Gears of a Mad God Omnibus

by Brent Nichols

  His hands were behind his back, and Colleen saw ropes at his ankles. He was tied to the machinery behind him.

  Next to Rick was Maggie. Her eyes were black, and swollen so badly she might not have been able to see. She was pressing herself against the machinery behind her, cringing back from the Englishman.

  The shadows grew deeper past Maggie, but Colleen could make out Carter's familiar outline. He was sagging against the metal behind him, his head hanging, his shoulders slumped. Beyond Carter was another shape, shrouded in darkness. Colleen couldn't see who it was.

  The Englishman stopped pacing and stepped close to Carter. His dapper suit and refined accent stood in sharp contrast to the sordid scene. "Your courage is commendable, but pointless," he snapped. "You will tell me everything. That is a certainty. The only question is, how much of you will remain when I am done?"

  Colleen shrank back, thinking furiously. She was badly outnumbered, and there might be two more cowboys, along with God only knew what other cultists, close by. She had to do something, but what?

  Her eyes kept straying to the boiler. Steam had always been her friend. It had saved her on the Arcadia, given her a weapon. Could she use it now? She couldn't see how.

  She stepped back, and her foot came down on a loose bit of metal. It grated under her shoe, and she froze.

  The Englishman's voice continued without pause, a string of threats and invective. There was no other sound. She hadn't been heard.

  There was no other sound. That was the problem. She couldn't act without drawing attention to herself. Every footstep might draw the gunmen to her. She eyed the boiler and the gears and pulleys attached to it, and made her decision. She would fill the workshop with noise and movement and smoke, and send the cowboys rushing in every direction trying to find her. Then she would find a way to reach her friends.

  Lighting a boiler in dead silence with hands that shook with tension proved to be quite a challenge. There was a stack of newspapers beside the firebox, along with kindling and a hopper full of coal. Colleen eased her wrench to the floor and set to work.

  The loudest sound she made was when she finally struck a match. She timed it poorly, dragging the match head across the side of the box just as the Englishman paused in his diatribe. The match flared to life in her hand, and she cupped it, listening, hoping desperately to hear the man resume his rant.

  Silence, except for the hiss of the match in her fingers. She pushed the match under the twists of newspaper she'd prepared, picked up her wrench, and darted into a gap between the boiler and a cabinet. She swung the cabinet door wide, hiding herself, and waited.

  The soft scuff of boot heels came to her straining ears. She held her breath and tightened her grip on the wrench. It was maddeningly difficult to judge distance or direction when all you heard was the occasional brush of leather on concrete. She stared at the cabinet door inches in front of her face, wondering if her feet showed underneath, wondering how many men were just on the other side of it.

  Fingers appeared on the top edge of the door, she lifted the wrench, the door swayed away, and she found herself staring into the astonished face of a man in a brown Stetson. She swung the wrench like her life depended on it, and connected with the side of his head. He flew backward, a pistol dropped from his hand and clattered across the floor, and he landed on his back, his arms and legs splayed wide.

  Colleen scanned the room. No one else was in sight. That wouldn't last long, though, not with the noise she was making. She put down her wrench, scooped up the fallen pistol, and knelt to grab a huge knife the cowboy had sheathed at his waist.

  He was unconscious, his face peaceful despite a welt rising on the side of his head. Colleen thought of Maggie's black eyes and drove a kick into his ribs.

  "Jed?" The Englishman's voice was sharp with impatience. "What's going on?"

  They would be coming in moments. Colleen looked in the firebox, saw the kindling burning fairly well, and yanked open the chute from the coal hopper. Her little fire was quickly buried in coal. It would catch or it would go out; there was nothing she could do about it now. She fled deeper into the building.

  Sounds of pursuit came quickly. She heard men blundering in the shadows and calling to each other. Colleen crept through narrow gaps in the machinery or dropped to her hands and knees, crawling awkwardly with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, keeping out of sight.

  She worked her way back toward the prisoners. From her hands and knees she had a whole new perspective on the former factory's mechanical setup. A gearbox near the boiler turned a spindle as thick as her leg, which ran down the center of the factory floor. Production machinery had been connected to the spindle. It was that line of machines that the prisoners were now tied to.

  The spindle itself was mounted about two feet above the floor, with a filthy crawl space underneath. Colleen, aware that she was ruining her second dress in two days, wormed her way into the crawl space and inched her way along.

  Mostly she was in near-darkness. To her left she could see a stretch of floor and the back wall of the warehouse. To her right were the machines the spindle had once powered. Each time legs appeared to her left she froze, counting on the dirt on her arms and legs to help her blend into the dirty crawl space. When the legs disappeared she resumed crawling.

  Small gaps opened up to her right from time to time, giving her brief glimpses into the main workshop area. She usually saw the Englishman pacing back and forth with a pistol in his hand. Then she came to a gap, peered through, and saw a trouser-covered leg with rope wrapped around the ankles.

  She scanned the open floor to her left. No one was in sight. She worked her way out of the crawl space, straightened up, cracked her neck, and tried to peer through the mass of machinery before her.

  She could see the back and side of a man's head. It was the shadowy fourth prisoner. She stared at him, and his head turned, putting the side of his face in the light. Colleen gasped. It was Smith, battered but alive.

  She tucked the pistol into her pocket. It was a very large pistol, with a long barrel, so she rammed the gun deeper into the pocket until the barrel tore through the lining. She could feel cold steel against her leg, but the pistol felt fairly secure. She climbed onto a rusted safety guard and wriggled forward, toward Smith. She worked her head and shoulder past a pipe and found that she could see his hands, bound behind his back, his arms around a metal clamp. She stretched out her right hand, the cowboy's knife stretching toward the ropes on Smith's wrists.

  "Leave him." Carter's whisper was so faint she thought she'd imagined it. He was still staring at the floor, ignoring her. "Free me. Not him."

  She hung there, frozen with indecision, and finally wriggled her way back until her feet were once again on the floor. She moved along the bank of machinery. When she judged she was behind Carter she started the process again, trying to clamber over the machinery without making a sound.

  She found she could see the Englishman. Once, he stopped pacing and stared right at her, and she froze. Then he resumed pacing, and Colleen continued worming her way forward.

  Pipes and metal tracks dug into her shoulders and back. She never did see Carter's hands. She ended up sprawled across a bench behind him, her legs poking in the air somewhere behind her. He was the only thing keeping her from the Englishman's view. She could see Carter's shoulders, and she put the knife against his sleeve and traced his arm downward, navigating by touch.

  She knew she'd hit the rope when her knife met resistance. Her arm was bent awkwardly over the edge of the bench, her hand completely out of sight, as she set to work sawing back and forth. Her arm scraped the edge of the bench, and the Englishman's pacing suddenly stopped.

  Colleen crouched motionless, unable to see the Englishman, unable to do anything but hold herself still. Then Carter moved his hands up and down, sawing the rope against her knife. She stayed frozen, letting him do the work, as the Englishman's pacing resumed.

  Finally Carter's
shoulders moved as the rope parted. He kept his arms behind him, but his hands came up, fumbling blindly for the knife. Colleen put the knife into his hand, then wormed her hand back, wriggled the pistol out of her pocket, and put it in his other hand.

  Boots thumped on the floor to the right, and the Englishman stopped pacing. Colleen heard one of the cowboys reporting. He had a slow Texas drawl, and he described how they were searching, how they weren't finding anything. Colleen took advantage of the distraction to work her way backward and get her feet on the floor.

  Chapter 9 - Daylight

  The claustrophobic crawl space seemed infinitely worse without a gun and a knife. She actually moved much faster, now that her hands were free and she didn't have to worry about accidental metallic clanks, but she felt horribly vulnerable.

  Soon she found herself peering around a chunk of rusted machinery into the open area with the boiler and tool cabinets. She could hear a faint hiss of air being drawn into the fire box. The fire was burning well, then. She squinted at the pressure gauge. It was dirty and at least twenty feet away, but she thought the needle was pretty far over.

  A man stood in the middle of the floor with a pistol in his hand. He was a cowboy, Stetson pushed back on his head, with long graying mustaches that curved around a cruel mouth. His face was in profile. If Colleen moved, he would spot her instantly.

  Someone moaned, and the cowboy turned away from her. The man she'd hit with the wrench lay by the far wall, and the armed cowboy walked toward him. Colleen rose, looking around, knowing that if she tried to come up behind him he would likely hear her footsteps. She needed noise, confusion.

  There was a metal casing near her, the main gearbox for the factory floor. A massive red handle stuck up from the top of it. Colleen calculated her options. The gearbox itself would provide cover, if she could pull the handle quickly enough.

  She shot a glance at the cowboy, who still had his back turned, and darted to the gearbox. She grabbed the red handle and heaved.

  Nothing happened.

  Cursing under her breath, she wrapped both hands around the end of the handle, brought her feet up, braced them against the side of the gearbox, and pulled for all she was worth.

  For an awful moment the handle refused to budge. Then, with a squeal of metal, the handle dropped six inches and the factory machinery came to life.

  The cowboy spun at the first metallic screech, and Colleen was keenly aware that she was in plain sight. But things were moving all over the room. Gears turned, belts and chains quivered, dust came billowing down from tracks in the ceiling, and the man stared, trying to look in every direction at once. When his head turned for an instant, Colleen let go of the handle and dropped out of sight behind the gearbox.

  Two gunshots rang out behind her. Either the Englishman was shooting the prisoners, or Carter had shot the Englishman. The cowboy ran past Colleen, and she rose from her hiding place.

  Another shot echoed through the warehouse, and she ducked involuntarily. She wasn't about to rush empty-handed into a gunfight, so she turned to the boiler instead. She poured in more coal from the hopper and checked the water level. The water was good. The pressure level was decent, and climbing. She opened the air vent on the firebox and considered her next move.

  Her gaze went to the man on the floor by the wall, the cowboy she'd knocked out. He was still unconscious, and she thought about smothering him as he lay there. She didn't doubt that he'd do the same to her, but she knew she couldn't kill him in cold blood. She needed to focus on the task at hand, which was drawing the cultists away from her friends.

  Clumps of dust-clogged spider web drifted down around her, and she turned her gaze to the ceiling far above her. She hadn't really noticed just how much of the factory's machinery was ceiling-mounted. There was a large structure beside the boiler, with a slowly-turning vertical shaft surrounded by a zig-zag metal staircase. It gave her the rudiments of an idea.

  Several toolboxes littered the workbenches around her. She grabbed the biggest toolbox she could see, grunting at the weight, and headed for the staircase. She ran up the stairs, not caring about the noise she made, and someone fired at her from below, the bullet knocking rust from the steps above her.

  She found a platform she could huddle on just below ceiling level. She was mostly surrounded by machinery, enough iron and brass to deflect a bullet.

  She heard a shot, and a ricochet that sounded dangerously close. She couldn't see the shooter, or where the bullet had hit. She decided he was shooting wildly, hoping to get lucky, and pushed him from her mind.

  She opened her toolbox. The top tray was filled with screwdrivers, pliers, and small wrenches. She pulled the tray out and set it aside. Underneath was a jumble of wrenches and a couple of hammers, and she smiled. She had missiles now. Anyone trying to follow her up the stairs was going to have a hard time of it.

  She scanned the machinery around her. Some of it was in motion. The big vertical shaft connected to a gearbox which in turn moved a flat metal chain. The chain rested in a track that ran the length of the building, a couple of feet below the corrugated iron of the ceiling.

  There was a second gearbox beside the first one, and a second metal chain. The rod that should have connected the two gearboxes was missing, though. That meant the second gearbox was pure raw materials. Colleen grabbed a screwdriver and set to work.

  She removed the casing and set it aside, and looked over the gears inside. She used a hammer and screwdriver to knock a cotter pin loose, and set to work prying loose a gear that had to be a foot and a half wide.

  She caught a flash of light from the corner of her eye as a shot rang out and a bullet spanged against metal. Colleen shrank back, then peered over the edge of her platform. A cowboy stood below her, aiming his pistol carefully, and she flinched back.

  She looked up. A circle of light glowed on the ceiling above her. The last bullet had punched through the ceiling, and she could see the lightening sky beyond. She measured the distance. He had missed her by a good four feet. She shrugged and decided to keep working.

  The next shot was closer, the one after that even closer. He was firing every five seconds or so, so she kept working for another four seconds and flinched back. A bullet banged off of the gearbox and she leaned back in, grabbed the big gear in both hands, and pulled it off of the shaft.

  She sank back, holding the brass circle in her lap. It was more than two inches thick, heavy enough to crush bones. She shouted, "Come and get me! I'm ready for you!"

  She peered over the edge of the platform, and the man below snapped a shot at her. Then he broke the pistol open, spilling cartridge casings on the floor, and started reloading from the loops on his belt. He was looking down at the gun in his hand, and Colleen saw her opportunity. He was too far out to hit with the big gear, so she picked up a wrench and let fly.

  It was going to fall short, she knew it as soon as the wrench left her fingers. It landed with a clatter at his feet, bouncing up to hit his shins, and he jumped, dropping the cartridge he'd been loading. He looked up, just in time to take her next wrench in the face.

  He swore, scrambling backward and crashing into the equipment behind him. He dropped his pistol, clapped a hand to his mouth, then scrambled forward to scoop up his the gun. She could see blood leaking between his fingers as he gave her a glare and retreated behind some machinery.

  The staircase creaked below her. Her plan was working. Someone was coming up the steps. Colleen picked up her biggest hammer and leaned over the far side of the platform. From here she could look down on a section of staircase fifteen feet below. A cowboy stepped into view, gun in hand. He was bareheaded, watching above him, and he spotted Colleen immediately and pulled back out of sight.

  She heard him moving up the staircase. From the rustle of his steps and the creak of metal she could pretty much count each step of the staircase as he advanced. He reached the landing directly beneath her, and she smiled. He assumed that if she couldn't see him,
he was safe. After all, bullets travelled in practically straight lines.

  Hammers, though, didn't behave like bullets. She waited for the creak of the next step, then leaned out and lobbed her hammer inward. She threw blindly, but she knew exactly where he was, and she heard the hammer slam into flesh before clattering against metal. He grunted, and she heard him fall, then get back up. He swore, and the gun blasted three times.

  Colleen let out an involuntary shriek and cringed back as jagged holes appeared in her platform. She smelled dust and gun smoke and fear, and she looked down, wondering how close those shots had come.

  A chunk was missing from the toe of her shoe. She stared, filled with a sense of unreality. A ragged half-circle was gone from the end of her shoe, and she blinked, wondering how the bullet had missed her toes. Then she saw the wet gleam of fresh blood and knew that the bullet hadn't missed. There was no pain, not yet, but the tip of her middle toe was gone. She saw a white gleam in the redness, the bone of her toe, and squeezed her eyes shut as the warehouse started to spin around her.

  The sound of stealthy footsteps snapped her out of her shock. There would be time later to swoon like a dime-novel damsel. Right now she was still in mortal peril.

  She picked up the huge brass gear, adrenalin giving her strength, and looked at the staircase below her. She tried to figure out which step he would be on, but she had lost track, and she was still having trouble focusing. Her ears rang from the gunshots, and the subtle scuff of footsteps seemed distant, directionless. She made her best guess. He would be half way up that section of the staircase, about four feet below the landing. That would put the top of his head about eight feet below her and four feet out, right about... there.

  She gathered herself, swinging the gear back, and as she swept forward, the cowboy sprang into view on the landing below her. The pistol came to bear on her, she felt her stomach lurch with the sure knowledge that she was going to die, and she tried to change the trajectory of the gear in mid-throw.