Nail The Coffin Lid -

by eisceire

Anyone looking at her throat know Sawyer has a dark past and many secrets that she can never speak. But how many secrets and how dark? With all that the cleaner is, what does it cost her to earn the trust of Balalaika? Rated T for gore, violence, sexual malpractice and the sheer, bloody darkness of Black Lagoon.

«» — NAIL THE COFFIN LID — «»

«» long stretch of a take on how Sawyer came to be who and what she is & high level of squick «»

«» graphic & explicit detail of a cleaner at work: read with gallon of brain bleach handy «»

«» don't fret on scoping full details - just follow the gist «»

«» more info in footnote «»

o0O¥O0o

Drugs! Sawyer never did drugs: oh at twelve in this nightmare town they were a luring dream; but never at the cost of two twin bullets through her kneecaps. Drugs! They did her: in the shape of her da's twenty something apprentice, way too high on something, who had her pressed against the butcher's block and as naked as any of the pigs hanging in the window. Gardai Hanratty was pacing outside and to be sure heard the ruckus but he'd sooner be buggered by the devil in hell than give a fiddlers fuck about whatever happened to the shiteheart atheist butcher who'd dared to raise a shop in papist Letterkenny.

Sawyer was going to have to change that and change it now if she didn't want to be as stuffed as any of the poultry on display. With the all the desperate energy of a hare in a trap she caught the strop hung down off the bench and flicked it high and hard to go crashing through the window and smashing into the Gardai's attention. From the look on his face you'd say he'd just been fucked by the Black Bull itself. No red blooded taig was ever about to miss so grand a chance a chance to flay an Orange raw; even if the atheist spawn was the excuse.

Gardai Hanratty was into the shop as quick as a salmon leap and had snatched up the meat pounder off the counter and had it down on the young rapareen's head before ever the lad had a chance to turn, That there was where things took a terrible turn for the worst. It wasn't any gardai truncheon that Hanratty swung but the heavy, loaded weight of a butcher's cosh. It buckled the Cromwellite head as easily as an empty Guinness can underheel.

That then was when one more dead animal lay stretched in the butcher shop. Atheist whelp and Romish progeny locked eyes; the one looked up from outside of faith and the other looked down from inside of faith and both knew that if this was ever known then they would very soon find out the solution to the afterlife for their own selves. It was the gardai who spoke first, as Sawyer pulled together the wreck of her clothes and added her shop coat on top, he made a vague and forlorn gesture around at the tackle of the shop.

« I don't suppose ye … ? »

Sawyer was trying her hardest not to run, to vomit, to breakdown; it had been a hard road to this place and this life and she had seen plenty more by her age than any adult of England ever would, but this was more than any colleen ought to have to face. Sawyer had grown along the border and knew the law that ruled beyond The State: if she was not able to make this body vanish (however fitting the death) it would be the funeral of Gardai Hanratty … and of her for being a part of it at all.

She could not even trust herself to speak but just nodded at Hanratty and thrust her da's butcher coat at him; he being a big man it draped well over Hanratty and covered all his uniform. Between them they shut the shop, drew the shutters and had the corpse heaved onto the butcher block.

Sawyer was able enough to show Hanratty the workings of the mincer but it was for her to the make the meat small enough to parcel in … for her to treat a man she had been speaking to not an hour before as if he was no more than a swine carcass. There was only one thing at all for her to do, with a deep and shuddering breath, she stared as hard as she might at the thing on the slab till she saw the grain of the meat, the parting of the joints, the cuts that could be made out of it … till she had made of it a Thing in her own mind.

Blood that was the problem. You could either bleed an animal dry, a pig or bull, if you slitted the throat and let the beast pump out its own scarlet life or have it hang over a basin till all the life juice was drained and you had the makings of blood puddings; the black and the white. Here so she wasn't able to do either: there would be no spurted blood as the heart of the Prod was as cold and dead as any stone (and likely had been his whole life long). There was no hope of a swift pump out nor any time to drain the meat white. Faced with this pure chasm in her life Sawyer had become nothing more than one of the machines in the shop: a mechanism to analyse and dissect whatever came in front of it.

Sawyer grabbed up a black plastic sack, plunged the hands of the corpse inside, then hacked them off in one decisive slash. There was not even a spurtle of blood before she had the two open wrists sealed tight within the sack. Then it was Hanratty's moment to apply chest compressions; in no way at all was there a hope of reviving the meat but it sent the blood through the veins and out at the lesions where all that crimson ichor pumped into the sack.

For all of the muscle Hanratty had to put into this parody of a first-response it was clean and it was familiar so it was not any of trouble to him. It was Sawyer who donned the rubber elbow-gloves and fished out the hands from where they swam like fish in a crimson ocean; from there she flipped them neatly down into the mincer. The sack dragged heavy against Sawyer's grasp as the weight of a human life roiled within; but for her it was nothing now but a large basin full of juice for ingredients.

With that it was nothing more than the ordinary of shop routine for her: she opened up the flesh and scooped out the entrails that still steamed and slung them down to the pail of pet food slops. Then it was the trotters that came off in the regular routine; this time it was feet, toes, ears and nose but nothing of a difference to Sawyer, not with her mind locked off. She passed them over to Hanratty without a thought or a care; it was but a shop task for him to pass them through the mincer. it was only the strange groan of a choke that he made which made her look over and see the puce-man about to vomit all over the mincer. It gave her just enough of a warning to shoulder him aside with all of her schoolgirl might.

« Feck ye bollix. Puke over that yoke an we'll never get it it clean. Shite ye; go an' get the range stoked fierce. Go on so; I'm the cleaner here. »

Her da would have larruped Sawyer good for taking street talk into the shop and it just wasn't good survival to give lip to the gardai but she had been ratcheted pure out of her old life in this last hour and would not ever be the same girl again. Sawyer never had minded being alone in the shop with her cleaver and the carcasses and she could not mind it now; whatever about the kind of animal it was.

She had the clothes sloughed way and all of the hard that would not go in the backroom range put to one side; which was not anyhow different from when she made sure of no pellets, bullets, rings or whatever were in the hide of any other beast on the slab. The hair of the head was shaved away like the bristles of a pig then all than that could burn was set to blaze in the range; even to the bloodied black sack.

Her da was away to market so there would be no disturbance at all till the evening; which surely had been the thought too in the head of the apprentice; the cockleshell and jigsaw head of the apprentice. Whatever about that Sawyer needed it all clear and finished long before her da and his eagle-eye were home. She had the small joints of hands, feet, face and manfinger all sheared off but she needed more if she was to pack the mincer full and jog the work up a pace.

The hard-earnt and wiry muscles she had fledged in her years at the block came to her aid and the chit was well able to hack through the frail below knee and elbow; in a few sure and practiced bladings. The upper arms and thighs were less of a challenge to her than sawing through bullock bone. The weans of meat and bone went through the mincer as they were. Those fine bones would reduce down to nothing. The heavier limbs she had to flense: meat into the grinder, bones into the crusher to make bone-meal. Grand fertiliser for the gardens but an evil flowering here.

Head and torso were all that remained. The braincase had been made eggshell, yet Sawyer could not risk any blood spatter. She was as unfeeling as the ruin of the gombeen on the bench, she had to be, she had to fly on autopilot or crash into ruin. She pared the head of the prod exactly as an Orange deserved and steeled off all the gentler parts (flesh, tongue, ears, eyes) for the mincer. The gelatinous ruin that was the home of a soul less than an hour ago was gouged out and fed to the mincer too. For days to come folks were going to puzzle how their blood puddings came to taste like spice burgers.

The torso was the final part, the task that Sawyer had left to last. She knew it was the hardest and the worst and did not feel sure she would be able to go on after. She had to gut the beast, to empty out liver and lights, bowels and intestines. Even she had to wear a mask and breath through the nose for this rank chore. it all had to go to the mincer, whatever the range didn't flame out. There was no reprieve for her or the gardai if anything at all that was identifiably human remains remained. In the end of it all the only memorial left is the boney carapace of a skeleton.

A knife to sever cartilage, tendons and ligaments; to prise out the spinal disks. A mallet and butcher's cosh swung with all the experienced and desperate strength that ran through Sawyer's young frame. The very same cosh that the Gardai had swung so brutally as to destroy three was the finale on the existence of one Williamite. Between soft and tender young flesh minced down to a fry up, the scaffold of bones ground down to powder to fly on the wind and all the waste parts of a human anatomy gone on the hungry peat of the range … the sashman may as well never have been.

Gardai Hanratty had plenty experience to wipe the scene of evidence, once Sawyer had done her clean. Then the two of them cooked a tale: neat, simple and clean. The butcherboy had been getting odder through the day and giving Sawyer the hungry eye, so she went and locked herself in the apartment over the shop, doing whatever it was teenage girls did indoors during the day. Gardai Hanratty had come by later, on his rounds, seen the thrown cosh and broken window. He had gone in to investigate and found Sawyer there but not a trace of the apprentice.

Lucky so for them, the lad was truly a dopehead and enough was found in his bag (and his home too) that it made the finger of suspicion waver away from the pair of them. To be sure the Drumcree Mob were none to happy on the loss of a fine and promising drummer but Sawyer's first clean was her best and the boy was done gone.

Well and good: Sawyer was able to grow up as clean and unblemished as her history and the land's history would allow. She had the last years of school, friends, crushes, amusements, concerts then she was scheming out her prom: the dress she would wear, the car she would hire, where to have the private party. Naturally too she had to plan a future and it was one as far away from here as could be, a university far south or perhaps across the water and whatever subject would sell across the globe. Her life looked to be opening out at last, the few tense years, when she had kept hid her fearsome secret, when she and the gardai hadn't let the whisper of a hint escape, it was all going to be set behind her.

Yet so, Gardai Hanratty had plans too and wasn't meaning to be in the Gardai Siochanna all his life. It was the army he had pinned his sights on There was a spot waiting him at the Custume Barracks, along by the Shannon, in Athlone. He had little chance of getting there, however, being much too useful to the boys in the long grass. He swept the path of the St Padraig's Fenian Brigade nicely clear and they weren't about to let him free or offer permission to go. Not at all they weren't, until he paid them off and sold the girl down the river: he gave up the secret and gave up her talent, for their use, for the price of his ticket of leave. Sawyer's kandiflos life was over.

Sawyer's dream of escape, of freedom from secrets was destroyed, in what was to have been the best holiday of all: the one between the end of school and the beginning of university. She was spoken to and made to understand: her qualifications would be earnt at Letterkenny Institute of Technology. She already had the skills the Republican Army felt need of and she would share them, unless she wanted her secrets to be shared to hungry ears and angry trigger fingers.

To be sure, it was a quality institute, she progressed, she developed, she made friends and she had a normal life. Yet so it was not civilian normal; the paramilitary underground was her alternate normality. The abrupt phone call, the sudden car journey, the game of spotter and follower, the nights in the bloody, long, grass unmaking a human being all of these ran parallel to her student face, her studies, the blossoming life of growing teen moving out into the world.

Yet so, for Sawyer that lantern show of her student daze floated on a dark river that could suck her under at any moment. Friendships and mentors she had in both worlds; it was no secret that a good number of her friends around town were taigs but there were more yet, that she knew well, from her crimson-fingered world, who she did not as much as look at, if she passed them by in the daylit world. In the light or in the dark it was a web of dancing shadows, of what was known, of what could be shown, of what could be blown, of the slippery fish that could leak out of the mouth or out of the eyes and (in one careless moment) write an epitaph for those accidentally betrayed. Yet so and never by Sawyer, she was as grand a dancer at the Dubh Mhor as others were at the Sean Os.

Sawyer played the game well, she had kept her own secret tight for years and it had taken a faithless gardai to spill it. In this world of perpetual eyes and ears that watched for the slightest of glimmers, to betray the sniper behind the curtain, she quickly earnt trust and confidence. There was no pretence she was in the game willingly but that only gave her the more incentive not to break cover and to keep her mouth sealed and her public face intact. yet so, her safety always rested on the probity of others: the nickname of "Butcher" going around, when added to some neatly severed body parts (lazily hidden by a cadet), and mixed in with mix in their discovery by the Prods meant Sawyer was going to be rudely awakened.

Sawyer got the alarm call of her short and dire life, when a gunshot rocked the floorboards of her very bedroom. From too long in the dark of ambush and pursuit, she had moved before she had thought and had an eye to a chink that looked onto the lounge beneath her room. There was her father: bound to a chair, gagged and with one knee shot out of him; the second was blasted away even as Sawyer watched and heard. It was an Orange Death Squad, with their ski masks and weaponry. They had found her or almost so. A little off target they were.

«Ye wee gobshite heathen. Bad enough the Papists murder our soldiers but ye have to damn their souls, with your bloody hands. How ye must have laughed at us, hiding under your Butcher codename and us never thinking ye were a butcher in truth. But aye! We found the sorry remains of Billy Page and a pure tidy job it was. A professional meat cutting. Now who else but ye has the skill for that? Taig puppet ye! Say your prayers to the devil.»

With those words the leader of the Prods took a killing shot, pure through her father's heart and under her eyes. It was all too late she woke to avert this inevitable doom — years too late.

«Put the place to the torch lads. We'll watch from the outside, that this shite's heathen get doesn't escape. Aye let the whore of Rome twist in the flames and feel sorrow for the bad company she kept. We'll send all her Papist friends down to join her in hell, by and by. Give the wee witch an early taste of her eternal damnation.»

Sawyer didn't wait to hear a syllable more. First she grabbed the rucsac that she always kept packed and the clothes of the day before. Then she slipped into her father's bedroom and wadded up all of the cash and cards that he always kept safe up there. Like so many folks she never went anywhere without her passport but, this once, made a double-check that it was secure in her pocket.

Then Sawyer had climbed out of the house (by a long used route) and was on the late coach to the Dublin Busaras long before all of her old life had finally burnt to the ground. It was nothing to pay cash for the a seat on the night coach and the 8pm ferry to Holyhead, Crewe and ultimately London. Then was when she lost her roots and all her footing, when she could find no place upon the darkened globe to stand firm and make for herself a life.

All of her qualifications gained or about to be gained spun away on burning winds; she had fled before she qualified and all of the papers she held bore her name and origin; they pointed enquirers to check her bona fides and seek for references back in her home town. The pain of that was that, any enquiry made, would send up a flare, to say that she was alive and hidden in such and such a place. Sawyer had to cocoon herself in a yet thicker web of secrets. Nor was it any enough

Without even basic qualifications or much of a history at all and at her young age, Sawyer floundered to gain a living and build a place for herself anywhere in the world. In her plight the most of the jobs to had were in the shadowy hinterland of legality. She foreswore the one talent she had, that would make her valued, protected and rewarded, it marked her all too clearly. For all of that: a slip of a girl, with her looks and the brogue on her, newly arrived and begun to eel her way into the shades — she was never going to escape the net of the Irish Diaspora.

London: The Cross, Kay Town and Camden. Onwards: Liverpool, Manchester, Bolton, Birmingham. Then across The Pond to the United States: New York, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago. Times were that Sawyer moved of her own volition, if not her own choice, as she fled her stalkers or hunted work. The meatyards in Chicago were one rare and honest use of her skills.

Those skills grew and her knowledge deepened: at every town where Sawyer was met with the Irish lilt, the heavy hint and an opening for a cleaner. It was an opening of welcome arms, if she took it, and the opening of steel jaws, if she tried to refuse it. The more that her ability heightened and her involvement deepened, the more she clamped her jaws tight; against all the secrets within her.

Every task completed was one more dark key she held and one more link in the chain that she made for herself. They never could let her go, with all she was and all she knew. Sawyer came to see herself amongst the damned, the living dead, the zombies. She was a Frankenstein monster, forged from the dreams and nightmares of all the many and widespread generations that believed in Ireland United & Free.

Sawyer embraced the Goths: in their love of the dark, the shadowy, the macabre and the grotesque, she found she could be a monster in every way. It echoed the hue of her soul and the tone of her mind. In the further hinterlands of that lifestyle, and yet more in the whispered chasms that she walked as a cleaner, Sawyer heard the murmur of a place, a city where all of the inhabitants were the living dead. it seemed the one spot upon the fevered globe that she might stand as an individual.

Sawyer yearned for it, longed for it, yet struggled to approach it; bound as she was in the fetters of conspiracy and concealment. For all the years of her childhood and beyond Sawyer had kept the fierce power which sealed her lips and let her survive. She turned that strength upon her desire and island-hopped ever closer to her goal. So many nations, so many lands where the Irish settled and flourished; each one a step towards her goal: Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, and more.

Finally the day came, when her shackles were drawn so thin and frail that she could break them in a few steps. The steps that took her under the noose and across the bridge to Roanapur. The town of the living dead, where one who could dismember the dead past remembrance of the living was soon in high demand. Sawyer had found herself a niche, a career, a role as a cleaner, a living and almost a life,

It was still, only, almost a life: Sawyer could not name it haven or stability or protection; not so long as she was one isolated crumb, prey to whatever hungry jaws came along. Sawyer needed the weight of a gang to anchor her and secure her from any hand that wished to drag her back to her old life. The most of the gangs were to much under the power of overseas masters and to shabby, shoddy, cheapskate and chaotic to be any firm bastion.

In her eyes their were only two powers in the town with leaders of the stature of Collins or Dev. It was to them she turned. The first she petitioned was the Dev of Roanapur: Chang of the Triads but he was too fearful of the balance of power and the feelings of his Baltic counterpart and would not take Sawyer under his wing. That much then for the bloody-handed politician.

Sawyer had one last chance, one final gamble on a defending patron. The military strategist, the Michael Collins of Roanapur. Sawyer was sick with the longing to get her full taste of Roanapur kandiflos. She had to win a place in this town that was bigger than herself or she could never lift up her head and shake off the fear of the reach of the Emerald Isle. Here she was then, she had just demonstrated (once more) the aplomb with which she could handle her chainsaw. It only remained now for Balalaika to render judgement.

«Da. You have the talent of a surgeon and the coldness of a butcher. Don't imagine you'll become vyostoniki you're not born of fire, blood and ice but you have value. A shame I must refuse you. But you do not have a Russian mouth and I fear the secrets you could spill out.»

Sawyer had been hunted most of her life by the Black Dog and the Fenian Hounds; haunted by the spectre of the Nationalist revenge. From the tenderest age she had locked in the deadliest secret, to keep family and self free of harm and it had not been enough, yet never by her own fault. The very guardian of the law (Gardai Hanratty) had sold over her one concealed talent, as the price of his liberty from the borderlands.

That treachery had forced her into a life of eternal secrecy which was broken by the carelessness of another. A carelessness that broke her father, home, career and life and yet was never a carelessness she could be accused of. In all of the paths her life had been forced down she had sunk to the neck in a bog of secrets yet never spat a one out.

Here was this banjaxed, refugee, San Patricio who challenged Sawyer on her tact. Here was Sawyer's final hope of sanctuary and it turned on her. It was too much for the girl: she was pure raging, as she gunned her chainsaw, swung it about and lashed the warehouse with a mire of blood and gore. It was enough, that final display of integrity, it earnt Sawyer tenure in Roanapur and a place in the Russian shadow.. All could see that Sawyer would never utter any confidence.

She no longer had a voice of her own to speak with.

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o0O¥O0o — A.N — o0O¥O0o

This fic is ass backwards. It began with the ending but then it needed reasons: to demo Sawyer was rich with secrets, that she was hunted and haunted, that the need for sanctuary was a desperate need. My mind spun and cast around the world for a scenario, no matter how exotic or tenuous.

Then it struck me: why look so far, when all the ingredients are on my doorstep. With that, this fic became a bit of fun for me: it could've been shaved of local argot and made international but it was pure craic to mix in what is really there. There are a rake of allusions to Irish history, culture and music in there if ye care to dig. Elsewise: figure any readers can gulp a few pebbles of confusion and still keep on track.

All of the terms refer to the long war over how British or how Irish the Island of Ireland will be. They are labels for the Prods or Protestants, the Catholics and the paramilitaries. Oh and there are some general insults in there too but none of the tags are what ye might call polite. Hell so most of them are incendiary.

The title is a paraphrase of a verse in Sunday Bloody Sunday by the Wolfe Tones. I was thinking of Sawyer nailing down the coffins of oh so many strangers.

Well, it was Sunday, Bloody Sunday

When they shot those people there

The cries of thirteen martyrs

Filled the Free Derry air

Is there any one among you

Dare to blame it on the kids?

Not a soldier boy was bleeding

When they nailed the coffin lids!