Ganymede (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  She clapped a hand over her mouth and fought for composure.

  Another one was coming. She wouldn’t be so fortunate twice in a row. She lifted the gun again and waited. The sloughing scrape of dead feet, the horrible rhythm of dead lungs.

  More of them, incoming.

  The first brute had only located and declared the prey. The rest would come in for the kill.

  “Dear God!” the colonel barked. He opened fire again, two more shots that exploded and left the madam’s ears humming. The bullets landed with squishy thumps, the sound of arrows hitting melons, but Josephine didn’t dare take her eyes off the path from whence she’d come—not unless she wanted the creatures to come groaning up behind her. She braced her back against the crates and locked her elbows, holding the gun out and facing the wood plank path.

  The colonel demanded, “What are they?” and now his voice was cracking, losing the battle-hardened calm that had served him well so far. “What are those things?”

  “They aren’t real; they aren’t real. This isn’t real,” the lieutenant babbled.

  A shot went wild and clipped the edge of the crate, casting splinters into Josephine’s hair and up against her face—where one left a brief, hot sting.

  “It isn’t true!” Cardiff was shouting now, and firing again; she was almost certain the wilder shots were his. Another one, two, three blasts.

  How many guns did the men have between them? How many shots?

  Josephine cursed herself for not observing them better. She should’ve noticed, should’ve counted. Nothing to be done for it now.

  “Pull yourself together, man!” the colonel ordered. Two more shots landed in something dense and wet. Then he tried a different tactic, addressing the incoming creatures directly. “Who are you? What do you want?” But it was a desperate, foolish thing, and the officer sensed it immediately.

  “Cardiff,” he called. “What are these things?”

  Three more shots rang out, and Josephine wished to God she could cover her ears, shut them out, give herself a moment of quiet so she could listen again, and better pinpoint the things that were to come.

  Not a chance. Two more shots, and then the fall of something heavy that clattered and rolled. A gun, discarded as empty. Texians always went armed, and surely two officers like these would have backup, or so she told herself as she stared with all her might—unblinking, lest she miss a crucial moment—and watched for more monsters, arriving up the back way.

  They were coming right for her. She knew it, even though her whole head was buzzing from the percussion of the gunshots so nearby.

  Two more uneven shapes, ambling up the walkway.

  Tightening her grip, readying her aim, she gave up on hiding from the Texians, who had problems of their own. Several more shots—she’d lost count how many—and the firing ceased amid a hail of rapid-fire swearing and struggling.

  “Goddammit! What are these—get away from me! Get it off me!”

  “Oh God! Oh God!”

  “What are they—what are they?” the colonel continued to shout.

  A hail of muffled blows and the rending of fabric. A scream from the lieutenant. A bellow from the colonel. The pounding slugs of something heavy—a gun in someone’s fist?—bludgeoning strikes in the midst of what sounded like a crowd but might be as few as three or four.

  It didn’t take many of them.

  And here came two more.

  Every shot had to count. Josephine took a deep breath. If the Texians were still alive behind her, it wouldn’t matter if they heard her now. She rose to her feet in a leap that was made melodic by the lift and swish of her skirts and the cracking shift of her undergarment stays snapping back to attention, and as the first newcomer came over the slight rise and stepped onto the planks, she blew off its face with a single shot.

  A second one was right behind it. She stopped that one, too—but her mark was off, a few inches too low, and the bullet tore a hole in the thing’s throat. It tumbled to its knees but started to crawl. Josephine took a brief running start and then kicked its head with all her weight and strength—sending the bulbous, foul-smelling skull flying off into the river, where it landed with a splash.

  Was that all of them?

  She didn’t see any more, but seeing wasn’t easy, and she was all but shooting blind. Whirling around to check the state of the Texians, she saw there was nothing to be done for them, even if she’d been inclined to. She didn’t mind two fewer Republicans in her city, not for a second, and if those two had known what she was up to, she’d have been thrown in jail or shot. She had no illusions about their shared humanity, or any fairy tales of cooperation to warm her.

  The lieutenant was down and dying, writhing or perhaps only being tugged this way and that by the two monsters that jerked on his limbs, biting them, tearing off hunks of flesh—anything they could fit in their mouths.

  The colonel was sitting upright, swinging with his gun, clapping a third one in the face while he held a fourth at bay with his hand. It wasn’t working. Number four ducked its head and tried to bite the colonel’s neck. Colonel Betters was not a young man, and his strength was failing. Any minute would be his last.

  His eyes met Josephine’s. He didn’t say anything; he only looked at her there, holding the gun. She aimed it at him. He nodded, understanding in some final flash of insight that this was the last favor he was ever going to get—and it was coming from a woman who ordinarily wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. But this was not a fire.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The colonel stopped fighting. His head slumped to his chest, and now the two ragged creatures met no resistance. They dived mouth-first into his carcass, moaning their enthusiasm even as one raised its head and wailed a shaky, raspy sound … a call that was returned from several sides.

  “Shit,” Josephine swore.

  The howler scrambled to its knees and scuttled toward her and she stopped it with a bullet between the eyes, its body snapping backwards and falling across the colonel’s knees. Its fellow monsters, no longer content to chew on the remains of the Texians, also rose from their gorging positions and reached out for the woman, who might have the bullets to shoot her way past them, or then again, she might not.

  One, two.

  She hit one in the temple and it spun away, rotating like a dancer until it tripped and fell off the wharf. It thrashed in the water and then it didn’t, sinking or merely stopping—Josephine couldn’t see that far, and was distracted by the creature she’d missed with her second shot. She fired another and caught it low in the neck. The bullet was so powerful, it blew the thing back away from her—if it didn’t send it down for good.

  Behind her, from the way she’d come as she’d followed the Texians to their doom, she could hear more cries, more wheezing moans, more uneven footsteps. More of the famished, snarling, semi-dead creatures.

  Her heart in her throat, she squeezed off another round and took an ear and a huge chunk of brain from the skull of the next attacker.

  But she couldn’t stay there, hemmed in with the wharf stretching out over the water one way and a row of shipping crates to her left; higher than she could expect to climb in broad daylight and without the restrictions of her clothing. Back along the planked walkway two, maybe three more things were coming—and in front of her, the edge of the pier let out onto the manufacturing row, now mostly abandoned.

  She heard the rumblings of more trouble from that way, but she chose it in an instant. It was the only direction where she might be able to find an open spot and run. If she could lose them in the row, or barricade herself inside one of the old factories, she might have a chance.

  No going back.

  No going out to the water—she could throw herself into the waves and hope the things chasing her couldn’t swim, but she’d likely drown in what she was wearing, and the river’s currents were riptide strong, killing hardier souls than her own every day.

  A last resort, then.
<
br />   She’d leave it for that—only if everything else failed.

  Ducking down, she grabbed the lieutenant’s lantern and ran, her felt-softened feet making barely the lightest hiss with each footfall. The lantern wasn’t broken, and that was good. It hadn’t even been turned down all the way—she wouldn’t need a match to move it, she’d only have to raise the wick and pray there was oil enough to keep it bright.

  But not yet.

  Not while they were rallying, and homing in. Not until she had so much distance between them that she could afford the luxury of sight.

  To her left and right reared cliffs of freight, or the wooden boxes that once contained it. In places, the passage narrowed to barely a doorway’s width, but she shoved forward, thinking she might have a bullet or two remaining. She was too distracted to estimate, and estimating wouldn’t do her any good. Either she had more ammunition or she didn’t.

  She zigzagged through the maze and into an open stretch with muddy floors or no floors at all. Tripping, then recovering, she saw three lumbering shadows approaching from behind and to her left—and one more closing in from directly ahead.

  To her right, at the far end of a wide pier, squatted an old oyster-shucking facility that had long since moved to a brighter part of town. It was partially boarded and none too inviting, but any port in a storm, Josephine figured. She was on the verge of dashing toward it when some new presence caught her eye, and she hesitated.

  A small, still silhouette stood near the wharf’s edge, outlined against a sky-high stack of folded nets that no one had used in half a century.

  “Settle down, child. Give me some light,” the silhouette said.

  Stunned, Josephine stood there. From two sides, then three sides, the creatures came closer.

  “Child, you heard me. Raise the lamp.”

  She recognized the voice, which in no way made the speaker’s appearance less stunning. Josephine said, “Ma’am?” and then hastily, as if she’d only just remembered she was holding the thing, lifted up the lantern and turned the crank to raise the wick. She did this in a rush, rolling the small metal knob and making the glass-cased lantern into a brilliant beacon in less than a second.

  It was counter to all sense. The creatures could see her more clearly. They knew where she was and that she was virtually trapped, if indeed the mindless things could be said to truly “know” anything at all.

  And now the monsters could see the speaker, her shape shrunken by tremendous age.

  The woman was sturdily built and nearly squat, as if the years had melted a larger woman into something smaller and wider, but no less commanding. On her head she wore a feathered black turban fixed with a gem that couldn’t possibly have been real, and across her shoulders hung a long red jacket in a faux mandarin style. It flowed neatly over her dove gray gown, and from the bottom hem of this gown peeked two small black points—the tips of her shoes.

  In her left hand she held a cane made of knotted wood. Her ring-covered fingers curled around the top, her jewelry flashing like sparks off a flint.

  Josephine would sooner have run right into the arms of the nearest monster than tell this woman no. She held the lamp up high, letting its light douse the scene, bringing whatever terrible clarity it was bound to show.

  The ancient colored woman in front of the nets raised her cane until she held it by the center, in her long-fingered fist. She swung it back over her head for momentum, and brought it crashing down against the coal-black column of a broken gas lamp that hadn’t been lit for years. The single resulting gong reverberated across the wharf, radiating in a wave that shook the boards beneath Josephine’s feet and brought every flesh-eating beast to a sudden, total standstill.

  They posed statuelike and utterly unmoving, staring into space or at the newcomer. Even their gnawing, slathering jaws ceased their eternal chewing.

  “Ma’am Laveau,” Josephine croaked. Then in French, “I don’t understand.”

  In French the woman replied, “What’s to understand? Come here, dear. Come to me.” She beckoned with her free hand. “The zombis won’t be so cooperative forever.”

  As if it’d heard and recognized the truth of this matter, the creature nearest to Mrs. Laveau shook its head. The old lady shook her head, too, and reached into a pocket—from which she withdrew a small bag filled with powder.

  She blew a pinch of the powder into the monster’s face and it flinched. In that flinch, even at a distance, Josephine could see a glimmer of what had once been human; but it was gone as quickly as it’d appeared.

  Once again, the thing was immobile.

  “Come, child. Let’s go. We’ll walk, and they’ll stay.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough. You trust me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then walk with me.” She pocketed her powder and beckoned again.

  This time, Josephine obeyed immediately. The lantern shook as she ran toward the old woman, and the boards of the wharf creaked beneath her feet. Her fear was a shocking, unfamiliar thing, and her body was so prepared to fight or run or die that her hands quaked and her teeth chattered, but Mrs. Laveau patted her shoulder and smiled. “There, you see? The dead must be reminded of their place.”

  Four

  Captain Cly closed the enormous door behind himself and kept his head low as he descended the stairs. Two floors deep, beneath the initial bank basement where the door was located, the “vaults” remained one of the safest corners of the city—the deepest, most secure, and most like a collection of ordinary homes. This bunker-within-a-bunker also served as storage for the most direly needed essentials: clean water, ammunition, gunpowder, gas masks and their accoutrements, and grocery supplies to keep the population fed.

  Over in “Chinatown,” nearer the wall’s edge on the far side of King Street Station, the oriental workers kept stores of their own, as their food preferences did not strictly overlap with the doornails. But in the last year, some of the doornails had taken to wandering toward the Chinese kitchens in search of unfamiliar food—while likewise some of the Chinese had shown an interest in dried salmon, occasional fruit tarts, and intermittent baked sweets.

  Food was a language all its own. And it was in no one’s best interest for anyone to starve.

  The halls were not particularly mazelike, and they were as well lit as anything else beneath the city’s surface. The ceilings were lower than Cly might have preferred, but this set the vaults apart from few other places in the world; so he watched his forehead and made his way along the first corridor without complaint, silent or sworn aloud.

  From the stairs at the other end he heard someone approach, moving with an uneven gait. Before the other man’s head could rise into view, Cly called out a greeting. “Swakhammer, is that you?”

  Jeremiah Swakhammer appeared with a lopsided grin and a cane. “Yeah, it’s me. You heard this thing tapping, did you?”

  “You’ve never been too light on your feet,” Cly said, extending a hand, which Swakhammer shook. “But now that you’ve got a third leg to bang around, sure enough. I know the sound of you.”

  “I won’t have it much longer, maybe. That crackpot Chinaman doctor Wong says if I’m careful, my leg will be right as rain within another few weeks. I might not even have a limp to show for it.”

  “That crackpot Chinaman doctor saved your lousy ass, Jerry. Don’t act like you don’t know it.”

  “I do, I do,” he said. The grin stayed put, even spreading. “But he puts the most god-awful muck on me—these salves and creams—and he makes me drink teas that taste like tobacco simmered in horse piss.”

  Cly was not altogether unfamiliar with Chinese medicine himself, having spent time in San Francisco and Portland with his first mate, Fang. “Do they work?”

  “Mostly. I think.”

  “Then quit your bellyaching, eh?” The captain slapped Swakhammer on the back, just to make him wobble. Jeremiah was a big man in his own right, but built wide—where
as Cly was built tall. “You ought to buy him flowers, next time you see the topside!”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what my daughter said.” The words came out of his mouth a little funny, like he wasn’t accustomed to referring to anyone that way. “But she’s a tyrant of a thing, just like that doctor. Must be common to medical folks.”

  “It’d shock me silly if any child of yours was a pushover. Speaking of her, how’s she doing? Is she settling in here to stay, or thinking of heading home?”

  Swakhammer shifted his shoulders and gave half a shrug. “She’s doing good—she gets on great with Dr. Wong, and helps him out down in Chinatown, and around here, too.” A note of pride crept into his voice when he added, “She’s as tough as me and twice as smart—so she fits in all right with the other women we got down here.”

  “When am I going to meet this kid, anyway?”

  “She’s no kid, not anymore. But you can meet her right now, if you want. I think you’re headed right for her. You’re looking for Briar, aren’t ya?”

  Captain Cly’s perennial flush bloomed around his collar. “I was … well, sure. Headed over to see her, I suppose. But I’m looking for Houjin, too. And he’s usually clowning around with her boy.” Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder, “But what’s your girl got to do with it? Did somebody get hurt?”

  “Briar’s all right, since that’s what you’re really asking.” Swakhammer said, “Come on, I’ll walk with you, and introduce you to my tyrant offspring.”

  Cly fell into step beside Jeremiah, and together they strolled around the next corner, down to the next flight of stairs. “Is something wrong with one of the boys?”

  “Zeke got himself scratched up. Those kids were out in the hill blocks—they’d gone through Chinatown and let themselves up near one of the pump rooms, poking around at the big houses up on the hill, or what’s left of them.”

  “Scavenging?”

  “Playing around, is my guess. Boys do dumb stuff. Anyhow, he fell on something—or fell in something. I’m not too clear on the particulars, but they can give you the story.”