by Devon Monk
Hink could make out six dead men on the ground, pieces and parts of them tossed about, and on fire. Cedar must have gotten the hang of that flamethrower.
Miss Dupuis and her crew were scurrying from one scant cover to the next, working their way away from the landing pad toward the opening into the mountain.
“Burn in hell, Mullins.” Hink took aim and lit the cannon’s fuse.
A chest-thumping explosion reverberated across the cliffs and sent sharp echoes over the horizon. The shot struck true. Right down the port side of the ship, knocking out her fan and blasting her hull into splinters.
Before the chunks of ship had a chance to hit the ground, Cedar Hunt was running.
Toward the damn ship.
He got up under her belly, and caught one of the netting ropes.
With the flamethrower strapped to his back, Cedar overhanded his way up that rope. When he was close enough, he stopped, triggered the flamethrower, and shot a blast of oil and fire twenty feet out, setting the ship on fire.
The ship he was hanging from by a thread.
The man was crazy, that was clear sure. But he knew how to cripple a foe.
Cedar slid down the rope, then let go. The ship rocked wildly, trying to stabilize without her port fans. Cedar was thrown more than thirty feet, but he tucked and rolled, taking the fall like a tumbler.
And then he stood up, looked around the field. The wolf, his brother, loped up next to him. As the ship above burned and wailed, Cedar Hunt and that wolf glanced first at Miss Dupuis and her people nearly in the tunnel, then up at Hink.
Cedar was bloody, burned, dirty. And yet he stood there as if he felt no pain. Like a warrior out of legend.
Likely he didn’t feel the pain. Hink had seen that on the field before too. Sometimes it took a man an hour or more to realize how he’d been broken, and what he was missing. And that discovery came on sudden and unpleasant. Some men never survived it.
Captain Hink cupped his mouth and yelled, “Inside. Tunnel!”
He didn’t wait to see if Cedar heard him, but the man had damn good ears.
The relative silence from the Gatling guns’ reloading wasn’t going to last.
He wondered if Mullins was going to try to land that fiery barge. As if in answer, a huge explosion hit the field, throwing Hink to his knees and nearly sending him tumbling down the stairs.
Dynamite. Old Jack was done horsing around with his guests.
Since he’d likely been paid by all the parties involved, he meant to kill them all. Old Jack never took a side in a conflict, other than taking as much money as he could fist, and saving his own hide.
Ears ringing, Hink got up, and got moving. Didn’t care about cover. He wanted speed. Every step down that staircase was agony, his leg getting heavier and heavier. But he pounded on, down the stairs, across to the hole in the mountain. Dupuis and her people were gone, hopefully already inside the mountain.
Just a few more yards, and he’d be there. Just a few more yards.
An arm came out of nowhere and grabbed hold of him by the waist, tugging his arm over a shoulder.
Cedar Hunt had somehow caught up, even across the distance of the field.
“Don’t need help,” Hink panted.
But Cedar kept hold of him, and half ran, half carried him despite his complaints.
Man was inhuman. The strength of him, the calm of him, the speed of him. And even though Hink had seen that on the battlefield too, to have him up close like this, the wolf guarding their rear, and then running ahead to make sure the path was clear, as if the wolf had a man’s mind in an animal’s body, sent a certain kind of dread through Hink’s belly.
Cedar Hunt had said the men they were fighting weren’t really men, but men worked up by something Strange. Hink agreed.
It was also clear that Mr. Cedar Hunt was not really a man either. Or not just a man. Same as the wolf was not just a wolf.
They were stuff of fairy tales and legends, or at least the bloody ones.
He was suddenly very glad to be on the same side of the fight as Cedar Hunt and his brother and wasn’t looking forward to a day in which that was no longer true.
They were nearly at the door now. Joonie Wright stepped out just enough to let loose a couple shots at the gunners who had reloaded the Gatlings. That copper shield device of hers wasn’t shooting bullets. When the hammer of her gun hit, the shield let out a blast of lightning that cracked across the air and dropped the Gatling gunner flat.
“Get inside,” Hink ordered.
She moved aside so he and Cedar and the wolf could enter the hill.
This was not the hall where they had been staying. As a matter of fact, it was halfway across the landing field and to the south of where they had been. Three tunnels led off in three directions. The only light came from Theobald’s foldable lantern that he’d pulled out of that carpetbag of his and lit.
“Let’s get moving,” Hink said.
“How badly are you hurt?” Miss Dupuis asked.
“The leg. It’s fine.”
“Broken? Shot?” she asked.
“Shot. And I said it’s fine.”
He pushed away from Cedar, who still had hold of him, and nearly collapsed.
“You might say the leg’s fine.” Miss Dupuis motioned to Theobald to come closer with the lantern. She knelt down in her skirts so she could get a better look at Hink’s thigh. “But your leg says otherwise.”
Hink was going to argue, but her man had placed the lantern on the floor and put his arm around Hink so he wouldn’t fall while Miss Dupuis probed at the wound with no remorse.
“She has quite the hand with battle injuries,” Theobald was saying, his voice carrying that smooth rhythm to it that drew attention away from everything else. “It’s how we met, as a matter of fact. I’d taken a terrible shot to the chest. She nursed me to recovery.”
“Did she make you hurt like the blazes too?” Hink ground out.
“She did. But you can endure,” Theobald said, and it annoyed Hink to no end that he found himself wanting to believe that every word the man said was true.
Miss Dupuis checked the front and the back of his thigh. “I think it went clear through. You are a very lucky man, Captain Hink. Any lower and that would have taken your kneecap right off.”
“If this is what lucky feels like, it ain’t all it’s talked up to be.”
Cedar was standing watch at the door. “Men. Headed this way. Guns. We need to move. Quietly. Wil, choose a tunnel.”
“Do you think it’s wise to follow an animal into this hill?” Theobald asked.
“He’s more than an animal, Otto,” Miss Dupuis said. “He carries the same gift as Mr. Hunt.”
“You,” Cedar said over the top of their conversation, “can do anything you want. Surrender to the men on their way in here and beg for mercy if you like. Maybe they’re not interested in killing you.”
“No need to worry,” Miss Dupuis said. “We follow you, Mr. Hunt. Do you have bandages, Theobald?”
“I have something that might work.” Theobald pulled out a clean neckerchief. “Will this do?”
“Very nicely, thank you,” Miss Dupuis said with a smile. A sort of intimate smile, from Hink’s perspective.
Huh. Maybe these two were quite a lot more than traveling companions.
He grunted, and exhaled on a curse as Miss Dupuis bound his leg tight. Woman had some muscle behind her.
“Now,” Miss Dupuis said, standing and drawing a derringer out of a pocket cleverly hidden in her dress. “What is our plan, gentlemen?”
“Can that…,” Hink started. “Can Wil find a way out of here?”
Wil stood in the far right tunnel entrance, sniffing the air.
“I don’t know,” Cedar said as the sound of gunfire rang out behind them. “But what’s left of Mullins’s crew isn’t going to give us much of a choice.”
“I hate tunnels,” Miss Wright said as she swiftly unwrapped the coils from her arm,
and handed those and the shield device to Theobald to pack in his carpetbag along with the harness that had attached to Miss Dupuis’s shotgun.
“Too dark, and too many echoes,” she said with that soft Southern accent. “I can’t hear a blasted thing.” She tossed Miss Dupuis her denuded shotgun.
“Now, I’m not arguing it’s a certain kind of risk navigating these tunnels, Joonie,” Theobald said. “But I trust Mr. Hunt and Wil will see us through.”
Joonie shook her head. “You say those pretty things, but then we still get shot at, Otto.”
He grinned at her. “And yet we always win, don’t we?”
“So far,” she agreed.
While they’d been talking, Cedar Hunt had been staring out the door.
“Dynamite,” Cedar yelled. “Get back!”
They ran for the tunnel Wil had chosen. Theobald, who had the sense to snatch up the lantern, was somewhere in the middle of the group, Miss Wright and Miss Dupuis at the front behind Wil. Captain Hink and Cedar brought up the rear.
Theobald lifted the lamp, and wild light dragged the rock walls.
They couldn’t run, because they couldn’t see that far, but Hink sure as hell wished they would get moving a bit faster.
The blast sounded like the world cracked itself in half. Rocks rattled down from the ceiling and a huge push of warm air and dust rushed into the tunnel, turning the lantern light muddy.
Hink covered his head and pushed his back up close to one wall.
It took a while, but the crackle of stones rolling to the ground eventually quieted.
“Everyone okay?” Hink asked.
“I think so,” Miss Dupuis said, coughing. “Otto?”
“Right here, Sophie. And apparently still in one piece,” he said.
“Joonie?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Miss Wright said. “And the wolf, Wil, is it? He’s next to me and seems uninjured.”
“Can’t go back,” Cedar said, peering through the dust the way they’d come in. “Sealed off.”
“What do we do, Mr. Hunt?” Miss Dupuis asked.
Cedar walked past Hink, past Theobald and Miss Dupuis. “We go forward.”
“To where?” Joonie asked. “The bottom of this mountain? Shouldn’t we just wait until dark and dig our way out the way we came in?”
“Don’t think so,” Captain Hink said. “Men with guns are gonna camp right on the other side of that rock pile waiting to shoot anyone who sticks their nose out. Old Jack ain’t gonna ask if you’re friend of foe, he’s just gonna kill you.”
Hink pushed off the wall where he’d been leaning to take some of the weight off his bad leg and started after Cedar Hunt. “We got any other light besides the one?” he asked.
“Might be something up here,” Cedar said from a ways down the tunnel. “A couple crates here on the wall.”
“Still got that ax on you, Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked.
A crack of steel breaking wood was answer enough. “Could use the light, if I may,” Cedar said.
Theobald handed the lantern to Miss Dupuis, and she handed it up until Hink took it and stood next to Cedar, peering down into the crate.
“Canteens, buckets, blankets,” Hink said. “No food. Pans, though. Bust open the other one.”
Cedar took a few steps down the tunnel and broke the next crate.
Hink looked over the contents. “Lanterns.” He picked one up, gave it a shake. “It’s got oil. Looks like there’s three of them. Light them all just to make sure they’re wicked proper, then take what supplies we can carry. Mr. Hunt, do you think Wil can do some scouting for us?”
“He already is.”
Hink glanced off where he had seen the wolf just a second ago, but he was gone, silent as the night. “He have a good nose for fresh air?” Hink asked quietly.
Joonie might be worried about being trapped, but Hink was more worried that the air would run foul.
“Yes. And he’ll find daylight, but it could take time,” Cedar said. Then, to the others, “If anyone else has a way, or device we might use to track out of the tunnels, now would be a good time to suggest it.”
“I have a compass,” Theobald said.
“You have paper and ink to record our headings in case we need to backtrack?” Hink asked.
“A man in my line of work always keeps paper and ink,” Theobald said cheerily.
“What line of work is that exactly?” Hink asked.
“Oh, I’m a man of many trades, but mostly I am a speaker and man of politics.”
He got busy digging in that bag of his, and produced a journal, a fountain pen, and a compass, which he strapped to his wrist like a watch.
“Everyone have a light?” Hink asked.
“Yes, Captain,” Miss Dupuis said. “I believe we are all ready.”
Cedar started off down the tunnel, moving easily over the sandy floor littered with stones, at a pace Hink could match. Except for Theobald calling out change of headings through the twists and turns, they didn’t talk for a long while, each of them busy minding feet and head.
Wil showed up after a bit.
“Any luck?” Cedar asked.
The wolf couldn’t speak, or so Hink supposed. But somehow, Cedar seemed to understand what the animal was trying to say.
“Branches off up here,” Cedar said. “Be careful.”
Hink was starting to really feel the leg wound. Each step was a little harder than the last. He knew he couldn’t walk these tunnels all night. He’d need a rest soon.
They took the left branch of the tunnel where Wil waited patiently for them. Then there was more walking. Some uphill, some down, and enough turns and branches that Hink was very glad Theobald was keeping close track of their meandering.
Just when Hink was about to tell Mr. Hunt his leg was going to completely give out on him, a gush of cool air washed into the tunnel.
Wil was some ways down that tunnel, whining softly.
There wasn’t any light up ahead, but the breeze had to come from some kind of opening to the outside.
“We’re facing east,” Theobald said.
“East sounds good to me.” Hink was going through his memories of flying over Old Jack’s mountain.
Not a lot of ships traveled here, and Old Jack had the guns to keep it that way. Still, he’d drifted the Swift silent on no engines over Jack’s on a full moon once.
“If we’re any sort of lucky,” Hink said between the brief moments of putting weight on his bad leg, “we’ll be somewhere near a clearing. Plenty of valleys between most of these peaks.”
“And then what?” Theobald asked.
“I’ll signal for the Swift to come get us,” Hink said. “If she’s anywhere within twenty miles and the sky is clear, she’ll be able to spot us.”
“You have a signaling device on you, Captain Hink?” Miss Dupuis asked.
“All airship crewmen carry one. Or should.” He grunted up the uneven floor. “They’ll be looking for it.”
And then the light from outside, even though it must be late evening, carved a blindingly white hole in the tunnel ahead and just slightly above where they stood.
It hurt to look at it, and Hink covered his eyes until he could bear the sight. Pretty soon he lowered his fingers and looked at the pile of stones that appeared to be the only way to climb out.
The tunnel opened wider here. Big enough you could drive two Conestogas and their teams of oxen side by side through it if you had the mind to.
Cedar stood at the bottom of the rock pile, his hands on his hips, his face tipped up, the wolf pacing silently behind him. He was thinking a route up those rocks.
“I’ll climb it first,” Cedar said. “Then I’ll help anyone up who might need it.”
Hink looked around and found himself a rock of suitable size for sitting. “Sounds like a plan to me.” He pulled the flask out of his jacket and took down the last swallow of bourbon. It didn’t do much to ease his pain, but it cleared the dust out of
his mouth.
Cedar clambered up the stones, reached the top in short order, then threw his shadow across the bright as he looked out to see where they’d ended up.
Didn’t take him much time. Not nearly enough for Hink to catch his breath. But he’d rather be breathless and out in the open sky than stuck down this bunghole.
Cedar retraced his route down the rocks and brushed off his hands as he walked over to where they were waiting.
“It’s a clearing. A valley,” Cedar said. “Sky’s clouded, but no rain. I didn’t hear anything in the air, but I didn’t wait very long.”
“The Swift will be silent,” Hink said. “Either anchored and watching, or set to drift and watching. Don’t worry. She’s out there.”
Hink stood and cleared the groan out of the back of his throat. “Go on up ahead of me. The leg’s going to slow me a bit on the climb.”
The others headed to the rockfall. Wil was already halfway up the stone tumble and Theobald was shortly behind him, helping Miss Dupuis and Miss Wright along the rough spots.
Hink put off climbing until they were nearly at the top, then limped over to the stones. This was not going to be any kind of pleasant.
He sighed and took the first step up. He hated caves, hated being on the ground, hated worse being underground. For just this sort of reason. Give a man the sky, and he could soar in the heavens. Stick him in a hole and all he did was crawl over rocks.
He cussed and sweated his way through the climb, and when Mr. Hunt offered him a hand about a third of the way from the top, he did not let pride get in his way of accepting.
Finally at the top of the pile, the cave opening slanted up a bit. He’d need to hike that, shoot the flare, and keep an ear out for the Swift. He took a breath, steeling himself for the rest of the walk.
Cedar came up on one side and put his shoulder under his arm.
“Getting pretty tired of you picking me for your dance partner,” Hink said.
“Don’t get shot next time.”
“Next time?” Hink said. “I don’t believe Old Jack will ever let us cross his dirt again.”
