Gods of Chicago: Omnibus Edition

by Sikes, AJ

  Emma’s ears rang with dread. The quiet streets, the hushed voices of people too frightened to come out of their homes. Soldiers talking about orders heavy with the promise of portent. She had to find Eddie. Whatever was coming next, she had to be by his side when it happened.

  Stepping as fast as she could, Emma left the porch and the side streets, making straight for the main stem where everyone had been marched out of the neighborhood. She could follow the trail of belongings and carts back to Biros’ shop. The wagon would still be there. Eddie would still be there. She kept telling herself that as she ran.

  Emma let her eyes roam over porches and windows along her path. Here and there a curtain would drop into place just as her gaze passed over the house. But she saw nobody on the streets, neither soldier nor citizen. Overhead the dark clouds threatened rain or snow, but no airships sailed in menacing circles. At the street that led to Biros and Nagy’s shops, Emma halted and caught her breath while she examined the neighborhood around her. The street had been cleared a bit. Wagons were pushed off to the side. The livestock were all gone though. Emma saw tire tracks in the slush. Trucks and jeeps had driven through here.

  The thought of driving reminded Emma of her car. Would it still be at Nagy’s? If it was, then maybe she and Eddie had a way out of this fix. She saw the wagon up ahead, only two blocks away. Fighting the urge to charge down the street, she kept close to the storefronts and houses, ready to duck into hiding if she needed to. Before she knew it, she stood beside the wagon where Eddie had hidden, wrapped in heavy wool and tucked beneath a bench.

  He wasn’t there now. The wool was gone, too, making Emma feel hope and worry at once. Had he waited until the street was quiet and then fled, keeping the wool around him for concealment and warmth? Or had soldiers found him and used the fabric to wrap his body before dumping it in an alley?

  Emma followed a stumbling path back to Biros’ shop. Her coat was still there. At least she hoped it was. And that meant her father’s revolver and Wynes’ pistol were still there, waiting for her to claim them.

  #

  Biros’ house looked different now. The whole neighborhood did, quiet and abandoned as it was. But Emma knew it wasn’t empty. She knew people hid in their homes still, and she worried for them. On her path from the wagon to the house, she’d heard the heavy thrumming of airship motors, and the repeated alerts about curfews, fugitives, and internment protocols. Emma cast a final glare at the sky behind her before stepping into Biros’ back room.

  The first thing she noticed was that her coat was gone. She let it be a blessing. Guns hadn’t helped her avoid trouble so far, just escape one kind and get into another that was worse.

  She stared around the room, looking first to the chair she’d sat in when Eszti had transformed her into a member of Biros’ family. Emma’s curls had been swept up and put in a pail beside the bench in the center of the room. She let her eyes roam the bench and then the others around the room. Spending only seconds on each item, Emma forced herself to remember the scene, to take in all the possessions Biros and his family had left behind. Bolts of fabric, tools, scissors, measuring tapes and sticks, a dressmaker’s dummy standing in the corner. Beside the dummy, a low bench was piled with cut out pieces for coats and pants and shirts. The uniform of the Village residents. Plain and gray, but made to withstand the harsh weather and the hard work these people performed every day. Emma lifted a section of a skirt, the needle and thread still in it where Eszti or her sister or cousin had left it.

  When they stopped working. Right before the soldiers came.

  Emma heard a shuffling sound from the cellar and her ears grew hot with alarm. She stepped slow and careful to the nearest bench and lifted a long pair of shears, maybe the ones Eszti had used to cut her hair. A gunshot exploded in the small space and Emma cried out as the bullet whipped by her head, embedding itself in the rafters above her.

  “Don’t shoot! I’m not a soldier.”

  “Lovebird? That you up there?” Eddie’s voice came to her. Then she saw his face, worried as sick as she felt, and she fell into his arms and cried. Eddie let out his own set of sobs. He pawed the hat off her head and she felt his hand roam around her scalp, brushing the tufts of blond hair this way and that. She crushed herself against him, held him close and shook the tension from her body in the safety of his embrace.

  “Thought you was gone, Lovebird. Thought they took you and Nagy and them. All of you gone.”

  Emma let her tears fall and listened to Eddie tell her about how he’d stayed put until all the soldiers had left. When the street was quiet, he’d snuck out of his hiding place and come back here to get her guns, then hid in the cellar, wondering if he should go after them or go back to Nagy’s or someplace else.

  Eddie handed her one of the guns and tucked the other into his belt.

  “Didn’t know if you’d be coming back. I didn’t know a damn thing and truth is I didn’t care to know. I just wanted to get out of here. Get somewhere felt more like home. If a man’s going to die he should do it at home.”

  Emma pocketed the gun Eddie had given her. It was her father’s revolver, the only thing he’d ever passed along, even if he hadn’t meant to. She stared around the room again at all the tools and fabric.

  “We should take them. Take their things so they can have them again.”

  “How we going to do that? You hear that man talking out there, don’t you?”

  The bulletin had been broadcast repeatedly since Emma got back to Biros’ house, and if anything had changed it was the urgency of the speaker’s voice.

  “My car might still be at Nagy’s. Do you think—”

  “I think you got the same idea I did. Might be a long shot, but it’s the only one we’ve got. Let’s go.”

  They took the crank torch and made their way back through the tunnel to Nagy’s basement speak. The room had been ransacked and all the booze from the bar was gone. Emma knew she owed these people a debt that may never be repaid. For now, she’d remember the help they gave her and the kindness they’d shown her.

  Eddie led the way up the cellar steps and through the trapdoor. Emma’s car was still in the alley outside Nagy’s house and shop. Her bag and clothes were strewn about in the slush and mud next to the garage. She picked up the bag, now scuffed, stained, and torn, nothing like the fine piece of luggage she’d bought at Macy’s a year ago. The clasp still worked, so she brought it inside.

  She and Eddie picked out some shoes from Nagy’s supply, and grabbed as many extra pairs as they could carry, in case they did meet up with the other Villagers or anyone else running from the soldiers. Emma stuffed her case with extra lacing, grommets, and the tools Nagy was using. They went to her car and checked it over. One of the tires had been shot flat.

  “Wynes getting his revenge,” Emma said. “I doubt we’d get far anyway.”

  “Where we going to, Lovebird?”

  “Someplace with a way out. Someplace. . .I don’t know, Eddie. Madame Tibor said we’d escape by flying. Where are we going to find a safe airship in this city now?” Emma’s tears fell slow and steady, in time to her heartbeat. Eddie put his arms around her.

  “I heard them soldiers talking about a yard. All the stuff they took from around here supposed to be going out by the lakeshore. They said cars are out there, too, and airships. All the private ones, even that one the newsman had, where you—”

  “Where I shot Archie Falco and got us into this mess,” Emma said, feeling the weight of her failure like a leaden blanket. Remembering the night she shot Falco put Emma’s mind into thoughts of escape again. The fortune teller may be crazy, or maybe she really could read the future with those cards of hers. The idea of flight and escape tugged at Emma’s gut and lit a fire inside that she was surprised to find couldn’t be stopped.

  “What else did the soldiers
say about that yard, Eddie? Did they say why everything was going out there?”

  “Yeah. They said it was the fair site.”

  The day’s events added up in Emma’s mind. An old neighborhood evacuated and probably not two days from being put to the torch. Livestock, private cars, and airships, all hauled away to the World’s Fair marshaling area. It was four years off, but the Governor had pushed hard for Chicago City to stay on the ball and churn out the goods for the Century of Progress. Emma’s father had been in on those talks not more than a year ago, when the Eastern Seaboard Governor had nearly convinced the fair committee that New York should have the honor of hosting the event.

  Now the Great Lakes Governor was here, and he was going to make sure Chicago City lived up to his expectations. He’d start by giving the city a gift. A new neighborhood, shiny and clean and fresh as can be. Emma and Eddie turned their faces to the sky at the first sound of gunfire. He dropped the shoes he was carrying and she set her case down. Explosions sounded in the near distance and the neighborhood shook beneath their feet. Eddie grabbed Emma’s hand and they ran, darting between houses and always moving away from the oncoming airships.

  As backdrop to the sounds of war, a bullhorn continued to broadcast alerts about fugitives and vandals, and cautioned all citizens to remain indoors.

  “They’re doing it now,” Emma said.

  “Doing what?” Eddie asked, panting as they ran.

  Emma forced him to halt. “They’re demolishing this neighborhood. The Governor wants to build a new one in its place, to make sure Chicago City looks good when people come here for the World’s Fair.”

  “That’s what the old gypsy said. I know. Now come on.”

  “No, Eddie. No. This neighborhood isn’t empty. There are people still hiding in their homes. Families with children.”

  Eddie stared into her eyes, and she knew he understood what she was asking. She also knew he didn’t want any part of helping people escape unless their names were Eddie Collins and Emma Farnsworth. She begged him with her eyes. Eddie gripped her hand and shook his head. He turned and pulled her to follow. She let him lead her along, the two of them fleeing the neighborhood by the quickest route they could find. Off the main stem, down a quiet street, Emma forcing herself not to look at the windows, to ignore the curtains that dropped into place as she and Eddie swept by in the growing night while machine gun fire and explosions crackled and roared behind them.

  At the neighborhood’s edge Eddie pulled up short and stepped into hiding beside a house. He yanked Emma to his side. She peered into the dusk and saw soldiers standing across the street. Teams of two and three stood with rifles at their sides, their visors reflecting pinpoints of firelight.

  Emma reached a hand into her pocket, feeling the gun. Her fingers curled around the cold metal as she stared at the soldiers. “They’re waiting for something,” she whispered.

  “I see that,” Eddie said. “But what?”

  A whistle sounded from somewhere in the line of soldiers. As one they lifted their weapons and stepped into the street.

  Chapter 37

  The air around Brand’s head swirled and shook. He batted at the visions of gossamer and lace until the room settled around him and he saw they’d returned to the speak. Madame Tibor stepped away from him, leaving go his hand.

  “What the hell is this?” Brand asked. “They tell you to leave town and when you don’t they bring in the bombardiers?”

  “I tell you, Mitchell Brand. Your Governor, for a long time he makes ready for this war. This eugenics. Now you see what he wants with city.”

  “He isn’t my Governor. Not sure he ever was and he sure as hell isn’t now. Why’d you bring me back here?”

  “Escape. To railroad.”

  “Rail—?”

  “We are making ready for long time, too.”

  The gypsy led Brand into the cellar. Where before there had been gypsies and negroes resting and working, now there were only foot tracks and scuff marks showing the passage of multiple people and their belongings. The barrels and crates from the room above had been hauled through the room and out the hole in the wall. Brand heard an insistent squeaking from that corner, like a hinge being worked back and forth. Madame Tibor went to the hole and he followed. She stepped through first and Brand heard voices raised in surprise and delight on the other side.

  A short passage of a half dozen feet had been cut into the earthen wall. Stepping through, Brand saw the passage connected the cellar to a wide tunnel with a set of tracks running down it. The fortune teller stood on the tracks talking to another gypsy, a tall man with a heavy mustache. Next to him was the redhead from earlier, still holding her wine glass in one hand and a book in the other. Madame Tibor caught Brand’s attention and introduced the pair in the tunnel

  “This is Mee-hawl-yee,” she told him, indicating the tall man, who reached out a hand the size of Brand’s chest. They shook and swapped smiles.

  “And this,” the gypsy woman paused, letting her tone suggest she didn’t know the nicest way to introduce the redhead.

  “Dana Reynolds,” the woman said, tucking her book into a pouch on her belt and throwing her wine glass at the wall behind her where it shattered and left a dark stain pooling on the earthen floor. She wore heavy black skirts and carried an honest to goodness sword in a scabbard at her side. Brand spotted a cable connecting the pommel of the weapon to a pouch on the woman’s belt. She wore a thick jacket of brown leather over a white blouse that peaked out from her collar. A series of straps and belts were slung across her chest.

  “You’d be…?” she asked him. A self-sure smile curled her lips while she waited on his reply.

  “Name’s Mitch. Mitchell Brand.”

  “The newsman?”

  “Yeah, with the…,” Brand had been about to say Chicago Daily Record, but the instinctive reply died on his tongue. “Yeah. I used to do the news. Seems I’ve changed jobs.”

  “And what do you do now?”

  “Well, now it seems I make news that might do nobody any good. Not with how they’re doing things in Chicago City these days.”

  To punctuate his statement, a burst of airship gunfire echoed into the tunnel from outside the speak. Brand heard the bullets spray against metal like a drum roll announcing the end of the show. Another volley came and Brand felt the microphone weighing on his hip.

  “I’d better get moving,” he said to Madame Tibor and Mihalyi. Putting a finger to his brow he nodded at Dana Reynolds. “Little Red—”

  Brand’s next words died on his lips. The redhead drew her sword faster than Brand could blink. The gypsies didn’t even flinch and let their grins tell Brand he’d played the wrong card. Not that he needed convincing. The blade hovering in front of his throat was proof enough.

  “One thing first, buster. My name is Dana Reynolds. You ever call me Little Red again and I’ll carve that name on your backside.” She dropped the point, aiming it below Brand’s belt.

  “And if I run out of room back there, I’ll just work my way around to the front.”

  The blade vibrated with a threatening hum and the pack on the woman’s belt emitted a low buzz.

  “What is it with the fancy pig stickers in this town,” Brand said, shaking his head. “Okay, Miss Reynolds—”

  “Dana. I don’t miss.”

  Brand noticed her patting a shotgun that hung down by her other hip, hidden in the folds of her skirts. Before he could try a third time, Dana had sheathed the sword and clapped a hand on Brand’s shoulder.

  “You’ll get used to me, Brand. Watch the name calling and we’ll be jake.”

  “We should go now,” Mihalyi said, motioning to his right. Brand followed the gypsy’s finger and saw a lantern light glowing down the dark throat of the tunnel. The squeaking sound from earlier grew l
ouder as a handcar came into view. Two negroes operated the car and a trio of gypsies sat on the low wooden benches to either side. The two gypsies at the front were covered in sweat and the negroes looked fairly fresh.

  Brand said to Madame Tibor, “Glad to see your pals take turns doing the work on this line.”

  “Governor hunts us, treats us all like animals. We should prove him right?” she said and jutted her chin at the handcar, urging Brand to follow Mihalyi and Dana who had already climbed aboard. Brand got on and turned around to help the fortune teller. She waved to him as the air in the tunnel fell across the space where she’d been standing. Brand flicked his eyes at Mihalyi and Dana. Seeing no sign of surprise, he figured the gypsies were all in on it together. The gentle giant confirmed it with his thickly accented words.

  “Comes and goes. You don’t know when. If needed, always she comes.”

  The negroes did their bit and got the handcar rolling again. None of them seemed fazed by the gypsy’s disappearing trick either. Brand stayed silent, watching the dark tunnel give way to the lantern light. Mihalyi lifted a heavy great coat from the floor of the car and offered it to Brand. He accepted it and draped it over himself, nodding off almost instantly. The first fingers of a dream reached for him in his sleep, and Brand let himself slip into the welcoming embrace of slumber. He jerked awake when the handcar came to a stop.

  Lanterns came to life all around them and Brand rubbed at his eyes to clear his vision. They’d reached a wider section of the tunnel. To one side was a large space piled full of crates and barrels. On the opposite side, the tunnel wall opened into darkness. Brand shrugged into the great coat before grabbing a lantern and aiming it at the opening in the wall. Through it he saw several sets of tracks, all heavy with handcars on them. Negroes and gypsies worked side by side, handling parcels and crates and loading them onto the handcars. Behind each handcar, flat cars were loaded with metal cans steaming with the scent of hot chow. Crates and baskets held loaves of bread and jars of preserves. A small barrel on each car dripped water from a wooden tap. Women and children were given the seats. Men stood or waited off to the side, apparently ready to walk the length of the tunnel if there weren’t enough seats.