Thrown-away Child

they had practiced—across an open stretch of freshly bulldozed embankment, making their way toward a cinder block structure at the riverbank. Faerie Princess scrambled along behind them.
    The target of the day for a trio of urban commandos was a discarded building—Substation No. 141, recently deactivated in favor of real estate development—belonging to the Louisiana Power & Light Company. Unplugged, as it were, the substation still appeared forbidding, deadly to the touch.
    A low cement building sat in a small fenced yard of bleached gravel. The building and yard were caged in a dome of razor wire. Surrounding the building was a network of braided steel cables, red fuse boxes the size of doors, and corkscrew surge pilings. High' voltage warning signs—DANGER in block letters, red thunder bolts and black skull-and-crossbone figures on a background of taxi yellow—were bolted to the fence, inside and out.
    The caged compound once emitted a constant buzz, the kind of sound that remains in the ear long after it has quit. Once there were frequent showers of white-hot sparks, rambling bursts of electrical current spouting through the cable runoff points. Even deactivated, not many would want to chance entering the compound.
    But the LP&L design experts, comfortable professionals all, had not imagined an age in which desperation for shelter would make their impregnable handiwork a home. Which is what Substation No. 141 had become: home to a gang of distinctly unlucky squatters, more frightened by the perils of life in the open air than by the possibility of electrocution.
    A flock of dozing seagulls perched on the razor wire blinked their eyes and cawed as the commandos neared.
    Pirate, first to reach the torn part of the fence, looked up at the gulls through the eyeholes of his mask. He turned to his comrades, sniggering. “Birdies fixing to spoil our surprise.”
    “Shut your face,” Faerie Princess said in a whispered snarl. “We got to catch them little niggers in their sleep.”
    Pirate pulled back a flap torn in the fence. Like their masks, the opening was too small for jowly men. Hobo pulled a wire cutter from his pocket and snipped a larger opening. Pirate pulled some more.
    One after the other, the commandos quietly piled through the fence. They stepped lightly over the gravel toward a steel door at the front of the cinder block building. The door stood propped in its frame, binges missing.
    Faerie Princess barked, “Showtime!” He pulled the steel bar from his belt and used it to pry away the door. Then he powered up his acetylene torch, the blue-white flame providing a moment’s faint illumination of the small space inside.
    Black boys lay on cardboard mats that covered the concrete floor. Their bodies were entwined, like kit tens, to increase warmth. Startled heads rose.
    Someone screamed.
    Pirate squeezed off half the magazine of his TEC-9. The silencer made it sound as innocent as a motorboat.
    Another scream.
    All three men now fired at the floor, sweeping the high-powered weapons in short but comprehensive arcs. They emptied the magazines, filling the dark space with smoke and the quick silence of the dead.
    Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt-putt-putt.
    They reloaded, and fired all over again.
    Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt-putt-putt.
    Faerie Princess powered up the torch once more. “Count up the coons,” he ordered.
    Hobo pulled a flashlight from his shirt pocket and shone it over the bloodied floor. His lips moved under his mask as he counted. Pirate counted, too, while Faerie Princess got down to business with the acetylene torch, heating up the end of the steel bar until the letters glowed red.
    “Fifteen,” Hobo finally said. Pirate added to the assessment, “Hoo-whee, that’s goddamn good!”
    “No time for bragging,” Faerie Princess said. “Just hold your light steady for me, left to right as we go.”
    Hobo moved behind with the flashlight as Faerie Princess stepped from body to body, searing stomachs and buttocks and chests and limbs with hot red letters. Sometimes he branded a dead boy clear through his shorts or T-shirt or whatever raggedy thing he wore.
    The smell of burnt flesh swirled in the smoke. Faerie Princess counted off the bodies. “One, two, three, four, five, six...”
    Pirate kept watch in the doorway. He saw nothing to worry about, nothing but a wooden tug gliding along down on the river. What alarmed him was the odor behind his back.
    “Holy shit, it’s like burning