“There’s a battle goin’ on, miss,” he said, as if she didn’t know.
“We need to see Mr. MacCallard,” she explained. After a moment, she added: “It’s urgent.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Do you know where he is?”
The miner shook his head. “Last I heard, he was up the street—past the ironclad.”
“Thank you, sir.” Phoebe made a slight curtsy and turned back to me.
“Don’t go up there, miss,” the miner called after her. “Jus’ get outta here.”
I stood up and followed her. We decided without speaking to retrace our steps and find a parallel street. It went without saying that a stroll up Main Street would be suicide.
As we rounded the corner, the air buzzed with shots. I tore Phoebe behind cover and chanced a peek.
Three unionists hunched behind some barrels, carbines pointed at us. They looked as surprised as we were.
“We’re friendlies,” I shouted.
“Why should we believe you?” they shouted back.
“Because I’m with him,” Phoebe cried out. “I got news for MacCallard from inside the factory.”
There were mutters. It sounded like they remembered her. She had, after all, volunteered for this foolishness after I fled.
I put the .45 in my belt and stepped out, hands up. They eased their weapons down.
“You know where MacCallard is?”
They shook their heads.
Gunshots echoed from the block behind us. Hardheads were circling nearer, if the shots were any indication. The men—whose role was to harry reinforcements—ran toward the action without another word.
Phoebe and I picked up the pace, but I couldn’t run, not with the scar tissue in my lungs. The smoke got thicker. I suspected we were downwind of the burning cart. My eyes were watering. My head spun whiskey-hard.
She led me in a daze. Sounds shifted. The fighting was ahead of us now instead of to the side. I could hear a steady crackle of gunfire punctuated with cries of pain or rage or warning.
It sounded closer.
A fearsome ritcha-titch-titch roared off the bricks around us.
Before I knew it, I had knocked Phoebe beneath me and pushed her face in the mud.
“It’s around the corner,” she said, knocking me off. “The Gatling can’t get us here, Mr. Schist.”
I lay in the mud and listened.
The acoustics were damn unpredictable here and the gears in my head were all fouled up. The brick alleys were echoing gunfire from every direction.
“We can’t be sure,” I said, looking around. “Any turn now...”
“We have to keep moving,” Phoebe said insistently, trying to drag me to my feet. There was a layer of muck on her cheek where I’d forced her down.
I stopped. “Do you hear singing?”
Phoebe gave me a pained expression. “It’s gotta be your condition.”
I liked that. My condition. “I’m not some old codger,” I said. “It’s my lungs that are messed up, not my ears.”
She looked doubtful.
Though my head swam from the low oxygen, I could still feel the blue serum in my veins. I was confused, yes, but my ears were sharp. That much I knew.
“This way,” I said, tugging her away from the battle, toward the sound.
“Mr. Schist...”
It was getting louder. I could hear it now—a soft baritone. “The wee birdies sing and the flowers all spring, and in sunshine the waters are sleeeeee—ping.”
Phoebe stopped and cocked her head like a dog. “I hear it too.” She spoke in a whisper, as if we were in church.
That was when I noticed the blood on the ground, thick puddles of it leading up the alley.
“It’s Loch Lomond,” I said, staring at the blood. “A lament.”
I kept walking, eyes narrowed, ears keen. When the chorus came, I joined in. “‘Oh you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afoooore you.’”
I recognized that baritone. It was Mack.
We found him sitting with his back against the bricks. He was holding MacCallard in his arms like a lover. The large miner sang and wept over the union leader.
When I knelt beside them, I saw that MacCallard had a splinter as big as a railroad spike sticking out of his side. Mack didn’t dare remove it, though blood gushed out of it. MacCallard’s overalls were drenched in the stuff. His face was ashen white and his eyes were unfocused.
He was breathing though. He seemed to stare up at the sweaty, weeping face of the black man as if enraptured.
It made sense, of course, that MacCallard wanted to hear the song. He was a Scotsman. But Mack was singing it with relish, as if he knew the words by heart. What’s more, he sang it with a hint of a highland accent, despite his dark skin.
When he finished, Mack looked up at us. Tears made streaks through the ash on his cheeks. “I told him not to go. The bang-squads, they got pinned down by that fucking gun.”
“MacCallard went in and put one of the charges on himself,” I said grimly. “He took the most dangerous job in the fight.”
Mack looked down and nodded, pushing a stray hair out of MacCallard’s face. “Aidan was always like that—said we can’t ask the men to do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves.”
“A lot of leaders think that way,” I said. “Like Alexander the Great.”
Mack nodded bitterly. “I told him, I said, ‘Alexander caught that arrow at Gaza. You lead from the front, you catch hell like the front.’”
I felt another surge of respect for MacCallard. This was the sort of leader men died for.
“You didn’t want to fight.” Phoebe knelt on his other side and cupped MacCallard’s head in her hand.
“Neither did Aidan,” Mack said. “But there was no other way.”
“There was,” I said harshly. “And you know it, deep down. You two didn’t come here looking for work.”
He bit his lip and shook his head.
“You’re radicals.”
Phoebe gasped. “You came here to start a fight?”
“No—we came here to help people.”
“Radicals,” I repeated. “Stirring up trouble.”
“Call us what you want—we brought these men something they don’t sell in the company store—ideas.”
I thought of Dr. Lichfield when he said it.
“We learned things from our father, stuff the workers don’t know. He was a good man, our daddy.”
I was beginning to put the pieces together. Our daddy.
“When his first wife died,” Mack explained. “He got himself a nanny for his little boy.”
“A black nanny.” I stared at Mack’s face, then at MacCallard’s. “He fell for her, didn’t he?”
Mack nodded. “He did the right thing, though. Other men would’ve shoved her away and pretended nothing happened, but not Dad. He didn’t care what the other white men thought. He made an honest woman of her. He gave her his name.”
“Mack,” I said with a grim smile, “is short for MacCallard.”
“You’re brothers!” Phoebe squeaked in disbelief. Like a lot of white folks, she didn’t think it was possible.
“That’s why Roy called him Big MacCallard. To differentiate him from you.”
Mack nodded. “They tried to call me Black MacCallard, but Aidan wouldn’t hear of it. We had the same daddy but
different mothers. Dad always treated us the same, white son and black. He was a good man.”
“The Magnocracy hates good men.”
“It does,” Mack said. Fresh tears glittered in his eyes. “It hates ’em fierce.”
“So what happened?” Phoebe asked in a small voice.
“Our father was an engineer. Engineers get to wear a starched collar. They have their own desks and every Friday they get a nice fat paycheck. You’d think being an engineer is great, right?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said quietly, but he didn’t hear me.
“The problem is, engineers get expensive. They ask for raises nobody wants to pay. One day, the bosses tell Daddy he’s fired ’cause he costs too much. Then they brought in this young buck fresh outta school. That little shit did the same job for half the price.
“So Daddy says, that’s all right, I’ll find another job. Only nobody wants to pay him what he’s worth, so he starts at the bottom again, even though he’s got a wife and two babies. And after a while, they fire him too, and hire another buck fresh outta school. This is how it goes...on and on. That man worked as hard with his mind as any fool did with a shovel, but they paid him pennies and fired him anyway.”
I’d heard the story before. In the Magnocracy, a man’s mind was just another machine to be used and thrown away, no different than a locomotive or an analytical.
“There’s no such thing as an old engineer,” I said.
“That’s right,” Mack said. “So we decided to do something about it. We knew better than to follow Daddy’s footsteps, workin’ for the man and gettin’ shit in return. We went down into the camps and the factories and we whispered. We whispered and whispered till our words were like an ocean roaring at their doorstep, threatening to drown the bastards.”
The rest fell into place for me.
“MacCallard they might suspect—big white fellah who talks nice,” I said. “You were the real sleeper—a black man with an education.” There were plenty of black folk with an education, mind you, but a lot of people didn’t know that. It would’ve been even more surprising to find one in the mines.
Phoebe leaned forward, looked into Big MacCallard’s face, and pulled the rag down from her mouth. “He’s gone,” she whispered.
Mack bowed his head and said nothing. Phoebe closed the dead man’s eyes.
The sight of MacCallard’s bloodless body reminded me why we were there. “The gates—you can’t open the factory gates.”
With a heaving sob, Mack lifted his face and looked at me with bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Mr. Liutt, or Dr. Lichfield—whatever you want to call him. He’s done something to those bodies he took. Something horrible. You do not want to go into the factory.”
“The men should see what he’s done,” Mack snarled. “They need to know what a monster he is.”
“You don’t understand. He’s reanimated them. They’re alive...sort of. And angry. Very, very angry.”
The miner glanced at Phoebe. She gave her most earnest—and terrified—nod.
“That’s impossible.”
“It should be, but it isn’t. Listen—I think I’ve pieced this all together. My friend or former associate, Kober, got hit and was bleeding. I took him up to the hospital and they took some of my blood and gave it to him. Normally, somebody else’s blood can make you sick. No one is sure why.”
“The Racists think that different nations shouldn’t mix their blood,” Mack said. He was probably an expert on the subject, since the philosophy of Racism was quite popular right now and, among other things, labeled him an abomination, since he was mixed-race.
“Whatever the reason is, mixing blood really is a problem. When the nurse gave my blood to Kober, though, she put it through a machine first with an elixir marked GS-12. I’ll bet that GS stands for grafting solution...or perhaps grafting suspension.”
“The greenhouse,” Phoebe suddenly added. “All the plants we saw!”
“That’s right,” I said. “Dr. Lichfield is fascinated by grafting. First he grafted plants, which is simple. But now he’s grafting people.”
“You’re saying he can bring bodies back to life by stealing parts from other bodies...like patching up a broken-down steam engine?”
“Exactly.”
Mack looked at his dead brother and clenched his jaw. I knew how he felt. Phoebe wasn’t the only one who would jump in the river-fire to keep out of Lichfield’s twisted hospital.
“But that’s not all,” Phoebe said urgently. “The bodies—the people—they’re angry that they’re dead.”
“Understandably.”
“Not just angry,” I told him, “but enraged. It’s like they blame us for carrying on after they died. Or,” I said, thinking more scientifically, “Lichfield’s process may have damaged their minds.”
Mack considered this. “So you’re saying that a mob of angry revenants is about to break out of the factory?”
“Yes—and they won’t differentiate between your men and Liutt’s.”
“Once enough hardheads leave the square, a group of us were supposed to dynamite the gates. We were going to storm the factory and occupy it.”
“That can’t happen,” Phoebe said.
We broke into a nearby tenement and hid MacCallard’s body. It cost us time we didn’t have, but I could hardly blame Mack for doing it, not now that he knew about Lichfield’s grotesquerie.
“I’ve got to stop the demolishers,” he announced as we stepped back into the alley.
“I’m not taking a little girl back into that. We’re leaving.”
“I wasn’t asking you.” He clasped my shoulder. “You’re a good man, Donovan Schist.”
“Don’t you dare say that. You know what the Magnocracy does to good men.”
He gave me a strained smile and nodded.
“Wait!” Phoebe protested.
“You’re not going with him,” I told her.
“That’s not it at all.” She cleared her throat and looked suddenly bashful. “What about Mr. Schist’s payment?”
The timing was pretty crass, but I could’ve kissed her.
Mack looked at me for a moment as if he wanted to take back the “good man” comment, then reached into his faded jacket and produced a delightfully fat envelope. “You two more than earned this.”
“You better believe it,” I said, snatching it.
The miner vanished into the smoke and shadows without another word.
“Off to where good men go,” I murmured. It was the last we ever saw of him.
I grabbed Phoebe by the hand and started running before she could start weeping or something.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We slipped up the narrow alley and came out at a muddy road. It ran from the river to the edge of town, paralleling the main thoroughfare. The fighting hadn’t spread here yet, though it still looked like a war zone.
The cheap glass windows had shattered when the dynamite blew. The mud glittered with shards as if the ground were covered in diamonds. A gang of armed unionists hustled by, ignoring us. A little while later, we saw a lanky man in worker threads. He took one look at our guns and ducked into the nearest alley.
As our adrenaline levels dropped, we started to notice those banal nuisances you forget in a battle.
Phoebe had, over the course of our misadventure, lost her skirt elevator. She had also, for that matter, lost her original skirt. The factory
girl uniform consisted of a gray dress and smock with a humble mourning shawl to match. Without a skirt elevator, the muck coated her hem, making the dress heavier by the second.
She shouldered the rifle, grasped the fabric, and hiked it up out of the mud. She looked up suddenly at a nearby building.
A shadow flitted between two cracked windows. These were worker housing, so many of them were probably still occupied by cowering families, despite MacCallard’s evacuation.
“They’re probably looking at your ankles,” I teased.
She didn’t laugh.
We could see the somber forest just two blocks away, past an intersection and rows of teetering brick. We were about to reach the intersection when we both stopped to listen.
The big black carriage burst into the intersection ahead of us, spewing smoke behind it.
Phoebe and I started toward a nearby building but it had a good head of steam. The coachman barely cleared the corner before barreling toward us. He ducked low and fed steam into the pistons, grinning over his checkered scarf. The enormous machine ate the distance between us in a heartbeat.
“He’s going to run us down.” I halted, drew the pistol and took a bead on his silver goggles. They were the easiest thing to see through the haze.
Phoebe stepped past me, making for the doorway nearby.
Suddenly, hot blood speckled my cheek. She stumbled into me with a gasp.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him—a grim scarecrow with a straight razor in each of his hands. He’d been skulking in the shadows of a doorway.
“Stanislaus,” I breathed.
He was wearing the dull gray weeds of a factory man, complete with faded wool cap. We’d seen him minutes before, only then he’d kept the hat down to hide his distinctive Slavic nose and cold blue eyes. He must’ve signaled his coach somehow and then doubled back to lay an ambush.
Phoebe collapsed in the mud.
There was no time to help her. I’d be dead in another second. I jumped clear of her prone body and fired three shots at the coachman. He ducked low and seemed to hiss at me.
Vacant Graves Page 27