Novel - Dead Reckoning (with Rosemary Edghill)

by Mercedes Lackey

  To distract herself, she went down to the livery stable to check on Nightingale. He regarded her with disgust from the far end of the corral. He’d probably run out of the stable when Gibbons was moving her buggy.

  “Don’t look at me,” Jett told him. “I didn’t build it.”

  But she dragged a bale of hay out into the corral for him, then brought out a bucket of oats. The water trough here was dry, so then she had to go up to the town pump and carry more buckets of water until it was full. When she was done, she was as hot and sweaty as if she’d never had a bath at all. The water barrel at the back of the stable was closer—there were water barrels under every drain spout in town—but this late in the spring the water in them was stale and brackish. It would do for cleaning and bathing, but it wasn’t something a body would drink if they had a choice.

  She’d taken off her coat and her vest before she started carrying water. Now she dipped up a bucketful from the trough and poured it over her head. It was warmer than her bathwater had been, and made her linen shirt cling to every part of her, but there wasn’t anyone here to see. When she set the bucket down, Nightingale walked up to her and began nudging her in the chest. He knew buckets meant baths, and he always thought it was hilarious to knock her flat in the dust when she was soaking wet.

  She was laughing, threatening to lock him in the barn and sell the barn, when she heard Gibbons cry out and heard the sound of breaking glass.

  She was wrong—I was wrong—the salt didn’t kill it, it just made it get up in the daytime! Jett thought wildly as she ran toward the saloon. She’d reached the Auto-Tachypode when she smelled a foul odor. Not like zombie. Like burning hair and vinegar.

  “Gibbons!” she shouted. There was no answer, and sucking in a lungful of that stink made her start to cough. She hauled her shirt out of her pants and dragged it off. Her neckerchief was in her coat, and her coat wasn’t here. This would have to do. She held it over her face as she ran into the saloon.

  The zombie was still where she’d left it, and now the bar was covered with jars and copper tubing. The contraption looked a little like a still at Court Oak she’d never been supposed to know anything about, and a lot like nothing she’d ever seen before.

  And Gibbons was lying on the floor in front of it, unconscious.

  “Dammit!” Jett’s eyes were watering as if the room were filled with smoke. Even breathing through the wet muslin, her throat burned and she desperately wanted to cough. This was no time to stand around and ask what was going on. She ran across the floor to Gibbons, then wrapped a fist in Gibbons’s collar and pulled. The twill fabric was sturdy. It held. And Gibbons didn’t weigh quite as much as the late Finlay Maxwell had.

  Jett hauled the unconscious Gibbons outside, but she didn’t stop there—the air outside the saloon was nearly as foul as the air inside it. She felt sick and dizzy, but she dragged Gibbons along the street until dark spots danced in front of her eyes, then dropped her and clung to one of the newel posts, gasping for air. It didn’t help much. The dizziness wasn’t fading. Jett sat down on the edge of the sidewalk and leaned back against the rail, gasping for breath.

  I learned how to pretend-swoon before I was fourteen, she thought, years before I ever fainted for real, because Tante Mère said men liked delicate females. I don’t think they’d like ’em near so much if they knew what it’s really like. She pressed the cold of her damp shirt against her face and neck for a moment, then struggled back into it. Can’t leave her lying out in the sun like that, she thought tiredly, and went to pull Gibbons into the small shade of the sidewalk.

  Gibbons began to stir even while Jett was moving her. She sat up weakly and began to cough.

  “You just stay where you are,” Jett said, but Gibbons had already dragged herself to her feet using the hitching rail, then staggered to the sidewalk steps to sit. Her hair had come partway out of its neat bun, and was a halo of gold-touched fire around her flushed face. Jett repressed an automatic twinge of envy. If she’d had Gibbons’s looks, she would have had all the boys in Orleans Parish coming around.

  In a time that was over. In a place that was gone. I’ve thought more about home this week than I have in the past two years! she thought angrily. What’s wrong with me?

  “What happened?” she demanded. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Nothing!” Gibbons protested automatically. “Nothing that should have caused … what did happen?”

  “Durned if I know,” Jett answered. “I heard you yelp and something broke. I came running. Whatever it was, it sure stinks.”

  “I was distilling some of the whiskey from the saloon,” Gibbons said. She coughed again, experimentally, and then began taking her hair down to put it up again. “I’d brought the spirit lamps in from my wagon. They burn alcohol, not kerosene. They’re a lot brighter, and I wanted plenty of light to autopsy Mister Maxwell. But I was running low on fuel for them.”

  “Whiskey’s already alcohol,” Jett pointed out.

  “It isn’t pure alcohol,” Gibbons said. “That’s why I was distilling it.” She pulled herself to her feet, clinging to the post for support. “I need to find out what was in that whiskey.”

  “You just hold your horses,” Jett said. “Let me get some air through there first. I’m not hauling you out of there twice.”

  She got to her feet, determined not to show a single sign of weakness Gibbons could use as an excuse to go with her, and walked down the street to the nearest alley. The buildings in Alsop hadn’t all been built at the same time, and most of them didn’t share a common wall. A fire could sweep through the wood buildings of an entire town in hours, and there was little way to stop its spread except by wetting down the wood of the adjoining buildings.

  Jett hated fire.

  She found the back door of the saloon and pulled it open, kicking a rock into place to serve as a doorstop. From the marks on the wood, the rock had served this purpose before. She could see straight through the building to the street. The saloon had double doors that could be closed behind the batwing doors in the unlikely event the saloon was ever closed for business. It was just as well Gibbons hadn’t shut them. Or tacked a blanket over that window I broke, Jett thought. Those things had probably saved her life.

  She got back to the street just in time to intercept Gibbons.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said firmly, taking Gibbons by the arm. “This dangfool science of yours can wait half an hour or so.”

  She hustled Gibbons over to the bench in front of the General Merchandise and pulled out her watch. When Gibbons started to get up again, Jett took off her Stetson and walloped her with it.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Gibbons said huffily.

  “Yeah, you could have taken it up with the angels if I hadn’t been here,” Jett said. “I have no notion how you managed to live this long without a nursemaid, I swear.”

  “I am not a child, you know!” Gibbons said.

  “Nope,” Jett said agreeably. “Just an idiot.”

  Gibbons folded her arms across her chest and glared.

  * * *

  If one thing headed the list of things Gibbons truly abominated, it was the notion of being managed and minded and nursemaided. Those persons who appointed themselves to such a role usually did so as a first step to unleashing a long list of proscriptions, and Gibbons’s entire life had been spent in a systematic overthrow of such things. Ladies did not wear Rational Dress. Ladies did not engage in intellectual pursuits. Ladies did not invent things. Ladies did not go anywhere without a suitable—meaning male—escort.

  There were times Gibbons wondered whether her life would have been different if her mother had survived her birth. Jacob Saltinstall Gibbons had shattered convention—and earned the undying loathing of his Boston family—by marrying one of his servants. And not even his housekeeper, which the Gibbons family would not have approved of either, but at least he would have been marrying an upper servant, but one of his Irish housemaids. That marr
iage had been the true reason his family had banished Jacob Gibbons to Chicago, but Mary Gibbons—née Maire Caithleen Donovan of County Cork, Ireland—had not lived to see her second wedding anniversary.

  Perhaps Gibbons’s mother had been as much an unconventional freethinker as her father was. Perhaps the three of them would have lived an ideal, if eccentric, life together. There was no way to know. Gibbons was merely thankful that her father—instead of returning to Boston to hand his child over to one of his female relatives to raise—had engaged a nurse and gone west.

  Gibbons’s childhood had been a happy one, spent doing essentially as she pleased, for though her father should have, by convention, hired a governess to succeed the nurse, he never had. Gibbons suspected it had simply slipped his mind. But if there’d been no governess standing over her to tell her what a “lady” ought to do and not do, there’d been plenty of other women eager to prove their worthiness to become the second Mrs. Gibbons by standing as moral preceptor to his daughter. Mister Gibbons had never noticed their overtures, and they’d only annoyed their target.

  By rights, Jett’s fussing should have irritated Gibbons as much as every other female’s had. No matter how good Jett’s masquerade was, Gibbons could see that was what it was: an act. Jett Gallatin might live as a man, but she was no more an emancipated modern woman than any simpering corset-wearing creature whose only ambition was to marry a man—any man!—and raise his children.

  On the other hand …

  Jett might be as ignorant as a troglodyte and utterly unemancipated, but she’d never once demanded Gibbons stop doing something on the grounds of her gender. It was true, Gibbons reflected, that Jett called her an idiot at least once a day and had no interest in learning anything Gibbons strove to teach her, but Gibbons suspected Jett treated everyone that way. In fact … in fact, if Gibbons had been a young man and Jett had found her—him—unconscious on the floor, Jett probably would have called him a fool and an idiot and walloped him with her hat. I only wish she were more interested in the life of the mind! Gibbons thought with a flash of irritation. It would be nice to be able to talk with someone who was not constantly lecturing me on my unfeminine behavior. Her father, of course, barely noticed she was a girl. But to say Jacob Gibbons was unworldly was to understate the case. And even dear Doctor Gordon had occasionally hinted gently that the freedom Gibbons enjoyed might not be … entirely suitable.

  “Time’s up,” Jett said, closing her watch and getting to her feet. “Let’s go see what tried to kill you this time.”

  * * *

  Jett entered the saloon warily—really, must she prowl everywhere?—insisting Gibbons stay behind her. As if some odd chemical reaction is something she can shoot! But once Jett had satisfied herself there was nothing here that was going to pounce on her, she excused herself and left Gibbons alone in the saloon.

  There was still a faint acrid odor hanging in the air. Since the only thing Gibbons had been doing had been distilling whiskey, the source must be the whiskey. But she’d performed the same distillation hundreds of times with no ill effects. So this whiskey must be different.

  She just had to find out how.

  She’d unpacked most of her equipment from the Auto-Tachypode already. She removed her microscope from its padded wooden case. It was only the work of minutes to fill a pair of her spirit lamps with the last of the pure (and safe) distillate and prepare a slide.

  Nothing.

  She took samples from the body of the zombie—hair, tissue, saliva, blood—and examined them beneath her lens.

  Still nothing.

  She returned to the whiskey and performed a flame reduction test. All that did was tell her there was something in it, for it released the same acrid scent as before, though in a much smaller quantity. Gibbons spared a moment’s wistful longing for her laboratory in the basement of the Russian Hill townhouse—she would have liked to be able to administer this whiskey to one of her laboratory rats to see if it, too, would return from the dead. At least she had a lot of tainted whiskey, because the next step was to attempt to separate the contaminants from the whiskey for further analysis.

  * * *

  “I have it,” she breathed in triumph. She’d nearly despaired as method after method had failed to yield the facts she sought. But she’d persevered. And gained victory.

  “There’s coffee,” Jett said. “I made up some food, too. A couple of hours ago.”

  “I know how he’s making the zombies,” Gibbons said, turning around.

  Jett was sitting at one of the two tables near the door. There was a deck of cards spread out on the table beside a coffee mug. On the other table was an enamelware coffeepot, a cookpot, a plate covered with a cloth, and a clean place setting. Jett had obviously returned to the saloon and been here for some time. The wonder wasn’t that Gibbons hadn’t noticed—she could be entirely single-minded in pursuit of a mystery—but that Jett’s presence hadn’t distracted her.

  “It’s probably cold by now,” Jett added.

  “Don’t you care about what I’ve found?” Gibbons demanded, delight fading into her usual irritation with Jett’s obtuseness.

  “Sure I do. But in case you haven’t noticed, the sun’s about to set, so I don’t guess anyone’s riding out to Jerusalem’s Wall right now. And you haven’t eaten a thing since yesterday.”

  “I ate … breakfast?” Gibbons said doubtfully.

  “Yesterday, maybe. I can put it back on the fire if—”

  “No, this is fine,” Gibbons said, abruptly aware of her growling stomach. She walked over to the table and sat down. Jett restacked the deck with a quick economical motion and joined her.

  Gibbons filled her bowl with beans and bacon and poured herself a cup of coffee. She added a generous splash of milk, stirred, and sipped it. It was tepid (and boiled, since the arcanum of the percolator was apparently beyond Jett), but coffee was coffee. She uncovered the plate of tortillas, scooped some of the beans into one, and talked as she ate.

  “I’m certain you have little interest in how I arrived at my conclusions, but I assure you they’re correct. All the whiskey here has—I believe—been adulterated. It was those contaminants that turned Finlay Maxwell into a revenant—though I suspect they weren’t what killed him.”

  “He fell over dead!” Jett protested. “We all saw him! Or heard him at least.”

  Gibbons shook her head. “I don’t think so. When he left the jail—the morning you and White Fox went to Jerusalem’s Wall—he came straight here and started drinking.”

  “Wouldn’t’ve been anyone to stop him,” Jett agreed, frowning.

  “Exactly! And as a confirmed drunkard, his body was sufficiently adapted to the use of alcohol for him to remain conscious long enough to drink himself—literally—to death. It’s possible to drink enough alcohol that one stops breathing, you know,” she added, since Jett was still looking puzzled. “The effects are similar to a fatal overdose of laudanum.”

  “I guess I just don’t know the right people,” Jett commented dryly. “All I ever heard tell of was someone getting outside of enough whiskey to pass out.”

  “I admit it could be an expensive matter to drink yourself to death quickly,” Gibbons agreed, “and a dipsomaniac rarely has unrestricted access to liquor, since they are usually impoverished as well. But that is beside the point! Imagine it, if you will. Maxwell, for the first time in his life, had all the liquor he could pour down his throat. So he did just that. Perhaps he drank as much from fear of what he had seen—perhaps because once he realized that no one could stop him, it was the first and only thing he wanted to do. Maxwell drank enough to poison himself to death—and rose from the dead because of what else was in those bottles. The first component I isolated was datura—you may know it as Jimsonweed—but while I am well aware illicit whiskey is sometimes adulterated with Jimsonweed to increase its effect—since datura can cause hallucinations and a number of other symptoms—it cannot cause an individual to rise from the d
ead. But then I also discovered the presence of maculotoxin!”

  “‘Defiling poison’?” Jett said, stumbling through the Latin credibly well, much to Gibbons’s surprise.

  “In layman’s terms, puffer fish toxin,” Gibbons said. “The puffer fish is a species of fish found only in tropical waters. In China and Japan they are considered a great delicacy, even though many parts of the fish are poisonous.” She paused, brooding. “I do not think these two compounds can wholly account for … zombification … but I cannot discover what else may be present with the limited equipment I have.”

  Gibbons sighed as Jett directed a speaking glance toward the interior of the saloon, not even bothering with her anticipated gibe about “poisonous.” It probably looked to her as if there was plenty of equipment here. Gibbons thought mournfully of her stock of reagents and catalysts, her rotary centrifuge, her good microscope. With the contents of her lab, she could have discovered every foreign element introduced into the whiskey.

  “I guess we’ve got enough zombies that we don’t need to make any more,” Jett said at last. “Can we bury Mister Maxwell now?”

  “I still need to find out why salt cured—or killed—him!” Gibbons protested. “Now that we know Brother Shepherd is drugging his targets with something that allows him to turn them into zombies once they die!”

  “Look here,” Jett said, her voice quiet and serious. “In case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t any ice within five hundred miles. That body is already going green. Another day in this heat and it’s going to turn black and bust open. It’s going to stink, it’s going to attract vultures, and for all I know, it’ll make us sick. I don’t know what you’re looking to find, but we need to get him into the ground.”

  Gibbons wanted to protest. But this wasn’t civilization. In a city she would have been able to buy a dozen five-pound blocks of ice at high summer, let alone in April—enough ice to refrigerate a specimen until she was finished with it. Here on the frontier, an autopsy was a race against time—and she’d lost too much time already.