“Schist!” It was too masculine to be Phoebe.
I turned. A large fellow with a red kerchief over his face was stumbling toward me. I caught him just as he collapsed.
“Kober? Koberman!”
He grasped my shoulders. “I think I got winged.”
I lowered him to the ground and, without thinking about it, instinctively covered him with my body as another onslaught of Gatlings cut the air above us.
“How bad is it?” I asked when the fire stopped.
“Can’t tell,” he grunted. “It’s my side.”
I rolled him over and rocks fell out of his pockets.
“You fucking rabble-rouser,” I snarled. “Are the Harrimen here to stop the riots or start them?” I wasn’t surprised. Thrown rocks were an excellent excuse to try out their new equipment. Any toe-tags they made would send a message to the union as well as future clients.
He cried out in pain instead of answering. His factory coveralls were smudged with grease and blood. Most of the blood seemed to be on his left side.
I felt something hard. He was wearing a custom-made aerosteel carapace. It was designed so that no one would notice it under his clothing.
“A diplomat’s vest.” I tore open his threads and poked my finger into his armor. “You’re right, it just winged you. It’s a lucky thing, too—not even aerosteel can stop a .45-70.”
“Get...get me to Lichfield.”
“I assume you mean the doctor and not the other thing,” I said.
He didn’t laugh.
I laid him down and charged the window with my truncheon, shattering it. Then I went back and hoisted him by his right arm. Before we started into the shop, I ripped his balaclava off.
“What are you doing? The mob’ll kill me.”
I shook my head. “They’re too busy running. I want the marksmen to know you’re on their side.”
The unionists wouldn’t have noticed if Liutt himself were among them. People were screaming and tearing at the walls like rats in a hot Franklin. The window I’d opened was already filled with a mad rush of desperate bodies.
A few of the rioters had the decency, once they were through the window, to unlock the front door of the shop. I made for the door, since it would’ve been mighty difficult to get Kober up and through the broken glass.
After a few moments of darkness and screaming, we exited the shop through the back. Folks were running in every direction. I re-covered his bare chin, since we were away from the marksmen and didn’t need to advertise his loyalty.
“Which way to the hospital?”
He pointed weakly toward Main Street.
“I want to stay out of the open. Is there another way?”
His head lolled, so I slapped him. He gave me an alternate route in a weak voice.
“You owe me big time,” I told him. “I left my charge back there.”
“Sorry, man. You don’t give refunds, right?”
“Hell, no.”
“Slick,” he said, coughing. His face was gray. “What the fuck was that noise? The Gatlings weren’t supposed to shoot.”
“Not until the seeds started throwing rocks, right?”
He feigned a cough.
“It was the railway bridge,” I told him. “It collapsed.”
“But that’s almost two miles away.”
“It was a big damn bridge. How far to the infirmary?”
He didn’t answer me. The fumes and the blood loss were making him dizzier than a drunk on a carousel.
The sagging brick buildings were all the same. I went down a blind alley, cursed my luck and retraced my steps. Koberman didn’t seem to notice. He slogged along beside me, murmuring to himself incoherently.
“That’s right, Donald,” I whispered. “Bitch about the pain so I know you’re alive.”
His head lolled up. “Who the fuck is Donald?”
“No one,” I lied. “Forget about it.” I don’t know why I told him to forget it. Another minute or two and he’d have forgotten it anyway. It’s like that when you’re bleeding hard.
I hadn’t thought about Donald Hanover, Union Private, in years. Despite the smoke in my lungs and the injured man I carried, Donald’s death was a fresh spike of pain in my chest. Kober didn’t remind me of my comrade—the situation did. It’s a hard thing when you carry a man for miles from the battlefield, just to watch him die.
The last thing I needed was a ghost on me now. I tried to shake him but it was hard. Damned hard. Kober was breathing raggedly in my ear just like Donald. He cursed and whimpered like Donald, too. It was impossible to tell what he was saying—maybe he was pleading with God. More likely he was calling Him a rotten bastard. Lord knows I’d been there before, half fearing, half hoping for death. Thoughts like that can be worse than pain. Pain you forget, but thoughts stay with you, like they’re branded on your soul.
Dr. Lichfield’s hospital was one and a half miles from the factory doors. It felt like ten, but I knew better. It was built squarely on the clear slope of a hill with a nice view of the factory. Farther up the mountain stood Liutt’s ostentatious residence, a sprawling mansion with marble colonnades that grinned devilishly on the misery below. On the other side of the hospital, farther up the valley, was the sprawling ramshackle town of Liuttsville.
I was impressed by the infirmary, to say the least. I expected a hasty wooden structure, more warehouse than hospital, or maybe even a tent. This place was solid brick though. It was even whitewashed, though now it was gray with soot.
Kober could barely keep his eyes open as we went through the door. We were with the first wave of injured rioters, so the place hadn’t turned to Bedlam yet. This probably saved his life. Soon the place would be overrun with people bleeding and dying. My goal was to be out before then.
“He’s a Hound,” I told the first nurse I saw. I hoped it would get him special treatment. It occurred to me, after I said it, that the nurses might not take the company’s part in this. They might hate the Harrimen as much as everyone else, especially after they saw all the people with bullets in them.
If this one hated them, though, she was too professional to show it. She helped us into a cot in an open recovery wing which had been hastily turned into a mass triage area.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
I gave her the telegraph-answer—broad strokes and no details. I didn’t bother to tell her my suspicions about the setup. It was better no one knew. More important, it was better no one knew that I knew.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” she said, crouched over him. “We need to CCS at once.”
This was really a surgeon’s call, but I didn’t complain. I knew that many times, it was the nurse who meant the difference between life and death, not the doctor.
She vanished to fetch the machine.
CCS was a damn tricky maneuver. Cross-Circulatory Sanguination had been used frequently in the war, with mixed results. Some folks did fine. Others died when they got a stranger’s blood. One thing was sure: within families, CCS had a higher success rate. The prevailing explanation was that the blood of different nations was toxic to one other. That theory seemed flawed to me—Americans were a mongrel lot. If that were true, our blood should kill us before we were born. But then I was half Irish, half Deutsch, so I had a different perspective. Most medical professors were Yankee bastards who thought miscegenation was a rare low-brow perversion.
The nurse returned with a large copper-and-glass apparatus that
was eerily anthropomorphic. It had two dials near the top like eyes and a pair of armlike tubes ending in noncorrosive steel needles.
“Roll up your sleeve,” she ordered.
I reached down and helped Kober bare his arm.
“I meant you.”
“What?” I blinked. “You’re not...”
“Do you want your friend to die?”
Shit. I owed Kober for the hotel room, not to mention his offer to ice Stanny. I suppose there was no way out of it. I had to help.
“You got a filter on this?” I said, only half joking. “So he just gets my German blood?”
Near as I could tell, Kober was pure Hun. If the race theory was true, my Irish blood would be like strychnine to him.
Our nurse missed the humor. “That won’t be a problem. Dr. Lichfield’s taken care of that. Sit here and make a fist.” The way she said “Dr. Lichfield” was one of awe, as if she could easily have substituted “Genius” for his name.
I’ve traded fists with more back-alley scrags than I can count. Once I even charged a Gatling nest head-on. None of that was as scary as the nurse pushing that impaling device into my arm. I envied Kober more than a little as she moved to repeat the procedure on him. Being unconscious, he didn’t have to watch her probe his veins like a stainless-steel mosquito.
Once Koberman and I were joined like freakish twins, she tapped a dial and set a timer. “There will be a chime when it’s done.”
“Like an egg timer?”
She ignored me. The room was flooding with wounded. “I probably won’t be back by then. Have you dressed a wound before?”
I nodded.
“These are real easy to patch. The stuff’s right here.” She pointed at a tray on the machine and left us alone.
With nothing better to do, I watched the machine with morbid interest. The apparatus began pumping and wheezing, drawing my life’s blood out and squeezing it into Kober.
There was a small green vial in the top of it. As I watched, the liquid inside dropped little by little, as if it were fueling the great copper pump between us. The glass vial was labeled GS-12. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it also read, in very small letters, Patent Pending, followed by a string of digits and the name Jonas Lichfield.
So Dr. Lichfield was an inventor as well as a doctor. His Technocratic beliefs were more than an affectation. I wondered what an ambitious physician-inventor was doing out here in the sticks. Liutt must’ve paid pretty well to keep him here. A city would be far more lucrative—not to mention interesting. Urban populations offered a myriad of cases. I imagined factories and mines got a whole lot of black lung and broken limbs but not much else. The workers don’t usually live long enough to develop other problems.
After three or four pumps, Koberman’s eyes shot open.
He tried to sit up but I stopped him.
“Not sure you’re ready to polka yet.”
He looked at the machine in horror. After a few seconds, the horror melted away and he recognized what was happening. “I feel great! Jesus, Schist—is that blood in your veins or Folger’s?”
I laughed and tapped one of the glass tanks. “Looks like blood to me.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“This’ll cost you a helluva lot more than a nickel a cup.”
“Agreed. We’re even, brother. How do we turn this off? I feel fine. Better than fine. I could run a marathon.”
“I doubt my blood closed that hole, man. You better stay put.”
His skin was still pale beneath the soot. The CCS procedure hadn’t topped him off yet. He wasn’t exaggerating about my blood, though. He was certainly acting energetic. His eyes darted around while his hands fidgeted with the sheets.
Did I look like that? I thought of how I’d felt all day and suddenly wished Lichfield were here. The tenements I haunted were awash in gin and laudanum, two seeming-paths to paradise that always crashed in hell. I knew from hard experience that chemical euphoria came at a price, and I didn’t just mean greenbacks. What price was I going to pay for this feeling of invincibility?
The chime rang and the pump stopped. We almost didn’t hear it, though, given the roar around us. Every bed was filled. The aisles were full of dirty factory workers wringing white-knuckled hands. Somewhere I could hear that low wretched sound a man makes when he’s trying not to weep.
After using the stuff on the tray to play nursemaid on us both, I stood up and observed rather abstractly that I was dizzy. My mind felt as crisp as a well-oiled Babbage, but my senses reeled. The observation stoked my misgivings like a shovel of coke.
“We should leave,” I said as more bodies came staggering in.
“I’ll say.” Kober stood up confidently but lurched into me after two steps.
I steadied him with my arm. “You sure you’re tiptop?”
“Who cares? I don’t want to spend another tick in this butcher shop.”
It was hard to argue with that. I maneuvered him past rows of sobbing factory wives. Kober saw the look in their eyes and hastily put a kerchief over his face again.
We stepped into the lobby and dodged a set of gurneys. The orderlies didn’t spare us a glance. They were busy sliding a pair of toe-tags to the basement lift.
I spotted Dr. Lichfield amid the bedlam behind us. He moved deliberately and serenely, as if this were a normal day at the office. For a moment, I could’ve sworn that he looked around with satisfaction, like a factory supervisor when the machinery hummed properly. Then, just as quickly as I saw him, he was gone. Crisp nurse uniforms and bloodstained factory coveralls enveloped him.
Before I could comment on what I saw to Kober, a pair of small arms caught me from behind. I spun around and found to my shock that I’d acquired a small brunette magnet.
“Mr. Schist!”
Kober cleared his throat audibly.
Phoebe ignored him. She kept hugging me tightly. “It was horrible, Mr. Schist!”
“Teaches you to leave your guardian,” Kober scolded. “A girl should have a man around to protect her.”
“I made it, didn’t I?” she asked, though her voice shook.
He snorted.
When she let go of me I held her at arm’s length to look her over. She didn’t appear to be wounded, though she was shaking hard. It was impossible to tell if it was nerves or the fact she had somehow lost her coat.
“You hurt?”
She shook her head. “I came up here looking for you.”
I nodded crisply and shepherded my small band out of the hospital. We steered clear of the doors to avoid the throng of new bodies pressing in, many of them wearing filthy bandages that must’ve been pillow cases and kerchiefs in a previous life.
It was the most wounded I’d seen since the war. I hadn’t even seen that many in the Pinkertons.
Koberman glanced around nervously. “I gotta get clear of all these gear-monkeys,” he whispered.
Phoebe gave him a look of contempt. “You wouldn’t have anything to worry about if you hadn’t just shot them.”
“Look at the mouth on you,” Kober said. “Stanny woulda found a good use for it.”
I realized with a jolt that I had thought the same thing, more or less, every time the girl troubled me. Coming out of Kober, though, the sentiment’s repulsive nature was laid bare.
A fresh bucket of guilt washed over me.
“You better go,” I told him. “You want my derringer?”
&
nbsp; He shook his head. “Nah.” He pursed his lips. “There’s a guard station ’round back. Most of the guys are probably still in town, but I could go in and lock the door.”
“Hide like a coon under a porch,” Phoebe murmured.
“Lie low,” he corrected her. “Jesus, Donovan, aren’t you gonna—”
“You got any artillery in there?” I asked, cutting him off.
“Yeah.”
“Think I could borrow something in a higher caliber? My peashooter doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
His face screwed up with regret. “Sorry, brother. I know I owe you one, but after a scene like today, they’ll be counting every cartridge, know what I mean? It’s like a war has started. They’d know for sure if I slipped you something and they’d think it was for the union.”
I tried not to look crestfallen. “Hey—don’t apologize. I owed you one anyway.”
“Saint Schist, eh?” He laughed. “You’re an alright fellow.”
“Don’t make me blush in front of the girl.”
He patted my arm and retreated around the side of the building.
“I tried to get a heavier gun, too,” Phoebe commiserated.
“Oh?” I started walking toward town.
She stopped. “We can’t go back to our room.”
“Has the fighting spread to the hotel?”
She shook her brown locks. “No, those three thugs were waiting there.” After a questioning look, she elaborated. “I went back to the room and the clerk let me in, only those three men were there, waiting. You should have seen how happy they were to catch me. They were patting each other’s backs. One of them cried, I think. From joy.”
“It was probably just the smoke.” I desperately wanted to believe that Stanny’s men weren’t that afraid of him.
“Yeah, maybe.” She shook her head. “Anyway, they put me on the fainting couch and waited by the door.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “One put on a pair of brass knuckles and another had a really big knife, the kind they gut pigs with.”
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