The Magpye: Circus (5 page)

That was why Garrity knew the
only safe place was right by King's side. Quiet, efficient,
unquestioning and uncomplaining, utterly morally vacant. The
perfect lieutenant. It has taken a lot of secrets learnt and shared
for Garrity to rise to where he was today, and he wasn't going to
let some psycho like Jack Taylor bring the whole house of cards
down.

No, if Garrity was going to
survive, he'd have to make sure King survived. Quietly, behind
closed doors and in corners, he was going to need to run a little
game of his own.

Ten yards from the precinct,
Garrity reached over and opened up the passenger door of the van.
With a grunt, he shoved the bag out, letting it bounce into the
road. Palm jammed down on the horn, he gunned the engine and
vanished into the night.

The floor of the warehouse was
bare, dominated by a large metal cage. Inside, barely conscious,
were the children. Magpye couldn't count how many. Too many was the
only number that made sense. He'd expected them to be filthy,
dressed in rags, but they were all clothed in matching t-shirts and
jeans and seemed clean. Someone here took care of the merchandise,
Magpye supposed. They stared out of the cage with vacant eyes. They
should have been afraid, but whatever they were drugged with kept
them so insensate that even a man in a mask, splattered with blood,
was not enough to rouse anything in them other than dumb curiosity.
Magpye tore his eyes away from the strange, dead-eyed children.
They would be White and Blind's problems soon enough.

Magpye had his own problems...
Beneath his feet, pungent gasoline sloshed and at the other end of
the warehouse floor there were six, maybe seven tanks of diesel
fuel. Used to refuel the vans and run the generator, Magpye
suspected. They had done the same at the circus. When you lived in
caravans and tents, fuel was always important. It was also
dangerous. One spark and the whole place would go up.

Two guards left, and it needed
to be up close and personal. It was time for Dorothy.

When he'd been alive, Dorothy
had been nearly seven feet tall, weighed over 300lbs, and had a
bright red beard that fell past his naval. He'd been the circus'
bearded lady, read a little tarot from time to time, but his main
role was as the circus doctor. Injuries were a common occurrence
and every circus had its own physician. Dorothy knew every bone in
the human body and, since he'd been living in Magpye's head, he'd
taken to breaking them.

The first guard stepped out
from behind the cage, his assault rifle trained on Magpye. He was
smaller than the others had been, but wiry. A scrapper. A scared
scrapper, backed into a corner.

"I know who you are."

"I doubt it. Seeing as I don't.
And if I were you, I wouldn't pull that trigger."

Magpye heard the second guard
step out behind him. He was moving slowly, carefully, but couldn't
disguise his footfalls in the inch or so of gas that was on the
floor.

"Don't need to shoot you," said
the first guard, taking a step forward. "Just need you to stand
still."

Magpye ducked, and Piotr's arms
closed on nothing but air as he lunged for Magpye. Tipping himself
forward, Magpye tucked into a roll before exploding upwards, legs
extended, the metal heels of his boots connecting with the first
guard's jaw. Bone splintered and Magpye heard the sound of the
guard's jaw dislocating from his skull. Landing on his feet next
the guard's unconscious body, Magpye turned to face Piotr.

The big Russian took a careful
step forward. The children, still docile, watched him. This one
they know, Magpye realised.

"You don't take the children,"
said Piotr, his accent thick. "They belong to me."

"We'll see."

Dorothy's ghost stepped forward
in Magpye's mind. In death, he was somehow even larger than he'd
been when he was alive. He cracked his spectral knuckles loudly
inside Magpye's head. "He's a big one," said the ghost. "I'm going
to need a knife."

Circling Piotr, Magpye reached
into his jacket and pulled a short blade. The Russian looked at
it.

"I cook with bigger knives than
that, little man."

He rushed forward, trying to
get inside Magpye's reach and remove the blade's advantage. Magpye
spun away and brought his leg up in a snap kick. The boot connected
with the Russian's side, but it was like kicking a wall. The
Russian smiled, grabbed Magpye's leg, and twisted, sending the
masked man onto the floor.

"Told you he was a big one,"
said Dorothy.

Magpye rolled onto his back
just in time to catch Piotr's foot coming down towards his face. He
threw a gauntleted forearm up, blocking the blow. The big Russian
pushed down, using his weight to force Magpye's arm across his own
throat. Gasping for air, Magpye fumbled with the knife in his free
hand.

"Behind the knee," sighed
Dorothy. "We've been through this. Lateral and medial hamstring
tendons."

Vision blurring, Magpye jammed the short blade into the
back of the Russian's knee and yanked it across. The knife was
sharp, parting the flesh easily. Magpye dug in deeper and pulled on
the blade again, this time feeling the resounding snap of the
severed tendons. Piotr toppled
,
clutching his knee.
Blood mixed with the gasoline. Rolling quickly over, Magpye shoved
the blade into Piotr's other knee. It took just one tear to finish
crippling the Russian. Face down, struggling to breathe as gasoline
found its way into his mouth and nostrils, the Russian was
finished.

Magpye struggled to his feet,
gasping for breath. He steadied himself on the cage for a second.
It was done. As his breathing slowed to normal, he felt a small
cold hand resting on top of his. One of the children, one somehow
more lucid than the rest, was looking up at him. Ten, maybe eleven,
she had a defiant expression on her face under a mess of unkempt
blonde hair.

"Have you come to take us?" she
asked.

"No," replied Magpye. With a
smile, Dorothy receded into the strange and etheric regions of
Magpye's mind and, unbidden, a small fragment of Able Quirk took
his place. It was one of the few pieces of Able that had survived.
It was the part that remembered the fire, the part that remembered
his friends dying. Perhaps it was the best part of him, the part
that knew only grief and loss, not revenge and hate. "No, I'm not
here to take you."

"Are you going to kill us?"

"No."

"Are you going to kill
him?"

Magpye followed the girl's
gaze. Piotr had rolled himself onto his back and was awkwardly
trying to pull himself away like some strange crippled fish,
floundering in the shallow pool of gas. He was a long way from the
unconscious guard's gun, and he knew it.

"Yes," replied Magpye. "I am
going to kill him."

"Good," replied the girl. "He's
a bad man."

"So am I."

One eye on Piotr's progress
across the floor, Magpye pulled a thin piece of metal from his belt
and got to work picking the padlock on the door. Piotr probably had
the keys, but Magpye didn't want to get within reach of the Russian
giant's arms again, even if he was crippled. Besides, picking locks
was the first thing that Marv had got him to do, after he'd found
him. He'd said it was therapeutic, that all problems were a type of
lock and he just had to learn to open them. He'd found the leap
from lock picking to marshalling the voices of ghosts in head to be
very different, but Marv was still a good teacher. The lock popped
off before Piotr had made another yard across the floor.

Magpye squatted down, bring his
masked face level with the little girl's own. She didn't flinch. It
wasn't the drugs, somehow she was not desensitised like the others.
She had simply seen far worse things than a man in a gas mask,
covered in blood.

"Get out," said Magpye. "Take
the others with you."

The little girl didn't need to
be asked again. She yanked on the collar of the boy next to her and
led him out of the cage. The boy behind him followed. Then a girl.
Then another boy. Whatever had been done to them here, it had
prepared them to follow orders. Magpye wondered if their minds were
even blanker than his had been, before the ghosts. Maybe there was
nothing there anymore, just a blank page. For the sake of those
that had gone before, he hoped so.

The girl deliberately led her
parade past Piotr, spitting in his face as she went. Magpye
unbolted and unlocked the rear doors of the warehouse, then pulled
them open. Cold air rushed in, a refreshing change to the sickly
stench of the warehouse. The girl stopped, looking up at the starry
sky.

"Where should we go?" she
asked.

"Not far," replied Magpye.
"There are people coming, good people. They'll take care of
you."

"What about you?"

"I take care of myself."

Magpye stalked back into the
warehouse, watching the last of the children go. He did not dare
count them. He had stopped counting the casualties a long time ago.
The number didn't mean anything anymore. Instead, he measured the
balance in victories like this one, and in the bloody acts of
revenge that the ghosts demanded.

Standing over Piotr, blocking
his reach to the unconscious guard's loose gun, it was Dorothy's
voice that Magpye heard next. "I recognise him," he said. "He was
at the circus."

"You watched them burn," Magpye growled. "You
watched
us
burn
."

"You're crazy," Piotr spat
back. "Just hurry up and fucking kill me if that's what you're
going to do."

Magpye reached into his coat
and pulled out a cellphone. Owen had given it to him, said it
wasn't traceable back to either of them. Magpye didn't care. One
day soon he was going to write his name across Cane King's face and
tell everyone what he'd done. Righteous fury knew no bounds and no
quarter, that's what the ghosts said. Magpye hit the speed
dial.

"It's us," he said flatly.
"It's done. You're going to need a bus. And fire engines."

Magpye snapped the phone shut
before Owen White could answer.

"Fire engines?" spluttered
Piotr, "You crazy fuck, you can't..."

But Magpye was already walking away, his
steel
-
capped boots sloshing through the pool of
gasoline. He heard Piotr floundering behind him, trying to pull
himself out of the warehouse. Magpye reached into his coat and
pulled out one of Malcolm's pistols.

"Trick shot time," he
whispered. "Yee-ha."

He fired over his shoulder, the
bullet ricocheting off the metal stairway and hitting the floor,
kicking up sparks and instantly igniting the gasoline. He heard
Piotr screaming, but it was immediately distant. A wave of heat hit
him.

Fire. Fire was memories.

Memories passed through the
mind of the Magpye like corpses down a flooded river. Against the
background torrent there were occasional shapes, sometimes faces,
twisted and turned and battered in the foaming flood of random
thoughts all mixed together. Somehow, he controlled it all, made
form from the chaos. One ghost at a time, one memory at a time, he,
they, had built the creature they called Magpye. It was neither a
him, nor an it. It was a they, and each fought for its place.

The most singular voice was
Able. He had been there first, after all, and it was his body. But
he was as much a ghost as any of them, convinced that he had died
and been reborn as this thing. Before the fire, before the circus
was put to flame and all his friends and family had been killed,
Able had never heard or seen a ghost in his life. So this new Able,
this Able that could sense the dead and make them his through their
dead flesh and old blood, this had to be a new Able. A different
Able.

And so the memories of the old
Able were lost in the flood of ghosts that raged and foamed and
threatened to burst the banks of his very mind in their desperate
hunt for revenge on those that had wronged them. Submerged beneath
so many others, old Able hardly spoke at all.

But fire, fire always brought
him forward. Fire was how he had "died" and how the new Able had
been born. New Able, Magpye, and the ghosts. Too many people for
one head. Too many by far.

Able had been a quiet kid.
Devoted to his mother and to his strange non-nuclear circus family,
he'd quietly learnt the various skills and trades that were the
cornerstones of circus life. There were other kids around, but none
of them worked as hard as Able for his keep. He could rig, and was
fearless of heights, could walk into the cage of any animal without
a care, and could set up for any act in the entire show. For every
acrobat, every clown, there was a guy like Able behind the scenes
somewhere. They kept the circus running and, when they needed to,
they kept the circus safe. Able could spot a pickpocket faster than
anyone and he'd turfed out his fair share. He wasn't a tough guy,
but he didn't need to be. Everyone knew that the circus took care
of its own, especially this circus.

Unlike other circuses, this one
didn't travel. It hadn't moved in generations, so Able had been
told. Other circuses didn't, wouldn't, come to this city, and so
this one had stayed. But for the stories that he heard of the city
and everything he read in the newspapers or heard on the old TV
that his mother kept in her caravan, the city always seemed a
faraway place. Its poison never really reached the circus and so
they existed in a sort of malignant symbiosis. The circus and city,
each the estranged twin of the other, each the other's twisted
mirror image in some ways.

The city people came here to
escape, Able thought. Who wouldn't want to come to place where
fantasy was the norm, where magic and excitement and danger were
guaranteed, all for the reasonable price of a ticket? Who wouldn't
want to come here when the place that they came from was synonymous
with fear, and nightmares, and corruption?