Chương 98: The Long Count

The house on Weaver's Row had a smell the last one had not. Abe stood in the flooded kitchen doorway with the lamp up and listened. It was in the pantry. He could hear it working at something in there, wet and patient, in a space too small for it. Two days ago he would have crossed the kitchen in a breath and finished it before it turned. Now he stood a moment longer, getting his grip right, because his left arm was bound stiff from wrist to elbow and his hands had been shaking on and off since dark.

Then he crossed the kitchen and finished it. It took three blows where the morning would have taken one. He stood over it in the black water and coughed, and the cough brought up salt. Every cough had, since the harbor. Outside, down the row, a pair of lamps bobbed in the dark. A crew was working the odd-numbered doors, two men and a pole and their names chalked on a slate. Nobody worked alone in the low city tonight. Except him. Pairs was Dobbs's own rule, and at dusk Dobbs had unmade it for exactly one person.

There were too many doors, and Abe was the only one who could clear them alone. Everything that had slipped past the boats in the morning was somewhere in the dark now. A pantry, a stairwell, a cellar with the water sitting in it. The city could not sleep until every one was found, so the crews had come down off the wall into the drowned streets with lamps and poles, three days awake, and started taking the low city back one house at a time. Abe took the houses nobody wanted.

The one on Marsh Lane had been standing at the foot of the cellar stairs, listening to the crew work the house next door through the wall. He took it in the dark, by ear, and stood over it after, and did not much like how long it had been listening. He marked each door with chalk as he cleared it and went on to the next one. Some doors already wore Thursday's chalk, from the search for the living. Tonight's mark went beside it. His legs went on carrying him. They had stopped saying much about it either way.

A runner came splashing up the row with word from the shed. The Longmarket side was clear to the chapel. Crew four was in at last, all hands, eating soup with their slate retired. And Dobbs had taken crew six up past the Longmarket, after a head that was not accounted for. Abe took the next house. By the middle of the night he had stopped counting doors. The strapping on his arm had gone soft with seawater. His leg worked well enough going forward and complained on stairs.

In a stairwell he found another one, folded in under the banister where the lamp took too long to find it, and it took four blows. The one after that took five. Each time he stood afterward in the dark and let his breathing settle, because there was nobody watching, and no reason to pretend the night was not costing him. He had not slept since Wednesday. The crews got scraps, sitting up on the nets between shifts, and he did not even get that.

The difference was supposed to be that he was built for it now, and by the small hours the difference had worn down to this: the crews were staggering, and he could still walk a straight line. The tiredness was in him all the same. It sat behind his eyes and in his grip, and it was the reason every kill now took an extra blow. There had been no quiet minute since Thursday, not one, and the rest he usually took inside the Turning-Wheel Trance had gone wherever the quiet had gone.

Between houses he sat down on somebody's doorstep and tried for it anyway. Fifty seconds of calm, and he could have a whole night of rest inside the stopped world and come back before his lamp burned any lower. He got about twenty seconds in, and then the harbor was back. The claw on his leg. The sea going into his chest. The calm broke. He tried three times, and the third time what broke it was Ada. He picked the lamp up and went back to work.

Somewhere in the small hours he stopped feeling tired, though he knew that was worse. He kept going. The third house had nothing in it at all. It had people. It stood on Tapper's Row, four doors up from the waterline, and every sweep since Thursday had it marked empty. The crew ahead of him had gone in after a noise on the ground floor and killed the thing making it. Then, over their own breathing, they heard the ceiling creak. The hatch to the roof space had a mattress over it, pulled across from the inside.

The man who came down out of it was called Lockett. He came down the ladder backward, slow, with his hands shaking. Then his wife came down. Then three girls, one after another, the smallest asleep and passed from hand to hand like a package. Five of them. They had gone up on Thursday night when the water came into their hall, dragged the mattress over the hatch when the sounds started, and lived for three days off a shelf of canned food.

They were missing from every count in Calder, and given up for dead by everyone who knew them. For a moment the crew just stood there. Then everyone was talking at once, and the man with the pole was laughing without any sound coming out, and the crew lead had the smallest girl inside his jacket.

"Somebody run up the shed," the crew lead said.

"Now. Tell them we're five up. FIVE UP!" Abe stood in the doorway, out of the lamplight, and let them have it. Thirty seconds. That was what the night had room for. Then the crew lead put the girl in her father's arms and picked the pole back up, and the lamps moved on to the next dark house, because the row was not finished. The Locketts went up the hill in the crew's spare blankets, all five walking, not one mark on them. He carried the Locketts with him through the next four houses, and it helped.

It did not make the dark any smaller, but it made the dark possible to keep walking into. He ran the news to the shed himself, because the runner was somewhere else, and good news should not have to wait for one. The shed at two in the morning was lamplight and steam and a rail of wooden tags Fenn had nailed up at dusk. One tag for every hand out in the streets, the name chalked big on the front. The rail had two sides, OUT and HOME, and each time a hand reported in, their tag crossed over.

Half the tags had crossed. Half had not. Under the rail hung the spare tags, blank, and a knife for making more. Fenn stood in front of it with his chalk, keeping the streets on the boards and the people on the rail. The two small names from the cut stood where they had stood since Thursday, at the bottom, in their own column. Not moved, and not moving. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"Five Locketts," Abe said.

"Tapper's Row. All of them walking." Fenn wrote it. His chalk hand stopped for a moment and he stood with his head down. Then he wrote the rest, and the men at the soup hatch made a sound that was too tired to be a cheer, and was one anyway.

"Your aunt's at the hall. Your sister's carrying water for the healer. They're both fine, as of the last runner." Fenn looked at the strapping on Abe's arm.

"Go through the hall on your next leg. Let somebody look at that."

"Anything from crew six?"

"Up past the Longmarket." Fenn turned back to the rail.

"No word since the last one." Crew nine was in. Purnell lay asleep on the nets with her crew down around her, their tags crossed over. Fenn had pulled them in at midnight and would not send them back out. At the hatch, one of the winch men asked Mullen whether his hip had anything else to say.

"Nothing new," said Mullen, and ladled. The hall at three in the morning smelled of lamp oil and wet wool. Mrs. Amery had a corner of it with two tables pushed together, and she had been working all night, the same as the crews, one hurt person at a time, her folding chair somewhere behind her, unsat in. She was closing a gash on a crewman's forearm when Abe came in, the skin drawing together under her fingers, the same as it had for Prosser, and the crewman watched it happen with his jaw hanging.

She took Abe next, without being asked. She closed the claw-mark on his leg most of the way in about a minute, and the deep ache went out of it with the closing. The arm she pressed in two places and watched his face.

"That's bruise, down to the bone. It'll heal on its own and take a week doing it." She cut the soaked strapping off and bound it fresh, wrist to elbow, tight.

"There's only so much of me in a night, and they're still carrying people in. Yours waits." June brought her a jug of water, and saw him. She put the jug down. She came over and stood in front of him, and looked at the new strapping, and the claw-mark on his leg, and the salt in the corners of his mouth, and her chin went hard like it did when she had decided not to cry.

"You're not allowed to do that again," said June.

"I know," said Abe. She punched him very softly on the good arm, and picked her jug back up, and went where the healer needed her. She looked back once, from the far end of the hall. Across the hall, Peg was asleep sitting up at the route table, the first sleep anybody had seen her take, and neither of them woke her. He went back down into the dark. The house after that had somebody in it who had not made it. A man, in the room behind his own front door, dead since Thursday. The wave had not done it.

The water had, quietly, on the first night, while the city was looking at the things with claws. Abe stood in the doorway with the lamp. Then he went upstairs for the blanket off the bed. There were slippers on the floor beside it, set together, toes to the wall. He wrapped the man in the blanket, and took him up over his shoulders, and carried him out of the house and up the middle of the dark street toward the shed.

Alone, because every pair of hands with a pole was needed for the living, and he was the only one in Calder with the strength to spare. It was a long way. His arm did not like it, and the night's miles were in his legs, and he carried him anyway, through water that was going down now, past doors with two kinds of chalk on them. Somewhere on that walk he waited to feel something about the man on his shoulders. Nothing came. It was a weight, and he was strong, and that was all there was.

A week ago this would have been the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Tonight it was a job on the way to the next job, and he knew that was wrong, and knowing did not make it feel like anything either. He had a breath put away from the day Brammall told him about Ada, still where he had left it, never let out. He put the man beside it, somewhere he could not feel it yet, and kept walking. At the shed he laid the man down on the boards, and gave Fenn the street and the house.

Fenn wrote a name against them without asking anyone what it was, because Fenn knew his streets. Abe stood a moment. There was no thirty seconds for this one. He picked his lamp back up and went out. The light came up gray and slow, and the water went down with it. The water had come in loud. It went out quietly: a hand's width off the shed steps in the last hour of the dark, a curb showing on Nether Street that had not shown in three days. The gulls were back over the harbor, the first ones since Thursday.

Nobody stopped to be glad about any of it. The crews came in with the light, pair by pair, wet to the chest. One pair came in carrying a third man between them, his ankle wrapped in somebody's shirt, and handed him up the boards toward the hall. Each hand moved their own tag across to HOME, and stood in the shed after, because standing anywhere else meant being alone with the night. Somebody had propped the big doors open so the gray light could come in.

Sefton put a mug of soup into Abe's good hand and had nothing to say, and the two of them stood against the nets and drank soup and watched the rail fill. The soup was the same soup it had been for three days. Nobody had said one word about the soup. Tag by tag, the OUT side emptied and the HOME side filled, and every tag that crossed made the shed a little easier to breathe in. Crew six came in at full light.

They came up the boards slowly, five men wet to the neck, and they did not go to the hatch, and they did not go to their tags. They stood together just inside the doors, and the gray light put their shadows down the middle of the shed. One of them had a coil of rope over his shoulder, both hands holding it there, like a thing he had decided never to put down. The shed went on moving around them for a little while. Then, without anyone saying a word, it stopped.

Mullen set the ladle down in the pot and left it there. Purnell came off the nets and stood up. Fenn turned around at the boards with the chalk still raised, and looked at the five men, and counted them. Abe watched him do the count twice, and watched the number come out the same both times. At the middle table, the tide sheets Dobbs had rolled up on Saturday morning lay where he had left them. The hook by the door, where he had hung the coiled rope after the harbor, held nothing.

The five men off crew six did not say anything, and nobody asked them to. The shed stood in the gray light with the steam coming off a hundred wet backs, and the whole long night sat in the room with them, and what had come through that door was not news yet. Every person in that room was keeping it from becoming news for one more minute. Abe stood with Sefton's soup going cold in his hand, and put this away too, beside Ada, beside the man on his shoulders, in the place the week kept making bigger.

He hated how much room there was in it now. It was Fenn who asked.

"Where is he?" The man with the rope did not put the rope down.

"A house off the Longmarket. There was a head not accounted for, a boy, and he went back in for him. One of those things was still in the cellar." He looked at the boards.

"He got the boy out to us first." Dobbs was dead. Fenn put the chalk down on the ledge. He went along the rail to the far end, where the crew leads' tags hung in a short row of their own, and took down the one that said DOBBS. He stood with it in his hand. Every tag on that rail had two places it could hang, and Dobbs was not out, and Dobbs was not home, and there was no third nail. Fenn held the tag for a long time, in front of everyone.

Outside, the light came up, and the water went down off a city that did not know yet what the night had taken from it. Then he hung it back on the side for the ones still out, and picked his chalk up again, because the count was his now. Dobbs's tag hung on the OUT side of the rail, with the morning going on around it, and it was never crossing over.