by Tonia Brown
“Turn!” Ched shouted. Following his cry, the cab shifted hard again to the left.
The professor hollered in high-pitched surprise with the turn.
Dodger held fast, his stomach dropping to his knees until the cab straightened out once more. When a moderate stability was reached, he shifted to the opposite side of the platform, drew his left-handed revolver and watched through the helm window. The men slowed their steeds and looked to one another as they pointed to the oncoming cab, the first real signs of confusion upon them. The cab drew nearer, then began to pass the men, and in their brief moment of bewilderment, Dodger took his shot.
This time he was better prepared for the rebound, though it still kicked harder than he would have liked. He assumed that Boon must’ve been built like a brick shithouse to deal with this kind of recoil on a regular basis. Hell, maybe it’s what killed the man.
His second shot was truer than the first, knocking the far left rider from his horse to the ground. The man rolled into the cloud of dust kicked up by the train before coming to what Dodger had to assume was a dead stop, in every sense of the word.
Good shot! You’ve got some talent.
Dodger ignored his subconscious compliment, as well as the white bands of pain flashing up his right arm. He reset the hammer on the left gun and fired again. The weapon flared to life, releasing its payload in less than a heartbeat, and blowing an arm clean off the next rider in line. He too fell from his steed, performing a midair spin, a little gunshot-induced pirouette, before disappearing into the cloud of dust and jumble of hooves below.
“Turn!” Ched cried.
Caught up in the moment, Dodger was attempting a third shot instead of preparing when the call came. He used his position as best he could, hooking his elbow in the platform frame and bracing his other hand against the doorframe behind him, gun and all. This worked well enough to keep him on his feet, though his right hand bitched the whole while.
Hang on, lad! Almost done!
On the next straightaway, the riders remained still, aiming there weapons at the oncoming cab.
Won’t be long before they guess our game. Best to drop them quick, before they get any ideas.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Dodger said, unsure of just who he was talking to. He returned to the left side of the platform once more readied his gun, waiting for his chance to act.
A third shot opened a hole big enough in the next rider’s chest for Dodger to see the scenery behind him. The rider swayed in place, then tipped off one side of his saddle and rolled into the path of the train’s tracks. With a jolting wallop that threatened to toss Dodger from his feet, they put the poor fellow out of his misery.
Without taking his eyes off of his last target, Dodger holstered the spent weapon and shifted the remaining gun from his swollen right hand into his left. He lifted this partially loaded pistol and set it, but the sight that awaited him held his fire.
The fourth rider, close enough to identify as Dan of the red mask, finally figured out what was happening to those around him. As Dodger switched shooting hands, Dan drew up tight on his reigns with both hands to turn his horse about. In the process, he fumbled his weapon, dropping it to the ground, but he didn’t seem to care. He was more concerned about getting away than retrieving his gun. By the time Dodger was ready to fire again, Dan was already beating a hasty retreat, spurring his horse and heading for the horizon as fast as the poor beast’s hooves would allow.
“Enough, Ched!” Dodger yelled. “We got ‘em on the run.”
The cab groaned and whined as the driver slowed her to a stop.
Dodger made note of the direction Dan was headed before backing away from the platform ledge. When they returned to town, he would alert the authorities and let them deal with the man. Dodger was done dealing with the maniac.
But apparently his inner voice wasn’t.
What are you doing? Kill him! Shoot him now before he can escape!
“No,” Dodger whispered.
But he will bring more men! He will lead others to us!
“No,” Dodger snapped. “I won’t shoot an unarmed man in the back.”
This inner voice went quiet for a moment, as if mulling things over, then said something very softly, in a whisper almost inaudible after the deafening reports of Boon’s special guns.
Neither would I have, son. Neither would I.
Before Dodger could question the meaning of his own words, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder.
“Mr. Carpenter!” the professor shouted as he clapped Dodger on the back. “That was amazing. You, my dear sir, are quite the sniper. What a steady hand. I haven’t seen shooting that fine in … well … never!”
“Thanks,” Dodger said.
“Not at all.” The professor proceeded to smooth down his rumpled clothes and pat a layer of coal dust from his coat. “Made a mess of the cab, but that’s certainly understandable. Nothing important broken I take it, Ched?”
“Nothing I’ll miss,” Ched said from his place at the helm. “Nicsh work. Even if you let one shlip pasht you.”
Dodger glanced to the retreating form of the bandit, as well as the three men dying in the dirt. “We can alert the law at Blackpoint about him and the others. They can deal with the mess.”
“Of course,” the professor said.
Ched raised a thin eyebrow. “You shure about that, Doc?”
“Certainly,” the professor said. “Run-of-the-mill outlaws? Let the authorities deal with it. That’s what they are paid for, yes?”
“Run of the mill?” Dodger asked. “What kind of outlaws do you usually get?”
Ched looked like he had a great deal to say on the matter, but the professor coughed and huffed the driver into silence.
“As I was saying,” the professor continued, “that was an amazing shootout. Yes! Amazing. You handled Boon’s guns with such poise and grace and …” The man paused as he caught sight of Dodger’s swollen wrist. “Oh my! But you’re injured!”
“It’s nothing,” Dodger said. “They just had a bit more kick than I expected.”
“Nonsense!” the professor shouted as he tenderly palpated Dodger’s wounds. “I think you may have broken this wrist.”
“It’s fine.” Dodger yanked his arm free and pulled his cuff over the swelling. There was no time for such nonsense. Not with unfinished business out there dying. He crossed the platform, heading off to the side and his business waiting beyond.
“Where are you going?” the professor asked.
“I want answers before those men bleed to death,” Dodger said. “I intend to go and get them.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“No, sir. You’re staying here, where it’s safe.”
Hopping down from the cab, Dodger tried to ignore the bite of his injured wrist. Before he got five steps away, a second huff sounded as someone dropped to the ground behind him.
Dodger turned to see the professor struggling to get to his feet. “I thought I said stay put.”
“I’m coming with you,” the professor said again.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Poppycock! What harm could three dying men possibly pose?”
Dodger didn’t have time to argue the point. He ran his good hand over his face and groaned. “Fine, just … just keep back until I say it’s safe to approach. Can you at least do that much?”
“Oh yes.” The professor nodded with glee. “Anything you say. You’re in charge.”
“I doubt that very much, sir.”
The first fatality was still lying in the train’s path. Dodger gave the corpse a cursory glance as he passed by, just to be sure the man was indeed dead. The body was more than dead; it was smashed to a pulp. Dodger had seen many a folk get in the way of a steam engine, but he had never seen this kind of result. The man was more soup than flesh, a sticky pool of viscous liquid baking in the midmorning sun. He reckoned it was the result of ending up under not just the train,
but her unusual tracks as well.
“Oh dear,” the professor said from somewhere behind him. “That isn’t pretty.”
“Death never is,” Dodger said.
The owner’s horse stood by the next rider, leaning over the dying man as if waiting for him to get back on. It lifted its head and whinnied as Dodger approached.
“Its okay, girl,” Dodger said, patting the mare on the neck. The horse whimpered and nodded in greeting as Dodger stepped her away from her master. He then stooped over the one-armed bandit, reaching down to roll him onto his back so he could get a better look at the results of his deed. But before he could touch the man, a strange thing happened.
The corpse dissolved, right before Dodger’s eyes.
With a loud hiss, the body shrank and liquefied into a gushing stew, not unlike the fellow who was caught under the tracks. Green fluid poured from the cuffs and collar of the man’s clothes, until all that was left was a runny mess. Dodger looked up in time to see the other casualty, only a few feet away, undergoing the same process. The mare huffed and backed farther away, dismayed by the state of her rider. Dodger couldn’t blame her; he was pretty dismayed himself.
“What a curious effect,” the professor said.
“Curious?” Dodger asked. “You call that curious? He melted! They melted right in front of us, and you find it curious?”
“Yes. I must admit it’s not something I see very often.”
“Often! I’ve never seen it at all!”
“Pshaw.” The professor seemed indifferent to Dodger’s outcry. “Happens all the time.”
“All the time!” Dodger couldn’t help but parrot the professor’s crazy words. “All the time! People don’t just melt. It doesn’t happen all the time. It never happens.”
Ignoring Dodger’s worry, the professor and reached into his jacket and produced a small metal baton. With a few tugs the rod telescoped until it was several feet long. The professor then proceeded to poke at the remains of one rider with the rod, lifting the layers of fabric to eye what was underneath.
“It has been my experience,” the professor explained as he poked and prodded, “that this kind of reaction is, of course, atypical in a normal subject, but not in one who has an unstable genetic code. Yes, very unstable by the looks of them. I believe these are not, as we hoped, run-of-the-mill bandits. I’m afraid we are looking at men who have been subjected to genetic modifications.”
“You mean these men have been changed in some way?” Dodger asked, showing his intelligence without meaning to. “That they are more than just human?”
The professor looked to Dodger with a raised eyebrow. “Yes. That’s precisely what I mean. They’ve been modified in some manner. And don’t get too close. This stuff quickly evolves into a highly acidic enzyme.”
The goop proved the professor’s point by eating its way through the dead man’s clothes.
“In what way do you think they were changed?” Dodger asked.
“There’s no way to know now. I guess I could take some samples back to the lab and take a look under the scope. Even then, it would be pure conjecture.”
“But you’re sure they’ve been modified?”
“Do you smell that?”
Dodger leaned over the runny corpse and breathed in. “Bread? I smell bread.”
“Yeast, actually. Yeast is what you smell. I find it tends to crop up a lot when I fiddle with this sort of experiment. For some reason, yeast just loves an altered genetic code. It’s rather like being a very bad cook. You try to blend a pig and a cow, and you end up with liquid bread. I thought I had succeeded, once, but in the end …” The professor let the idea drift away as he swabbed his baton on the dirt and returned it to its normal length.
Dodger furrowed his brow at the fluid remains. “What a way to go. If I had known they would do that … I might not have … I would have …”
“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known this would happen. No one could. Except for me, of course. Under normal circumstances, they surely have a much higher constitution than you or I. But very few beings can stand up to that kind of damage. A single bullet, perhaps. But not three at once.”
Dodger caught on to that idea and turned it about in his mind.
“This kind of reaction is why I don’t experiment on live subjects,” the professor said as he tucked the baton into his coat. “I mean, it’s one thing to reduce a slab of beef and a pork chop to a pool of goop, but it’s a tragedy that these men should suffer like that. I just wish others would see there is no wisdom in this kind of genetic …” He paused to look up to Dodger. “Mr. Carpenter, are you well?”
Dodger was well enough, he just wasn’t there. He was somewhere else. Another time, another place. He was reaching back, with his mind, to ten minutes earlier. Just before the shootout began. Just before Clemet took a chest full of gunshot. He was remembering what Dan of the red mask said before he shot his own man.
Raise your gun! Or I’ll turn you to soup.
“He knew,” Dodger said. “Dan knew they would end up like this. They all knew. They kept saying I wasn’t like them.” Another thought struck Dodger, driving him into action. He ran to the mare and calmed her into allowing him to mount.
“Mr. Carpenter?” the professor asked.
“Get back to the cab.” Dodger grabbed the reins of the dead man’s horse and swung onto her. “Tell Ched to meet me at the place where we first saw the riders.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Trying to save a man’s life.”
“Then you need to take me as well.” The professor held up his hand for a boost onto the mare. “Come now, I’m better equipped to do so than you. Ched will know to follow us.”
Dodger almost said no, but the man had a point. Reaching down, Dodger grabbed the professor’s arm and helped him onto the back of the saddle, then nudged the horse into movement with a kick. If the professor was right, then the man’s genetic enhancements might be enough to allow him to survive a single gunshot wound. If, perhaps, the bullet missed his vital organs, then there was a very good chance he might still be alive.
Dodger prayed it was so, because he was pretty sure he knew who the man was, and why he knew so much about Sergeant Dodger.
****
back to top
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Chapter Eight
Death and Dismissal
In which things get just too weird for Dodger.
The mare slowed to a nervous trot, whinnying and snorting in complaint.
“I know, girl,” Dodger said, patting her neck. “I sense it too.”
“Sense what?” the professor asked.
“Death.”
Clemet wasn’t a pile of goop, which was a good start. He had, however, lost a fantastic amount of blood, which wasn’t so good. Lying on his back with his eyes closed, hands clutched across his wounded chest, he looked more at a peaceful rest and less on the threshold of death. Then again, Dodger supposed it was the same thing. A wide, uneven layer of darkness encircled him where his life fluid seeped into the dry dirt.
Dodger dropped off the saddle and onto his knees beside Clemet. The professor fell to the ground with a huff and clambered up beside Dodger.
“Is he still alive?” the professor asked.
“Hey there, Clem? You still with us?”
The man didn’t answer. He didn’t move.
The professor poked a finger under the mask to rest against Clemet’s throat. “He still has a pulse, but it’s very weak.” From the recesses of his coat, the professor produced a black leather wallet. He untied the thing, then flipped it open, unrolling it onto the dirt beside the downed man. All manner of shiny gadgets—ranging from surgical instruments to thieves’ tools—rested in the various folds of the wallet.
Dodger snorted in surprise. “You prepare for everything, don’t you?”
“One never knows when one will need to pick a lock or sew a man’s chest closed. Now leave me be so I can
get this blasted mask out of the way.”
The professor clipped away the bloody cloth, and Dodger gasped aloud at the sight underneath.
“Hello there,” the professor whispered. “Looks like we found the root of our alterations.”
When the professor said that the men had been genetically enhanced, Dodger supposed that they must’ve taken steroids of some kind, such as those meant to build the muscle mass of cattle or pigs. That would certainly explain the bulk of Dan, but not the slender build of the others.
What lay under the mask, however, was not what he expected.
Clemet’s cheeks were low and puffy, cascading into folds about his neck, while his chin and mouth protruded into a muzzle shape. His nose turned up in a button and bore a familiar triangular look about it. Upon closer inspection, Dodger discovered a matching patch of whiskers sprouting from either side of the man’s nose. Not beard hair, no. More along the lines of animal whiskers. In fact, the lad’s entire face was coated with a fine layer of white fuzz, or rather fur. Dodger touched a trembling finger to the bruise that looped the man’s left eye. The shiner wasn’t a shiner at all, but instead an oval patch of black fur amidst the sea of soft white.
Like a spot about the eye of a dog.
“Help me get his vest and shirt open,” the professor pleaded. “We need to visualize the wound if we are going to do any good.”
“But his face,” Dodger whispered.
“Never mind that.”
“He looks like … he’s … is he a man or a dog?”
“Yes,” the professor huffed, irritated by Dodger’s distraction. “He’s probably part canine in some fashion. Now do you want to rescue the poor pup or just sit about and ogle him all day?”
Dodger’s cheeks burned with both the shame of being caught gawking with the professor displayed an ever-casual acceptance of the extraordinary. It was as if nothing could surprise the man. As if he had seen just about everything there was to see. And maybe he had.
“Hey, Clemet,” Dodger said. “We’re going to take your shirt off. Okay?”
