“You better hope they come soon. I’m hungry and I will eat you alive.”
She looked forward and saw Olaf standing in the center of the ring. At his feet were at least five score of those horrific black bugs. The light was coming from a couple of smokeless lanterns placed on either side of the ring. She sat up with some effort, still woozy from the effects of the ether, compounded by the fact that her hands were tied.
As she shifted towards the shovel, Olaf turned around and advanced towards her, the carpet of oily blackness moved with him. “You will lie on the ground and do nothing or I will kill you right now.” His voice rose to a shout and she threw herself back to the ground, curling up there. She did not have to feign her fear. “When this is done, you’d better pray to your gods that I kill you quickly.”
As she hid her face from his distorted features— elongated jaw, too-large eyes and clawed hands— the smell of the shovel told her that she had reached her goal. She waited until the Shifter and his retinue returned to his spot in the center of the ring to risk shifting her wrists onto the shovel’s edge.
~ * ~
Will was surprised and a little unnerved at the complete silence of the showground. Whatever hold the Shifter had on these people, he made sure that they were all tucked away in their tents and wagons He took a breath and readied himself with a revolver in one hand and his saddlebag in the other. He stepped through the front flap of the main tent..
Inside it was dark except for a man and blackness in the center of the ring. All of the risers were still in place as if a ghost audience watched what was about to unfold. As he got closer to the ring and its meager light, he saw two things: there was something very wrong with the man and the blackness at his feet was moving.
Then he saw Mena’s body lying at the other end of the ring behind the Shifter and cocked his gun.
“She isn’t hurt. Just scared,” Olaf said. “Have you come to rescue your dear sister?”
Will saw her faint movement and his heart was glad. Just let me get her out alive, he prayed.
“You demanded the exchange.” He lifted up the saddlebag.
“Toss the queen here. It’s fine if she bounces. She’s made of stern stuff.”
He did and everything seemed to happen at once. As soon as the saddlebag hit the ground in the middle of the sea of black bugs, a dozen Scarabs exploded from it and started shooting bursts of light in all directions. As random as the bursts seemed, each one hit a cluster of bugs, some still on the ground and most flying. Every bug hit stopped moving, lying where they were or falling out of the air.
In the middle was the Scarab who had hired Mena and Scott. That Scarab flew at Olaf, firing light bursts, one after another. Through the haze of black wings and light bursts, Will aimed his revolver and fired two shots. Both struck, but only one struck true, taking out one of the Shifter’s eyes. The other one grazed his forehead.
“My turn,” Olaf said and whipped an impossibly long tentacle at Will. It would have struck if another Scarab hadn’t thrown itself in the way of the weapon. Will dodged left and then right. Every tentacle whipped out at him ended with a Scarab embedded in it that then exploded like a small stick of dynamite.
The next two shots Will took were to Olaf’s chest. These shots were accompanied by much larger bursts of light from the Scarab queen who came out from hiding. Olaf roared at the sight of her and turned his attacks that way, while shrugging off the wounds the bullets made in his flesh. More Scarabs sacrificed themselves to protect their queen and Will knew he had only two shots left to hit the brain in the chest of the monster or to blind it. He decided to go for the kill and fired.
Both shots hit but did nothing to slow the Shifter down.
The Shifter’s tentacles captured the Scarab queen and it roared again in triumph. By this time, it could barely be called a man. Opening its mouth to a prodigious size, it looked as if it was about to swallow the Scarab queen whole when it suddenly stilled, with its chest area pushed forward and a surprised look of real pain on its face. As its tentacles let go of the queen, it looked down with its remaining eye and saw the slim edge of metal poking out of its chest.
“My turn,” Mena said and gave another hard thrust on the shovel she had used to penetrate the Shifter. Half of the shovel head came out the front of its chest. What was left of the creature’s face collapsed, and the body fell over as Mena released the shovel. Will and Mena watched in disgust as the Shifter disintegrated into a noxious goo.
We need to leave, the queen said. She only had eight Scarabs left. All of them hovered in a protective pattern around her.
Mena ran to Will, who kissed her once, hard and glad, before turning and leaving with the Scarabs.
As the sun rose over their small camp, the Scarabs that had sacrificed their energy for their queen and those who went into battle began to glow in the morning’s light. Soon they were hovering about the queen while Mena and Will sat close together.
“I’m sorry to see that your lead guy didn’t make it,” Will said.
He will be rebuilt. His core programming has been saved.
“Will we have to deal with any more Shifters?” Mena asked.
After a pause, the queen spoke. I do not believe so. There are no records of other Shifters on this planet. We will investigate further as a matter of caution.
They watched as the Scarabs formed up into orderly lines. The queen spoke again. Will Brogan, lay your coat on the ground.
Mena and Will looked at each other. She shrugged as Will pulled his duster from his saddle and laid it out on the ground with the lining towards the sky.
Mena Scott and Will Brogan, you were offered gold as payment for rescuing me. We do not have the gold we promised but we know where it is.
The queen then flashed a bright light onto the lining of the coat. When they blinked the spots out of their eyes, they could see that some sort of map had been drawn there.
There should be a sufficient amount of gold at this location for your needs. We thank you. If our paths cross again, may they be in good times.
With that, the Scarab queen rose high in the sky and moved faster than the eye could follow towards the rising sun. The rest of the Scarabs followed, twinkling briefly before they disappeared.
“Well, I’ll be…it’s a treasure map,” Will said, as he knelt to examine his coat.
“No one’s going to believe this.”
“They don’t have to.”
Mena smiled at him, “I guess another adventure or two can’t hurt before we find our homestead.”
Will stood and pulled her to him. “Not as long as I’m with you. That’s homestead enough for me.”
<>
~ * ~
THE CLOCKWORK COWBOY
J. Steven York
I t was a Texas scorcher in Calliope Springs, and the main street was all but empty. The place looked dry and dead, like the whole town just might snap off at the roots and blow away. The wind whipped through town in little gusts that sent clouds of dust in the air, covering everything with a fine layer.
Every time I moved, I could feel the grit grinding at the metal in my joints, and I had to keep wiping my glass eyes clean with the corner of my bandanna. That’s why I’d rode into town, to pick up a can of grease at the mercantile for my old clockwork war-horse Piston and me.
I heard my friend Rusty well before I saw him, clumping his way slowly up the boardwalk behind me, one heavy step after another. Rusty is a winder-man, and he’s built like a pot-belly stove, all cast-iron, legs like steam-engine push-rods, and an oversized-chest nearly as wide as a man’s spread arms just to house his enormous main-spring. Like most winder-men, he isn’t too bright, but he’s got a good governor in him, and I’m not much of one for small-talk anyway.
“Hey Rusty, how’s it going at the mill?”
Rusty stopped and turned his head slowly towards me, looking at me with big glass eyes for a while before answering. I could hear the Greek gears in his head spinning,
trying to put a sentence together. He reminded me of an old tortoise when he did that. Slow, but none too concerned about it.
“Not good, Liberty. Not good at all. The river is down to a trickle, and the wheel, she’s barely a-turning.”
They call me Liberty Brass, because brass is what my head is made out of, and there’s a crack along the right side of my face where a cannonball grazed me in the War. I nodded that sorry excuse for a head at Rusty. “Sorry to hear that. I saw some clouds out over the hills yesterday. Hoped their might be some rain up there.”
Rusty tilted his head a little, and his neck made a noise like a hinge that needs oil. “Ain’t just the rain, Liberty. It’s the Black Oak ranch upstream. They’ve gone and dammed up the river!”
You might think it strange that a town of clockwork men would run on water and that getting our metal hides as far away from that rust-producing stuff as we could would be the best thing for us, but that just ain’t the case. If a clockwork man doesn’t like rust, there’s one thing he likes even less: winding down.
It was that winding that made us beholden to the folks that built us and the folks that bought us. But there are other ways to wind an automaton than the hand of man: with the powers of steam, and wind, and yes, water; and for those of us who have chosen to flee the world of flesh-men and their misadventures, that is a godsend.
So it should hardly be a surprise that when a band of freematons led by the famous dance-hall steam-man Calliope Jones headed west into Texas about 1855 they should set up camp in the remains of an old grist mill and simply never leave, rebuilding the mill for their own purposes. Jones broke down a few years later, as steam-men often do, but his rusting bones are propped up on a hill overlooking the town of Calliope Springs. They say at night sometimes, when the wind blows just right, you can still hear his pipes sing its praises.
But I didn’t come to the place until much later, until after I walked away from Gettysburg. It was there I had learned of Lincoln’s Second Emancipation Proclamation, which set free us automatons forced to serve the South, in word if not necessarily in fact. I had seen enough killing, and I was already across the Mason-Dixon long before the War finished winding down.
Me and Piston headed north for a while, ending up in Chicago where I worked in the stockyards and learned a little about cattle. Then we rode west on an empty stock train to St. Louis, then south to Texas. We worked a herd or two, but clockwork men weren’t welcome most places, and we kept moving on and on.
Until we found Calliope Springs, anyway.
Here we fit in. Calliope Springs might not have been the most prosperous of towns, built as it was on the grave of an earlier town, failed and abandoned during the Indian wars. But it was a home for cast-off toys like me. Not just clockwork and steam men, but a few freemen, Chinamen, “fallen women,” and other flesh-and-bone people who were shunned most everywhere else.
I didn’t mind hard work, long as I could keep my spring wound, and worked odd jobs and as a round-up hand at some of the local ranches saving every penny I could. I was able to buy up a piece of land to start a small ranch of my own, if you could call it that. I had a shack just big enough to keep the rain off, a small barn, and a herd of cattle just big enough to be called a herd. It weren’t much, but it gave me pleasure and provided enough to keep me and Piston’s springs wound and our joints oiled.
Thinking of that, I reached into the coin purse hanging around my neck and fished out a bit of silver. “How about a wind, Rusty? I’m running a little low.”
Rusty looked both ways up and down the street. “Don’t know if I should, Liberty. With the mill being like it is, it’s hard for us just to keep ourselves wound.”
“Come on, Rusty. For a friend?”
“Well, I guess so.”
He came over close to the warhorse, hoping maybe nobody would see us and demand to be wound too. I turned around. My winder is a round recess behind my right shoulder, with a lift-up key that couldn’t be lost.
Rusty grabbed the key with his right hand, and there was a clunk as the gears connected his wrist directly to his mainspring. There was a whirring noise as his hand spun, doing in seconds a wind that would have taken a flesh-and-blood man twenty minutes to do.
As he did, I heard horses and a wagon come around the corner off the Hill Road. I heard them pull up behind us, and I heard a man laugh. “Well ain’t that fine, boys? We come up on a couple of clock-men screwing each other right out in the street!”
My winding finished, I turned to find the man talking. He stood tall in the front of a fine black carriage, the reins still hanging from one hand. He was tall, with a pointed nose, long hair the color of a silver dollar, and a neatly trimmed beard to match. Though there is a saying among clockwork-men that all flesh-men look alike, he seemed familiar to me, and I knew I had seen him somewhere before.
Next to him sat a broad-shouldered cowboy with a carbine resting casually across his lap. Two other rough-looking cowboys rode along on horseback. But it was the final member of the party who drew all eyes to him.
He was a steam-man, tall and painted black as night, astride the biggest, blackest plow-horse I’ve ever seen, who still seemed weary under the big automaton’s weight.
The day of steam-men was long past and most had fallen into disrepair, but this one was painted, polished and oiled so he looked brand-new. His arms made Rusty’s look like tooth-picks, and his glass eyes glinted down at me, dark and evil, a dim orange glow behind them, like his firebox was connected right up to his head.
Without taking those dangerous-looking eyes off me, he reached back to a saddlebag, pulled up a hunk of coal as big as a man’s head, and casually shoved it through the firebox door in his chest. A puff of black smoke rolled out of the smokestack on his right shoulder, and steam hissed from a valve on his right side.
As he slammed the firebox door closed, I saw there was an iron name-plate on it: MOGUL. I had heard there was a big locomotive by that name up north, and wondered if that was where the name had come from. If so, it fit.
Up and down the street doors and curtains were pulled open a smidge, and both people and automatons cautiously peered out to see what the ruckus was. A few of the braver souls and soulless actually stepped outside to get a better look.
A door creaked open behind me, and Ben Jackson stepped out of his metalsmith shop. Ben had been a slave in Georgia, and like me came west looking for a better life. Now he was book-studying to become a full-fledged gearsmith, something the town needed almost as bad as water.
“Get on out here!” shouted the man in the carriage. “I got something for all of you to hear!”
More folks began to wander into the street. Some leaned out of windows or stood on balconies.
“My name is Winston Hudd, and I own the Black Oak Ranch upstream. You may have noticed that I’ve built a dam across my river to secure my water rights.”
There was murmuring from the street. Inside my head, my governor started to whine and rattle as it did when I got riled. It had never been right since that cannonball, and I could feel it heating up behind my right eye as it thrashed around, trying to find some kind of balance.
“I also know that you folks—have been used to sucking hind-tit off my water these many years, but those days are over. You want my water, you’re going to have to pay for it—a thousand dollars for every foot I let my slip gates down. No money, no water!”
“He cain’t do that!” said Ben.
“Reckon he already did,” I said, trying to be calm, but just thinking about it made my head rattle.
“Well, somebody should stand up to him!”
I was grinding my gears for an answer when Ben stepped forward into the street, too fast for me to stop.
He walked right up to the wagon, the rifleman looming over him. “That river belongs to Calliope Springs just as much as it does to you!”
The man with the rifle jumped down from the carriage and slammed the butt of it against Ben’s face, sendi
ng him falling backwards into the dust.
“Show some respect, you filthy niggra!” said the rifleman. He spat into the dust next to where Ben lay, then looked at the faces watching him up and down the street. “Ain’t none of the lot of you worth licking Mr. Hudd’s boots!”
Behind him, the other cowboys casually pulled out and cocked their irons, aiming them at the sky, but clearly ready to use them if need be.
I ran over and went down on one knee next to Ben. Blood ran from a crack along his left cheek that was near a mirror to mine, and his eyes looked off at the sky like he had forgot where he was for a minute. “Ben, you okay?”
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