by Jean Rabe
“It can’t be real,” she said.
Obadiah frowned. “It’s real, all right. I seen it.”
Dusky shuddered. “But—but ”
She sat on one of the beds and held herself, rubbing her hands over her shoulders. She’d been foolish enough to let hope take root in her heart. Hope that the Union might somehow win the war. Hope that she might someday put this plantation far behind.
Obadiah sat next to her and put his arms around her. She turned toward him and buried her face in his shoulder and wept. When she finished, he reached under her chin and tilted her face up so that he could look into it.
She saw that he had tears glittering his eyes too, although none of them had spilled down onto his face.
“It’s gonna be all right,” he said. And she believed him.
He brought his face closer to hers, and their lips brushed together in a tender kiss. She drew back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
A smile broke through as she wiped away her tears. “I—I just never kissed a man before.”
He smiled, showing all his teeth. “You think I’m a man?”
She felt a hunger leap up inside of her. She leaned upward and kissed him again. “Do you think I’m a woman?”
His eyes shone at her, the tears that had welled there gone, replaced with a warmth that Dusky now realized she’d longed to see. He brought his face down to hers again. “For sure.”
Dusky felt her body arch toward Obadiah’s, pressing his chest against her breasts. Their tongues came together, and she discovered that he tasted sweeter than any berry. She felt herself being carried away, body and soul.
Then a sound came outside the door.
“Obadiah!” a voice came. “You in there?”
The heat between Dusky and Obadiah evaporated. She recognized the voice. It belonged to Emmanuel, the man who’d taken over as the head of the men after her daddy died.
Obadiah looked at Dusky and froze, unable to open his mouth. Dusky stood and headed for the back door. If Emmanuel caught her in here, the best she could expect was a whipping. She stopped to give Obadiah one last kiss, though, and that’s when the door burst open.
“Obadiah!”
Emmanuel stood silhouetted in the doorway, his bulk occupying the entire frame from edge to edge. Without a moment’s thought, Dusky fled, her feet carrying her out the back door and up the low hill toward the main house. She was halfway home before she regained control.
She stopped and looked back at the shack and its empty front door. Emmanuel was shouting something at Obadiah, but Dusky couldn’t quite make out his words. When his form appeared in the doorway again, she turned back toward the main house and sprinted away, not stopping until she was safe in the room she shared with the other girls.
When Missy and Sandy came in later, they found Dusky curled up on her bed. The tears she’d wept had long since dried, and she’d spent the time since then lying there, thinking about what had happened and what she could hope to do about it. The girls tittered about the excitement, the gunshots they’d heard, but to them it was just a story someone had told them. They hadn’t seen the soldier die. Someone—Obadiah, Dusky guessed—had removed the body so the only evidence the other girls had seen of the incident had been the soldier’s blood.
“This ain’t nothing for you girls to laugh about,” Mamma Esther said when she stormed into the room. “You got your things packed? Y’all ready to go?”
“I thought we wasn’t going nowhere,” Missy said. “After Martha got herself shot, we said we gave up on that.”
“Gonna happen one way or the other,” Mamma Esther said. “That soldier didn’t come all the way down to Georgia by his lonesome. Soldiers are like mice. See one, there’s bound to be more.”
“But what we gonna do if they come here?” Sandy’s voice squeaked as she spoke. She was only eleven.
“Get,” said Mamma Esther. “That’s why you need to be packed. When the bullets start flying, we best be on our way. We can come back when it’s over and see who won.”
“Or just keep heading north.” Dusky sat up in her bed as she spoke. Everyone’s eyes turned to her. “To be free.”
Mamma Esther grimaced at her. “Now, don’t be talking like that. Don’t be getting your hopes up, none of you. There ain’t no telling who’s gonna win this war, and either way you can bet we’re gonna be on the losing side.”
Dusky opened her mouth to speak, but before the words could come out, a gunshot cracked in the distance. Then several more came, until it sounded like a barrage of lightning had struck the plantation, bringing with it a rolling thunder that seemed as if it might never end. Missy and Sandy clutched at each other and screeched in fear. Mamma Esther’s frown deepened as she shuffled over to comfort them.
Dusky ran to the window and peered outside. The sun was setting over Stone Mountain in the west, leaving the land shrouded in darkness and the sky turning a brilliant pink and orange. She could see most of the plantation from here, all the way to the clearing in front of the barn, down past that to the shack, and from there to the half-picked cotton fields beyond.
The doors to the barn stood open. There, framed in the massive entrance, Dusky saw the great machine.
It stood taller than a man on a horse, and it was wide around as a Conestoga wagon, but it was made of polished metal that covered it from end to end and gleamed in the dying rays of the sun. It rolled forward out of the barn on great metal wheels shaped like massive versions of the cogs that Dusky had once seen sitting inside a broken wristwatch. A demonic glow surrounded it, reflected off the ground below it and shoving back the encroaching night. Gun barrels bristled from every side of the machine. A pair of Gatling guns sat atop its shoulders, smoke wafting out of each of their multiple barrels, and it bore a massive cowcatcher strapped across its front. The machine spewed steam through a giant whistle that stabbed from its rear. The horrible noise caused Dusky to cover her ears while Missy and Sandy screeched once again in fear.
Emmanuel lay dead in front of the machine. Isaiah, Jebediah, and Aaron were sprawled along the trampled grass nearby, the life bleeding out of each of them so fast that it left them without even a moan.
Obadiah sat twenty yards in front of the machine, clutching at his leg and hollering in pain. He struggled to his feet, tried his weight on his injured leg, and collapsed once more.
Dusky pushed herself away from the window and headed for the bedroom door.
“Where you think you’re going?” Mamma Esther asked.
“I can’t just let him die like that,” Dusky said. She wiped the tears away from her face, unaware until then that they’d been blurring her vision.
“There ain’t no good you can do that boy now,” Mamma Esther said. “Ain’t no use in getting yourself killed too.”
Dusky pushed open the door. “I love him.” As the words left her lips, she knew them to be true. “I got to try.”
Leaving Mamma Esther to comfort the whimpering girls, Dusky made her way through the house until she reached the front door. Slipping out between the tall white columns, she crept around until she could see the field in front of the barn.
Obadiah stood there, still alive—for now.
Dr. Tucker stood next to him, fastening a pair of manacles around Obadiah’s hands and trussing them behind his back. Dusky had seen him use this sadistic invention on recaptured slaves before. The interior rims of the manacles had been sharpened, and anyone who struggled against them was likely to cut his wrists to the bone.
Obadiah grunted in agony as he tried to maintain his balance on his one good leg and failed. Dusky’s heart ached for him. She knew she had to do something to save him, but what? Maybe, she thought, Dr. Tucker would see that he’d had enough by now and would leave him be. Maybe he’d satiated his anger and his madness by murdering the other men whose bodies lay sprawled about the field.
Or maybe not.
Staying to the edge of the field, Dusky crawled her way
through the taller grass, making her way toward the barn. The weeds pricked her legs and pulled at her skirt, but she ignored them and concentrated on keeping her head low. As long as Dr. Tucker was busy with Obadiah, she stood a chance. If the man managed to spot her, though, they were all doomed.
The doctor reached down into the grass and produced a rope that terminated in a noose. He tossed it up over a sturdy tree branch that hung high overhead, then placed the loop over Obadiah’s head. He sneered as he tightened it around Obadiah’s neck.
“You and the rest of those boys figured you’d just walk right in and take the Behemoth from me?” he said. “You think I’m stupid. That I didn’t know that you’d been watching me? That I didn’t know that you’d try to do something to stop me?”
Dr. Tucker gave the rope a fierce tug, and Obadiah gagged.
“You think I wasn’t ready for you, boy?”
Dusky reached the barn and stared up at the machine—the Behemoth, as Dr. Tucker had called it. She had never seen anything so magnificent and terrifying in her life. Now that she was close enough, she realized that the glow from the thing’s underbelly came from a fire that had been stoked in a boiler down there. As she noticed this, she wondered if the machine’s invulnerable metal hide wasn’t quite so impenetrable from below.
Dusky got on her hands and knees and crawled underneath the Behemoth. There she spotted a trap door that had been left open, a hole in the great beast’s suit of armor.
“Take heart, boy,” Dr. Tucker said. “You’re going to go down in history as the first man to ever be hanged by use of a steam engine.”
The doctor strode over to the front of the behemoth and began to fasten the open end of the rope there. As he worked, Dusky held her breath, hoping he couldn’t hear her, no matter how hard her heart might be pounding.
“Don’t worry, though,” Dr. Tucker called back to Obadiah. “You won’t be up there long. While you’re hanging there, struggling for your last breath, I’ll help you find it. I need a target to help me calibrate my guns. After all, when I take on Sherman’s men tomorrow, I need to make sure the Behemoth is in top shape.”
Dusky’s blood ran cold. While the plantation’s men were hardly well-trained soldiers, she’d seen what the machine had done to them. If Dr. Tucker managed to deploy his Behemoth against the Union invaders, she didn’t see how they could stand against it. It would mow them down like dry summer grass.
She couldn’t let that happen.
As Dusky eyed the hatch that led into the machine, Dr. Tucker leaned down to examine his knot and gasped. “Hello there,” he said.
Startled, Dusky did the only thing she could think of. She scrambled up into the belly of the Behemoth.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Dr. Tucker said as Dusky disappeared into the machine.
She reached over and slammed the trapdoor shut before he could reach her. Then she sat down on top of the hatch, pushing all her weight down onto it.
Dr. Tucker smashed into the trapdoor from below, lifting Dusky into the air. A moment later, though, she came crashing right back down. It was dark inside the machine, lit only by the glow of the stoked fire. Dusky felt around with her hands, finding the edges of the trapdoor and following them with her fingers until she found a latch.
Dr. Tucker smacked into the trapdoor again, and Dusky screamed as the impact lifted her into the air again. The sound seemed to shock the man so much that he dropped back once more. When he did, Dusky found the thick bolt for the latch and slammed it home.
Dr. Tucker threw himself into the trapdoor once more, but this time it held tight. From below, Dusky heard a groan of pain that grew into a howl of frustration and fury.
“Come on out of there, you witch!” Dr. Tucker said. “You come out of there right now!”
Dusky scrambled away from the trapdoor. She didn’t know much about Dr. Tucker’s fearsome contraption, but she knew she wasn’t leaving it to face his wrath. So far, she’d somehow managed to make it through her life without taking a good whipping, but if she came out of here now, she knew that thirty-nine lashes would be the best she could hope for.
She glanced around the interior of the machine. The flickering flames from the boiler’s stove cast everything in a hellish orange light.
Levers and switches of all types bristled from the walls inside the Behemoth. Dusky didn’t know what any of them might do. One might save Obadiah. Another might kill him. A third might blow the entire metal beast up and destroy them all.
A leather chair sat fixed higher up in the contraption, and Dusky crawled into it and looked around. From here, she could see out of the machine through thin slits that had been cut into the metal plating. Straight before her, she saw Obadiah hanging from a noose, and she fought back a full-throated scream that threatened to break free right up until she spotted the fact that his feet were still on the ground.
“I said, get out of there, or I swear to God in Heaven I’ll kill every last damn one of you!” Dr. Tucker banged on the belly of the Behemoth with something hard, and the clanging rang throughout the entire machine. Dusky felt like she’d been made into the clapper of a gigantic bell.
She scanned the controls in front of her, and she recognized some of them. Dr. Tucker had been driving a steam-powered horseless carriage around the plantation for the past year, and Dusky had sometimes watched him manipulate the controls to get the machine in motion. This lever in front looked familiar, like it should kick this contraption forward.
Dusky reached out and clasped the handle, squeezing the hand lever that released the mechanism. Then she shoved it.
The Behemoth surged backward, and Dusky pitched forward into the control rods with a squeal. She looked up through the slit and saw the rope pulling tight and hauling Obadiah into the air. She’d been trying to save him, but she was killing him instead.
A stream of curses erupted from beneath the machine. Dusky shared their sentiment, although she would not have aimed them at the same target. She shoved herself back and fumbled for the same lever again. Finding it, she hauled backward on it, and it pivoted back into the neutral position, where it stopped with a solid clunk.
Obadiah still hung there in the air, his feet well off the ground and flailing about for purchase on the earth below. Dusky allowed herself a little curse too. If she didn’t do something soon, Obadiah would die—at her hand! But she also didn’t want to make everything worse.
Dusky put her hand back on the control lever. Should she use that one or another? There were so many to choose from. Or should she just get out of the machine and go cut Obadiah down?
Dr. Tucker strode in front of the machine now and leveled his pistol at her. He thumbed back the hammer on it and fired.
Dusky shrieked as the bullet ricocheted off the Behemoth’s metal skin. Obadiah gave out a strangled cry of anguish worse than any he’d uttered for himself.
Dr. Tucker threw back his head and laughed.
“Come on out of there now, Dusky.” He pointed the gun straight at her, as if he could see her through the slender slits and would put his next bullet right between her eyes, just like he’d done to that poor Union soldier. “You do, and maybe I’ll just beat you half to death and wait to see if God wants to leave you with me or bring you home.”
The sneer on the man’s face set Dusky off. She could tell he was bluffing. He’d built this damned machine of his too well. He couldn’t hurt her, no matter how much he might want to.
That realization raised her spirits a bit, but she knew that if she didn’t get out of there and cut Obadiah loose he’d be dead in a matter of seconds. She couldn’t just sit here safe inside this metal can and wait. She had to take action, or the man she loved would die in a horrible, painful way.
Dr. Tucker seemed to sense she was about to take action. He opened fire at her again.
Dusky squeezed the hand lever on the handle before her as the bullets glanced and pinged off of the Behemoth’s skin. This time, instead of pushing forward, she pul
led back on the long-handled lever with all her might.
The lever gave, and the machine lurched forward like a gigantic, ravenous monster. Dr. Tucker kept firing until his gun was empty, refusing to give ground to his slave inside his own machine. Behind him, Obadiah’s twitching form touched down on the ground and collapsed.
A horrible cry went up from the front of the machine as Dr. Tucker disappeared beneath it. His pride, Dusky guessed, kept his feet in place when he should rather have been running away. Quick as she could, Dusky pushed the lever forward again until it clunked back into its place. It rolled to a stop just before it might have run over Obadiah.
Dusky threw herself out of the seat and toward the trapdoor. Flinging it open, she dropped to the scorched ground beneath the Behemoth. Dr. Tucker—or what was left of him—lay there, mangled by the cowcatcher as it had shoved forward along the lawn. She turned her head away.
Scrambling from under the machine, Dusky dashed over to where Obadiah lay, still as death. She fell to her knees and pulled the noose from around his throat. It had made livid red marks upon his neck, but once she removed it, he started hacking and coughing, struggling to get the air back into his lungs.
Dusky thought she had never heard such a wonderful sound in her life. She leaned over and kissed Obadiah’s face again and again as tears flowed down her face.
“You’re alive,” she said. “Oh, thank the Lord, you’re alive.”
“My arms,” Obadiah said weakly.
“Oh!” Dusky said. She looked over at Dr. Tucker’s stone-still form. She cringed at the thought of having to touch his body, but she had no other choice. She found the key to his cruel manacles in one of his blood-soaked pockets, and in a moment she had Obadiah freed.
He brought his arms around and held her in them tight, his shoulders shaking with the release of his emotions. “The worst part wasn’t hanging there,” he said. “It was the thought I wouldn’t be able to stop him from killing you.”
“We’re safe now,” Dusky said. “Right?”
Obadiah craned back his neck to peer into her eyes, and he nodded. He let his eyes roam the body-littered field, where many of his friends lay.