by Jack Conner
Irritation flashed in her features. “You fool! This is nothing about -- ”
Doors banged below. People called to each other. Obviously guests were emerging from their suites, alerted by the gunshot. Lynch and Eliza had little time. He had no doubt that she and her Society of Mars could sort the mess out, hush it up and make it so it had never been, but as for him . . .
He stared at her. and something tore inside him. Could this really be her? He couldn’t make himself believe it. He had slept at her grave last night! A great pain came over him, and for a moment he thought he would pass out.
She stared at him pityingly. “Lynch . . . ” She said the word softly, perhaps patronizingly. “What are you doing here? This is not your place.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Shocking him, she lowered her gun. It dangled in her hand, pointing at the floor. Was this a trick?
In a voice so low he could almost not hear it, she said, “Go. Go now. They will hunt you. I cannot promise what will happen should we meet again. But I will give you this one chance, for -- ” (She smiled, and it was a sad smile) “ -- old time’s sake.”
He swallowed. His throat was tight.
He lowered his own pistol. “Eliza -- ”
“Go,” she whispered. “Just go.”
The suite door exploded open.
***
It startled them both. It especially startled Lynch, as the enraged form of the trooper he had struck over the head barreled into him. The impact knocked him against the far wall and threw the gun from his hand. The blow also drove the breath from his lungs and rang his skull like a drum when it hit the wall.
The trooper punched him in the gut with his right hand, then his left, then again, pummeling him with all his strength. He was faster and stronger than Lynch would have thought. The blow Lynch had received to the head dazed him for a moment, but he shook it off and slugged the trooper across the face, hard, having to strike from the side as the man’s face was pressed close to his own. He struck and struck again. The trooper ignored the blows and kept pummeling, grimly determined to beat Lynch’s abdomen until he vomited.
Lynch kneed him in the groin. The trooper twisted to avoid the blow. This gave Lynch just enough room to shove the man off and slip away, his belly aching, spasming. The man grabbed him by his jacket and hurled him against the wall. His cheekbone struck. He fell to the floor, dazed.
The trooper ripped off his gas mask and smiled viciously down at Lynch. He smacked a fist into the palm of a hand.
Lynch crawled backward, trying to give his head room to clear.
The man came on. “I’m going to enjoy getting the answers out of you.”
Lynch feigned weariness, let the man step closer, then swept his legs with all his strength, knocking the trooper’s own legs out from under him. The man fell hard against the wall and slipped down.
They both fought for their feet. Before either could gain theirs, the second trooper stumbled out of the suite, holding his bleeding chest with one hand, gas mask still on. He carried both his rifle and his comrade’s under the crook of his good arm, but Lynch knew he could use neither, for they were two-handed weapons and he would not be able to move the arm of his injured side. When he saw the fallen pistol, he leapt for it despite his wound. Rifles clattered to the floor.
Eliza stood there, gun in hand, expression unreadable. The trooper that had attacked Lynch stood between her and Lynch, and it was possible she could simply be waiting for a clean shot.
Lynch gained his feet as the trooper did. He swung his hook at the same second the man lunged toward him. The hook scraped across one side of the man’s face, the man screamed and reeled backward.
It was at this moment that Lynch saw the crest on his chest, the seal of the security company’s uniform, and the mystery only deepened. It was the coat of arms of the mysterious Queen, a fist clutching a blazing sun.
Lynch shoved the reeling trooper into the other trooper even as the second one brought up his gun. The gun crashed and both troopers fell in a heap against the wall.
Lynch still had his second gun, Meyers’s gun, but it was past time to go, and he ran the other way, giving Eliza no time to aim but ducking immediately down a side-hall. His breaths came fast and hard, and his heart beat as rapidly as the hooves of a warhorse. Sweat squeezed from every pore in his body, dripping from his eyebrows into his eye, stinging it. He even felt a phantom pain in his ghost eye, as he thought of it, a faint tingling, itching under the patch.
He found a stairway, started down it. From below came the sounds of hotel guests murmuring fearfully. At his rapid footsteps, conversation stopped and their sounds retreated. Surely the police had already been called. The cops would make no difference to the Society. They might even aid the Society in tracking Lynch.
He fled down a richly appointed hall, nearly collided with a stone-carved ashtray pedestal that was shaped like a mermaid. As he did, he saw a laundry chute and for a moment he was tempted to throw himself down it. But then an old fear of enclosed spaces surfaces in him, and he balked and passed the lift. He resisted taking this, too, but only because he didn’t want to be trapped in a cage while people shot at him.
He leapt down the stairs to the next level, where guests milled about. There were fewer than Lynch thought there should have been for so grand a hotel but more than there should have been for such a pitiful town, and they stared at him as he approached. A thin sluice of blood dripped from his hook, his clothes were disheveled, he knew his cheek would be reddened from the blow against the wall. What with his eye patch, hook, and ragged state, he would present a perfect villain.
Yet instead of gasping or fleeing, they merely raised their eyebrows and regarded him with distaste as he fled through their ranks, making for the stairwell at the far end of the hall, hoping to lose any pursuit. After descending the next set of stairs, he heard rapid, multiple footsteps echoing up the corridor, reverberating from around a bend. Hotel security, it had to be. Would they too bear the fist-and-sun crest?
He passed a laundry chute, and this time he flung himself inside. He started to descend too rapidly, his elbows and knees clanking off the metal. To reduce the noise he checked his slide, widening his legs and arms to brace against the wall, letting friction slow him. Nevertheless the impact of the bend jarred him, and the impact of the next. Like a ball in a pin-ball machine, he bounced down one arm of the chute till he hit the sharp elbow, rebounded, and was shot down the next arm. The blows the trooper had dealt to his stomach only made it worse, and by the time the chute spat him into a small pile of dirty laundry in a large dark room he was on the verge of coughing up his guts.
He heaved in great breaths and tried to steady himself. He rose and rested hook and palm on his knees, hanging his head down. Slowly the world stopped spinning and his stomach stopped heaving. He stood in a large dark room, furnace blazing in one corner, generator the other. Cabinets likely full of rations hinted that this area could be used as a shelter if the Count’s bombardment widened beyond the major metropolitan areas.
The most singular thing about the room -- the basement, obviously -- were the two great metal mechanisms at its center. For the hotel’s lift plunged through the darkness above to end on the level basement floor, and a short walk from its terminus crouched another cage of dusty iron grillwork -- another lift. This one lead down. Down into the depths of the earth.
Lynch stared at it, unbelieving.
The lift that led up into the hotel rattled. A noise of gears and clanking machinery echoed down the tube. Lynch ducked into the pile of dirty laundry and very carefully peeked out. The lift itself appeared as it descended past the lip of the floor above, and by the firelight of the furnace and the few meager bulbs that lit the basement Lynch saw Eliza and one of the troopers -- the injured one. She held the rifles now and he leaned dizzily against the wall. The lift reached the bottom, Eliza opened the grate and led the injured man over to the other lift. Lynch only shook his head as s
he used a key to unlock a deadbolt, slid open the door and ushered the man inside.
She then pressed a button and the lift descended through the floor of the basement and disappeared into the earth.
***
Lynch reached for his pack of cigarettes, Sullivan’s pack, and swore when he realized they had been crushed in his descent through the laundry chute. He flung them aside, and his gaze strayed to the lifts.
“Eliza, Eliza, what are you up to?”
He stalked over to the second lift and stared through the slats, gazed down into the dark hole she had vanished into. Where did it possibly go? Why was she going there, and how did it further the cause of the Society, whatever that cause might be? Were there more troopers below, like ants in a colony? Why did they bear the crest of the fist-and-sun? How were they connected to this hotel, or to the mysterious Queen these townspeople revered -- or at least whose memory they exploited to make tourist money off of?
In any case, Lynch had to assume that police had arrived, and that police officers in conjunction with hotel security would be combing the hotel for him, searching every room, every corner. He wondered why the one trooper had remained behind. With a start, he wondered if the security company the man worked for might not also provide the hotel with security. The trooper would then stay behind to liaise with his colleagues and organize the search. Lynch would have to hide out here in the basement until the search was over. Of course, they would likely search the basement, as well.
Which left . . .
Lynch stared down into the depths.
“Well,” he said. “Why not? I always did like climbing.”
Of course, this looked -- and proved -- a bit different than climbing the high oak trees that had surrounded his family’s country mansion as a boy. For a time the deadbolt that secured the gate stymied him. He could not gain access to the chute while the gate barred his way. He took out the police-issue pistol and pointed it at the lock, then cursed and shoved the gun away; he needed to make this trip without anyone being the wiser, and a destroyed deadbolt would rather give the game away. He found the answer, as he often did, in the steel tip of his hook. With enough probing and twisting by the sharp point, the lock’s innards surrendered and he opened the gate, slipped inside, then awkwardly passed his hand through the bars and refastened the lock.
He looked down. Darkness gaped at his feet, and he mashed his eye shut. It was a long way down. When the nausea subsided, he picked his way slowly down the scaffolding that lined the lift shaft. The dark grew wet and cold, so black it was nearly oppressive -- then was oppressive -- and the light became a pinprick overhead. From time to time he passed corridors and saw platforms where the lift would stop. The lift, however, was nowhere to be seen -- it was still far below -- and these levels were black and abandoned. Eventually the light from the furnace room above grew so faint he had to see his way by flicking his cigarette lighter, and this only in emergencies, for he had to brace himself in order to be able to manipulate the lighter with his one hand. Thus he proceeded down -- and down -- primarily in darkness. The mineral stink of the earth permeated the air, filling his nose.
The mines, he knew. The lift descended into the mines. In a way it made sense. Lord Whaley, former resident of the penthouse, the man who had built the mines and presumably reaped a fortune off them, had built a grand hotel to showcase his riches right over the mine itself and had taken over one of the main lifts as his own private conveyance into his domain.
From time to time Lynch had to stop and catch his breath. His arms ached, his legs cramped, and his back felt like it was on fire. Sweat dripped from his scalp, trickled down his neck between his shoulder blades, gathering with more sweat there, and soaked into his shirt so that his shirt stuck to the narrow of his back or else trickled down between his buttocks. It stung his eye constantly and he licked salt off his lips.
At one point something rattled below, and he stared down to see the lift climbing the shaft -- right toward him. A light blazed in it, coming closer and closer. It would smash him to pieces or force him to jump atop it.
He noticed a depression behind the lift tube’s scaffolding. The tube had been carved through the rock of the earth and often there were spaces beyond the scaffolding, little hollows in the stone. Sweating, he clambered over to the one he had seen, folded himself up, and crawled inside, just as the lift swept past.
Its breeze rustled his hair. The light that blazed inside the lift nearly blinded him after so much time in darkness, but after blinking into it for a moment he saw it was merely a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly back and forth from a cable. The lift was unoccupied.
Ghostly and clanking, stinking of grease and metal, the lift disappeared up the tube and was gone. Lynch blinked, cursing that the lift had robbed him of his hard-won night vision, and waited.
After what he judged to be about five minutes -- it had taken him much longer to reach this point -- the lift returned, clanking and rattling downward, its smell of grease and metal spreading before it, and at last it passed him. He frowned into its interior, shielding his eye against its light.
Two figures rode it, one hunched and cadaverous, the other tall, finely dressed, and wearing a top hat and red-tinted sunglasses, even here underground.
Lars Gunnerson. And his poison-belching servant Fieglund.
They passed Lynch without once looking into the shadows where he hid, and from the expression on Lars Gunnerson’s face the man wouldn’t have cared if he had seen him. Gunnerson looked distracted and irritable, though it was hard to be sure with his glasses. He carried a briefcase in one hand and smoked a cigarette on a cigarette-holder in the other. As before, he wore a purplish velvet suit.
The lift descended past Lynch’s location and was gone.
Lynch stared down after it, after its dwindling light, like a firefly into the night.
Lars Gunnerson went to join Eliza.
Lars Gunnerson and Eliza . . .
Lynch’s skin crawled at the pairing, then realized something. Lars Gunnerson and Eliza shared something in common: both were supposed to be dead. Both were wealthy, powerful people, committed to the Society, and both were thought dead by the general population.
***
Lynch descended through the darkness until he saw lights below; the lift had stopped. He waited to make sure it had been vacated and descended all the way, eventually alighting on the lift top. When he heard footsteps retreating around a bend, he lowered himself and dropped to the floor, which he found earthen. His shoulder, leg and hand muscles trembled in relief, and he was tempted to issue a long, satisfied groan.
A string of lights hung from the earthen ceiling, high for a mine. Raw-cut beams buttressed the walls. This tunnel was below the main network of mining tunnels Lynch had passed and he wondered if this tunnel belonged to the mines at all. If it had been an existing tunnel during the time of the mine’s operation, it had been recently shored-up.
The tunnel soon hit an intersection. The hallway it bisected proved just as large and well-lit, and he crouched along the wall, trying to determine in which direction to go.
Footsteps faded down the hall to his right. If he wanted to follow Lars Gunnerson, that was the direction he should go. Of course, the question was whether he should see to his own self-interest first -- survival -- or if he should try to uncover the Society’s secrets. If he had truly been bent on self-preservation he supposed he should have hidden in one of the dark halls of the abandoned mine above and simply waited until the heat died down.
He had wanted to follow Eliza, and still did. He needed to know why she had faked her own death to join the Society -- why she had left him.
Theirs had not been a casual relationship. She had risked her own social position just to tryst with him. She still belonged to a class whose women must be courted and wooed, always with a chaperone, and only by eligible, wealthy gentlemen whose families would prove a good match for their own. Lynch’s family may once
have been such a prize, but when he and Eliza met it had already been on the decline. They had attended the same wealthy country church growing up, had known each other since they were children, but as their bodies grew and their hormones raged they had found time to meet outside of church, in the woods and fields they knew, in hidden glades and upon misty moors. They had grown close, very close, all outside of society’s knowledge. If Eliza had been caught, she and perhaps even her family would have been ruined -- disgraced by a liaison with the likes of the James boy. Yet she had kept at it.
When Lynch’s mother had fallen ill and he had spiraled into a depression not unlike his father’s, it had been Eliza that had pulled him out of it. And when she had been betrothed to a decrepit old man who used her as a sex slave and rarely let her leave his mansion, Lynch had been there to pull her out of her own despair. They had met secretly, continuing their affair, now risking more than social ruin; her husband would kill Lynch and Eliza too if they were caught. Meanwhile Lynch had gone to war, had realized the bloodlust in his veins, had nearly succumbed to it -- but Eliza had always been there to pull him out of it when he returned on leave, even if he had to sneak and plot to see her.
Finally he had received word (via one of her friends’ letters; her husband had censored her own) that the old man was dying, that she would finally be rid of him, that she and Lynch would be free. And then had come Lynch’s injury, his capture, and dismissal from the army. He had seen her in his fever dreams, had called out to her repeatedly -- so he’d been told -- but when he at long last climbed out of his illness the news that greeted him was her death.
He had been crushed. Destroyed.
His own family had squandered its fortunes; he would have to sell the mansion. He was a cripple. His father had died. And . . . Eliza . . .