Page 87 of If Looks Could Kill
“Hold on tighter, Miss Girl,” Freddie calls over his shoulder to Pearl. “Don’t give up. Hospital’s just up ahead. End of the next block.”
She hasn’t the heart, nor the strength, to tell him that there’s nothing the hospital can do for her now. Her time is up.
The bike stops abruptly, and Pearl’s face collides with the scratchy wool of Freddie’s jacket.
“What’s the matter?” Oscar’s winded voice calls from behind. “What’s going on?”
Pearl peers around Freddie’s back to see a commotion snarling up the road ahead.
An overturned omnibus lies in ruins, blocking the street.
Someone tends to an injured driver, and a handful of men try to calm four frightened horses.
A pair of police officers route traffic away from the block, pushing them a block uptown.
Pearl watches in a haze. How odd, that all this should happen at such a late hour.
“Can’t we just bike through?” Freddie calls to the cops. “We got an injured lady here.”
“Just one block around, son,” the officer calls back. “Won’t take long.”
“Jack the Ripper got her!” Dick shouts.
This does not improve their credibility with the officer. “Move it along, chums.”
Freddie pushes off hard and pumps furiously to start his extra-weighted bicycle crawling forward as he turns up the avenue.
“And get yourselves to bed!” the cop yells after them.
“Hold on,” Freddie yells. Pearl tightens her grip to keep from being flung off the bike while her grubby Galahad negotiates a tight corner onto the next street up.
She leans her cheek against Freddie’s back. She doesn’t care what it looks like. His wool-clad back is warmer than city air. His moving muscles are life, and that’s worth holding on to.
She glances up at the darkened windows of New Yorkers who aren’t about to die, who simply sleep through a peaceful night.
In one house, light gleams through fringed red curtains framing a bay window. In the center of the tableau stands an almost-naked girl, cringing with shame. Someone shoves her, and she stumbles closer to the glass.
Pearl closes her eyes. It’s the least bit of kindness she can give, to look away. The poor thing. The poor, poor thing. Young and inexperienced. How she’ll suffer.
Look at her.
Pearl pushes away the impulse. She will not add to the girl’s humiliation by looking.
Look at her.
Freddie pedals on. They’re nearly to the end of the block.
You know her. Look at the girl in the window.
With all that’s left of her strength, with her abdominal muscles crying out in protest, Pearl twists enough to turn and look.
Oh, God in heaven. No. It can’t be. It can’t.
But it is.
A newspaper boy got the fright of his life that night. The bleeding, dying damsel he’d squired along so heroically to the hospital let go of his waist, tilted to one side, and tumbled off his bike and onto the street. She’s dead, he thought. She died on his watch, almost at the hospital’s doorstep.
Just as he righted the bike, she rose from the pavement like God’s own vengeance.
No longer weak and faint, but charged with fury.
Boiling with new blood. Her hands uncurled before her as vicious claws extruded from her nail beds.
Rage flashed red in her eyes. She shook her hair loose.
It rose and swayed around her in a cloud, a halo, a crown of deadly golden snakes.
The poor lad stumbled back with a yelp.
She strode back down the block, toward a house with its second-story light on and a scantily clad girl standing limply in a window like a plucked turkey in a poulterer’s shop.
His mate, on the other bicycle, cried out, and the first lad looked over to see that other blond girl, the foreign one, untangle herself from the other toppled bicycle, then rise also, like a phoenix, parting the night before her as she ran with her sister into the thick of battle.
“Coo-ey,” said Oscar.