by D. J. Butler
Burton squeezed the trigger without hesitating, almost without aiming.
Click.
The gun misfired.
“Where’s Brigham Young?” he shouted, pulling the trigger again.
Click.
“Rostam’s mace!” he swore. The powder had gotten wet in the steam. He shoved the gun back into its holster and lurched across the room as fast as he could.
Hickman slipped out of sight, sliding down. Burton drew his saber, throwing himself towards the window.
Crash!
The bedroom’s other window shattered and a man in a short coat and beaver hat piled through, knees and elbows first. He had one arm up in front of his face to protect it, and a knife in each hand.
Burton aimed for the man’s shoulder, hoping to incapacitate him and head off any fight. He was painfully aware that, outside the window, Hickman was scrambling down a short shingled roof and headed for some surface that might be the top of a steam-truck.
He swung, expecting the man to land and lunge—
his attacker dropped and rolled instead—
and Burton missed.
The force of his swing carried him past the tumbling Danite, and his wounded leg made him stumble and slide off-balance. Together, they put him out of position—
which meant that the Danite’s knife narrowly missed biting into Burton’s belly, and instead just cut through his coat.
Slicing open my official correspondence, Burton thought.
In return he kicked the Danite, to keep him rolling and move him further away so Burton could regain his balance. Teetering as he was, though, and kicking with a knife stuck in his thigh, Burton’s kick was girlishly weak and ineffective.
The Danite’s hat fell off, but he sprang to his feet and charged Burton. He slashed with both knives, arms snapping back and forth in front of him like a willow tree whipping about in a high wind.
Burton longed for an épée, or a spear, or anything else with a point. A sharpened stick would have done nicely. The saber he had taken from the Danite was a chopping weapon only, a clumsy piece of work useful only to horsemen and hatcheteers. With a pointed weapon, he could keep the knife-wielder at bay. With this saber, he could only hack and slash, try not to expose himself too much and hope for a major hit on his opponent.
“Like I’m chopping down trees!” he grunted, not really realizing he was speaking out loud until he had done so. To emphasize his point, he swung for the knife fighter’s throat, then quickly stepped aside as the other man lunged into the space vacated by the sword, slicing and stabbing in short, furious blows.
Thud! from outside. That would be Hickman, Burton thought, landing on the steam-truck. The Danite would get away if he didn’t do something, and pretty quick.
He backed away in a circle from a flurry of blows. He felt the steam before he actually saw the missing wall out of the corner of his eye, and turned sharply to avoid falling into hot water.
This was like a samurai sword, like the long, one-edged katana of the bushido warrior. Kendo, he knew the art of fighting with such swords was called. Gliding steps, long arcs of attack and powerful incapacitating blows.
Impressive to watch, and effective against a similarly armed fighter.
Useless against a quick man with knives.
Burton backed away again under a rain of razor-sharp knife blades. The cuff of his coat sleeve lost two buttons to a slashing attack that he only barely avoided, and his boot knocked aside the Danite’s beaver hat.
Under the window, a steam engine hissed into life, coughing vapor up into the curtains. Burton was out of time.
With his hurt leg, his kicked up the hat, hurling it into his attacker’s face.
The Danite kept coming, slash, slash—
Burton sacrificed his left arm.
He thrust his arm in among the cutting blades. He felt the steel of one knife tear into the flesh of his upper arm. His heavy coat dulled the attack somewhat, but not enough to prevent the searing pain entirely.
Burton grunted with pain—
but he closed his hand around the wrist of the Danite’s other arm, preventing that knife from stabbing him in the chest—
and punched his foe in the nose with the heavy basket hilt of his stolen saber.
Hard.
The man stumbled back. Burton let him go and grinned a farewell as he tumbled through where a wall had once been, over the edge and into steam and hot water below. He screamed as he fell, then hit the ground below with both a splash and a thud.
Burton had no time to waste on monitoring the man’s fate, nor on removing the knives from his arm and leg. He threw himself through the window and bounced down the porch roof, just in time to flop onto the rooftop of the steam-truck’s cargo compartment a split second before it pulled away.
“Rudabeh’s blessed withers, but that smarts,” he ground out through clenched teeth as the steam-truck turned and started bouncing down the field behind the hotel.
He saw the Third Virginia Cavalry, or at least a couple of dozen of them, arrayed beside the beached Liahona behind him, and on the bluff above the steam-truck. They were talking to Poe, and they didn’t look friendly.
Burton tightened his grip on the cavalry saber.
* * *
Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy ran like the devil himself was after him (only it wasn’t the devil, was it? because the devil was clearly the thieving little boy who had taken his gun just when he needed it most, not the ugly monkey whose own machine of death had apparently run empty or misfired or jammed at the crucial instant… the devil had better luck than that, didn’t he?).
Weeds whipped at his legs, but they were nothing. The branches of the bloody-damn-hell trees that poked at his eyes and scratched his cheeks, now those were things to worry about. What the hell did you call these things? Mother O’Shaughnessy never prepared him for trees like these. They had leaves like oak trees, but they were midgets.
Tiny hell-spawned midgets like the circus freak on his tail.
Tam slapped at the last hedge of branches and broke through. His foot struck something invisible in the grass—
pain scorched his ankle—
he stumbled forward, tripped, caught himself on his good leg, kept hobbling.
If he couldn’t run, he had to fight. He still had the stiletto on his wrist, and the canister of weird brass beetles inside his coat… whatever they might do to flesh. Of course, they’d certainly made a mess of some of the Deseret Hotel’s upholstery, me boy, he said to himself, so you can likely guess what they’d do to a bit of tender meat. They’d scared the shite out of the midget when Tam had pretended he was going to loose them on the child, anyway.
But the clearing wasn’t empty; there was a little wooden hut in the center of it, a tiny shack with a hole shaped like a blazing sun carved into the door. Was that a shithouse? Tam wondered. Who wanted to run all the way down from the house, a quarter of a mile away, holding up the flap of his long woolens with every step, when he had a case of the trots? A shithouse belonged right behind the house, not on the other side of the hill. These Mormons were idjits, all of them.
Tam shot a glance over his shoulder—the dwarf lagged behind, probably slowed down even worse than Tam by the fake oak trees because he was such a runty little thing. His head wasn’t even visible above the trees’ claws; Tam only knew generally where he was by the rustling of grass and the shaking of branches.
He had a few seconds’ lead time, but not much more.
Perfect.
Tam opened the canister. He cracked the outhouse door and lifted the plank seat worn smooth by years of straining Deseret buttocks, exposing a dark and reeking pit. He threw his scarf onto the edge of the hole—that’d catch the dwarf’s attention and make him hesitate. Then he scattered brass beetles around the floor inside, over stones worn flat by use and the curling back half of a Sears Roebuck catalog, advertising hoop skirts and panacea tablets and wooden hobbyhorses and hunting rifles.
Le
aving the door open a touch, he gimped as quickly as he could around and behind the outhouse to hide.
He looked at the canister while he listened for the dwarf’s approach. There were two buttons inside the lid. He’d figured which button activated the bloody things back at the Deseret Hotel, turned them into unstoppable chewers and devourers of matter, but in all the excitement since he’d forgotten which it was. He let his imagination run wild for a few seconds, thinking about the irritating dwarf being chewed down to bones and buttons by a swarm of clicking brass beetles.
“Heh heh,” he chuckled. You’ve got the little bastard now, me boy.
But which button to press? He’d forgotten which was which, and they weren’t labeled or marked in any way.
He heard the soft thud and swish of little dwarf feet coming through the clearing.
To hell with it. He’d press both buttons, and St. Brigit would do the rest. Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised him to be a coward.
He held the canister in one hand and kept his knife hand free, just in case (but the stiletto still tight against his forearm, to keep one unpleasant little surprise in store for an appropriate moment). If he had a bit more of a head start, he reflected, he might have loaded the Maxim Husher, and that would have given the midget an entertaining jolt. Oh, well.
The door creaked open.
“The hell?” the midget muttered.
Tam jammed his thumb down over both the canister’s buttons.
Click-clack-clatter, click-clack-clatter, he heard from the outhouse. He grinned, stood up and limped two steps away from the outhouse.
“Shit!” the dwarf yelled, there was a thump, and the outhouse rattled, like the dwarf was wrestling someone inside. It was as good as a stage show, it was, all that shaking and noise and Tam bursting at the seams with laughter all the while. Tam imagined the little corn-pone-nibbler fighting all the beetles at once in there, maybe swarming together like a cloud into the shape of a fighting man, or maybe the beetles swarmed together into the shape of a bigger beetle.
It was like having a genie in a magic lamp.
He rubbed the canister fondly, feeling very satisfied and wishing he could have a nice drink of whisky to celebrate. Maybe the beetles could bring him some, if he rubbed their little brass bellies and asked nicely.
The outhouse stopped moving.
Then he saw a glistening brass carpet, edging out from under the outhouse door and swarming in his direction. It was the beetles.
And as they came, they devoured. He saw tiny brass bug-jaws tearing at grass and sticks on the ground and even little stones, shattering it all and ripping it to shreds.
Tam took a long step back.
Click-clack-clatter.
Surely, the little creatures were heading his way because they’d done their job, and now they were coming home to their jar to go nicely back to sleep again, weren’t they? He’d jammed both buttons, and one was the eat button and one was the go to sleep button. They’d eaten, and now they were going to go to sleep.
The swarm kept coming. Behind it, the ground was gnawed clean.
Tam took another step back. “Easy, lads.”
Could the dwarf have taken control of the bugs somehow, countermanded Tam’s attack order? Tam shook his head, that notion made no bloody-damn-hell sense at all.
Click-clack-clatter.
Or did it? An ether device, a timer, a code of some kind only the bugs knew or could hear, a secret communication by vibration, Brigit’s belly button, even telepathy? In a world in which flesh-eating metal bugs could be poured out of a can like so many oats, what wasn’t possible? Tam’s heart pounded like a railroad piston.
The swarm was almost on him.
Tam threw the canister away to his left, into the trees, and lurched away several steps to his right.
The metal bug swarm followed the canister.
Tam stopped and watched, realizing that he was sweating and shaking from nerves. Where the canister had landed, he saw grass fall over as if it were mowing itself, and then a tree snapped and toppled to the ground, and then another.
He watched for thirty seconds, or maybe a minute, until there was a circle of scoured earth around the canister and the beetles had crawled inside. No more click-clack, and his heart was starting to slow down, but Tam didn’t dare go pick the canister up.
Not yet. He’d let it lie a while.
Still, if the little bugs had done so much damage to the local flora, he had to imagine they’d made short work of the cracker midget. Tam chuckled, shook his head to clear out the adrenalin, and walked around to the front of the outhouse and its open door.
The seat was down again. There was no sign at all of the Sears Roebuck catalog, with its skirts and guns and toys and snake oil. Shame, that, Tam reflected, too late. The Sears Roebuck catalog made nice reading in idle moments, he should have kept it. No sign of the scarf or the dwarf, either, though.
“Bad luck, that,” Tam chortled. “Shitty way to die.” He laughed out loud, cackling like the vulture he resembled. “On the other hand, it seems I’ve lost my good scarf.”
Click.
Tam froze.
“You lost more’n that, Irish.”
Tam looked up. Above the outhouse door, on the inside, was a little shelf. The dwarf was perched up in the ceiling, wedged there with one hand on the little shelf and both feet against the far wall.
“Monkey!” Tam gasped.
“Proud of it,” grunted the little man.
In his free hand, he held a long pistol, cocked and pointed at Tam O’Shaughnessy’s birdlike head.
“Fookin’ hell,” Tam commented.
“Guess you forgot I could climb.”
“You had another pistol?”
“Believe it or not, I found one in the crapper.”
Tam slammed the door shut and threw himself to one side.
Bang! Bang!
Splintered holes erupted in the desiccated wood of the outhouse, but the bullets missed Tam and he sprint-hobbled for the canister again.
The bloody-damn-hell metal beetles might eat him alive, but they might not, and the midget certainly would.
Thump!
Tam heard the door kicked open behind him and he knew the dwarf was only seconds from blasting him to oblivion. He staggered through grass, cutting across towards the artificial clearing where the bugs had click-clack-clattered everything right down to the ground like hyperactive sheep, or termites.
Bang!
Tam felt the bullet burn through his coat, narrowly missing his ribs.
He saw the canister and jumped, throwing himself headlong and grabbing for it like he was a drowning man it was a rope. He clenched his teeth and squinted at the thought that he might be throwing himself to his own death, but he didn’t see any of the little buggers on the ground—
he hit, oomph, grabbed the canister—
and rolled to his feet.
“Brigit!” he howled, pain lancing through his twisted ankle.
Miraculously, all the bugs stayed inside. They were quiet and still, and Tam jammed down both buttons again.
Click-clack-clatter, click-clack-clatter, he heard in the canister as he raised it over his head.
The midget froze, gun pointed at Tam.
“They’re activated, you little ape, do you hear me? They’re turned on!”
The dwarf spat slowly on the ground. “I can hear ’em,” he admitted.
“Shoot me and I throw the little buggers! Then we both die! Is that what you want?”
The midget seemed to be considering. “I want you to leave the boy alone,” he said.
“I don’t give a fook about the boy!” Tam felt hysterical.
“Then what the hell do you want?”
Tam considered, for a split second, the possibility of telling the dwarf. Maybe they could reach a deal. They could both agree not to talk to the Pinkertons, to lie low, and soon enough he and Sam Clemens would have finished this rotten mission and be out of the
Kingdom. Tam could go off to California, or Novy Moskva, or somewhere else where the Pinkertons would never find him.
Hell, he might even be willing to go back to Ireland. Potato blight or not, he’d learned there were worse places to be.
Tam shook his head. No, he could never trust the midget. The man was crooked, he might turn Tam in for reward money, or worse. He might turn him in just because Tam was a Union man, and the dwarf was with the South. Or maybe he hated the Irish. The southerners were notorious for that sort of ill-will, and the little fellow had that horrible loping sound to his voice that marked him as a Mississippi monkey, or Louisiana, or something… Tam wasn’t very good at telling those accents apart.
He had to bluff, or threaten, or fight.
Tam drew back the arm with the canister in it, like he was going to throw.
The dwarf cocked his pistol.
“Stop!”
The voice rang through the confusion of Tam’s thoughts and over his thudding heartbeat like a bell. It came from somewhere over in the tall grass. Tam tried to split his eyes, send one poking around to look for the source of the voice while the other stayed fixed on his opponent. He could see the dwarf doing the same.
The voice belonged to the boy, John Moses.
He stepped out of the grass and into the clearing. “Stop fighting,” he said. “It isn’t nice.”
“Oh yeah?” Tam sneered.
“Yeah,” John Moses said.
Then Tam noticed that the little boy held the strange rapid-shot gun. It looked gigantic in his childish hands. He struggled, but he managed to lift it and hold the barrel more or less level. Level enough to mow Tam flat, judging by what he’d seen it do to the front of the hotel.
“I said stop fighting,” John Moses repeated himself in his wee piping whistle of a voice. “And I mean it, you fooks.”
“Shite,” Tam said.
* * *
“You’re all under arrest,” called one of the cavalrymen in a loud, trumpet-like voice. The men were out of their ordinary uniforms and wearing the strange gray outfits, but the speaker had two chevrons on the sleeves of his jacket. Poe inferred that the chevrons marked him as a corporal.
“By what authority?” Poe demanded.