by Cat Rambo
Ma ran forward to claim her spouse. Chaz drew and aimed. But the ladder bobbed and jerked in the air, swaying as the zeppelin ascended, its engine now barking harshly.
He jumped. For a sickening second he thought he wouldn’t make it, and then in an even more sickening moment, he realized he had and that he was moving upward as rapidly as the zeppelin. He spared a glance down and his stomach clenched. He set his jaw and began climbing, the rope fibers biting harshly into his hands. Up above, the bandits had climbed into the cabin and one was goggling down at him.
He expected with a certain fatality that they’d start shooting. But they let him haul himself upward until he emerged through the hatch and into the crowded cabin where Mandy stood with hands on her hips in a way that was indisputably her mother’s. The air smelled musty and the interior was in bad shape, brass dials and trim overcome by verdigris.
“You get back off now, Chaz,” she said. “I’m seizing my destiny. This used to be my second cousin Vaughn Lightning’s airship and crew and now I’m taking over.”
He gawped. “You’re related to Doc Lightning?” He remembered the way Ma had snatched the letter away before he could read more. It made more sense now.
She nodded.
“But I came to rescue you,” he said.
“You thought you’d come rescue me and I’d fall in your arms a-fluttering my eyelashes.”
“That was among my hopes, yes.” He swallowed hard, looking her straight in the eye. “I’ve loved you ever since I first saw you, Mandy Brown. I’d build you a home and your own laboratory and all the tubes and sparkmeters and gewgidgets your heart craved. I’d lay the moon at your feet, if you wanted.”
Was that regret in her gaze? His heart leaped, only to be dashed by her next words.
“Sometimes,” she said, and her voice was gentler than he’d every heard it, “sometimes that isn’t enough, Chaz.”
Under her direction, they set him down near the outskirts of Pearlie. By now the engine was purring like a cat that had been given its own cow for dairy purposes, the dull brass of the zeppelin’s interior fittings was starting to shine, and the bandits looked like hopeful men rather than desperate ones. They lowered him down on a rope, and as he hung there, he stared up, willing Mandy to change her mind at the last minute, hoping until he saw her face vanish as the hatch slid closed.
Doc Brown was at the chirugeon’s, Ma with him. She glanced up as Chaz entered, question in her eyes. When he shook his head and sat down beside her, she only said, “Timothy thinks my idea for the lubricant was mighty smart.”
“Didn’t say that exactly,” Doc Brown murmured, although his eyes were closed. “Said it was unique.”
“Much of the same,” Ma said. She patted Chas’s elbow. “You come round tomorrow, Chaz. Love may break your heart, but good barbecue’ll build it back into operating shape.”
He could only think of Mandy’s eyes, filled with a pity that was worse than any other expression he could have seen. He looked at the sprig of wisteria someone had put in a little vase beside the sickbed, a touch of purple, delicate and light as air, and shook his head.
But Ma knew as she watched him. She might not have the book learning her husband and daughter did, but she knew there were things in life you could count on and things you couldn’t. Love was in the latter category, but there would always be barbecue.
Afternotes:
I wrote “Memphis BBQ” in response to a story request received while I was having a wonderful time as Editor Guest of Honor at MidSouthCon. I went out for several wonderful meals there, and wanted to celebrate the occasion. The landscape is one I remember fondly.
The new Dr. Lightning’s adventures are also due to be chronicled; she will meet up with a few other characters from the series.
Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch,
Where Do You Wander?
Jemina noticed the Very Small Person the moment the little girl entered the train. The child paused in the doorway to survey the car before glancing down at her ticket and then at the other half of the hard wooden bench, high-backed, its shellac peeling, that Jemina sat on. Jemina tucked the macrame bag beside her in with her elbow.
The child was one of the last passengers on, which was why Jemina had been hoping against hope to have the bench to herself, at least for part of the two day trip to Kansas City. The train began to roll forward, a hoot of steam from the engine, a bell clang from the caboose at the back of the train, the rumble underfoot making the little blonde girl pick her way with extra caution, balancing the small black suitcase in one hand against the pillowy cloth bag in the other.
She arrived mid-car beside Jemina and nodded at her as she struggled briefly to hoist her suitcase up before the elderly man across the aisle did it for her. She plumped the cloth bag in the corner between sidearm and back and sat down with a little noise of delight as she looked around. Catching herself at the noise, she blushed, fixed her gaze sternly forward as she folded her hands in her lap, and peeped at Jemina sidelong.
Jemina tried to imagine how she might appear. She knew herself thin but nicely dressed and pale-skinned. The lace at her throat was Bruges, the cross around her neck gold, the gloves on her hands white and clean. She looked like a school-teacher, she imagined, but not a particularly nice one. She felt her lips thin further at the thought.
The child, interpreting the flattening of Jemina’s mouth for disapproval, fished in her bag and took out a small black bound Bible. She began to read.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Jemina said. Her boldness surprised her, but this was a child, after all. “I’m Jemina Iarainn and I’m a scientist, headed to work at the War Institute in Seattle. Who are you are and where are you going?”
The smile bestowed on her could have lit a room. The Bible slid back into the bag. “Oh thank goodness! I’m Laurel Finch and this is my very first train ride ever, up to Seattle too, and I was hoping I’d have an agreeable companion on my voyage.”
She stumbled over the solemnity in the last words. Jemina said, “Trips are much, much nicer with someone to talk to. Where are you going in Seattle? To visit relatives?”
“To the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home there,” Laurel said, and her mouth drooped before she summoned her smile again. “I’ve been staying with my uncle for the last three years but he is traveling to China as an ambassador. It’s all right, he’ll come back for me, but in the meantime I’m to live there for a few years.”
“Seattle is very nice,” Jemina said. Her mind raced along the years before this child, living among orphans with no chance of adoption herself. Bleak, as bleak as any of Jemina’s childhood years. “You will meet Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s daughter. She lives down near the market and is a real Indian princess.”
“Do you know Seattle well?”
Jemina shook her head, then nodded. “My twin sister is out there already and she has been writing me long letters.”
“Is she also a scientist?”
“She writes for the newspaper.”
“Oh! Like Nellie Bly!” Laurel clapped her hands and Jemina sighed internally. A daredevil reporter was more exciting than a scientist, but she was the one constructing giant killing war machines, after all, even though she was not at liberty to talk about any of that.
The train was rattling along steadily by now, the countryside rolling past the windows as they left Baltimore behind. Someone towards the back of the car broke out a pipe, blue smoke creeping up to hang near the wooden ceiling, painted red with tiny stars speckled along it in a single long stripe. It was officially late morning now, and Jemina wished she’d been able to bring her tea with her.
“Have you always lived in Baltimore?” she asked Laurel.
The child nodded. “What about you?”
“I grew up in Connecticut, but I came to study at Johns Hopkins here.”
“Were you there during the last war?”
Only three years back now, the great War between the States, which might have g
one so differently if not for Lincoln’s decision to treat with the Emperor of Haiti, to bring over necromancers who raised the dead, no matter which color of uniform they wore, to fight on the Northern side. And now they were at war with Europe and the alien forces that had appeared in those countries, the fairies, werewolves, and vampires.
“I was there and actually helped with the effort,” Jemina said, trying not to puff up a little. She had worked side by side by the necromancers, learning as much as she could, pulling that knowledge into her own studies. It was why she was headed to the War Institute ther nowe. The last scientist-necromancer, McCormick, had died on a train like this one six months earlier. Jemina thought she would make it, but who knew? She played on a bigger game board than she ever had before.
To her disappointment, Laurel didn’t ask what she’d done for the war. She realized that the child’s parents must have died due to some military action. No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it.
“I have a book,” Laurel said. “Other than the Bible, I mean. Will you read it to me?”
“Surely you are old enough to read?”
Laurel sat up straight. “Of course I am!” She let herself relax. “But sometimes it’s nice to hear it read and that way we can both enjoy it.”
“What’s the book?”
Laurel fished in her bag. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
As the train made its way along, they voyaged through the book, occasionally pausing to talk about its contents. Laurel confessed to missing the kitten she had left at her uncle’s, which she had named Abraham Lincoln after the President. Her uncle’s landlady had taken Abraham Lincoln, and had promised to write about his adventures.
At this point, Laurel’s lip quivered to the point where Jemina hastened to tell stories of the entirely fictitious six kittens her own equally fictitious landlady had been hosting. In truth, Jemina had been living in the grey buildings of the East Coast’s War Institute, and was not particularly looking forward to their counterpart on the West Coast. The Institute had promised her a handsome wage and an actual house to live in, though, near the campus where she’d be working.
Around noon, Jemina’s stomach growled.
“I am going to the dining car,” shea said.
“Oh. Have sandwiches. My uncle’s landlady made them for me. They’re not very nice,” Laurel said with more honesty than tact.
“My treat,” Jemina said.
She watched with amusement as Laurel worked her way through fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and two helpings of apple pie chased down with a tumbler of milk. She ate tea and toast herself, the teabag left steeping in the hot water till it was tannin bitter, dark as oak-lemonade, and every sip sent caffeine singing through her nerves. It didn’t matter if she indulged in stimulants here on the train; she wouldn’t be able to sleep anyhow, only doze for four days till her destination.
“My cousin,” Laurel announced as she mopped milk from her upper lip, “said many of these trains get attacked by werewolves.”
“My cousin,” Jemina said, leaning forward, “who is a Pinkerton agent, said that the kind of werewolves that attack these trains are very different than the kind that live in England.”
The conversation had obviously not gone in the direction that Laurel had expected. She eyed Jemina. “How are they different?”
“They are shapeshifters, who can take on a number of different forms, wolves being only one of them.”
Worry flashed on Laurel’s face. “So someone here could be a werewolf?” she asked, looking around at the other diners.
“Probably not,” Jemina said. “These cars are warded with silver.” She indicated the top of the window. “See the little star? That’s real silver and keeps out negative magics.”
“You mean evil?”
Jemina shook her head. “There’s not really such a thing as good and evil. There is, though, positive and negative. Negative magic drains things.”
“What were the zombie soldiers that won the war?” Laurel said.
This was not territory in which Jemina had thought to wander, or which she found particularly hospitable. “It depends on which side you were on,” she said.
Her mind flashed: a zombie hand, pale nailed and blunt, groping out from the iron cage where it had been confined, in an early war experiment before they’d learned to tame them.
She shoved the thought away before it went anyplace worse.
“Do you ever take off your gloves?” Laurel asked.
The directness of the question startled her. “No. I have a skin condition that I prefer to keep masked.”
“Are you sick?”
“No!” she said, more sharply than she meant to. The teapot was silverplate, some of the luster worn away by use. She poured more tea into her cup and drizzled in cream, the white devoured by the darker liquid.
They ate in silence.
Finally, pushing back her plate and crossing knife and fork atop it, Jemina looked to the window as Laurel ate the last bite of pie. Outside were plains, great seas of long grass tipped with the purple fuzz of seeds, shifting in the afternoon light to ripple in waves. Far above in the relentlessly blue sky, a hawk hovered on outspread wings, dipping down, then riding an updraft higher in great swings like a broken pendulum.
The waiter appeared at her elbow.
“Everything to your satisfaction, ma’am?” He was an older black man, eyes deferential but solicitous of Laurel as he removed her plate. Jemina smiled at him and shook her head.
She folded her napkin in a neat quadrangle before rising and holding out a hand to Laurel.
“Shall we go back?”
Each time they stepped on the swaying platform between the cars, Laurel paused. Jemina couldn’t blame her. There was an exhilaration to the buffet of the air, the swing underfoot, the landscape flashing past.
They stopped outright on the last platform. Laurel clenched the railing, shoulder-height for her, with both hands and looked out. Her hair lashed in the wind like an Medusa’s tangle.
“Will we see Indians?” she said.
“Quite probably”
“And buffalo?”
“Undoubtedly.” Jemina had, as was her way, researched the trip well before embarking on it. She knew the distances between cities, and had the route plotted out on the map of the United States that hung in her head, colored with elementary school dyes, unfaded over the years.
Laurel took a deep breath of the wild air, sweet grass mingled with coal smoke, before reluctantly moving to the door.
Jemina stepped after her. They bnearly collided with the passenger coming out, who scowled at both of them, dividing the look and pronouncing them equally unsatisfactory. He was dressed in the Western style, with high-heeled boots, but a tuft of lace at his untanned neck, a dandy’s puff that somehow set Jemina instantly against him.
She’d seen his kind during the experiments: wealthy merchants come to examine the way Lincoln proposed to win the war, aided by his Haitian allies, lending him their knowledge in order to keep their country from American meddling somewhere down the line. Men who examined the horrific with cold, calculating eyes while they smoked cigars and chatted about tax rates.
One of them had even asked about the possibility of zombie factory labor.
She’d stood with the President at one point, watching. He was a tall man, towering over her, dressed in a sooty black suit. His eyes were sunken, sleepless.
Perhaps they might have discussed the ethics of it all at another moment. But times had been desperate, and full of chaos and hard choices.
How did they test whether the Confederate dead would turn on their fellow but living Johnnies? They’d put them in together and at first Jemina had thought they meant to take out the living prisoners once the point had been proved and then she realized they had no intention of doing so. She’d turned her head, unwilling to watch, but she could hear screams and then worse sounds, thick, meaty sounds and gulping, and smell the hot
tang of blood-
The man said, “Watch your step, little lady,” and handed Laurel through the door. He was trying to impress her, Jemina decided, and she shook off his assisting hand as she followed Laurel.
Unexpectedly, he laughed as the door closed after them. Not an unkind laugh, but as though amused at the way she’d brushed past him. Her cheeks warmed as they made their way back to their seat.
They settled back in. The high-backed wooden bench lacked any cushioning, but Jemina rolled up her shawl and laid it against the wall for a pillow and let Laurel settle against her, a slight warmth and weight that was comforting, like a kitten resting on one’s lap.
They stayed that way in silence for a little while, but the rumble of the train, the back and forth of other passengers did not make for rest.
Or so Jemina thought but she found herself soon enough in a thin sleep, dreaming of being awake. The back door of the train car opened and she turned back towards it in agonizingly slow motion, already knowing what she would see there: the encarmined teeth, the glazed eyes, the staggerstep of the broken boned.
They hadn’t let her keep the charm they’d all worn during the experiments, the ones that warded off the undead. Those were expensive to manufacture and strictly regulated, because every soldier to enter the battlefield had to wear one or go down beneath the cold teeth belonging to his own side.
When she got to Seattle and began her work, they’d give her another. But here and now -- little to protect her -- she raises her hand as though to point a finger at the zombies coming so close she smells the carrion stink of them, the smell of rot that had made her eventually burn the clothes she’d worn when daily working with them...
