by Trish Telep
"I was born in September, myself," the young man continued. "September fifth, in Clay County, Missouri."
Martha sat back in surprise. "I'm a Missouri girl. I was born in Mercer County, I believe."
The blue-eyed young man sat forward, coat falling open and, for a moment, the late afternoon light ran across his gray waistcoat and she realized that it was not made of cloth, it was woven from the new metal threads. She wondered why he'd need a bullet-proof vest. "Seems impolite not to introduce ourselves, since we were born practically neighbors." His smile lit up his face. "I'm JW."
She held out her gloved hand. "Martha," she said, noting that he did not give his surname and deciding not to reveal hers in return.
"Pleased to meet you, miss."
"Pleased to meet you too, JW." They shook hands politely and then both sat back in their chairs.
Martha guessed that he was maybe four or five years her senior. He was tall--as tall as she was--and while he was not handsome, his astonishingly blue eyes lent his face a dramatic intensity. His nose was straight and unbroken, his top lip so thin it was almost invisible and when he pressed his lips together, it gave his face an ugly, sour expression. He wore his thick hair swept straight back off his head in the latest fashion. His clothes were tailored and relatively new, except for his boots, which were battered and scarred and looked at least a decade old. He was dressed entirely in black, in the style popularized by the last president. Unlike the president, who favored bow ties, JW preferred a string tie. His looked like it was made from two strands of woven gold. And now that she'd seen the metal-weave vest, she noticed the bulges beneath both arms and the hint of a sheath knife on his belt.
"You're staring at me as intently as you were at the newspaper."
"I'm shortsighted," Martha admitted. "I broke my glasses. Sat on them a couple of days ago. I'll get a new pair in San Francisco."
"I heard everything is expensive there." He stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles. "There's so much money flowing out of the mines, the miners don't know what to do with it, and have no qualms about spending it. A new pair of glasses could be costly."
"I'm sure I can afford it," Martha said tightly. She had two dollars in her pocket and another four hidden in the sole of her shoe.
"Of course." JW sat back in the chair fiddling with the gold band on his little finger. She realized that he had rings on every finger, an enormous gold watch on his right wrist and a second timepiece on his left.
The only piece of jewelry she owned--her mother's rose gold wedding ring--was sewn into the hem of her skirt for safekeeping. She used to have an English pocket watch that, for a long time, she believed was her father's, but she'd sold it a couple of weeks ago in Chicago for the price of the airship tickets. A year ago she met a man who had fought with her father, Robert, in the First Canadian War. The man claimed that Robert Burke was so anti-British that he refused to eat English food or even drink tea. When he was wounded in the Battle of the Lakes, he'd been captured by the Britannica forces. Refusing to accept treatment from an English doctor, he had died of his wounds. When Martha discovered that the pocket watch had been made in London, she immediately knew her father would never have carried an English watch and had no qualms about selling it for the price of the Transcontinental tickets.
JW, she decided, was probably a gambler, or a shootist. She'd come across them before on her travels. None of them had been older than twenty-five, and most died a lot younger.
"What brings you out west, Miss Martha?" JW asked.
"I was about to ask you the same question," she smiled.
"I asked first."
There was a moment when she thought about lying, but finally settled on the truth. "I'm looking for someone," she said quietly.
"Parent?"
"My brothers," she said.
JW said nothing.
"Two years ago, they started out west," Martha said. "Then they disappeared."
"It happens," JW said quietly, and something flickered behind his blue eyes. "People lose touch. Families fall apart."
Martha shook her head quickly. "No," she said fiercely. "Not this family. Not my family. We lost our mother on the trail from Missouri to Virginia City. I became mother to the boys. When they left they promised they'd write. And they did. They wrote to me every week for the first couple of months, even sent me a little money when they could afford it. Then the letters stopped."
"So you decided to go find them," JW said.
"I did."
"And you were, what--fourteen when you started?"
"I guess I was."
"That's a long time to be on the road, alone."
The young woman said nothing.
The young man's eyes twinkled. "You're something else, Miss Martha. You know that? Something else again." There was a note of genuine respect in his voice.
"You've got family, brothers ... sisters?" she asked, shifting the conversation away from herself.
"I've a brother, Frank."
"And if he went missing, you'd go looking for him, wouldn't you?" Martha said quickly.
"In a heartbeat."
"Then we're not so different, are we?"
JW opened his mouth to reply, but a dull throbbing pulsed up through the floor as the airship's engines audibly slowed. Martha looked out of the window again. The ground looked a little closer. Unfolding the ship's schedule tucked into her glove, the young woman traced the airship's route across the United States and Native Nations. She looked up to find JW staring at her.
"Something's wrong," she said. "We shouldn't be landing so soon."
The intercom whistled and the scattering of passengers in the carriage automatically looked up to the brass speaking tubes hanging over the seats. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Fontaine speaking." The accent was pure Boston. "As we are about to begin our descent into the Deadwood aerodrome, please return to your seats and fasten your harnesses."
The huge gas turbines rumbled again and the airship dipped. Further down the carriage, a woman screamed and then tried to turn it into a laugh.
The ship's steward moved down the aisle. "Next stop, Deadwood, South Dakota. Strap on your harnesses, ladies and gentlemen." He stopped alongside Martha and leaned down. He smiled, but his two front teeth were missing and his tongue wriggled in his mouth like a fat worm. "Are you doing all right, little lady? Do you need a helping hand there?"
"No, thank you," she said firmly and something in her expression made him turn away. The last person to call her "little lady" would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. "Why are we landing?" she asked loudly as he moved down the carriage.
The man shrugged elaborately. "We sometimes overnight in Deadwood if we're running out of daylight. We can get an early start in the morning." The steward tipped a finger to the brim of his peaked cap and moved on down the aisle.
"We've three hours of daylight left," JW said quietly.
The young man and woman leaned forward to look down at the quickly approaching town, their heads almost touching as they stared out of the porthole. "I don't recall a Deadwood stop on our schedule," he muttered.
"That's because there isn't one." Martha said quickly, focusing on the ground. The outskirts of the town had appeared, a smattering of adobe tenements clustered along a stretch of water that was too straight to be natural.
"Never heard anything good about Deadwood," JW said.
"Neither have I. Why are we landing, then?"
"The ship's captain probably has a deal with the local hotels and restaurants," he said. "Land the ship for the night and the passengers will pay well for a comfortable bed and a hot meal. The taverns will do a good business also. The rest of the crew might get a kickback too--free drinks, maybe."
Martha nodded very slowly.
"But you don't believe that, do you?" JW asked. Resting his elbows on his knees, he leaned forward and clasped his hands together. His face was inches from hers.
"I don't. Do you
?" she countered.
JW's smile lit up his face. "Guess I don't."
There was the familiar banshee wail as gas vented from the balloon's flues and the ship swayed, then dipped.
"I guess you know what I am, Miss Martha?" JW said quietly.
"A shootist and a gambler."
Impressed, the young man nodded in agreement. "And you know what's kept me alive?"
"The same thing that's kept me out of trouble for the past two years," Martha Burke said softly.
"Instinct," JW said.
"Instinct," Martha agreed.
Heads pressed together, they stared through the porthole and watched as the airship sailed over the town, and out onto a field marked off in rectangles and squares. One side of the airfield was taken up by an enormous airship hangar. As it banked, the young couple saw a welcoming committee gathered around the base of the steps that would be positioned against the balloon. There were a dozen men, black metal clearly visible beneath their work clothes, heads concealed in globular mirrored helmets that gave them an almost insectile appearance. They were armed with long spears topped with ugly metal heads. Blue green flames flickered at the top of some of the lances, while others leaked gray smoke into the late afternoon air.
"That's not good," JW muttered. "This is too elaborate for a robbery."
The airship was close enough to the ground now that they could make out details in the costumes of the armed men. Their metal vests were emblazoned with the stylized logo of a crossed pickaxe and hammer, the symbol for the Federation of American Mine Owners, a ruthless cartel who controlled almost ninety percent of all America's mines.
JW focused on the weapons. "That's the latest technology: Canadian compressed-air flechette rifles and gas flame spears," he said. "Very, very expensive ..." He looked over at Martha and the expression on her face stopped him cold. "What?" he breathed.
"In the barn, behind the men," she whispered and moved back so that he could peer through the window.
"What am I looking for ...?" he began. "Oh ..." he breathed.
Wrapped in twisting steam and curling gray smoke, an enormous metal and glass object was visible through the open doors of the huge airship hangar. It looked like a bird, a cross between an eagle and a bat. Taller than a three-story house, broad at the base, narrowing to a jutting peak, it was constructed entirely of burnished red metal, polished white ceramics and gleaming glass. The head was a mirrored globe that matched the helmets of the men on the ground. One enormous wing was folded snug against the body of the creature, its twin was spread out while men crawled across it, torches and welding guns sparking and flashing.
"Thunderbird," Martha Burke and JW said together. "So they're not a legend," the young man added, unsnapping his seat harness. "We need to get ..."
"You need to stay right where you are." The airship steward had reappeared behind the young man. He was accompanied by two crewmen. All of them were wearing black metal vests over their sky-blue uniforms. The three men were carrying old-fashioned gas-powered pistols. "Little miss," the steward said looking at Martha, "why don't you tell your friend here what I've got in my hand." The smile on his face was ugly.
Without taking her eyes off him, Martha said. "Probably one of the nastiest-looking guns I've ever seen," she said softly.
"You'll be giving me your pistols, young man," the steward said. "And you'll be doing it very slowly and carefully."
For a single instant Martha saw JW's lips turn white as he pressed them tightly together. His eyes locked on hers and she shook her head, warning him not to do anything stupid. There was a moment when she thought he was going to try something anyway and then his head moved in the tiniest of nods and he smiled. Reaching under his coat, right hand under left arm, left hand under right, he produced a pair of matched black dart guns with ornate silver and bone handles.
"Very nice," the steward said with a wet-lipped grin, examining the weapons before stuffing them both into his belt.
"Take real good care of them," JW said, "I'll want them back."
"That's not going to happen," the steward said.
"We'll see," JW muttered, and the young woman could clearly hear the threat in his voice.
As the three men moved on down the cabin, relieving the male passengers of their weapons, Martha calmly pulled her valise from under her chair, opened it and brought out her scuffed steel-toed boots. Kicking off her flat-soled shoes, she pulled on a pair of worn socks before slipping into the boots. JW watched her, a bemused look on his face.
"Those are my best shoes," Martha explained, laying them carefully in her valise, "in fact, they're my only shoes. I don't want them destroyed in the mud."
Puzzled, JW said, "What mud?"
Martha nodded to the fast approaching ground. "That mud."
JW shook his head. "We'll not leave the airship," he said confidently.
The engines roared for a brief moment then fell shockingly quiet. In the silence, Captain Fontaine's voice echoed crisp and clear from the speaking tubes. "Move to the doors, ladies and gentlemen. You will disembark on the port side of the ship."
"Or maybe we will," JW said.
Martha managed not to smile as she pulled her bonnet out of her bag and fixed it on her head, tying the black ribbon in a neat bow under her chin.
The steward marched down the cabin, followed by the two crewmen carrying satchels full of pistols and knives taken from passengers. The ornate head of a swordstick poked through one of the bags. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Deadwood. You'll never want to leave," he said. "And some of you probably won't either," he added nastily, glancing at JW.
* * *
There was a long scream of venting gas and then a series of thumps as the airship deployed its four anchors. On the ground, mechanics struggled to attach the four huge anchor hooks to the enormous circular rings set into the earth. When the anchors were in place, the huge craft shuddered before coming to a halt. The mechanics rolled a wooden cradle into place. It slotted beneath the balloon, keeping it ten feet off the ground. The Low and freight carriages were barely inches from the earth.
The wealthier passengers from High appeared first, men in fine suits, some in military or naval uniforms, though it was unlikely they had ever been in the services. All the women from High were in the latest fashions, which also favored a military theme this season. Then the Middle appeared, escorted out of their carriages by the insect-helmeted men. And finally the Low doors were opened to reveal the group of terrified children. They were unceremoniously bundled out onto the hard earth. Many were blue-lipped with the chill from the uninsulated carriage and so cold they could barely stand.
Surrounded by the helmeted guards, the airship's 120 passengers were marched across the muddy airfield, toward the streets of Deadwood.
"Have you any idea what's going on?" Martha asked.
"None," JW admitted. "Maybe we're going to be held for ransom."
Lifting up the hem of her skirt, Martha hopped over an oily puddle. "I'm not worth anything."
"I am," JW muttered.
Martha looked at him quickly. "There's a bounty on you?"
"A small one. Enough to entice a bounty hunter or two to try their hands, but not enough for something like this. And if they just wanted me, they could have taken me off the ship." He shook his head quickly. "No this is more, much more."
Martha stumbled and JW's hand shot out and caught her arm, steadying her. "Thank you," she said. When they both realized he still had his hand on her arm, they colored and immediately looked away. "What do you know about this place?" she asked quickly.
"Rumors ..." he said, looking up as they passed under an arched sign that read "Deadwood," the letters picked out in scraps of twisted metal. The sign had been scorched by fire around the edges and was speckled with black flechette needles. "Campfire stories. It's said that once people enter the town, they never leave. It's also said there is no law in Deadwood."
The town's inhabitants had gathered to wa
tch the passengers march in. Still and silent, they lined up on either side of the broad street, men and women in a peculiar mix of costumes and dress. Many were in fashionable attire--though few of the clothes fit properly--others were wearing cast-off army uniforms, still others were wearing clothes that were obviously homemade from scraps of cloth. None of the clothes were clean. The people were gaunt and unnaturally pale as if they rarely saw the sunlight.
"They seem like ghosts," JW said.
The helmeted guards were everywhere, lurking in the dark alleyways, positioned on the rooftops or gathered on street corners.
"At least the guards look human," Martha said quietly, staring at them in their frightening helmets.
"They are," JW muttered. "But I'm not sure about the creatures in the shadows."
Martha looked quickly left and right. Most of the wooden buildings lining the street were clustered close together with narrow, shaded alleyways running between some of them. Many were piled high with garbage, rotting food and scraps of timber, tumbled weed and burst bags of soiled cloth. Skinny dogs and large feral cats darted in and out of the alleys. "Where?" she asked.