Chezzie could not remember ever being this hungry.
Not even on the long journey from the convent to Dublin last year when he’d eaten grass and his own shoelaces. He sat on a park bench in St. Stephen’s Green off Harcourt Street. His stomach ached so bad it felt like it was eating him from the inside.
There was a dead dog in the fountain. It was white with maggots. Probably jumped in there to find something to drink but the water had stopped running when the first bomb dropped. Chezzie licked his lips, his eyes on the buzzing corpse.
He wanted to. He desperately wanted to. Hell, road kill had been what kept him alive for the last three months. But then he’d gotten sick. So sick he thought it was the end of him. And he hadn’t even cared.
The park wasn’t a safe place to be. There used to be tents here last year when he first arrived. And shacks. There was even some order in a weird, end-of-the-world kind of way with a grilled meat kiosk and a whore tent operating for whatever you had to trade.
But that was before the second bomb dropped. Since then things were a lot worse. The whore tent was gone. The shacks with families were gone. The grilled meat kiosk. All gone.
Sometimes, when Chezzie thought back to the convent—and he worked very hard not to do that because when he did he would often start to cry in self-pity and frustration—he’d remember the biscuits and jam the most. Twice in the last six months he’d started back down the road to the convent, the lure of the nuns’ cooking and the warmth of their underground jail cell drawing him there.
And twice the sound of that bastard Donovan’s warning rang in his head like a death knell—If you ever come back we’ll shoot you on sight.
It wasn’t fair. There was Mac who was the fecking leader of the rape camp! He of all of ‘em should’ve been strung up before poor Bill was or thrown out like Chezzie. But no. Mac—the wanker who started it all—he was eating hot meals and sleeping every night in a soft bed.
Chezzie squinted skyward. There weren’t even pigeons in the park any more. He wondered how people had caught them in the past. The thought of roasted bird made his mouth water and his stomach cramped painfully. He ran a shaky hand across his face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two men skulking along Harcourt. They didn’t seem to have noticed him which was strange since he was sitting out in the open.
He knew it wasn’t safe here but the corner of the alley he’d called his own for the past month had been taken over by three women with knives. He wasn’t sure where to go from here. The two men were crouched over and moving quickly and Chezzie watched them with interest. One of them carried something under his arm—something that moved.
Chezzie leaned forward. A dog? A chicken? Where had they gotten such a thing? He stood up without realizing he was doing it. He’d sold his body twice for food and found a sore arse a small price to pay for a full stomach. He watched the men as they stopped and looked over their shoulders. Were they being followed? Chezzie saw no one.
He began to move in their direction. The worst they could do was tell him to bugger off. Well, as he picked up his pace he realized that wasn’t at all the worse they could do. But his hunger drove him forward.
They’d left the park perimeter now but Chezzie saw which alley they’d disappeared down. A muffled squawk coming from up ahead told him they did indeed have a chicken. From the sounds of it, maybe even two.
Where the feck did the bastards get chickens?
He found himself running now. His legs felt wobbly. But the chickens grew louder the closer he got. His panting was deafening in his own ears. He didn’t know what he would do when he caught up with the men, whether he would beg them or attempt to grab one of the chickens. He just knew he had to try.
He saw them at the end of the alley. The two men stood with their heads together as they began ripping the feathers from the live birds. The animals shrieked. One of the men bit the head off his bird and Chezzie watched the blood spurt from his mouth like a macabre fountain. His friend laughed. Chezzie must have made a sound because the laugh was stolen from the man’s lips as he turned and looked at Chezzie. His face hardened. He tucked his bird under his arm and pulled out a knife, facing Chezzie.
“I just want…” Chezzie said, his voice a raspy whisper that didn’t even carry to the men.
“Get away, ye gowl!” the man snarled, jabbing the air with his knife.
But Chezzie could not stop coming. “I just need…” he whimpered.
A gunshot fired. The man with the knife looked at Chezzie in surprise and then down at his chest where a blossom of blood exploded. He crumpled to his knees, the chicken racing away with a terrified squawk.
Did I do that? Chezzie wondered in confusion, as he watched the chicken run toward him. He leaned down and snatched the animal up, shocked by the feel of its body—like a loose birdcage covered in feathers. He crushed the bird to his chest and swiveled to face the alley opening.
Standing there were three soldiers. All three had their guns aimed at him.
The Garda.
One of the soldiers raised his rifle to his face and fired past Chezzie’s ear. Chezzie dropped the chicken. Behind him, the sound of the other man’s screams echoed off the sides of the alley’s stone walls.
Chezzie turned back to the soldiers and saved his own life by fainting.
The oblivion didn’t last long. A hard kick to the ribs brought Chezzie back to reality. He fought to breathe against the pain, against his lungs closing down. He was so weak. His ribs hurt so bad. Chezzie’s face pressed against the slimy cold cobblestones of the alley.
“Just shoot ‘im,” a voice said. “We got one of the chickens.”
“Commander Hurley wants the citizenry brought in for the lions,” another voice said. “Not shot in an empty back alley.”
The soldier’s words didn’t make sense to Chezzie but he knew that name. Somewhere in the back of his hunger-crazed mind, he knew that name.
“On yer feet, ye gipe!”
Rough hands yanked him to his feet and he fought to stay standing.
“Cor, he smells something rotten.”
“The lions won’t care.”
The soldiers looked at him with open disgust. One of them pointed his gun at him.
“Don’t make me touch ye again,” the soldier said. “I ain’t had me shots. Move!”
“I…I know your commander,” Chezzie stuttered, not entirely sure why he said that.
“What’s that? What’s he saying?”
“Hurley,” Chezzie said. And hadn’t he just been thinking of poor old Bill? Was God giving him a message? With the chicken and now Bill?
“He says he knows Commander Hurley,” one of the soldiers said.
“Great. They can talk it over as he fights off Leo and Simba. Let’s move.” The soldier jabbed Chezzie in the ribs with his gun and gestured toward the mouth of the alley.
He fell twice as they walked through the deserted streets of Dublin. Chezzie had come this way not an hour earlier and had spent much of the walk attempting to avoid the thugs and murderers who lined the path.
Now it was totally devoid of people. Not a soul, not a sound.
The soldiers strode confidently through the street with Chezzie alternately lumbering and staggering between them. It took all his concentration not to fall.
Whatever would happen now was out of his hands and there was a relief in that. He didn’t bother looking where they were going. It didn’t matter. These men were in charge. These men would tell him what to do. And if his struggle was finally over, they would tell him that too.
They walked down Fishamble Street to the front of the Dublin opera house. A line of six soldiers stood out front but they didn’t even look at him as he was led into the main lobby. The odor of blood and shit and fear hit Chezzie like a hammer as he entered. Two of the soldiers flanked him, their hands like iron vices on his arms as they dragged him to an anteroom off the cavernous lobby. He watched their eyes as they silently communicated with one another. Bizarrely, he thought he saw nervousness.
The muffled roar of a lion rattled the framed photographs on the walls of the anteroom. The fear clawed up Chezzie’s spine like a living thing, grasping for his throat. He made a strangled sound and both soldiers turned to him.
So it was true. The fecking rumors were true.
Chezzie struggled against his captors, his eyes wide with terror.
“No!” he screamed. “You can’t! Please, no!”
The soldiers weren’t looking at him now. They were watching the door to the anteroom, their faces tense and strained.
On the rare times he’d shared a night around a burning trashcan with Dublin’s night people, Chezzie had heard the stories. Scare stories that the Garda had created their own lion pit for entertainment and were throwing Dubliners into it. Stories, like all the others, designed to strike terror into the heart by night but by light of day couldn’t be believed.
“I know him, I tell you,” Chezzie whimpered. “Let me talk to him.”
It had to be him. It couldn’t not be him. How many times had Bill complained about his brother in the Garda? Complained about that sadistic son of a bitch living in Dublin with electricity and hot meals and nothing changed for him? A throb of doubt wheedled its way into Chezzie’s fervor of fear and desperation.
The Hurley that Bill talked about was no officer. No commander of anything.
Chezzie drove the splinter of doubt away. It was all he had. If he was wrong he was worse than dead. Allowing these men to kill him was one thing. Being eaten piece by screaming, flailing piece by a lion every bit as hungry as Chezzie was—was beyond the worst of any of Chezzie’s nightmares.
“Please,” he begged. “I didn’t even steal the chicken.”
“Shirrup,” one of the soldiers said.
The door handle began to twist and Chezzie felt a scream welling up inside him. The door opened and a large bald headed man with shoulders the width of two men and cold, dead eyes strode into the room. He was wearing a uniform, his boots polished so they looked like black mirrors. His face twisted into a grimace of revulsion.
“Please, sir…” Chezzie said, his eyes tearing up. This was his chance. His only chance.
“He says he knows you, Commander,” a soldier behind Hurley said.
Hurley’s face remained contorted into an expression of having to endure a bad smell.
“Not…no,” Chezzie said. “Your brother. I knew your brother, Bill.”
An image of fingers laying down a hand of cards on a green-felted tablecloth flashed across Chezzie’s mind. Betting everything—his life and a death too terrible to imagine—on one gambit. No room for maneuvering. No second chances.
“You know Bill?”
Chezzie forced himself not to weep. In three words he took a step back from the precipice. Just a bit. Just enough.
“We worked together at…Mrs. Branigan’s camp for…” Chezzie struggled for the name of the rape camp, not sure he’d ever really known.
“I know where he worked,” Hurley said, his eyes narrowing, his lip finally uncurling at Chezzie’s stench. “Where is my brother now?”
“Murdered,” Chezzie said excitedly, “at a secret nunnery down south. I can take you there.”