Boneshaker

“That’s a good thought,” Angeline said approvingly. “He’ll be easier to take down than carry up, and if you can get him in a cart, you can roll him all the way back to the Vaults without a lot of trouble.”

“If, if, and if. How are we going to —?” Briar said.

Lucy interrupted. “Give me one minute,” she said. She added to Swakhammer in particular, “Don’t you go anywhere, you big old bastard. You hang on. I’ll be right back.”

If he heard her, he didn’t give any indication of it. His breathing was so shallow it could scarcely be detected, and the twitching of his pupils beneath his eyelids had slowed to a faint roll, corner to corner.

Half a minute later Lucy returned with Squiddy, Frank, and Allen, if Briar remembered the other men’s names correctly. Frank didn’t look so hot. He had a black eye so broad that it nearly made a black nose and a black forehead too; and Allen was nursing a hand that had been injured in some way. But between them, they crawled into the hole, lifted up the armored man, and began to half tow, half carry him out and down.

Lucy said, “We can take him to the lift. At the bottom level, we ought to find mining carts — this is where all the lines ended when Mi

“Where will we take him?” Squiddy asked. “He needs a doctor, but—”

And that’s when they noticed the bloody puddle with a masked villain lying dead at its center.

“Jesus. He’s dead, ain’t he?” Frank asked with awe.

“He’s dead, and thank Jesus for it,” Angeline told him. She reached for one of Swakhammer’s dangling feet — the one that did not appear broken. She picked it up and propped it over her shoulder. “I’ll help you carry him. I could use a peek from a doctor myself,” she confessed. “But this corner of of Jeremiah ain’t so heavy. I can help.”

“I know a man,” Lucy said. “He’s an old Chinaman who lives close to here. It’s not medicine like the kind you’re used to, but it’s medicine all the same, and right now, you’ll both have to take what you can get.”

“The medicine I’m used to?” Allen grumbled. “I’d sooner die, if you want the truth.”

“Swakhammer’d maybe rather die than get cleaned up by a Chinaman,” Lucy said as she used her uncommonly strong mechanical arm to brace Jeremiah’s back. “He’s scared to death of them. But I’m willing to scare him if it keeps him in one piece.”

“Momma?”

“What, Zeke?”

“What about us?”

Briar hesitated, though she dared not hesitate long. Jeremiah Swakhammer was being toted away under the straining backs of his friends, and he was leaving a dripping blood trail like a ball of yarn unspooling behind them. Upstairs the sounds of rotters moaning and stomping continued. Their infuriated, starving demands grew louder and louder as their numbers climbed, and they struggled to find their way inside the pried-open cra

“They’re everywhere,” Briar said, not really answering his question.

“Down’s going to be as bad as up. I don’t know how this room has stayed so clear,” Lucy said with a grunt. “Where’s the Daisy?”

“Here!” Briar said quickly, like she’d had the same thought at the very same moment. The massive shoulder ca

“Roughly. Turn that knob there, on the left. Turn it all the way up; we’re going to need all the juice that thing can give us.”

“Done. Now what?”

“Now it’s got to warm up. Jeremiah says it has to collect its energy. It gathers up electricity in order to fire. Take it with us — come along, come over to the lift. Fire it inside the lift — that’ll be the best place, don’t you think?”

“You’re right,” Briar said. “The sound will carry from floor to floor, not just the one. That will work, if we can get to the lift.” With that thought, she handed the Daisy to Zeke, who strained to hold it. “Take this,” she told him. “I’m going to go ahead and clear the hallway. There were rotters there before; they might be there still.”

She readied the Spencer and ran ahead of the clot who carried Swakhammer, and ahead of her own son, whose back was bent backward nearly double as he tried to balance his body’s weight against the weight of the gun.

Briar kicked open the stairwell corridor and charged down unopposed.

“Stairway’s clear!” she shouted to the group behind her. “Zeke, come ahead of them with that gun! Lucy — how long until it’s warmed up properly? It ain’t been fired lately. Please tell me it’s not a quarter of an hour!”

“Not if he didn’t fire it. Just give it a minute,” the answer dribbled down through the stairwell.

Briar didn’t hear the last part. The corridor on the guest floor was peppered lightly with rotters in varying states of gruesome decay. She counted five of them, shambling between the bodies of their comrades and gnawing on the limbs of more freshly fallen men. Thus distracted, they barely noticed Briar, who picked them off quickly, one after the other.

The floor was cluttered with limbs that ought to stink, but then she remembered that she was still wearing her mask and that’s why she could only smell the charcoal and rubber seals. For the first time since arriving, she was glad for the singular odor of her own face.

Here and there an arm had fallen away from pure decomposition; and over there in a corner, the decapitated forms of other seminaked, putrefying corpses were collected as they’d toppled. It bothered her for a moment, wondering who’d decapitated them. But then she decided that she did not care and it did not matter. All the living — even those who fought amongst themselves — had a common enemy in the rotters, and whoever had separated those heads from those bodies had her gratitude.

She kicked at the limbs she could easily move, trying to clear a path and test the state of the prone and prostrate forms. One faker opened its lone remaining eyelid and bared its teeth, which Briar promptly shot out of its face.

Zeke popped out from the stairwell corridor with the Daisy shoved behind his neck, his arms draped over it so he could support it like a set of stocks. “Momma, what are we going to do?” he asked with real urgency, and Briar heard a question that she wasn’t quite prepared to answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we need to get out of here, that’s plain enough. We’ll start with that.”

“Are we going with them? To Chinatown?”

“No, don’t,” Angeline said.

She was the one who emerged first from the stairwell, still bearing Swakhammer’s leg over her shoulder. Behind her came Frank with the other leg, then Squiddy and Lucy with the rest of the unconscious man borne between them.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Get yourself to the fort. Go to that ship, the one they fixed there. It ought to be ready to fly,” Angeline added, each word abbreviated and stressed with her own exhaustion. “It’ll take you out.”

“Out of the city?” Zeke asked.

“Out of this part of it, at the very least,” Lucy said from underneath Jeremiah’s neck. “Help us get him on the lift, and then send us down. And as soon as we’re gone…” She shifted Jeremiah’s weight, and he let out a tiny moan. “You get on the lift, Briar Wilkes, and take that goddamned gun and fire it. And then you get up, and you get out of here.”

Still uncertain, Briar followed the first part of the order and helped maneuver the big man onto the lift. They rested him against Frank and Squiddy while Lucy poked through the levers up above. She said, “Once we hit bottom and get Jeremiah off to the tracks, I’ll send it back up, you understand? You’ll have to jump for it, ’cause it’s not going to stop.”

“I understand,” Briar said. “But I’m not sure—”