Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  It wasn’t a very dignified landing, but she cleared the edge safely.

  I ran along the wall and vaulted over just as she started fixing her skirts.

  She shot me a red-faced glance before lifting the rifle and shooting two reanimants about to follow us over. She didn’t bother to aim for any particular body part—the kinetic shock was all she needed. They slipped face-first into the jagged wall-top and tumbled onto the pavement below.

  “They probably couldn’t make the jump,” I pointed out. “They’re not very dexterous.”

  “Did you wanna chance it?” she snapped.

  Before I could answer, there was a flash of bright light, followed by a boom. Windows shattered in unison all around us, showering the streets and rooftops with glass.

  A tower of flame appeared in the center of town.

  “Well,” I said, dusting off my shoulders. “Looks like the battle’s started.”

  “The union doesn’t know about the monsters,” Phoebe whispered. “What if they let them out?”

  As soon as she said this, a chain of small explosions cut the air like a firecracker. MacCallard wasn’t being stingy with the bang-juice.

  “We have to warn them,” Phoebe announced.

  “What? Do you expect MacCallard to join forces with the Harrimen or something?”

  “No. But maybe they’ll retreat and let the detectives handle it. Maybe MacCallard will call off the battle until this is sorted out.”

  “Like a rain check?”

  “If MacCallard attacks the factory, he might free those monsters.”

  I laughed. “Why would he stop his plans? Because a former Pinkerton and a little girl tell him that Liutt built Varney the Fucking Vampire in his basement?”

  She looked uncertain. “It sounds crazy when you put it that way.”

  “It sounds crazy any way you put it,” I said, grabbing her by the hand.

  We plunged into the dark stairwell and descended. When we emerged street-level, we could hear a rolling symphony of gunshots. I couldn’t tell if the .45-70 had warmed up yet.

  If the schematics on his table were any indication, MacCallard was going to make the ‘61 his primary target. It had to be taken out early in the battle. Every minute the Duke rolled, men would die by the cartload.

  I retrieved the overcoat I had thrown into the street from the sharpshooter-tower and threw it over Phoebe’s shoulders. She started to run up the boulevard.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Phoebe trotted ahead a few feet before turning. “What?”

  “You’re going toward the battle.” I swept forward and took her by her hand again.

  “I told you...we have to warn them.”

  “No, we don’t. I didn’t come back to help MacCallard. I came back to rescue you.”

  She blinked in embarrassment, perhaps remembering the argument before I left. “And I thank you for that, Mr. Schist.”

  “I wasn’t looking for thanks.” I dragged her away from the battle. “Though I appreciate it,” I added gruffly. “I don’t get that very often.”

  I could sense a protest rising in her like flood water behind a dam. After five steps, she went stiff. Her heels ground glass underfoot as she tried to stop me.

  “We’ve gotta help, Mr. Schist. It’s our Christian duty.”

  I rounded on her. “What exactly do you owe them, you silly minx? They sent you in there.” I pointed an angry finger at the factory.

  Even now, we could hear the monsters vainly scratching at the inside like a hundred giant rats.

  She listened, shivering for a moment, then looked me in the eye. “MacCallard has your money.” The girl knew me too well. “He showed us that fat envelope,” she added earnestly. “He told me it’s yours if you came back after I’d done the mission.”

  I hesitated.

  “A month of union dues.”

  I shook my head. “I have to go into the middle of a battle to get it.”

  “There’s almost a thousand workers. Think about that—a month’s dues from a thousand workers. My ma couldn’t pay that—not if she saved up her whole life.”

  I was too old and jaded to listen to a teenager. Sure, money’s good, but living is better. That was true even in the Magnocracy.

  “Haven’t you ever believed in something?” she demanded.

  It was the wrong thing to say. Visions of Gettysburg exploded into my mind like shrapnel.

  “Yeah,” I told her harshly. “Never again.” I started away, dragging her by her arm.

  She dug her heels in hard.

  “We’ve been down this road before,” I reminded her. “Do I have to carry you?”

  Phoebe thrust the rifle butt into the ground and puffed out her small breasts. “No, you don’t. I won’t try to run, either. Just listen for a moment.”

  I went still for a moment.

  “I already admitted I can’t take care of myself. You’re older and wiser than me, Mr. Schist, so I’ll do what you say. But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that we shouldn’t at least warn them what’s behind those gates.”

  I let go of her and put a bare crippled hand over my face.

  “Well?”

  The thought of those monsters loose in any town—even this one—was unspeakable.

  “Maybe Moira will name the baby after me,” I said. “After she’s done spitting on my grave.”

  “At least you’ll have a grave,” she said.

  I shook my head and drew the bogus Colt. “That remains to be seen. If we stay around to warn them, we’re not just risking death. Did it occur to you that if Lichfield gets your pretty little parts, you might end up spending your afterlife in a steam carriage factory?”

  Her face went hard. “Don’t let that happen, Mr. Schist. Throw my earthly remains in that burning river if you have to.”

  “Even if it means Gabriel can’t bring you back with his trumpet?”

  Phoebe gave me a wink. “He’ll just have to use the tuba.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We gave the factory and the quadrangle a wide berth. The area rang with gunshots, but there was no way to tell if it was reanimants or unionists they were shooting.

  Somehow, through that rolling thunder, we heard the clatter of carriage wheels. A steamcoach was driving along one of the parallel streets. It slowed down with a wheeze of steam, paused, then rattled again as it picked up speed.

  It was a search pattern. The vehicle hesitated to examine alleys and open doorways, then hastened to the next building.

  “Stanny’s looking for us,” I said. “The coachman saw us go over the wall.”

  Phoebe knelt with her rifle pointed toward the clatter. I put my back against the bricks.

  A vague black shape sharked along the far end of the alley behind a curtain of gray smoke. We held our breath, but it didn’t stop.

  After a few minutes, the noise faded down the street. Their path was taking them away from us.

  I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed. Our confrontation with Stanislaus couldn’t be put off forever. The man was persistent, to say the least. Though I was exhausted and my lungs were burning, I half wished he had found us so we could settle the issue once and for all.

  “Think he’ll find us?”

  MacCallard had evacuated most of the workers out of the tenements. The company stores were all boarded up. Liuttsburg was a ghost town, save for the hotly contested main boul
evard. If we stayed in the streets, we’d eventually be spotted for sure.

  “Not in the battle,” I said. “Though out here...”

  She looked around. “One more reason to visit MacCallard.”

  I was glad the battle was far removed from the factory gates, since it lessened the chance of letting the reanimants out. It also made sense tactically. MacCallard didn’t want to fight the hardheads where they were dug in with sharpshooter-towers and barricades. His strategy demanded the ironclad be drawn out of the square and into the narrow streets.

  It worked. Harriman’s thugs didn’t know their history. Like Romans in Parthia, they allowed the enemy to taunt them out to the killing grounds. Here on Main Street was where the explosions had sounded.

  A pillar of flame raged at an intersection, sending fresh gray smoke over the already-smoky streets. It was diminished from when we first saw it, but seemed to have sufficient fuel to burn for a while.

  The Duke of Wellington had careened into a corner store, which promptly collapsed into a mound of bright red brick. The explosion had maimed the steely beast but not killed it. One of the Gatlings was functional, spitting round after round into the hazy streets nearby.

  The infantry escorts were hunched in a circle around the wounded iron monster. It reminded me of a dime-novel wagon train fighting off indigenous hostiles. They used tumbled piles of brick for cover, firing madly at the dust and smoke around them.

  The union wasn’t in the dust and smoke, though. They were playing it safe, using the tenements for cover. They moved from window to window so the Harrimen never knew where the next shot would come from while keeping a steady barrage of gunfire on the trapped detectives.

  Phoebe and I stopped running. I leaned into a brick wall, gasping for breath. The bruise on my shoulder flared painfully and I remembered that I had been shot there. The exertion of our escape fell on me like a hammer.

  Phoebe’s hazy face swam in and out of my oxygen-deprived vision. She looked contrite, though maybe I was imagining that, since it was her fault I was there.

  She disappeared and returned moments later with a wet handkerchief. She tied it over the bottom of my face and then put another one on herself.

  I didn’t ask where she found the water because I didn’t want to know. It was oily and foul on my chin, but the rag did a tolerable job of filtering the air so I didn’t complain.

  A few slow breaths behind the impromptu mask and I felt steadier.

  “Can’t run,” I whispered to her.

  She nodded. “I don’t think you have to anymore. We’re at the battle. MacCallard has to be nearby.”

  I wanted to scream at her but didn’t have the breath for it. She didn’t understand. A soldier who couldn’t run was as good as a trout that couldn’t swim. Running was often more important than shooting. If you maneuvered right, you might not even need bullets to kill an enemy. If you couldn’t maneuver, though, it was only a matter of time before someone picked you off.

  We might not have been fighting for one side or another, but the best way to survive a battle was to think like a soldier, which meant being a soldier. Only Phoebe wasn’t a soldier. Nobody was their first time out. That’s why, for most people, their first time out was also their last. Most men died in their first battle. If you made it through the first one, you learned the tricks which got you through the rest. After that, your survival chances went up exponentially.

  Of course, even a grizzled vet caught a stray bullet every now and then.

  She shook off her coat and groped my shoulders. She was taking the greatcoat off. I wondered if she was trying to pay me back for showing the reanimants her chemise. Seemed like a bad time for that.

  “We can’t go in there with this on,” she insisted. “They’ll shoot you.”

  “They want to shoot me anyway.”

  She took it off all the same and threw it in the street with hers.

  I shivered. After all the jumping and sprinting, my pores had been oozing sweat like a colander. My clothes were soaked and the air was damned cold.

  Phoebe gave me a look of motherly concern—amusing on one so young—but I waved her away and stood up.

  “Let’s get my money.”

  As we crept from alley to alley, keeping our heads low, we could admire MacCallard’s trap in its entirety.

  It was simple but deadly. His forces attacked and retreated, attacked and retreated. If he had been fighting Pinkertons, this might not have worked. Pinkertons were a disciplined lot. Disciplined enough to avoid chasing an enemy into an ambush a la Crassus.

  But the Harrimen weren’t so disciplined. Or maybe they were worrying about their reputation. Maybe they thought it was important to look indomitable, for both the union and for future clients. Whatever their reasons, they did what any overly confident bunch of morons would do—they rolled out their steam fort and counted on their armor and their superior weaponry, as if tactics didn’t matter.

  But tactics always matter.

  Their assault was exactly what MacCallard wanted. His unionists peppered the hardheads with bullets and fell back, drawing the ironclad deeper into the winding brick warrens of the city. When the Duke clattered to this intersection, the trap was sprung. The detective part of my mind reconstructed it like a crime scene.

  A burning cart rolled out to block the ironclad’s path. The operators knew that a little fire wouldn’t hurt their vehicle, so they laughed and shoveled more coal in the firebox. With their steam up, they meant to plow right through the fiery obstacle like a haystack.

  But the cart was a Trojan horse. Or perhaps a Trojan bomb would be more appropriate. The union had filled the damn thing with dynamite. Nobody expects you to hide dynamite in something on fire, but that’s because a lot of people don’t know much about dynamite. The beauty of Nobel’s blasting powder is that it doesn’t explode in fire. It burns like a candle. In order to explode, it needs a blasting cap.

  Which the unionists activated as soon as the ironclad’s cattle-catcher hit the cart, sending up a pillar of flame that Phoebe and I could see on the other side of town.

  It was a nasty blow, but steam forts are tough. It wasn’t meant to disable the machine—it was meant to disable the crew. An explosion like that had a wave of kinetic energy which the iron skin did nothing to stop. The boom also deafened, stunned, or killed the hardheads marching nearby, delaying their response.

  Which cleared the way for the next part of MacCallard’s plan.

  Brave but suicidal unionists sprinted up to the sides and put special charges at predetermined points on the Duke’s exterior. Then they ran like hell.

  By then, the Harrimen were snapping out of their trance. The other unionists did what they could to cover them, but a lot of these gremlins caught bullets in the back. You could tell which ones had this job because they lay in the street, facedown and weaponless.

  The crew managed to start driving the steam fort just as the charges blew. Missing several wheels, the steam fort lost control and crashed into the corner store. Liuttsburg didn’t have any building inspectors or quality control, so naturally it collapsed. The surviving crew spun their Gatlings around and prepared for the fight of their life.

  The infantry, meanwhile, ran up to the broken machine and hunkered down beneath its sputtering guns. They threw up makeshift berms out of broken masonry, bricks, and bodies, praying that their Gatling would win the day.

  But MacCallard’s guns were going to fini
sh the job. The union didn’t bother with a frontal charge because they didn’t have to. They hid in bullet-pocked buildings, plinking the hardheads from broken windows and smoky alleys.

  The hardheads were screaming for help, but it wouldn’t come—soon as the trap was sprung, the union threw up barricades behind them. The reinforcing Harrimen ran up against a wall of overturned drays and carts and barrels. The unionists perched behind that wall and leisurely drilled anyone who tried to climb it. That part of the battle wasn’t a fight to kill. It was a fight to delay. The reinforcements had to detour through narrow alleys made treacherous with smoke and gunfire.

  MacCallard had separated the enemy, keen as pie.

  I had to admire the author of this bloody masterpiece, even if I hated the bastard for using Phoebe and me so recklessly.

  Though I admired MacCallard, it was Roy I found myself thinking about. Roy and his honor. I hoped he didn’t catch a bullet, though the same honor that made me like him now would probably get him killed.

  “The crossfire’s insane,” I observed, hunching at an alley mouth. “We can’t go this way.”

  Phoebe peeked around and fell back with a nod. “Friends are as dangerous as enemies in that mess.”

  “That hardly matters,” I said. “Since we don’t have any friends here.”

  “Sure we do. Let’s see what they have to say.”

  With gunfire raging just a few yards away, Phoebe trotted to a door facing the alley. She knocked absurdly, as if she were calling on a friend in Gramercy Park for tea.

  Perhaps more absurdly, someone answered.

  It was a tall black miner in a red balaclava. He had a repeating carbine in one hand as he opened the door. When he saw the wisp of a girl, he immediately lowered his weapon and pulled the rag down from his mouth so he could speak.