From that other roadside, stranded motorists and other random folk swarmed out onto the road, snatching up the scattered belongings. Something flammable had ignited in one of the vehicles, and gouts of flame erupted. Hamilton recoiled at the high-pitched cry of terror and pain that came from within the wrecked car. He took an instinctive step toward the accident but halted himself immediately. There was, simply, nothing he could do.
Jonny had it right. This wasn’t going to last long. None of it. The lawlessness let loose by the revolution was still spreading and intensifying. He wondered if these three with the electricity generator had weapons in their wagon. He had the feeling they would need some as mob rule truly took over.
Hamilton ducked his head to look in at Jonny. Jonny’s gaze came off the charge gauge. He mouthed, One more minute. It was the ultra-low resistance cells in the battery, a recent technological miracle out of the Manchester labs, which allowed such swift recharging. Hamilton kept a cool military bearing as he waited, but tension snaked through him nonetheless.
When an electrical lorry came lumbering off the road, squealing to a halt behind their compact electricar, he stepped back and turned so he had a good line of sight on the vehicle’s cab and so he could draw his right-hand pistol as easily as possible. This was law of the jungle thinking, and he knew it. But what else was war, in the end? And what had these people thought they were loosing on themselves?
Two men with builds like longshoremen swung down from the high cab of the lorry. Both wore grins that were more predatory than friendly. To the man who’d fastened the cable to the electricar Hamilton said softly and clearly out of the corner of his mouth, “Disconnect that right now. And if you’re able, prepare to defend yourselves.” This last he added as the cable was detached and while he was opening the passenger-side door and slipping swiftly inside.
Jonny had the vehicle underway as he was still pulling shut the door. The dial read almost a full charge. Good. Enough to reach Chicago by nightfall. Jonny handled the wheel well. He too was evidently aware of the riotous pattern of the roadway and deftly compensated for the reckless driving all around him. He dodged, accelerated, braked, swerved, all at just the right times to avoid scrapes and collisions.
Behind them Hamilton had no idea if the two beefy men from the truck were making the entrepreneurial ambitions of the three with the wagon more or less difficult. Certainly other drivers would want to make use of those cables. It struck him that vendors lining the roadside wasn’t, in and of itself, a bad idea. In more normal times they would be quite a convenience, in fact. He imagined small emporiums where one might buy travel-ready food, like those vegetables farther back. Certainly recharging stations at regular intervals along a stretch like this would make sense. Even by exacting a modest fee—unlike those swindlers with the wagon—a proprietor could expect a tidy profit. But why stop there? Add inns and taverns and restaurants and recreational facilities for cranky children. A whole roadside culture could expect to flower… when times were normal.
Times were not normal.
Hamilton watched the growing chaos with a jaundiced eye. More wrecks, more bodies, more scenes of scavenging and outright looting. A car loaded up with belligerent-looking youths raced up alongside and tried to deliberately force their vehicle off the road. Hamilton brought out one of the pistols, but before he could even properly brandish it, much less aim and shoot, Jonny had hit the brakes, yanked their compact car hard to the left, swinging briefly and alarmingly into oncoming traffic before accelerating at a dizzying speed and swooping back into the proper flow. The car with the youths never reappeared.
IT SEEMED an impossible pace to maintain. This wasn’t just travel, after all; it was battle on the roadway, a vicious fight for every mile. Or so it felt anyway, with every nearby vehicle or person or persons on the roadside a potential antagonist.
They traded off driving duties, only pulling off the highway to switch when the shoulder was completely empty and going around the car to the driver’s side with gun very visibly in hand. In this strange, unsettling, and turbulent manner, they journeyed through the day.
Farms had begun to appear, remote from each other at first, then growing denser. Hamilton saw cattle in fields. He also spotted veritable ragtag armies of men and women out defending these cultivated lands from any encroachment. Every home was now a castle, and every castle anticipated a siege.
The disquiet deepened in Hamilton. Once the Fleet and other military branches put down this revolution and restored order, he wondered uneasily how these Colonists would make peace amongst themselves. He’d seen a great deal of truly savage behavior just on the road. Surely it would be worse in the cities. The Fleet frequency reports he had listened in on had made mention of the urban upheavals. But obviously it wasn’t just Colonial Underground soldiers fighting the British. He had witnessed firsthand how willing—eager, even—these so-called Americans were to clash with one another, to rob, to act as opportunists. How had these Colonies ever gone so wrong? he wondered dolefully. Surely their mother country bore some of the blame. Children didn’t turn out to be monsters without some neglect or even outright abuse on the part of their genitors.
What could England have done to this land to make its people so unbalanced?
The day waned, and the farmlands thinned again, with houses springing up on either fringe of the roadway. These too started sparse, then grew denser. A city lay ahead. Chicago itself. A great hub of industry and population, currently no doubt in the throes of this same damnable chaos.
They had traded stints at the steering wheel again, and Jonny was adroitly piloting their compact electricar now. They had eaten more of the provisions and emptied the canteen. Jonny had finished the liquor last night. So they were running out of supplies right on schedule. That fact appealed to Hamilton’s sense of military timing.
A sign on the roadside indicated the distance to Chicago. Just a handful of miles. Hamilton peered ahead. He thought he saw a hint of the topmost stories of the city’s structures ahead, a thin line on the horizon, but clouds had moved in with the ebbing of the day, and the twilight was gray and nebulous.
Traffic, oddly enough, seemed more orderly now. Vehicles moved in relatively tidy rows, traveling at more sedate speeds.
Except for one car, Hamilton noted with alarm. It was coming in the opposite direction, rapidly approaching them. It was a curious, cut-down contraption, as if its outer metal parts had been peeled away for better velocity. It seemed little more than a steel skeleton, with two occupants. The car dodged in and around the slower conveyances.
But that wasn’t what had alarmed Hamilton. The darting car was being shadowed—literally; an actual shadow pursued the vehicle, one made by the grayed, dwindling rays of the sun, a shadow cast in the shape of an aircraft. Hamilton pressed his face near the windscreen and craned his neck. He saw the bird up there. A quick, flitting ship, sleek and small. Its propellers whirled, carrying the gas-filled body of the thing forward at a speed matching the fast car below it.
A QD-108 model aircraft, Hamilton automatically noted as the buzz of the swooping bird filled the sky with rattling noise and as Hamilton, obeying a sudden instinct, reached over and grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the right. The bird opened fire with its undercarriage-mounted high-caliber repeaters, and the deadly piercing bullets tore into the planked roadway just behind the fleeing vehicle. Wooden splinters flew up in its wake in a fury.
Jonny wrested the wheel from Hamilton, making a smooth turn out of the clumsy yanking Hamilton had started. They swung away from the mayhem. The QD-108’s chattering guns tried to stay on the target car, but it continued to evade side to side at high speed. Inevitably—with a gunner firing so indiscriminately—the salvo struck other vehicles as well as the timbered road. The bird was still racing toward Hamilton and Jonny’s position, on the cusp of overtaking them in the opposite direction.
But it was too late. The chaos unleashed was like nothing they’d encountered even on
this tumultuous odyssey. Traffic in both directions scattered every which way as death rained from the skies. Cars collided, one after the other. Again bodies were flung through windscreens to spill sickeningly over the road, there to be smashed again by other careening vehicles. Swerving transports overturned. It had an exponential effect, the disorder and bloody havoc growing and growing, seeming to feed on itself.
Not that Hamilton had much time for observation or reflection. Jonny was deft at the wheel, but the road ahead, even the shoulder of it, was abruptly a hopeless mass of tangled metal, a wall of twisted debris that only became more impassable with every injurious and fatal impact as still more cars collided into the vast jumble.
The speeding skinless car vanished down the road with its two fugitive passengers, going south. The airship pursued, still firing. Hamilton looked up again, thinking remotely to note the craft’s identifying numbers so to eventually report the unconscionably careless captain and his bullet-happy gunner, but the bird whisked past too rapidly in the dusk. Also Jonny had had to slam on the brakes, and their car was going into a spin.
Vehicles tumbled around them, like a stampeding herd of rhinos suddenly all toppling in the heat. The centrifugal force of the spinning car was terrible. Hamilton reached out to brace himself but instead lunged for Jonny, thinking to put himself between him and the windscreen.
At least, later on, that was what he would think he had been attempting to do. He knew the protective instinct was in him. He knew he would do almost anything for Jonny. In the moment, though, there was little more than the shriek of tires followed by the enormous impact, like the fist of a titan, which struck them. Then came the awful crunch of glass, and it seemed he was in flight himself, once more untethered from the earth as though going up in an airship. His hands grasped emptily, and he made to call out Jonny’s name. But only blackness heard him.
THIRTEEN.
PAIN BLOTTED out the night, which by now must have fallen. Pain underlay everything. It pricked his nerve endings. It was there when he moved or kept still. It came when he breathed and when he held his air in his lungs, looking to disrupt his body’s processes in any way if only to get some relief.
Hamilton had crashed through the windscreen. Jonny had watched him go, soaring out, sailing majestically through the air. Everything had slowed, as if molasses had been poured over the scene of the calamity, or as if—neither more nor less likely—some god had seized hold of time itself and only allowed it to jerk forward in tiny increments, freezing it at intervals.
That was how the accident had seemed. He retained distinct images of it, as clear and still and solemn as old-fashioned daguerreotypes. He’d had to stomp on the brakes. The car had spun, despite how he had wrangled the wheel. He had learned to drive so dexterously in New Orleans, while in the ranks of Kane’s gang. Kane had never let him pilot that fancy electricar of his, but it was common practice to steal vehicles for capers, thus leaving behind fewer clues. And after a successful job, it was something of a tradition to wring out the car or cars in question, pushing them to their limits and performing all sorts of daredevil feats before abandoning them. Thus Jonny had been taught to handle an electricar like a bull rider handled a bull.
He couldn’t have done anything to keep Hamilton from smashing through the glass. The car’s spin had ended abruptly when it had slammed into the back end of another vehicle, which had itself crashed into something else ahead of it in that colossal tangle of crumpled metal and twisted bodies. He’d been vaguely aware of the diving airship, of its raking guns. But trying to keep their car on a sane course had preoccupied him. He had almost reached the shoulder, but that vehicle had blocked them.
When Hamilton flew out of his seat—Jonny retained a stark, frozen image of that—with his hands still reaching toward Jonny and an incomprehensible cry on his lips, Jonny had thought he was seeing the man alive for the very last time. That seemingly impartial fact had seared itself into his being in that moment. Hamilton Arkwright was about to die. His curiously graceful arc through the air, unaided this time by any flying machine, was to encompass the final seconds of his life.
Jonny had had one thought on the matter as the barren reality of it played out helplessly before him: I never got to tell him I love him.
Those words had burned themselves into his soul right alongside the implacable verdict regarding Hamilton’s imminent mortality. But by then, Jonny, subject to the same intractable forces of physics, had been crushed brutally against the steering wheel and had started to lose consciousness. Glass from the windscreen flew back at him. He wouldn’t even last long enough to see Hamilton complete his flight. Either Hamilton was going to smash bodily into the vehicle ahead of them, or he would clear the wreck and sail over onto the shoulder of the road. It was that last possibility—only just calculated—which lit a spark of hope before blackness came.
That blackness had lasted forever, or he wished it had, since while in it he hadn’t felt this pain, which was a soft yet intense, all-encompassing sort of hurt.
He was aware of being moved. That was about the limit of what his senses could bring him. He wasn’t trying too desperately to find out more. He’d been in a serious wreck, and every instinct told him to retreat inward, to wait out the pain.
The only motive he had to find out more was to learn if Hamilton was okay. But Jonny already knew he was. He had heard his voice, babbling in a stream, then later speaking a soothing lullaby of reassuring words. Hamilton had told him he would take care of him. He was taking him somewhere… to a doctor? He would protect Jonny. Just sleep. And hang on. So the voice had said.
At some point there had come the sound of gunshots, a pair of them, close by. But Hamilton’s voice had resumed its comforting litany afterward. Much more distantly, beyond what his muted senses could accurately detect, there seemed a vague din, punctuated by more gunfire, raised voices, and a rising and falling buzz of engines.
The movement he felt was accompanied by a rhythmic swaying. Jonny was aware of his pained body tipping forward and back, as if on a seesaw, which cast his flickering memory back to boyhood. He recalled, gauzily yet somehow vividly, a metal beam braced over a chunk of cheap concrete fallen from a nearby building into a weedy, trashy lot. He and other children had fashioned the seesaw. Jonny had played there for hours. It was the ultimate privilege to have a go on one end of the beam. Something about that rhythmical up and down motion had felt magical. The beam had swiftly worn a groove in the stone, and the seesaw remained a reliable piece of recreational equipment for the neighborhood kids for some while.
It was good to have a turn on the seesaw. He’d been on it some time now, a longer spell than was usually allowed, what with the other youngsters clamoring for a chance. He realized, memory merging with the haze of the present, that he was alone on the seesaw. In fact, it had stopped moving with no other children to work the other end. This was a sudden, alarming occurrence. Panic seized him.
“Easy. Easy there! I’m back. I’m here. It’s all right.”
Hamilton’s voice. Hamilton… who had himself been in the same wreck as he. Jonny had seen him crash through the windscreen, go flying—he must have cleared the wrecked vehicle in front of them, gone right over it, landed safely. And now… and now….
“Hush, J.C. I’ve got you in a barrow. I had to convince an unpleasant fellow to surrender it to me, as he was using it to haul away looted wares. But we’re inside the city limits, and it’s just a matter of time before I can find a medical facility or mobile aid unit. Don’t try to open your eyes. I just found a blanket for you. There. You’re tucked in like a weary boy. Sleep. I’ll have help for you soon….”
Hamilton grunted—lifting the barrow’s handles? What barrow? Jonny was back on the seesaw, being lulled by the comforting movement. Hamilton continued talking, the words gone muzzy but the tone a solace. It was everything just knowing he was there.
Jonny returned to the blackness, hoping he wasn’t imagining Hamilton’s presenc
e.
THERE WAS commotion. But there was also Hamilton, still there, telling him to stay quiet, not to worry. For some reason Jonny was tensed for the sound of another nearby gunshot. He’d heard plenty of gunplay on the streets of New York, among the tenements. It was a sound he had adjusted to at a young age.
What, he wondered, would his life have been like if he’d been born into some staid and stable family—a father and mother, parents respectable and sober? What if he’d belonged to a well-off family? Hah! Wouldn’t that have been a hoot? A house and servants, food whenever he wanted it. Money at the ready. No need to go out and finesse it.
Silly. Stupid. An easier life, yeah… but who would he have been then? Some snot. Some pompous boy, growing up to be a stuffy adult, on his way to being a mean, haughty old man who thought every poor person deserved his or her lot. And what would he have done for cock? He’d always heard all the aristocracy’s queers had to pretend to be attracted to the opposite sex, lest they get cut out of the will. Again—hah!
So maybe it was for the best he’d had no father, or rather a rotating cast of pugnacious or dimwitted or simply indifferent men who’d assumed the role, however temporarily, crowding the cramped rooms he and his beleaguered, drunken mother shared. It had been wise not to get emotionally attached to any of those men. It had also been easy. He remembered the ones who’d hit, the others who’d given him a coin or two to disappear for the day, and the handful who had touched him—or tried to, anyway. After all, he’d learned to fight early on, and fight smart. Mostly, though, he had learned when to run, and that there was no shame in running. None whatsoever.
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