Straight Outta Deadwood

by David Boop

  There was no pity or understanding in the plague doctor’s face, but no anger either. He was a blank slate, and Leon saw only his own belligerence reflected back in the man’s black eyes. “There was a choleric outbreak in Owlwood, of unusual proportions. This requires investigation. You will very likely die there, and deservedly so.”

  Leon considered the plague doctor’s face, still round with baby fat. “And you’ll be stuck. Pissed someone off, did you?”

  They did not speak again until they reached Owlwood.

  * * *

  Owlwood was a hell-on-wheels town, the sort made of equal parts rail workers, drifters, gamblers, and whores. These spur towns sucked up rail company money like milk from a tit, kept afloat only to justify building the line out this far into the godforsaken plains. Hell, the first building visible, across from the platform that would someday be a rail depot—if the town didn’t just dry up and blow away—was a saloon that should have been belching gun smoke and whiskey fumes and shouting drunks out into the packed dirt that stood in for a street.

  Except that Owlwood lay silent as a crypt, save for the hiss of wind in dry grass, the metallic squeal of an unoiled windmill, the hum of flies. The trees that presumably gave the town its name were a dark smudge on the horizon, marking the Owl River. As the wind shifted toward the locomotive, it carried the stink, the sour throat-choke of rot in the sun.

  Leon felt the locomotive’s unease and offered it comfort he did not feel. It was probably for the best that he needed to lay the great machine down; he sang it the traditional lullaby with a throat scratchy with death scent and pulled his spark back into its cage to rest.

  The plague doctor stood on the platform, his arms crossed over his round chest, his smooth chin dipped.

  Leon rasped at the stubble on his own and wondered if he could ask for a shave, but he doubted it. Traitors didn’t get sharp objects.

  “They all dead?” he asked.

  “Not all,” the plague doctor said. “There’s still life in the town. I’ve come in time.” He pulled a set of manacles from his pocket.

  “Is that necessary?” Leon asked.

  “I’ll leave you out in the sun, if you prefer.”

  “I could help you.”

  “I neither want nor need further aid from a traitor.”

  The urge to throw a punch tightened Leon’s fist, but he also still felt that twist in his gut. He was a dead man in so many ways, but whatever the plague doctor had done to him would probably be the worst. He let the man chain him to the platform railing, full in the sun so he could enjoy the light at least, for all the light felt thinner up in Dakota Territory.

  * * *

  Theodore ignored the stoker as he prepared himself for the hunt. Most of the supplies in his trunk would wait until he knew what exactly he was dealing with, but certain things were unquestionably required: hand mirror, silver scalpels, a few precious glass tubes for the inspection of fluids, and his mask. The plague doctor’s mask hadn’t changed much over the centuries, but for the beak being repurposed. Theodore’s training and talents in the arcane arts made him immune to all but the most evilly conceived diseases; the mask’s true purpose was to help him sniff them out. As always, he felt a curious relief settle over him as he pulled on the mask. The glass lenses of the eyes warped the world outside slightly, to a truer form. But more importantly, he felt the relief of having his face covered, the assurance that no one could now look at him and think they saw something he was not.

  It was a relief, really, to not have the soldiers trailing him. He was tired of their jokes and comments, just as he was tired of arguing with his colleagues—who had known him since he’d been delivered to the army school—what his proper name was. What a time he had come to in his life, that he was happier to travel in the company of a traitor and murderer.

  He set out into the deserted dirt swathes that stood in for the few streets of Owlwood, seeking out the signs of life he had felt at the edge of his awareness. This took him to a small house, its walls uneven and filled with gaps, at the end of one of the streets. He did not bother to knock as he went inside.

  The air was thick and close, and he smelled the sickness—and vomit, blood, and shit—along with the exhalations of the living. The back room of the house contained a bed with two Chinese women. They shivered under a thin blanket despite the heat of the day that already had sweat collecting in the small of Theodore’s back.

  One of the women opened her bloodshot brown eyes and saw him, an unsteady little scream escaping her mouth.

  “I am here to take your sickness away,” Theodore said, though she looked too ill and feverish to understand, if she even spoke English. He pulled off one glove and rested his hand on her clammy forehead, letting his awareness fall into her body. The disease was superficially like cholera, he felt immediately, but twisted into something new and even more deadly. He forced the miasma of it into a single mass and pushed that through her blood. All it took was a little flick of one of the silver scalpels to open a vein in her arm and let the filth of it ooze out, shit-brown and smoking.

  He wiped the miasma away with a bit of cloth and bound her arm up with another. When he met the woman’s narrow eyes again, they were still fever bright, but recognition lived in them now. “Where do you get your water?” he asked.

  With a shaking voice, she told him.

  * * *

  One by one, Theodore visited each shack that still had a living person in it; there weren’t so many as that. At each, he drew out sickness, asked after their water, and told them all the same thing: drink beer for now, do not touch the well, and wash yourself thoroughly. Most of the population seemed to be common laborers, Chinese salted with Irish, not unusual for this area.

  He passed by the churned, bare dirt of a mass grave, buzzing with black flies. His feet dragged a bit by the end of those visits, an unfortunate consequence of having done so much healing. But he’d known this would happen, when he’d found the discarded plea for help in the surgeon general’s wastebasket. And this was no better nor worse than what some of the more famed plague doctors of the corps had done in the past. He knew he was as strong and competent as his peers—more so, even—and this would be his ultimate proof of that fact.

  As he mounted the platform, the murderer Leon spoke to him: “Mind giving me a drink of water again?”

  He’d almost forgotten the man was there. Theodore pushed his mask up so he could wipe the sweat from his face. Loyalty to one’s part in the great machine of American progress; that lesson had been the drumbeat of his life. But Theodore couldn’t quite find it in his heart to think that a condemned man must suffer more. It did not sit well with his principles as a healer; perhaps that was why his colleagues thought him soft.

  He gave Leon the water canteen again and released one of the man’s hands so he wouldn’t have to contort himself around the railing to drink. “You about done?” Leon asked.

  The question, and the concern in it, caught Theodore off guard. “With the healing, yes. Next, I will capture the disease itself, which is best done at moonrise.”

  “You should rest until then,” Leon said.

  Motivated, Theodore was certain, by the desire to not die in agony if the plague doctor happened to collapse and leave him chained at the platform. “I’ll consider it,” he said dryly. He didn’t think he could sleep, with the presence of the disease still weighting down the air. Instead, he retreated into the engine where he could gather his materials and prepare; sunset was only a few hours away. As a happy side effect, it meant Leon could not attempt further conversation.

  * * *

  Theodore might have fallen asleep on the splintery bench in the locomotive for a short while, but the oppressive heat left him feeling suffocated. He bore his implements for the battle to come out to the town’s well; the seven silver spikes were so heavy he could only carry them two at a time.

  “I could help you with those,” Leon offered, from where he remained chained to
the railing. Theodore ignored him.

  The last thing he carried in the fading light of sunset was a bag of salt mixed with silver filings and crushed abalone shells. He used that to draw a circle around the well, adding the appropriate arcane symbols at the compass points. He lit his lantern and set it on the ground nearby, where it cast warped shadows and splashed light across the glittering white-pink salt.

  He felt the miasma as the sliver of moon rose, like the deep rumble of an earthquake, spread out in the water underground. Theodore took his one precious vial of quicksilver from his inner pocket and smashed it against the side of the well.

  The disease, drawn inexorably by power and silver and the compass points, rose from the well in a great cloud that blotted out the stars and choked off the light of Theodore’s lantern. He felt a familiarity to the structure of its form, as he had before, like it had once been cholera but had undergone some demonic transformation. Theodore picked up his hammer and the first silver spike. The miasma beat against the invisible wall made by the salt circle, shrieking and whistling at a pitch no one but a plague doctor could hear.

  He stepped across the circle, careful to keep the hem of his coat from disrupting the salt.

  The disease crashed down on him like a wave. It felt like warm treacle against the armor of his coat and mask, held at bay by the carefully etched symbols of protection on the inside of the leather. With a mighty effort, Theodore heaved the weight back and stabbed the first spike into it. Between breaths made harsh with effort, he pounded the spike through the miasma and into the ground. He recited: “I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witness, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture…”

  The miasma screamed as Theodore picked up another spike and hammered it home again and beat the doctor bruisingly on his shoulders and chest. Sweat soaked Theodore’s shirt and gathered at his chin. He tasted salt with each breath. As his muscles burned and a deep ache built in his hands, he continued, “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing…”

  Some plague doctors preferred Christian prayers, but Theodore had found the old oath more powerful to keep his mind and energies focused on the disease despite all fatigue.

  His words ran out as he took up the last of the spikes. The disease, pinned but still flapping like a malevolent sheet in unseen winds, slapped him back hard and sent him stumbling. His foot hit the salt circle and smudged it. Immediately, the black thing began to stream for the opening, stretching and thinning to snap where it was pinned. With a hoarse shout, Theodore plunged the seventh spike into the pulsing mass and struck with the hammer.

  The miasma let out one last unearthly shriek, then went still, twitching feebly. Dizzy and panting, Theodore forced himself into motion, walking around the circle widdershins seven times. The small circle felt miles across to his aching legs. At the seventh circuit, he pulled up the dregs of his power, already depleted from so much healing earlier, and took out a glass vial from his pocket, mercifully unbroken in the struggle. He touched it to the seventh spike.

  All seven of the spikes went black with tarnish. The disease vanished in a soundless explosion that threatened to knock Theodore flat. When he held the vial up, it was filled with something dark and viscous and undeniably evil.

  And now that he could see it so concentrated, it carried a terrible veneer of familiarity.

  Sickened, he took up his lantern and stumbled back to the rail platform.

  * * *

  “You ain’t dead, are you?” Leon asked. He knew the plague doctor wasn’t dead. He could see the man’s chest rising and falling from where he’d sprawled across the platform, seemingly too exhausted to move further. A little glass vial had tumbled from his fingers and lay nearby. No, the more important question was if he was awake.

  The answer to that seemed to be no.

  Carefully, he edged along the railing until the manacle around his one wrist caught. The plague doctor hadn’t bothered chaining his other hand back up in the afternoon. Leon was a tall man, with long arms. If he leaned as far as he could, his full weight pulling his wrist against the manacle, he could just reach the plague doctor.

  Slowly, barely daring to breathe, he began to pull the doctor’s coat aside, going for the pocket he knew contained the key.

  His gut twisted around the promised agonizing death in three days, but Leon had taken a lot of time to think, sitting out on the platform. There hadn’t been anything else to do, other than twitch flies away and watch the plague doctor’s comings and goings. He’d tried every trick he knew to ingratiate himself with the fat little bastard, and he might as well have been howling at the moon for help. So he’d concluded, sometime in the afternoon, that if he was going to die anyway, he’d take the pain if it meant not living out his last moments in a dank cellar. And who knew, maybe he could make it far enough west to get to Indian lands. Maybe if he didn’t get shot on sight, one of their shamans would be willing to help him if he told his story about the derailed train and his death sentence. It was more hope than the alternative.

  His fingers found the key. The plague doctor’s eyes flew open behind the mask and he grabbed Leon’s wrist with his leather-gloved hands. Leon jerked back, and only succeeded in dragging the man closer. It gave him a new idea: He heaved again, and they were suddenly in fighting distance, and Leon had all the advantages even if he could only use one hand. He twisted free of the plague doctor’s grasp and got his hand around the man’s throat. “Take your curse off me, you little bastard.”

  The little man mutely shook his head, his leather-coated fingers scrabbling for purchase on Leon’s arms.

  “You know I’m a killer. I’m not even going to feel sorry for notching another one of you fuckers. Take your curse off!”

  The plague doctor stopped prying at Leon’s fingers and started shaking, but it wasn’t fear—he was laughing, silent and horrible. With his high-pitched voice curiously tinny through the apparatus of his mask, he wheezed, “I know…you’re lying.”

  The cold that shot through Leon had nothing to do with magic. His grip relaxed. “The hell did you say?”

  The plague doctor pushed his mask up, revealing an expression of horrible merriment. “I know bodies. Your liver’s about drowned in drink, and that didn’t happen whilst you were locked up. You were no doubt drunk when you derailed that train. You’re no willful murderer.”

  “You’re the liar!” Leon kicked the little man, the motion halfhearted rather than savage. He felt naked before the doctor’s dark eyes. After weeks of telling the story, he’d almost convinced himself it was the truth, building himself into a new Leon who might be a hero. Now it had all collapsed like a house of cards, and the plague doctor…had stopped laughing.

  He’d propped himself up on one elbow. “Why lie about it?”

  “I was dead either way,” Leon said. Trapped in the wreckage of his train and wishing he’d died, he’d had a lot of time to think. What had stuck in his head was the last thing he’d heard, coming out of Fort Laramie—a preacher going on and on about Indian removal being wrong, shouting to be heard over a jeering crowd. Leon had added a few drunken curses of his own, not because he cared, but because he felt like shouting just then. But in the wreckage, with blood slowly soaking through his shirt, he’d found himself thinking back to the army’s so-called school where all the stokers went as soon as they were found. And he’d thought about nights hearing the kids younger than him crying and knowing some of them had come from reservations and thinking maybe they weren’t being done any favors. He’d been saved from the breakers and a short life in the mines, himself, but he’d also never seen his family again.

  And he’d wished, in those despairing, bleeding moments, he’d had the bravery to make that kind of choice, instead of just losing control of his partner locomotive on a curve, driven too fa
st by whiskey dizziness, and finding them all irreparably thrown to the earth.

  He sat down on the platform, the boards still warm from the sun. “Doesn’t matter anyway, if you put a disease in me.”

  “I might have lied, as well,” the plague doctor said. He took the key from his coat pocket and offered it over to Leon.

  “Fuck you.” But Leon took it and undid the manacles. He chafed his sore wrist as he glared at the little man. It would serve him right if he gave him another good kick and ran off with the locomotive now. “I’m going to fucking leave you here.”

  The plague doctor picked up the vial from platform and laid back down, holding it toward the moon like he might see through it. It was black as pitch in his hand. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Your balls,” Leon said, sullenly.

  But the plague doctor didn’t even seem to be listening to him. “The disease I took from the well. And I know that it was put there by the hand of man. Now that I have it, I can tell that it isn’t natural. It was…modified. By another plague doctor of the Army on the Frontier. Not the surgeon general himself, I don’t think…it doesn’t smell of him. But one of his close confidantes.”

  “You can do that?” As if the plague doctors weren’t terrifying enough already.

  “Oh yes. Though it’s a terrible, evil thing to do. We’re supposed to use our power and knowledge to heal, never to hurt. And yet.” The plague doctor turned the vial in his hand. “Our people have been friends with disease since we first set foot in America, you know.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Leon asked. Why was the man telling him this—and why did he care?

  “I’m supposed to bring it back to the medical corps, to be examined and classified and cured.”

  “But?”

  “But I’m not inclined to violate my oath and help turn another unseen monster loose.”