* * *
It was where White Fox found her when dawn began to brighten the sky. He’d slept lightly, as he always did, and a part of him expected the young gunslinger to have crept away in the night. But when he rolled out from under the wagon, he found her feeding the fire back to life.
“Got some Arbuckle’s in my kit,” she said, seeing him. “Figure I could add some bacon to those beans, too.”
White Fox nodded silently. After he’d washed, he made a wide circle around Gibbons’s wagon, but he saw no sign that any creature who did not belong here had approached in the night. When he returned, Jett had sliced several chunks of bacon into the beans left over from last night’s meal, and the coffeepot was already heating. He raided his own supplies for salt and meal, and by the time Gibbons appeared, breakfast was all but ready.
* * *
In the light of morning, Jett had a better view of Gibbons’s outlandish costume. There was actually more than one, for last night’s outfit had been royal blue, and today’s was a vibrant scarlet. It consisted of voluminous pantalets that clearly revealed her legs, because they were gathered tightly at her ankles. Over it she wore a long tunic with soutache embroidery across the bosom and shoulders, and beneath that tunic a white muslin blouse. It was entirely obvious that Gibbons was not wearing a corset of any kind.
“I see you are admiring my Rational Dress,” Gibbons said proudly. “It was invented by Miss Libby Miller—a noted female suffrage activist—to free women from the tyranny of corsets and petticoats. I confess I am disappointed it has not been more enthusiastically adopted,” she added, looking momentarily crestfallen, “but you of all people will certainly see how much more convenient it is to have the freedom of one’s limbs!”
“It’s very … rational,” Jett said awkwardly. Jett might dress as a man, but privately she longed for the pretty and fashionable dresses she’d left behind. She thought Gibbons’s costume was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen in her life—but she could not bear to hurt Gibbons’s feelings by saying so. “You can’t sit a horse in that,” she added, feeling something more was called for. “Can you?”
“Certainly not!” Gibbons agreed merrily. “My Auto-Tachypode is far more efficient. I have every faith that someday they will be as widespread as Rational Dress, and horses will be a thing of the past.”
“Doubtless you know best about that,” Jett said dryly. She drank coffee for a few moments in silence. “Tell me—have you thought better of this nonsensical idea of yours?”
“If by that you mean do I intend to give up my idea of seeing Alsop for myself, I certainly have not,” Gibbons said. “It is Mister Fox’s destination as well—not that I require his protection in the least.”
“Oh, of course not,” Jett muttered. “But you cannot mean to go to Alsop, White Fox,” she added, turning to him. “I know Gibbons does not believe me—but you, at least, must know I am not lying.” Perhaps if he changed his mind, Gibbons would change hers.
“I must,” White Fox said. “My trail leads there, and I must find answers, no matter the cost. Many people—Negroes, whites, and Indians—have gone missing of late. Perhaps your zombies are the cause.”
“P’raps you’ll just end up missing, too,” Jett grumbled.
“Really, you are the most fearful gunslinger I have ever met,” Gibbons said sternly. “Why, you said yourself the creatures fear daylight! We shall be perfectly safe!”
“Well, if you’re going to Alsop, I reckon I’m going with you,” Jett said. Even if Gibbons was a crazy damnyankee and White Fox worked for the Bluebellies, she couldn’t let them ride into danger by themselves.
“Can’t stop you!” Gibbons said cheerfully.
Jett was beginning to think Honoria Gibbons did everything cheerfully.
* * *
“I’m about to start the Auto-Tachypode! You’ll want to move well away! Your horses will not appreciate the commotion!” Gibbons called, stepping up into the back of the wagon. She didn’t wait to see whether White Fox and Jett took her advice. If they didn’t this time, they certainly would in the future. Horses simply didn’t seem to like the Auto-Tachypode.
Wagons such as this one normally provided a tidy and weatherproof traveling home for their owners, but while Gibbons thought of this as more her home than her suite of rooms in her papa’s Russian Hill townhouse, even she had to admit it was cramped. Most of the interior was taken up with the Gatling guns and their firing mechanism and with the Auto-Tachypode’s motive mechanism, a collection of cogwheels, pulleys, and pistons as elaborate as the interior of a Swiss watch. But while one might wind a watch to permit it to function, the Auto-Tachypode’s motive power came from steam. A steam boiler—a marvel of miniaturization, and her own invention—allowed the Auto-Tachypode to function. She had filled the reservoir last night as soon as it had cooled, and had begun stoking it even before she had dressed to greet the day.
She consulted the pressure gauges with a critical eye. The boiler had built up a good head of steam. Everything was in readiness. She exited the back of the wagon again, being careful to latch the doors firmly behind her. She had no interest in chasing her boxes of supplies over half the desert—and even less in being laughed at by her two companions.
She was pleased to see Jett and White Fox had taken her warning seriously. They were on the far side of the creek, watching the proceedings with curiosity. She walked around to the front of the wagon and took her place on the wooden bench. While the bench itself had been part of the wagon’s original structure, that was the last thing about it that was conventional. She pulled the gleaming wooden tiller toward her and ran her hand over the small forest of brass levers installed at the right-hand side of the seat. It is not that I am nervous, she told herself. I simply wish this to be a true exhibition of the mechanism’s capabilites.
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered under her breath. She grasped the largest of the brass levers and pulled back on it strongly. The moment she released the clutch there was an earsplitting shriek of released steam followed by the clattering banging racket of churning pistons. The entire wagon began to shake violently.
“Are you all right?” Jett shouted anxiously to her.
“Never better!” Gibbons shouted back.
She released the brake. The shaking stopped, replaced with a low mechanical vibration, and to her secret glee, the Auto-Tachypode began to move forward with majestic grace. She pulled the tiller toward her gently, and it turned toward the stream. At that point, both horses thought better of remaining where they were. They didn’t bolt, but their riders were forced to wheel them about and trot them further away. As the Auto-Tachypode bumped gently down into the streambed, Gibbons congratulated herself once again at having had the forethought to augment the wagon’s wooden wheels with tires of vulcanized rubber. Not only did their textured surfaces provide additional traction, the rubber acted as a sort of shock absorber and provided a smoother ride. The wagon climbed the far bank as easily as it had descended the near one, and began chugging its way toward Alsop at a stately two miles per hour.
* * *
At first the horses would have nothing to do with the strange contraption, but after half an hour or so they were willing to walk alongside it, apparently having decided it was some odd new variety of locomotive. Gibbons happily answered her companions’ questions about her invention, though she privately doubted she’d won any converts to this new method of transport. Jett thought it was too slow, and White Fox thought it was too noisy, though both of them agreed a steam engine that did not have to have tracks laid for it was of a certain amount of use.
“It is only a prototype, after all!” Gibbons said. “Once it has been thoroughly tested I shall build one capable of sustaining a higher operating speed, and even of pulling a number of wagons behind it!” She did not think it was worth mentioning just now that the Auto-Tachypode was capable of attaining a speed in excess of fifteen miles an hour—though it was a risky business, as it require
d the engine to build up such a head of steam that it was in constant danger of exploding. It was true that the main body of the boiler had been cast in one piece to avoid precisely that, but Gibbons had a healthy respect for the dangerous power of live steam. She had seen far too many deadly accidents at the locomotive yards where she’d researched her invention.
* * *
It was midmorning by the time they reached Alsop, and Jett would have thought she’d dreamed the previous night’s attack … except for the fact that not so much as a barking dog greeted their extremely noisy arrival. In a way, she was grateful for the noise that contraption of Gibbons produced. It kept things from being so quiet she’d turn tail and run for it.
“I’m going to check the livery stable!” Jett shouted over the racket of the Auto-Tachypode. White Fox raised a hand to indicate he’d heard, and she spurred ahead toward the stables.
This isn’t right, she thought as she dismounted. The corrals outside the building were deserted, though the horses should have already been turned out for the day. The stable doors were open, and she entered warily, one hand on her gun-butt. The interior was dark—no one left a lantern unattended in a barn full of hay—but enough sun shone through the doorway to show her rows of stalls, some with saddles hung on the partitions.
But there were no horses here anywhere. No horses—and no people.
She made a quick and careful circuit of the stable’s interior. The bunk in the cubby where the hostlers slept was cold, and so was the potbellied stove. She picked up the enamelware coffee pot on top of it and looked inside. The coffee had cooked down to sludge before the stove went out. Would’ve been a full pot around sundown, she mused. Looks like there wasn’t anybody left around to drink it, though. She checked the tiny house built out behind the stable—most shopkeepers lived over their stores, but the owner of a livery stable couldn’t do that. The bed was made, and there was no pot on the stove, but that was the only difference between the house and the hostler’s cubby. She shivered despite herself, and hurried back to where Nightingale stood waiting patiently.
“Not even a stable cat,” she said to him as she swung back into the saddle. “That isn’t right.”
As she headed back to the others, there was a sound Jett and Nightingale were both familiar with: the earsplitting whistle of escaping steam that meant a boiler being vented. It was clear Gibbons meant to stop here a while. Just as long as we clear out by sunset, Jett thought worriedly. She didn’t know the zombies would return with sunset—but she didn’t know they wouldn’t, either.
By the time Jett rejoined them, Gibbons had done whatever she needed to do to prepare the Auto-Tachypode for an extended period of inactivity. Deerfoot was drinking thirstily from the half-empty water trough outside the saloon, and White Fox leaned against the hitching rail glancing watchfully around himself. Jett swung down from Nightingale’s back and flipped his reins up over his saddle-horn. He shook himself all over like an enormous dog, nosed at her shoulder companionably, and ambled over to the water trough.
“This is where you were when you were attacked?” White Fox asked quietly.
Jett favored him with a sardonic smile. “Reckon that smashed window tells the tale,” she said, tipping back her Stetson.
“Then come along!” Gibbons said, jumping down from the wagon’s bench. “It is time to begin investigating your story!”
Jett opened her mouth to say it wasn’t a story, it was the unvarnished Gospel truth, and closed it again. Gibbons would find out soon enough. But when she followed Gibbons in through the saloon’s bat-wing doors, for a moment Jett doubted herself as much as Gibbons obviously did. There’d been a fight here for certain—tables and chairs were broken and overturned—but the saloon was utterly empty of both the living and the dead.
“This can’t be …,” she said slowly.
“Oh, don’t distress yourself, my good—Jett,” Gibbons said airily. “Unless one is trained in the principles of scientific observation, it’s very easy to—”
“Someone died here,” White Fox said quietly. “More than one, I think.”
He knelt in the sawdust that covered the floor. On an ordinary evening, it would have been swept out onto the street at the end of the night and fresh would have scattered before the saloon opened in the morning, but last night’s sawdust still covered the floor. It was scuffed and scattered, but in several places it had been darkened with blood—so much blood that the blood-soaked sawdust had stuck to the floor as it dried. He brushed the floor clear around the darkened places to reveal the wood was blood-soaked as well.
“Nobody bleeds that much and gets up to go dancing,” Jett said sharply.
“Still doesn’t mean they were killed by zombies!” Gibbons answered cheerfully.
“Then where in tarnation is everybody in this durned town?” Jett shouted, rounding on her. You couldn’t punch a lady, but oh, how she wanted to! “Answer me that, if you’re so smart!”
“Just because I don’t know doesn’t mean you’re right!” Gibbons shouted back, a matching fire in her own eyes.
“You want some damnyankee notion of evidence?” Jett strode across the floor to a charred crater in the plaster wall. “Here’s where the barkeep put both barrels into one’a those things!” She spied something on the floor and pounced on it. “And here’s the axe he tried next!” The blade was still clean.
“Post hoc ergo propter hoc—all that proves is that there was a saloon brawl,” Gibbons answered, her eyes flashing dangerously.
After this, therefore because of this. Jett wondered if it would improve Gibbons’s opinion of her to know Jett was probably as fluent in Latin as she was. It hadn’t been considered ‘feminine’ for a girl to have much book-learning, but as the lone girl on an isolated plantation, Jett had shared everything with her brothers, including their school-days.
“If you say so,” Jett answered, throwing up her hands. She turned to step out onto the street again—zombies or no zombies, the deserted saloon gave her the willies—but she suddenly noticed something. “Hey. Where’d White Fox get to?”
The indignantly baffled look on Gibbons’s face did much to restore Jett’s good humor, even if it did nothing to answer her question. She was about to suggest they go looking for him—she had no intention of leaving Gibbons alone, even if Alsop seemed deserted—when White Fox walked in through the doorway that led to the saloon’s back room.
“There’s no one upstairs,” he said. “All the rooms are empty.”
“Then the whole place is empty,” Gibbons said briskly. “Let’s keep looking.”
The main street of Alsop contained a general store, a dining parlor and boarding house, a feed and grain, a bank, a telegraph and post office, a newspaper office, and a jail. The church was about a mile outside of town, and a few houses—probably owned by the few citizens of Alsop who did not live above or behind their businesses or workplaces—formed a ragged line between the church and the town. Jett had already checked the livery stable, and the church was far enough away that the three of them were in unspoken agreement to save it for last. By the time they’d checked the first few establishments, it was clear there was no one at all in Alsop.
The three of them split up to search more quickly. Jett frowned as she gazed around the general store. When the sun set, Jett intended to be far away from Alsop. What she found almost more unsettling than the complete absence of living things was the fact that nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. Just walked off and locked everything up behind them when they did. She’d had to smash the glass pane in the door to get in.
No. Wait, she thought. I saw those things come walking out this door last night plain as day.
Maybe the people of Alsop were still here. Hiding. They might not have come out for the noise of Gibbons’s steam-driven whirligig, but …
She drew her pistol and ran out into the street. Pointing its barrel skyward, she pulled the trigger over and over again. Gibbons and White Fox came running at the
sound of gunfire, staring at her incredulously.
“Wait,” Jett said urgently, before either of them could speak. The three of them stood in silence for several seconds. And then—faint and distant—they heard the sound of shouting.
The shouting continued, indistinct but vigorous, and they finally traced it to its source—the jail. Jett stepped in front of Gibbons and opened the door, gun drawn.
“Well it’s about time!” the man in the cell said irritably. “Where’s Sheriff Mitchell? He was supposed to give me my breakfast—not to mention my supper!—and let me out of here hours ago!”
The cell’s occupant was unshaven and disheveled, his long silver hair curling down over his shoulders. He wore a frock coat and a brocade vest, though the string tie and starched collar that should have completed the outfit were missing—but even though he looked disreputable, he was clean.
“First things first,” Gibbons said crisply, stepping around Jett and walking up to the door. “Who are you?”
“Finlay Maxwell,” the man answered, drawing himself up proudly. “I have the honor and privilege to be the Town Drunk of this fine metropolis, a position I have held for the last four years. It is a sign of civilization for a society to be able to support truly useless individuals such as I.”
“Don’t seem like there’d be much money in being a drunk,” Jett said quickly. If Gibbons decided to lecture Maxwell on the evils of drink, they’d never get anything out of him.
“Dear sir, I am an actor by profession,” Maxwell said haughtily. “A—dare I say it—a celebrated thespian who has performed before the crowned heads of Europe! It was the most trifling misunderstanding about the disposition of the receipts from our highly successful western engagement that caused my theatrical troupe to decamp without me.”
“A trifling misunderstanding, I’m certain,” Gibbons said dryly. “But certainly they didn’t lock you up here when they left.”
“Certainly not, my good woman. I do not scruple to admit that—every now and then—I am forced to rely on Sheriff Mitchell’s kind hospitality. And yesterday was one such occasion. I had barely arisen from my healing slumber in the embrace of the grape when the night was made clangorous with the sound of guns. Naturally, Sheriff Mitchell and his minion, the worthy Deputy Aldine, sallied forth to deal with the fuss, never to return. And what I saw thereafter I can barely credit.” He paused dramatically.
Novel - Dead Reckoning (with Rosemary Edghill) Page 4