The first of us didn’t change until a month later. The Army had continued to skirmish throughout that time with Indians, as the shifting disease swept through their remaining population. By the time they’d figured out it was contagious, it had been too late. There were too many infected, too many werewolves who’d gone to ground once they’d known what they were.
And now, four years later, the world was ending.
“Quinn, do you know why no one messes with the Tellurians?” I asked in a lazy tone from where I leaned against a brick wall, unscrewing the top of my silver flask. Smoke hissed and drifted up as I took a long swig of whiskey from it, blistering my lips with its touch. It was a perverse reminder to me of what I was, and that I deserved it.
“Oh, sure, I’ve heard tales of the lightning and crazy things they can—”
“Nope,” I said, cutting him off.
I put away my flask and walked toward him. The crowd at the Testing Station parted to let me through, no one wanting to touch one of the furbacks that worked and walked among them. Quinn stood arrogant and puffed-up, a ginger fireplug made of muscle and beard, but barely old enough to have either. I could see in his eyes that he was all bluster. It was easy to feel sorry for him, but examples had to be made for the other lads.
“No one picks fights with the storm prophets for a single reason,” I whispered, poking him in the chest and enunciating each word with my finger. “They. Are. Our. Only. Hope.”
“Not yours,” he sneered.
“True,” I allowed.
He didn’t see the uppercut coming, and I’d laid him out flat across the ground before he could blink.
“Not yours either. Accept it, boyo. Welcome to the ranks of the damned. We always got room for one more.”
Quinn spat blood out as he struggled up from the ground. “You’ve just bought yourself a boatload of trouble, you filthy animal. When Farell hears what you done . . .”
“Save it, Quinn,” our foreman, John O’Brian said, stepping out from the onlookers. “The Wardens won’t stand for you laying hands on a Tellurian. And once they hear you failed the sizzle test, you’ll be bunking with Jack and his kind. So you might want to just accept it now.”
Surprising everyone, I grabbed Quinn’s arm and hoisted him off the ground. I leaned in close to avoid the crowd’s ears, hoping I could get through his wounded ego and offer a friendly piece of advice.
“Be a man, Quinn,” I growled, catching his eye. “You and me, we can’t be saved. But there’s plenty that can. Stand for what’s right before the disease robs you of the chance. The wolf will catch us both soon enough, lad. Until then, spit in the beast’s eye and build a hope for those that are still human.”
For a moment, it looked as if I might have gotten through to the young man. But there was laughter in the crowd, directed at him, and I watched as his pride soured, turning in on him. He pushed off me, cursing my name, and shouldered his way through the throng.
Damn.
I turned back to the Tellurian lady who had been watching the whole affair with one hand under the rickety table the prophets had set up. At a guess, she was cradling one of the weird weapons the secretive order of scientists kept on hand when they went out into the real world. The problem with trying to save some people is that those who get left behind often want to cave your skull in for not picking them. Quinn probably wasn’t the first man who’d mouthed off to her, and he likely wouldn’t be the last.
“Thank you for your assistance. However unnecessary it was,” she said.
I got the feeling, if the lady had possessed eyebrows, they’d be cocked at me.
“No problem, Miss . . .”
“I am not a miss, and I’ll thank you to remember it. You, however, may address me as Omega.”
“A lot of those wandering around down here these days,” I said, pulling out the thirty scrip I had brought with me. “Even met a Theta once. You want to supply a name to go with the title?”
“Katharine. But you will call me Omega Johnson.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Katie. Now, can you change this in for a ticket or not?”
The Tellurian looked at the scrip resting on her table with her emotionless goggles before turning her gaze back to me. “Why? You admitted that you are infected. There is no point in buying a lottery ticket. You would not be allowed to board, even were you to win.”
I gave her my most charming grin, the one that hid the missing teeth best. “It’s for me dear old mum.”
The Omega shook her head in disbelief, but resisted calling me out as she scooped up the scrip and pulled out a printed ticket from beneath the table. Unlike Quinn, I wasn’t going for the extra lottery ticket you could get every turn-in if you took the sizzle test and proved you were still human. As silly as it had sounded to the Tellurian, I’d told her the truth. Omega Johnson tore the ticket I’d bought in half, giving me the claim bit and putting the other bit with the matching serial number into a steel safe through a slit on top.
“I would wish you luck, but that’s a useless gesture.”
“Nice to meet you too, Katie,” I said, grinning at her. Half bowing, I finally let O’Brian drag me away from the table as I shoved the ticket into my pocket.
“I can’t believe you still waste your time with those,” he groused as we hurried down the street toward the work site. “There’s plenty of whiskey and women that would take the scrip, and eating something once in a while wouldn’t do you no harm.”
I shrugged. “None of that will matter the next time I sprout fur and go full feral. You know that. I’m overdue for a visit to a Reaper.”
O’Brian didn’t have anything to say to that. The man was rough around the edges, but basically a good sort. He’d come to look on me fondly. I was a hard worker, but so were a great many men. No, O’Brian liked me more for the stability I’d brought to the work crew with my age and experience, and the fact that the Wardens tended to leave those around me alone.
When the race to get the salvation cities had begun six months before, it had started a Gold Rush in the underworld. Gangs swarmed away from Five Points, heading East and West depending on which of the lucrative territories they wanted to lay claim to, absorbing the local brigands into their fold. The Eastman gang had primarily taken over the undertrades around the fledgling Menlo Station out Jersey way, where Thomas Edison was building his own flying city.
Our own Irish lads had put down roots in the rich soil around Wardenclyffe on the edge of Long Island and taken to referring to themselves as Wardens. Tesla and his kind heart was a much easier mark than the wily old Edison, who used his own roughshods to keep control over the shady lads.
With the gangs split in opposite directions out of the cramped confines of Manhattan, the shady types were able to spread their influence without rubbing up against each other much. This meant folks that kept their noses relatively clean were squeezed even harder. Getting work on the Wardenclyffe project was supposed to be easy, what with the scramble to get every lucky sod off the ground they could. But if you didn’t give the Wardens their cut, you quickly found that no amount of lottery tickets could raise you up from where they’d planted you.
Thing was, those rules didn’t much apply to those of us who’d been at Wounded Knee. Most of my brothers-in-arms had already permanently turned into the hulking abominations, and those of us left were on the last ticks of our clocks. People tended to blame the Indians for spreading the disease, but the U.S. Army had been just as efficient at it when they’d split the survivors among other platoons. Then again, how were they supposed to know that each man who lived was a bomb waiting to go off?
O’Brian followed my lead when we dived into the rowdy crowd surrounding the gallows the local law had been forced to put up a few weeks before. As the launch date approached for Wardenclyffe, more and more people had tried to sneak onto the city proper. Work crews were so heavily supervised, with roll calls and Tellurian overseers, that it was a better chance to try your luck i
n a work lull to slip in. Since the whole point of the salvation cities was to float the uninfected away from the damned, it was tantamount as mass murder for someone like me to try to sneak onto one.
O’Brian and I were afforded a bit more space than most, as no one knew when my final change would hit. I was the last man standing from the Wounded Knee soldiers, and damned if I knew why the final change hadn’t hit me yet when no one else had made it past the first couple of years. Perhaps I was just a bit too old and stringy for the beast inside to use me proper. O’Brian was an idiot for keeping company with me, but it did give him advantages in how close we could get to the gallows.
“I can’t believe we worked on such a thing of beauty,” O’Brian said, pitching his voice above the crowd’s noise as we milled around.
While I thought more of a painted lady’s caress as beauty, he did have a point: Wardenclyffe was damn impressive.
The salvation city’s silhouette cut jaggedly across the New York City skyline, a hastily constructed mishmash of brick and wood, steel and iron. Wardenclyffe’s buildings were nowhere near as high as the skyscrapers of New York proper. It’s largest, being the odd tower in the center that rose about eight hundred feet up from the wooden deck that served as the topside’s base, was only half the thickness of the gigantic vessel.
Early on, I’d been assigned a work detail beneath the mile-wide deck that sat flush with the ground. After the first massive excavation, we’d begun transporting down the equipment that allowed the Tellurians to build the gigantic squall tubes, which would allow Wardenclyffe to rebel against all the laws of science and the Almighty. I was one of the few lucky sods that had even seen the construction of the titanic glass and steel contraptions.
The Tellurians had requested infected workers specifically for that part, since we could stand up to the voltage and occasional electrocutions better than others. Or rather, that’s what they claimed. The damned seemed to die just as easily when the inevitable happened at the breakneck pace the work required. If nothing else, we were missed less when accidents occurred. But in the end, at least it spared the normal lads the worst of the danger.
And that was an idea I could get behind.
It was a clear day, blue and beautiful without a cloud in the sky, but the ground was as muddy as a swamp. The constant storms that Thunder Trains had lured in over the last few weeks were gone, their power drained by Wardenclyffe into her superstructure, but the miserable mud persevered. There was no sign of the Double Ts in the skies above Long Island any more, as they were safely stowed on the salvation city, waiting for the day when they would be the only way the floating metropolis could regain power.
There was a commotion in the crowd as Omega Johnson was escorted through the throng by a cadre of deputies. She carried a bulging sack that could only be thousands upon thousands of lottery tickets. After handing it off to a copper, she joined the thick stream of approved humanity winding across the open field behind the gallows and boarding Wardenclyffe.
Ever since the Blood Panic of ‘93, and the seizing of all industrial assets by the government, those tickets had been the only currency worth pursuing. Gold and paper money weren’t worth their own weight these days, and while silver could kill a werewolf, it wouldn’t save your life after all your neighbors had gone down to the fur. The only way out of the nightmare was to earn your scrip constructing one of the salvation cities and hope you could buy enough tickets to get lucky to get your arse on one.
“The time has come!” a rail-thin Tellurian shouted from the gallows as the last of the tickets was dumped into a huge wooden box under the trap door. The crowd surged and bellowed in response. Shirtless men worked hard at cranks on the side of the box, churning the tickets up and making it as random as possible. Where the noose would normally hang, a large mechanical arm with a clamp on the end stood instead. It would plunge into the tickets below, drawing up the batch. Luck decided how many tickets would be clutched within the claw and who would be saved from the savage apocalypse. The cities were already overcrowded, but better to starve peacefully in the clouds rather than be screaming meat on the ground.
“What the bloody hell is that fool doing?” I muttered, catching sight of Quinn’s bright orange beard at the edge of the crowd. He was dressed in strange, bulky gear, and was taking pains to fasten a chainmail hood on his head. His bright ginger beard flared comically from the too-tight straps on the hood, but he was determined to make it fit. I’d seen the getup before, but I was having trouble concentrating for some reason.
A crack of lightning popped in the distance, as the first of Wardenclyffe’s buried squall tubes flared to life. Suddenly, I realized what Quinn was on about.
“He stole himself a hot-suit,” I whispered in horror.
The burlap hot-suits had a chainmail layer that helped to shunt off lightning hits from the crazy people that rode the Double Ts through the air. From what I’d gathered working around the Tellurians, the suit had a pretty good chance to let a man live through a lightning strike if he had a bit of luck on his side. There was only one reason for Quinn to have it.
The infected git was going to sneak aboard Wardenclyffe.
No one else seemed to notice the skulking man. As I focused in on him, my vision started narrowing, the colors of the rest of the world fading out while Quinn’s hair seemed to catch fire with how vivid his colors became.
“Jack? Jack, are you all right?”
I ignored O’Brian’s concern. The noise of the crowd was overpowering, disorienting, and there was a hunger gnawing at my belly. I took the handful of lottery tickets I’d accumulated over the last six months of work and shoved them at him.
“If win . . . my ma,” I managed to rasp out.
O’Brian had the good sense to grab onto the tickets, melting back into the press of bodies around us with a horrified look on his face, but the damn fool was too petrified to raise the alarm. He needed to run, to get a Reaper, a copper, someone, anyone. The change was coming on me faster than ever before, and there was no way to get clear of innocents.
They needed to kill me and stop Quinn. Right then.
But in the excitement of the lottery and impending launch, no one noticed. I shoved through the crowd, my teeth growing sharp. Keep Quinn in sight. Concentrate on him. Just him. He was infected. Like me. Couldn’t let him on the city.
Quinn saw me, and what I was becoming, and turned tail.
My lips split into a feral grin, and I felt the surge inside as the wolf pushed out.
Prey ran.
Predators chased.
It was difficult to keep my eyes and teeth off the people that pressed in, but I forced myself to narrow down on Quinn as he clumsily scaled the wooden wall between the lottery area and the launching field. I didn’t bother trying to climb it. I simply leapt over the six-foot high wall. The hunger had me, and pain shot through my body as my bones began to break and instantaneously reform into monstrous shapes.
Quinn ran with the Devil at his heels across the quarter mile of open space between the lottery area and the edge of Wardenclyffe. Distantly, I heard alarms start up as the Tellurians realized that Wardenclyffe’s launch field had been breached. Lightning crackled from the strange tower in the center of Wardenclyffe, caressing the artificial island of steel and wood. Bolts of energy tore up the muddy earth around the salvation city proper, and the tiny portion of my mind that fought to remain human almost understood the words ‘emergency launch’ when Tellurians cried out with it.
Lightning shot from Wardenclyffe like a waterfall of light, striking anything and everything. Quinn took a direct hit to his hot-suit and staggered like a drunkard.
“Mine!” I roared, sensing the kill, surging ahead.
Then a bolt of lightning caught me mid-air.
The stench of burning choked me as blood boiled and muscles seized. My landing was anything but graceful, and there was a distinct snap as several fused bones broke apart again.
Although I was reeli
ng from the electrocution, for some reason the beast had fled, leaving me back in control. The wolf was lurking under my mind though, pain and fear welling up from it. I didn’t have long left. My right arm was partially transformed, and the long claws of the werewolf tipped my still-human fingers. Parts of my left shin had become crooked, and it was difficult to stand back up. My face felt as if it had gone ten rounds with the wrong end of a whiskey bottle, and the overgrown teeth jutting out from my mouth made it difficult not to slice my own tongue off. For the moment, the transformation into an abomination had been halted, but I was no beauty to look at, to be sure.
A shadow blotted out the sun, and the world quaked.
Wardenclyffe was taking off.
Mud and rocks broke away from the sides of the massive city with a crack like an iced pond in winter. Crisscrossing steel girders seemed to burst from the ground as the mile-wide Wardenclyffe strained to break free of its bonds, rising from the cradle of Mother Earth with a ponderous grace. Cables that hadn’t been disconnected from the launch cradle lashed around, deadly sparking serpents that could cut the unwary in twain.
As the bottom of the city cleared the ground, the squall tube clusters came into view. The sluggish black fluid the Tellurians had pumped into the tubes was shining a bright blue, and electricity flashed between the clusters in a deadly web of light and energy. My eyes felt as if they were going to burn out. Even after turning my head away, the lightning played across my dazzled vision.
Quinn was less stunned than I was, and he timed a jump to catch hold of one of the cables thrashing round. The steel cut through his stolen hot-suit as he grabbed on, and my nose caught the tempting smell of freshly spilled blood. But he managed to hold on and even started climbing up the lifeline toward the rising city.
“No!” I screamed through my malformed mouth, forcing myself up. Rather than fight the beast inside, I grabbed hold of it and wrestled the wild to the surface. Electricity still arced everywhere, but there was no choice. If Quinn managed to make it to the top of the cable, the entire city would suffer for it.
Cogs in Time Volume Three (The Steamworks Series Book 3) Page 19