Dreadnought

“The line,” she guessed.

He nodded. “It’s coming, one way or t’other. Our boys is go

“I heard they brought a walker to the fight last night,” Mercy fished.

He snapped, “And we brought ours, and brought theirs down. They think they got a foothold, though, so they sneaking in around Raccoon and lining up behind Signal,” he said, meaning that the Union was creeping around from the mountains to the west and north.

“I heard they took the Dreadnought out of play,” said the boy as he went back to discarding his papers. “I heard they took it back north, or maybe east, to feed another cracker line. Maybe they won’t come no closer, not without their big old engine to beef ’em up.”

She said, “Dreadnought. That’s the engine they used to move the walker, ain’t it?”

The magazine man said, “Yeah, they use it to tote around their biggest war toys.” He sat on the back of the cart, dipping it lower on its axle. “You see, miss, what they done is, they built themselves the biggest, meanest engine they could imagine, and then they trussed it up with enough armor and artillery to be a real war machine. Ready to go from place to place, easy as anything else that rolls along a line.” He made a little gesture, like a man playing with a child’s cars on a carpet railway.

“It’s a monster,” said the boy.

“It’s a fine piece of engineering,” the man countered. “But it’s only an engine-and just one engine, at that. Even if they brought it here, to Fort Chattanooga, and used it to try and rout the lot of us straight back across the Georgia state line, it wouldn’t do no good.”

Mercy asked, “And why is that?”

He pointed a finger at her and said, “Because I don’t give two pebbles of squirrel shit how awesome the Dreadnought is. This-here is the proper rail exchange for everything east of Houston and north of Tallahassee. We got enough engines here to run it out on a rail.” He chuckled at his own joke. “It can’t take on all of us, not all at once. Not here. This-here city is made of rails, miss. It’s made of steel, and coal, and sweat, and no one train is going to come here and change nothing. ’Sides,” he added. “Monster or no, it can’t run across the street, or waltz up a rock wall and bust a line into a mountain.”

“That’s what the walkers are for,” the boy chimed in.

“Yeah, well.” The man spit a gob of tobacco into the street. “They only got a handful of those, and after last night, they’re down one. We got half a dozen, and ours are pushed by Texas crude, not by old-fashioned steam. It’s the way of the future!” he assured Mercy. “This city, right here. This is where the future puts its feet on the ground and starts kicking Yankee ass. Right here,” he emphasized, and waggled his rear end off the edge of the cart. He hit the ground with a whump, and reached for the last pile or two of papers. He pointed his finger back at her one more time and said, “But for now, I think ladies ought to find their way out of the city limits. Things might get worse before they line up again.”

Then he brought the gate up on the cart with a satisfied slam, tipped his hat in salutation, and took the reins of the mule who was hitched up to it, leading the whole setup away.

Mercy wandered back toward the St. George and thanked the man at the desk when he indicated that supper was well under way. She settled for what she found there, then returned to the safety of her room.

Once there, she took inventory of what she had left, stacking her money in discrete piles. “Lord Almighty,” she said aloud. “This is going to be one hell of a mess, Daddy.”

The word startled her. She’d never called her stepfather anything but “Father,” and she could hardly remember Jeremiah Granville Swakhammer, except from her mother’s disappointment. In the years since he’d left them both, she’d heard more about him than she’d ever personally experienced-and what she’d heard had run the gamut, depending on the speaker.

She knew he was a big man, and uncommonly strong, and not terribly well educated-but none too stupid, either. She knew he was fu

But the game eluded her. The memory stayed sharp, but contained few details.

And it wasn’t enough to tell her why she was doing this. Not really.

It’d been a hard enough crawl already, just from Richmond to the bottommost side of Te

“I don’t know,” she said to the small piles of money, and the new stockings and gloves and toiletries laid out across the bed, “I guess now that Phillip’s gone, I just don’t have anywhere to go. Or, at least,” she amended the sentiment with a catch in her throat, “I don’t have anywhere I’ve gotta be.”

She repacked everything, rolling the cloth items tightly and arranging the rest carefully, cramming it all into the medical satchel that she hadn’t let out of her sight since leaving the hospital. Then she went downstairs and left a note asking to be roused for breakfast, and settled down for a badly needed night of sleep.

She dreamed of Phillip’s corpse, friendly and waving a handkerchief from the train platform, seeing her off as she left him for parts unknown. And she awoke in the night with a sob, clutching her chest, her face covered in tears.

Seven

It had been dark when she first entered the Fort at Chattanooga, and she hadn’t noticed the gates. She knew she’d dozed, but she must’ve been damn near dead asleep to have missed them-or so she decided, as the train dragged her through them at a swift crawl, tugging the whole line of cars through a pair of vast steel portals. They rose so far up into the sky that if Mercy craned her neck to see out the window, she could just barely make out the tops of the things-and the guards who paced back and forth there-before the train had successfully threaded through them. Afterwards, the massive hydraulic hinges crushed the mechanical doors shut once more with a grinding of metal and hissing of steam that could be heard even over the engine and the clacking of the wheels being vigorously pumped along the rails.

The engine on Mercy’s new train was called Virginia Lightning. Its hand-painted letters had caught her eye as she boarded the first car in the line, standing out in green and white against the matte black body of the engine. She’d be traveling in the first class compartment, for all that she hadn’t the money to afford it. But it was either that, the colored car, or nothing at all-or so she’d been informed at the ticket counter. It had been dumb luck that assigned her to the Pullman; a pair of ragged soldiers had tottered along, and one of them recognized her as the woman who’d done her best to save the colonel, who still clung to life somewhere, en route to either a proper hospital or a Christian burial. Between them, the two gray-clad boys had rustled through their pockets and pulled out enough money to grant the nurse the upgrade, against her feeble protests.

So she was to ride in the fancy Pullman car, all the way to Memphis.