by D. J. Butler
—and found himself staring down the barrels of three long pistols in the hands of two furious-looking men.
For a split second Absalom considered the very real possibility of his own death and found that he wasn’t terribly troubled. He’d carried out his duty to his family and he’d served his country well. If he died on the errand of his Queen, he joined thousands of greater men than himself in a shared patriotic glory. A faint smile crept across his lips.
Crunch!
A long, laced-up boot spun sideways, crashed into the temple of One Pistol, flipping him over like a rag doll thrown by a petulant child. A swirl of skirt like a pinwheel followed the boot, and a flash of petticoats and sleek legs, and as Annie Webb landed her other boot came down hard on the Danite’s throat.
Snap!
Two Gun’s eyes slipped sideways for a moment in surprise as his comrade vanished under an onslaught of petticoats. When the moment ended, his face twisted into a snarl, his eyeballs rolled forward again to target Absalom—
—Boom!—
—and his head exploded.
Blood and worse spattered over Absalom’s face and chest. He resolved not to think about it; he had business to take care of.
He heard the shouting of men and gunshots outside the farmhouse.
He tucked the derringer into his waistband and strode across the floor toward John D. Lee. The square-headed man shoved a timber out of his way and unearthed Brigham Young, who stared up at him with a fierce, unyielding brow.
“I’m not leaving!” he heard Heber Kimball shout behind him.
Men with knives closed in on either side of Absalom. One spun suddenly backwards in a nearly perfect circle as Annie Webb’s toes crunched into the underside of his chin; the other disappeared in a cloud of red mist that spattered Absalom even further.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Through the missing wall, Absalom glimpsed one of the Striders only a dozen paces away and he realized that Master Sergeant Jackson was watching over him.
John D. Lee straightened up. He cocked and aimed his pistol at Brigham Young’s forehead.
Absalom had vaguely imagined that he’d pick up a fallen pistol or other weapon from the floor as he crossed it, but there hadn’t been any. So when he reached John D. Lee, he simply punched the man as hard as he could in the jaw.
Bang!
Lee staggered sideways. His gun went off and the bullet sank into the wreckage of the roof and disappeared. He turned, off-balance, raised his pistol—
—and Absalom punched it aside, sending the gun flying.
The Danite stared.
Absalom took off his hat and tossed it aside. He raised his fists into guard position in front of his face.
“Son of a—”
Boom!
Indistinctly out of the corner of his eye, Absalom saw Heber Kimball blast with a scattergun, knocking down a Danite who came charging into the farmhouse door.
Shooting and shouting continued outside, but inside the farmhouse was as still as the eye of any hurricane. Soft groans came from the rubble. Absalom knew that Young was still alive and felt optimistic that Armstrong and Clemens might be equally lucky. It wasn’t that heavy a roof, after all.
John D. Lee eyed his pistol where it lay, across the ravaged room.
“Are you man enough to fight without it, Mr. Lee?” Absalom dared him. “Fisticuffs, like gentlemen, though I hesitate to sully the word by associating it with you!”
Lee flared his nostrils. He shrugged out of his coat and tossed it aside onto the floor.
“My ancestor Richard Lee emigrated from England and made a fortune on this continent in tobacco,” he snarled slowly. “Thomas Lee founded the Ohio Company that opened up the great inner reaches of this land for the civilizing touch of the white man. Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee signed the Declaration of Independence that severed the noxious umbilical that tied us to the tyrants of Old England.” He pushed his shirtsleeves up over his forearms, revealing a surprising amount of wiry, corded muscle. “And when your whining grandfathers objected, Light-Horse Harry Lee rode roughshod over their lobsterback underlings at Paulus Hook, Camden, and Yorktown, and sent them weeping back to their kidney pies.”
Lee spat on the floor and raised his fists.
“Then you can consider this a repayment,” Absalom said.
He punched first, straight for Lee’s nose. It was a light punch, to which he didn’t fully commit, because he wanted to test Lee’s guard.
Lee turned it aside easily and punched back hard, turning with his shoulders and throwing a fist at Absalom’s stomach—
but Absalom easily stepped aside.
He punched for Lee’s temple with a right cross that glanced off the other man’s shoulder and then they both pulled back into defensive stances.
Lee started circling to his right. He had a wary look in his eyes now. Absalom saw the dwarf Coltrane scramble over the rubble of the fallen roof, so he circled to the right too, and drew Lee away into the center of the room and away from Brigham Young and the other trapped men.
Lee charged, hurling punch after punch at Absalom’s sternum. Absalom caught the flying fists against his forearms, again and again—
—ducked under the punches—
—slammed his own knuckles into John D. Lee’s belly—
—and caught a sharp punch to his own jaw.
Absalom staggered away. His vision spun and he fought to keep his guard up. By luck more than by skill, his flailing hands managed to slap away two more punches before his vision calmed enough for him to focus on Lee.
“You’re in over your head,” Lee barked.
Outside, the battle continued, many reports of handguns, and the booming of the larger firearms mounted on the Striders.
The thrill of the fight rushed through Absalom’s body, almost making up for the blow he’d taken. He saw Annie watching from the side of the room; she looked like a coiled spring, ready to hurl herself into action. He saw the Strider outside, too. It traded shots with a knot of men in the farm’s outbuildings, but it held its position and Absalom felt it was keeping an eye on him.
Absalom didn’t want to be rescued, especially by beautiful women. He wanted to rescue them, by George.
“Ha!” he spat out his contempt, and jumped forward punching again.
Lee stood his ground and met Absalom’s jabs with his left hand guarding and a right uppercut for Absalom’s jaw.
Absalom swerved, took the punch on his shoulder.
He buffeted Lee on the cheek, backhand. It was a little irregular and bad form, but it connected.
Lee headbutted Absalom in the forehead.
The attack was so fast, Absalom didn’t see it coming. One moment, he was swiping the other man across the face, and the next, the space inside his head felt infinite and echoed with pain and his vision narrowed to a tiny tunnel, the only image in which was the sight of John D. Lee’s hammer-hard head pulling away after the blow.
“Ugh,” Absalom said, and fell back.
He kept his feet under him, though not by much, and he staggered and slipped like a dancing marionette.
“Ouch!” someone yelled as Absalom stepped on him.
He lurched forward again, trying to raise his hands to intercept the—
POW!
The punch hit him squarely in the nose, and it was bigger and louder and more painful than the exploding chimney.
He punched back, without form or discipline. His head hurt so much, he couldn’t even feel his hand and he had no idea if his fist connected.
Thud!
Lee punched him in the stomach.
“Unnph!” Absalom gasped, and he doubled forward. He was still on his feet, but only barely, and he knew the killer, bout-ending punch was inevitable now, was surely about to land on his face. He felt humiliated. Annie would rescue him, or if he fell maybe Master Sergeant Jackson would simply squeeze the trigger and blow John D. Lee to smithereens, but he, Absalom Fearnley-S
tandish, had personally failed.
Abysmally.
The expected punch didn’t arrive. Instead, Lee grabbed him in a clinch hold, pulling Absalom tight to his own chest.
Absalom dimly heard a snick and then felt a cold, metallic line against the side of his neck. Is that a knife? he wondered.
“I’m leaving now.” John D. Lee’s voice was gigantic and booming in Absalom’s ear and inside his empty, quivering skull. “Anybody tries to stop me, I kill the Englishman.”
Hishhhhhhh!
The rock surface skimming past the accordion gate and punctured glass of the lift door disappeared first at the top, and then the gap in the stone slid down until it filled the entire door. Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy stood beside Richard Burton in the center of the lift.
At Burton’s suggestion, they didn’t try to hide, and just stood with their heads down. Hopefully, Burton had lectured Tam during the lift ride, their concealed faces would create enough uncertainty to give them a small margin of initiative if anyone were waiting for them.
Hopefully, Tam thought but didn’t say, the bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons wouldn’t just shoot first and then examine their faces later. After all, Burton openly held a saber in his hand.
The sword and the man’s mustache made Tam feel like he was in some mad piratical pantomime. He half expected to be made to walk the plank at any moment and he was half tempted to shoot Burton the first moment the man turned his back, only he didn’t think Sam Clemens would like it, and after all, he and Burton were on the same side now, more or less.
Tam had punched through the linings of both pockets of his coat, so he could keep his hands in his pockets, each filled with a loaded Maxim Husher ready for action. He was beginning to feel sober again. He itched all over, ached, and was grumpy. He didn’t like the feeling and he disliked it even more than he usually disliked the sensation of sobering up. He felt light-headed and a little sick. He wondered if something was wrong with him.
Besides the two gunshots and the missing chunk of his ear, of course.
No one waited for them at the Bay level. Burton quietly slid the doors open in two quick movements and they both looked out.
The Bay was a single vast chamber, thirty feet tall at least and large enough to hold several good-sized village greens. It was lit by the blue light radiating from Franklin Poles that jutted from the ceiling, upside down like iron stalactites, illuminating everything and leaving the floor unobstructed. Obstruction was provided by the stacks of lumber and iron and brass and piles of crates that stood all around the chamber like toys in an untidy child’s room. Several steam-trucks, of various sizes and no consistent make or appearance, stood haphazardly in the Bay as well, motors stilled. To one side a plascrete ramp, wide enough for two steam-trucks to drive abreast, led up through the ceiling into a darkness that looked like the darkness of night outdoors. There’s your exit, me boy, Tam thought.
Directly across the Bay was another opening in the cavern wall. As Burton and Tam watched, a steam-truck rumbled into the Bay and ground to halt, idling its engine. Half a dozen tall men in long coats stood around it with guns and one old man with hair so white and wild that Tam could see it from the lift.
“That’s our steam-truck,” Burton said in his lecturing way, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“No wonder there weren’t any Pinkertons to welcome us,” Tam answered, showing he was just as smart as the Englishman. “They all went over to welcome the truck.”
Burton shut the gate and jammed the control lever up to the LAKE slot.
This ride was short, but it felt extremely fast and violent to Tam. Burton looked unfazed and he glared down at Tam as the Irishman bent at the waist, leaned with one hand against the wooden panels of the walls and breathed deeply.
“Are you well?”
Tam answered by throwing up, a thin stream of sour bile that he spat into the corner of the lift. The space well and truly reeked now, blood and sweat and bile, not to mention the urine released by the Pinkerton who had died in the lift.
“Well enough.” Tam straightened and wiped polluted spittle from his chin with the back of his hand. “Right fookin’ cheerful, in fact. Now I’ve made some room for them, I’m ready to eat me a Pinkerton or two.”
He grinned at the Englishman and opened the lift door.
They hobbled out into cold night, weapons first, and Tam sucked in the freezing air to catch his breath. It helped, though he still thought he might throw up again.
They stood outside, next to a large, long brick-shaped building made of plascrete and fitted with few windows. Of those few, even fewer showed any light. Before them was a sward of wild meadow grass and flowers, silvery-gray in the light, that fell gently down to a long, narrow lake, a shimmering silver pan. Halfway down the meadow, a gaping hole that must be the ramp into the Bay below lay at the end of a gravel road that led past the lake and disappeared at its end, apparently dropping off a cliff. The lake was fed by a glacier, a ribbon of shining white that climbed up a boulder-strewn field to a jagged rocky ridge above.
Tam followed the ridge around with his eyes. The complex stood in a big horseshoe-shaped bowl and was lidded over with the most amazing field of stars Tam had ever seen. The sky looked more star than void between and though the moon was down, he felt he could see perfectly. Keep your wits about you, me boy, he told himself, but he was still stunned by the sight.
Even more amazing than the stars, though, was the sight directly above Tam. The brickish building was punctuated by a single tower, something like the steeple of a village church. It rose into the darkness, gray and forbidden, and at its height it bulked out into some sort of platform. All along its length ran metal rods. The rods emerged from the plascrete just above the ground and ran vertically up towards the top of the tower. They were the thickness of Tam’s wrist, but they disappeared from sight before he could see any end of them. Smaller horizontal rods linked them to each other at intervals (and what could those possibly be for, then? They looked like the world’s biggest seamstress was building a hoop skirt around the tower, and hadn’t yet got to the crinoline).
Clustered around the platform, hanging in mid-air … flying … were four enormous objects. Airships, Tam thought. Each bore four external pods like an animal’s four feet, paws down, and a golden light glowed in a dim ring, cupped into each paw.
“Hell and begorra.”
“Utnapishtim’s beard,” Burton added.
“They look like Viking ships. They look like big bloody-damn-hell Viking ships with feet out the sides that can fly.”
Burton harrumphed. “I would have said Sumerian magur-boats, but in the essentials, we’re agreed.”
Tam chuckled. “You smug English fook, with your Queen and country. We’ve done it, don’t you see?” He pointed with a gun. “That up there is the world’s one and only flying airship fleet!”
Burton grinned, looking even more like a pirate. “Let’s go up to the tower and take a closer look, shall we?” He slapped Tam on the shoulder. Tam would have been embarrassed to admit how good the friendly smack felt.
They held their breaths and hobbled back into the lift. Burton pressed the lever to TOWER.
Hishhhhhh!
Tam vomited again.
“Ach!” he spat on the lift floor. “Anthony’s knuckles, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”
“Injuries,” Burton promptly suggested. “Sleep deprivation, physical exertion. Have you drunk enough water? You might be dehydrated. Altitude sickness, of course. We must be at eight or nine thousand feet of elevation here, judging by the way my ears feel.”
“Fookin’ hell, you make me sound like a little girl. Altitude sickness, really?”
“Really,” Burton affirmed, furrowing his brow. “And, of course, you drank an entire bottle of whisky in short order. All things considered, it’s amazing you’ve made it as far as you have.”
“A single bottle is nothing,” Tam bluffed. “I drank whisky from Mother O’Shaughne
ssy’s breast.” He leaned against the wall and breathed deeply, spitting sour strings out of his mouth. His own tongue tasted like he’d been cleaning a stable floor with it.
Hishhhh … the lift stopped moving. The door still faced a solid sheet of plascrete.
“Damn!” Burton cursed.
“Lift broken?”
“Or we’re discovered. Let’s hope it’s the lift.” Burton jiggled the control lever out of the TOWER notch and back into it. Nothing happened.
“We can’t stay here, we’ll be shot like rats.” Tam shot his eyes around the lift and spotted an indented square in the ceiling that looked like a trapdoor. “Emergency exit, right there,” he said.
“I’ll go first,” Burton suggested. “Maybe there’s a ladder in the lift shaft. Or we can climb up the ropes.”
“Like hell,” Tam snapped. “We’re both of us shot full of holes and I’m sick to boot but you’ve had it worse than I have. Said so yourself. Give me a bloody-damn-hell hand, I’m going up.” He grinned. “For Queen and country.”
Burton made stirrups with his hands and hoisted Tam towards the ceiling. The mustached man grunted and ground his teeth but didn’t complain or even wince as Tam pushed open the trap door. He snaked his arms up through the open space and wedged his elbows into it, dragging his body up.
He brushed aside a loose cable and struggled to come to the top of the lift carriage. Taut cables locked into the carriage top near him shot straight up, but not into darkness as he had expected.
Tam stopped. “Aw, shite,” he said. “Harris.”
“Higley,” the Pinkerton corrected him. “Hello, McNamara. Top of the evening to you.”
“O’Shaughnessy,” Tam sighed. “Listen, have you seen my friends? I seem to have lost them all in this great bloody complex of yours.”
The rooftop of the lift carriage was level with the exit from the shaft. Four men stood in it, each holding a Henry rifle. Three of the men pointed their guns down at the lift. Higley held the muzzle of his weapon pressed directly against the lift cable.
“Ah,” Higley chuckled, “you Irish are great liars. Come out slowly with your hands up and tell your friend in the carriage he’s next. You try any funny business, any delay, any sign of a weapon, and I’ll squeeze the trigger and drop you both to the bottom of Timpanogos Mountain.”