by D. J. Butler
The bridge sagged, fire whipping all about the fringes of the Liahona’s deck.
“Load!” Jones yelled again.
“Captain Jones, we’re not going to make it!” Burton snapped uselessly, then wedged his body into the corner of the wheelhouse, behind a chair bolted to the floor, preparing for impact. He took a last glance at the Jim Smiley just in time to see it disappear into the trees.
This river can’t be that deep, he told himself. The bridge will collapse and the steam-truck will be delayed, but we’ll be able to drive out directly. He told himself these things as persuasively as he could, but in his heart he doubted and prepared for the worst.
The prow of the Liahona shattered the wooden toll-gate like matchsticks.
“Hold on!” Burton yelled, to no one and to everyone.
Then the bridge snapped and the Liahona fell into the river below.
***
Part the Second
Deseret
***
Chapter Six
Mexican Stridermen evacuated the Liahona’s passengers so the crew could pump out its furnace and restart it. They had just happened along a few hours after the big steam-truck had shattered the bridge, bound for the Salt Lake Valley, and by then the passengers clustered on the truck’s deck were bored, restless, and ready to be helped ashore. Other than the showman, Archibald, or Poe, or whatever his real name was, who seemed to be keeping out of sight.
Dick Burton looked furious, like a bear in a pit, snapping at anyone and anything that got in his way, and he stuck to the steam-truck’s captain like glue. Absalom made sure to steer clear of both of them. Captain Jones, if anything, looked even angrier than Burton, so Absalom was happy to get off the Liahona for a little while.
Absalom rode across to the west bank of the river in the folding back rumble seat of a Strider with a long-faced woman he didn’t know and her two children. He had tried to maneuver to get into the same Strider as Annie, but when passengers had lined up to board he hadn’t been able to find her. He was polite, though, doffing his damaged hat and smiling at the children even when one of them kicked him in the shin. Some of the baggage had floated away with the flooding of the Liahona’s belly and the Stridermen chased that down too in their jerky, long-legged vehicles.
Absalom had never before seen a real live Mexican or one of their Striders, and he found them fascinating. They looked vaguely chivalrous, like knights of the trash heap, with smoked-glass visors on their bulky helmets, cup-like padding on knees and elbows and shoulders, high riding boots and many-buckled leather harnesses belted about their hips and chests. They behaved like knights, too, deferential and helpful and modest, though they kept their visors down. With their rifle-fired suction harpoons they had quickly snared the larger pieces of luggage. One of the Striders had knelt down and disgorged a Striderman, who had waded into waist-high water with a long pole like a boathook and dragged in the last of the passengers’ drifting things.
One of the final items recovered was a smallish trunk that Absalom recognized as his own and he had rushed over to the Striderman as he dragged it up onto the bank.
“Thank you!” he cried. “Thank you, er, officer! Sir!”
The Striderman pulled off his helmet and shook out long curling black hair, down past her padded shoulders.
“I am not a sir,” she said in a rich Mexican accent.
She was beautiful. Her skin was cinnamon-dark, her eyes were coal, her lips were full, and she looked like she might just punch Absalom in the face. He swallowed hard.
“Ma’am,” he corrected himself.
“No, cabrón,” she insisted slowly. She talked to him like she was talking to a backward child. “Si yo fuera un oficial … if I were an officer, I would be a sir. Man or woman makes no difference, all officers are sir. But I am not an officer, I am a Master Sergeant.” She edged one shoulder in his direction, as if the chevrons stitched onto it were supposed to mean something to him. “And Master Sergeant is as high as I go. The Ejército Nacional has a policy of not promoting its best gunners out from behind their guns.”
“Yes, ah, I see,” Absalom lied. “How shall I address you, then?”
She turned partly away from him and mounted the bent leg of her Strider. The vehicle reminded Absalom of the tales of Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut that his Russian grandmother had told him when he was a small boy. It consisted of a cockpit the size of a couple of sofas jammed together, protected from the elements by a glass windscreen and a leather membrane on an accordion skeleton that could be pulled over to protect the Stridermen from inclement weather.
Inside the cockpit were two chairs and the folding rumble seat, and around the outside of it were built-in compartments, like steel saddlebags and holsters. A swiveling platform with several cannons protruding from its nose rose at the back of the carriage, but the entire thing was studded with tubes like guns of unknown make and power. Absalom had seen the Mexicans shoot harpoons out of some of the tubes, but at least one big one in front seemed to have a spring-loaded hammer on the top of its many-chambered cylinder, and Absalom had seen an open pouch full of things that might be bullets, built into shiny brass jackets. Two legs sprouted from the right and left sides, or shoulders, of the carriage. Each leg dropped through two powerful pistons and a large, flexible ball joint to terminate in a crude four-toed claw. The Striders hissed and clanked when they moved and emitted a constant puff of thin black fumes out their tail. They looked like giant, menacing chickens.
“No creo que sea necesario. I don’t really see that joo will need to talk to me again at all, inglés,” she said, sounding completely indifferent. “Peró en caso que tenga ocasión, joo can call me Master Sergeant.” She hopped with practiced nonchalance up the bent leg of her Strider and vaulted into the carriage. Now that he knew she was a woman, he wondered how on earth he had missed it before. Even through her padding and bodysuit, he could see now that she was curvaceous and very feminine. “Master Sergeant Jackson, if joo need to tell me apart from Ortiz allá.”
Absalom wondered if Ortiz was also a beautiful woman. Maybe they all were, though he thought if President Tubman’s Ejército Nacional consisted entirely of ebony-skinned Amazons, Mexico City would have been a more desirable Foreign Office posting than it was.
Pffffffft-ankkkh! The Strider rose smoothly to its feet, pistons sliding, steam hissing from its joints, and fumes chugging out its tail. Master Sergeant Jackson dropped her smoked glass faceplate back into place and said something to her companion in the carriage. She didn’t wave to Absalom as the Strider turned its back on him and crunched off through the tall grass to join its fellows, resuming their collective trek into the Kingdom of Deseret.
She didn’t look back to see him wave, either.
“You’re being real brave, boy,” Jed told the big-eyed youngster. “Keep it up, we’ll be outta here in no time at all.”
What the hell are you doing, Coltrane? he wondered. Ten years ago you would have killed that kid the minute you saw him on top of the Liahona’s wheelhouse; killed him with your bare hands and then fed him to the beetles. Of course, it would have been crocodiles back then, you hadn’t ever met Horace Hunley or any of the crew that the Richmond set like to call Whitney’s boys, and you were doing flips on the circuit with a shit-eating grin on your face, catching nickels they threw at you with your toes, or working the Ikey Heyman with one eye out for Johnny Law, in case the patch money didn’t hold. Hell, how long has it been since you wrestled an alligator? Or even saw one?
Government work’s making you soft.
That was a real problem, since it wasn’t a government he was working for. Not yet, anyway. Right now it was just a bunch of men. They wanted to be a government, Jed thought that someday they might be a government, but right now they were traitors and hard men and desperadoes in the halls of power. He couldn’t really afford to get crosswise with his bosses, especially not over some damn kid.
Jed sighed. He wriggled and twisted, the
ropes that the beak-nosed Irishman had used to tie him chafing at his wrists and forearms and ankles. He and John Moses—also tied hand and foot—sat in a big bathtub like two wiggling peas in a porcelain pod, with a white curtain, three shut doors, and most likely a Do Not Disturb sign between them and the hall.
“We could yell for help,” John Moses suggested.
Of course that seems like a good idea to him, Jed realized. He lives here, he’s innocent, he’s just a kid. Me, I yell for help and even if someone does hear me through all the doors and the hissing of the pipes in the walls, I gotta start answering questions I’d rather not, like for starters probably “What’s a cracker dwarf from Shitsville, Arkansas doing hog-tied in a bathtub in the Deseret Hotel?” and eventually maybe even “Hey, midget, what do you know about the disappearance of a Pinkerton detective from a honeypot stall in Bridger’s Saloon in the Wyoming Territory night before last?”
It hardly mattered, anyway. If there were any chance of their being heard, the Irishman would have gagged them. Or cut their tongues out. “You go ahead and give it a try, John Moses,” Jed suggested, jerking one shoulder to try to dislocate it on purpose. Not Sam Clemens, though. Sam seemed to be, what? Merciful? Fair? Aloof? Undecided? Ironic? The dwarf wasn’t sure, but he knew if their places had been switched, he’d have killed the Union man and thrown him off the steam-truck.
Or maybe not, given that Jed Coltrane seemed to have become a complete sissy.
The Irishman, now, he’d have killed Jed for sure, if Clemens hadn’t interfered. The little man stopped his writhing long enough to shudder. As soon as they had checked in, the evil-looking red-head had spent all of three minutes experimenting and had figured out how to work Hunley’s scarab cylinder.
It wasn’t any great trick; the thing only had two buttons. But the way O’Shaughnessy had gone about it took a certain determination and a dark bent of mind. After shaking both his tied up prisoners out of the steamer trunk in which they’d come up to the hotel room, he’d said nothing. Instead, he’d made a show of pouring the scarabs out over the little boy. Then he’d pantomimed pressing the buttons.
“No!” Jed Coltrane had shouted, and the Irishman knew then what he had in his hands, or at least he could guess. Two destroyed seat cushions later, he’d packed the cylinder back into his greatcoat pocket and when the two Yankees had left, the scarabs had gone with them, along with both the Maxim Hushers. The Irishman was going out among the Mormons dressed to kill.
Jed had expected John Moses to be hollering now, but the boy just stared at him with patient, observant eyes. He stared back, a little fiercer than he needed to, to make a point.
“What?” he wanted to know.
“You’re brave,” John Moses said. “You’re the bravest kid I know.”
Jed Coltrane’s effort to dislocate his own shoulder fell apart in the paroxysms of his own laughter. “Oh, that’s good,” he laughed. “That’s really rich.” He sighed, some of the tension shaking out of him, and then he scrunched up onto his knees and tried to poke his head through the tub’s curtain. “Let’s try some tumbling.” He’d never been good at the contortionist stuff, anyway. He curled forward as he let himself roll out of the tub, so he completed half a somersault and landed on his own shoulder, relatively painlessly. His falling body jerked the curtain open and it stayed.
John Moses was puzzled. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
Jed wormed his way across the floor on his belly. The boy’s voice, resounding from behind the curtain and within the tub’s recessed niche, echoed and bounced as if far away. He hoisted himself to his feet by pushing off against the wall with his head. The doorknob was too big for his teeth, but he thought if he hit it just right with his head—crack!
Nope.
“Look, John Moses,” Jed grunted, not really sure why he was bothering to explain, “you ain’t ever seen a kid like me before. You ain’t seen a kid as hairy as me, as ugly as I am, as foul-mouthed, or as drinks as much. That’s ’cause there ain’t no such kid, not in this whole wide world.”
Crack!
Still nothing. His head hurt a bit, but not so much that he wouldn’t try it again.
“There’s you,” John Moses objected.
“I ain’t a kid. I’m a midget. That’s a grown man, only shorter and more ornery.”
Crack!
The third time, the door popped open.
John Moses’s eyes were saucers.
“Stay here a minute,” Jed told him, and it only took a little more than the promised minute before he managed to knock over a dark wooden correspondence desk, wrangle a letter opener from its drawer, and saw himself free. He liberated the boy, then threw aside the letter opener. The Irishman had the guns and all Jed’s knives and his piano wire and the scarabs, so a letter opener was worse than pointless; it would only tempt Jed into rash action, as if he had a real weapon in his hands.
He’d settle for his knives back, but what he really wanted was a gun. Something big, that would punch holes in a man. Jed had a specific man in mind for the punching.
“You’re still brave,” John Moses said defiantly. His slouch cap lay in the corner of the suite’s front room and John Moses retrieved it with dignity unnatural in such a small boy, pulling it down onto his head. “I wish I was brave.”
Jed knew he was going to have to leave the boy here. He’d leave the boy, go get himself armed, somehow, and go after the Irishman. He needed the scarabs back and then he needed to find out what had happened to Poe and if there was still a mission. He didn’t want the boy screaming for help as soon as Jed left, of course. He decided he’d better try to inspire the kid. “Sure, you’re brave,” he agreed.
“I cry a lot,” the boy said.
Jed shrugged. “So do I,” he lied. Hell, he couldn’t remember if he’d ever cried, not even as a boy. Crying would just get you a whipping from Pa, especially if you were the runt and no good around the farm, except to wrestle with the hens for their eggs and milk the little nanny three times a week. Jed had left that dump behind as soon as he possibly could. He’d never looked back, and he sure as hell had never cried about leaving. “That ain’t neither here nor there. Being brave is not running away when people need you.”
“Oh, yeah?” the boy asked.
“Yeah,” Jed repeated, “and that means I ain’t so brave. I’ve been running all my life, from one damn thing or another.” He rubbed his wrists, enjoyed the tingle of feeling that returned to them with the renewed blood flow. It was a line of bullshit he was selling the boy and he knew it, but at least it was a line of bullshit that he wished was true. “You got a Pa, don’t you? And he sticks around, does right by you and your Ma?”
John Moses nodded solemnly.
“See now, that there is a brave man.”
Jed was just about ready to leave the little boy. He considered taking him down to the street and leaving him there, but he didn’t want to be seen abandoning the kid. No, he’d get the boy to use the toilet and sneak off while the door was shut. He still had to figure out how to get himself armed. At least the Irishman hadn’t taken his money, but Jed had precious little cash. Maybe enough to buy one puny knife and that hardly gave him any comfort.
He wondered where Poe was.
He had to deal with the Irishman first—he couldn’t risk the mission getting knocked into the dust, much less getting hanged, because one vicious red-head nursed a grudge—and then he needed to get back with his boss and get the mission on track. “And he’s got a job too, don’t he? What’s your Pa do for a living, John Moses?”
John Moses smiled with pride and stuck out his little chest. “He makes guns. He owns his own shop.”
Jed Coltrane almost laughed out loud. “Does he now?” he asked. “That sounds like a fine and noble occupation. And is your Pa’s shop somewhere in the Great Salt Lake City, by any chance?”
“No.” John Moses shook his head. “But it’s real close, and the train will take you there.”
Jed
had visions of riding the blinds under some Deseret train. He could do it, he’d done it often as a carny, but he didn’t like the idea of doing it with such a small kid as a companion. He knew his luck couldn’t have been that good. “I’m afraid I ain’t got the money for a ticket, kid,” he said with a wistful grimace, patting down his nearly empty pockets. “You got any cash?”
“You don’t need money, silly,” John Moses answered. “This is the Great Salt Lake City. Only I don’t know where the train station is from here.”
Jed felt like he was beginning to see light at the end of his personal tunnel and he grinned. “That’s what the guy behind the front desk is for.”
The Great Salt Lake City made Sam Clemens feel alive, despite the bow tie he’d wrapped around his neck.
The whole thing—the whole swarming, ticking, crazy thing—was one big device, everything tightly knitted together and pumping in sync. There were footpaths, clean plascrete strips for walking that were open to the early evening air on the ground level, cutting in and among the columns and towers, and bordered all along with orange trees and rosebushes. There were footpaths overhead, too, undergirded with steel and encased in glass and running from building to building over carriages, horses, steam-trucks, and other pedestrians.
The vehicular traffic flowed along shockingly wide streets. There were various other tubes whose use he couldn’t surmise, radiating out from each building like irregular wheel spokes. Some were large enough that a man might crawl through and had grates on the side. A few vented steam. Some were tighter in radius and made entirely of glass, and Sam thought he saw small, blurred objects shooting through them from one building to the next. They looked like high-speed aerial trains for pixies, he mused.
Iron lampposts dotted the footpaths, topped with glass bulbs that at night, Sam presumed, would cast some sort of light on their surroundings. Franklin Poles, and a prodigiously large number of them. In the daylight they were swallowed up and invisible against the grandiosity all around them.