The Eternal War

CHAPTER 91

1831, New Orleans

The trail of chaos led a quarter of a mile up Powder Street, battered and split wooden kegs spilling liquor on to the ground and penniless vagrants clustered around each one, eagerly filling their cupped hands.

They passed a woman with a broken leg howling for a physician, an overturned baker’s wagon that had spilled loaves across the track and a trapper’s bundle of beaver pelts and deer hides scattered across the way, ruined and torn by hooves and wheel rims, before finally finding themselves looking into the gated courtyard and stables of a brewery.

‘The cart came from here,’ said Bob.

A crowd of brewery workers had been drawn out to the courtyard from inside a two-storey brick building, and were gathered around something. They could see workers turning away ashen-faced, doubling over and retching. A woman screamed and ran from the courtyard past them.

‘Excuse me? Miss? What just happened?’ asked Sal.

The woman shook her head and gabbled something about ‘the devil’s work’. Then she was gone, hurrying away as fast as her feet could carry her.

‘This is the contamination event,’ said Bob.

‘Aye. Come on, we should go and have a look.’

They crossed the courtyard, heading towards brick-built stables. They could hear the horses inside, distressed, the clattering of circling restless hooves, snorting and lowing behind the stable doors.

The crowd of people were gathered around something on the ground. Among the babble of frightened voices Sal could hear snippets of whispered words:

‘… witchcraft …’

‘… work of the devil …’

A man with a loud voice was busy castigating the brewery workers on the evils of drink … and that this was God’s warning to them, this was God’s punishment.

They pushed their way through the crowd to get a better look, not difficult since the gathered crowd was reluctant to draw any closer to what it was on the ground that had drawn them round.

Finally Liam, Bob and Sal could see for themselves what it was — the cause of the disturbance, the cause of the runaway brewery cart. Liam stopped where he stood, queasily covering his mouth with a hand.

‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph …’

Sal took another step closer and squatted down beside … it.

‘Don’t touch it!’ screamed one of the crowd of people. ‘It is a creation of evil! A demon!’

She ignored the warning and reached one hand out carefully towards it … the monstrosity. If she could believe in things supernatural, then a creation of evil sounded like the perfect description for this pitiful ruin of a creature lying on the ground amid its own blood, steaming offal and twisted sinews.

‘Is that a person … or something?’ she whispered.

It was as if a slaughterhouse had dumped a day’s worth of off-cuts and refuse into the courtyard. Amid the glistening purple and bloody gristle she could see the hindquarters of a horse, still flexing weakly, kicking spasmodically. But worse still — the stuff that she was sure would fuel a lifetime of future nightmares for her — the blood-spattered head, shoulders and upper torso of a man welded to the flanks of the same horse, or perhaps it was a second horse. As if God had decided to construct a centaur and in a moment of frustration and irritation had given up and hurled the failed mess down to Earth.

Her hand gently touched the dead man’s head.

His eyes flickered open.