom always gets his man,” said a third, and this seemed to settle the question.

“You’re right. He got ’em,” said Behan to the others. “Inspector Alastair Ransom’s killed the Leather Aprons!”

A half-hearted cheer filled the underground passageway, but no one was ready yet to party, not with Ransom lying at their feet so near death.