She kept a steady fusillade and I watched the steam gauge. The needle wiggled with anticipation. Four reloads later, it was climbing. I couldn’t wait any longer. I gave the engine all the steam she’d take.
Phoebe was such a consummate shooter that she didn’t miss a shot when we lurched into a flying charge.
The monsters were so thick that I had no choice—we plowed through them like a field of rancid weeds. Most were bowled over harmlessly, but several reanimants were ground under our wheels. Two grabbed the back of the carriage and started climbing toward us.
A rangy gray one with bad teeth climbed near the exhaust vent. I pulled the lever and watched steam gush over him like dragon’s breath.
The damn creature didn’t even gasp in pain. The steam seared him so badly I could smell his flesh cooking, but the monster kept coming with his thin long arms.
I put a foot in his face and pushed hard. He grabbed my trousers but I managed to send him sprawling as Phoebe shot the other in the shoulder. It didn’t work—the bullet went right through the corpse, not staggering him at all. He kept coming, reaching for her white calves. Phoebe reared up and bludgeoned him with her rifle butt like Hercules smiting the giants of the earth. He lost his grip and went flying into the darkness.
There were screams coming from inside the carriage. A pair of reanimants were barnacled to the side. They shattered the window with their bare fists.
Before I could do anything, Phoebe cried out beside me. “Mr. Schist!”
A tree loomed ahead. I hadn’t noticed because I was paying attention to the reanimants.
I hit the rudder hard. We dodged it, iron bowtie and all. The erratic maneuver caught one of our loathsome passengers by surprise, snapping him into a conifer so hard we heard his back break.
A mottled pack of undying miners came loping after us, but the majority of the revenants were for storming the hospital. We could hear the nurses screaming inside.
I thought of Lichfield skulking alone in his secret passage.
The carriage door suddenly flew open, catching the reanimant off-guard. The orderly reached out and tried to push the monster loose. Its attention was on him, so without letting go of the rudder, I leaned out and stomped hard on the back of its head.
The blow might’ve dazed a living man, but not a reanimant. It was enough to knock him loose, though. He blundered under our wheels and squelched loudly.
Phoebe shut her eyes and pretended not to hear.
We entered the grim leafless wood between the hospital and Juniper Junction. I braked hard and choked the steam to a trickle. The rough ground threatened to shake the vehicle to pieces as our wooden wheels smashed every root beneath us.
“Why are we slowing down?” Phoebe shrieked through rattling teeth.
“Can’t afford to hit anything,” I said, dodging a tree.
Unfortunately, the reanimants weren’t afraid of trees. They came pell-mell, without a care for tree or root or stone. We could see them tripping and bashing into one another, but that hardly slowed them at all.
Phoebe hiked her gown up and took a knee over the passenger compartment. Despite the chill and the jerking motion of the coach, she struck a picture-perfect marksman pose.
“I think I’d rather crash than get caught by them,” she said between shots.
I didn’t answer. My vision narrowed to the dark path before us. Arm and steering-lever became one. I suddenly felt as if the steamcoach and I were a single being, a great puffing machine with a human brain.
The rifle roared then clicked. With one hand on the lever, I took it from her. She snatched the revolver. I hooked my leg over the rudder and hastily reloaded the Krag-Petersson while she emptied the sixer.
Spent casings dropped and rolled over the carriage top and fell like rain onto the seat beside me. I’d never seen so many smoking shells. Phoebe was a one-woman Gatling.
I finished the rifle and she handed me the smoking sixer. We repeated the procedure.
If I believed in angels, I’d say one rode shotgun with me that night. Somehow I didn’t hit a single tree. We rolled into Juniper Junction mostly unscathed—though the carriage was about shook to pieces.
Phoebe slipped down into the driver’s seat beside me, face flushed with excitement. I chanced a look over my shoulder and saw that the forest was empty.
“No more Varneys behind us,” she said triumphantly. “And bullets to spare.” She reloaded the rifle.
“That’s good,” I said. “We might need ‘em.”
The smile vanished from her face. “For what?”
“A roadblock.”
“They’ll let us through. We’re friends. And if they don’t...” She patted the rifle.
If anything makes you cocksure, it’s blasting dozens of people and walking away unscathed—especially people who are already dead.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked, laughing.
Her cheeks were rosy, as if she’d been dancing a jig instead of re-killing corpses.
“Heavens, yeah,” she said, shivering.
I threw my tattered miner’s jacket over her but it didn’t do much good. Her legs were mostly bare and it was a cold night. I asked her if she wanted to go down inside the coach but she shook her head.
Maybe she refused to go inside because this was Stanny’s carriage. Or maybe because she almost died in there. I liked to believe she preferred to be by my side, even in the cold. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. I’d grown fond of the girl—though I hated to admit it. Getting cozy with clients was never a good idea. They have a bad habit of dying on me.
Without even realizing it, I began hoping Moira’s baby was a girl. I suddenly wanted a daughter, though I’d never really thought about it before now.
There were still folks milling around the streets of Juniper Junction, watching the ruddy sky nervously.
“What do we tell them? They’ve got to get out of here,” Phoebe said, looking around.
The orderly inside the carriage seemed to anticipate the problem. He leaned out of the carriage and shouted, “Fire’s comin’ this way. Get outta town!”
I turned and looked at the woods. The barren trees loomed in the shadows of the red sky, quiet and brooding.
“We’ve got some distance between us,” Phoebe said, as if reading my thoughts. “We could help these people. We can afford to lose some speed.”
Maybe it was her brown eyes. Or maybe it was the fat paycheck from MacCallard. I don’t know what made me do it, but for a moment, I was overtaken by goodwill for mankind, that chancy emotion so rare in the Magnocracy.
“We’ll take all we can carry,” I said.
People surged forward, unsettlingly reminiscent of the reanimants.
“Don’t bother with luggage!” the orderly screamed at them. “There’s no time! Get on or get running!”
We took half a dozen at least inside and another four or five up top. The steering didn’t answer so keenly now. It felt like trying to guide a stampeding elephant pregnant with twins. One of the men in back started shoveling coal without being asked.
Once we got clear of the crowds, I let the coach have all the steam she wanted. There was a lot of weight on her, but she built speed up slow and steady, like a locomotive. After a bit of warming up, we hurled along at forty, maybe fifty miles an hour. We bounced about as much as we rolled, but by some miracle no one shook loose.
Phoebe forgot her chill entirely. Her eyes lit up and s
he screeched happily every time I took a jagged bend. There were a few other passengers that whooped as well, but most rode in silence. Clearly, not everyone enjoyed my piloting—one fellow in back vomited twice—but no one complained.
We had quite a head of steam and a fair bit of inertia. I suspected we could blast through any roadblock the union had. I didn’t have much reason to spare the engine, since it wasn’t mine. If they tried to shoot us, well, I had Phoebe next to me and a whole lot of innocent refugees.
As it happened, the unionists weren’t a problem, because they were already dead or surrendered.
The cavalry had arrived.
We saw their smoke before we saw them—a great black cloud billowing up from the rails. Before long we could make out a shiny steel train chugging west toward Juniper.
This wasn’t the Akronite. It was a railway enforcer—an armored steam wagon sent out to fix problems. Right now, the Liutt-area was a problem.
It carried engineers, machinists and other technicals in case there was a mechanical problem. It also carried guns and the men to use ‘em, in case there was a people problem. The double-decker rail fort bristled with Gatlings and heavy-bore swivel guns that could’ve poked holes in an ironclad at five hundred yards.
When they saw us, a detachment of men were sent to meet us on the road. I could tell they were Pinkertons at once—staunch allies of the rail barons. They didn’t bother with hardhead gear like Harriman’s men. They wore regular winter greatcoats and, because they were in the country, knee-high boots. They were lightly armed—just pistols and the occasional shotgun. If they had thought we were a threat, they would’ve lobbed explosive shells at us from the train.
“Nice coach,” one of them said.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m only borrowing it.”
I didn’t recognize any faces among the detectives. That was probably a good thing. I still had a few friends among the Pinkertons, but I also had enemies. Plenty, in fact, since I’d iced a couple on my last case.
I left Stanny’s coach on the road and went with the men to the train. It was the best option—they offered us a place out of the wind and a warm blanket for Phoebe. It wasn’t charity, though. It was intelligence-gathering. They wanted to know everything they could about the mess they were about to fix. And we were going to tell them.
As interrogations go, this one wasn’t bad, especially after they discovered we were Pennsy customers, which made me glad I’d kept our tickets in my money belt. After that, they gave us hot coffee and a couple of nice seats in back. They told us we’d be brought home at company expense. It was, after all, what I’d paid for. Unfortunately, it meant surrendering the considerable arsenal we had acquired. It was what I expected. The bogus Colt was as good as gone—the Pinkertons had an agreement with the Magnates to destroy any counterfeits they seized. They gave us claim receipts for the Krag-Petersson and my .22. They didn’t take the derringer because they didn’t know I had it. This was the main reason one had a derringer, after all.
Neither of us mentioned the reanimants. Or MacCallard or Lichfield, for that matter. There was no prior planning between us. It was just easier to tell them there was union trouble and leave it at that.
Pennsy was angry about the union blockade, but they weren’t going to clean up Liutt’s mess. They removed the rail block, secured the Akronite, and then using sandbags turned the platform at Juniper into an armored redoubt. It was nice to see such discipline again, such control. These guys weren’t humanitarians—they left folks in the cold who didn’t have tickets—but they weren’t reckless or cruel like the Harrimen.
We watched the two towns burn from the safety of the locomotive.
A few survivors staggered out of the forest, half-dead from exposure and screaming craziness, but the rail company took no notice. It was obvious that the river-fire played queer tricks with people’s minds. Men lost in the woods see all kinds of strangeness, particularly if they’re injured or starved. In time, everybody stopped talking about what they saw. People realized, like Phoebe and I, that it was better that way.
The reanimants never made an appearance. Only a small group had chased us to Juniper. The rest must’ve roamed the hills until their GS-12 ran out and they died a second time, assuming of course that the fires didn’t burn them up.
Kober didn’t show up and he never tried to contact me, though it ain’t like we were the type to send each other Christmas cards. I still feel bad when I think about him though. At times I wish Phoebe had taken the helmet off that dead trooper. Mostly I’m glad she hadn’t. Roy and Mack didn’t show up either. Sometimes I think they survived. Other times I know better.
The mines caught fire, but that wasn’t Pennsy’s problem. They retrieved their assets from the train platform and left the two towns to burn. Their only show of civic concern was to put up a warning sign.
It was pretty standard, of course. Danger, it read. And a rope across the road to indicate it was closed to traffic.
Folks in the Magnocracy are good at reading signs, though. What they really saw was Keep Your Head Down and Keep Moving. Nothing to See Here. Just Another Mass Grave.
There was no shortage of those after the War of Southern Secession.
If PRR was irritated with Liutt, they didn’t show it. Neither did the other Magnates.
Naturally, I was assuming that the sly savant lived, given his considerable wits and resources. After meeting him, I was glad that most Magnates were hidebound penny-pinchers with no eye past the bottom line. I’m not sure the world could’ve handled any more Lichfields.
From the way the Pinkertons talked, I could already tell the papers were going to chock the whole flaming mess up to an industrial accident. Cost of doing business, they’d say. If unions were mentioned at all, it would be in passing. The Magnates didn’t want to give anyone ideas.
With Pennsy reasserting control, the bridge would be rebuilt with that crispy efficacy one expected from the rail barons. Phoebe and I weren’t going to wait around, though. True to their word, they shipped us back to Pittsburgh on the Pennsy dime. The river-fire hadn’t reached the southern parts of the river, so a detour was possible.
The Pittsburgh depot was a good-sized station with a row of merchants just off the platforms.
“Better find a clothing store,” I said, producing the union payment.
“Don’t these suit me?” Phoebe asked with a pirouette. The skirt of her hospital gown whirled around her. If it weren’t for the company-issue railway blanket she used for a shawl, she probably would’ve been arrested for indecency.
“About as well as these suit me,” I grunted, looking down at my miner’s rags. I unwrapped the payment. “I’ll split it with you, fifty-fifty.”
“You saved my life, Mr. Schist. You don’t owe me a thing.”
“If it doesn’t feel proper...”
She eyed the fat packet. “I did lose all my personal effects, though.”
I thought of the ruined copy of Dilthey and my carpetbag. “Stings, don’t it? Well, there’s no painkiller like greenbacks.”
I opened the envelope and my heart stopped.
Phoebe saw my face and pulled it down to eye-level. “Company script,” she whispered.
“And no company to cash it.”
“It ain’t fair.” Tears welled hot and angry in her eyes. “After all you went through—all the danger you faced. You nearly died for them.”
MacCallard must’ve used all his Federal t
ender buying guns. All he had after that was company script. With his army surrounding us, I wouldn’t have been in a position to complain. Of course, I didn’t even get the chance to do that, since he was dead.
I stepped to the nearest trash barrel and threw the envelope away. “That’s my final lesson to you, my dear. Remember it well. Always get it in greenbacks.”
She nodded, tears dripping off her chin. I gave her my bravest smile and led her away.
Since I was a man, I did my crying alone in the water closet.
After a painful visit to the depot’s small branch bank, we made our way soberly to a store and bought some decent threads for the trip home. Once the cost of new clothes were counted, the case officially became a net loss. So much for a nice ride in the country.
While Phoebe was in the changing room I took out the last of the exultatium and laid it in the palm of my hand, wondering what it was worth. It would be difficult to find a buyer for a product no one knew about. On the other hand, it was a rather nice ace up my sleeve if I ever needed it.
Phoebe emerged from behind the curtain in a plain blue frock. When she turned to close the curtains, I stuffed the ampoules in my pocket and feigned a smile. “You look nice.”
“Liar.” She took my arm like an old friend and smiled. “They’re kinda loose. And not very flattering.”
“Factory weeds never are.” I tried not to sound wistful. The clothing Magnates had put a lot of tailors out of business.
“Do you have my ticket?”
I handed it to her. “I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve decided you’ll go on without me.”
She raised an eyebrow at her train ticket. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the fact our detour runs through the CSA, does it?”
“Not at all,” I said quickly. “It’s on account of Moira. I’ve been gone a while. It’s time I get home.”
We walked in silence for a time.
The annoying little chit had nailed it, of course. I hadn’t been south of the Mason-Dixon since I quit the Pinkertons. I hadn’t slept in days and the company script still rankled. I didn’t have the patience to deal with Southern hospitality.
Vacant Graves Page 30