by Sam Stone
KAT ON A HOT TIN AIRSHIP
SAM STONE
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by
Telos Publishing Ltd
17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, LL19 9SH
www.telos.co.uk
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Kat On A Hot Tin Airship © 2013 Sam Stone
Cover Art © Martin Baines
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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Acknowledgements
My muse: David J Howe. My publisher: Stephen James Walker. Tennessee Williams: for just being so very good at observing life.
Thanks to Keith Stephenson for designing the Perkins-Armley Purse Pistol and then for his generous gift of the weapon at The Asylum Steampunk Convivial in 2012.
Prologue
The visitor was always there. Maggie could sense him, even from an early age. There would be a strange disquiet, a sense of gathering shadows that grew around one particular corner of the nursery. It didn’t bother the small child in her early years, but later, as she grew, the visitor would feel closer and she felt eyes on her all the time. Sometimes she felt like a mouse caught in an open field being circled by an owl.
As Maggie became more self-aware, puberty approached. Changes happened in her body that she felt she had no control over. Nanny Simone sat her down one day and told her what was happening. Womanhood loomed on the horizon: a terrifying future of marriage suddenly became a real possibility. Nanny Simone moved her things out of the nursery, away from her younger sister, and into a new room. A grown-up bedroom for a growing-up girl.
There was a kind of excitement and relief in moving into the other room. This was a place of her own: no longer did she have to share any of her toys. She had a dressing table, a beautiful silver-framed mirror stood on top and Maggie watched herself as Nanny Simone brushed her long black hair one hundred times with a silver-handled brush. She could almost see the changes in her reflection. Her mouth had grown fuller. Her eyes were framed by brows that had a womanly curve. She also began to see Nanny Simone in a different light. The black nursemaid had always been there for her, but Maggie was recognising the differences between her and the house slave that had little to do with skin colour.
Her first night in her new, huge, double bed, alone in the room, was confusing and frightening. She had never slept alone before. But Nanny Simone said it was part of growing up: a relevant transition for a woman in her station.
‘Leave the light on, please Nanny,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s so dark in this room. So many dark corners.’
Nanny Simone chuckled. ‘You’ll get used to it, Miss Maggie.’
But she left a small oil lamp lit on the dressing table and Maggie stared at it with half-closed eyes trying to ignore the shadows that expanded either side of the room. Somehow the small light made the darkness worse.
As tiredness overwhelmed her, Maggie felt strangely homesick. She missed her sister, even though she was so much younger and often cried in the night, disturbing both of their sleep. She missed the familiar tick of the clock on the mantelpiece, the shapes of their toys scattered around the room. She felt an immense pressure inside her chest. A griping fear of the unknown. Adulthood seemed to her to be the worst thing in the world. She fell into a restless sleep, anxiety wriggling around in the back of her subconscious.
Several nights after she had moved into her new room, Maggie became aware of the visitor. She usually sensed its presence only in the nursery and she was surprised and confused to experience this feeling here. She had begun to enjoy her new bed and surroundings. The novelty, instead of waning, had become increasingly exciting. The idea of maturity was now a fascinating prospect, no longer something to fear. She had begun to value her newfound privacy. Enjoying the ability to take herself away from everything, just to be alone in her room.
Her parents were treating her differently too. Instead of ignoring her presence they occasionally addressed her. Her mother had started to give her grown-up presents. Jewellery, French perfume and sweet-smelling soaps were luxuries she had begun to enjoy and appreciate. It made her feel special and different.
She was trying on some of the jewellery – an ornate necklace, way too big and fussy for her young throat, but it made Maggie feel as though she looked like a woman already. In the mirror her reflection turned left, then right, and Maggie examined the ostentatious jewels with interest as they caught the light from the lamps.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw something dark and blurred that seemed to rush across the room. She turned her head, looking over to the curtains that hung across the big window overlooking the back of the plantation and the beds of cotton. A figure stood there. Maggie was sure of it, and she knew who it was, could smell it in the air – like the smoke from extinguished candles.
She looked away quickly. Forcing her attention back to her own image. The visitor must be ignored. Only then would he – and yes, Maggie always thought it was male in essence, though she never knew why – would go away. Deep down she was sure that if she acknowledged his presence she would somehow grant him the right to be there. It was like a primitive knowledge, something she instinctively understood.
She took a deep breath, but her heart pounded. She feared the shadow more than any other imagined monster and she didn’t know why. It was merely a shadow! Probably all just her imagination, like Nanny Simone had said when she had tried to tell her about ‘him’ some years ago.
‘I wonder what Nanny Simone will think of these?’ Maggie whispered as though by saying the imposing nanny’s name she would scare the thing away.
Her voice broke the silence, and, she hoped, disturbed the spell of uncertainty that the visitor always brought with him. Maggie stood up and turned towards the door. But the shadow was oddly dense there too. She glanced back at the window. No darkness lurked there now. It had moved – she was sure of it! She gulped in another ragged breath. Fear of something nameless – some violence she didn’t understand – came up into her throat like bile.
Maggie wasn’t sure what she should do. She wanted out of her room. She had to find Nanny Simone and tell her about this thing. But then, she recalled how the woman felt about what she called ‘wandering imagination’. She knew she wouldn’t believe her.
She sank down onto her new bed and closed her eyes. Willing the thing to go away and let her out. When she opened them again, the shadow was no longer there. Her eyes darted around the room, even as her heartbeat skipped. Then relief flooded her. It had gone again! Maybe it was some benign spirit that sometimes liked to watch the living? Maggie wasn’t sure and was too afraid to tell anyone about it, for fear they would think she was going mad. Just like her Aunt Alice had all those years ago …
She ran a hand over her forehead and noted it was trembling. Her body felt weak with anxiety and she no longer wanted to be alone.
She stood, hurried to the door to her room and opened it.
A brutal face, full of demonic darkness grinned at her from the other side.
Maggie screamed.
1
New York – 1865
The creature had run from one shadow to another, as though avoiding daylight wherever it could. In outward appearance it seemed to be a middle-aged dock-worker. Wearing dusty, dark clothing that had seen better days. A flat cap, pulled down over his eyes, covered thinning hair. He was to the casual eye an ordinary man. Quite invisible to anyone of note.
I perhaps wouldn’t have noticed him at all but for the bulky sack he carried. It looked too large and heavy for one person to bear, yet the man hefted it with little trouble. His bulging muscles barely registered the weight as he slung the straps over his back and hurried away towards the row of warehouses near the dock. I knew then that he wasn’t what he appeared to be.
Keeping well back, and abandoning my plans to meet up with George Pepper and Martin Crewe in Battery Park, I followed.
There was a row of secure warehouses on the dock, and the nervous man hurried past a stack of empty crates that had been abandoned just outside the first structure. He paused, looking back, as though some supernatural sense told him he was being followed. I ducked down behind a mound of broken pieces of wood, and waited there until I was certain he had moved on.
By the time I looked around the heap, he had passed the first warehouse and was headed towards a doorway in the side of the second. I carried on then, pausing by the crates just as he had.
I placed my reticule on top of one of the crates, looked around, and then quickly unfastened the long skirt that would only delay me. After tripping over a dress and almost being ripped to shreds by a horde of demons out for blood, I’d learnt the hard way that female clothing wasn’t conducive to my line of work. So, I wore a pair of tight breeches and calf-length flat-heeled boots underneath my formal clothing for these sort of occasions.
I opened my reticule and retrieved my weapons belt. On it hung a hand-held clockwork crossbow, the holster for a Crewe-Remington Laser, which when armed was connected to a wrist holster that contained a power pack that provided energy for the weapon when the sun was down, or when needed inside. The weapon itself stored a small amount of power but wasn’t good for prolonged use without the pack. Martin Crewe had designed this gun for me, after his initial prototype worked so well some years before when the shop in which we worked, Tiffany & Co, was besieged by zombies. The failure of the previous model had always been its limitation to daylight use. Martin had harvested that power since. The weapon now lay inside the pack, and all I had to do to charge it was to leave it on the ledge by my window for a day. The sun was sucked inside by a small panel containing a module rigged with what Martin called ‘electronic’ wires. It somehow absorbed natural light and conducted it down the wires to operate the system. Martin called it a SunPan. Somehow this clever device captured and stored the energy and used it to power the gun. It meant that I could use it anywhere now, even in the darkest room.
I stuffed my brown velvet skirt behind the back of the crates, strapped the belt around my waist, the holster on my thigh, and the wrist holster around my right wrist. On my other thigh I added another holster. This one contained an adapted Colt 45. Instead of firing ordinary bullets the Colt now fired shells containing liquid nitrogen. The bullets were dangerous – guaranteed to explode on impact – fortunately my clever friend Martin had coated the bullets with a benign substance that kept the content cold and stable until they met with the warmer flesh of the target.
I pulled on a pair of leather gloves, removed the bullets from a metal cartridge and began to load them into the gun. It took six in all. And six were usually more than enough to deal with any enemy.
I patted my ankle, making sure that the knife hidden there was still secure. It was made of steel and silver and encrusted with diamond shards. Hard. Deadly. And of course we had learnt in the last few years that silver and diamonds were poison to a lot of the things I fought. Yes, I was armed to the teeth. And weapons were something I had come to rely on in the fight against the Darkness, an unstoppable evil that used it’s many minions to try to destroy the goodness in humanity.
I guess some would say the Darkness was the devil, and that the demons came from hell. Maybe they did, and I supposed that these things had been around for the whole history of mankind, which explained where the many superstitions of heaven and hell came from. In my case I had found hypocrisy in organised religion and, although I had every reason to believe that there was certainly an evil out there waiting in the dark ready to manipulate man, I was somewhat cynical about the idea of a ‘god’. I had good reason to be. All I saw in our city was evil, and I was fighting every day to push it back. To stop it from consuming us all, plunging the world into a dark pit that would never be salvageable. That was why, if I saw even one of those things living among mankind, I killed it on sight.
The Darkness was an infection. It was a leech. It fed on our misery, making itself stronger.
And me? I’m Kat Lightfoot. Fighting the evil brought into the world by the Darkness was just an average day in New York. And so, I hid my reticule with the skirt behind the crates and slid along the wall, careful to remain unobserved. I reached the side door of the second warehouse, now armed and ready for the battle I would probably face.
Inside I quickly merged with the dark, hiding behind the nearest row of boxes. The warehouse was unusually dark and quiet. I could make out shapes of cartons, crates, pallets of goods, all stacked in neat rows. I had not expected it to be bustling, not if this thing were hiding out here. Humans tended to avoid them, even when they didn’t know why. A natural dislike of the creatures … or maybe we had all developed another sense since the first uprising, I wasn’t sure. Most people, however, went about their daily life oblivious to the demons and monsters walking among them. I think I’d once been the same before my eyes were opened and New York nearly fell to the Darkness. That day we had been saved by our domestic cats, which had been carrying a venom in their claws that was deadly to the zombies and an effective cure for anyone newly-infected. The infection had spread too quickly, we were outnumbered. Without the cats we would have been doomed for certain.
Since then, though, the battle had continued, and Pepper, Martin and I were seemingly the only people who knew how to fight back when the things got greedy and came out of their hiding places again.
Something scurried across the aisle. I cocked the laser pistol, removed the safety, and switched on the battery. Then I looked down the sight, scanned the dark area and stepped out from behind the crates.
I took a few quiet steps, glanced down another cross-road of crates, then moved on. There was a strange chattering sound, like the faint twitter of crickets on a hot night. Interesting. I moved forward, with slow intent, checking the rows each time I reached an intersection. The layout reminded me of the Manhattan City grid, and I began to treat each section as a block that would take me closer to the target.
One step further on and the chattering, chirruping noise became louder. I glanced down the next aisle. Nothing there, but I was rapidly approaching an open space in the centre of the warehouse that could be dangerously exposed for me. As I edged towards the end of the rows, something moved across the bottom. I ducked back behind the nearest row of boxes. The chattering stopped. I held my breath, afraid I’d been heard, but after a moment the sound resumed, only this time I could also hear the scamper of feet ahead. It sounded like the scrape of thousands of insects, skittering across a wooden floor.
I peeped around the boxes, saw there was no-one there, then edged forward again. At the end of the row I looked into the gloom of the warehouse. Dull light filtered in from skylight windows above, casting the occasional spotlight glow down into the large, empty space. It was a dullish day out, perfect weather to encourage Darkness creatures to venture out. They were rarely ever found in bright sunlight.
I saw the one I had followed, placing his stolen wares down on the floor in the centre. From this distance it still appeared human, but experience had t
aught me that you couldn’t take anyone at face value anymore. The sound of chirruping grew louder, and then I saw other things creep from the shadows, out towards the sack of stolen food the thing had brought them.
They were beings of the Darkness for sure. An ancient demon, three-legged, vile, with grey slime-covered skin, was moving faster than the rest towards the spoils. The smell of putrefaction wafted from his skin. I pressed my free hand over my nose to prevent the stench from making me gag. Another monster, disguised as an urchin, hobbled forward. Its flesh bulged with poison-filled boils. I felt a vague rush of sympathy for the urchin whose body had been stolen. He had probably been alive when they took him. But the demons cared nothing for human life, and the bodies they used were no longer fit for human souls to inhabit. The best I could do for this one now was kill the body, sending the demon straight back to whatever ‘hell’ it came from. Hopefully freeing the tortured human soul if it was still trapped inside: an issue of uncertainty that my colleagues and I had often debated upon.
I waited for all of the creatures to gather, to be sure that none was waiting in the shadows.
The chirruping sound picked up, and I realised with surprise that this was some form of private language they had. The demons I had conversed with usually spoke in English before I killed them. I guess it hadn’t occurred to me until now that this was all part of the mimicking process.
The dock-worker demon bent down and opened the large bag it had brought. There were some 15 or 20 of them gathered now, and you have to pick your battles carefully. I was beginning to think that retreat would be the best course of action this time. All well and good taking one or two down, but this seemed too many. I was alone, possibly didn’t have enough weaponry to finish them all, and it was likely that the creatures would turn nasty as soon as one of them was destroyed. I looked from one to the other, trying to work out exactly what they were. You see, not all monsters are the same. Some are demons, others zombies, some are shades. There are nephilims, and phantoms. All carnivorous in their own way … These appeared to be … skinners … which meant that the package would contain …
