a better deal 

ryan c. bradley

The three men were chained together as they shuffled up the steps to the gallows. Their ankles were bleeding from the mile they’d walked shackled. Magda imagined the metal would be cold against their skin with the gray winter sky glowering down. She had to crane her neck to the side to get a look at James at the end of the line. He was shaking, and it set her off again. She and the baby would’ve been fine. They hadn’t needed a goat. They’d survived tough winters before, and they would’ve survived this one. She and Clara would starve now.
Clara wailed in the sling on Magda’s chest. The sweet girl hadn’t stopped screaming since they’d arrived at the gallows and Magda had given up on calming her. With the yelling and jostling of the crowd, any reprieve would be temporary. 
          The trip had been longer for them, five miles at least, but Magda had hired a man with a cart for the ride back. She didn’t have enough to pay him to watch Clara or to help her get James. But if everything went well, her husband would ride back with them. She couldn’t bring herself to think of it as James’s body, an empty vessel. She refused to consider what would happen if she couldn’t get him back either. 
          The crowd was a mix of three groups. The families of those about to die were edging closer to the gallows, their shoulders slumped, bodies shriveled with tension. Then there were the merrymakers, who were drinking, dancing, and singing. For them, this was a celebratory occasion. She wanted to hate them, but more than once, she and James had been them. The resurrectionists were all gathered toward the front as well. She recognized them by the way they stood. Stiff young men in thick, expensive coats. They needed the bodies for their studies. 
          She’d seen them fighting off the families, absconding with the bodies of the dead. She’d laughed. James’s favorite part was when the executed stopped kicking and the families and the resurrectionists charged. James loved seeing the young men wallop the widows. And now it was going to be her fighting for his body. The bloody fool. 
          Her headache raged. Her stomach was tight, and she’d spent the night feeding the baby while she squatted over the chamber pot. The image of what the resurrectionists would do to James broke through her mental bulwark. She saw their scalpels cutting through his arms, the boys poking at his veins. Taking out his organs, leering at his guts. 
 

Harold wished that he didn’t have to be there. For his classmates, obtaining a cadaver was as simple as writing their father for funds. His father had been an executioner, hanging other men before he plied his trade on himself. The job had been enough for Harold to pay the school fees, to watch from the rafters as another knife man dissected a cadaver, but Harold needed to see it closer. He needed to feel it, to do it himself. 
          He would be a great surgeon. But first, he needed to learn anatomy. Some of the other men who shared his financial limitations went to graveyards in the night. One had described it to him—shoveling a hole six feet down, breaking the lid of the coffin and slipping the body out. You had to strip off the jewels and clothing, so you couldn’t be tried for graverobbing. 
          Harold didn’t have the stomach for breaking the law. He could see himself, one day, elbow deep in his fellow man, removing a musket ball or a blade, suturing the holes shut. But that required a different kind of fortitude, one that Harold suspected he had. 
          The men in front of him, being paraded onto the gallows, had done this to themselves. They were shivering so the chain holding them together clinked quietly underneath the jeers of the crowd. They’d broken laws and the legal protections that guarded their bodies from anatomists were gone. They smelled of excrement and vomit and the beer the bar down the road had gifted each of them as they passed.  Harold shivered too, only partly from the cold cutting through his coat. 
          The executioner, black mask concealing his face, set a rope over each man’s head. 
          When Harold’s father had done this, he’d been gentle. It always seemed curious to Harold that his father had tenderness for the men he killed but none to spare for his own children. This executioner was rough. 
Jenkins, who’d told him about the hanging, elbowed him. “Don’t go for the last body. Give the feces time to dry.” 
          Harold turned back to the crowd. A woman with a baby was elbowing her way to the front. He knew she was kin to one of the men by the tight set of her jaw. He turned away from her, not wanting to look. Couldn’t she find someone to watch the child? 
          He tried to tell himself that this was for scientific advancement. That he would save lives later on as a surgeon. That it was the law that forbade dissection of the innocent. The law that condemned these men and revoked its protections. It was the Church and superstition that convinced people that to be dissected was a terrible fate, as if anything done to the body would affect the soul after it left. 
          But that woman was still there, baby screaming in her arms and he couldn’t help but look.

Magda swallowed down bile when the executioner hung the rope around James’s neck. His eyes were far away, but she did her best to catch his attention. She didn't want him to die without seeing Clara one last time, without seeing her and knowing that she loved him even if he was a fool. He couldn’t die without knowing that she loved him, even if she hated him, too. 
          The executioner moved like an old man, struggling to kneel down and unlock the chains around the men’s ankles after there was a noose around each of their necks. A pair of boys edging toward manhood ran out onto the stage to take the chains away. 
          A woman bumped into Magda from behind, spilling her ale on Magda’s dress. The woman laughed an apology and danced away before Magda could vent her rage. Clara cried louder. She wriggled, trying to face the gallows. Magda held Clara’s head against her chest.
          The executioner stood behind the first man. “Warren Wartburton has been sentenced to death for the crime of murder. In a drunken state, he slayed his neighbor, Allen Neville, after accusations were made of cheating during a game of Backgammon. Have you anything to say, before this crowd, before God, this day, Wartburton?” 
          The man stepped up to the edge of the gallows. “I’d like it to be known, that I never cheated. Neville falsely—”
          The executioner shoved Wartburton off the edge of the gallows as the condemned man spoke. Wartburton made a terrible choking noise as his neck snapped. His body spasmed. His waste dripped down his pant legs. The crowd roared with delight. 
          One of the resurrectionists ran forward. There were two guards stationed around the gallows, and one of them stepped forward and thumped the over-eager man. Again, the crowd erupted. 
          “There’ll be no claiming any bodies until the last man has been hung,” the executioner said. 

Harold hadn’t been to a hanging before, but he’d known better than to charge the gallows before the last man had been hanged. He suspected that Christopher had been briefed, too, but he was an excitable little fellow, so nervous to not get one of the three bodies that he’d forgotten himself. The guard had walloped Christopher good. He’d be heading home with a hematoma instead of a cadaver. The poor boy was struggling to stand. 
          “Idiot,” mumbled Jenkins. 
          Harold sighed. He scanned the crowd again. The woman with the baby was still there, ready to run. The families of the other two had more members. He followed her gaze. She couldn’t take her eyes off the third man. 
          The executioner walked behind the second. Harold knew from his father that the black sack served two purposes: to scare the prisoners and to conceal the identity of the executioner. If the people knew who he was, even the ones cheering, they’d kill the man. 
          “Peter Downes Junior was caught and convicted for stealing the horse of a nobleman, Edward Pittington,” the executioner said. 
          A man near the front of the crowd yelled, “I hope you’re feeling Downes, Peter.”
          “Do you have anything you want to say before this crowd, before God, on this day?” the executioner asked, loudly. 
          “A horse cannot be owned,” Peter said. 
          The executioner paused, as if Peter had something else to say. When Peter didn’t continue, the executioner pushed him off the gallows. His neck cracked like a log being split. 
          A man, who Harold ascertained must be Peter Downes Senior, fell to his knees, howling. He pounded his fist against the ground. A guard took a step in the father’s direction, but there was no need to restrain the man. He’d fallen onto his face and was screaming into the ground.
          “That’s one less grabbing at the body,” Jenkins said. 
          Harold swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat.  

Magda wanted to be sick. It was James’s turn. His father was long dead. So was hers. Cholera had ripped through her family first, and then his after they took her in. They were the only three left, and soon they’d be two. James seemed to see her at the moment, to make eye contact briefly. 
          “Oh, James,” she said. 
          “I’m sorry,” he yelled across the crowd. 
          Magda forgot her girl. Clara managed to turn herself around. “Dada,” she said, pointing at the gallows. 
          “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” the man who’d jeered earlier yelled. The crowd applauded. 
          Madga should’ve shielded Clara’s eyes, but she lost herself. 
          “James Evans was caught stealing a sheep from the estate of Edward Pittington. He stood trial and has been sentenced to death,” the executioner said, voice empty of feeling. Magda wondered what he would do if it was his wife on the gallows and he was standing in the crowd. The man—who she pictured as a spindled, gray man under his hood—wouldn’t be able to stand. He’d collapse like Peter Downes’ father. 
          James’s knees shook. His anxiety was hers. It went through her like she were the one standing on the gallows, rope around her neck, a crowd of a hundred waiting for her to hang. 
          “Do you have anything you’d like to say to this crowd, to God, before you die?” the executioner asked. 
          James’s eyes were so far away, like his soul had already left his body. But he came back to himself when he spoke. “Magda, we needed to eat,” he said. “It’s not right for Pittington to have so much when we have—” 
          “No,” Magda whispered. 
          The executioner pushed James. As he fell, Magda thought of him sneaking out on horseback to talk through her window until early in the morning. His feet went off the gallows. The hours they stole in the barn to make love while everyone else worked the fields. The rope coiled high in the air, going up before inevitably coming down. The children they’d lost before Clara. The rope snapped taut. James’s neck broke, his head lolling toward his shoulder. 
          Clara howled.
          “No,” Magda whispered again. They were both fools. Why hadn’t she forgiven him? 

The last man’s feet kicked as his widow knelt. Harold tried to put the image of the widow with her baby out of his mind. He was doing this for science. For the good of all mankind. The lives he would save would make this all worth it. In the grand calculus of being, he would come out as good. 
          The executioner faced his head toward the crowd. “By the power vested in me by King William IV, as each of you have witnessed, I have acted out the will of England and God.” 
          “Now get those bodies,” a woman from the crowd yelled. 
          Jenkins rushed the gallows first. People behind him pushed past as Harold took off. Jenkins went for the corpse of the man whose father had passed out. Christopher was back on his feet, running for the first corpse.           Harold went for the third body. The last one. 
          The crowd was going wild behind them. A man took bets on which bodies the resurrectionists would get and which would be buried by their families. 
          Harold made it to the gallows and hopped up onto the wood. He looked back, and the widow had only just started running. He hugged her husband’s leg. The wet hit his shoulder before he noticed the smell. The warm excrement smeared his shirt. 
          He pulled the body backwards and hugged it tight to stop the swinging before taking out his knife to cut the rope. 

Why did James have to be last? She’d been teary eyed, watching the last bit of life leave him when everyone else had charged. His last bit of bad luck in a life full of it. One of the resurrectionists—a skinny, clean-shaven thing—already had James on the gallows. 
          She wouldn’t stand for it. She cupped Clara’s head to support it as she made her way to the gallows. She had to run around the steps while the boy cut James down. 
          She shoved him in the chest. Clara bounced against her. “That’s my husband, you bastard,” she said. 
          The boy stumbled back. 
          As throngs struggled over the other two bodies, no one was going after James. 
          The resurrectionist’s knife thunked into the wood of the gallows. Clara screamed in the sling, hadn’t stopped screaming this entire time. 
          Magda hefted her husband up in her arms, trying not to crush Clara in the sling. He was always slight, they all were after last winter, but his body moved differently now. James was a sack of meat and bones. She left the resurrectionist propped up on his elbows. If he could be beaten that easily, all the better. 
          When she turned there was another, bigger, one. 
          “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, voice soft, but his eyes told a different story. His nose was bleeding from another family fighting him off. 
          James’s weight shifted, his head falling away from her, stopping between his shoulder blades. 
          “I loved this man,” she said. 
          “I don’t care,” the bigger man said. 
          “Jenkins,” the resurrectionist behind her said. “Let her go.” 
          “Why, Harold?” the big man said. 
          “Because she doesn’t have someone to watch that baby,” the resurrectionist said. “Everyone in this life deserves a little bit of mercy.” 
          The one called Jenkins scowled. “You’re soft, Harold.” 
          The crowd was roaring behind them. A woman fell to the ground as the resurrectionist who’d charged earlier broke out of a crowd with the first body. 
          Jenkins chased after him. She didn’t know if it was because the already injured resurrectionist was easier prey, or if he pitied her, or if Harold had saved her. 
          It was when he was gone she realized how heavy James was, straining against her arms. 
          “Let me help,” Harold said. 
          If she thought she could’ve made it through the crowd without him, she would’ve said no. 
          They each got on one side of James, wrapping his arms around their shoulders and carrying him like he’d had too much to drink. The crowd parted for them, as resurrectionists and families fought for the last body. 
          The cart man was rubbing his hands together for warmth as he waited. Clara was screaming, wrapped around Magda’s chest. When they’d gotten James onto the cart, she comforted her baby for the first time that day. Cooing. James might be gone, but at least he wasn’t going to be cut apart, ogled and studied. 
          “You did better than I thought,” the cartman said. “Who’s your helper?” 
          “Harold,” the resurrectionist said, and shook the cartman’s hand. 
          The cartman wiped his palm against the side of his pants, trying to get Harold’s filth off. 
          Harold asked, “Will this be enough to take the cadaver to London?” and gave the cartman a sack of coins. 
          The cartman peered inside. His face lit up. 
          The sounds of the crowd were dying down. “We had a deal,” Magda said, as the cartman examined the inside of the sack. “Where is your honor?” Magda asked. 
          “The man is offering a better deal,” the cartman said. 

Harold sat at the front of the cart, unable to look at the widow as the cartman’s donkey sidled away. The woman and her baby howled. A bit of sun peeked through the gray clouds, a ray of sunshine he didn’t deserve.

          He would save lives after this. That made it all worth it. 

          Didn’t it?  

Ryan C. Bradley (he/him) is a musician, podcaster, and the author of the novella Saint’s Blood and the forthcoming books Bad Connections: Horror Stories and Say Uncle. His short fiction has appeared in NoSleep, Tales to Terrify, and Dark Moon Digest, among others. He hosts the Horror Anthology Anthology podcast on his Patreon and co-hosts Horror Hangover with Cass Clarke. Learn more about him at ryancbradley.com.