5.5: Aftermath
Up on the warehouse roof, Claw looked in appalled horror at what he'd done. When he'd crawled to the edge of the roof, seen the Quarryman advancing on the helpless Delilah and fired off a bolt of electricity at him, he'd meant only to stun the man, stop him from hurting her. He hadn't meant to kill him!
The thought that he hadn't meant to kill kept running gibbering through his skull, and were even the first words he signed to Dana when she crawled up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. She nodded grimly, then told him firmly in sign language to get them both down to the alley floor ASAP.
He jumped from the roof with her, spreading his wings to brake their descent and make their landing more-or-less gentle. Once on the ground, he directed him to tend to Malibu while she handled Delilah. Delilah had backed or fallen against the alley wall, and was slumped against it whimpering, still blinded from the explosion. She flinched at the sound of footsteps approaching, but Dana crooned in her eerily distinctive voice, "Is me, Dana, is only me... Bad men all dead, you safe now…" as she found the lock Brentwood had broken before dying and started unfastening and unwrapping her chains.
Claw winced at Malibu's broken wing as he strained to break the lock on his chains, then unwrapped them from around him. The movement and jagged shards of pain it brought roused the gargoyle to unwilling consciousness, and he fluttered his eyes open and croaked, "What… happen?"
"Malibu!" Delilah cried out in relief that he at least was still alive, even as memory and grief came crashing down again. "Oh, Brentwood, they killed Brentwood!"
"Brentwood!" Malibu lurched to his feet, brushing off Claw's concerned hand as he staggered over to his clan-sister. Pain and grief throwing all his language lessons out the window, he begged her, "No dead, please wrong, no dead!"
Delilah could only shake her head dumbly as she gestured blindly over to where the Brentwood-shaped outline of gravel lying amidst the dead Quarrymen. Claw and Dana stared at it in horror, with silent tears running down their cheeks, while Malibu fell against Delilah with a howl of grief and they wept together.
After only a couple of minutes of grieving together, their storm of tears was interrupted with firm taps on their shoulders. Malibu glared at Dana, but she said slowly and more-or-less clearly even as the tears trickled down her cheeks, "Deh-lah-lah still no see?" When Delilah squinted at her but admitted she still saw only big purple splotches, Dana continued, "You go with Claw home safe. Mal-boo with me here, help hide dead people stuff. No let bodies stay, or bad bad trouble." The sentences were literal translations of the words if she'd been signing them instead, and might have confused some people, but the gargoyle clones understood perfectly, and silently complied.
Claw looked worriedly over his shoulder at Dana as he escorted Delilah away. He couldn't decide if he was more concerned for her safety, since the police had probably already been alerted to the sound of gunfire and were likely on their way at that very moment, or by the fact that she was handling all this with such grim competence that she had to have done it before…
Grinding his beak against the pain, Malibu grimly ignored his broken wing as he grabbed a body by the collar with each hand and began hauling them through the hidden entrance to the Labyrinth.
As she began hauling on a third corpse, Dana reflected bitterly that she had indeed done this sort of cleanup before. She'd hated it then, and she hated it now, but she knew all too well that sometimes, it was necessary. Just like her former family and home, the Labyrinth needed secrecy for safety, and sometimes it was necessary to protect the protectors.
The police had indeed been alerted to the gunfire, and shortly thereafter two patrol cars drove up to the alley between the warehouses from where their caller had said the shots had been heard. But when they got there, they found only a messy, spreading pool of oil mixed with bright red hydraulic fluid, obviously spilled from a couple of 55-gallon drums that were lying tipped on their sides in plain sight. There was a small scattering of gravel in the middle of the spill, but otherwise nothing amiss; no bodies, no guns, not even any spent cartridges lying about. "One helluva mess to clean up, but otherwise, it looks like a false alarm," one officer at the scene said, and two of the others concurred.
"I'm not so sure," the fourth officer said thoughtfully, eyes narrowed. "Something here just doesn't feel right…"
Down inside a chamber just inside the Labyrinth entrance that they had closed just barely in time to avoid the police, Dana silently piled in a corner all the Quarryhammers and net-mortars they had found with the bodies. Then she dropped beside that pile a dilapidated cardboard box, containing the gun, spent bullet casings and gobbets of flesh and brains that they had hastily scooped up, before opening and tipping over the barrels of oil and other fluids to hide the spilled blood. Then she just as silently directed Malibu in pantomime to strip the bodies of their dark blue uniforms and all other clothing.
The clothing would be burned later on, while the bodies would be tied to weights and brought back to the surface when the coast was clear, to be sunk deep in the Hudson River. And Dana promised herself that she and Father Sullivan would say a silent Mass for their souls next Sunday night; it was all the burial ceremony these men could be allowed. Some of them were carrying wallets in their pockets, which might contain money the Labyrinth's coffers could use, but she dropped them all into the second improvised sack she'd made from a shirt without opening them. If any of them were opened, they might have identification and pictures inside, and she desperately didn't want to know these men's names, or whether or not they were leaving families behind.
She was stripping her third body of its Quarryman clothing when she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, Malibu jerking back from one of the bodies he'd been working on. She got up and went over, to see him staring at the man's chest, which was slowly but perceptibly still rising and falling. One of the seven bodies they'd brought down was still alive. Bleeding heavily from wounds to the chest and shoulder, but still alive. For long moments they stared at him, neither saying nor signing anything. Then their eyes met in grim understanding.
The heavy thud of an uncharged Quarryhammer hitting flesh echoed through the otherwise silent chamber. When the echoes died, Dana and Malibu quietly, trembling slightly, went back to work.
When they had finished, they bundled the clothes together for burning and took them along as they staggered after the others. They also carried Dana's outermost coat, bundled around a quantity of gravel; all they could quickly collect of Brentwood's remains.
To be continued…