Of Stations Infernal

by Kin S. Law

  “Oh,” said Hargreaves. Before she could protest, Funny Goat climbed the back of the lorry and hunkered down low under the cloth canopy. She tried not to stare at the backs of his legs pulling his chaps up. “I suppose I could sneak him past the town. There’s a blanket in the back there, Mr. Goat.”

  A hand came up and waved in acknowledgment.

  “You’re a good egg, miss,” said the farmer. “Not often you see a woman traveling on her own in the country. Let alone one with the gumption to help a man, ’specially a red man.”

  “Everybody needs a helping hand once in a while,” said Hargreaves. “Truth is, I don’t believe I’ve been a very good person of late.”

  “I think this will help put your accounts right,” said the farmer. “Funny Goat’s led a hard life. He’s been waiting for a ride for a week, but the moment people ’round here see his Injun nose, it’s like he’s got the pox on him. It’s those papers, talking about the Blackfoot threat all the time. Half those raids are white men dressed up in feathers and making damn fools of themselves, you mark my words.” He started cluck-clucking around like the birds in his cart.

  Hargreaves laughed, nodded enthusiastically and took her purchases to the cabin. She made to give Funny Goat one of the corn cobs she’d bought, but turned only to see a wide-brimmed hat pulled over his face and his chest rising and falling evenly. She shrugged, left the farmer to his cart, and drove on down the road.

  The meandering back roads took their toll on Hargreaves’ coal and water stores, and she didn’t much feel like scraping the dry, grassy mounds from the road to refuel her lorry. Funny Goat seemed comfortable enough on the old straw bales Hargreaves had used to hide Alphonse, though. Eventually she was obliged to use a main road, in the hopes of finding a town. Well paved and free of the old spirits of the West, it took her unerringly forward until it stopped abruptly at a checkpoint placed across a bridge. Hargreaves slowed when she saw it, and pulled over to warn her passenger.

  “Hey, Funny Goat. There’s a checkpoint here,” said Hargreaves, turning to knock on the wall of the cabin. She could see into the lorry bed from a small window, but still started when Funny Goat sat up from the pile of hay. He seemed to become swallowed up in it very easily.

  “It’s all right,” said Funny Goat. He seemed oddly calm. “Just drive up to them.”

  He could hardly know about Alphonse, disguised as a pile of scrap and some bales of hay. Hargreaves didn’t want to draw attention to her own secrets. So she nodded, and soon enough they were on their way.

  A double row of sandbags and one horse-drawn phaeton barred the near side of the bridge. There were four patrolmen, who initially seemed quite normal under their practical coats. Each man wore rifles on their shoulders. None of them wore a uniform, nor anything official. It was only when one of the men swept his coat aside to spit out a wad of sick brown tobacco that Hargreaves felt the chills march down her back. Under their coats, every patrolman wore a suit of clanker armor. The spitter strolled amicably toward her window.

  “Miss, this here’s a routine checkpoint, by order of the Militia of the State of Montana,” the man said as he arrived at her elbow. Hargreaves shook off the memory of being chased by hordes of senseless monsters and instead took in the ill fit of the suits, and the slapdash way they had been put together.

  “All right,” Hargreaves said to the militiaman. “Will you be needing my license and papers?” Of which she had forged a copy, carefully splicing her warrant card photogram onto a legitimate license in the goggle compartment. The papers were in a folder on the passenger seat, but Hargreaves made a show of rifling through some bric-a-brac on the console so she could get a bead on the disturbing armor.

  Once she took note of the rusted joints and general air of ill maintenance, she let her breath out in a slow, calming exhale. It was the gait that gave them away, she decided. No, these weren’t the cursed hauberks of piston-powered cruelty designed by the mad alchemist Mordemere. She recognized the familiar grates and riveted plates originally designed for plodding livestock. These men had cobbled together suits that surely would be useful against highwaymen with guns, but they would never be driven insane by their corrupting presence. Still, if they looked in the back, she might have to shoot them, and her .22 rounds were never any good against clankers. Alphonse would pass as some automata horse parts. Funny Goat was another matter. If worse came to worst, there were always her trusty feminine wiles.

  “Gosh, no.” The militiamen laughed. Hargreaves relaxed. “Them Feddie papers ain’t worth shit. Pardon my French. Possession is nine-tenths the law out here.”

  “I have no other papers,” said Hargreaves.

  “That’s all right. A good white gal like you’s all right by us,” said the man, leering just a bit. Hargreaves could only smile.

  “Once we take a look in the back.”

  She froze, trying not to let her panic show.

  But the militiaman was already gesturing to the other two men in clockworked suits, who were just climbing with softly whistling joints into the bed of the lorry. Hargreaves could see them in her mirror, a little. Her foot hovered over the throttle. If they found Funny Goat or Alphonse…

  The man jumped into the lorry bed, setting the springs squeaking, and the sound of his steps paused. Hargreaves felt the lorry bounce as he jumped off the back again. Then the first man appeared once more at her window, which was a little like having her heart jump ticking out of her chest. Those damned suits!

  “Looks like you’re headed to town to trade some scrap,” said the militiaman amicably. “Listen, once you’re done, the militia like to visit the Corn Hole on the east side. I’d be happy to buy a lady a drink.”

  “I’m sure,” said Hargreaves with what nerves remained to her. She tried to look inviting as she drove off, and was so concerned with getting away and checking on Funny Goat, she nearly missed the tattoo under the man’s collar, just peeking out of the makeshift clanker armor. For a moment, Hargreaves thought she saw a treacherous hound.

  Two miles past the bridge, she stopped in a deserted side road. She jumped down and walked to the back of the lorry, but Funny Goat was gone.

  Instead of the handsome burnished man, Hargreaves found two sturdy feathers joined by a glass bead. A gift, she supposed. She braided the ornament into her hair, admiring herself in a mirror. She hoped Funny Goat would be able to find his way through Spelter unharmed.

  Once she reached the town, things began to come more than passing strange. As she turned down the main avenue, a pile of sandbags at the corner made the road difficult to pass. From the milkman to the meter maids, everybody had a characteristic lump in their belts. Hargreaves gasped when she saw a small boy, no older than six or seven, sauntering down the street clutching a brightly painted, child-size rifle. She caught a newspaper that was stuck in a fence nearby, which seemed almost jubilant about the civil unrest that had enveloped Wiliston and Watford City back in the Dakotas. Hargreaves frowned. She had boarded a plains-crawler a few days ago from Sidney, not two towns from those places, and there had been no news of unrest. Not to mention those towns lay on the other side of the ether desert she had just crossed. Where would the news come from then?

  There was no shortage of space in the wide streets of Spelter, so Hargreaves left the lorry in a quiet alley and entered the town proper. She wanted to match records from Burgess’ books to the town hall ledgers. The numbers were suspicious. For a dealer in gears, Burgess was regularly buying equipment usually used for food processing: grain mills, industrial grinders, tons and tons of salt. If she was passing through, she might as well look into the capacious pantry Burgess was building. But in her darkest heart, Hargreaves also knew what such things could also be used for. The manufacture of boiled hams, yes, but also disease mediums. Pestilence in a can. And Spelter, with its age-old automata horses and its brand of provincial xenophobia, seemed just the innocent sort of place that would produce such things without asking too many questions.

/>   When she reached a Greco-Roman courthouse, she discovered the book she had copied the numbers into was gone, along with some other small notes. Fumbling about, she cursed. Was it still in Alphonse? Or dropped, at the waystation, or at Appleton? Thinking she might telegraph the waystation at least to check, she found the nearest townsperson, a matron on the arm of a large, bearded man who scowled at Hargreaves. Before she could speak, the man interceded rudely.

  “Excuse me, I was speaking to the lady,” said Hargreaves, affronted.

  “I speak for her,” said the man. “And she ain’t no lady.”

  Recovering quickly from the rudeness and the double negative, Hargreaves asked for the nearest telegraph. The man pointed to a small general store before hurrying the woman away by the arm. He mumbled something under his breath, something that sounded like “foreigners.”

  In fact, most of the passersby seemed insulted by her very presence. They kept staring at her corset, worn on the outside, when she walked into the general store. When she addressed the men in it, they wouldn’t speak to her. One of them muttered behind her back. She caught something that sounded like “off her leash.” She asked the front desk for coal, and was told rather reluctantly that there was a depot within walking distance.

  For Vanessa Hargreaves, Scotland Yard Inspector, a pattern began to emerge: a woman out and about on her own was in very poor taste. Despite the bile bubbling up inside her, she had to concede things would go more easily if she was not the subject of the town’s ire. The inspector was no stranger to disguise, and it took merely one trip through some untended laundry lines to emerge with trousers, a cap to conceal her golden hair, and a thick vest to hold down her ample bosom. Undoing her corset and modest bustle was a guilty pleasure. As soon as she stepped into the street, her figure instantly separated her from the womenfolk.

  “Men. Such dolts,” she murmured, with some bitter satisfaction.

  A horse-and-four passed by drawn by automata horses. It stopped not far ahead, and two men got out with a crate of magazines. One of them began to display them to passersby, while the other put on a square wooden pack jingling with change. A third man appeared with a long pole that unfurled into a banner depicting a severe-looking man with a priestly collar. Several people appeared to offer custom.

  “The latest from Reverend Deveraux on the evils and arrogance of so-called ether science!” the man with the banner advertised.

  “Blackfoot scalpers seen south of Missoula! The Ghost Train sighted in Cooperstown, Rugby, and Bottineau—citizens unaccounted for! Is Spelter next? Congress talks soot tax! Coal miners threatened! That’ll be a nickel,” The second man joined in, as he made change for a customer from his pack. There were switches at one of the straps, which he depressed to produce the change jangling down to a slot at his waist. “Troop ships off the shores of Milwaukee!”

  Hargreaves bought one, a twenty-page sheaf about the size of a penny dreadful. It was about as enlightening, the same sort of tripe as the official news. She was just wondering who in their right mind would believe it when she heard another customer gasp.

  “They bombed it! They even got to New York!”

  Curious, Hargreaves turned the pages of the pamphlet and found a small, blurry photogram. Though she hadn’t seen it before, she knew it instantly for what it was; the wreckage of the streets of New York after the great tarantula automata had wrecked the sewers beneath it. The shot had been taken with the iconic shape of the bridge in the background. Shockingly, the headline beneath claimed that foreign powers had collaborated with the Indian nations and conceived to attack. Exactly who those powers were was a matter of some speculation, but the article was not shy about pointing fingers at everyone “from the blacks to the gypsies.”

  Hargreaves, had had enough of this mockery of journalism. She left the little knot of people surrounding the cart and soon found herself at a market, where she could enjoy her newfound gender freedom somewhat. The collection of stalls was located on a wide green, full of autumn melons and golden corn with tumbling, untrimmed beards. The farmers treated her as if she were a young, beardless man, but at least they smiled and did business. She wondered how they would feel if Rosa or Captain Clemens walked through the market, given the sorts of headlines they were exposed to. It was hard to find a single person not of European descent in Spelter, but easy to see why people who lived out their lives in such plenty would be afraid of losing it to things they had never seen.

  More of the automata horses were tied up at some public hitching rails. They got along with flesh-and-blood horses even through mouthfuls of sparking coal chips. Rust tinged the plates of their shins and their bellies. Clearly, the horses had known the sound of automata for a long time, perhaps even grown up as foals scampering about steel flanks. They did not find those clockworked horses strange or terrifying.

  “I have to bugger off out of here as soon as I can,” murmured Hargreaves to herself. She had been expecting a steamworked utopia when she touched on American shores. Instead, this place seemed rife with ancient ills.

  The trains, like they were in every other city she had passed, were not running through Spelter. At the station, she found the ticket office shuttered and the news boards quiet, the long lines of ticking letter tablets flipped to their blank place holder faces. There was some ether traffic at the telegraph office, but with the trains not running across the ether desert to Minneapolis, there was nothing to carry messages from the East than lines buried more than a century ago.

  Only the Fred Hornby’s next door seemed to be doing well, supplying good food to bustling group of locals. Hargreaves enjoyed a clandestine pastry while she consulted a map behind the counter for the fuel depot. She smiled at the two men behind the counter, a pair of twin brothers she told apart by their demeanor. One stayed behind the service window, a shy man whose dark skin made him almost invisible. The other ran the counter with a smile, a flip of his neatly tied dreadlocks, and a grin. Hargreaves watched him bring food to a pair of ruddy-cheeked ladies sitting near a window. She could just read their lips.

  “What in tarnation! You watch where you’re putting those thar hands of yours,” said one of them.

  “Maude, the boy doesn’t know any better. And look, he’s got the plates on a towel.”

  “How can you stand people like that?” asked Hargreaves when the waiter came round.

  “Hmm? Oh, them,” said the waiter as he got Hargreaves more coffee. Truly, she was beginning to see the appeal. “The town’s full of them. We’d make no profit if we turned every racist away. And the rail doesn’t just bring business, it brings more civilized folk every day, shipped in with every balloon.”

  “Why ought you care? It’s not like it’s your place…oh,” said Hargreaves as she caught the ocean of meaning in the man’s eyes. “Duly chastised, Mr.…”

  “Cormac. Fredrick, and my brother William. We just bought the franchise a few days ago. Truth be told we’re hoping nobody finds out we own the place, and don’t just work here,” said Frederick, a touch more ominous than Hargreaves cared for.

  “What will they do if they find out?” asked Hargreaves. “What would you do?”

  “Honestly? Hope the racists don’t run very fast.”

  When she left the Fred Hornby’s a little while later, Hargreaves felt more than ready to leave, and headed straight for the fuel depot. She was able to barter for some cans of water and a few bundles of coal. It would get her through the thin part of Idaho and into the gold rush towns of Washington. From there, she thought she might book passage on a ship bound for the Lands Beyond. If the fare was too dear, she could go south where adventurers and explorers congregated more often. Crescent City, or Fort Bragg. But not San Francisco, where she had discovered the Ubique western headquarters had been built. If Officers Ortega and Ferrera were right, Burgess had dark dealings with that seller of sundries, and Hargreaves did not know how far his reach would be. She could see one of their cam and cog markings in that very depot, adv
ertising quality steamworks right over her head. San Francisco would be the belly of the beast, and she would be delivering the Cook box to the enemy.

  As she finished her fuel transaction, she overheard two men leaning against a truck, unshaven but otherwise quite civilized. Their truck had been patched with canvas and other impromptu but sturdy materials. One of them was leafing through one of the onerous pamphlets.

  “…don’t give a damn about us. It’s wild out here.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe Devereaux’s bupkiss.”

  “The Blackfoots coming out of their reservations on raiding parties? Nah. But that Ghost Train? I’d rather be safe than sorry. They say it pulls in at the witching hour to let dead men aboard. Its boilers are full of blood, and its lines are strung with the bones of the damned.”

  “The mayor is saying we shouldn’t have repealed all Washington’s gun laws. He thinks we can defend ourselves perfectly well even if we wait for a telegraphed check.”

  “And pay their fees and taxes in the meantime. No, we need our guns now against those Blackfoots and pirates and ghosts and God knows what else. Lazy Mexies taking all the jobs up north, I hear. Uppity niggers too.”

  “Hey, now, I don’t stand for that kind of talk. My cousin is married to a freedman, a decent feller up in Traverse City. Trades in furs, proper businessman he is. T’ain’t his fault he’s blacker than a kettle.”

  “Sorry, I knew it. I knew it.”

  Hargreaves nearly retched. She had been in town for most of a day, and hadn’t seen a single Red Indian or blackamoor about in the open, let alone an Arab. Now she knew why. But this talk of the Ghost Train had her attention, though it didn’t seem to be the time to think about it.

  The attendant had barely finished loading the lorry and unbuckling the water hose when a ringing alarum tore through the air. At once, the space in the fuel depot was a flurry of activity. The two chatting men jumped into their truck and steamed away, rusty pistons clacking up a complaining din. The attendant rushed into the depot’s small shop and depressed a large lever. Hargreaves instinctively ducked for cover, thinking she was under fire, but the loud clanking sounds were coming from every water pump and fuel dispensing machine. Experimentally, she tried a hose, which only regurgitated a few hot drops before going dry.