by D. J. Butler
The horses, the flesh and blood ones, saw him coming first. Two of them yanked up their pickets and bolted before any of the Danites or the Third Virginia heard the clank-and-hiss of Sam Clemens’s truck and turned around.
And then it was too late.
Bang! Bang!
Crash!
Crack-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz-ckz!
Bullets smashed out windows of the Jim Smiley’s wheelhouse, banged off her metal hull and sank into her heavy rubber. Jed stayed low—easy enough—looking over the control panel of the steam-truck just enough to be able to steer at the thickest knots of Danites and cavalrymen he could find.
Men threw themselves on the Jim Smiley’s ladders and shrieked in pain as they were flung off again, electrocuted. The craft’s ponderous tyres rolled over man and machine alike, crushing clocksprung horses into their component parts and simultaneously turning them into lethal transmitters of the steam-truck’s deadly lightning currents. The heavy rubber reduced hollering, struggling men into smears of goo on the grass. The air reeked of ozone and blood and smoke, gunpowder and otherwise, and the night rang with the screams of men and horses.
Just as Jed wondered how long the electricks would hold out, he heard an enormous SNAP! and the crackling sound that told him the deck was electrified ended. He spun the wheel, aiming for a cluster of four men who fired at him with rifles and pistols, and then he turned and ran.
Across the deck he pelted, looking for targets—
—bullets cut the air around him.
Jed saw two men, one mounted on a clocksprung horse and the other trying to mount up. He thumbed the vibro-blade’s switch to on and hurled himself through the air.
Hummmmmmmm, sang Sam Colt’s deadly blade.
Jed landed in the empty saddle of one of the horses. While the man whose mount he’d boarded cursed and reached for a pistol, Jed swung the vibro-blade in a neat arc—
—slicing through the head of the other horse—
—and cutting off one leg of its rider.
Jed wasn’t used to fighting with knives that met no resistance and his own momentum pulled him forward and off the horse. He scrabbled with his free hand at the sculpted metal saddle horn and missed, tumbling to the ground and narrowly avoiding impaling himself on the humming weapon.
The mutilated rider screamed and fell backwards onto the ground in a spout of red blood. His horse kicked aimlessly with its back feet, then kicked again, and again, trampling its own severed head with its razor-sharp metallic front hooves. Jed rolled, narrowly avoided being crushed by the clocksprung horse, and then the other cavalryman got a bead on him with his pistol and started firing.
Bang! Bang!
Jed threw the vibro-blade. It wasn’t meant to be a throwing weapon, it wasn’t especially balanced and it wasn’t weighted in the tip. But Jed was a carny who had done his time at every conceivable kind of joint, including throwing knives at beautiful girls, and Jed knew the secret of throwing any sort of knife at all, even one that would chop your finger off if you so much as touched its tip.
He threw the vibro-blade by the handle, overhand, so the blade launched out from his shoulder in a straight line, and not tumbling like a weighted knife. He let his extended index finger drag along the knife’s hilt as he threw, truing up his aim at the center of the cavalryman’s chest by simply pointing at him.
Bang!
Pain lanced through Jed Coltrane as a bullet hit him in the stomach.
Fhoomp!
The vibro-blade slammed straight into the center of the man’s gray-breasted uniform, punched a hole right through his entire chest, and hurtled straight away like a perfectly pitched baseball, into the air.
“Aaaagh!” One-Leg kept screaming, thrashing around in a growing puddle of his own arterial spray.
The standing soldier dropped his pistol, stared down at the bloody hole in the middle of his chest, looked at Jed with an expression that was half-accusation and half-puzzlement and then toppled forward, crashing face-first into the grass.
“Aaaagh!”
Jed grabbed the dropped pistol and turned on One-Leg.
“Shut up!” he yelled, and put the man out of his misery.
He almost vomited from the pain, and looked at his own belly. Black blood soaked into his shirt from a neat little bullet hole. Jed probed around his side and back and couldn’t find an exit wound. The bullet’s still inside you, Coltrane, you idiot, he thought. Not that it matters, because as soon as they can recover a teaspoon’s worth of organization, these boys’ll jump on you and cut you down.
Jed cocked his borrowed pistol again and turned to face whatever he had coming.
But the wave of attacking soldiers he expected didn’t materialize. Instead, through blurring vision, he saw men in gray running away and men in long coats chasing down skittish, fleeing horses. And Absalom Fearnley-Standish, scalloped hat on his head and pistol held high, charging in silhouette out of the inferno of the Tabernacle with an angel to each side of him, blasting at the few holdouts among the Virginians and the Danites and driving them away. Behind them, grinding in the opposite direction and plunging into the wall of flames, went the Jim Smiley.
“Thanks, old girl,” he mumbled a farewell. The beheaded clocksprung horse finally wound down and toppled over, and Jed sat down on its flank, holding one hand over his wound. The sweat on his forehead felt cold and clammy even though the fire in the Tabernacle rose higher, flames exploding out the balconies and windows of the upper stories.
Absalom and the two women found him there a minute later. They looked concerned. He felt like he was seeing them through water, slow and distorted and slightly out of their true positions.
“Thack you, Mr. Coltrade,” the Englishman said, doffing his hat and making a slight bow. “I believe you saved our lives.”
“Eh,” Jed grunted. “I’m gonna need a doctor.”
Poe’s machine led the way (and wasn’t there something perfect and poetic about that, an ultra-advanced machine that was shaped like some kind of ancient Egyptian monster, and all the human beings enslaved to it?), bounding up plascrete corridors and tearing to shreds the Pinkertons that got in its way.
That turned out to be an awful lot of Pinkertons. Their deaths, by claw and fang and sheer pounding mass of bloody-damn-hell steel, cheered Tam’s heart considerably. He still felt sick.
Poe stalked along in the Typhonian Animal’s wake, grim as death, alternating inaudible toots on his whistle and wet, sucking coughs by which he smeared the foul and nauseating contents of his chest on the floors and walls of Orson Pratt’s facility.
Roxie stalked at his right side, a pistol in each hand (But hadn’t the scattergun been a work of art, for the two shots it provided? And after she’d killed one man and winged another, Tam had been more than happy to finish off the wounded fellow with a knife to the belly.), and Burton marched at his left.
Tam followed in the back. It gave him a good view of the carnage ahead of him and when he stopped to retch, belly empty and aching and lungs burning like fire, which he did every few minutes, he could do it without being stared at. Also, following at a distance let him use his sharp ears to good effect, to hear the creak when a fat-eyed Pinkerton opened a door to try to get the drop on him—
—Bang!—
Tam sent the man to the hell he deserved.
Or the soft squish and slap of shoe leather as men crowded in waiting down a side passage—
—Bang! Bang! Snick!
—and Tam added three more widows to the rosters of the beneficiaries of the Pinkertons’ pension and insurance fund.
Abruptly, he caught up to the others. They had stopped in an open area not quite expansive enough to be a room, arguing. They stood beside another lift door, with its brass and glass panels and its accordion gate and beside that a plascrete door labeled STAIRS.
“If we get onto the lift again, we trap ourselves.” Burton’s voice was as hard as a punch to the jaw. “We did that before, and played right
into their hands.”
“You said no more fookin’ stairs!”
“And going up the stairs doesn’t trap us?” Roxie demanded. “Do you imagine there are exits halfway up the tower, if we need them?”
Tam heard the click and shuffle of boot heels on the plascrete behind him, and turned in time to plug another bloody-damn-hell Pinkerton twice with the Model 1.
“I imagine,” Burton snarled, “that even if we find ourselves surrounded, in the stairwell we’ll have a fighting chance. No one will be able to simply cut the rope and drop us to our deaths!”
Tam shuffled wearily to the Pinkerton and took his pistol, shoving it into his coat pocket with the others he’d taken from dead men in the last few minutes and then sliding more brass-jacketed cartridges into the Smith & Wesson. He liked the Model 1, maybe even more than he had liked the Hushers. It reloaded much easier and sometimes, like this evening, killing was a game of volume.
“Can he even make it up the stairs?” Roxie shouted, waving at Edgar Allan Poe. She had a point there, Tam thought, and besides, he was puking up his own guts—from the altitude or the injuries or the alcohol, whichever it was he didn’t care—and the thought of climbing the mooring tower up to the airships on foot didn’t appeal to him.
For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to go to the mooring tower at all. Why not go down, get a truck, and get the hell out of Deseret? Go to bloody-damn-hell California, rob Californian banks of their queer rectangular dollars and look for the easy life? But he looked at Poe, dying on his feet, and Burton, shot all to hell and still fighting for his precious chubby Queen, and Roxie, who’d seduced two different men to come to the aid of her husband (and did a woman ever look finer than when she had a pistol in each hand and blood in her eye?), and found that he couldn’t walk away.
“Shite.”
He pressed the lift’s lever from NO CALL to UP.
No sound, no motion.
“Damn!” Roxie shouted.
“It doesn’t fookin’ matter, does it?” Tam pointed out. “The lift’s dead. We’re walking.”
He dragged open the plascrete door.
Poe nodded, wiped blood off his lips and blew into the silent whistle. With a click and a clatter of metal nails on the hard floor, the Seth-Beast pushed past Tam and crashed up the stairs.
“Come on, then,” Tam said, and he offered his shoulder to Poe.
“Thanks.” Poe’s voice was a gravelly whisper. Together, they limped up the stairs.
Bang! Bang!
Burton and Roxie fired at enemies Tam couldn’t see before slamming the door shut.
“You know,” Tam grunted, Poe heavy on his arm, “that pony-dog thing’s so big, if you called it back here, I could sling you over its shoulders and you could just ride up to the top of the tower.”
Poe shook his head, spat a squirt of blood onto the floor like bright red tobacco juice, and kept climbing. “We need it to go first,” he said slowly.
Like an exclamation mark to the dying man’s words, a door slammed at the top of the stairs and then screaming began.
“Right you are,” Tam agreed, and did his best to pick up the pace. He hurt and hefting the American slowed him down, but Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised any quitters.
“Here,” Burton said gruffly, “let me help.” The Englishman shoved himself under Poe’s other shoulder and together they hauled the American right off his feet. Tam still hurt like hell and the going was still slow.
“Brigit’s secret belly,” Tam chortled, “aren’t we a pretty choir of angels, all of us dying and just trying to get across the finish line before we do?”
“Speak for yourself,” Richard Burton grunted.
“But really,” Tam said, “you did promise me no more stairs.”
“Or better still,” Roxie suggested, “shut up.”
The stairs climbed back and forth in a regular Z-shaped pattern. The interior of the stairwell was dimly lit by a small electricks globe at each landing but it was enough glow to walk by. It was enough light to shoot by, too, at least for Roxie, who brought up the rear with her two pistols. Once they reached the second landing, Tam heard the door below open and the whisper of men plotting against them.
“Pinkertons,” he said softly, and before he had closed his mouth on the end of the foul word, Roxie stood at the stair’s banister and was firing down into the well.
She kept a steady pressure on the men behind them and when her pistols ran dry Tam mutely dug two more out of his pockets and handed them to her.
“This really isn’t my strong suit,” she observed, taking them.
“No?” Burton sweated under their shared burden, and left a spattered trail of his own blood on the plascrete behind him. “Perhaps you can go down and offer the gentlemen a doctored drink.”
“I thought I might seduce them,” she countered. “Men are so easy that way.” Bang! Bang! “I think it’s because of their boundless vanity.”
The air inside the stairwell, thick and artificial to begin with, stank acridly of fired bullets, blood, bile, phlegm, and sweat. It was half the reek of a hospital and half the airborne ordure of battle.
“Is it vanity, woman?” Burton snarled. “Or pride in accomplishment? Men brewed beer, tamed the horse, captured fire from heaven, built the pyramids, learned to sail the oceans, invented writing, music, theater, dance, government, and philosophy, and discovered mathematics. Maybe men have something to say for themselves, after all.”
Roxie laughed, a light, almost frivolous sound that was given a murderous edge to it by the gunshot punctuation she rained down on the following Pinkertons. Bang! “Why, Captain Burton,” she fluttered, “you make it sound like all those accomplishments belonged to a single fellow!”
“A single man may accomplish many great things!” Burton nearly shouted with the effort. Tam willed him to shut his mouth and keep carrying his half of the American but he wasn’t about to open his mouth and say anything out loud, for fear of getting shot by the irate explorer. “Think of Newton! Or your own Benjamin Franklin! Or Alexander the Great, by Ravana’s ten heads!”
“And what each of those men has in common,” Roxie pointed out, bang! Bang!, “is that a woman gave birth to him.”
“Not without the help of another man, she didn’t!”
“True,” she agreed, “but a paltry, sad kind of help, five minutes of sweat for which the man no doubt patted himself on the back forever after.”
Burton growled and pushed harder up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs bright blue light flooded in through an open door mixed with the sounds of gunfire and angry yelling. “Hold him,” Tam muttered to Burton, and shoved Poe entirely onto the Englishman before getting a reply. As much as anything else, Tam wanted a breath of cold air that didn’t smell of plascrete and bodily fluids. He shoved his head around the corner into the cool light recklessly, though he made sure to poke out the Smith & Wesson Model 1 at the same time.
He saw the top of the mooring tower. It was a great flat space, a square, and above each of the four corners of the platform floated one of the strange, Viking-like airships, tethered by a metal pole jutting up from the tower’s corner and inserted below the prow of the ship. They were stuck to the tower by pins through their tails, as if they were gigantic bugs in some naturalist’s collection. Blue bolts of lightning ran up and down the bits and crackling ozone mixed into the compound stink that already blocked Tam’s nostrils. More electricity jolted and snapped about the edges of the platform and Tam remembered the lightning rods he and Burton had seen climbing up the outside of the tower. Rope ladders dangled from the hind end of each ship. One of the four ladders was anchored to a big iron mooring ring at the nearest corner of the platform but the others dangled free. The names of the ships were painted on the side in that Mormon gibberish-writing, just like the name of the Liahona was.
Lightning flashed from the tops of all four anchor poles towards the center of the space above the
tower, like interlocked fingers or a great bloody-damn-hell spider’s web of electricity. Noticing it, Tam flinched and tightened his grip on the Model 1. You stupid bloody idjit, he told himself. As if you’re going to shoot the lightning. He felt the hair on the back of his neck and head both stand straight up and he screwed his porkpie hat on a little tighter, in a vain attempt to tamp it back down.
In the center of the mooring platform was a plascrete shed; Franklin Poles at its corners cast bluish light over the platform, though the area was lit much more by the wild electricity snapping free through the air than by the domesticated shining of the Poles.
Seven or eight men huddled inside the little building and fought through its doors and windows the steel-gleaming, four-legged mock-Egyptian apparition of death that stalked them. With sticks and knives and guns they fired at it, but it was winning—the bodies of as many men lay torn and broken on the floor, and as Tam looked, the Seth-Beast shoved its head and forequarters through a window, shattering iron shutters into scrap and removing the head of a screaming Pinkerton in a single bite. Bullets fired by the Pinkertons streaked and sparked harmlessly off its armored flanks.
“Fookin’ hell,” he called back to Edgar Allan Poe. “It’s eerie how that thing of yours doesn’t make a noise, even while it’s chewing men to pieces.”
“You’d prefer it to say woof, I suppose?”
“I’d prefer it to do something, is all I’m saying. Besides generate minced Pinkerton, I mean. Not that I object to the mincing at all.”
“Yes, well,” Poe mumbled dryly, “I promise to take your criticism to Mr. Hunley next time I see him, though I can’t make any representations about the likelihood or imminence of that possibility.” He spat a quid of thick blood against the wall.
Bang! Bang!
“If you’re quite finished chatting,” Roxie snapped, “we’re about to have company by the tradesmen’s entrance.”
“Hell and begorra!” Tam shouted, and pointed with his Model 1. The others crowded into the stairwell exit with him and looked. The airships, all of them, were sliding up the metal antennae that rooted them to the tower.