The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  “No,” said Mrs Sasa. “That will remain your job.”

  The eyes of Private Quill followed her whenever he thought there were no officers looking. Kayo avoided his eyes and didn’t go into any room with him unless someone else was there. Quill stopped leaving her gifts. That was fine as long as Isao led Marsh around the countryside, but the money that Isao made from cigarettes, chocolates, and the other knick-knacks was essential. They could never afford rice without Quill.

  One night Isao bought home fish. Kayo scolded him. “We need to save our money.”

  “We need fish,” said Isao. “Just this once.”

  “No,” said Kayo. “Quill doesn’t give me gifts to sell anymore.”

  “Well, Marsh-sensei keeps giving me money.” Isao lifted bits of fish to his mouth. “I like him. He’s been teaching me about genetic mutation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sometimes when you are irradiated, it can change you.”

  Kayo had bad dreams about that. “It has not changed you or me.”

  “You,” said Isao.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’ve mutated into a rich man.”

  “So, he thinks that this creature you’re looking for is a mutation? Not a turtle?”

  Isao shrugged. “If an animal mutates, it could become anything. You know, a dog or a tanuki could have two heads or something.” Isao puffed as he chewed the hot fish. “With Marsh-sensei in my pocket, we don’t need Quill. Besides, I think I could convince the sensei to take us to America.”

  Kayo clucked in disgust. “Marsh-sensei will leave. There is no mutated monster and he will make science somewhere else.” She chewed on her lower lip. “We need Quill.”

  “Why did he stop giving you gifts?” said Isao. “Did you make him mad?”

  “In a way,” said Kayo. She made up her mind. She pushed her fish away.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “No. You can have mine. Come with me tomorrow. I need you to translate some English for me.”

  Kayo brushed her hair and left it out, black, smooth and glossy. She borrowed a dress from one of Mrs Sasa’s girls, belted at the waist to hide how baggy it was on her. Mrs Sasa offered some lipstick, suggesting that it would make her look more adult, but Kayo didn’t want to look more adult. Part of her hoped that if she looked thirteen, Quill would go back to the way things were before.

  He didn’t though. When she entered the barracks with her laundry basket and Isao, he watched her as though she were laid on a small ceramic plate with wasabi and ginger especially for his eyes. When she explained to Isao what she thought Quill wanted and what she needed his English for, they had argued. In the end Isao had agreed to speak for her, but he was angry and ashamed.

  Isao’s narrow eyes were like a microscope, boring into Quill. “My sister says that she doesn’t mind if you date her. As long as you give us a full bag of rice and enough money to buy good food each month.”

  Quill pinched Kayo’s hair between thumb and forefinger, and rattled off something to Isao. “He says that he’ll do that.” Isao gestured with his hands as he and Quill negotiated. Kayo knew were talking about the exact amount of yen that Kayo would be worth a month.

  Then it was done. For a bag of rice and money for fruit and fish, she was a prostitute to an American. They wouldn’t go hungry. She was nauseous.

  “He says tomorrow night. Come here. I know a place in the country he can take you.”

  Quill disappeared and returned with two envelopes, one for the laundry, one with some yen for her. He outlined her jaw with a finger, kissed her on the forehead and they left. Outside, she hugged herself with her hands to stop shaking.

  Isao plucked the envelope away from her. He counted the money. “This is more than we’ve seen in a month, Kayo. More than Marsh-sensei gives me.” He put it in the dirty pocket of his shorts.

  “Give it to me,” said Kayo. “I need to buy our dinner.”

  “No,” said Isao. His face was hard. “I keep the money.”

  She raised her hand to slap him, but she put it down again, and she didn’t look at him. Her tears splattered in the dirt, her fists clenched at her sides. Kayo’s tears blinded her as she made her way back to the laundry.

  Before meeting Quill, Kayo let Mrs Sasa use rouge and lipstick to paint her face. Mrs Sasa began to talk about how Kayo might like to date other men, to make more money. She could arrange things, and keep a small fee. Kayo said no. It was bad enough that there was the fact of Quill. She would not sink that low. Mrs Sasa helped Kayo pile her hair upon her head, like a Hollywood starlet. Kayo felt very unlike herself, which made her feel better about everything. She thought about the woman she looked like on the outside. This woman was not Kayo. She was someone else.

  At the barracks, she navigated the stairs unbalanced, teetering in borrowed pumps. Quill leaned on a counter, scowling. He said something in English and pointed at his watch. Kayo knew she was late. He grabbed her wrist. Tonight he looked like a hungry tiger, and she knew that while she would walk through her life for the rest of her years, tonight Quill would eat the piece of her that was alive.

  They drove an American jeep out to a farm in the country, an old-fashioned house with torn paper jagged in the shoji doors. She and Isao had stayed here on their way from Hiroshima to Hakodate. No one was here now, the house too far from town, too old to be of use to the Americans.

  Quill spat out a wad of gum. He had also gone to some effort to look nice, his hair slicked back, and his uniform brushed and straightened, like he was some Joe taking his girl to the movies. He reached for her across the seat and pulled her in from the small of her back, and he kissed her. His tongue pushed into her mouth like a snake, a swollen thing that made her gag. She squirmed to get away. He clenched her to his body. She froze like a rabbit, only her mind active, screaming the word “no” over and over.

  He stopped and said something in English, sharp and mean. There was only hunger in his eyes. He had paid. They had a deal. With shame, she began unbuttoning the top three buttons of her dress, her fingers clumsy, her hands trembling. She thought about what she needed to do to make sure that she and Isao survived. Rice. Water. Fish.

  Quill placed a hand down her bra, over a tiny budding breast. She winced and closed her eyes. His fingers played with the hooks, and he leaned her back on the car seat. She riveted her eyes shut. He was everywhere.

  Then abruptly Quill disappeared.

  Kayo opened her eyes. Marsh dangled Quill by the collar of his shirt, his fist cocked back, ready to strike Quill like a temple bell. The akuma man stood a foot over Quill, dangerous. No, not a demon. An avenging bodhisattva.

  Behind them, Isao rocked on his feet, a satisfied cat, sunning itself in the light of success. He opened the jeep door and helped her out. “Run, Kayo. Not toward the house.”

  The ground shook with the tremor of an earthquake. Kayo jumped out of the rocking car and onto the side of her ankle, just as she had feared because of the pumps. She abandoned the shoes. The ground shook again, jarring. Over the tree line, part of mountain moved, a hill of green.

  “See,” Isao yelled over the roar that filled the night like an air-raid siren. “Good value for the money, sensei.” Isao stared at the creature, and it turned in their direction. Kayo knew then. He was controlling the monster. At least she thought he might be. Both of them what Marsh called mutations.

  Marsh dropped Quill, who jabbered some frantic English and raced toward the house. A dome, a giant green-shelled turtle, blended into the pines of the mountain so that when it slept, the people of Hakodate would not see it.

  Now the turtle was awake. Isao stared at it, standing his ground. “You are the protector of children!” he yelled. “That man is yours!”

  Marsh grabbed Kayo’s arm and they swerved out of the monster’s path. The turtle lumbered on stalky pillars. Its tail leveled trees, and its shell plowed the ground as it plodded toward Quill.

  Quill bee-l
ined for the dilapidated house. He scrambled into the crawl space. She imagined his screams drowned out by the air raid siren of the kaiju’s shrieking roar.

  Kayo heard Isao shout, or it might have been in her head. “Protect my sister. Protect Japan.”

  The turtle stamped the house in its path flat. It exploded into splinters, frames, mats and rot. Kayo couldn’t look at another explosion, more destruction. Crumbling and crunching crescendoed and died. The night became silent. The turtle turned back to Isao, who touched its beak as it bent down. Then it plodded back to the mountains, back to its sleep.

  Isao pulled Quill’s money out of his pocket, dropped it, and ground the white envelope into the grass with his dirty tennis shoe. “We will never spend a penny of that money,” he said. “You will tell Mrs Sasa you are not interested in any more of her ideas, and you will quit the laundry.”

  Kayo shook her head. “How will we live? I must do something. I must take care of you.”

  Isao took her hand. “We’ve managed before. We’ll do so now.”

  Kayo kissed his forehead, and he wiped glossy red lipstick off with the back of his hand.

  Marsh spoke in Japanese. “Kayo, are you okay?”

  Kayo clutched her dress across her chest and bowed. “Thank you very much, sensei.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Isao told me tonight we’d find a monster. We did, but we got here in time.” He crossed his arms and studied Isao. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  Isao put his hands up in the air and smiled at Marsh. “No, I haven’t. I promised you we’d find your mutation. What will the commander say when you tell him Quill is dead?”

  “That Quill wasn’t the only monster here.” Marsh ran a hand over his head. “I mean, that was an accident. That would never happen again, right?”

  “No,” said Isao. “Never.”

  The turtle once again tucked into the mountains. Kayo watched the pines shift on the mountains behind it and felt Isao’s eyes watching her, and the sleepy eyes of the turtle. She felt protected. She felt safe.

  The Wings The Lungs, The Engine The Heart

  Laurie Tom

  As Karl scrubbed his hands in the small allotment of water he could afford, he could hear the muffled scraping of Mueller pulling the heart-box out of storage on the opposite end of the operating room. Tarps dropped with a dull thud, and tiny wooden wheels wobbled as they rolled on the uneven floor.

  Karl shook his hands dry and glanced at his cane, resting against the wall beside the washbasin. Sometimes he needed it after a long day’s work, but he was fresh this afternoon, and the last thing he wanted was to be berated for his human frailties should he decline the operation.

  “Do we have enough of the right blood?” he asked Mueller.

  “I believe so, Dr Huber.”

  That did not inspire confidence in Karl, but there was little help for that. Blood transfusion was still a very new thing, and this ramshackle facility was a building apart from the rest of the infirmary. It had a special operating room for a unique purpose as ordered by the Kaiser.

  Mueller placed sheets of paper on a tray beside the operating table, depicting the means by which Karl was to connect the heart-box to his patient. He had looked over those sheets far too many times, all in preparation for this.

  The door to the operating room opened with a bang as Ostermann entered the room. “They’re almost here!” His orderly handed a set of hastily scrawled notes to Karl, who glanced at them perfunctorily before passing them on to Mueller. Mueller set them down by the heart-box instructions.

  Karl was not happy, but at least now he would be given the chance to do his job. He would have gladly operated to save the life of a soldier, regardless of whether or not he had limbs, but the army would not bring any such man here.

  Instead he had to deal with Dr Steinfeld’s monstrosity. The good doctor would not risk his neck out so close to the front, where Allied bombing could conceivably blow him into his next life. Instead Karl and a handful of others were dispatched like jackals along the Western Front, each with a godforsaken contraption to use when a suitable candidate was found.

  He needed a soldier who was dying or newly dead, but with a body that was intact enough to perform after resuscitation. And therein lay the problem. Soldiers in trenches frequently died after being blown to pieces or blistered by gas, and that was if sickness and disease did not claim them first.

  The wait had made Karl idle, and frustrated.

  Ostermann held open the door, ushering in a pair of men carrying a body on a stretcher. They moved their cargo smartly to the table, their movements quick and oddly reverent.

  Karl took command, calling for his staff to remove their patient’s clothes and wash him down; then he spoke with the men who had brought his candidate.

  “What killed him? He looks already dead.”

  “Believed to be a single bullet through the torso. He seems to have bashed his chin against the butt of his machine gun when he landed, but that should not have been fatal.”

  Karl glanced over his shoulder at the bruised face of the young man on the operating table and agreed. That would heal. If he got up again. He had hoped for someone who was dying rather than dead. He did not know how long after death Steinfeld’s heart-box would work, assuming it did at all, but aside from being already dead, he could hardly have asked for a better candidate.

  “Landed?” he asked.

  “His triplane, sir. Please,” and now the soldier’s voice wavered, “you’ve got to bring him back. A lot of men died to retrieve him.”

  Karl grimaced. “Who in God’s name is this that men would be sent to die just to bring a body back?”

  “Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen. High Command wants . . .”

  Karl had heard enough. Oh, he knew what High Command wanted, but he did not have to be happy about it.

  He ordered the soldiers out and looked at his staff, who had wheeled the heart-box over and were ready to begin. The loathsome thing was almost as wide as a soldier’s bed and tall enough to reach a man’s waist. Mueller cranked it up and it thrummed as the orderly checked the medical notes left by the soldiers and added the first pints of blood. This would be Karl’s first attempt to connect the monster, but he knew the steps. Steinfeld had gone over them far too many times. The man did not trust him.

  Karl scowled at the body on the table as he came alongside. Reaching out a gloved hand, he prodded it lightly. So this was Manfred von Richthofen. It would be his bad luck to get him. The body was cooling, but not cold. And if it was High Command that wanted Richthofen resuscitated, eyes would be on every detail if he failed. He wasn’t sure resuscitation would even be possible anymore, and throwing good lives after bad; sheer folly. What was one pilot in the grand scheme of things?

  The way High Command paraded him around one would think der Rote Kampfflieger was single-handedly winning the war. Even the British had a name for him: “the Red Baron”. Richthofen was worth more than a hundred men as far as propaganda was concerned, but how many of those men did they send to retrieve a body that may never walk again?

  Certainly he had a friendly grin and an enviable kill record, making him the face of the best Germany had to offer. People at home could rest easy knowing men like der Rote Kampfflieger were fighting the Allies in the West. He was also an arrogant noble who thought so highly of himself that against all common sense he was willing to paint his plane completely red so enemies and allies alike would know when he took to the air.

  He probably would have lived longer if he hadn’t been flying red.

  But work was work.

  Karl didn’t expect to resuscitate him, given how long he must have been dead, but he and his staff might learn something from the attempt. He expected he would get reprimanded by the military for failing to save an already dead man, but honestly what worse could they do to him? He was already working in a hospital in spitting distance of the Allied bombers.

  Richthofen recuperated wit
h an orderly on duty in his room at all hours of the day and the heart-box ever whirring at his side. For days he did not regain consciousness and the machine pumped blood for a heart that no longer beat. The bullet that had claimed Richthofen’s life had entered beneath his right armpit, punctured one lung, clipped his heart, and exited just above his left nipple. He had probably remained conscious for only moments after, and despite himself Karl was impressed to know that Richthofen had managed to land at all before succumbing to such a wound.

  The man had a way of defying the odds. Karl knew this was not the first time that Richthofen had been shot down. He had been in the hospital previously after having been shot in the head and again the man had managed to land his plane.

  Karl checked on his patient at least twice daily, more frequently when Richthofen regained consciousness, though the man was addled as though from a fever and would not remember him six hours later. As Karl waited for his patient to change one way or the other he paged through Der Rote Kampfflieger, Richthofen’s autobiography. Mueller had brought it for his own reading, but pushed it onto Karl, telling him that he might like his patient a bit better if he understood him.

  Karl only accepted it out of tedium. It was foolish for a man in his twenties to think he had a life story worth telling, but Karl supposed it was all for propaganda. People loved to know their heroes. Karl used to, but Steinfeld had turned out no hero. Famous people never lived up to being the picture that others had painted.

  Ten days after Richthofen’s arrival, he greeted Karl upon his entrance and said, “I am told that I have you to thank for reviving me.”

  Karl pulled up a chair beside him and said, “There is nothing to thank. You have an inhospitable road ahead of you.”

  The heart-box thrummed beside the bed across from Karl, a box of pumps and tubes, four of which ran to the harness around Richthofen’s torso and from there into his back. The moment the machine stopped, Richthofen’s life would end.

  And the young man seemed well aware of that, because his eyes traveled to the box on hearing Karl’s words.