Eliza followed them out, determined to watch them for as long as possible. Wellington’s logic was sound—the mission had to come first. If she found him in Antarctica, there was no place on God’s Earth the House of Usher could hide him from her. Eliza would find him again, but every hour—every moment—away from him was an advantage for the secret society. There was also the possibility that Doctor Sound would sequester her from any kind of rescue mission and carry out with another agent his original orders to eliminate Wellington Thornhill Books on sight.
The mission had to come first, though. He was right in that. Regardless of the House of Usher making this personal, the mission—apparently now taking her to San Francisco—had to come first. Then, once the job was done, she could take a leave of absence, starting straightaway.
Dammit, she should have risked the shot. Eliza should have worked harder to get the priest inside the building. Once in here she could have figured out how to distract her, how to disarm her, or how to turn Wellington’s disadvantage into a strength.
Perhaps the madness of America was rubbing off on her. She needed to get home.
Home suddenly flew from her thoughts as a board creaked from behind her. She turned around to be face-to-face with the man sneaking up behind her, the garrotte constricting around her neck as he pulled his crossed fists in opposite directions. Her head reeled in a queer sensation, as she could not draw a breath, could not scream. She could feel her own hands on the man’s wrists, but it took all of her strength just to do that. Eliza should have been able to kick at the very least. Something was turning her feet into lead weights. What was happening to her?
I’m dying. Slowly, she assured herself when she tightened her grip on the killer’s wrists, but I am dying.
The harder she tried to take a breath, the more her head swam. His face was blurring now, and she could hear his grunts and her own pathetic whimpers, and she had a vice grip on his wrists. She knew where the man’s crotch was. Why didn’t she kick? Why couldn’t she kick?
The stinging in her neck was finally subsiding. At least that was some cold comfort.
Coming to your rescue is threatening to become a habit, she had said to him. Are you ready?
I am, he had replied. Wellington had shown such bravery. He was ready to face his fate, sacrificing himself for Queen and Country. For her. Such courage. Such . . .
Eliza pulled against the man’s wrists, and when her head drove into the man’s nose, she felt something give.
That wasn’t good enough. Not for her. Which is why she did it again.
He let go, and Eliza felt the floor. She pulled the rope free of her neck, coughing and wheezing as she did. Eliza was also finding her balance again, shaking her head as she brought herself back to her feet. Whoever this cad was, he was kneeling away from her, trying to fix his nose as best as he could. Eliza buried her hand into the man’s scraggly hair and drove his face into the closest wall, smearing it with a streak of fresh blood. If there were any teeth in her human brush stroke, she didn’t bother to look. When she released him, he collapsed in front of her on the floor.
There was his crotch.
Her kick sat him bolt upright and that was when she delivered a sidekick to his blood-covered face.
Eliza took a few more deep breaths, watching the man for a moment, noting the right foot twitching slightly. That being the only movement on his person, she looked over his clothes.
When she flipped the lapel, the badge caught sunlight.
He had been keeping watch from the lower right window on the first floor. She recognised the blue bandanna wrapped around his wrist. Her eyes narrowed on the Pinkerton shield before tossing the lapel aside and relieving the man of his pistol. A fully loaded cylinder. Good omen.
With one deeper draw of the dry desert air, Eliza stormed out of Edison’s workshop, fumbling for her sun specs.
Her strides were wide as she made her way down the centre of Flagstaff. A cart and rider saw her from a distance and wisely veered out of her way as her gaze jumped from her right to her left. They could not have gotten far.
Two buildings ahead of her she saw them. Eliza lowered the ocular magnifiers still attached to her sun specs, bringing them both closer to her. Wellington’s second shadow, the priest, walked barely two paces behind him, a Holy Bible in her grasp covering her mid-section. No one could get between them, barring any break for freedom Wellington could make. Eliza focused on the Bible. It was bowed slightly. A weapon of some kind had to be behind that book.
Now how could she convince the priest that she, Eliza Braun, was not the problem.
She now looked ahead of them, then across the street, the distant windows and rooftops jostling back and forth alarmingly close in one eye. A dizziness threatened to knock her off balance, but she focused, the dry warmth of the Arizona Territories reminding her of where she was, what her priority was. One for her, so there had to be someone for Wellington. There had to be. Her eyes went to the higher windows of surrounding buildings and rooftops.
And there he was. One building down, from a rooftop vantage point, a marksman was lining up his shot.
Then came the shot. Apparently, the sniper had his target.
Wellington toppled back into the priest. They hit the ground as people around them screamed, and another bullet shattered a window where Wellington and the priest had once stood. Couples walking in their direction now ran in the opposite one. A mother walking with her children behind the priest scooped up her crying daughter and shielded her in a crouch before the storefront.
“Move for the alley!” Eliza shouted to the priest as she grabbed hold of Wellington’s limp arm. Ye gods, he weighed far more than she’d realised. “We have to get to cover. Now!”
Eliza took aim in the direction of the sniper. She knew the Pink’s gun lacked range, but her blind fire was more for effect. So long as they thought she was armed . . .
The priest fired several shots across the street before hefting Wellington from the other arm. His feet bouncing lightly against the cracks between boards, they scrambled for a narrow gap between buildings as glass and wood shattered and splintered around them.
“Dammit!” Eliza swore. The alleyway was not a complete pass-through but simply an alcove. While out of the line of fire, they were still trapped. She needed . . .
Wellington had not moved. Even the priest was looking him over, confounded.
“That was a Winchester,” she said. “I know that sound intimately. He should have a hole the size of a fist in his chest.”
Eliza had always pictured tearing open Wellington’s shirt in the heat of passion. However, that passion’s aim was not to check for an entry wound dealt by a Winchester. She grabbed his shirt and pulled it apart . . .
The impact point caught her eye immediately. It was difficult to miss as the flattened bullet gleamed against the pine green suede. Eliza’s hand hovered over his torso, but she couldn’t see it. Because he was wearing . . .
“Is he wearing . . . ?” the priest began.
Eliza cocked her hand back and slapped Wellington across the face. His eyes flicked open as he rolled to one side and wheezed. It hurt to hear him take in a breath, but the hacking cough and his movement were confirmation that Wellington Books was, indeed, alive.
“You’re wearing a corset?” Eliza screamed, driving a fist into the garment. “You’re wearing a bullet-proof corset?!”
“What’s good for the goose . . .” Wellington growled as he pushed himself deeper into their alcove. “Taking back everything I’ve said about Axelrod, I promise you, does not pain me as much as that bullet.”
Bullets struck the ground where his feet lingered. He bolted upright, and then took stock of where they were.
He was probably about to state what Eliza already knew, when he noticed. “Good Lord—your neck!”
“Later!” she snapped.
Her eyes returned to the priest. “So maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Consider that as we’re currently pinned down by Pinkertons. They’re working for Edison. He wants us dead.”
“Wait,” the priest said. “Edison wants you dead?”
“But, Eliza,” Wellington said, “he’s in league with the House of Usher.”
“He is?” the priest asked.
Eliza gave the priest a quick nod before taking aim, driving back two gunmen daring to cross the street.
“I’m beginning to think the relationship with Edison and Usher is a bit . . . complicated,” Eliza grumbled. “How many, Welly?”
“I can only be sure of the sniper at present, but if I were to guess?” Wellington quickly poked his head out from their concealment, and immediately lost his bowler to a bullet. “Judging from the amount of gunfire, ordinance damage, we’re looking at five at the very least.”
Eliza gave a nod and returned to the priest, who was looking at them both wide-eyed. “Are you with us?”
“Who are you people?” she asked with a shake of her head.
“We serve at the pleasure of the Queen,” answered Eliza. She glanced at the window above their heads, and turned in the direction of the bloody mess she had left behind in Edison’s workshop shambling up the main road. Eliza felled the man with one shot, but was knocked forwards when a bullet slammed into her back. “Bugger me”—she winced as she crawled back to her hiding spot alongside Wellington and the priest—“that stings.”
“Just be glad it didn’t hit you in the lacing,” Wellington chided. “The armour there is not quite so reinforced. Roll over.” She felt his fingers against the outside of her dress, stopping where it stung the hardest. “That sniper is going to be a problem.”
She looked at the slug in Wellington’s hand. “You were right,” she said to the priest. “A Winchester.” In one hand she held the now-dead Pink’s pistol, two bullets remaining. Turning the small pistol handle first to her partner, she shrugged. “Make it count, Welly.”
The priest slapped her own pistol into his hand. “Make them count, Wellington.”
Another rain of bullets pushed them farther back into the limited noon shadows; but Wellington remained still, watching the direction of the larger splinters. “Right then.” And he stood and fired the Pink’s pistol in the direction of the sniper, the .38 at the storefront barricade of the Pinkertons.
One man’s scream could now be heard just across the street.
“Right then. Two down. One wounded, right shoulder. I wanted to make sure I didn’t kill him outright.” He looked to the priest who was moving a hand underneath her robes. When it reappeared, her hand held six bullets. “We needed a target. I saw three hostiles over there. The sniper.” A scream came again. “Counting the wounded man, five total.”
The priest shook her head, reloading her pistol. “Now, just back up a moment. How are you so sure?”
“The House of Usher wants him alive, no exceptions, you’re seeing him do this,” scoffed Eliza, now drawing her remaining ’81, “and you have to ask?”
“You shot my brother!” came a voice from across the street, just before a new storm of bullets.
The assault appeared to slow, and that’s when the priest emerged from her cover, the second .38 in her other hand, responding with a firestorm of her own. Her robes caught the desert breeze, making her a far wider target than she was truthfully. The billowing fabric gave the Pinkertons a target, but that also meant stepping out from their own hiding spots. Her .38 gave good report to the gunfire ripping harmlessly through the robes.
It was the single gunshot—Eliza knew it was the sniper—that sent the priest to the ground.
Wellington grabbed a handful of vestments and pulled while Eliza fired her pistol. On the click-click-click of dry fire, she shuffled back to where Wellington was removing the vestments from the priest.
“You’d better not leave that .38 behind,” the priest snapped once the robes were free, her expression quite stern. “You don’t know how hard I prayed for a pair of guns like this.”
“We have more pressing matters upon us,” Wellington said, ripping off his cravat. He wadded it over the shoulder wound and pressed. “Lean forward.”
She gave a groan, and Eliza saw what Wellington no doubt suspected. Against the wall, where the priest had propped herself, was a patch of blood. Eliza fished from Wellington’s inside pocket his kerchief and pressed it against the exit wound.
“At least the bullet passed through,” Eliza said, gently easing the priest back against the building. “Keep pressure on it.”
“Not my first time seeing a bullet wound on the battlefield,” he said while attempting to help the priest sit up, perhaps find even the slightest comfort for her. “So what do we have?”
“I got on my belt . . .” the priest panted, opening her hand, and groaned, “Aww, fuck!”
Both Eliza and Wellington gave a start.
“It’s a perfectly acceptable Anglo-Saxon word,” the priest stated quite factually. “Ruined by the French, if you must know.” She then hefted the gun. “And I said it because we’re down to three bullets.”
Eliza patted around herself for any option that could present itself, and her hand fell on the bulbous chamber strapped in by a makeshift holster she had created out of strips of leather. The slipknot parted easily and she held up the odd weapon before them both. “I have this,” she said, referring to the Brouhaha.
“All right, I’ll go on and ask,” the priest said, hardly impressed with Axelrod’s creation. “That is what exactly?”
“It’s—” The weapon’s name stuck in her throat. She simply could not call it by name without chuckling. “It’s the exciting future of armament.”
Wellington gave his brow a quick wipe, glanced out into the street, and muttered, “We’re what I believe Americans would call ‘easy pickings’ for that sniper.” He looked around him, licking his lips as his eyes went from the end of the alleyway to the rooftops above them. “We need a distraction of some kind.”
“And then what?” Eliza asked.
He motioned to the exciter in Eliza’s grasp. “Give that thing a field test, I suppose.”
“So what’s the distraction?” the priest asked.
Eliza shook her head, until a thought came to mind. “Welly,” she began, not entirely certain whether she should feel anxious, dreadful, hopeful, or all of the above. “That method I employed to keep the bomb from exploding . . .”
“Using the Jack Frost to disarm the detonator? Yes, what of it?”
“I didn’t say ‘disarm the detonator,’ now did I? I said, ‘keep from exploding.’ There is a difference.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Eliza?”
“When the ice eventually melts, which it has been doing steadily since we left Edison’s workshop, the battery leads should become active again.” She bit her bottom lip. “And the phonograph was still playing when we left it.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
Eliza brought up the exciter. “We might get that distraction after—”
A savage frenzy of fire, glass, and wood erupted several buildings down, the mushroom cloud of smoke casting ominous shadows across the street and storefronts around them. Eliza stepped out of her hiding place, held out her arm in the direction of the sniper, and pulled the trigger of the Brouhaha.
A whistle emitted from the exciter’s vent, its sound quickly growing from a shrill cry into a wild scream over a matter a seconds. The wild scream became a wild roar, and then something launched from the exciter’s muzzle. It was a transparent sphere that roiled and rolled towards the sniper’s rooftop. When the distortion reached her intended target, the sphere cut like a fine blade into the wooden building, peeling its timbers back like the skin of some exotic fruit. Eliza could see the shooter swept into the sphere, spinning like a chi
ld’s top and then cast aside in the distance.
She looked down at the indicator dial to read the Brouhaha’s current setting:
TYPHOON
Eliza jumped at the sound of gunfire, but this time coming from her side of the street. Two more Pinks fell as “Wild Bill” Wheatley strode up alongside her and held out his Peacemakers at the remaining two.
“There’s been enough killin’ for one day, boys, doncha think?” he called out to them. Neither man dropped their guns. Bill gave a rough laugh and said, “Look, either it’s my Peacemakers or Lizzie’s little gadget here. Your choice.”
The remaining Pinks glanced at one another and then dropped their guns, raising their hands above their heads.
“And how are things at the Red Rock Theatre, Lizzie?” Bill asked her. “Got all those entrances and exits sorted?”
“Wellington and I got a little sidetracked,” she returned, lowering the Brouhaha.
“This is what you call ‘sidetracked’ in Jolly Ol’ England, huh?” He gave a laugh as the two men stepped out and then got to their knees, placing their hands on top of their heads. “The minute I heard the gunfight, I knew you were jus’ having a good ol’ time without me.” He looked over Eliza to see Wellington emerge out of hiding with the priest draped over his shoulder. “Care to explain why you got yourself a wounded—lady—of the cloth there?”
“I think,” Eliza said, “we’re all in need of a drink.”
TWENTY-ONE
Wherein a Priest Takes Sabbatical and Plans Are Made
The priest winced as she sat in the bar of the Royal Hotel, the high-back chair hardly allowing her to prop up her arm as the doctor had ordered. Wellington looked around for another cushion; and on relieving one from a nearby chez lounge, he added it underneath her arm. Her face twisted in pain, but settling into the chair once more she closed her eyes, took in a breath, and colour returned to her face.
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