by wildbow
Archie rose to his feet, blood was streaming from a cut on one gloved finger where the blade had clipped him as it had divested him of the syringe. Hunched over his wounded hand, he used the other to draw a large knife from his belt, approached, and stopped short when Mary threw two knives into his thighs, just above the knees.
Mary’s free knife, still with the cord attached, was flicked. Archie seemed to sense that the attack would follow, and moved back and clear out of the way. Then he moved forward with staggering steps, knife held up and out, clearly intent on using his longer reach and the blade to win the fight.
Mary didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver—the Lambs and us hostages were mostly behind her, the room here wasn’t large, and the tricks with string and knives needed room to flail around.
“Go down, you bastard,” I told Archie. “You’ll only get hurt more.”
“Nng,” he grunted, hunching over more.
The hunch was a feint. I knew that, Mary knew that. He broke out of the supposed weakness and pain by stepping forward, lunging, cutting with that oversized knife of his.
But that attack in itself was a feint too. He stood straight, unfolding, no longer hunched in pain, and he had a pistol in his more injured hand.
Mary’s leg went out as the hand aimed. He didn’t extend his arm—he kept it close to the chest, aiming from there. The very tip of Mary’s toe caught the bottom of the gun and kicked it skyward.
He brought the hand down, aiming, and Mary already had two blades drawn, crossed like a pair of scissors, catching the lower part of his gun hand in the crux.
With a grace and fluidity that wouldn’t have been out of place if this was one more attack in a series of attacks, the final reveal after a long chain of feints, he let the gun dangle from one finger in the trigger guard, his other hand going up.
He dropped to his knees, hands raised.
The very instant she had caught his gun hand between the two blades, he’d realized he was outmatched and surrendered.
“Face down on the ground,” Mary ordered.
Archie complied.
“Helen?” Mary asked.
Helen took over guarding Archie. Mary, meanwhile, walked over to Berger. Lillian hurried to Berger’s side.
“Tranquilizer,” Davis said.
“Not a full dose, judging by the fluid on the ground. How are you, professor?” Lillian asked.
“I feel as if my mind dropped to the bottom of a very deep well. I’m feeling vertigo from the fall, it’s dark, and it’s a long way to the surface,” Berger said. “On the upside, the pain of not having skin on half of my face is rather muted.”
“You’re mushing up your words more,” I pointed out.
“Thank you, Sylvester. You’ll have to excuse that I’m missing part of my lips and tongue.”
Mary checked the shackle. She checked the lock, and then the links, and worked her way down to where it connected to the sink-pipe. She checked the end attached to the pipe.
“Lock is wooded here, too. Pipe is cast iron,” Mary observed, of the pipe. “Nothing to unscrew. It’s all one solid piece, welded together. We could tear apart the cabinet the sink is on and try to throw this sink to the ground, destroying the pipe, but…”
“Cast iron,” Duncan observed, finishing the sentence. “Buildings like this? I’ve seen the pictures of the houses after fires, after bombings, after other disasters, where the house is ruined, but the bones of it stand. Sometimes you see the piping just sticking up there like a skeletal tree, outlasting the rest of the house.”
“Helen,” Mary said. “Can you? Twisting the chain? Can you brute-force it?”
Helen took the chain, testing the weight of it in her hands. She gathered up a short length of it, and she proceeded to wring it.
Very faintly, I could hear the protest of the metal.
“Progress,” Mary said.
“Slow,” Duncan observed. “Probably not faster than a hacksaw.”
Mary stood up, wiping hands she’d dirtied touching the pipe on a towelcloth. She took in the scene.
“It’s a draw,” Lillian said.
Mary frowned.
“We take Sy, we take Jessie. They keep Berger for now. We make a…”
“Trade?” I asked.
“No,” Lillian said. “Not a trade. We can’t not bring you in, and we can’t leave Berger either. You can’t let us leave without Berger.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like a very good exchange,” I said. “Giving up Berger for nothing. The way I see it, I gotta keep Berger, and I gotta stay free. Only way this works is if both sides leave unhappy. Bonus points if we’re amicable.”
“We’ll see,” Lillian said. She looked at Mary. “What do you think?”
“We’ll take Mabel and this man with us,” Mary said. “We rendezvous in an hour, due west of here. There should be a crossroad. We meet there, we discuss, we figure something out.”
Previous Next
Gut Feeling—17.3
A hike into the wet, cold woods was the last thing I wanted after the day I’d had yesterday. Worse, we weren’t taking the path, but we were moving through thick brush and collections of branches. The Lambs ahead of me had collected the bags they had hidden away in the spot where they had been observing our little city from. They took care to avoid breaking branches as they walked through thicker areas, and stepped where there wasn’t too much mud or snow. All to avoid leaving a clear path as to where we had gone.
Meanwhile, I made sure to walk into or onto every branch, every patch of snow, break every iced over puddle…
There wasn’t really a logic behind it. There wasn’t a deeper scheme, it wasn’t step one out of however many to turn this situation around. It was just satisfying to do, and I felt more than a little bit contrarian.
None of the Lambs had stayed behind. We were together, and besides the addition of Mabel and Archie as hostages, we were only the Lambs, together again. Good company, bad circumstance, worse weather.
“We can set up camp here,” Mary said. “Chemical stove, no fire.”
“I think I have the tank for the chemical stove in my bag,” Duncan said. “It’s heavy enough that it feels that way, anyhow. Someone else has the stove part.”
“I do,” Mary said.
We settled in a ditch. It wasn’t the right word, but I wasn’t feeling charitable enough to think about what word would work. In the midst of the trees, the ground had formed a dip here, a bowl deep enough that I could stand within and I couldn’t quite look out and past the top. Water had pooled at the bottom of this depression, and now that it had frozen over, that ice formed half of the floor. Downed trees and large branches occupied most of the space.
We found seats on the drier parts of the fallen trees, using them as benches. Duncan placed the little tank in the center, and Mary pulled the top piece and base of the little stove out of her bag, screwing them on.
It was half the size of a breadbox, a portable stove that I was mostly familiar with as something our team medics packed for the sake of boiling water in the field. Lillian had the foldable pot, stowed in her bag partially folded with the less-used medical equipment packed within.
Tea, apparently, was the first priority. In a moment, the stove was hissing and sputtering, periodic orange flames reaching out to lick at the underside or side of the pot. The smoke was clean—nothing that would attract attention.
Trekking through inhospitable terrain wasn’t a comfortable thing. Given the time of year, we didn’t have bugs, but all the same, just about every member of the group had a bit of branch to dig out of the space where their sock met their leg, clothing adjustments to make, weight to redistribute in bags for easier carrying later or frozen mud caked into the treads of their boots. Tea was in the works, and now the Lambs cared for the small things, getting organized and comfortable.
“Cake?” Helen asked.
“Limited backpack space, and you brought cake,” Jessie said.
“
You’re surprised?” Helen asked. “It’s not confectionery, that would be a mess, but it’s still cake.”
“I would love a slice,” Jessie said.
“Me too,” I said.
Other Lambs agreed.
As resting spots went, it was good. The walls of the ditch provided some protection from wind, and the tree cover kept the precipitation away. The Lambs’ presence combined with that of my particular cast of Lambs to make the little spot very cozy.
I suspected Berger was more cozy, beyond the discomfort as he waited for the shackle to be removed from his wrist.
“Duncan?” Lillian asked. “Can you check on Sy? He’s looking a little pale.”
I frowned at that, and Lillian pretended not to notice.
“Jessie,” Lillian said. “Are you okay? No injuries? You’re not too cold?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Jessie said.
“Good, I’m glad. Mabel? No, you’re as well as can be expected?”
“I’m alright,” Mabel said. “I’m actually a little bit more comfortable than I was, now that I’m out here. I know that sounds odd, but it makes me think of camping with my brother.”
“Do you need anything to be comfortable?” Lillian asked.
“My legs are a touch cold,” Mabel said. She was wearing a skirt, and her knees were bare. Helen supplied a blanket, one of several from the tightly folded and belted sleeping bag arrangement, and given that Mabel’s hands were tied behind her back, Helen took it upon herself to get the blanket arranged.
“And…” Helen turned to Archie.
“I’m fine,” Archie said.
The water on the little stove was already starting to form bubbles. Even the initial steam was dramatic in the cold.
“In just a short while, we’ll go rendezvous with Sylvester’s rebels,” Mary said. “They have Berger, we have Sylvester and Jessie. If we have to, we’ll trade the pair away to get him. I’d rather go back to our original plan and have the extraction be our mission.”
“Agreed,” Lillian said.
“Yeah,” Duncan said. “They’re Sylvester-trained, they’ll be pains in the ass, but I’d rather deal with a hundred lesser Sylvester headaches than one effective, concrete Sylvester headache.”
“Three hundred,” I said. “Minus any casualties from last night. I’d really rather you didn’t hurt them. I know you’re capable, but at no stage in this have I really fought you guys—”
I saw several Lambs open their mouths to protest. I jumped straight in to say, “Unless you’re going to take issue with my playing with knives when I borrowed one of Mary’s and pretended like I was going to take one of you hostage.”
“Might,” Mary said.
“I was pretending,” I said, insistent. “Either way, my point stands. I was willing to tell my guys to surrender so you wouldn’t have to fight. I want everyone here to survive. I need you all to want this too.”
Duncan checked my temperature, then measured my heartbeat.
Helen hummed as she served the tea. With as many people as we had, there weren’t many containers to drink from, and the water from the pot of boiling water went quickly. As was proper, Helen served us first before preparing a fresh pot of water for the little heat source.
“I want us all to be on the same page,” I said. “And that’s something that’s a lot easier to say than to accomplish. I’d really like to think there’s a way through this.”
“We’re very different people,” Lillian said.
“Don’t say that as if it’s bad!” I said, aghast. “Different is good!”
“Yes,” Ashton said. It would have been easy for us to talk over him, but he’d found a moment where he could be heard. He added, “I said something very similar to the new Lambs before.”
I jumped in, “We embrace each other and our peculiarities. Sometimes literally.”
“Please leave my peculiarity un-embraced,” Duncan said, adjusting his belt in a way that drew attention to his groin.
There was a titter of amusement from the group. I allowed him a smile. Had to. Take Archie and Mabel out of the equation, and Duncan was in a group with Mary, Lillian, Jessie and myself. He wasn’t taking himself too seriously, he was willing to be the butt of a joke for the benefit of the group, and I wanted to reward him for that. Leaving him hanging out to dry with his naughty implication and three girls in the area wouldn’t have been a reward.
“Seriously though,” Duncan said. “Yes, different is good.”
Duncan continued his ministrations and care, checking I was okay. He began peeling back the bandage at my shoulder. I winced, but I was glad I didn’t feel the telltale agony of the plague crawling through me.
“A group of very disparate members needs several things to stay strong,” Mary was saying. “Love, respect, honesty, caring, sharing, communication, and trust.”
Back to that.
“Yeah,” I said, simply. “And… I forgot how this thread of conversation started.”
“We’re all very different people, everyone being on the same page,” Jessie supplied.
“Right. Thank you, yes. I think this is doable. Mary touched on how. Communication. We need to put everything out on the table.”
“We have hostages in earshot,” Lillian said.
“Then Duncan and Lillian can dig into their kits and gather some earplugs. Or wax, or something. If any of you have a keypress, there’s soft wax in there, you know, the little boxes that you stick keys into to figure out the shape of them. Dig out the wax, jam it in Mabel’s ear.”
Mabel looked a touch annoyed at that.
“That was an example,” I clarified.
“Why do I feel like this is a trap?” Mary asked. “The moment we plug up the ears of the hostages, you’ll reveal you have a warbeast inside you, and it starts screeching or singing, and you simply clean up in the aftermath?”
I sighed.
Duncan was poking and prodding me, Helen was serving out tea in the caps from the various dewar bottles the group had brought with them. She had cake as well, and in absence of plates, she was depositing the cake directly into hands. It looked like new-citrus and poppyseed.
“I’ll get dirty and sticky,” Ashton complained.
“Lick your fingers clean,” Helen instructed him.
“That won’t be enough,” Ashton said, sounding as annoyed as he ever got. Not that he got annoyed.
“Then lick better,” Helen instructed him.
Ashton proceeded to eat his slice of cake with all of the enthusiasm of a prisoner on death row walking to the gallows.
Helen, meanwhile, sat down across from Jessie, Mabel, Archie and myself. She didn’t blink, watching each of us,
I’d proposed things, only to discover there was no trust. No sharing, no communication, no honesty about true feelings and allegiances, no respect, no love. This wasn’t anything that would properly stand under any real scrutiny.
Archie and Mabel were listening, more or less quiet, listening in.
Could I afford to risk it?
“We met the real Mary Cobourn,” I said.
Tea-sippers stopped mid-sip. Cake eaters coughed with crumbs in their mouths.
Only Archie and Mabel remained blissfully unaware.
“It was a thing,” I said, simply.
“It was,” Jessie said.
I could see Mary’s phantom cluing me into Mary’s thought process as she composed herself. She was even angry at this stage.
“Too targeted toward my weak points, too convenient in timing,” Mary said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m always less believable when I’m telling the truth.”
I glanced down at my tea. Helen, still unblinking, took it, and she dutifully gave me a drink from the cup she’d placed beside me, tipping back a small amount of the contents. I looked at the cake, and she gave me cake.
“That’s a fiction, Sylvester,” Mary said. “I think you once made yourself appear to be bad at that, so you could introdu
ce ambiguity, and it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Easily possible,” I said.
“Mary Cobourn?” Lillian asked. “The last we heard of her was—”
“She was sent off by Percy,” I said.
“The last proper mention of her was in Percy’s notes in the Lamb’s adventure journals from the tenth day of the fifth month of nineteen twenty-one,” Jessie said.
“I can’t get away from that man,” Lillian said.
“He’s still dead. He doesn’t have any power,” I said. “But anyone, everyone leaves a ripple of effect and consequence when they do something. Percy’s still rippling. So is Mary Cobourn. I don’t think those ripples have a lot of influence.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Block,” Archie spoke, interrupting the flow of conversation.
Dang it.
“Archie,” I said.
“You said something about those people back in the city.”
“Archie,” I said. “No. Ignore those people. Trust me when I say you really shouldn’t want to know any of this. All those times I told our people to just run, to surrender, to let things happen? Doesn’t sound good, but I was really trying to protect them. I’m really trying to protect you now.”
“Oh my lords,” Lillian said, her eyes widening. “The Block.”
“Well, cat’s out of the bag now,” I commented, glancing at Jessie.
“Had to find its way out sometime,” Jessie said.
“Sometimes you can just tie it really, really tight,” I said. “Sometimes you need that cat secured. Sometimes there’s not really another choice.”
“You followed the lead Emmett gave you to the Block,” Lillian said. “You found the real Mary Cobourn. He was dealing with the Academy in a very illicit capacity. Corruption?”
“In a way,” I said. Off to the side, Helen was supplying Jessie with tea. Ashton now held a cup for Mabel. Archie had declined taking anything.
“That explains why you said Duncan would theoretically react worse to this news than I would. He isn’t as inured to that side of things. He holds the upper rungs of the Academy in higher regard than I do.”
“I’m not as fragile as you’re making me out to be,” Duncan said.