Gods of Chicago: Omnibus Edition

by Sikes, AJ

  Mr. Brand seemed to notice and gave Aiden’s shoulder a shake.

  “You have to know how to use this, Conroy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I get mine while we’re out here, it’s up to you to get on the mic and tell the people what’s happening.”

  The weight of it settled into Aiden’s stomach like a ball of lead. He couldn’t move to join Mr. Brand when he stood and looked around the corner.

  “The park is down the street. That’s where we have to be.” Mr. Brand looked down on him and seemed ready to shake his head. “C’mon, Conroy. Get up. I’ll pour you a slug when it’s all over. Right now, we’re on duty.”

  Aiden took his boss’s hand and stood. Then they moved out.

  Chapter 41

  Emma stayed close to Eddie as they followed the old man and his daughter down the tracks. The rails stretched forever into the darkness, pushing the edge of Emma’s vision deeper and deeper into the black but never changing, never showing her a destination other than the pitch ahead of them. To the side, she would see bits of old sidewalks, the planks and trestles rotten or showing burn marks from the fire that swallowed Old Chicago and spat it out a charred and blackened husk. Like the neighborhood she and Eddie and their two guides had just fled from.

  Their path reached an incline and Emma’s legs felt like stone. Her steps faltered as the long day’s fatigue settled in. She fell against Eddie and he caught her.

  “Keep on, Lovebird. We’re almost there. See?” He pointed up ahead and Emma could just make out a circle of paler darkness, a slight shade of gray brighter than the surrounding tunnel. Through the opening, she saw the promise of freedom leading away and into the night, but it was a promise soon broken. They emerged under the canopy of a deserted train shed. The tracks were empty but for two old handcars off to the right.

  “Trains have gone,” Peter said, dropping the crank torch into the gravel at his feet. His daughter turned on him and spoke fast and sharp in their tongue. The squat little man recoiled from the abuse and held up his hands, defending himself with cries of shame and regret. The girl gave up and went to Emma with great streams of tears pouring down her cheeks.

  “The soldiers, they take my mother. Take her with the others. He says no, that she came with others, that she will be here waiting for us. But I know better. They are at the camp. She will be made to work until she is dead.” The girl collapsed against Emma and clung to her shoulders for support. Emma found her legs, but was thankful for Eddie’s hands on her waist.

  “What camp? What’s she mean about a camp?” Emma demanded of the father.

  “Is by lakeshore. For the fair they build. All the Rigos are taken there to work. To make fair happen. My daughter fears her mother will die there. Will not be first time our people are made to work like slaves. Will not be last.”

  “And that’s all you can say about it? Your wife is there with the others, all those people from your neighborhood, and you’re just going to stand here?”

  “What should Peter do? Eh? Peter should fight soldiers? Should take his gun and shoot at men with rifles and bombs and airships? Peter should die like other Rigos who fight for neighborhood that is already lost? Ah,” the old man’s voice cracked. He shook his head and turned away.

  “What does that mean?” Emma asked. “That word. I know it ain’t nice, so why do you keep saying it?”

  The daughter piped up. “It means gypsy. Person with no home. Person who doesn’t belong anywhere. But we are not Rigos!” she shouted, whirling to face her father. His grief had passed and he stood with his hands by his sides, defeated but not dead.

  “No, my girl,” he said, coming close and putting his hands on hers. “No, we are not Rigos. We are Kertész, and I would see your mother, my Katarina, again before I die.”

  Emma stepped forward, leaving the support of Eddie’s hands. She went to the handcars. Both had been loaded with cargo recently. Fresh scrapes in the deck showed where heavy objects had been dragged and shifted. One of the cars had a broken handle, making it next to useless unless they wanted to pump and lift from one side only. The other car’s handle was fine though.

  “How far do these tracks go?” Emma asked, turning back to Peter and his daughter.

  “To river, but—”

  “So we’ll need to find a way across the river and out to the lakeshore. Let’s go.”

  Peter and his daughter hesitated until Eddie came up and put his hands on their shoulders. “She’s right. We can’t hang around here, and Misses Kertész ain’t going to like it if we’re late picking her up, is she?” He looked into Emma’s eyes as he spoke and she saw that old fire again, the embers that glowed in the heart of the man she loved. She smiled at him and moved to help Peter and his daughter over to the handcar.

  #

  They took turns pumping the handcar down the tracks. Peter’s daughter lit the way with the crank torch. Emma and Eddie worked the lever arm for the first leg of their journey. Peter spelled Emma a bit and then she gave Eddie a break. The car squeaked and squealed along the tracks as they made the quickest pace they could manage. They kept on this way, rotating shifts on the lever arm, until they reached the ruins of a depot house from the old city. The musty smell of sodden wood mixed with charcoal filled the tunnel around them. Emma climbed off the handcar and helped the girl down behind her.

  They stepped aside to make room for her father and Eddie to dismount the car. “What’s your name anyway?” Emma asked.

  “Marta. Your name really is Lovebird?”

  Emma laughed. “No, that’s what Eddie calls me. My name’s Emma.”

  The girl’s eyes rounded and Emma felt a tension forming in the air behind her. Peter spoke up then and confirmed her fears.

  “Emma Farnsworth,” he said. “Rich woman who murders man in airship and runs away with dark man.” The tension between them grew so great Emma feared she would have to draw her father’s gun. An instant later, Emma felt the thickness in the air dissolve amidst the old man’s chuckles. “Peter chooses good company tonight.”

  Emma looked into Marta’s eyes and saw friendship there still, but her sadness remained and a ring of worry creased the skin around her eyes now. Not knowing what to say, Emma simply nodded, admitting her identity, and waited for the girl or her father to respond.

  “Is okay,” Peter said. “My daughter and I do not believe everything on radio. Come.”

  He ushered them up a set of crumbled stone steps and to a door that was set into the tunnel wall. Working a catch on one side, he pushed the door open slowly and Emma felt the chill of a Chicago City night rush into the tunnel. They stepped out at the back of an open shed that sat at the mouth of a wharf. Stacks of lumber and rope filled the shed, and they moved through them carefully. Emma kept her eyes darting around the wharf area. Across the pier was another set of sheds, their far sides open to the river.

  Silos and half-filled lumber yards waited across the river, expectant and hopeful for the next day’s shipments from the Eastern Seaboard. Emma spied the narrow bridge she and Eddie had driven across the previous day. It was two piers farther along the wharf on this side. Across the bridge, the silos and shack stood ominous in the dark night, and she couldn’t shake the fear that coppers or soldiers would come rushing out of the shadows at any second.

  “Let’s get moving. That bridge isn’t guarded.”

  They moved as fast as they could, staying low and shuffling between piles of cargo, coils of rope and netting, and stacks of lumber. Within minutes, they’d reached the near end of the bridge.

  “We’re almost there. Just a—”

  Emma swallowed her words and pulled up short when a jeep engine sounded from farther down the wharf road. A set of headlights flashed across the wall of the silos across the bridge. The vehicle came slowly along the road a
nd for a moment, Emma hoped it would pass by. But a searchlight stabbed out into the darkness and swept the area. Emma and her companions dropped to a crouch behind a stack of railroad ties.

  The jeep pulled to a halt at the opposite end of the bridge and the engine cut. The headlights dimmed but the searchlight stayed lit and continued to sweep like a blade against the curtain of darkness.

  “What is Emma Farnsworth’s plan?” Peter asked, making no effort to hide his disappointment.

  “Father!” Marta hissed.

  Emma put a hand up to silence them when the searchlight sliced in their direction and hovered off to the side of their hiding place. A bullhorn crackled to life and they all pressed their backs tight against the railroad ties.

  “Citizens, curfew is in effect until oh-five-thirty hours tomorrow morning. Anyone on the streets is subject to internment.”

  The four of them stayed put. Emma drew her dad’s revolver and saw Eddie palm the pistol they got from Wynes. Only Peter kept his gun tucked away. He shook his head at Emma and Eddie, muttering something under his breath. Emma ignored the old man. If the soldiers were coming for them, they’d have to take them with a fight. She hadn’t gotten this far just to throw her hands up in the air and waltz off to a cold cell and a jailer’s leers.

  Shouting from across the river came to her ears. At first she feared it was the soldiers yelling for them to come out, that they’d been spotted somehow. But shouts of fright and anger cut the night air. When a sharp, final silence fell again, Emma risked a look. She couldn’t see any soldiers, and the searchlight wasn’t moving anymore either. It was still lit, but had been aimed farther away from the bridge, leaving the passage across shrouded in shadow.

  “Let’s go,” she said, stepping fast to the next pile of lumber along their route. She turned to see Eddie following her. Peter and Marta came next, the old man shaking his head and showing more distress than before.

  “Is no good. No good,” he kept muttering, twitching and whipping his head side to side, and peering into the night as if he expected a threat to emerge from every corner. Emma wanted to calm him down, quiet him for fear he’d give them away, but the air around them fluttered and shook, reminding Emma of her escape from the prison chain earlier. An instant later, her fears were made real as the ghost of her father stepped out of the night beside her astride a rusted old Boneshaker bicycle.

  His face was stained with filth and his wispy white hair stuck out in all directions from his scalp like whorls of spider silk.

  “Emma. My girl, I’m so sorry.”

  “Dad?”

  Tears fell in rivers that froze on her father’s hobo face. He wiped at them and dirt smudged across his cheeks, showing a patch of clean skin. In a flash, the edges of the clean area grew inward like a fungus until a layer of grime had coated Josiah Farnsworth’s face again.

  “Can’t tell you how sorry I am, my Emma. My only. . .” he trailed off, and his eyes blinked fast, like he’d heard or seen something in the distance that scared him. “We gotta move on now, my girl. Time to go,” he said, taking her free hand and leading her out from behind the lumber pile. She went with him, unable to deny the pull to follow, just as she was unable to deny the feeling of horror that rose in her chest and throat.

  “Time to go now. Just like when you was a little tot and your Momma and me used to put you on the trains to New York to visit your Grandmother. Time to go, Little Emma.”

  Her father had been walking backwards, pushing the bicycle along with his feet. He paused and glanced over Emma’s shoulder. “They with you, Emma? That nigger boy there and them two—what are they now, some of them gypsies? They your friends now?”

  Hearing the vulgar names escape her father’s lips, Emma broke from the spell and ripped her hand from his. “Yes, they’re my friends. His name is Eddie, and he’s not just a friend. He’s the man I love. And they’re not gypsies. They have names. Peter and Marta. She’s his daughter, and at least he has enough sense to stay by her side and see her through the worst of times instead of taking the easy way out like you did.”

  “Emma, I—”

  “Shut up! Just shut up,” Emma hollered at him, her anger and fury unstoppable now, even though the threat of discovery still hung heavy in her mind. Whatever this tramp was supposed to be, wherever he’d come from, he’d earned an earful, and she was going to give it to him.

  “What the hell are you? I saw you in your office. I saw what you did. With this,” she said, lifting the gun between them. The tramp recoiled in fright, putting his hands up and begging her to remove the weapon from his sight. She pressed forward, holding the gun on him now, and backed him into a corner between two stacks of lumber.

  “I’m your daddy, Emma,” he said, broken and defeated. “I’m the same as ever I was back then. A drunk. A good for nothing drunk. I helped you as best I could back on the street this morning, and I did the same just now. But it’s going to cost me, my girl. It’s going to cost me more than you can know.”

  “What do you mean? What’s left to pay? There’s nothing left of the Farnsworth name in Chicago City, nothing but a—”

  A rabid hiss split the night around them and Emma spun to put her back up against the lumber pile beside the tramp who looked and talked and acted just like her father.

  “Go on, my girl. Go on and run now.”

  “What?”

  “Run, I said. Dammit! Run!”

  Emma backed away from him, his acrid breath and vehemence shoving against her chest. Behind her she heard a girl’s voice cry out and then a scream. Eddie hollered and then Emma heard gunshots from two pistols. She moved to help, but felt her father’s hand on her arm. She knew then that the tramp was her father. His touch, his grip was too familiar, too much like she remembered. As she stood there, frozen in memory, Eddie and Marta raced around the end of the lumber pile and came to stand with her, facing back the way they’d come.

  Sounds of grisly violence came to them from their former hiding place and Marta sobbed in pitiable, wracking grief. Eddie put his arm around her and pulled her farther away, backing them into the corner beside Emma and her father. Emma watched all this happen and knew she should be doing something, but her father’s hand on her arm kept her fixed where she stood. When finally he released her she almost toppled forward.

  “Told you to run, Emma. You listen this time. You run, my girl. Run and don’t stop.”

  Emma turned to regard her father, the tramp. Behind her the sounds of gore had gone silent and a steady, rasping breathing grew to take their place.

  “You,” her father said, looking at Eddie. “You take good care of her, boy. You do that, you hear?”

  Eddie nodded and gritted his teeth. Emma’s father trembled and muttered a feeble apology in Eddie’s direction as he pushed past them all on his bicycle, moving straight for the growling and hissing sounds coming from around the lumber pile.

  “Let’s go, Lovebird.”

  Emma took Marta’s hand and together they followed Eddie out of the lumber stacks and onto the bridge. Their gait was slow but quickened as they reached the middle of the crossing. A cry of terror pierced the night from within the stacked lumber and Eddie began to run. Emma tugged Marta along and pumped her legs with every ounce of strength she had.

  Chapter 42

  Keeping to a crouch, Brand moved down the street. They passed shot up houses, and the sounds of battle came louder and harsher to Brand’s ears as they neared Humboldt Park. With Conroy at his heels, Brand kept on toward the fighting. At the end of the block, he pulled up against a shattered sedan and immediately jumped back a pace, nearly tumbling into Conroy as he caught up. A soldier was lying dead on the ground behind the car and Brand had just missed stepping on the man’s outstretched hand. The barrel of a Tommy gun poked out from beneath the body and a pistol still hung on the soldier’
s belt, strapped into a holster.

  Brand dragged the body aside and lifted the Tommy gun. He struggled to balance it in his hands and settled for tucking it under his arm with his hand on the forward grip.

  “You want a sidearm, Conroy?” he asked, noticing the kid’s eyes were fixed on the still holstered pistol.

  Conroy nodded, but his face said different, so Brand fished the pistol out and stuck it into his own pocket. The kid seemed to understand. His face fell, but Brand could see it was more from relief than shame.

  A burst of gunfire sounded close by and they both tucked in tight against the ruined car. The park was across the street. Brand sneaked a glance around the sedan’s grill and his eyes went misty with grief at the sight of soldiers and citizens fighting hand to hand on the wide open lawn of the park. Some of the people held shovels and other tools, anything that would serve as a weapon. Others had rifles or pistols and kept up a steady exchange with soldiers, trading shots from behind park benches and waste barrels. Down the street to the right, buildings burned at the park’s edge, casting an amber glow over the whole scene beneath the gray clouds above. To the left, a thick grove of trees extended empty branches into the wintery sky.

  Tapping Conroy’s shoulder to alert him, Brand edged back the way they’d come and raced for the tree line. The kid followed close behind. At the tree line, Brand scurried up to a thick tree and knelt down, looking out at the park. He motioned for Conroy to keep his eyes open and to follow close. The kid nodded and followed Brand to the next set of trees. Silently hoping Conroy had it in him to stay alert if the bullets came their way, Brand lifted the mic off his belt and opened the channel.

  #

  Aiden crouched behind his boss at the first tree, then followed him deeper into the grove. As they moved, Aiden thought he should ask Mr. Brand for the pistol he’d picked off the dead soldier. He should have reached out for it when it was offered instead of just nodding. Now his boss knew he was afraid of using a gun, that he couldn’t be trusted. Shame warmed Aiden’s neck and cheeks.