Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

Bruno capitalized on the toss by rolling up into a sitting position on Shawnee’s stomach, fastening a grip around the Chief’s enormous neck. At once, Micmac began to struggle for air.

“Give,” demanded Bruno.

The Chief only gasped and tried futilely to roll away.

“Give up,” Bruno repeated with more ferocity in his voice. And Milena wondered just how the strongman would know if the Chief did, in fact, surrender.

“I’m telling you,” shouted Bruno, leaning down close to the Chief’s face, “give up and apologize. Or I’ll break your miserable neck.”

Chick and Kitty and Durga all flinched at this, but Bruno, drunk on adrenaline and testosterone and invested fully in the moment, didn’t realize the significance of what he was saying.

The Chief’s eyes began to flicker and the noise from his throat grew deeper and more raspy.

“Bruno, enough,” Chick yelled, throwing over the fencing, jumping down from the stage and running at his patriarch.

Bruno saw the flash of feathers at his periphery and, in that instant, he looked up to see the chicken boy flying toward him. Then he looked back at Shawnee, suddenly conscious of what he was doing and horrified that he was doing it. He took his hands, at once, from the Chief’s neck.

What happened next took only seconds: The Chief, panicked, gasping for breath, bucked. Bruno’s weight shifted and he began to slide off the Chief’s stomach. The Chief lifted his ass off the ground, reached around to the waist of his pants and pulled free his hatchet, then threw himself upward and brought the hatchet down with all his strength. The blade sank into Bruno’s flesh where the arm was joined to the right shoulder, at the socket. It fell to the bone and then it passed beyond the bone, chopping through the hard calcium and into the marrow of the joint’s core.

Blood spurted like a geyser. All of the freaks screamed in unison. Bruno tried to climb to his feet, staggered, swooned, and fell backward. The Chief ran to him, pulled free the hatchet and thought, for just a second, about burying it once again, this time in the skull of the foreign interloper. Instead, he climbed to his feet, waved the bloody blade, hex-style, at the freaks, and ran, wild-eyed, out of the annex.

Kitty jumped off the stage, as did Fatos and Milena. They ran to Bruno, who was in the arms of the chicken boy, whose feathers were turning black as oil, painted by the spray of the blood. Bruno was starting to slip out of consciousness. He tried to speak and managed only a weak grunt. Bubbles of saliva formed on his mouth. His wounded arm sagged next to his body, attached only by flaps of skin and ligament and sinew near the pit.

Kitty and Milena tore sleeves from their gowns and Chick tried to tie off the wound, but the gash was too deep and wide and the flow of blood too rapid. The rags were soaked in seconds and did nothing to stanch the hemorrhage.

“Fatos,” Chick yelled, “run and get the canvasman.”

The mule sprinted from the annex. Behind Chick, Jeta could be heard vomiting and Durga was trying frantically to find a way off her stage. Now, Nadja, Aziz, Vasco and Marcel came running to join the strongman.

The chicken boy looked at his compatriots and struggled for something reassuring to say. But he could feel his feathers and the skin beneath them becoming saturated with the strongman’s blood and this made him lightheaded. He wondered for a second if he were about to fade into the Limbo. But the father voice remained silent. And then Fatos was back with Forrest DeWitt and Dr. Taber, the yokel who had certified Lazarus Cole’s death. For a moment, Chick didn’t understand what Taber was doing here until he realized that the man must truly be a doctor of some kind.

Taber took one look at the injury and said, “Oh, Christ, this isn’t good.”

DeWitt gave him a shove toward Bruno. Taber went down on his knees next to Chick, looked more closely at the wound, and said, “We’ve got to get him into the clinic.”

Nodding gravely, DeWitt said to Chick, “We can take the ringmaster’s truck. I’ve got it waiting outside.”

Bruno passed out completely when DeWitt and the doctor tried to lift him. With the help of Fatos and Milena, they carried the strongman out of the tent and laid him in the open bed of a dilapidated pickup. Kitty and Milena started to climb in and DeWitt said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I’ll go,” said Chick, hopping up into the bed. “The rest of you wait here. I’ll send word as soon as I can.”

The others did as the chicken boy instructed, stepping back from the vehicle and huddling into one another.

Taber and DeWitt climbed into the cab and gunned the engine, producing several backfires and a cloud of black smoke. They eased the truck into gear and drove rapidly across the fairgrounds in the direction of the county road.

Chick lay beside the strongman, cushioning Bruno’s head, whispering in the patriarch’s ear.

“I’m sorry,” Chick said, over the rush of the wind. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.

“I chose you out of the world,” the chicken boy whispered to the unconscious behemoth. “And the world will not love those who are not its own.”

Nadia was sitting on the hood of the Honda, looking like a different person. The nurse’s whites were gone and she was wearing a short black skirt and red silk halter and a pair of high-heeled sandals. She had let all that thick black hair down and it changed the look of her face. Her cheekbones seemed higher, more pronounced, and Sweeney thought her eyes were more almond-shaped.

She smiled when she saw him.

“How’d you know it was my car?” he asked.

“You look,” she said, “like an Accord kind of guy,” and he thought there was no way to take it as a compliment.

He came to a stop at the bumper and she leaned forward onto her knees.

“Aren’t you beat?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It always takes me a while to come down. It’s like, being around all that sleep. .” and she rolled her eyes and shook her head and the thick hair, wavy and bordering on wild, bounced around her face.

“So where is this place?” Sweeney asked.

Nadia put out her hand and said, “It’s probably easier if I drive.”

AS SHE PULLEDout onto Route 16, Sweeney adjusted the rearview and looked at the Peck.

“Jesus, it’s ugly,” he said.

“Doesn’t it kill you?” Nadia said. “More money than God and they build this monstrosity.”

“Maybe in its day,” Sweeney said as the Clinic slipped off the mirror.

“That place,” Nadia said, “was a goddamn tomb from day one.”

They rode in silence for a quarter mile. It was an odd feeling. Except in cabs to the airports, Sweeney hadn’t been a passenger in over a year, and he’d rarely been one in his own car. But it wasn’t unpleasant, and Nadia was a smooth and confident driver. She accelerated up a rise and he looked down at her leg and saw a gold chain tight around her ankle. He turned on the radio, rolled the tuner until he came to some Al Green.

“It’s weird,” he said. “This thing was giving me some problems this morning.”

“I’ve got friends with a garage,” she said. “Just let me know.”

“You from around here?”

She laughed and it was low and throaty and Sweeney moved in his seat.

“God, no,” she said. “Can you imagine being from here?”

“I haven’t seen much of the actual city,” he said.

She took a quick right and suddenly they were moving through a noman’s-land of forgotten industrial parks — brick and concrete bunkers surrounded by dead fields. Sweeney counted three cars that were burned down to the frames and abandoned on the side of the road.