Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  “We got the digits off your bean-counter.”

  “Liar.”

  His face reddened. The word stung him worse than a blow. Hillfolk are funny about honor.

  “I know my goddamn accountant,” I said. “He takes his job seriously.”

  The accountant-client bond was sacred, more sacred than a doctor and his patient. True, some digit-apes had been known to betray that trust, but they never found work again. The Magnates had no use for bean-counters who couldn’t keep secrets. It was better to seem loyal, even to an enemy, than to be a cheat. After a robber baron destroyed an opponent, it was not uncommon to hire his accountants. But only the loyal ones. Traitors were shown the door.

  “Your bean-counter might be trustworthy,” Roy allowed. From his tone, I could tell he didn’t believe it. Men like Roy had no use for accountants—they were too poor to hire one and too low class to ever know one. “But his telegraph boy ain’t.”

  I picked up the page with my left hand, keeping my right hanging by the sixer. It was a cable from their contact in New York.

  “Transfers from a Pinkerton account,” Roy said triumphantly. “You’re still on the fucking payroll.”

  The two scrags behind him flexed their fingers as if they wanted to throttle me. I drew my gun but didn’t fire.

  Instead, I laughed. “Nice try, country boy.” It was my turn to be smug. “You shoulda stayed in school past third grade and learned some arithmetic.”

  That dangerous scarlet color was rising to his face again. Gun or no, he was on the verge of attacking me. “You think it’s funny we caught you, Pinkerton? Six dinky shots ain’t gonna save your skin now. It’ll be a miracle if you leave town alive.”

  “Look a little closer at those figures,” I told him. “Or have someone who can read do it.”

  “I know my letters,” he snarled, snatching it back.

  “No wonder MacCallard’s in charge, you dolt. If you’d shown him that, he would’ve known that I wasn’t a Pinkerton anymore.” I knew I was antagonizing him, but I couldn’t help it. Part of me wanted them to attack. I wanted to punch his liver full of holes and watch him bleed all over the polished floorboards.

  I’d keep killing people till they ran out of hotel rooms. We’d sleep in the street if we had to.

  He stared at the page, confounded. “All’s I see is payments.”

  “Look again. You know what the little dashes mean?”

  He just blinked stupidly. “I—”

  “Those payments were made to the Pinkerton account, not from.”

  Roy and his scrags said nothing for a moment. Their rage boiled out of them. They looked like schoolchildren who’d been asked to answer a question they didn’t understand.

  “That don’t make no sense.”

  I grinned. “It does if I owe money to the Pinkertons.”

  “But why owe money to the Pinkertons...I thought you used to work for them.”

  I laughed. “Because I killed three.”

  Their jaws went slack.

  Phoebe’s eyes widened.

  I nodded at them, grinning. “After I went independent, I ran afoul of ‘em. Three came after me so I clipped ‘em.” It was a lie—I’d only killed one. As it happened, my wife Moira killed the other two. I could never let anyone know that, though, for many reasons. The noblest was that I had to protect Moira, though in more practical terms, I had my reputation to consider. Three dead Pinkertons makes for a tough reputation. Stanny isn’t the only guy who had to worry about that.

  That reputation was now coming to bear on the unionists. They were dealing with a man who’d smoked three Pinkertons.

  My grin grew wider. They shuffled back like I was a keg of gunpowder with a short fuse. In a way, I was.

  Unions and Pinkertons had a complex relationship, to say the least. Whatever dislike these men had for the Eyes, they also had respect. Oh, they hated the Eyes. But they also feared ‘em. Even Phoebe was taken aback, which told me that the Pinkertons had a reputation in Darke County, too.

  “So you killed three Pinkertons,” Roy said slowly. “And they just let you...pay ’em off?”

  It was hard to tell what shocked Roy more, that a slick-talking city boy had taken out three of his most hated enemy, or that I got away with it. What he would never understand, of course, was that I didn’t get away with it. The Pinkertons had me like a rat in a trap—they knew where I lived, who I was married to and what sort of job I did.

  Hillfolk could never appreciate how important money was in the city. I decided to school him on the subject.

  “The Pinkertons and I had a legitimate conflict of interest. They were working for one person, I was working for another. It was business, they know that. So we settled it.”

  It sounded so simple. They’d never know what it had been like, hiding in coal-cellars and dusty attics. My accountant approached them with an offer, was refused, and made another. It had taken weeks before we came to a mutually satisfying figure, weeks that I’d spent skulking underground like a shaggy-bearded anarchist.

  “So you killed three detectives...and they sent you an invoice?”

  “We tallied the value of training and experience, plus recompense to their families. It’s a considerable figure, let me tell you. I’ll be paying them for some time.”

  Roy’s shock changed to a sneer. “They’re extorting you.”

  I sighed. Condescension was preferable to murderous hatred, but it was still annoying. Reckless savages couldn’t understand the ties I had. I could’ve turned my back on New York, ridden the Bicoastal to California, and be done with it. But I had family to think of. More importantly, all my connections were in the city. These difficulties in Liuttsburg were just a taste of what this job would be like outside my usual territory. Here I at least knew a guy. That was one more contact than I could expect anywhere else.

  I was formulating my next snide remark when we heard shouts outside. The unionists rushed out of my room without an apology or even a backward glance. When I turned to speak with Phoebe, I was horrified to discover she’d escaped with them.

  I crossed an empty lobby and stepped into a street clogged with people.

  “What’s going on?” Roy asked.

  “There’s a big announcement down at the factory.”

  “More goddamn pink slips, I’ll wager.”

  There were grunts in the crowd around me. I stood on my toes to find Phoebe. Before I could catch her, the crowd around us started flowing toward the factory.

  I spotted her some distance away. I could tell it was her by the cheap paisley. Factory girls didn’t even have that much. They wore dull gray shawls instead.

  “Phoebe!” I called.

  She turned and pointed up the road. “Let’s see what’s going on!” she shouted or something to that effect. It was hard to tell because everyone around us seemed to be shouting as well.

  The herd oozed its way between crumbling brick storefronts toward the factory. I yelled, but she didn’t turn again. I tried desperately to push my way to her, but to no avail.

  I debated drawing my .22 and clearing a path with a shot in the air, but decided that might get me killed. There were hardheads on the rooftops. They had large-caliber rifles with polished brass scopes. The last thing I wanted was to be mistaken for an anarchist or something.

  I drew my truncheon instead and started jabbing people out of my way. I got a few nasty looks but people moved. I was about to reach her when our
crowd merged into a larger crowd, forming a turgid estuary of bodies. The girl vanished.

  Beneath my feet the cold slushy mud gave way to brick. Factory smokestacks loomed over our heads like the citadel of some fallen angel. The mob of workers and curiosity-seekers had been channeled into a paved quadrangle between Main Street and the factory entrance. The factory itself was girded by a high wall topped in iron spikes. It was hard to tell if the spikes were red from rust or the hellish glow of the river. Sentry towers rose at regular intervals. Binocs and rifle scopes flashed inside them. Various bills and announcements papered the wall, their words obliterated by a layer of gray soot.

  The place was about as homey as Sing Sing, right down to its gates, the biggest Carnegie Steel could forge.

  A platform with a large copper voice-amplifier was assembled outside the massive gates. A little man with the harried appearance of middle management was standing there, wearing an expression like he was surrounded by starving hyenas. The Harrimen were conspicuously absent from the platform, leaving that poor white-collar dupe on his own.

  I didn’t have time to pity him, though. Everything smelled wrong to me. Through the haze of river smoke, I could taste the excitement in the air. It was like the anticipation before a battle. The workers had wrapped kerchiefs or balaclavas around their faces against the smoke, making them an anonymous crowd of angry eyes.

  Men do funny things when you can’t see their faces.

  My foot kicked something and I looked down. It was Phoebe’s hat. She must have lost it in the throng. I picked it up and began searching vainly for a bareheaded brunette. I stopped when my teeth started vibrating inside my skull.

  The dry ironclad trundled into the plaza, blocking Main Street.

  This limited the crowd’s escape options to two smaller avenues which fed into the plaza. Both were completely inadequate for a crowd this size.

  I swallowed my panic and collapsed my truncheon. I cupped hands over my mouth and screamed Phoebe’s name as loud as I could.

  No one answered.

  The terrified man on the platform approached the mouthpiece of the amplifier.

  The mob hushed.

  I screamed her name again. People turned and glared at me, but none were Phoebe.

  “Attention, workers!” The man’s voice was weak from fear. The amplifier, however, carried every word to the far reaches of the courtyard. “I must announce another shift change.”

  The crowd exploded with rage. Fists pumped the air and men screamed obscenities, but no one moved to assault him. Yet.

  I watched the crowd anxiously. I’d never been on this side of the thing before. Usually, I was on the other side, protecting management. I didn’t like the way it felt, the inarticulate rage wafting off the people around me.

  Through all that madness, I noticed one of the men was clean-shaven. His balaclava fell while he was screaming and I could see that his chin and cheeks were smooth as a baby bottom. He slipped his kerchief fast so that no one would notice. I noticed, though. I noticed and felt another wave of panic.

  The Magnocracy wasn’t Rome. Facial hair was the fashion of the day. Grown men wore beards or, if they were fashionably urban like myself, a handsome mustache. What’s more, Mr. Liutt liked his men to have beards. The only company men without facial hair were young boys who couldn’t shave. There was, however, a company where the men did shave. So their filterhelms would fit.

  The crowd was seeded. I would’ve suspected an anarchist or a violent socialist, if it weren’t for the baby face. The baby face was a dead giveaway that it was Harriman’s goon, not some radical.

  I turned to the ‘61. It was flanked now by hardheads. They stared into the crowd with soulless glass eyes. Lines of them marched into the other lanes as well, cutting off those points of escape. With these blocked, we were trapped, hemmed in by the rumbling steam fort and the grim walls of the factory.

  I ground my teeth and kept surveying the plaza. There were streetlights here and there, rising up out of the crowd like banners. Mr. Liutt might have skimped on lighting the rest of town, but he needed the approach to his factory well-lit, the better to protect it.

  I opened my truncheon and shoved my way to the nearest. I crawled monkeylike until I was over head-level and began scanning the crowd. I spotted Phoebe fifty feet away, but the obstinate chit wouldn’t answer me.

  The salaried guy was talking again. Even with the amplifier, it was hard to hear him through the jeers.

  “E Wing graveyard shift is hereby terminated. Vacate your company housing immediately. If you are in good health and desire employment, please inquire at Liuttsville Mining Operations.”

  The mob was howling. The platform began shaking. Many hands gripped its edge. The amplifier fell over and the man stood naked before them. Even from fifty yards away, I could tell he was trembling.

  People were so distracted by the news that they hardly noticed when I knocked them over to reach Phoebe. I grabbed her elbow and spun her about, only to find that it wasn’t Phoebe at all but a petite factory girl.

  She scowled at me. “Do I know you?” Her face was gaunt and her eyes ringed in darkness, giving her a skull-like appearance.

  “This is no place for a child!” I told her. “Get out of here!”

  The manager was on his belly now, talking sideways into the fallen amplifier. “Please, calm down. Return to your homes at once.”

  I released the girl and looked back at the Duke. No one in the crowd even noticed it was there. The Hounds were quietly and efficiently feeding bullet-belts into their hungry guns. I wondered if this was what deer felt like, when the wolves started circling.

  I was thirty yards from the Gatling, but that wouldn’t make a lick of difference. The ironclad might have been an ol’ ‘61, but it wasn’t carrying a Gatling gun from 1861. They’d retrofitted this monster with a pair of .45-70 field pieces, the latest innovation in mass murder. Even elbow-to-elbow in the crowd, I felt naked. Thirty yards of humanity would do nothing to slow down the thousand or so steel-penetrating rounds they could throw every minute.

  My soldier’s instincts went rabbit. I needed a hole in the ground and now.

  “Survive Gettysburg and die in Liuttsburg,” I said to myself.

  No one heard me. They were too busy screaming.

  Phoebe was nowhere to be seen. I decided she was done for. I consoled myself with the knowledge that a Gatling bullet is a clean way to die. Cleaner, anyway, than having syphilis chew up her brain tissue, which would’ve happened if I’d let Stanny have her.

  I had helped her all I could. She was God’s problem now.

  Chapter Eight

  I knew from experience that the Almighty was prone to dropping people like eggs, so I started planning my escape. There weren’t enough Hounds to guard all the storefronts, so I might be able to break a window and scurry out a back door.

  I started to walk away when the crowd surged forward. I was swept with them, caught in a human wave breaking against the factory wall.

  The stage was cracking and the manager was screaming, but the Hounds did nothing. They watched, impassive, because no one had laid a hand on him yet.

  I didn’t want to be there when the crowd got him.

  The window was just ten paces away when the dam finally broke. There was a resounding boom, like a hundred pounds of high-grade dynamite going off at once. Any fool should’ve been able to tell it wasn’t a gun. They should’ve been used to explo
sions, given their proximity to a mining town, but this time, the boom came from the west. It rolled off the river like a wave, pushing the smoke before it.

  My eyes stung. A tsunami of thick smoke swept into the town.

  The hardheads, not knowing what to make of this new development, fell back on their one and only talent—violence. The Gatlings spewed death into the crowd, ritcha-titch-titch, their clockwork feeders cranking round after round as smoking copper cartridges flew from their breech.

  No sooner did the gun crew start their massacre than the hardhead infantry joined in. Dull shotgun booms echoed off the bricks around us.

  The edges of the mob collapsed at once, as if a giant blade had swept over a stage of marionettes.

  A man’s face exploded inches from my head. The spray hit my eye. I blinked and looked up. Scopes flickered on the rooftops. Harriman’s sharpshooters weren’t going to let the Gatlings have all the fun.

  I crouched low and swung my baton before me, knocking people aside. It was strange, but now that bullets were flying, my panic evaporated. My mind began weighing my options with the detachment of a brass Babbage.

  Glass shattered and a nearby wall suddenly burned. Some lunatic was throwing fire-bombs. It suddenly occurred to me that the crowd might’ve been seeded by both Harrimen and anarchists. I doubt the Harrimen agitators were supposed to commit arson.

  I stumbled over a prone body and paused. It was a young girl with brown hair. I rolled her over with my toe and saw it wasn’t Phoebe but the pale girl with the face of exhaustion.

  She’d get plenty of sleep now.

  The window loomed before me. Chunks of masonry fell to the ground as the Gatlings sprayed the wall ahead of me. I dropped to my belly and waited for the roaring scythe to move on. People dropped everywhere, screaming and weeping and dying.

  A detached part of my mind noticed that the blood was flowing to the edges of the courtyard and into drains. Mr. Liutt had built the plaza with an incline. I wondered if he’d done that with rain or blood in mind. It’s hard to tell with Magnates.