READ: Marked Men 2
A stowaway on a train, running from something horrible, falls into the hands of evil men. Soon, innocent lives will be lost as human monsters will face something ancient, powerful... and hungry.
Welcome back for Part 2 of 'Marked Men'! | Read Part 1
He relived the nightmare with every slumber.
They let go of Daniel and he fell. Blood dripped from his mouth as he rolled over, holding up his hands, pleading for them to stop hitting him.
Nelson Grainer laughed.
The boot of Nelson's man, Stephens, lifted Daniel, hurling him against a crate of rotting lettuce. Nelson fanned the cards had pulled from Daniel's sleeve. “I can't stand a cheat, Mr. Downey. Especially a poor one.” He threw the cards in Daniel's face.
Nelson knelt before Daniel, pulling the white glove of his left hand free. “I'm going to tell you something very important,” he giggled. The giggle stretched, and Nelson pressed his left hand to his forehead to collect himself.
Red, glowing marks swirled on the back of Nelson's hand.
~
Daniel jerked himself awake. He immediately regretted it: his ears rang, end everywhere something ached.
By dim lantern light he could see dozens of Chinese men sitting or lying injured along the walls of a round cavern, damp and chill; Somewhere close gunshots roared, the screams coming after them muffled by echo.
The boy!
There—there was a boy,” he croaked to them.
An old man turned to face him. “No question asking!” The words were thickly accented, but the meaning clear. He stamped closer and Daniel could make out wizened features and clear eyes. It was the man who had spied the charge of dynamite before the explosion. “Lots dead, maybe because of you! And more still dying, didn't you hear!”
One of the injured limped closer, blood twisted in the long black hair of his mustache and the matted ponytail draped over one shoulder. He slid a knife from a fold of pajama top and slashed it toward Daniel. His words were lost on Daniel, but not the grief they held.
The old man silenced the knife wielder with a raised hand. An angry murmur spread through the crowd, but when the eldest turned to them quiet descended again.
Daniel tried to stand and just barely managed. He remembered the rain of stone smashing down on the Chinese workers. A rain he'd loosed by killing Jessup. He gasped as he remembered the sounds the rocks made as they collided with flesh.
Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and sipped despair. He tried to let just a little out, like he'd once rationed whiskey. Just like whiskey, he found himself wallowing in the despair more and more. He thought of his parents, good Irish farmers who saved a lifetime to send him to school in Boston. Only Daniel had squandered their money, he'd been expelled that first year and evicted from his rooms.
That was when he took up cheating, and put himself on the road to the Mark.
The old man held his hand up to keep the mob at bay. Daniel saw blood staining them. He looked down and saw matching red stains on his vest. “You carried me out? You saved my life.”
The old man shook his head. “Yes, old fool Shen saved you from the rocks. Better maybe I let you die!” Shen pitched his voice low. “I know what you run from. I saw the Mark. You carry great debt of sin. You are damned.”
Daniel stuck his hands into the pockets of his trousers to hide the Mark. What did Shen know? The mob was bent on his death, Daniel could feel it. It was not the time to ask. “Please, I did not bring the mountain down on us.”
Shen stalked closer. “We saw you fight with foreman Jessup, and the explosion. So many missing, we dare wait for them no longer. Lots of us think you done it. Lots want you to die.” He walked closer and whispered. “maybe better for you, die here, before it takes you!”
“I'll take my chances,” Daniel said, swallowing his need to ask more. He had to save his life first. “Bock wanted you all buried, Shen!”
The enraged man came closer, poking the air with his knife. Shen spoke sharply to ward the man off a second time. “Young's brother died today. Maybe Jun, the boy, dead, too. You shot Jessup, started all this. So say to my why I don't let You have a revenge!”
Shen returned to the survivors. He shook his head at a whisper, but the questioner spoke louder, more forcefully. Shen raised his eyes to meet Daniel's across the cavern, then finally nodded. At once the man with the bloody mustache started across the floor.
Shen grabbed the man's knife arm, spoke softly. The man began sobbing, barely checking his advance. The old man crossed back to Daniel's side. He tapped his ears. “I planted lots of dynamite for railroad. Hear little, unless it is quiet. Easy to pretend no English, and sometimes lets me hear secrets.” Shen leaned in, placed a hand on Daniel's shoulder. “I wish I can say you didn't make the explosion like I can say you protected the boy.”
Daniel swallowed.
“Very sorry, Daniel.” Shen's eyes fell away. “Very sorry,” he said again, and turned and walked away.
The mark seethed, sensing the danger. Daniel felt its fear, took courage from it.
If this is the last hand...
“Shen,” Daniel called out, and the man stopped in place. “The Mark. Tell him to bleed me clean. Don't let him touch me.”
The old man's head bowed ever so slightly. He uttered a sharp command, slid his hand across his throat. Young nodded, his eyes not straying from Daniel's. He raised the knife blade high over a shoulder in a backhand grip, ready to carry out the sentence his grief demanded.
Daniel listened for the inner voice that always looked for the out, counted the cards. He was surprised to find his greatest sorrow was not for himself, but for Jun, and Shen, and the others whose mountain grave he would share. Jessup had been right about one thing. Helluva time to become a good Samaritan.
As the knife came slicing down he felt fury rise in the Mark. It realized he planned to rob it of a new host, to take a small victory in burying the debt of evil in the bowels of this mountain along with his flesh.
Daniel took cold comfort: the evil would die with him. He jutted his chin out to make for a clean cut.
The knife whistled close. A shot rang out. The tip of the blade barely pricked Daniel's throat as he watched a drop of red appear on Young's chest. He staggered backward and turned to face Travis and Hawkins, the flat of their palms cocking their pistols to fire.
Young screamed between Daniel and the guns. He jerked with each impact but kept on going, raising his blade and burying it in Hawkins' neck. The dying man emptied his pistol into Young.
“Damn y'all!” Travis cursed in his Southern drawl. “You especially, Downey! Bock won't dig us out till we kill all your Chinese friends.” Daniel heard the metallic scraping of bullets being jammed into a six-shooter.
Someone doused the lantern. People scattered, terrified, in the dark.
“Boulder nicked my right hand, too,” Travis said, indignant. The chamber snicked closed, then Daniel heard him cock the hammer. “Gonna cost that rich bastard more fo' healin'-up time.” Travis fired into the dark again.
Daniel heard a man fall and cry out. Daniel searched for him in the dark and hauled him to his feet. He followed the sounds of the fleeing Chinese, reaching a wall and skinning his hand along it until he felt a cool breeze and his hand sank through empty space. Another gunshot lit the room and he saw Shen scoop the bleeding man out of his arms and pull him through the opening.
“You sure pissed off Bock, Danny boy! Don't worry 'bout him, though, I'm gonna sort you out myself.” Daniel scrambled through the hole just before Travis' next shots chipped the far side. A lantern glowed ahead of him, and he saw Shen beckoning him to follow.
“Gonna hunt you down if I have to go through every slant-eye first. I got the bullets, boy!”
Daniel stopped. The lantern, hid by the backs of the fleeing, faded.
Travis was a killer. Daniel heard the scuffle of boots at Travis stalked carefully closer, searching for the opening. Travis would follow the light ahead and spend every bullet he had in the pursuit.
Daniel thought back to the first moonless night after he'd been Marked. The Thomason gang had laughed at him when he'd come to them for sanctuary, and Daniel had hidden with the rats beneath the saloon they called home. They were the toughest and cruelest of Boston's gangs, but when the collector had arrived, they cried for their mothers and fell before it. Daniel had listened to it all, biting on his fist and voiding himself...and walked numbly away when daylight came.
The next moonless night, Daniel had hidden behind the jail cell of a man waiting to be hanged. Earlier that night the saloon had been full of the man's victims. The sobbing accounts of his cruelty and slaughter reminded him of the Thomason's and gave him an idea. Daniel waited beneath the window of that prison cell, ice in his bowels but with nowhere left to run and no more cards up his sleeve. Then it had come, and he'd listened to the murderer whimper and hammer at the bars in vain as the collector descended upon him, silencing him forever.
He saw the shadow of the thing, thrown by fluttering candlelight on the ground before him, and it was more than he ever wanted to know of it. Then the light had been snuffed out, and once again Daniel waited in terror for the light of day. At dawn he fled, grief-stricken by what he'd done.
“It takes only sinners,” he kept telling himself, but the words rang hollow. He had spent every sleepless night since watching the moon fatten and wane, wondering if he could sacrifice another.
Daniel might have been spared this moonless night, too, with the likes of Travis close by. But the Mark was quiet yet; the collector was not close enough for Daniel to ambush the gunman without risking a bullet, and he would not buy time with the lives of innocents. That was something, at least. Something still good in him.
“No more good folk die before I do,” Daniel whispered. He turned around, built up speed, and barreled past the opening just ahead of a bullet's roar.
“Would'a thought you a crack shot,” he taunted over his shoulder. Get him angry, that was Daniel's hope. Drive him away from Shen and the others. “Getting old, Travis?”
Travis screamed. More bullets caromed through the passage as Daniel ran for his life. Maybe I can live through this, Daniel thought. Maybe Shen knew a way out. And maybe I can pull an inside straight right out of my—His foot sank in a deep groove filled with water and he tumbled hard to the ground.
His lungs heaved, and his legs felt weighted with lead. He struggled to his knees and listened hard.
He knew Travis would be close, now. He had to keep running, but the water in the pool was cool. It took him back to that night three months past; the thing he could not banish from his dreams and spent every waking hour running to escape.
~
Nelson leaned over Daniel in that alley, close enough for the glowing Mark, hungry and alive, to light both their faces.
“Do you like my Mark?” Nelson reached into Daniel's sodden lap and lifted his left hand, clasping it with his own. Writing scrawled along the flesh of the Nelson's palm and stretched tentatively toward Daniel's. Letter by arcane letter leaped across. Each new touch was agony, like barbed wire tearing, like flame licking and burning.
“It likes you!” Nelson hissed breathlessly.
Daniel's eyes jerked, uncomprehending, from the words crawling onto his flesh and back to Nelson's tortured eyes.
“I am dying, and I begin to understand that something comes after this life. I have done terrible things, but you will pay for them.”
Something cold, something malevolent entered him, and Daniel gasped as the last of the red glow fell from Nelson's hand.
“Yes, take it all!” Nelson wept, and Stephen stepped close to help him to his feet.
Darkness seethed through him, spirits of hatred and cruelty and all mortal sins. “Why?” Daniel begged.
Nelson stood taller now freed of his burden. “You earned it, my boy! You are a liar and a cheat, I could not have passed it on otherwise.”
A carriage turned the corner and hooves clattered to a hasty stop. Nelson climbed in. “I doubt there is enough magic left in the world to unmake that Mark, that makes it yours for life,” Nelson called.
The horse started moving.
“You will feel the collector when it comes!” As the carriage turned the corner, Nelson cried out the window. “It will seek the Mark on the darkest night each month. Hide among sinners when it comes, it may win you time.” Nelson's voice became tearful once he was out of sight. “Thank you, my boy! Thank you!”
Daniel lay gasping in his nest of fetid trash, scratching in terror at his hand.
~
“Daniel!”
He wrenched away from the memory, hearing his name. It was Jun's voice, crying out in pain.
“I got your little Chink friend, Danny, want to watch me gut him? No more running, now! Get on back, and you can die instead.”
Daniel had already turned back when the Mark flashed brilliantly. Words began to form, layered circles withing circles, and the glow flared bright enough to light the way.
It was time.
When I introduced this story in my last post I gave a bit of an explainer of why I'm re-releasing some old fantasy stories (with a light audio re-polish, but it's still not my best recordings :). Suffice it to say, I'm editing my new release and it's a fantasy novel. Sort of.
This creative departure makes a great opportunity to resurface some fantasy stories from the last 15 years of my podcast, while I ready my new, big beast for release in the wild.
In preparation for launching that new and huge something, I'm revamping my Patreon and this (ghost-powered) in-house alternative to provide a better experience to mysupporters. At the same time, I have renovated my podcast. It's been running since 2009, so it needed some love! I'm also launching an ebook-as-newsletter feed, a model I'm excited to play with! Okay, that's the background. Let's get to the story!