***
The cloaked and hooded figure appeared unexpectedly in their midst, striding boldly from the shadows stretching between the railcars and into the circle of light cast by their small campfire near the tracks. The men goggled, unsure of what they were seeing. The strange and terrifying apparition spoke, its voice deep and menacing:
“The Red Judge passes sentence on you – flee, while you still can.”
Some of the men backed away, searching for an escape from the newcomer, others held their ground, producing a mélange of weaponry. Ball bats materialized from beneath tattered coats, crowbars were lifted up from crates stacked nearby, chains rattled as they were wound around filthy, grimy hands. The eyes of the men who hefted the weapons glinted malevolently.
The blood red figure paused, its head turning slightly one way, then the other. Suddenly, its hands reached beneath the long, flowing robes it wore and reappeared brandishing two dusky Colt semi-automatics.
“You’ve been warned,” The Red Judge growled, the voice muffled by his all-encompassing mask.
“Turn away, or die.”
The rail yard had paid off in spades. The ex-D.A. cooled his heels until nightfall and, entering the grounds of the yard in full regalia, felt certain that it would not only be useful, but necessary to reveal himself thusly. If he guessed correctly, it would mark the first time The Red Judge encouraged violence with an adversary beyond the few sorties he had made previously against smalltime crooks and racketeers in the city.
At first the train yard seemed a dead end, but as he progressed deeper and deeper into its depths and entered the oldest section of the grounds, Danner found something that momentarily startled him: a plethora of squatters.
Oh, every such yard offered some level of sanctuary to bums and hoboes and the like, way stations for those eaten up and spit out by society, but the number of them climbed steadily higher as he made his way across track after track and past one decrepit, forgotten boxcar after another.
As he moved, he remembered well the events of November and the part that such men played in them. At their culmination, a small platoon of street derelicts and tramps descended on a theatre, an aging dowager of Broadstreet but still a vibrant one, and there slaughtered dozens of patrons, an entire cast of actors, and a score of the city’s finest police officers.
The source of the dirty, tattered army had never been uncovered; Lane Danner believed that within the city’s old train yard, he’d found it.
And what more, they appeared to be organized.
As The Red Judge, Danner homed in on what he divined as a focal point for the waves of tramps, a centralized meeting place. It was a boxcar, ancient looking and immense. It reeked, not only of physical rot, but of intangible evil. Studying it from a safe distance and watching for roving sentinels, he once again trusted that his instincts had led him to where he most needed to be.
His brain flashed through various plans of infiltration. Tossing them out just as soon as they occurred to him, he decided to implement the one strategy that had always worked well for him in the courtroom: the direct approach.
Danner strode confidently toward the men, his dark red vestments almost black in the overcast night, but fiery crimson where the light of the crackling fire caught them. He imagined he might look like a demon out of hell – or at least he hoped he did. But, it struck him that they very probably worked for such an entity. Or were enslaved to such.
No one approached him, the tramps and hoboes apparently mesmerized by his bold confrontation to their ranks. He clutched his Colts in tight fists, both pointing downward, but his muscles tensed to react to any movement from those arrayed about him.
Off to his left, a crowbar glinted in the fire’s ambiance as it turned end over end through the air toward his head.
The ex-D.A. ducked, the bar whistling past his headpiece. Without hesitation, he fired at its wielder. The bullet tore threw the man’s shoulder and he howled in agony.
The rest came at him all in a rush.
The Red Judge whirled around in place, pumping slugs into his attackers. Several leapt back, caught by bullets, blood fountaining from wounds. Shrieks rent the air.
One tramp ripped through the others to Danner, his meaty, greasy hand swinging a length of chain. Danner took the brunt of it on the side of his helmet, but the padding there held and he staggered backward only a step or two. Recovering quickly, he shoved the barrel of one pistol up under his assailant’s sternum and pulled the trigger.
The tramps scattered, their feet kicking up dirt and debris from their retreat.
Pushing the body away from him and seeing no other takers, the ex-D.A. swung his attention to the old boxcar. It drew him in like a magnet, hunkered there on the abandoned track like an ancient elephant. Somehow, he could not look away from it.
Assuming the gunshots and the cries of the wounded and dying would draw others to the spot, Danner put his back to the railcar and reloaded his Colts. They were hot to the touch; both weapons were new, but now baptized in violence.
He reached out to grasp the big handle of the car’s door, steeling himself to what he might find inside.
The Red Judge pulled the door open along its track and without hesitation sprang inside, his Colts immediately up and before him, his eyes questing in the semi-darkness of the boxcar for targets. To the right, emptiness, save for some few dirty scraps of blanket or clothing. To his left, absolute horror.
The inside of the car stretched away into the distance, impossibly long, most likely somehow melded with the next boxcar to create an even larger space. All Danner saw, though, with gut wrenching loathing, was a scene straight out of Hell.
A squirming mass of bodies occupied the car, a seemingly improbable number despite the extended space. The smell of them was pungent, even through his mask.
They writhed and undulated as a solid mass, a knot of disabused humanity choking the space, filling it not as individuals, but as a hive of insects might.
He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. He stood transfixed by the mass, the movement of the torsos, arms, legs, and heads mystifying, hypnotic. That it was comprised of human beings did not fully register on his eyes and brain as he stared. A flickering light from somewhere overhead of it all didn’t help, but only added to the surreality of the tableau.
The Colts dipped an inch or so, his hands involuntarily loosening their grip. His booted feet seemed glued to the dirty boards that made up the floor of the railcar. He wanted to yell, to scream, but his voice was gone, utterly absent.
Hands took hold of him from behind, roughly. An arm snaked around his neck, drawing in tightly to press at his throat, crushing it. Other hands reached out and slid down his arms, seeking the Colts. It was shocking enough to crack the spell that hung over him, but only a little.
Danner fought. His muscles tensed and flexed. He tried to drive his elbows backwards, desperate to find hard contact with soft abdomens, but his arms were held fast as if in a steel vise. He heard heavy breathing in his ears and, incredibly, it gave him hope; whoever had grabbed him was working hard to restrict his movements.
Panic arced through him, though, his entire body screaming at him to do something. The hands began to pull at his arms with what seemed to be supernatural strength. Inch by inch his Colts, not of his own volition, neared his head and with a sharp spike of fear he realized what his attackers meant to do.
The muzzles of the twin pistols pointed inward now, toward his temples, the filthy fingers of his unseen foes worming a path to his own fingers, more specifically his trigger fingers. He could feel his eyes widen to almost bursting and the sweat poured down his face underneath the mask in rivulets, but still he could not scream. Within seconds he knew he would be dead if he did not do something.
He let himself go. Completely dead weight, Danner took his assailants by surprise and together they crashed to the floor.
Scrambling to knock loose the grips on his arms and wrists, he swung the Co
lts around, saw grimy, angry faces, and fired.
Dark matter and bone splattered his mask and hood. The holds on him went slack. He leapt to his feet, slipping in gore leaking from his former captors.
The writhing knot of people broke apart and rushed at him all at once.
Before he knew it, he was violently and unceremoniously seized. Danner fought back, trying to call on the stamina and fortitude he’d just tapped to save him from two bullets to the head, but it was useless. The mass of bodies completely overpowered him and began to drag him forward, toward the head of the altered train car.
More faces loomed out of the darkness as he passed, abominations in the feeble light. Beyond them, lining the walls, he glimpsed great wooden barrels, one after another, dozens of them.
Arriving at the front of the space, the sea of tramps and hoboes parted. In their wake he was presented with a new figure, different from the others.
Danner saw a bigger man, perhaps as tall as himself, wearing shoddy, well-worn clothing like his fellows, but in somewhat better repair. Over his head, the man wore a hood that looked to be a sturdy burlap sack with two holes punched in it for the eyes and cinched around the throat by a piece of fraying rope. From underneath, the man’s eyes burned brightly, a look of mania dancing around them, rimming them with almost religious zeal.
Staring at the figure, the ex-D.A. wondered who he was. During the events of November, a mastermind drove the terror that gripped the city, someone who’d sent shocking missives to the Mayor’s office, an unnamed criminal brain who promised to build a religion of death in the city and claimed the people of the streets as his army.
One newspaper report described an eyewitness’ glimpse of the mastermind during the assault on the Old Burlesque Theatre as a “walking dead man.”
Could this be him? Danner asked himself. We never knew, never discovered who he was…didn’t even have a name to pin to him. Utterly confounded, he looked the man up and down. Only those enigmatic words scrawled in blood on the theatre’s basement wall…
As if in answer, the hooded man pulled back, stepping to the side and revealing objects that rested behind him on a large crate against the wall of the boxcar.
It was an altar; there was no other word for it that came to Danner’s mind. Black candles flickered in grimy holders, set around the carcasses of three dead cats, arranged as if chasing one another yet lying on their sides on a filmy altar cloth.
Cold, numbing dread washed over him in a sudden wave when he realized that the cloth below the candles and the cats was a woman’s slip.
Some part of his brain, some deep recess of knowledge that comprised his law career, informed him that the cats were significant to the slip, that the animals represented the feminine, and that men, in dark moments, liked to torture cats.
Putting everything he still had behind it, Danner struggled with his captors. With fury and frenzy as his fuel, he fought to free himself. Pushing back against the men who held him, he tried to topple them with his own weight, but they seemed wise to his trick. Hands grasped at his hood, tipping his head upward to make room for a knife to his throat.
It was then he saw the two words scrawled in blood some few feet above the makeshift altar, on the grimy boards that made of the walls of the railcar:
corpus vile
Got to get out! he screamed at himself inwardly. Out! Out!
He drove a foot into one of that of his captors. The man screamed, released him. The burlap-masked figure reeled back, pointing at Danner with a long, straight finger. He could see the man’s mouth twisting in anger below the hood, but no words issued forth.
Chaos! Shouting and screeching rent the air. Hands grasped at him again. He kicked out, upsetting the altar, sending the large wooden board on top of the crate that made up its bulk flying upward. He caught it, swinging around to use it as a shield of sorts and running at the tramps to crash into them.
Spotting one of his Colts lying on the floor several feet from where he was held, he snatched it up, and shot the nearest man to him.
Reaching the door to the boxcar, The Red Judge turned to look back at the throng of squalor panting, his lungs burning from lack of air. He fired again and again. Down went two more men who’d approached him, their eyes rolling up into their sockets as life was ripped from them by the bullets.
Amazingly, even through the din, a gurgling noise reached his ears. Danner saw one of his slugs had punched a hole in one of the barrels. A dark, viscous liquid poured out in a stream. Someone bellowed, “The candles!” and he knew in an instant what was to be his fate.
He unloaded the last of his bullets into the barrels. At the same moment of his pulling the trigger for the third or fourth time, a great rushing of light and air and sound threw him from the car and into oblivion.