Margaret Iron

Margaret picked her way through the innards of a house with high walls and archways connecting the collapsing, cavernous rooms. The house was in a Victorian style, and for all she knew she was the last person in this forsaken land to remember such trivial details of the old world. She sidled through a doorway with its left post jutting out like a geometric art piece, similar to the ones she saw in the green parks during childhood.

The opposite wall was inlaid with shelves holding a treasury of crumbling books more useful as kindling for fire. The ceiling had fallen, and in the middle of the library a sofa with the barest of cloth attached to its wooden skeleton, perched halfway out of a hole that stank of mold and rot. Crossing the room resulted in creaks and groans that increased in volume the closer she moved toward the ruined sofa. Light flickered through as clouds and smoke passed overhead, the collapsed roof filling the room with a shifting light. She turned and placed her hand on the wall in which the door sat, its paint decayed and scraped away by elements, both natural and unnatural. Ceiling beams angled along the wall behind her, cradled in the gouges carved by their fall.

She wore a patchwork leather backpack sagging with weight. That weight kept her strong and unbent, even as her hair turned from gray to white. The coarse leather straps rubbed against her own leathery, wrinkled skin as she slid the pack off and placed it on the ground. From it she took a brown radio box with a spiral cord attached to a microphone, an apparatus older than her. She turned the central dial until a harsh static sound cut in and a small blue indicator light lit up. She brought the microphone close to her mouth and pressed the call button on the top of the box.

“Come in, Rash.”

“This is Rash.” Good, they had been waiting for her call.

“Iron is unbent.” she said.

“The smoke falls.” Said Rash.

She knew the passwords were necessary hindrances at best.

“I found a suitable wall.” she said.

“Good, because we’ve got two minutes.”

“How were they so quick?”

“They have horses.”

“Shit, how did we not see that? Not important. They’ll have to dismount.” she said distractedly, re-calculating the risks involved.

“You know how she gets around horses. I say we don’t use her.”

“It’s too late for that.” She bit back. This plan had to still work.

“Copy that ma’am.” His displeasure cut through the static.

Rash had earned his name, and a sightless eye, by choosing to go against her orders exactly one time. He’d do what he was told even if he didn’t like it.

She packed up the radio and dug around in her pack for a tarnished silver heart shaped locket on a stainless steel chain. She hung the chain about her neck, and hid the locket beneath her faded plaid scarf. She turned a small screw in the base of the locket and it thrummed against her thin shirt. Then she threw the pack, with the radio and few other essentials, into the mold infested pit.

She inched toward the pit, testing the floor’s stability as she went. She was two feet from the pit when hooves striking dry, thick dirt echoed from outside. Three sets of hooves一at least her ears hadn’t failed her. They pranced to a halt outside, and there was a spurt of silence before the house creaked under the new intruders. She held her breath unconsciously while moving around the pit and over a rotted wood floor that threatened to fall out at any moment. Once on the other side with her back to the bookshelves she gulped down air in deep breaths that did nothing to calm her racing heart.

A pistol was holstered on her back that in her younger days she used to grab without looking, but doing that now caused spasms in her arm. She had to turn her head to draw the gun and when she did so, she caught sight of a yellowed skeleton sitting slumped against a desk on one of the side walls. It was a very small skeleton with a faded sheet containing music notes. The poor kid was probably trying to sing when the smoke stripped her of the ability as with everyone else.

“Margaret Iron, I’ve been told you’d be impossible to surprise.” Said a masculine, scratchy voice she had not wanted to ever hear again.

Her fear spiked as she saw a green skinned man standing naked on the other side of the doorway with his own pistol already drawn and pointed at her. Patches of scabs dotted the skin where the injections of vibrant green dye were administered. Two other green men holding crude spears flanked him. Between them was a bound and gagged fourth person, his skin bursting with acne but not pigmented with green. Her nickname “Iron” had to do with how others perceived her and, as the green men walked into the room with her son, her fear was put into a vault and locked.

“I must be getting old.” Said Margaret.

“You are old, hag.” said the man with the gun, “You just kept on breathing while better men died from the smoke, the winters, or your little group’s guns.”

“Are you going to shoot me or trade with me?”

“I’d prefer both.” Said the green man.

“We both know that your ‘little clan’ won’t survive the aftermath of such an exchange, so I suggest we talk.”

The man faked joviality. “I want twenty guns, all of which have to work. Then you can have your son back.”

“I have other children, what makes you think I would give you so much equipment for him?”

“He’s your son.”

The son of a man she’d loved too much, but the green man couldn’t know that.

“Would you give your enemies weapons that could be used against you in order to save someone who ran away?”

“So you wouldn’t mind one of my men putting a spear through his guts?”

“One less mouth to feed.” The heat in her stomach cooled off before it could find its way into her expression. “Before you do, I have a question that might change this trade.”

“Hags often seem to have a lot of questions.”

“Have you ever heard the myth of the siren?”

His tone immediately lost the false humor. “You’re stalling. What scheme are you playing at?”

“No scheme. Have you heard the myth?”

“I’ll have you know the rest of my ‘little clan’ will be here soon.” He swept the gun in an arc before leveling it at her once again. “If your people are out there we’ll have a fight that will cost you lives that I know you’d rather not lose.”

“Bloodshed becomes increasingly inefficient when you’ve lived like I have.” Replied Margaret.

“Living by lying to all the clans to keep us at one another’s throats so we never attack the real threat? I guess bloodshed is only efficient if it happens to other people.”

“You’re smarter than the last few leaders of your clan.” She meant it, even though her tone reflected the green man’s own mocking tone.

“Which is why you are going to trade me twenty guns for your son’s life.”

“One last time, have you heard of the Siren’s Song?”

A soft melody rose through the ruins, a clear voice practicing arts lost to humanity in their various calamities. Margaret had bought enough time.

The green men claimed to have overcome their weak humanity and rejected the low ways of men to become one with their mother, nature. Naturally, they were determined to kill everyone who didn’t agree with their philosophy, and it so happened that the least natural handheld weapons would serve their naturalistic ends.

Their creeds and proclamations were silenced by the unknown and forgotten beauty contained within the clarion voice possessed by Margaret’s daughter. The song, full of indistinct words, finished as abruptly as it began.

Margaret’s hand tightened around her gun’s grip; and she whipped the pistol around- without turning her head. Her arm spasmed and pain coursed through her shoulder, shooting down her back, curving at her toes and returning up the renegade nerves.

The green men’s trance ended as Margaret fell forward.

She’d planned on falling, but not uncontrollably nor this soon. Slivers of wood slid into her face and arms, the floor stuttered out snaps and moans. For a moment she thought the floor would hold, then the planks broke beneath her. She heard a shot fired nearby, and then that clear, pretty voice rose in indistinct song again.

The landing was softer than she expected, a thick blanket of mold submerged beneath standing water cushioning her fall. Landing face first forced some of the foul water into her mouth. She wondered how the water had fallen down here and why it hadn’t dissipated years ago.

A crash and another gunshot. Debris flew overhead and more of the floor above caved in, almost crushing Margaret. Extra sunlight flooded into the basement revealing rubble strewn across a floor covered in black mold. She rolled onto her side, looking for any clue as to whether the plan had been successful. The green men hadn’t been far enough in the room to be crushed by the wall, and they’d still had Jonas.

She’d lived with inexplicable, sudden pains in every joint and muscle from her neck to her ankles; and, scars had healed over bullet holes and knife cuts. Luck had been with her, but she never relied on it. Her grip on the pistol had remained firm through pain and the spasms, and the fall, and a loss of control that she could not pinpoint.

She dragged herself through the rubble looking for signs of the green men or her son. She heard two successive screams and another gunshot. He couldn’t sing like his sister, and he was always wandering off to make trouble, but he was all she had left of her husband. If the green men took him from her, she would erase them, not even saving their bodies for the recycler.

It didn’t take her long to spot the two spear holders' bodies splayed across rubble, their throats torn out. Her heart jumped at the sight of her son bent forward. Then she noticed the blood seeping down the back of his neck and a spear point jabbed through his midsection, propping him up.

“Jonas…”

“I thought your son was ugly, but look at this thing! I bet she would have killed your son if I hadn’t already.” That scratchy voice had survived.

The green man held tightly to her daughter- a mass of misplaced bones topped with an oversized head dominated by a large nose and two oversized ears. Her eyes and cheek bone were so small that the whole face looked tiny in relation to the head. What sparse hair she grew came out in sickly rainbow colors. Bulky arms hung limp at her side. She wasn’t resisting the man, she was sniffing him, and the gun he was holding to her head.

“I never would have expected something so ugly to make a sound so beautiful. I don’t know what this power is that she has, but we’ll use it.”

The green man had no idea that the only thing keeping him safe from her daughter’s unrestrained brutal nature was the smell of those damned horses. It had taken years to learn what triggered her impulses, but animals always calmed her down. So did music.

Jonas was dead, and Margaret was certain she would die soon, but her daughter didn’t have to suffer the fate of being used by these men.

“It’s called singing.” Margaret said as she coughed up blood. “A Siren was a beautiful woman who lured men to their death singing an irresistible song. Siren is her name, and she will never be yours to use.” While she spoke, her free hand wriggled around the locket.

The green man pointed his gun at Margaret.

“Did you make it to old age by boring people with stories?”

“Margaret?” That was Rash’s voice. Margaret stayed silent. He wasn’t supposed to enter the house yet, but maybe he’d bought her the opportunity she needed.

“I see, the stories are just a stall while you wait for others to do the work. What will your people do when they see your body nailed to our walls?” Said the green man.

Rash called out again, he was in the room above, providing just the right amount of distraction.

“Don’t you know? This house is our grave.” Margaret said.

She snapped the chain of the locket and flung it. The locket struck a wooden plank and popped open to reveal a tiny, now broken, music box. Siren threw off the man like a rag doll and his gun fired wide. Siren rushed toward her now unprotected mother.

Margaret had taken aim. She didn’t need to see the fine details. The green blob in her vision sat up and raised an arm. Margaret heard one last gunshot mixed with one scratchy throated scream. Siren’s bulk filled her vision. Siren’s beady blue eyes held no recognition of her mother, but Margaret saw more humanity behind them than the green man had ever possessed. Margaret’s detached arm was across the room before she noticed the pain.