by D. J. Butler
“Perfect,” Cannon said. “I accept.”
The stocky Liverpudlian raised his pistol and pointed it at Brigham Young’s head.
“No bullet or blade!” shouted Orrin Porter Rockwell, and leaped.
***
Chapter Nineteen
The Englishman looked like he’d charged without a second’s thought but somehow he’d chosen the right direction. As he sprinted, firing, he moved behind the plascrete shed in the center of the mooring platform. Several of the men inside the shed saw him and began throwing themselves against windows to take aim at Burton, but Harrison’s view of him was cut off by the little building—
—which meant that he turned the ray gun against Tam.
Higley, that was the man’s name. What a stupid bloody-damn-hell clodhopper of a name.
Zottt!
Tam threw himself flat. The plascrete hurt like a giant’s fist punching him in the stomach, chest, and chin simultaneously but the phlogiston gun’s killer beam missed, turning the air over Tam’s head to fire and incinerating the hairs on the back of his neck.
Tam fired back with the Smith & Wesson. His shots were a little wild but he didn’t care. He had to give Higley something to think about, force him to dodge just a little or take cover, or Pratt’s weapon would make this a very short fight.
He fired and then he rolled sideways, tumbling shoulders-over-elbows and trying to keep the Pinkerton in his sight and his pistol pointed more or less in the other man’s direction.
Zottt!
The heat of the killer beam made Tam’s face sweat and then sparks exploded above and behind him. Higley stopped shooting and staggered back.
Tam was puzzled but relieved and kept moving. He looked for Burton and saw the man dragging one of the Pinkertons bodily out the window of the shed, punching him in the jaw with the butt of his pistol.
Sparks rained down around Tam and he wondered why. He saw Higley do a little uncertain jig, moving to one side and then the other, and then the Pinkerton turned and broke into a run to his left.
He’s hit the lightning rod, Tam thought.
Then: He’s hit the bloody-damn-hell lightning rod!
Tam scrambled up and into action, galloping right on two legs and a hand, and bringing the Model 1 into play, squeezing off shots at Higley as he ran straight at the man. The imminence of death slowed his perception of time, like honey had been poured over the entire scene, and in Tam’s imagination the electric prickle on the nape of neck became the sharp poking of a thousand needles.
Higley raised the ray gun.
Tam squeezed the trigger again and his heart sank as he heard the loud click—
—CRASH!!!
The lightning rod smashed into the plascrete floor of the mooring platform like a fallen tree wreathed in St. Elmo’s fire. Tam felt something that was part fire, part knives, and part gigantic vibrating tickle in the soles of his feet, and then he was thrown sideways, the rush of electricity tossing him onwards in the direction in which he was already moving, towards the edge of the platform.
Higley flew headlong in the same direction, losing his grip on his weapon.
Tam hit the edge of the platform, grabbed at it, missed—
—and then caught himself with one hand on a metal bar that ran around the outside of the tower, horizontally just beneath the lip of the mooring platform.
The Smith & Wesson left his other hand on impact and disappeared into the darkness below, along with Tam’s porkpie hat. Fire raged through the wound in his arm and bile bubbled up through his lips.
“Fookin’ Brigit and fookin’ Anthony and every other fookin’ saint help me now!” Tam squealed, hating himself for the little girl sound that came out of his throat. He spat against the plascrete tower wall and coughed for breath, expecting a ray gun beam to slice him to pieces at any second.
No beam.
He grabbed with his other hand for the bar and steadied himself a little.
Tam’s head spun. He hurt, he felt sick, he was exhausted, and he wanted a drink.
You were bloody-damn-hell right, Burton, he thought. All of the above.
He snaked up a hand and grabbed the plascrete. It was his uninjured arm so he managed to drag his chin up to the level of the mooring platform for a better look. At least the bar wasn’t electrocuting him, he realized with relief. Why was that? Maybe the electricity all came out of the metal when the pole fell, he guessed. Hell if he knew.
All four airships were gone now. The Franklin Poles had gone dead and Tam realized that he could still see because the sky was beginning to gray over with the coming of morning. The shed in the center of the platform was quiet and he saw that the lightning rod, when it had hit the plascrete, had smashed into the wall of the shed, too. He wondered if Burton and the Pinkertons inside were dead.
Higley wasn’t dead, though. He stirred, brushing at his face like he dreamed of being caught in a swarm of flies. The Pinkerton groaned.
Pratt’s ray gun lay on the plascrete, halfway between Tam and Higley. Its gaping muzzle, grossly oversized by comparison with any normal firearm, stared at Tam like a viper. It looked ready to bite (but wasn’t any gun a biting beastie, and the trick was to be on the tail side, and not get the fangs?).
“Hell and begorra.” Tam spat bile out of his mouth and tried to dig his good elbow into the plascrete. It took several tries because, with the vertigo that twisted his vision all around every time he tried to focus on anything, he kept slipping and missing his mark. The fact that his toes dangled over an abyss that, as he could see out of the corner of his eye, might as well be bottomless, didn’t help. As he finally got the elbow firmly planted and hoisted himself with a sharp cry of pain up onto it, he heard a louder groan from Higley.
The Pinkerton propped himself up on one forearm and shook his head.
Anthony’s teeth! Tam clawed at the plascrete with his nails like a dog, trying to drag himself forward faster. The hiss of his breath through his teeth was too loud, like a hurricane in his own ears, and he imagined Higley could hear it, too.
He flopped chest-down on the platform and sucked in cold air, pain lancing through his bad arm. The air smelled ozone-fried and full of death, like meat charred to cinders by an electricks cooker.
“Dammit!” Higley cursed, and Tam heard a scraping sound.
He didn’t waste time looking up, just threw himself in the direction of the ray gun. He lunged, fingers out, paddling across cold plascrete like he was swimming, and raised his head. He and Higley locked eyes—
—and grabbed the gun at the same time.
Better than no loaf at all, Tam thought. Only Higley had the bloody-damn-hell tail end of the snake.
Tam threw himself back, praying to Brigit that he wasn’t hurling himself off the platform to his death. He wrapped both hands around the barrel of the ray gun and pushed it up with all his wasted, pain-wracked strength, trying to get the viper mouth away from his throat, above his head.
Zottt!
Tam felt his hair burst into flame but his head wasn’t incinerated. He smelled plascrete melting, a horrible tarry bubbling stink, and then his shoulders hit the mooring platform floor and it was solid.
And Higley came crashing down on top of him.
Zottt!
The ray gun fired again, over Tam’s head, and he smelled the burning stink more intensely, and then Higley let go of the gun—
—it rattled away across the plascrete and stopped, spinning, right at the new, melted, edge of the platform—
—and Higley’s big heavy Pinkerton body slammed into Tam, the first point of contact being the bigger man’s knee crunching into Tam’s crotch.
“Aaagh!” Tam screamed.
Higley head-butted Tam, maybe on purpose or maybe not, but it hurt like hell. Then the Pinkerton reached over Tam’s shoulder, trying to crawl past him for the gun.
Tam grabbed Higley’s head. He wrapped his fingers in the other man’s hair and yanked back as hard as he could.
>
“Damn Irish!” Higley bellowed, and punched Tam in the jaw.
Tam lost his vision. He knew he wasn’t unconscious, because he could still feel Higley’s hair clutched in his fist, and the Pinkerton’s knee as he pummeled Tam again in the balls, but he saw a bright flash of light and then blackness.
Tam snapped his hand forward.
“Let go!” Higley snarled, and punched Tam again, this time in the throat.
Tam lost his wind and vomited at the same moment, and had the horrible feeling of his lungs filling up with his own bile—
—and as the stiletto leaped into his hand, he shoved it forward, hard, at the spot where his best guess told him Higley’s neck would be. Whatever he hit, it had the satisfying resistance of human flesh.
“Glagh!”
Hot blood spilled over Tam’s face and chest and arms and Higley lurched sideways, screaming and coughing. Tam coughed, too, spitting out bile and blood and gasping to get whatever slivers of tainted air he could into his lungs. He couldn’t see, he vomited again, he took an elbow in the face, and he didn’t let go.
He slashed again, and stabbed. Sometimes he hit flesh and sometimes he hit plascrete, but he kept stabbing and coughing and spitting and sucking air until the hunk of flesh he grappled had stopped moving, and finally his stiletto blade hit the plascrete one last time and its blade snapped off, sticking into the palm of his hand like a giant splinter.
Tam coughed, spewing out blood and bile and what felt like half his lung. “Fookin’ hell!” he shouted, and then he wiped blood from his face with his sleeve, which was almost as bloody.
Vision began to return, under a dark gray sheet and streaked with blue sparks almost as heavy as the overhead field of electricks had been. For good measure, Tam smashed Higley’s mangled face against the plascrete, shattering the dead man’s nose, and then he rolled away from the body and vomited some more.
He was surprised he had anything left to throw up, but then he was surprised even to be alive, at this point.
“Seamus fookin’ McNamara!” he gasped. “Idjits!”
Tam lurched to his feet, found his sense of vertigo hadn’t recovered, and fell to the hard plascrete again.
He yanked the broken blade from his hand, wincing as more blood gushed out, wiped blood off his forehead, and out of his eyes, and looked around again. The sky grew ever lighter. Off in the distance in mid-air he saw flashes and he dimly thought that some sort of battle was being waged in the clouds.
“I hope Poe is sticking it to that bastard Pratt,” he spat, and looked around for the ray gun. He found it, teetering on the edge of the abyss.
He crawled this time, staying low and moving slowly, and made it all the way to the gun without collapsing. Below, the creeping light of morning showed a blue lake and the gray, bowl-shaped arms of the mountain around, with a silver skunk’s tail of snow connecting the two. It was a long way down, and as Tam grabbed the ray gun he pulled away from the drop, sinking back to the floor and breathing heavy.
Bang!
He heard a gunshot elsewhere on the mooring platform, and Tam rolled over to look. He saw Richard Burton, standing but looking more like a mutilated corpse than a man, with blood and bandages all over his body, and a half-reloaded Smith & Wesson Model 1 in his hands.
A big-shouldered Pinkerton leaned against the shed with his back to Tam. He held a long Henry rifle in his hands, and he pointed it at Burton.
Tam thought about standing, but didn’t dare risk it. Biting back a groan with his bloody-coppery-tasting teeth, he tightened his grip on Orson Pratt’s ray gun, as much as he could with his battered and sliced hands, and started dragging himself on one elbow and two knees in the direction of the little shed.
Crash!
The message machine room filled with shards of flying glass and splinters of wood, and Sam staggered back, raising an arm to protect his face. Something long and spear-like punched George Cannon in the chest and hurled him across the room toward the door, scattering his minions out of the way likes Swiss skiers before an avalanche barreling down the slopes of Mont Blanc.
Rockwell hit the ground where Cannon had been, looking like a dog whose bone had been yanked from his jaws and thrown across the yard. He stumbled, knees wobbling, and tried to recover his balance.
Bang!
Cannon’s bullet disappeared in the confusion. The turncoat Welker raised his pistols and a knife appeared in his throat. He staggered sideways and rotated, cocking and firing his pistols alternately as he turned and sank to the floor, a deadly Fourth of July cracker with blood spilling down his shirt.
Bang!
Lee shot Welker in the forehead, blowing him to the floor before the other man shot the Danite chieftain, and then turned his attention grimly to the rest of the room.
Orrin Porter Rockwell got his feet under him again. The wild man hurled a table onto its side with a titanic grunt and then tackled Brigham Young and Sam Clemens both simultaneously, knocking them towards the upended table and shelter. Sam resisted out of reflex but the back of his knees struck a horizontal table leg and he sat down, hard, slamming prone onto his back. He spat his Partagás straight up into the air as he hit, like the explosion of a tobacco landmine.
Crash!
Another window exploded inward, showering Sam with glass again. His face felt like it had been shaved by a drunk with farm implements and he coughed out the last wisps of cigar smoke from his lungs and cheeks with a sense of disappointment. A figure wrapped head to toe in leather crashed into the room in the cloud of shards, a pistol in each hand.
Rockwell pulled a knife—
—the figure fired, both guns blazing and throwing lead at John Lee, George Cannon and their cohorts.
“Surround them!” Lee yelled to someone in the hall behind him, and he backed into the message room doorway, leaving Lindemuth behind, who collapsed under the withering fire of the leather-clad figure. Staring up at the specter of death, Sam found himself uniquely situated to appreciate the voluptuousness of this angel of punishment, and then he recognized it—her—as the Mexican Striderman, Master Sergeant Jackson.
Sam struggled to sit up, wishing he still had the brace of pistols in his hands.
Another spear hurtled in through the window over the shoulder of the dwarf Coltrane, who rolled in with a humming Colt vibro-blade in his hand. The spear struck John Lee in the shoulder and knocked him spinning out into the hall, but Sam noticed that there was no blood. A spear that size should have taken off the man’s arm entirely, but there wasn’t a drop.
Then he saw the spear that had knocked George Cannon down. It was long, light and forged of steel, and it ended in a rubber cup. Sam laughed. “Where did you find a weapon like that?” he asked no one in particular, shaking his head. “A squadron of militant plumbers?”
Coltrane slammed the door shut and jumped aside to avoid bullets that snapped through the wood immediately, punching holes and sending in shafts of yellow gas light.
“Anyway, it did the job,” he answered his own question, reminding himself of his electrified steam-truck deck.
Absalom Fearnley-Standish backed into the room through one of the broken windows, frock coat skirt first and pistols last, firing out after himself. Cute little Annie Webb, who had so entranced Sam in Bridger’s Saloon, came in the same moment by the other window.
“They’re behide us!” Absalom cried. He had acquired a distinctly more manly ring to his voice despite the broken nose.
“They’re on every side!” Annie added. She kicked at a man following close on her heels, sending him flying away into the darkness.
Only it wasn’t darkness. Behind Annie Webb, Sam realized that he now saw the grayish light of early morning. In that half-light he saw the Third Virginia and Danites, taking up positions in the street and at the Mercantile, facing the Lion House. A glance out the other side’s windows showed him more men taking up positions in the Tabernacle’s gardens.
“So much for the poor performa
nce of the Virginians!” he shouted. “Quick, before they settle in! Where’s your Strider, Sergeant?”
“The one, she is destroyed,” Jackson said simply, and grabbed another table, knocking it over in front of the windows facing South Tabernacle and the Mercantile. “The other, joo tell me, but tengo miedo que she is lost.”
Rockwell tossed a third table on its side, creating a sheltered area walled in on three sides by heavy wood. Sam hoped it was heavy enough.
“The Jim Smiley, then,” Sam suggested. “We can run—”
“Burned up,” Jed Coltrane grunted. The dwarf shoved his vibro-blade straight through the plaster wall into the hallway, cutting a long horizontal slash at knee-level. A man’s voice outside screamed and cursed, and Jed somersaulted away, throwing himself behind a chair and then scooting around a table end into the sheltered space. “If it’s any comfort to you, she did a lot of damage before she went.”
“Burned up?” Sam demanded, disgruntled. “How in mercy do you burn up that many tons of steel and India rubber? Was she hit by a meteorite?”
“Near enough,” Coltrane agreed. Absalom Fearnley-Standish crouched beside him, sharing the cover of the tables, and handed the dwarf a long pistol. Both men began pouring powder and reloading. Up close, Sam could now see that the little man bled from a belly wound and breathed through flared nostrils.
“You hit, Jed?” he asked, stupidly.
“We can’t go, anyway,” Rockwell said, and his voice was profoundly sad.
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked, and Rockwell pointed at Brigham Young. Only then did Sam realize that the President of Deseret hadn’t moved since the shootout began and he looked at the man, half-expecting to find him dead.
Young wasn’t dead, but he looked bad. He lay on his back, a thick shard of glass lodged in his neck and blood streaming down his chest from what looked like a bullet wound in his shoulder.
“No bullet or blade,” Rockwell said, even sadder. “Brother Joseph made his promise to the wrong man.”