by Devon Monk
The Swift screamed out her killing song as the engine pumped thunder and power into her bones. The repercussions of another cannon shot—this one wide—cracked through the air.
Closer. So close, Hink could jump the door and land on the Black Sledge’s wing, if he wanted.
“Now!” he yelled to Mr. Seldom. But even as the word left his lips, Mr. Seldom had already let loose the flaming hook.
Guffin got himself settled in to see how many swear words he could fit in a breath as he, Hink, and Lum fought the controls to pull the Swift up out of her suicide dive.
The wind gave them hell, but just as Hink was thinking it was time to tell the crew to kiss their boots good-bye, the breeze shifted and nudged the Swift’s tail, giving her the air she needed. The Swift scraped over the top of the Black Sledge, leaving more than a little dust behind.
“Seldom?” Hink called out.
“Dead on, Captain,” Seldom yelled.
And then as if in response, the Black Sledge shuddered and rocked as she fell away beneath them. A gout of flame took up the port side of her—Seldom’s torch hitting dry tinder. They’d go up in a flame if they didn’t dump water to put out the fire. Of course, without enough water, there’d be no steam to keep her up or put her down soft. Especially not with a storm looming.
The way Hink reckoned it, Captain Barlow had himself a handful of hard decisions to make right about now.
And otherwise occupied was just how Hink liked the crew of the ships he was about to board.
“Guffin. The wheel,” Hink said.
Guffin jammed a staypin in the controls, unlatched his belt line, and with one hand on the overhead bars made his way across the ship to the helm.
Once there, Hink unlatched and left the wheel in Guffin’s hands, not waiting to see if he had latched the harness to the interior framework of the ship or kicked boots into the straps.
Hink caught at the framework as he ran to the door Seldom was manning.
“Give me as long as you can,” Hink said.
Seldom nodded. “Always do.”
Hink unlatched his breathing gear, dragging the scarf at his neck up over his nose, and buttoned it to the leather lining at the edge of his goggles. This high, the cold could freeze a man’s face right off.
Seldom unplugged Hink’s hose, then latched around Hink’s torso the harness that would haul him home. He handed Hink the three-hooks, two rakelike handles with metal barbs at one end and leather cuffs at the other. Hink buckled the cuffs around his wrists and gripped the handles.
“Keep her up, boys!” he yelled. Then Captain Hink stepped out the door and into the brace of wind.
The fall was fast, hard, and at the same time seemed to take forever. Wind blasted his eyes, face, and near tore off his clothes. The Black Sledge was just a few stories below him, and if he hit it right, the netting that covered her canvas would be plenty enough for him to catch on to.
Captain Hink hit the ship and swung the hooks in both his hands, which did a hell of a job of tangling up with the ropes.
He grunted in pain as his shoulders bore the weight of his landing and his arms nearly ripped from their sockets. It took him a second to breathe air back into his lungs and shake the dizzy out of his head. Then he was scrambling down the netting, toward the windows.
He hung down off the netting, his harness line still attached to the Swift. If this was gonna get done, it’d have to be fast, before the lines fouled and he’d have to cut free.
That is, if he lived long enough to cut free.
He pulled his gun, shot the window, and then smashed the glass out of it with the heavy barbed end of the hook. No return fire, which meant he’d caught them away from the glass, maybe busy, say, trying to douse the flame crawling up the side of their ship.
He pushed in through the broken window. Not much slack on his line left, and he’d be damned if he was going to cut free to go any farther.
The smoke that rolled through the old tub was choking and hot. Captain Barlow was somewhere in that mess, shouting orders. The dim shape of men scurrying to do as their captain told them impressed Hink. Even though Barlow was a snake-bellied traitor, he knew how to run a tight ship.
If the Sledge had any luck still on her ledger, she might make it through this little debacle.
They say luck favors the brave and fortune favors fools. Hink decided that he must be just enough of both today. One of Barlow’s crewmen was shock-still and strapped to the side bar, likely watching his life march before his eyes. Hink didn’t have to take but a step or two before he was in front of the man.
“I’m commandeering your services, sailor.” Hink hit him across the back of the head with the blunt end of the hook. The man sagged and Hink took up some swearing as he pulled the extra hauling harness off of his belt and strapped it around the man. He attached a second line onto the rope that was latched to his own harness so they both had a chance to be pulled back up to the Swift.
“You better be worth the trouble,” Hink muttered as he lifted the man up across his shoulder and stomped back to the window.
Once he’d muscled the both of them out the hole and up the ropes on the outside of the ship, a yell from behind him clued him in that the crew had been stirred up. Then gunshots rang out, louder than the flames, louder than the fire, louder than old Barlow himself. Hink knew he’d better get off this puffer fast if he wanted to keep on living.
He pulled on the rope, three hard tugs in a row, and pushed away from the ship like a kid swinging for a water hole.
The added weight of the unconscious man on his harness near took the breath back out of him as they slammed into the side of the ship. But Mr. Seldom had caught his signal. Hink felt the jerk and pull of the rope winching upward.
The Swift’s engines changed tone as Guffin maneuvered her up and away from the foundering Black Sledge.
Hink glanced up at his ship. She was a shiny beauty, ghostlike and luminescent against the smoke and clouds. Even swinging the waltz on a string beneath her, he couldn’t help but smile.
The ground far, far below him twirled as he was hauled upward. The Black Sledge seemed to have done some fair good in putting out the fire, and was smoking downward at a relatively safe speed toward a green bowl of a valley cradled between two peaks. They might make it down just fine.
Or they might be stuck in the middle of a range, with little in the way of supplies and a winter storm bearing down.
As if reflecting on his thoughts, the sky flashed with a rattle of lightning, thunder rolling way up above the glim fields. Rain started off in spits that turned into a good hard-driven drizzle. Even at this height, it was still just rain and not ice or snow.
By the time Hink was reaching up for Mr. Seldom’s and Molly Gregor’s hands to haul him into the Swift, he was soaked down to his long underwear and shaking from the cold.
“Who’s this?” Molly asked of the man he deposited on the floor.
“Didn’t catch his name,” Hink said, shivering under the blanket she tossed over his shoulders.
“If you’re cold, Captain,” she said, “you can work the boilers on the way home.” Molly’s sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and sweat trickled down the side of her neck and glossed her cheeks. Every inch of her exposed skin was tanned and dusted with soot from the big engine.
Hink grinned. “Wouldn’t want to put you out of a job, Molly.”
“The way you handle a boiler?” She scoffed. “We’d be dead before sunrise. Captain,” she added.
Seldom finished unlatching the harnesses and ropes between Hink and their guest, and then dragged the man by the armpits off to one side where he could latch him into the straps and framework there and keep him from getting stepped on by the crew.
Hink shoved up to his feet and, holding the blanket around him, walked over to Guffin, at the wheel.
“Heading?”
“Due west. Thought we could bed down in one of the hollows there.”
“We got
the guts for that, Molly?” Hink asked.
“We’ll need to take it slow, but she’ll get us there,” Molly said. “So long as the storm doesn’t kick up too strong.”
“Aim us over the ridge, Mr. Guffin,” Hink said. “Easy as you can.”
“Aye, Captain,” Guffin said.
Seldom stepped over to navigation and Lum Ansell kept steady where he was, humming a low song, as was his habit in the air.
Hink walked the planking, trying to pace the warm back into his bones and taking the time to think things through. Who he should have gone for was Barlow, not this ship plugger. For all he knew the man was new to the hills and didn’t have a darn idea of why Barlow was looking for him.
“He’s coming to,” Molly announced. “Want I should put the snore back in him?”
“No, he needs talking to, and I need to do the talking.” Captain Hink stopped pacing and stood in front of the man, who had a blanket thrown on him. Likely that was Molly’s doing. Sure, the man was a captive and they’d just as soon throw him out to kick the breeze if he so much as spit, but if he froze, they wouldn’t be able to chisel any words out of him.
Hink waited for the man to rouse himself enough to pull the blanket up around his chin and tuck his knees to his chest.
“Have a few questions for you, sailor,” Hink said. “And if you answer them nice and clear, and nice and true, I won’t have my second kick you out of this boat.”
He had to raise his voice enough to be heard over the engines and the wind and rain squalling around out there. From the rock and yaw of the Swift, it was darned clear they were airborne.
Hink watched as the man scratched the tally of each of those things in his brain.
“I don’t want no trouble,” he finally said. Well, croaked was more like it. The smoke and the cold had run roughshod over his vocals.
“Then we’re of an agreement,” Hink said. “No trouble. You give me answers, and I’ll see that your boots are planted on solid ground. Here’s question number one: who is Captain Barlow answering to?”
“Said his name was the Saint,” the man said.
Hink tried not to let his surprise show. The man jumped so quick into telling him the truth, it caught him quiet for a second. Which worked out just fine. The man must have interpreted Hink’s surprised silence as an invitation to keep on babbling.
“I don’t know anything else, mister. Captain,” the man said. “All I know is the cap said there’s a general who had a need for us to do our job and do it quickly.”
“What was your job?” Hink asked.
“Find Marshal Paisley Cadwaller Hink Cage and bring him in.”
“Paisley?” Molly said, smiling. “What kind of pansy-pants name is Paisley?”
Hink did not answer her, though he sent a glare in her direction that would have burned through steel. His mama had her reasons for giving him so many names.
“So once you found this marshal, what was it you were going to do to him?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “Take him to the Saint for the thing he was holding out Vicinity’s way.”
“Holding?” Hink said, bending down over the man. “What thing? What thing is the marshal holding?”
“Don’t know,” the man said, cowering back from Hink’s questions as if each word was a rock thrown at his head. “Just heard Barlow say something about a holder and Vicinity and Marshal Hink Cage. I don’t know nothing more. I swear by it. I don’t know nothing more.”
Man was half scared out of his mind, that was sure.
“Captain,” Molly said. “You might want to step back a bit.”
Hink frowned and looked at Molly. She nodded toward his hand.
In that hand was the man’s shirt, and in that shirt was the man. Hink had reached out and grabbed him and hauled him onto his feet so he could yell in his face proper. Had done it without thinking, that temper catching hold of his hands and using them before his brain could send in suggestions.
No wonder the man was quaking.
“Sure thing,” Hink said. “Sure.” He let go of the man and took a step or two back. “Molly, we got anything hot to drink on this boat?”
“Might,” she said.
“See to it the sailor here gets something to knock the freeze off.”
Molly nodded and headed back to the keg stove at the rear of the ship to rustle up some tea.
Hink took off in the opposite way and came up behind Guffin. “Give over the wheel,” he said.
Guffin untethered and stepped back.
“We putting down in a pocket, Captain?”
Hink latched line to the frame and stomped his boots into the floor bracers. “We’re cutting over the range.”
“Over? Where to?”
“Vicinity,” he said. “Before the Saint’s devils get there first.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cedar Hunt eyed the rising dead piled up in the center of the town. He needed to get Rose to the wagon, then ride out of here before the undead could follow. Only problem was the undead were between him and the wagon, and Rose was bleeding badly from that shoulder wound.
He backtracked, working in the shadows of the buildings and trying to get to the wagon around the other way.
The idea of leaving an entire town full of bodies being trotted around by the Strange set a rod of fear down his spine. How long would they stay in this town, and if they got loose, how many people would die?
The stack of bodies was still unstacking. Some of them slow and awkward, with no hands, arms, feet, or eyes to guide them. They crawled about, moaning and mewling. They might have once been human, but it was clear and sure from the way they moved, and from the unholy sounds coming out of them, that they were human no longer.
Others pulled up quick, catching on to the hows of walking. If not exactly graceful, they were at least steady and growing steadier with every step. First they walked. Then they broke into a jog. Fast. Headed his way.
He shifted his hold on Rose Small, who was still unconscious in his arms, and pulled his gun.
Shot down the two in the lead, but there were more, too many more, behind them. He couldn’t fight without putting Rose down. The townfolk paused over the two men he’d shot, they pushed at them, pulled at them. And then the men he’d shot stood back up.
Didn’t look like a bullet could kill a thing that was already dead. Leastwise not a shot to the heart or the head.
Cedar swore and started running. He needed an open door, solid walls, and something that could cause a whole hell of a lot more damage than his revolver.
The crack of a shotgun blew apart the night. Cedar jerked toward the blast.
The Madder brothers were driving the wagon hard his way, coming up from behind the undead and rolling over the ones who got in the way of the big iron-rimmed wheels.
Alun sat the driver’s seat, snapping the reins to push those big draft horses to full speed. The horses were more than willing to give it to him, dinner plate–sized hooves smashing through flesh and bone just as easily as through mud.
Cadoc Madder stood on the buckboard braced next to Alun. His geared-up shotgun was slung low at his shoulder. He took aim for the middle of the unalives again as the wagon rolled through them.
The flash of gunpowder lit up the night and Cedar’s sight went muddy.
When he could blink his focus back, he saw the dead that had just fallen picking themselves up, while others, too broken to walk, still found ways to crawl or drag themselves toward him.
“Don’t know what you did, Mr. Hunt,” Alun yelled, “but you’ve angered up a mess of Strange tonight. Never seen them so intent on taking one man down.”
“Rose is hurt,” Cedar said. “She’s bleeding.”
The Madders pulled the big wagon up beside him. Bryn was on his horse, and Rose’s and Cedar’s horses were tethered to the back of the wagon along with the mule.
Where were Mae and Wil?
Before he could ask, Mae leaned out of t
he wagon, throwing down the wooden steps.
“Hurry,” she said.
Cedar was up the stairs and into the wagon fast.
The undead were still coming, still running, slogging through the mud and muck. Not just the pile of people they’d gathered. More townfolk poured out from houses up a ways, places Cedar and the Madders hadn’t gotten to yet. Most of them seemed to have good strong legs beneath them, and were closing the distance fast.
“Put her on the bed,” Mae said as she found her satchel and started digging for herbs and bandages. Cedar set Rose down as gently as he could. He braced for the wagon to start rolling, expecting the lurch of the drafts pulling fast, but they were not moving.
“Go!” he yelled, not knowing what the Madders were waiting for. “Where’s Wil?”
Mae was already bent over Rose, pulling her wool coat open and unbuttoning her dress so she could see to her wound.
“I don’t know,” she said, her words coming out fast and slippery as if she was fitting them in between a conversation she was trying to listen to. “Oh. Oh, no.” She had pulled Rose’s dress away to reveal her shoulder, neck, and her chest down to the blood-soaked edge of her shift.
“I need…” Mae started. “No, not that. Not those things.” She brushed at the air as if pushing away hands that were not helping. “I need hot water. I need herbs to stanch.” She looked up at Cedar, her cheeks flushed but her eyes clear, if a bit startled. “I might need tines if there’s a bullet in there to be dug out. Can you help me see if it shot her all the way through?”
“It wasn’t a bullet,” he said, propping Rose up so Mae could hold the lantern closer to her back.
She finished pulling Rose’s coat off, then examined the back of her dress. “No blood here, so it didn’t go clean through. What hit her?”
“A key. A tin key. About half the size of my pinky,” he said. “We ran into the Strange. A trap. Triggered the fuse and”—he hesitated to go too clearly into detail about the girl exploding—“the house blew to bits. Could be wood, metal, or bone in there too.”
Mae slipped Rose’s dress the rest of the way off her so that she could look at the bare skin of her back.