The City That Feeds on Blood
“Kieran’s got a real talent for this.”
“Should’ve put him to work ages ago. These are sharper than brand-new.”
I spent the entire afternoon honing twenty kitchen knives.
Every last one of them belonged to the neighbors.
Total take so far: sixty cents.
A dozen eggs ran thirty-four cents, so that was enough to fill Roa’s belly with eggs.
“Big Brother’s the best!”
“Heh.”
Ridiculous, how something so small could lift my mood.
With Roa’s cheers ringing in my ears, I kept grinding knives in the middle of the living room until the light outside went dim.
Mother still hadn’t come home from work.
My younger brother Liam got back first.
Soaked to the bone from the rain, he stopped dead at the sight of the knives spread across the floor, mouth hanging open.
“…What the hell is all that?”
Did it really need explaining?
One look at the whetstone made it obvious.
Come to think of it, this was the first time I’d taken a proper look at Liam.
From head to toe he was nothing like me—brown hair, pale freckled skin.
Every inch the Irish kid.
Maybe that was why he’d never wanted to be seen with his older brother.
Even when he shined shoes, Liam never worked the same corner as Kieran.
From the scraps of memory I could sift through, Kieran had always blamed himself for that.
He’d grown up watching people spit on his mixed looks, and he’d never once managed to act like a real big brother worth relying on.
A weak, timid older brother who never belonged anywhere and spent every moment reading the room.
That was who Kieran had been to Liam.
Whether the kid still thought that or not didn’t matter.
I spoke to him the way a dependable older brother should.
“You’re late. Go change out of those wet clothes and rest.”
Liam blinked at me for a second, then started peeling off his sodden layers.
Rainwater dripped and pooled by the door.
Roa, armed with a rag bigger than she was, scrubbed at the floor while chattering away.
“Little Brother, did you shine shoes today?”
“Who the hell shines shoes in this rain?”
“Then what?”
“I told you this morning. I did something else.”
“What kind of something?”
Liam flicked a glance my way before answering.
“…None of your business.”
“Hmph! Aunt Mary says curiosity is the start of invention, you know!”
“Invention, my ass. You need money for that. Patent fees alone run a hundred bucks.”
“Grr! I’m telling Mom! Little Brother crushed Roa’s dreams!”
Scrape, scrape…
Shit. Filing a patent cost that much?
Then again, looking at how many people Edison had buried under patent lawsuits, Liam probably wasn’t wrong.
In the end, if you were poor, even inventing something was out of reach.
“Fucking hell.”
Liam blinked hard and stared at me, wondering if he’d misheard.
I went right back to sharpening as if nothing had happened. He cocked his head and turned back to Roa.
“Seriously though, you’re getting mouthier by the day. Where’d you even learn a word like ‘crushed’?”
“Oh, Jake says it all the time lately. ‘I’m gonna crush everything!’”
“That little bastard’s a psycho. Stay away from him.”
“Yeah. I think so too.”
Scrape, scrape.
I listened to them talk while holding a freshly honed blade up to the lamplight, checking the edge.
That was when Liam wandered over and ran his eyes across the piled kitchen knives and paring knives. He picked one up, studied the edge, and asked in open surprise,
“You sharpened all these?”
“What does it look like?”
“…Totally random. Mom used to yell at you for screwing them up.”
Might as well settle this right here.
I looked from one of them to the other and spoke.
“Forget the old Kieran. As of today, I’ve been reborn. Even if the way I act or talk seems off, just roll with it.”
“Whoa! So it’s Big Brother’s birthday today? Wait—if you’re one year old today, that makes you my little brother!”
“…Being reborn means starting over with a new body and a new mindset.”
“Ahhh! I wanna do that too! Roa wants to be reborn!”
Roa clearly wasn’t thinking at all. Liam just folded his arms and looked back and forth between me and the knives.
“Cut the weird talk. How the hell did you get the knives like that?”
“Necessity is the mother of invention. You think you can live forever just shining shoes?”
“Funny. I’ve been saying that for years.”
Liam’s face went flat and unimpressed.
Most boys his age—seventeen—had already left shoe-shining behind for something that paid better. Stubborn, inflexible Kieran had clung to the one job he knew.
It had driven Liam crazy; he’d constantly needled him about how long he planned to keep scraping by on shoes.
In a lot of ways Liam had always been the more grown-up of the two. Until now, anyway.
“But, hyung.”
His expression turned serious.
“Why’d you suddenly do something you’ve never done? How many times have they stolen your kit? And you went after Gary’s crew just to get it back? Hell, I heard you even threw rocks.”
Kieran’s shoe-shining life had been one long history of kit theft. Stolen, stomped flat, smashed to pieces—it happened all the time.
Some people, after taking enough punishment, stop getting angry and just accept it. That had been Kieran.
But even the quietest man snaps when the pressure finally hits the breaking point.
A few days ago, Kieran had snapped.
Something behind his eyes had flipped.
The reason was a birthday present for Roa.
He’d scraped together twenty cents and bought her a hairpin.
Gary’s boys had stolen the whole kit—hairpin and all—then stood there laughing in his face.
You think that’s funny? You think hurting people is fun?
Something inside Kieran had broken clean through that day.
He’d grabbed a rock, chased them down, and thrown it at Gary.
Then they’d beaten him half to death.
The same punks who’d harassed him as kids had grown into bigger, stronger men—strong enough to kill if they felt like it.
Fists that once only left bruises now belonged to cruel, vicious, dangerous young thugs.
And so Kieran had been beaten to death.
Funny how much it resembled the way I’d died in my last life—walking into a mafia den and never walking out.
Kieran had thrown his life away for his little sister’s gift.
Me…
What the hell had I risked my life for?
“Hyung, why aren’t you answering? You knew Gary’s crew would jump you the second they saw you. Why’d you go after them?”
Liam’s voice rose.
Korean blood still ran in my veins, and this little punk was raising his voice at his older brother?
“Sometimes a man just loses it. That was one of those days.”
“What kind of answer is that? Gary heard you’re still walking around and said the next time he sees you he’s not holding back. Why don’t you just get a factory job or something? How long are we supposed to live like this?”
Liam bit down hard on his lip.
So he still thought of me as his brother after all.
Sharp-eyed little Roa clamped her mouth shut, puffed out her cheeks, and rolled her eyes from side to side.
I felt a little guilty for souring the mood.
I poked her cheek with one finger.
“Pfffft—”
“Okay, okay, enough.”
“Tch. Who knows what’ll happen if you run into Gary’s crew again. For a while, don’t even think about wandering outside.”
“Wasn’t planning on leaving the house anyway.”
The one who’d been beaten wasn’t me—it was Kieran.
Honestly, I didn’t feel enough rage to go hunting for revenge.
I’d collide with them someday, but that was a problem for later.
I went back to sharpening knives.
Liam didn’t say another word.
“My babies must be starving. Dinner’ll be ready in a flash.”
Mother came home from work.
She changed clothes in a hurry and started chopping vegetables. The razor-sharp kitchen knife clearly delighted her; she kept making little sounds of admiration.
“How on earth did you hide a talent like this all this time?”
At dinner we sat packed tight around the table, heads almost touching.
We weren’t religious, but I joined the prayer anyway.
I clasped my hands and closed my eyes.
God… how the hell am I supposed to survive this?
The prayer ended and the meal began.
Then Liam, still chewing, suddenly dug into his pocket and held out a fistful of coins.
“This is what I earned today.”
Ninety cents.
Mother studied him for a long moment.
“Can you tell me what kind of work it was?”
“Just… filling in for someone.”
“…Did you work at the docks?”
Liam nodded without a word.
Mother chewed her lip, then let out a quiet sigh.
I kept chewing my potato while I turned the meaning of that sigh over in my head.
The word “docks” only pointed to one thing.
The massive strike that had just exploded among New York’s longshoremen.
Three years earlier, the Great War that broke out in Europe in 1914 had driven the dockworkers into brutal, endless shifts.
Wartime cargo meant endless hours of killing labor.
Wages hadn’t risen; wartime inflation had actually driven real wages into the dirt.
While the government and the shipping companies raked in war profits, the men who moved the cargo sank deeper into poverty.
That rage had finally erupted into a massive strike across the New York and New Jersey waterfronts.
The unions demanded higher pay, shorter hours, and safer conditions, and they sat down to negotiate with the federal government and the companies.
But the companies hadn’t limited themselves to the bargaining table.
To cut losses and break the strike, they brought in replacement workers.
The union called those replacements—those traitors—strikebreakers, or labor sluggers, or “scabs.”
And today, one of those scabs had been Liam.
The real problem was the violence that always flared during a strike.
He could get caught in the middle of it without warning.
And there was one more thing.
Mother’s older brothers—my two uncles from the O’Connell side—were New York longshoremen out on strike.
She and her brothers had never gotten along.
“Liam… the uncles didn’t see you, did they?”
“No way.”
“If you’re going back tomorrow…”
“I know. I’ll stay out of sight.”
Mother managed a thin smile, but her face stayed dark.
After the meal she went around the neighboring apartments returning the knives I’d sharpened.
The money she brought back came to a dollar fifty.
More than a full day of shoe-shining.
“At this rate we’re going to get rich.”
She came home wearing a huge grin.
Put together with what Liam and I had earned, we could put meat and eggs on the table for one good weekend meal.
No one was happier about that than—
“Roa’s so happy! Brothers are the best!”
It rained for days straight.
The day after I started sharpening knives, business peaked—then the jobs dried up almost overnight.
Today not a single person brought me a blade.
I’d expected it. Mother’s circle and the tenants of the tenement house could only go so far.
Expanding outside the building?
That would mean fighting every knife grinder who already owned a street for survival rights.
Once the rain stopped, I’d go back to shining shoes.
Until then I stayed home and built my body.
“Twenty-two… twenty-three… twenty… fucking four.”
Thirty push-ups and I already felt like I was going to shit blood. Every muscle screamed.
But what choice did I have?
If I didn’t want to get beaten to death again, I had to do it.
I put together a more systematic training plan.
Different place, different equipment, but I kept the same routines I’d used in Special Forces.
To make the most of the cramped space I started with body-weight work—planks, burpees, lunges, crunches, leg raises—then used the wall for push-ups and hammered my legs with squats.
In the evenings Roa copied me.
“Hup! Hup! I can do it too…!”
“You’re gonna shit yourself again.”
“Roa was just reborn! Forget the earlier poop! Hup! Hup!”
Liam, still working as a strikebreaker, came home every night completely spent and collapsed.
Dock work was clearly brutal, and here was his older brother doing weird exercises in the middle of the apartment. Sprawled on the bed, Liam stared at me like I was an idiot.
“You sure your head’s not cracked? What’s any of that gonna change?”
“A lot of things. Try it and you’ll see.”
“If you’ve got energy left, go work. Use that time to figure out how to make real money.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me not to go outside?”
“So you’re just gonna do this forever?”
The kid was painfully realistic and cynical.
I understood. At fifteen he’d already been forced to grow up in a place like this.
Watching his brother thrash around on the floor must have looked both alien and ridiculous.
I didn’t stop.
I took a beating from Mother’s wooden spoon for driving nails into the doorframe, but I still got a pull-up bar mounted.
Instead of dumbbells I used crates of potatoes, buckets filled with water, and a backpack stuffed with heavy stones. I worked every muscle I had.
Finally the rain that had fallen for days came to an end.
We rushed through breakfast and the family scattered in different directions.
“Big Brother’s going to work starting today, right?”
I had no intention of working yet.
For days I’d been running the building stairs; today I planned to take the run outside.
I left the apartment and stepped into the street.
The sky was just starting to lighten—red bleeding into gray.
The narrow lanes lined with tenement houses were still thick with mud from the long rain.
An early-opening bakery sent the smell of fresh bread rolling into the air.
I started running past the old red-brick buildings.
People who had just woken up leaned out of windows; some grabbed the morning paper, others yawned into coffee cups. Their faces flashed past me in a blur.
When I broke out of the alley into a wider avenue, the street was already crowded with people hurrying in every direction.
They shared the road with horses, wagons, and rattling 1910 Ford Model Ts. The metal machines still hadn’t outnumbered the animals.
Pushcarts lined the curb, already open for business, selling fruit, vegetables, fish.
One laborer shoved a three-wheeled cart, sweeping up the mountain of filth that had collected overnight.
It looked like a black-and-white film someone had just colorized.
I ran and drank it all in.
My body felt charged with energy.
It wasn’t only the shock of dropping from forty-seven to seventeen.
For a man who’d just come back from the dead, my recovery was unnatural, and every workout produced results far beyond what I expected.
Maybe this body had been born gifted.
Even when I’d been seventeen in my previous life, I hadn’t had this kind of stamina.
In combat, when the bloodlust peaked and the world narrowed to pure rage, there were moments you half-believed bullets would simply miss you—or that even if they hit, you wouldn’t die.
This body gave me that same feeling just from ordinary training.
A gift from God?
Sorry for dumping me in this shithole?
Whatever it was, watching the body change day by day made it impossible to stop.
Around the time I’d covered three blocks, I saw a boy working hard first thing in the morning.
He was a pickpocket, snatching goods from a pushcart and bolting.
The crime was organized.
Three other kids blocked the owner while another quietly cleaned out the unattended cart.
Why the hell was I standing still and watching?
I picked up speed again.
Not long after, near the intersection of Canal and Mulberry, a crowd had gathered in front of a storefront. A strange hybrid vehicle—half Ford, half wagon—stood waiting.
“Make way! Make way!”
The onlookers parted and police appeared, loading a body onto a stretcher and into the wagon.
I stopped running and stared at the corpse on the stretcher.
One ear had been cut off. The shirt was soaked in blood and full of holes—knife wounds.
Complicated debts? Personal grudge?
What interested me more was the crowd’s reaction.
Some people pointed and laughed. Others frowned at the brutality yet still raked the body with curious eyes. There were children who couldn’t have been ten years old.
It looked uncomfortably familiar—like the scenes I’d seen in African civil wars and Middle Eastern battlefields.
Shot, stabbed, dead of disease, crushed in collapsing mines, ground up in factory machines.
In a place where death is ordinary, even someone else’s tragedy turns into street theater.
A city that grows by feeding on blood.
A jungle ruled by the law of the strong.
The Lower East Side of Manhattan was thick with danger in every direction.
And sometimes that danger arrived without warning. Like now.
“Found you, you half-breed bastard.”
Gary—the same Gary who had beaten Kieran to death—clamped a hand on my shoulder and growled into my ear.