The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2)

by Cassandra Duffy

  A moment before she believed she would retch, the dust cloud broke, the open road yawned wide before her, and the mutants found room enough to scatter out of her way. She drove hard, dodging between derelict, rusted out cars, striving to put distance, regardless of the direction, between her and the mutants of Yuba City. She could still hear them behind her, screaming in their unintelligible tongue. Even after she was certain she was too far away to still hear them, she still heard them.

  The sun was setting over her left shoulder—she was heading north, into what used to be farmland. She’d no doubt lost most of her supplies again and the bike was once again laboring. She needed to make camp, to give the bike time to cool down—more than these things though she needed to put space between herself and Yuba City. She pushed the bike hard, nearly to the breaking point before she swiped her hand across the gauges to clear the dust and know precisely how close the bike was to catastrophic failure. Everything was in the red. Steam was pouring out of every gasket, threatening to cook her like a lobster in the saddle if she didn’t back off immediately. She pulled off on a small road to the west in the midst of pasture gone to fallow, and finally let the bike lumber into the soft, green grass between the barbwire fence and the road’s gravel shoulder. She had to hand crank the quad-struts to hold the bike up, which was made difficult by the metal handle having heated to almost an almost unbearable temperature with the rest of the metal on the bike.

  She rolled feebly from the motorcycle, gasping and coughing in the grass as her new and different movements kicked up more of the Yuba City dust off her clothing. She finally did throw up, which only made her feel sicker. The hangover that she’d thought might be on the verge of leaving her became a secondary concern. She didn’t know what she’d breathed in during the course of her mad dash through hell, but she had to assume whatever made the mutants what they were hadn’t gone anywhere simply because the Slark moved on.

  Claudia crawled weakly back to the motorcycle and searched for three necessities. She hadn’t lost all her water, she hadn’t lost the map that was folded in her jacket, and her rifle was still strapped snugly in place.

  She coughed violently several more times and threw up again. She couldn’t tell if the sun was setting or if her vision was going dark. Regardless, she tumbled into unconsciousness unwillingly with the daylight fading.

  Chapter 8:

  A Spirit Guide to a Bridge of Fool’s Gold.

  Dreams, feverish nightmares haunted Claudia’s sleep, scarring her mind with visions of Veronica and Fiona being torn apart and worse by the mutants of Yuba City. She startled awake, screaming so loud she wasn’t even sure of the source of the noise until she’d stopped. She glanced around the gathering dusk to make sure the mutants hadn’t actually chased her. The fields were quiet with only the sound of a few cowbirds chirruping their way across the man-made grasslands and the far away sound of wind blowing through open country. Her head was throbbing, her fingers were numb, and she thought she might be coming down with a migraine of epic proportions.

  She came a hair’s breadth from draining the last of her canteens down her throat. She checked her bike’s recollection tanks first to see if the bike needed water. Miracle of miracles, the motorcycle’s re-condensing chamber had functioned perfectly, recapturing two thirds of the bike’s water supply and pouring it back into the two tanks. Claudia drank greedily from one of her remaining two canteens, stopping short of overdoing it as the water almost immediately threatened to come back up.

  She checked the map, checked the mile posts, and even checked the scant few signs around her, all of which offered her no real information. She’d turned left while going north, which mean she was pointed west and that was all she needed to know. She slid into the saddle on the bike and started the engine. It rebelled at first but fell into the increasingly familiar dull thunder on the second attempt.

  Her eyes itched and the open air blowing across them as she rode didn’t help. The sun was long below the horizon and soon she was driving blind with only a couple lights on the bike offering any illumination with the main headlamp destroyed by the mutant who had nearly come up over the top of the handlebars. All of these problems seemed fine to Claudia though. She could follow a road knowing little else about it than it was beneath her.

  It didn’t take a doctor to know she was having fever delirium, but the thing about having fever delirium, even if one knew they were having it, was that one couldn’t be made to care. Claudia laughed to herself at this realization and drove on deciding a swift death in a motorcycle crash was preferable to a slow, delirious death and certainly better than becoming one of the monstrous mutants.

  She found signs, found the markers that would guide her back to her route. But then she picked up a hitchhiker, although she was sure she hadn’t stopped. Veronica was with her, sometimes on the bike behind her, sometimes running alongside, and sometimes simply talking in her ear. Claudia tried to ask her how she’d found her way to western California. Her mouth refused and the words wouldn’t form.

  “Like a champion of perdition, you ride into oblivion,” Veronica said to her. “When you reach the Pacific, will you point the gnarled front of your motorcycle toward the Far East and drive resolutely off a cliff like Thelma and Louise?”

  Claudia wanted to answer, wanted to tell Veronica that she never got the references she kept making to that movie as Claudia had never seen it. Veronica was always doing that, referencing movies that Claudia had been too young to see when they existed and would now never get a chance. Movies were gone forever. That seemed sad to Claudia. She liked movies. Movies were extinct. Like dinosaurs. Movies were dinosaurs. In her fever delirium, these thoughts seemed profound although she suspected they were actually rather simplistic.

  Claudia mechanically made turns along her trip. Signs told her she was passing through Santa Rosa heading south on the final leg of her quest. If she was lucky, she would have just enough left in her to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and collapse among the ruins of San Francisco so the mutants there could feast upon her. Santa Rosa was alive and well, people walking the streets, tending their yards, and out on random errands. Of course, everyone in Santa Rosa was Veronica. They all knew her though and they were all glad to see her. Claudia wanted to stop, wanted to live in this dark city that was entirely peopled by glowing specters of the White Queen, but they were all cheering her on, encouraging her to finish her trip. And so she drove on into the darkness, following the winding roads leading south.

  By the time she’d reached the overlook leading down toward the bridge and the city of San Francisco, she was aware her hallucinations had completely replaced reality in such a seamless way that she couldn’t be sure if she was even really awake. The city, which she’d only seen briefly when first arriving in the states, had undergone a truly bizarre change. The only building left stretching into the skyline was the Transamerica Pyramid. It stood tall and lonely above a field of black, illuminated white against the night sky as the sole remaining beacon of how to find San Francisco.

  From her vantage point above, she could also see the Golden Gate Bridge was missing a significant section out of the middle. The suspension lines still flowed from one end to the other, but they were the only part of the bridge complete enough to make the entire trip from shore to shore.

  Claudia wound her way down to the bridge and began her trek across it. Several chunks of the railing were missing where people had no doubt driven off the bridge in the distant past. The lanes were clear though and she was free to press the bike to its limits. She struggled to keep the motorcycle in a straight line when winds began kicking up toward the middle, setting the crumbling bridge to sway beneath her. Maybe that’s where the gaps in the railing had truly come from, people trying to drive across and getting hurled off by an unexpected shifting of the bridge. Claudia found the swaying of the bridge nearly matched the swaying in her head brought on by the fever, making the entire experience rather soothing when it should have
been terrifying.

  Her headache was gone, replaced by vertigo and a strange sense of euphoria. Despite being freezing cold and overly hot all at once, she couldn’t figure out how the two extremes weren’t canceling each other out. She wondered if maybe falling off the bridge wouldn’t feel kind of nice—she might have even tried if she could be sure of the water’s temperature.

  She pulled up nearly to the edge of the crumbling pavement, far closer than her right-minded self would have. She knew she wasn’t in her right mind and didn’t care. She un-strapped her rifle from the bike and slung it lazily over her shoulder.

  “If you want to reach the other side, you have to climb,” Veronica told her.

  “I know,” Claudia said, finally finding her voice. She couldn’t find Veronica anymore, but she knew she was somewhere nearby.

  Claudia scrambled almost drunkenly over the railing, grasping onto one of the last two suspension tethers on the right side of the bridge. Climbing it was difficult, especially with the constant swaying of the bridge and the vertigo spinning her head. She made it to the top, even managed to free climb around the outside of the massive suspension line that arced across the entire expanse of the bay, and she began walking south. Her headache was returning, the footing was slippery, and the little lines along the side meant as possibly handrails for maintenance people had huge gaps. Rather than kneel and crawl, as would have been prudent, Claudia brazenly high-wire walked these handrail-less sections.

  She struggled getting down. The ribbed points in the massive cable was how she’d gotten up from the suspension wires, but getting up was apparently far easier than getting down. She slipped in the very early going, shrugged hard to keep her rifle strapped to her shoulder, and lost her handhold in the process. Were it not for a solid grip for her left hand and a fortunate weakness in the structure to create a hole for her foot, she would have followed her rifle into the bay hundreds of feet below. She watched the rifle go with a strange detachment. She needed the gun, had an emotional attachment to it, but couldn’t think of anything she could do to change it or her fortune at that point. Somehow she found herself walking down the centerline between lanes on the opposite side of the bridge, beckoned on by the white pyramid jutting into the sky. How she’d completed the descent from the bridge, she couldn’t be sure, and the more pressing concern was how itchy her eyes were. Veronica was gone now. Her rifle was gone. The cantankerous bike that had brought her so far, complaining the entire way, was gone. The only thing not gone from her was the will to walk toward the pyramid.

  She stumbled once, but managed to keep her feet. She stumbled again and this time went over although she managed to rise again. The sun was coming up, pinking the sky in the east, and bringing with it a clearer vision of the pyramid that was her surviving focus. Ocean birds squawked, soaring nearby on their morning fishing expeditions. The water beneath her roared as the ocean struck the bay. Her focus remained on the pyramid. She stumbled again, fell, and this time stayed down. She was so close, on the other side of the San Francisco side towers of the bridge. Even still, she was done, spent, not to rise again.

  She heard men, real men with real voices speaking accented English although she couldn’t understand what they said. They flashed lights in her eyes. She tried to apologize to the doctor since she didn’t imagine she would leave his care in pristine condition this time; it took her a moment to realize the lights probably didn’t belong to the doctor from Carson City.

  “Only one sparkler,” one of the men said after he’d finished flashing the lights in her eyes.

  “Claudia?” a familiar voice called to her. Not Veronica this time, a voice so long unheard that she almost couldn’t even be sure it was the voice she remembered. “Claudia, is that you?”

  “Papa?” Claudia choked out. The rising sun was over his shoulder, obscuring her view of him. Moreover, one of her eyes was refusing to work, as though she was viewing the entire world through frosted glass over her right eye.

  “This one is too far gone. Over the edge with her, Marceau,” a stern man’s voice spoke from farther back on the bridge. “We don’t have time for your flights of fancy.”

  “This is not a flight of fancy,” her father growled. Claudia recognized the voice as a rarity. He spoke softly most often, a hard man, but with a subtle exterior. Should his angry voice arise, she didn’t envy who it was leveled at. “This is my daughter, finally found her way to me.”

  “You’ve said this before, made this same mistake more than once, and this infected will not be allowed back in my city,” the man’s voice said. He had an accent, a British accent, high end like aged scotch and London Fog hound’s-tooth clothing.

  “It is me, Papa,” Claudia said. “Veronica helped me, but I lost my rifle…”

  Claudia was dropped from her father’s arms, landing harshly on the pavement though she’d only fallen a foot or so back to where she’d originally landed. She heard a scuffle, but she couldn’t regain herself enough to see what was happening. Rough hands grabbed her by the arms and began pulling her toward the edge. She heard her father’s voice shouting in French after her. She could see him again, although just barely. He was being restrained by two men while a third stood by, hands behind his back, supervising. She was being lifted toward some purpose as another man grasped her ankles.

  Over the side, the British man said again. He was too focused on watching Claudia’s removal to notice that her father had broken free—indeed, had broken one captor’s nose and the other’s arm in the process. The British man didn’t see her father coming, didn’t seem to really understand what was happening even when her father’s knife cut into the side of the British man’s neck and slashed out through the front of his throat. Claudia watched the blur of her father scoop the British man’s pistol from its holster on his hip even as he was falling forward, gurgling blood. Claudia’s father pointed the strange looking gun in her general direction and fired off two odd sounding shots. Normal gunfire had a distinct pop, but these shots sounded more like quick hisses followed by a snap. The two men holding her fell, letting her go. She bounced softly on their tangled legs and slid down the pavement ledge of the narrow walkway on the side of the bridge. Her father turned his attention to the two men who had tried to hold him. They were still licking their wounds, shocked at his ferocity, and made little or no fight when her father shot them as well with two more of the peculiar sounding shots.

  Reality began to flicker around her. Her father, strong as an ox even now, hurled bodies over the side of the bridge over and over until Claudia lost count and wondered if maybe he hadn’t always been locked in this Sisyphean task and she had always watched him. Reality faded to black and she was being carried by her father toward the pyramid although he was calling it the white tower. The white tower, he told her, would be their salvation. Reality faded again only to return to what she thought was a laboratory of arcane origin. A man with a salt and pepper beard and a strange magnifying apparatus over one eye was inspecting her even as she was carried by her father.

  “Possible, but not probable,” the strange little man said in another British accent, this one lower, more common, but not quite Thames dredge low.

  “This is my daughter,” her father repeated.

  The man’s skepticism appeared to match his dead countryman’s on the bridge, although he was hardly as dismissive. He wore his doubt plainly on his face but made no comment.

  “I found you, Papa,” Claudia said, reaching for her father’s stony face to offer evidence for her father’s words.

  This seemed to change the little bearded man’s position on the matter, galvanizing him to remarkable action that only a moment ago seemed unlikely. “Blast me from the rock’s fort,” the man said, “it really is your daughter!”

  Claudia was given over to medical hands, laid on a table with wheels, and gentle hands began the work of removing her clothes. She wanted to ask after where they were going, but the question was voiced by a female assistant
behind a breathing mask of some sort before she could. The incinerator was where the man instructed his assistant to take the clothes. The woman in the strange rubber breathing mask hurried off with Claudia’s belongings to burn them. An odd metallic clicking followed the woman when she walked away.

  “Where’s the rest of your patrol?” someone well out of Claudia’s view asked. She was moving away from her father and the asker of the question. She desperately wanted to hear his answer, although she couldn’t be sure of why.

  “Mutant attack,” her father said. “They followed my daughter across the bridge.”

  Claudia knew the lie, knew her father’s eyes would narrow when he told it, and she suspected he wouldn’t be believed although she couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation before she was wheeled into another room, whiter than the inside of a fluorescent light bulb.

  Chapter 9:

  The Girl in the Jar.

  Olivia walked the halls of the White Tower with her mechanical leg straining to keep one foot in front of the other. She was growing tired of the mechanical monstrosity attached to her from just above her knee on down to the ground. It worked well enough, in short spurts, but malfunctioned occasionally and required far too much maintenance. Her reasons for visiting Dr. Gatling were twofold that day as were most of her trips lately.

  Gatling’s office was a wonderworks of science unleashed upon a world that craved its discoveries more than gold. A mind like Gatling’s came along rarely, found its way poorly in the old world, and often pursued flights of fancy deigned useless by most, but all encompassing by the doctor. Ideas that formerly received a ‘there isn’t a viable market for this’ response now were given a ‘Godspeed, good doctor’ by a society who ceased to care about profits when simple survival came at a premium. Many of these flights of fancy remained on shelves around this laboratory, stacked to the ceiling, triaged as failures, projects to return to, and projects that hadn’t quite failed yet would never be completed. Dr. Gatling was at his workbench, among his inventions, tinkering with something or other when Olivia limped through his door.