Hey guys.  Hope this isn't too out-of-place... part 1 of an extended flashback for my character.  It's open for plot crossover, by the way, if Hairy approves.<br/><br/><strong>CATCHING HELL, part i</strong><br/>A story of Katie Sinclair<br/>The streets of New Orleans are lean-stoned and riddled with offshoots and alleyways as some living hive, cross-cut and exposed like a half-slaughtered lamb.  I've never been in a city this sprawling or this loosely run; it's like hundreds of thousands of people just made their way here and sprawled out, be it atop tombstones, in the doorways or parlors, or on the gas-lit streetcorners, or down the man-wide shoots between masonry walls and iron-topped fences where it was hard to tell the living from the shade.  Hell, they don't even care that it's raining.<br/><br/>It's been hell on this trail... three weeks of cross-country push after push, train rides through open country past plantations of "freed" slaves and gaunt widows and orphans.  The War and Emancipation have brought equality to the poor at last; they can suffer and break their backs and die poor side-by-side instead of across the yard, white black and red alike.  The rich didn't change though, but they weren't there to see me ride by, my long coat spread along the horse's back as I rode, hat low on my face and weapons shooting up like quills from the horse's saddle.  It was the workers that beheld me, and they often stopped to stare from their late-summer work, mopping sweat from streaked, labor-tight faces to stare.<br/><br/>The land's changed enough to satisfy.  Cattle country's become rice plantations, wheat fields gone for sugar cane.  I may have started this hot month sleeping under a joshua tree, but I've been finishing it under canopies of Spanish moss, my horse tethered to a magnolia where the nights are mild and wet and sleeping naked doesn't sound so impractical as it should.  I draw enough attention being a woman of perhaps twenty years possessing the horseback swagger of a weathered caballero.  I don't find joy in seeing the eager attraction in the eyes of courting-age men fade suddenly to fear when my 'good side' profile gives way to a full-on stare at my face.<br/><br/>The one who helped me be reborn said I was lovely in the fashion of a gilded, fine knife... prettily featured, but with no mistaking my true nature. Personally, I think their reaction's because of my eyepatch; because I don't seem ashamed of it, because it hints at a history of violence they have managed to avoid.<br/><br/>Regardless, despite my lonesome passage in a city of opportunists, shanghaiers and cut-throats, I'm riding through unmolested, and for that I am grateful.  Riding into this city, with its industrial cloud and white-masted ships on the biggest river I've ever seen... it's been like riding into a special chamber of hell, a decent below the sea's level to a city as rich with ghosts as any nightmare.<br/><br/>I come upon a wide trench in the road I'm crossing, and it's hissing softly with the rainwater that drains into it.  "Canal Street," I find myself saying.  The fellow I'm hunting is supposed to be a little farther on... the French Quarter, a residence on Rue Du Monde.  The canal was supposed to have been insufficient following an April rain this year, and supposedly a levee breached and flooded the town thoroughly.  Even by the nighttime glow of streetlamps and moonlight I can see that the lower parts of the walls are stained gray-brown after that flood, like my boots and my horse's flank-- permeated by the waters of many crossings.<br/><br/>The streets are well-sized, and a passing cart-- a late-night delivery of wheat and sugar sacks that smell, suspiciously, like liquor-- clacks along the paved rue at a steady clip, splashing a torrent of dirty street-water up onto the face of a white-painted brick facade.  My horse, weary with my constant driving, seems to have surrendered to the insanity of his rider and offers no complaint as it whirls by.<br/><br/>He's got a long night ahead, so I hope his mood will last.<br/><br/>-<br/><br/>The rain's broken and the moon's come out, reflecting its pale face, from time to time, in the deep black puddles that stand in the street like holes to nowhere.  Another young man calls from an alleyway, his accent thickly acadian.  "You looking for something, darlin'?  You need some company?"  those that announce themselves rarely constitute a significant threat, so I don't stop.<br/><br/>A long, canvas-bound bundle leaves the unlit doorway of rowhouse, workers struggling to maintain the stability of the brown-red stained bundle.  There were several already on a flat-bed, and this one was tossed atop the others.  Cholera.  A little while later, through a yellow-tinged window I can see the silhouette of a woman dressing.  I can't see her, but I imagine that she's beautiful, because I'd like her to be.  There's the wail of a reed instrument of the kind I once heard at a show in Kansas city-- it was called an oboe, and its sound was eerily low and beautiful and here, in these rain-slicked streets where everyone lived close and died close and fucked and ate and worked in the same old chambers of stone and brick and wood, it was the most haunting sound she'd ever heard called music.<br/><br/><br/>When I reach Conti street, I've found a cloister of New Orleans' wealth.  The interior I can make out through some of these doors is like some kind of dollhouse... chandeliers of real crystal, huge, like the drooping ice-laden boughs of a sycamore.  Colors of gold and red and virulent green, draperies of fine linens and silks lining high walls and ceilings, paintings of people and places like I've never seen.  I can hear fiddles and brass instruments from one such home, where one of the finest-dressed gentlemen I've laid my eyes upon stands at the door with gloved hands at his sides, a wide-flaring tophat of black silk at his crown.  With a mild shock, I realize he's a doorman.<br/><br/>"Four-nineteen?"  I call out, bringing my horse to a halt so his metal-shoed hooves don't echo over my voice.  He lifts his black face toward me, and I can see the gleam of moonlight across skin like well-oiled, old leather.<br/><br/>He has a moment to assess me before he proceeds.  "That residence is not one I'd advise a young lady to call upon," he answers.  I catch him blink and realize he's not looking upon me with his milk-clouded eyes.  "Even one who rides a rage-shod horse, and therfore must have come a long way."  Somehow, I feel that the blind man is seeing me with the same kind of knowing that my own missing eye can see him.<br/><br/>Those who I heard tell of New Orleans described it often as a city of wonders, temptations, threats and decadence.  The superstitious said that was only half of it... seeing the man before me, and feeling the vibration of his awareness of me, the certain confidence and mystique of his self seeping out-- oh, yes, I could believe it.  This city was rich with mysteries and corruptions far beyond me, and I was best to reach my destination and be done.<br/><br/>"Begging your pardon, sir," I call.  My voice is crisp against the smoothed stones of the street, and he seems to accept the respect as if it's overdue.  "It's not by my  choice."  His blind eyes blink once more, almost luminous in that dark face amid the dark night.  And the one that brought me here enters my mind, and I can feel something from within that home behind him, and I know he's looking through me and into that memory.<br/><br/>-<br/><i><b>Sancti Spiriti, North Texas.  Twenty-one days prior.</b><br/>When I came upon the town, there was smoke coiling into the bruised and ruddy sky in long, inky trails, as if the sky was seeping from several wounds, long threads of black blood trickling in rivulets toward the horizon below.  The town itself was shuttered up tightly, its horses stabled and its children crammed into the stuffy heat of the crowded pine-board homes.  It'd been over for sufficient time, however, that my arrival seemed to coincide with their mutual decision to ease tension.  I was regarded with the usual trepidation that I've come to know and expect, though one boy-- bold, perhaps out of exceptional courage, or perhaps a result of minimal brain-- came at my horse at a steady run.  "You're that lady gunfighter they's been writin' bout, aintcha?  You that One-Eyed Kate?"<br/><br/>A woman in full bustle and bonnet came rushing to collect the youth at about the same time that a handfull of drunken men-- ranch hands, from the look of their boots and dungarees-- staggered onto the porch of the Sancti Spiriti Saloon on the heels of a well-dressed, but equally drunk, oil man-- this last one sported a waxed mustache that simply gleamed in the hard light of the summer afternoon.  <br/><br/>The boy's mother wrapped an arm around him like a bustling hen, hissing admonishments into his ear and edging away from where I sat my horse.  "Ma, this here's one-eyed cate, like my penny novel--"  he fished a tattered bundle of yellowed papers from his pocket, waving it in a flutter before his mother's face.  I didn't like the name... completely unoriginal and with no poetry to it at all... but I kept my piece.<br/><br/>"There AIN'T no such person as One-Eyed Kate.  This here gentlem-er,lady's just... passin' through, 'sall-- you an' your stupid funny books--"<br/><br/>"Ma'am," I said, tipping my hat and catching her eye in doing so.  I can usually keep a person's eye once I have it, so I keep my eyes on hers and lean a little lower in the saddle, bending from the waist.  "The boy's just fine, he ain't botherin' me.  Might I ask, though, what's the cause of all the... disturbance, and what's the nature of them fires yonder?"<br/><br/>The lady looked up.  She was quite nice to look upon... very clean, with little blonde ringlets damp against her forehead.  I wasn't sweating, despite the heavy coat, but I doubt she'd noticed.  Her mouth moved, and she made as if to flee.  She fully intended to, that's for certain-- no one wants to get involved, not many willingly play party to my brand of inquisition, nor the perceived betrayals of the kind of monsters I must hunt.  It's as if they would prefer to believe they've somehow avoided the evils that preceed my necessary intervention if they manage to ignore them and deny their existence.<br/><br/>I wouldn't let her leave, though.  To anyone at a distance without spyglass or an eagle's eyesight, I was merely a lean figure on a horse, hands visibly at peace on the reigns, speaking politely to a well-dressed woman and her lad.  But in actuality, I had just reached out to her soul and, with no more force than necessary, given her conscience a slap on the ass.  "Wake up," I said curtly.  "And tell me what happened here before it's too late."<br/><br/>She blinked rapidly, seemed to go a bit paler, but didn't break my gaze.  I could have kept her there for an hour, but it wasn't necessary.  Although the boy seemed a bit concerned, she remained unhurt, showed no fear or distress-- she merely started talking.<br/><br/>-<br/><br/>Bodies were piled into pyres, smouldering and spitting smoke into the sky, charred but not consumed.  Blood tainted the dry earth here and there, drawing trails of ants and circling, sniffing coyotes.  A child's doll, a little plaything of corn silks stuffed into rag cloth, lay half-burned at the base of one smouldering pile.  Clothes fluttered softly on the ground, the wind too weak to stir them further, as if the people in them had been taken directly to another world and left them empty on the ground.  In a sense, they had... they wouldn't need the tattered garments, knees and elbows darned and patched... they wouldn't need the simple cotton shifts or the worn leather shoes that looked like they'd walked a thousand miles.  They were poor, they had almost nothing, and that which they owned was now just litter on the earth.<br/><br/>One of my tricks is that I can piece things together from tracks, or scuffs, or broken twigs or toppled lamps or drawers left oddly ajar. That day in Sancti Spiriti was no exception, and I deduced the nature of the scene in seconds:<br/><br/>The men and women had been separated, the men made to dig trenches with shovels.  The shovels, they already had... these men were migrant workers of a sort, and the shovels were among their few posessions.  The women and children had been separated off to a side-- probably to discourage the workers from attempting escape.  The men had worked well, and quickly, but there was no hope in it for them.  Undoubtedly, they had looked skyward, scanned the horizon, prayed and hoped that the townsfolk would send help.  A sherriff and deputies, to notify the marshall-- if they couldn't be saved, perhaps their families would be spared.  If none would live, then perhaps their murderers would be stopped before--<br/><br/>They'd been shot halfway through their work.  Their executioners hadn't the patience, or perhaps the time, to wait while the men dug, the women cried and whispered, the children bawled in confusion. The women were them combed through... their numbers reduced, they were easier to control-- the old and very young had been next, left to bleed out on the cracked earth far from the trenches.  There had been raping, stripping of clothes-- that explained the garments strewn about-- the stock had been appraised and tested, in a sense.  Those of marketable value were taken and the rest were finished off and piled in with the others.<br/><br/>Judging from the concurrence of tracks, shoe sizes and arrangement of tracks, it was clear that there were about twelve men, and they'd taken six girls with them.  The girls were on the younger side, generally, from what she could tell.  Slave stock.<br/><br/>She'd risen from the point where the group had ridden off.  "Damnation."  She looked off to the east-- the tracks were heading for the Alabama line.<br/><br/>Fourty-seven bodies, half-cremated, half-cooked, smoldering in puddles of pitch.  Buzzards were circling, coyotes dotted the horizon all around.  <br/><br/>"Damnation," she'd said again.  She turned to face the little town-- the town hadn't hazarded a soul-- these bodies were the flesh of outsiders, of sub-humans, to them.  It was easy to turn their backs, and they'd be back to business soon enough.  The dead were those of a lower social caste, of a different species.  In exchange for their complicity, their silence, and their liquor, had been left alone and they'd been done with it.  These people had died unaided, unmourned.  <br/><br/>Because they were Chinese.<br/><br/>Rail-workers, families-- refuggees from the west, the west that fell off the fucking map.  Survivors of horrors that this little town had never seen-- those that had avoided doom only to find it again in Texas.<br/><br/>"Fuck that town," she said coolly.  Settling her hat onto her head, she checked the chambers of her pistol, the double-barrel, the Sharps rifle and the Winchester.  <br/><br/>She spat into the dust, watching the horizon as the slinking shapes of coyotes disappeared and reappeared in the summer heat.  <br/><br/>"Fuck that town."<br/><br/>-<br/></i><br/><br/>"You've come a long way, child, to complete this errand."  The man in the top hat, his teeth white like ivory when he smiles at me, has lifted the brim of his hat to show me his face.  By the gas light, I can see he has a silver ring through each earlobe and his face has a thin white powdery beard.  "But you paid little mind, child, to whose quarter you were coming to."  He lifted his cap from his head.  "My lady might object to your taking such an interest in four-nineteen of the Rue de Conti, especially seeing as you have the way about you of one who's not going dere for a smoke and some jelly roll."<br/><br/>The laugh that follows is charming, malicious, and endearing, all at once.  I didn't recognize the phrase, but I caught the meaning nonetheless.  How much of me he'd seen with those blind eyes, I can't say, but somehow I doubt I've found his house by accident.<br/><br/>"Sir... I am keepin' you from something of import, I am sure... you must have been expecting company, and I did not mean to intrude--"<br/><br/>"Oh, child, I was expecting company."  He smiled that wicked smile once more.  "I was told to expect it.  I was told to expect<i>you</i>."