Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Anyway, they’re all dead. The last of the Sons of Cuchu-lainn. Samantha was wrong. She overestimated them. They weren’t the boys who make no noise. They weren’t that smart.

Do they even know the story of their name? The child Setanta was renamed Cuchulainn because he killed a dog. Blood transformed him.

Transformed all of us.

And I have lost a lot of it.

Red under my back and legs.

Red, all of today and yesterday.

I’m exhausted.

Lying prone on the ground, like a child making a snow angel. My hand cradling her white neck, massaging the capillaries to keep the rigor at bay for a few minutes yet. A vermilion hand. A flower of grief.

I’m too weak to get up. I can’t move. So here I’ll stay. Half-naked between the trees. The story of the precipitation running through the vultured rag of human paint that is smeared in great swirls across my body. In my hair and in my eyes that are almond now and black.

Stay here.

Under the ordered sky.

The growing day extinguishing the lamps of heaven and the yellow of unprayed-for souls. A big tiredness in every constriction of my rib cage. A lightness in my head that can only be oxygen deprivation. Death wants me, too.

About us, insects scenting putrefying flesh and descending onto the snow-draped soil where two bodies lie.

Five this morning. Five in the space of an hour.

One the day before yesterday.

I blink away the snowflakes.

I try to get up.

But it’s too hard. And anyway it’s better here on the ground, the earth licking my wounds in the protection of the trees.

Better than up there in the afterlife of the accursed, caught between a massacre and the stretched attitudes of the hills.

If I get up, I know how it will be.

I know what will happen. A hushed absence and around me the sentient creatures will move aside in recognition. They know there will be more slaughters down the road. For I am the one, the master of the art. I am the favored son of Death. Touched was a mere pretender. They’ll run and the skeleton will smile beneath his hood.

No.

I’ll resist it. I’ll stay here. With her.

An ocean wind. A faltering front. The snow is ending. Back in its box until December. The weather will return to something more autumnal, but the world will not be as it was before. I’ve changed it. Everything remade with a bitter quality. I see it manifest in the ghost of pine trees, in the clouds, the black bark, the dead girl next to me in the snow.

I shake my head.

I’ll resist it…

A jet.

The moon.

Aye.

Do that, Michael.

Don’t get up. Don’t let them see you. They can leave you for a while yet. They can let you be. Those tongues of midnight. Whispering incantations. Casting glyphs. Biding their time. They’ll weather well their wait, blessed as they are with the virtues of patience and fortitude and the knowledge of their propagation with the blood from the never-ending works of man.

You’ll live to see another day. They’ll let you have some years of peace.

You’ll live because she is out there and she wants you. And her power is growing and will grow until she cleanses the deck of all the captains.

And you’ll live because he is out there too. And no one knows. And he is coming. And the rage in you is as nothing to the bursting dam that is him. And you’re the one that set him free.

It’s a dangerous world, Michael. Stay in the woods. Hide.

From the paramedics, the feds, the killers, hide from them all.

Don’t get up.

Don’t get up if you know what’s good for you.

Snow blinks into my eyelids.

I watch the sky.

Not a jet.

A helicopter.

Rotor blades.

Engines.

Sirens.

Cars.

A squeal of brakes.

A slamming door.

Voices.

Footsteps.

I get up.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles. He studied politics at Oxford University and after a failed law career he moved to New York City in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, door-to-door salesman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach, book-store clerk and librarian. Having lived in Colorado for many years with his wife and daughters, he and his family have moved to Melbourne, Australia.

In addition to The Dead Yard, Serpent’s Tail publishes the other two volumes in Adrian McKinty’s The Dead Trilogy – Dead I Well May Be and The Bloomsday Dead, as well as Fifty Grand and Hidden River.