Steampunked

by Joe R. Lansdale

  At this moment, John Feather’s cross finally came loose in the ground and toppled to the earth with him on top of it. He let out a howl of pain.

  Fuck that stoic red man shit.

  McCormic was first. He wore his helmet, had his oxygen tank turned on. After a moment, he turned off the oxygen and removed the helmet. He came down the flexible staircase breathing deeply of the air.

  “Very fresh,” he said.

  The Frenchman and the Russian came after him, removing their helmets.

  “I believe it ees our Earth,” said the Frenchman. “Only fugged up.”

  *****

  From where he lay, John Feather tried to yell, but found that he had lost his voice. That scream had taken it out of him. He was hoarse and weak. But if he could get their attention, whoever, whatever they were, they might help him. They might eat him too, but considering his condition, he was willing to take the chance.

  He tried to yell, but the voice just wasn’t there. He tried several times.

  The men with parts of their heads in their hands, turned away from the ship, walked around it, and headed away from him, in the direction from which he and his friends and the steam man had come.

  When they were dots in the distance, John Feather’s voice returned to him in a squeak. But it didn’t matter now. They were out of earshot.

  All he could manage was a weak “Shit.”

  *****

  The Dark Rider had a lot of fun poking Beadle’s wound, but he eventually became bored of that, left, came back with a salt shaker. He shook salt in the wound. Beadle groaned. The Moorlock hopped up and down. He hadn’t had this much fun since he’d helped eat his first-born young. The Dark Rider smiled, tried not to think of Weena.

  *****

  After lying there for a while, John Feather sat up and looked at his crucified feet. They hurt like a bitch. It took balls, but he reached down and grabbed both feet with his hands, and jerked with all his might.

  The nail groaned, came loose, but not completely. The pain that shot through John Feather was so intense he lay back down. He prayed to the Great Spirit, then to the white man’s god Jesus. He threw in a couple words for Buddha as well, even though he couldn’t remember if Buddha actually did anything or not. Wasn’t he just kind of an inspiration or something? He tried to remember the name of the Arabic god he had heard mentioned, but it wouldn’t come to him.

  Great Spirit, Jesus, Buddha, all seemed on vacation. The men carrying their heads didn’t show up either.

  John Feather sat up, took hold of his feet again, wrenched with all his might.

  This time the nail came free, and John Feather passed out.

  *****

  With pliers, one by one, the Dark Rider removed, with a slow wrench, Beadle’s toenails.

  *****

  John Feather found he could stand, but it was painful. He preferred to go forward on knuckles and knees, but that wasn’t doing his hands any good.

  Finally, using a combination of stand and crawl, he made it to the steam man, looked up at the spike in its ass, saw there was room to enter inside between shaft and passageway. Painfully, he took hold of the shaft and attempted to climb it. It was very difficult. His hands and feet hurt beyond anything he could imagine and the wounds from them slicked the stake with blood.

  He fell twice and hit the ground hard before finally rubbing dirt in his wounds and trying a third time. It was slow and deliberate. But this time he made it.

  *****

  “And this little piggy cried wee-wee-wee, all the way … HOME!”

  With that, the Dark Rider jerked out the last toenail on Beadle’s left foot.

  Beadle groaned so loud, for a moment, even the Moorlock was startled.

  “Now,” the Dark Rider said, “let’s go for the other one. What do you say?”

  Beadle was too much in pain to say anything. And besides, what would it matter? He was going to save his breath for groaning and screaming.

  *****

  Inside Steam, John Feather found water and washed the dirt from his wounds and used herbs and roots from his medicine and utility bag, applied them in a quick poultice, then bound them with ripped sheets from one of the locked cabinets. He made a breech cloth from some of the sheet, found his extra pair of soft moccasins and slid inside of them. His feet had swollen, but the leather was soft and stretched. He was able to put them on without too much trouble, and he found the cleansing and dressing had relieved the pain in his feet enough so that he could stand. It wasn’t by any means comfortable to do so, but he felt he had to.

  He tied his medicine bag around his waist, got a Webb rifle from its rack, his extra bow and quiver of forty-five thin arrows with long, steel points.

  Then he paused.

  He put the rifle, the bow and quiver of arrows aside. He looked out of Steam’s ass at the shaft that ran through it and out the neck, looked at the head balanced on top.

  John Feather climbed down inside the right leg and took a canister off the wall. He carried it to the gap in Steam’s ass and opened it, even though the action caused his hands to bleed. Inside was kerosene. He poured the kerosene down the shaft. He took flint and steel from his medicine pouch and struck up a spark that hit the soaked shaft and caused it to burst into flame. Fire ran down the length of the shaft and it began to burn.

  John Feather took wood from the sealed hoppers, built a fire in Steam’s belly.

  *****

  “Just two more to go on this foot,” the Dark Rider said, “then we start on the fingernails. Then we’re going to see if you’ve been circumcised. And if not, we’re going to do that. And if so, we’re going to do it really close, if you know what I mean.”

  “Can I have ‘em? Can I have ‘em?” the Moorlock asked.

  “You can have them, but as it looks to me, you should start on and finish your head.”

  The Moorlock grabbed the head of his brethren and began chewing on it.

  Between bites he said, “Thank you, Master. Thank you.”

  “Let’s do the right thumb first,” the Dark Rider said. “What do you say?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Beadle knew it was useless to ask for mercy from his enemy. He kept wishing he’d just pass out, but so far, no such luck. This hurt like hell, but was survivable, and therefore stretched out the possibilities. None of them good. It was made all the worse by the fact that the Dark Rider took his time. A little tug here, a little tug there, almost a tug, then a tug, easing the nails out one slow nail at a time.

  Not to mention that the Dark Rider liked to pause with his pliers to squeeze the joints themselves, or to pause and poke at the wound in his shoulder.

  The Dark Rider seemed to be having the time of his life.

  Beadle wished he could say the same.

  *****

  John Feather worked the bellows. The fire was going nicely. It wasn’t normally a wise thing to do, but John Feather doused the interior of the furnace with kerosene, and as a result, a rush of fire burst out of it and singed his eyebrows, but the wood blazed.

  John Feather checked the shaft in Steam’s ass.

  Burning nicely.

  He went back to the bellows, worked there vigorously, stoking up the flame. The water in the chambers began to heat, and John Feather continued to work the bellows. Smoke came up through Steam’s ass as the shaft blazed and caught solid.

  *****

  “Now we have the pinky on the right hand … And, there, isn’t that better just having it done with?”

  Beadle couldn’t understand what the Dark Rider was saying. He couldn’t understand because he couldn’t quit screaming.

  The Dark Rider said, “And now let’s do that lefty.”

  *****

  Vapor from the pipes pumped up and out of Steam’s headless neck. Steam toppled forward and struck the ground hard, throwing John Feather against the side of the furnace, and in that instant, John Feather realized the shaft had burned through. Slightly burned from the furnace, J
ohn Feather recovered his feet, closed the furnace door, crawled along the side of Steam and began to work the emergency controls in the mid-body of the machine. They were serviceable at best.

  Working these controls, he was able to make Steam put his hands beneath him and right himself.

  John Feather clung to a cabinet until Steam was standing straight, then he took his stance on the platform in front of the seats and moved from one position to the other, working levers, observing dials.

  It was erratic, but John Feather managed to have Steam lurch forward, find his head, and set it in place. Or almost in place. It set slightly tilted to the left.

  John Feather climbed into the head and refastened the steam cables that had come unsnapped when the head came loose. He had to replace one from the backup stock. He tried the main controls. The fall Steam had taken had affected them; they were a little rough, but they worked.

  John Feather started Steam toward the museum.

  Condensation not only came out of the hole in the steam man’s hat, but it hissed out of his eye holes and neck as well. He walked as if drunk.

  (9)

  Ruckus

  The wall came apart and Steam tore off part of the roof too. He grabbed a rip in the roof and shook it. A big block of granite fell from the ceiling, just missed Beadle on the table, passed to the left elbow of the Dark Rider, and got his Moorlock companion square, just as he was sucking an eyeball from the head he had been eating.

  Steam ducked his head and entered the remains of the museum.

  “I swore what I’d do to you Beadle,” the Dark Rider said. “And I’ll do it.”

  With that, the Dark Rider ducked under the table Beadle was strapped to, lifted it on his back, his arms outstretched, his hands turned backward to clasp the table’s sides, and with little visible effort, darted for the staircase.

  Steam, head ducked, tried to pursue him, but as he went up the stairs the ceiling was too low. John Feather made Steam push at the ceiling with his head and shoulders like Atlas bearing the weight of the world, and Steam lifted.

  The ceiling began to fall all around and on Steam.

  The Dark Rider was up the stairs now, heading for the opening to the roof. When he came to the opening, he flung the table backward so that Beadle landed on his face, breaking his nose, bamming his kneecaps, and in the process, not doing his already maligned toes any good.

  The Dark Rider grabbed the table and tore it apart, causing the straps that bound Beadle to be released. He grabbed Beadle by the head, like a kid not knowing how to carry a puppy, and started up a ladder to the roof.

  When the Dark Rider reached the summit of the ladder, he used his free hand to throw open the trap, then, still holding the struggling Beadle by the head, pulled him onto the moonlit roof.

  To the Dark Rider’s right, he saw that the rip in the sky had grown, and that a rip within the rip had opened up a gap of darkness in which strange, unidentifiable shapes moved.

  Below his feet the roof shook, then exploded. Steam’s crooked head poked through. And then rose. It was obvious the steam man was coming up the stairs, and he was tearing the roof apart.

  The Dark Rider picked Beadle up by shoulder and thigh, raised him over his head. The Dark Rider thought the easy thing would be to toss Beadle from the roof.

  Game over.

  But that was the easy thing. He wanted this bastard to suffer.

  And then he knew. He’d take his chances inside the rip. If he and Beadle survived it, he’d continue to make Beadle suffer slowly. Nothing else beyond that mattered. He realized suddenly that Beadle had been all that mattered for some time now, and when Beadle was dead, he would have only the memory of Weena again. Nothing else to preoccupy his thoughts. No more Beadle, no more steam man or regulators.

  With Beadle raised over his head, the Dark Rider growled and started to run toward the rip.

  *****

  John Feather saw through the shattered eye of Steam what the Dark Rider planned. Painfully, he grabbed at the quiver he had discarded, picked up his bow, took a coil of thin rope from the wall, tied it to the arrow with one quick loop, and watched as the Dark Rider completed the edge of the museum’s roof, which was where the rip in the sky joined it.

  The Dark Rider leaped.

  John Feather let the arrow fly, dropped the bow, grabbed at the loose end of the rope and listened to the rest of it feed out.

  The shot was a good one. It was right on the money. It went through Beadle’s left thigh, right on through, and into his inner right thigh.

  John Feather heard Beadle yell just as he jerked the rope with all his might. Beadle came loose from the Dark Rider’s grasp in midair and was pulled back and slammed onto the museum roof, but the Dark Rider leapt into the dark rip with a curse that reverberated back into this world, then was nothing more than a fading echo.

  *****

  The Dark Rider’s leap had carried him into a place of complete cold darkness. His element. Or so it seemed.

  He passed between shapes. Giant bats. They snapped smelly teeth at him and missed.

  In time, he thought it would have been better had they not missed.

  Because he was falling.

  Falling … falling.

  His leap had carried him into an abyss. Seemingly bottomless, because he fell and fell and fell, and if he had been able to keep time, he would have realized that days passed, and still he fell. And had he needed oxygen like normal men he would have long been dead, but he did not need it, and therefore he did not die.

  He just continued to fall.

  He thought of Weena. He wondered if there really was a plane on which her soul survived, wondered if he could join her there, if she would want him now that he was what he was.

  And he fell and he fell … and he is falling still… .

  *****

  But, back to John Feather and Beadle.

  John Feather found a knife, dropped the ladder out from under Steam’s ear, hobbled down it and out to Beadle. John Feather, while Beadle protested, cut the arrowhead out of Beadle’s thigh, hacked the arrow off at the shaft, and using one injured, bleeding foot against the outside of Beadle’s leg, jerked it free.

  “We’re going to have to help one another,” John Feather said. “I’m not feeling too strong. My hands are seizing up.”

  “Did you have to shoot me with an arrow?”

  “It was that, or follow him. And if he had gone into that rip, I would not have followed. I’m not that much of a friend.”

  The two of them, supporting one another, hobbled back to Steam.

  Inside, Beadle found spare pants and shirt and boots and put them on. John Feather doctored his wounds again. Then, in their control chairs, they worked Steam and brought him out of the remains of the museum. They saw a few Moorlocks through Steam’s eyes, but they were scattering. The sun was coming up.

  “We should try and kill them all,” Beadle said.

  “I’m not up to killing much of anything,” John Feather said.

  “Yeah,” Beadle said. “Me either.”

  “Without their leader, they aren’t much.”

  “I think we’re making a mistake.”

  John Feather sighed. “You may be right. But …”

  “Yeah. Let’s take Steam home.”

  John Feather, in considerable pain, looked through one of Steam’s eyes at the landscape bathed in the orange-red light of the rising sun. There were more rips out there than before, and he saw things spilling out of some of them.

  “If we still have a home,” said John Feather.

  Epilogue

  The astronauts, who had shed their heavy pressure suits and were wearing orange jumps, stopped walking as a green Dodge Caravan driven by a blonde woman with two kids in it, a boy and a girl, stopped beside them.

  She lowered an electric window.

  “You look lost,” she said.

  “Very,” said McCormic.

  “I suggest you get in.” She nodded to the re
ar.

  The astronauts glanced in that direction. A herd of small but very aggressive looking dinosaurs were thundering in their direction.

  “We’ll take you up on that suggestion,” McCormic said.

  They hustled inside. The boy and girl looked terrified. The astronauts smiled at them.

  The blonde woman put her foot to the gas and they tore off.

  Behind them the dinosaurs continued to pursue. The woman soon had the Caravan up to eighty and the dinosaurs were no longer visible.

  “How much gas do you have?” asked McCormic.

  “Over half a tank,” she said. “Where are we?”

  McCormic looked at the others. They shrugged. He said, “We haven’t a clue. But I think we’re home, and yet, we aren’t.”

  “I guess,” said the blonde woman, “that’s as good an answer as I’m going to find.”

  The Caravan drove on.

  All about, earth and sky resounded with the sounds of time and space coming apart.

  Table of Contents

  Trains Not Taken

  The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down

  Foreword

  (1)

  (2)

  (3)

  (4)

  (5)

  (6)

  (7)

  (8)

  (9)

  Epilogue