Alexander Jablokov - The Fury At Colonus

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2024-11-25 0 0 40.06KB 14 页 5.9玖币

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THE FURY AT COLONUS

Alexander Jablokov

The only black ambulance in the city stopped in the littered area at the rear of Police HQ. The siren,

unsuccessfully repaired many times, sounded like a sobbing infant, one too tired or despairing to cry

properly. The dark-cloaked figure of the Fury rolled out of the back and fell to the pavement. Without

seeing if his unwelcome passenger had landed safely, the driver gunned the engine, and the ambulance

whimpered off.

"Nice to see you back, ma'am," the desk sergeant said from behind his bulletproof glass, scrolling a

schematic smile across the LEDs of the overhead announcement board. The Fury peeled a flattened

Coca Cola cup from her dark coat and dropped it on the floor. It was a hot day, the sunlight molten on

the worn squares of the floor, but the Fury kept her ankle-length coat buttoned up to her neck. Only the

ends of her thick fingernails stuck out of the over-long sleeves. Her hair was long and stiff with dried

blood.

She walked past the rows of desks and the whispers followed her.

"Back?"

"Long one, this time. Rough. Maybe next time she won't --"

"Shh! Bad luck. Did you hear what happened?"

"Popped Oedipus's head like a watermelon, when she finally caught up to him. Don't know why it took

so long, with those bad feet of his...."

"Popped his head?"

"Right between her hands."

"Oh, come on. A watermelon's impossible, much less a skull. Think you could do that?"

"Hey, I don't know. Maybe those empty eye sockets made it easier, gave a pressure release or

something. I saw the autopsy photos. Here, I got 'em in my desk."

"You are a swine. Can I see?"

The Fury opened the door to her office. She had already noted the absence of her name on the frosted

glass, and so was prepared for the empty room with its cracked plasterboard and Burger King bag

crumpled in a corner. Her heavy desk had left gouges in the floor. As she examined the abandoned

space, the one fluorescent remaining flickered and went out, leaving a dismal residual glow, like crushed

fire flies.

Her new office was five levels down into the substructure of the building, behind a stack of dented filing

cabinets with hand- lettered labels, the black ink faded almost to illegibility. There were two windows,

which implied a rise in status, but both revealed nothing but twisted layers of bedrock. They were the

sides of aquarium tanks, displaying trapped seas of stone.

They'd moved her collection and arranged it in order on her walls: dangling jump ropes, crow bars bent

by the frantic force of their homicidal use, pieces of stained cloth, even her favorite, a

more-than-man-sized execution device made of two perpendicular wood beams. The drawers of her

desk were still full of teeth and finger bones, and racks of organs in jars filled the shelves. The morgue

kept demanding them back, but she always refused to recognize the validity of their paperwork. She was

too attached to her souvenirs to let them go. Each was the memory of an avenged wound.

The precise arrangement of the office was all of a piece with the new Director's meticulousness, and

indicated that the Fury's effectiveness could, and would, be destroyed without ever violating departmental

regulations.

The Fury sniffed her desk. Clean as a looted tomb. A key flick, and Pending files appeared on the

computer screen. Nothing flagged for her. Departmental statistics showed that a higher percentage of

crimes were being solved. She wasn't interested in solving crimes. That wasn't her territory.

As a final indignity, her In tray held a stack of sheets explaining the Department's new retirement plan.

Glossy color photographs showed the green leaves of a place called Kindly Grove, with the legend

'Gracious and Exclusive!' Using her fingernails, she spread them deliberately out on the ancient surface of

her desk, tearing and shredding the paper. They would try to wall her in down here, she knew, until she

was completely entombed in stone, as she had been before her existence.

As she sat, the trundle of document-laden carts, the flirtatious laughs, the anxious footsteps, the tense

discussions, all the sounds of the office, continued, first abashed by her presence behind the door, then

unrestrained, as her existence was forgotten.

A drop of liquid fell on the piled sheets, its smack loud in the silence of her office. She turned her head in

time to see another blot of crimson appear on the investment options page. Then another, each drop

thick, rounded, and shiny. The metallic scent of fresh blood filled the room. A desperate splatter

obliterated most of the health benefits. The Fury put her fingernail in a drop, touched it to her tongue --

and was out of the office and down the hall.

"Oh, an oversight, of course," Athena said from behind her garishly painted desk. Her hair was swept up

above her head and held in place by rusting metal spikes pulled from some distant battlefield. Her wide

gray eyes regarded the Fury calmly.

"You should have been copied on it. An oversight, as I said." Athena snacked on an ox's thigh bone

wrapped in fat, but didn't offer the Fury any. There had been a time, the Fury remembered, when

sacrifices had been offered her as well. "It's nothing. All taken care of. No need to trouble yourself, its

just a family dispute, a problem stemming from the late war...."

The Fury ran her fingernails across the desk's elaborately painted surface. Ten parallel lines of blood

appeared, and began to soak in, ruining the colorful scenes painted there. With a casual air, as if she'd

just spilled a little tea, Athena shook out the linen napkin in her lap and wiped up the blood.

Athena was an Olympian, a member of the new administration. A lot of irrevocable changes were being

made. But the Fury was a key member of the Old Service. Athena could fiddle with the details of

jurisdiction all she wanted, but she could not stop the Fury from acting.

Athena swiveled her chair and stared out of the window. Her office was high up, and looked out over the

bronze towers of the city. Their edges were rosy now with what was either dawn or sunset. Abruptly

rising mountains held in the sky.

"Well, fine. If you want to go, I can't stop you. As you obviously know. But...well, I do have to mention.

There's no free money left in the travel budget. None at all. I don't know how it happened, something to

do with how we calculate the quarter --"

The Fury turned and left the office. She could walk.

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