Hellfire

by Jeff Provine

  Nate clambered to his feet.

  The sheriff stepped back. “Going to go peacefully this time?”

  Nate nodded his head. “Mrs. Martha Kemp in Lake Providence, on Wilkinson Street. She’s my mother. Tell her what happened to me.”

  Blake nodded once. “Of course.”

  Someone pushed him from behind, and Nate had to take a step forward to keep from falling. He looked back at the monstrous hunchback, head and shoulders taller than him. There was nothing he could do but glare, so he did.

  The same chill came over him as he’d gotten standing near the short hunchback. Nate forced it away. He had to keep his senses, for Ma and Ann’s sake.

  They marched him to the anchor resting beneath the floating airship. The cable groaned softly as it held tight to the anchor in the ground. A fresh rope was thrown down from the stubby balcony by a man in engineer’s coveralls.

  The small hunchback scooped it up and spread out a set of leather belts. He shuffled around Nate, buckling them around his shoulders, crotch, and waist.

  The hunchback smelled of the rotten egg at the back of the henhouse. It made Nate’s eyes water and a lump form in his throat. Nate had to swallow not to gag.

  There was a whistle of steam, and a winch above growled. The belts went tight. Nate sailed up into the air along with the little hunchback. Beneath him, the huge hunchback wrestled with the anchor, freeing its spikes from the muddy ground.

  As the belts hauled him up, the whole scene spread out beneath Nate. He saw the sheriff and the man with the mustache trading a last few words while the scrawny man stood back, scribbling away on his paper pad. Beyond them, the wrecked locomotive rested face-first in the bayou, its tender slumped over the back of the engine.

  “Wait a minute,” Nate muttered.

  He had ridden the turn before the bridge over the Bartholomew six days a week for the past three years of his life. It was gentle. They’d already cut their speed over the Ouachita, and the engine would’ve gone slower and slower with the valve open. The locomotive should not have even been able to jump the rail, let alone fly the distance into the water. It simply couldn’t go fast enough. The monster must have pushed it along.

  “I’m not crazy!” Nate blurted. He threw up his shackled hands. “Look! The train can’t go that fast!”

  The short hunchback gave a vicious snort and shoved him inside the airship.

  Chapter Six

  Sheriff Blake watched the airship sail toward the east. A stream of sulfurous smoke trailed it, creating a yellowish haze before it disappeared into the darkening sky. There was nothing he could do now about the fireman. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned away.

  The airship’s anchor had left a torn-up pit about a foot deep. When the train came up from Lake Providence with the men and tools to repair the broken rail, he’d have to borrow a shovel and smooth it out before someone stumbled into it.

  His deputies were sitting in the wagon. Kemp had torn them up trying to escape. Actions like that made him out to be guilty, or at least mad, but something about this mess made Blake’s dinner curdle in his stomach.

  Husk clambered down from the crashed locomotive. Blake watched him write down another note and then tuck his pad and pencil into his coat pocket. The reporter strode up to him on his crane’s legs.

  “Fleeing justice, horse theft, striking two officers of the law,” Husk said. “There’s a lot more you could have gotten him on than wrecking a train.”

  Blake pursed his lips. He tried to think, but his mind felt slow as mud.

  Husk didn’t seem to have that problem. Pointing up at the locomotive, he said, “It’s all cool up there now. The cab is torn to shreds, and there are a few holes where rivets burst along the side of the firebox, but otherwise it’s in pretty good shape for a crashed locomotive.”

  Blake hummed in agreement.

  “You all right, Sheriff?”

  Blake opened his mouth and blew out a slow sigh before speaking. “Something ain’t right.”

  “What’s that?”

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t know, just something feels wrong about all this.”

  “Seems fairly standard to me,” Husk told hm. “Fireman goes a little mad, crashes the train. It’s second-page stuff.”

  Blake took a hand out of his pocket and raised a finger. “He didn’t crash the train. He crashed the locomotive. He disconnected the cars and set the brake to save the rest of the train.”

  Husk dropped his jaw without opening his lips, jutting out his chin under his comically long face.

  “Ever hear of a man with Stoker’s Madness having the good sense to save the cars in the middle of wrecking the locomotive?” Blake asked.

  Husk puffed out his lips, and his face returned to normal. “No, I haven’t. Usually folks gone mad like that keep swinging shovels and biting until they’re pinned down.”

  “Exactly,” Blake said.

  “So you don’t think he’s crazy? He blamed the crash on a monster!”

  Blake pursed his lips again to think. Finally, he shook his head. “Yeah. That boy’s most likely off his rocker.”

  “I guess we can never know for certain,” Husk said. He clicked his tongue. “And better a rest home than the hangman’s noose for murder.”

  “Murder?”

  “The engineer. I imagine he was thrown somewhere back along the rail, unless Kemp did something to him earlier on.”

  Blake turned and looked east again. He could barely see the puff of smoke the airship floating near the first stars of the night.

  “They just up and left,” Blake realized aloud.

  “What?”

  “The men from the Rail Agency. They said they would search for the engineer from the air, but they’re heading straight back toward Lake Providence.”

  “There’s not too much light left. Maybe they’re coming back in the morning.”

  Blake shook his head. “There’s plenty of light to follow the rails. In fact, we could launch a search party with lanterns on foot, but the marshal specifically told us that the Agency would handle it.”

  Husk jutted out his chin again. “Well, they don’t have the best reputation for caring about railroad workers.”

  “It’s more than that,” Blake said. “They know something we don’t. There aren’t too many places the engineer, or at least his body, could be. They don’t want us looking.”

  Both men stood for a beat of silence. Blake glared at the airship, willing it to turn back and give up some answers. It wouldn’t.

  “So,” Husk said, “what are you going to do?”

  Blake turned back to the newspaperman. “You said there were two other crashes like this?”

  “One outside of Shreveport, the other northwest up in Faber’s Bluff.”

  “Anybody survive those?”

  Husk squinted in thought. “Nobody survived the Shreveport crash. Locomotive went runaway and then exploded. Witnesses saw the men try to scramble out of the cab, but it went up too fast.”

  Blake closed his eyes in memoriam.

  “The one at Faber’s Bluff was an explosion, too. It killed the train’s crew, but there was a courier riding along with a special delivery.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Husk shook his head. “Taken away for questioning by the Rail Agency. I haven’t read anything about him since, and I read twelve newspapers a day. Local and national.”

  “They’re hiding something?” Blake asked.

  “Sure seems that way.”

  A cold wind came up from the bayou. The tender swung gently on the upturned locomotive, letting out a vicious groan of metal against metal. It would take a whole team to salvage the wreckage. Blake wondered if it could even be repaired.

  He cleared his throat. “What have you got going tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got to work up my article on this tonight,” Husk said. “Tomorrow’s nothing more than a few local updates about town gossip and a write-up about the Mi
dsummer’s Day festival in Providence this Saturday.”

  “Feel like catching the morning train to Shreveport and seeing if you can get any more out of those witnesses? Maybe anything about monsters?”

  “Are you serious? You want me to ask around about monsters?”

  Blake sighed. He couldn’t believe he thought it himself. “All I know is Kemp was willing to give us answers, as preposterous as those seemed. The Rail Agency doesn’t want us knowing something, and monsters are at least a start.”

  Husk laughed aloud. “And you’re the one always riding me about printing ridiculous stories!”

  “Think of how many papers it’d sell,” Blake said.

  Husk stopped laughing. He arched a thin eyebrow and let his head roll back and forth. He shrugged one lanky shoulder. “I reckon I could. What about you?”

  “I’ve got to go into Lake Providence and look up Kemp’s mother. She’s liable to worry.”

  “No monsters for you, then?”

  “Officially, no,” Blake said. He looked back east again. “But it wouldn’t hurt to follow up on Kemp and that courier.”

  Husk laid a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get too eager with the Rail Agency. They have a reputation—”

  “I like to think I have one myself as an honorable man,” Blake told him. “A God-fearing man has bigger things to worry about than the constructs of man.”

  Husk gave a grinned and patted the sheriff. Without a goodbye, he walked away.

  Blake watched him wave to the deputies and walk on to where his horse had been retied to the tree. Kemp had nearly gotten away on that horse. It wouldn’t have been hard to track him, but then he didn’t seem worried about getting caught. He just seemed to need to get away.

  Blake had been there to stop him. He didn’t use the ham-fisted hands the Rail Agency did; he just stood in the way and would have made Kemp run him down to escape. Kemp didn’t. He was a man willing to fight, but he wasn’t a killer.

  Blake mumbled to himself, “I should have let him go.”

  Chapter Seven

  The warm odor of cedar was thick inside the airship. Nate liked cedar. It reminded him of his grandmother’s old trunk where she kept family quilts older than the American Revolution, so she said.

  They used cedar because it was so light, he’d been told by a friend from the old days stoking at the laundry who had gone on to serve the engine for an airship. It was the same for the aluminum nails and bands that kept the cedar together, though those were so expensive that just the scrap from an airship would be worth more than Nate could earn in his entire life working on the rails. Anything seemed light compared to the heavy iron of the locomotives Nate drove.

  Lightness had its place, but Nate liked the ground. The train might sway, but it was solid on its wheels on an unchanging path. Up in the sky, there was no telling where a breeze might come from. It must have been hell keeping the ship on course.

  The airship swayed under him again. Cables groaned from somewhere above him, readjusting like an old man in his rocking chair.

  Trains swayed, too, but they never had to worry about plummeting hundreds of feet if something went wrong. Nate rattled his shackles against the chain on the wall where they’d tied him. If the airship decided to fall, there would be nothing he could do but go along with it.

  “They almost never do,” he told himself.

  Still, his teeth chattered. He assured himself it was because of the cold air so far above the warmth of the earth. The sun had set a while back, and the night breezes slipped in through the open portholes. Nate’s ash-stained shirt suddenly seemed thin. He wondered if he could reach the porthole and close it.

  Nate shifted up from where he sat on the floor. The hunchbacks had thrown him in this little room at the back of the airship near the disembarking balcony. It was a half-empty storeroom with boxes piled in one of the corners. They were lashed to eyehooks set in the wall, the same as he was across the room.

  Nate pulled as far as he could from the chain, pressing the metal of the shackles into his wrists. His right shoulder burned, so he gave up trying to pull.

  The porthole was still a yard away from him. He could see through it, at least. There wasn’t too much to see in the darkness of night with the moon still in its first quarter and already setting. He made out a few creeks and farmsteads cleared out of the woods. A faint glow came from the east ahead of them.

  Struggling closer to the wall, he could see in front of the airship. There, the city of Lake Providence lay out before him, visible even at night. The oxbow lake shined, and the buildings stood tall. A few of the smokestacks had haze streaming out of them as factory men worked the nightshift. Right in the middle, down the public mall from the new capitol, was the City Center building. It was a prize of modern architecture, something the politicians had been harping on for over a year as it grew up from the ground. Now just a few cranes stood over it like mother herons as workers finished its construction in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Burr’s settlement of Bastrop alongside the Midsummer festival. Beyond the city, he could make out the famed Burr Bridge across Stack Island, built after the earthquakes of 1813, long before Nate’s parents came to the then-territory. It glowed with lamps that reflected on the sleepy Mississippi.

  None of it had been there a half century ago, just a few Indian settlements and Colonel Burr’s colony near Bastrop. When steam power began its surge, Burr was quick to do everything he could to improve the new territory he dubbed Gloriana. The bridge across the Mississippi was one of a dozen feats of engineering that showered wealth upon the state. Now trains crisscrossed it up to Ozarka and Texas, tractors ploughed farms, factories churned out goods, and even airships flew. All that progress came in under a lifetime, yet Nate couldn’t imagine the city not being there.

  From the air, it didn’t look real through the hazy smoke. It seemed like a painting by an unknown artist capturing the city in the moment. The people and horses in the streets were too small to make out from this distance; only the buildings and the smoke stood out.

  He heard the door open behind him. Nate backed away from the porthole.

  The man with the waxed mustache walked inside, his boots making hollow thumps on the wooden planks. Marshal Ticks, Nate remembered. “Enjoying the view?”

  The two hunchbacks were behind him, the tall one ducking under the low ceiling.

  “I was just trying to close the window,” Nate said.

  Ticks strode across the room, pulling a black leather glove from one hand and leaving the hunchbacks at the door. He shut the glass, fastening its lock with a click. His hands looked smooth, no callouses like Nate’s shovel left.

  “Better?” he asked.

  Nate gave a slow nod.

  “Now, then,” Ticks said, leaning against the cedar wall and crossing the arms. “Let’s talk about what happened this afternoon.”

  “You said I had to see a doctor.”

  “We can deal with that later, provided we have to at all. I’m just looking for your statement on what you saw.”

  Nate turned away. He didn’t want to think about the thing in the firebox. “I told that sheriff everything already.”

  Ticks made a disappointed grunt. “Yes, and we’ll have to collect his report in due time. Now, in the interest of timeliness, mind repeating what you told him?”

  The dark, faceless thing flashed in front of his eyes. Nate squeezed them shut and took in a breath.

  “What did you see?”

  Nate let his breath out. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Ticks coughed. “I understand, but this is a very important matter to the Rail Agency. Your statement could be worthy of a very handsome reward.”

  Nate opened his eyes. “You want to bribe me?”

  Ticks rolled his dark eyes innocently but didn’t disagree.

  “Do I look like the kind of man who takes bribes?” Nate’s heart beat faster. “I earn my money!”

  “You can earn a gr
eat deal by helping us with this investigation.”

  “I wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

  “Come now. We can talk this out like men.”

  “Men don’t stomp on another man’s wound,” Nate said and rolled his shoulder, reawakening a spark of pain.

  Ticks’s mustache twitched. “Right. My apologies. In the heat of the moment, I overreacted.”

  Nate pressed his lips together tightly.

  Ticks sighed. “Is there anything else I can get you? A drink, perhaps?”

  Nate glanced at his shoulder, covered in dried blood. A little whiskey would dull the pain, but he didn’t want to drink with Ticks any more than he wanted to talk with him.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Something to eat, then.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Ticks sighed again. “Very well. We’ll do this the hard way. Parvis.”

  The short hunchback shuffled forward. Nate could hear him making fast wheezes through his mask. It was high-pitched, like a giggle.

  He pulled a little metal hammer out of his pocket. It bore short spikes, a meat tenderizer, like Nate’s mother had in her kitchen. With his oddly long arm, he held it up in front of him, twirling it slowly as if examining each part. Nate watched the reflections off the dark glass eyes in the hunchback’s mask.

  Ticks cleared his throat. “Now, then, Mr. Kemp. Tell us about the fire.”

  “What about the fire?”

  “Parvis,” Ticks said simply.

  The little hunchback shot forward and slammed the hammer right into Nate’s knee. Nate fell, and another swing landed on the back of his ribs. The pain made him howl so hard he pressed his eyes closed. Nothing was broken, but he didn’t want to imagine the bruise he’d have in the morning.

  Eventually the pain faded enough for Nate to control his screaming. He panted for air to refill his lungs.

  Ticks’s boots thumped on the planks again. “Every time I give my say, Mr. Parvis gets to hit you twice anywhere he pleases. He loves this game.”

  Nate took a pair of deep breaths and calmed himself. His knee throbbed. His back could still feel the mallet against it.