Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

“It’s all I ate when I was in the army.”

  “General Sherman said ‘war is hell.’ I didn’t know that’s what he meant.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “But...what sort of animal is it?”

  I shrugged. “The tasty kind. It probably had hooves. Who knows? Just eat it.”

  “It looks old.”

  “It is. But the canning process preserved it.” I laughed. “You would never have made it in the city, you silly minx. Everything comes in a can, not just preserves.”

  I sipped my coffee and watched with amusement as the country girl’s hunger finally won out. She choked the sandwich down like she was eating a raw lamprey. The room was ready by the time she was finished, so I belted the last of the coffee and led her upstairs.

  We were too used to each other now to stand on ceremony. I stripped my shirt right there in front of her and washed my face and chest. My jaw was rough with stubble, threatening to turn my mustache into a beard. I couldn’t shave, though, since one of the scrags had filched my razor, probably to slit my throat later.

  The water was gray when I was done, so after checking the window for steamcoaches, I left the revolver with Phoebe and went downstairs to fill it with fresh water, or as fresh as I could get, anyway.

  While I was waiting, a messenger boy in a maroon vest and one of those silly hats came in. He paused beside me at the desk. “Where’s the clerk?”

  “Little late for deliveries, isn’t it?” I asked him.

  He beamed. “We work day and night, sir. Best messenger service in the county.”

  I eyed the greasy package beside him. “What’s that?”

  “Professional ethics forbid me from looking.” He sniffed. “Where is the clerk?”

  “Fetching water.” I yawned.

  The delivery boy had a West Pennsylvania accent and a face full of pimples. I had a hard time imagining Stanny Slash using this guy to ice somebody.

  “I’ll go up then.” He started up the stairs.

  I thumped the counter for a few minutes until I heard a high-pitched scream.

  “Phoebe?” I shouted, taking the stairs two at a time. I fumbled with my pocket, drawing the derringer.

  There was a clatter and a splash of water as the clerk started up after me. “What now?” he cried.

  When we reached our room, I found it wasn’t Phoebe that screamed, but the pimply messenger boy. He lay on the floor, pointing and gibbering at the open door in a terrified alto. I thought for a moment that he had surprised Phoebe and been shot, but I didn’t see any blood.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  His face was ashen gray beneath the ubiquitous soot.

  I turned and found Phoebe in the doorway with an open mouth, staring at something on the floor. It was the greasy parcel. Evidently, it was meant for me. Or maybe her. I suppose at this point, that didn’t matter.

  “I don’t understand,” the girl sputtered.

  “Shit,” the clerk said. “It’s getting blood on the floorboards.”

  I bent and scrutinized the package, pushing open the paper with my truncheon.

  There was a head inside. It was fresh. The blood hadn’t even congealed yet. I had a morbid desire to touch the cheek and see if it were still warm.

  “Who is it?” Phoebe asked.

  “A friend,” I said. It was the rat-faced Nativist from the depot, the one I had poisoned with castor oil. Now it was his turn to be the immigrant. In Hell.

  “I don’t understand.”

  I thought it over. The sender must’ve decapitated the beady-eyed scrag just outside the messenger service, wrapped it up, and paid for express shipping so that the boy had it in our hotel before the blood had time to thicken.

  “It was sent from Juniper Junction,” I announced.

  The messenger boy nodded dumbly.

  “How do you know?” Phoebe asked. “There’s no return address.”

  “Because Stanny Slash sent it.”

  The steamcoach offered him the privacy needed to dismember and package the head right outside the messenger station. Stanislaus had probably even woken up the proprietor so that the boy would be ready to move as soon as he got the parcel.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought this man worked for Stanny Slash.”

  “He just retired.”

  The clerk opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t. Everyone there, except for me, seemed to find this an unacceptable retirement plan. I, however, was familiar with Stanny Slash’s work. If anything, I thought the rat-faced little thug had gotten off easy.

  “So he killed his own employee?”

  “Yep.”

  “But...why?”

  “Because he didn’t catch us fast enough. Because he let you go not once but twice.” I turned to the quivering courier. “Were there any other packages? Or any special instructions?”

  He shook his head furiously. “No...just that I was to take it here immediately.” The messenger swallowed hard. “He tipped really well.”

  “Yeah, Stanislaus appreciates prompt service.” I considered the head for a moment. “When I see him, I’ll let him know how quick you were.”

  The messenger boy seemed grateful.

  Phoebe, however, was less enthusiastic. “I thought we were avoiding Stanislaus.”

  “Oh, we are.” I put my derringer away. “But he’ll catch us. And when he does—” I looked her in the eye and tried very hard to sound confident, “—I’ll kill him.”

  “Not in here you won’t,” the clerk sniffed. “You’re out of here. I don’t care how many detectives thump me on the head or how big a bribe you give me. We’re done. Get out. You are no longer welcome in this establishment.”

  Phoebe closed the door and dressed herself, leaving me in the hallway with the angry clerk. I had planned on leaving anyway. When heads you didn’t order started arriving, a place was no longer safe.

  I couldn’t help but needle the man though. “Not much Christian charity in you, is there? Throwing my ward and me into the cold street like this.”

  “Don’t forget to take your head,” the clerk told me.

  “What do you mean, my head?” I protested. “I never signed for it.”

  The door opened. Phoebe appeared wearing her jacket and the only hat which hadn’t been stomped, ripped, or stained by ash. She also had my bowler in hand.

  “How unprofessional,” I said, inclining my head for her.

  Phoebe kindly put my hat on me and, after a moment’s examination, straightened it.

  The clerk watched this gentle exchange incredulously. “It’s your head.”

  With a deep sigh, I gingerly rewrapped the package and took it by the string. “Where’s the company morgue?”

  “Dr. Lichfield runs it out of the hospital basement.”

  “How serendipitous. We were going there anyway. Come now, friends.”

  Head in one hand, Phoebe’s arm in the other, I went down the back stair and into the cold red night. She had the .22 clutched under a large pleat of her dress.

  Chapter Twelve

  We’d only gone a few yards down the alley when we heard it—the clatter of wooden carriage wheels and the fevered cranking of a steam engine. Phoebe froze where she was without being asked. Together we stood in the shadow of the hotel, eyes locked on the main street.

  A steamcoach went by, a great rumbling beast with a tail of steam that hung heavy behind it. The chrome and
brass components were colored red by the river-light, which combined with the black paint to give it a singularly diabolical appearance appropriate for its passenger.

  A strange whimsy struck: the horseless carriage reminded me uncomfortably of the Cóiste Bodhar, that rolling black harbinger of death which every Irish family feared. My gran told me about it when I was a little boy. My father—ever the Teutonic pragmatist—laughed at the stories. In time, so did I. Now, as I watched the vapor-trail dance in the cold street, the Death Coach didn’t seem so silly.

  Maybe it was because I was holding a head in my left hand.

  Phoebe tugged at me to get moving. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Mr. Schist?”

  “Nothing.” I shook the phantoms off as best I could.

  The carriage rumbled up the avenue past the hotel.

  Phoebe paused. “He’s not stopping. Why isn’t he stopping?”

  “Because he doesn’t want to kill us yet. He wants us to know he’s here.”

  She started walking again, dragging me with her. “Nasty bit of work, isn’t he?” She shuddered. I could tell she was thinking of the businessman with the slit throat.

  “Yeah.”

  We trudged upslope in silence after that. Above us the hospital waited pale in the river-light.

  The man at the entry desk asked after our business. I put the dismembered head on the counter in front of him. He gave it the merest glance before pointing to the stairwell. “Cadaver drop-off’s in the basement.”

  Phoebe and I exchanged a look of mingled shock and amusement before descending.

  Mr. Liutt might have skimped on things like roads and gas and decent housing, but not on his morgue. In death, his workers entered the nicest room in town, though I doubted they appreciated it. The front doors were polished aerosteel, the duranite stuff they used in dirigible frames. Although they were eight feet tall and nearly six wide, they swung light as moth wings on their greased hinges. Immaculate white tiles covered the floors and crept up the walls to waist-height. Above that, the walls were spotless plaster.

  We entered a vestibule with several office doors and a polished oak desk. No one manned it, however, so we continued unchallenged to a second set of aerosteel push-doors. I noted the office doors for future reference, since both were locked. People lock things they want to protect. Sometimes that’s money, but more often, locked offices have something more valuable: information. It occurred to me that they might even have information on the scabs. It ain’t like the gears can tell the difference between a unionist and a scab. Those offices might have all the records I needed.

  Right now, though, I had the head to deliver. The decapitated head wouldn’t be much of an explanation if they caught me in one of the offices.

  I turned to the morgue.

  Phoebe looked up and hesitated. Crisp black letters over the door said Authorized Persons Only.

  “Don’t worry. He’s got authorization.” I jiggled the head.

  She frowned as we pushed through the doors into the morgue. I was about to tell her how you get used to bodies in my profession, but she wasn’t listening. Her brown eyes darted around the room, trying to drink in the whole scene at once.

  I have to admit, even I was a little impressed, and I don’t impress easy. I’d once stood beside Archimedes, the enormous clicking brain of the Magnocracy, one of the largest Babbages on Earth. I knew what cutting-edge looked like. This place was razor-fucking-sharp.

  My distorted reflection stared back down at me from a gleaming brass pipe. It carried steam out of a boiler room and into the lab’s myriad technica. Several carriage-sized apparatuses swallowed the steam down and rumbled ominously. Some were clearly for chemical manufacture, given their bubbling beakers and twisting glass veins. Others had more sinister purposes, if their polished sicklelike appendages were any indicator.

  Between the machines squatted a decent-sized Babbage. This was no mere engine for bookies. This was white-collar-grade, the kind of analytical reserved for big digit bean-counting or Post-Newtonian physics. It was startling to see a machine like that lying dormant—usually their owners ran them round the clock to justify the cost.

  I wondered what hold the doc had over Liutt. The robber baron didn’t light his towns, but the lab had its own gas system. Flickering yellow jets danced inside concave saucers with a mirror finish. The mirrors amplified the weak illumination, compounding their output so that every surface gleamed with artificial daylight.

  Even the gurneys were fancy—each cart had a gut underneath of cogs and gears and coiled spring power banks. They even sported small mnemonic engines. Verhalen would’ve loved to spend an hour in here. Alive, of course.

  “Watch this,” I said, walking to a rack of mnemonikeys. I reached in and selected one at random. I thrust it into the Babbage of the nearest gurney and let go. The rod slid down until its perforations caught on the teeth of the mnemonic engine, releasing the spring.

  Phoebe’s breath caught in her throat as the clockwork cart rattled along its pre-defined course. It skated smartly between dissecting tables and devices, braking crisply at the far wall in front of a massive iron door that reminded me of a bank vault.

  When the device hit the door, the mnemonic rod turned, clicking audibly, and the vault door swung open to reveal a yawning black tunnel beyond. As if on cue, the cart suddenly jacked its slab into the air. The purpose was obvious—had a corpse been lying there, it would’ve slid into the chute.

  I looked at that chute and knew immediately that if I could find out where it went, I would know what they were doing with the miners’ corpses.

  The vault closed after accepting the imaginary corpse and the rod cranked again. The mechano-cart backed crisply out and executed a graceful turn into an open space beneath the dangling hose of a pressurized steam cleaner. This elephantine apparatus sprang to life, firing a mix of steam and water hard enough to sheer flesh from a bone. When the hose was done, the cart rolled forward, dripping and steaming, to stop in an empty alcove across the room. The mnemonic rod spun a final half turn, activating the brake, and fell silent.

  Phoebe’s eyes were wide as saucers and just as white.

  “Bet they don’t have anything like that in Darke County,” I said smugly.

  Instead of answering me, she screamed.

  Before I could react, a pair of heavy gloves closed around my throat. I could see my attacker’s reflection in one of the mirrors overhead—it was a hardhead in full combat getup. He didn’t have a weapon and, by the feel of it, he didn’t need one. He wasn’t much taller than me—with the filterhelm he was barely six feet—but his grip was like a steel vise. I knew better than to try to break free. Twisting to face him, I drew the truncheon and, with a flick and a twist, telescoped it into a brass club.

  I tried a sucker jab, but his guts were like iron. I dashed it against his chin and then rained blows on his helmet, cracking the glass of his lens. They were so fragmented that it was impossible for him to see, yet still the hands tightened.

  Purple spots danced in my vision. The strangest thing was the pulsing—with every twist of his hands, I felt a bizarre throbbing through his fingers, as if his heartbeat was so damn strong that it reverberated through his bones and into my ears.

  I forgot about the pulsing. My truncheon dropped from my grasp and clattered on the tiles. The heavy brass echoed off the walls like a cathedral bell. It rang through my mind again and again—until I realized it wasn’t echoes I was heari
ng but gunshots.

  Smoke curled in the air between us. The hands released me and I collapsed onto the smooth hard floor, gasping for breath. My lungs felt like I’d inhaled embers right out of a hot Franklin. Despite the pain, my eyes fixated on the hardhead’s boots—they were wrong. He had his right boot on his left foot and vice versa.

  Despite the agony of my lungs and the cold floor on my face, I still couldn’t help but think how odd it was to walk around like that. It couldn’t be comfortable.

  What an idiot. Evidently, he was also too stupid to feel gunshots.

  Phoebe backpedaled, emptying my revolver into her lurching opponent. Twenty-twos don’t have much punch, but our opponent didn’t even flinch. The brute might have been wearing hardhead gear, but I expected him to feel something. When I shot the hardheads in our hotel room, they cursed a blue streak at me, but this bastard kept marching forward like a clockwork toy. The .22 might as well have been spitting papier-mâché instead of lead.

  Through a cloud of imaginary purple bees, I saw my truncheon. I snatched it and stood up behind the detective. Phoebe was still firing, so I was counting on his armor to prevent through-and-throughs. Taking my weapon in both hands, I brought it down on the back of the hardhead’s neck like I was chopping wood.

  He stumbled. For a moment, I thought I’d broken his neck, but then he turned to face me.

  Before the gloves could close around my neck and finish me—there was no way Phoebe could stop him now—a voice shouted, reverberating off the walls.

  “Victor!”

  The hardhead was instantly motionless, like someone had cut his steam. His fingers were mere inches from my throat.

  “Here, Victor.”

  Dr. Lichfield was on the far side of the lab, elbow propping one of the aerosteel doors open. He held a pair of stainless steel tongs which absurdly gripped a cucumber sandwich, I assume so he wouldn’t get crumbs or mayonnaise on his fingers.

  The hardhead ambled over to the doctor.