The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  Ronnie lowered the goggles over her eyes, making sure no stray hairs trailed from beneath her cap. She slung the satchel with the Leica over one shoulder, hefting the duffle with the grappling gun over the other. Discrete questioning and money across the right palms had brought her the name of the man who’d assaulted Tommy – Gordon Wexler. From there, it had been surprisingly easy to track down his regular haunts. Ronnie stood outside his favorite now, a Gothic mansion that had once been a private residence, the lower two floors a conventional gentlemen’s club with a dining hall, library, billiards room, bars, and the top floor catering to more particular tastes.

  Light spilled from windows on all three floors, but the grounds were shadowed with massive oak trees. Trusting to the darkness and her leathers to keep her hidden, Ronnie aimed for one of the largest of the trees growing close to the house. She set the duffle down at its base and drew out Emielle’s grappling hook gun.

  Her father had taught both his daughters to shoot when they were young. The lessons served her well now. She braced the stock against her shoulder, took a calming breath, and squeezed on the exhale. The hook caught in a fork between two high branches. Ronnie tugged the line to make sure it was secure, then climbed.

  Her arms shook by the time she reached the lowest branch that would hold her. She refused to give in to the temptation to look down, and kept climbing until she was even with the third floor. The tree was big enough that even this high up, the branches could easily hold her. She crawled as far out as she could, getting close enough to the house that she could practically touch the window.

  Ronnie had a clear view into a brightly-lit room holding a baby grand piano, a bar, and a scatter of wing-backed chairs and small tables. She prepped the camera as she scanned the faces in the room. Her pulse skipped as she spotted Gordon Wexler, a boy in a spangled silver dress and feathered headband at his side.

  Unlike Tommy, this boy proudly let his chest hair show, dark curls visible above the dress’ plunging neckline. Perhaps that’s what Wexler had requested. He squeezed the boy’s behind and guided him to a chair. Ronnie brought up the Leica, scarcely daring to breathe. She snapped Wexler nuzzling the boy’s throat, the boy sitting in Wexler’s lap, Wexler’s hand on the boy’s thigh, hiking his skirt higher – clicking until she ran out of film.

  Adrenaline shook Ronnie’s body as she climbed from the tree. She wanted to whoop aloud, but held the sound inside. She coiled the grappling gun, packed it back into the duffle. Things could still go wrong, the pictures might not turn out. She knew it rationally, but in this moment, her heart refused to acknowledge anything but victory.

  Ronnie couldn’t keep the grin from her face as she entered the garage. She breathed deep of the dust-and-oil smell, nodding to the men as she made her way toward where Emielle crouched beside the R32. Emielle looked up in surprise, wiping her hands on an oily rag as she straightened.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Even the strain in Emielle’s expression wasn’t enough to dampen Ronnie’s mood. She pulled the envelope, thick with photographs, from her satchel and handed it over. A duplicate envelope sat on the bed in Ronnie’s apartment, waiting to be anonymously mailed to Gordon Wexler.

  “What’s this?” Emielle lifted the envelope’s flap, but didn’t remove the contents, doubt clear in her eyes.

  “Insurance.” Ronnie’s grin deepened. “I’ve decided what kind of vigilante I want to be.”

  Black Sunday

  Kim Lakin-Smith

  Friday April 12, 1935

  Wesley Sanders edged the drink onto the table.

  “There ya’rl, Miss Nightingale. Iced lemonade, or as Momma’s prone to call it, sunlight in a glass.”

  The eight-year-old grinned. His teeth were large and very white, as if slicked with whitewash like the exterior of the Grace Presbyterian Church. His cheeks were nut-brown apples.

  Carrie-Anne leant forward in her rocker and put her toes to the floor. She smiled back. “Thank you, Wesley. Tell your momma, she sure does know how to soothe the spirit.”

  Wesley bobbed his cap. He waltzed off down the porch, humming one of those slow sad Negro church songs he was prone to. Even after he’d swung through the inner gauze and disappeared inside the house, Carrie-Anne could hear the tune. It seemed to nestle down inside the dry Oklahoma heat and stay there, whispering at her.

  She picked up the lemonade, rested the sole of a bare foot against the table and rocked. Julie Sander’s eldest, Abraham, had painted the porch a light gray color before he’d abandoned Bromide for Oklahoma City last fall. That afternoon, the paint shade complimented the troubled sky where blue and lavender clouds roiled.

  A storm was coming. What kind, Carrie-Anne wasn’t sure. This time of year, it could be hail, could be lightning, could be a twister. But she welcomed it. The weather was unseasonably close. It licked at the nape of her neck where her shoulder-length hair clung, and at each underarm, leaving sweat stains on her new cotton dress. Everything induced slumber. Except the cold lemonade.

  Carrie-Anne put the glass to her lips and sipped. She wanted to stay mindful. The back gate needed fixing; she’d set the new yardman on it with instructions to go about replacing the struts. One of her stockings had a run that wouldn’t darn itself. Plus the whole house needed airing.

  She’d noticed as much that morning. Rising from her blankets at the tail end of night, she’d descended the stairs and glimpsed the place as with an outsider’s eye. Everything was layered with dust. She’d got a rag to it. But as she beat the motes, she’d felt a familiar, inexplicable crackling along her bare arms. Lips parted, she’d held up a hand to the window. In the first rays of dawn, the dust had appeared to dance near but never touch her skin, as if magnetically repelled . . . Seconds later, she’d heard footsteps on the stairs and Julie Sanders saying in her quiet way, “Sure is dusty, Miss Nightingale. I’ll light a flame under the coffee pot then get to helping ya.”

  Carrie-Anne braced her foot against the table and stayed tipped back on the rockers. Having filled the role of nursery nurse ever since Carrie-Anne first arrived at Boar House, aged eight and orphaned, Julie was like family, as were her boys. Which was how the woman knew to fill the house with the clarifying aroma of coffee and just join in shaking out the dust that morning. Also how she knew to dispatch Wesley with cool lemonade when the gate was still broken, the stocking still torn, the house still dust-riddled.

  All the same, Julie’s best efforts had failed. With the heat cooking in around her, Carrie-Anne found it impossible to rouse herself to any thought but one.

  Where the hell were they?

  Even wearing ear mufflers, he couldn’t escape the terrible clanking as fragments of rock in the sand ricocheted off the drill. The cockpit shuddered with each impact. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth to stop them jarring. The four-point Sutton harness rubbed the same sore spots it did every run; Virgil imagined Carrie-Anne slavering the blisters with peppered grease. Lust alleviated his discomfort. The excavations were pivotal to his work, but, Christ, he missed that gal. Her baby scent when she soaped the sweat offa her. Those frank blue eyes and wide mouth. He liked her off-beat beauty.

  “Stop tugging your little john back there, Virgil, and crank the boiler. That last sheet of bedrock took the best of old Bessie’s heat.” Straining at the front harness, Josephine Splitz attempted to glare back over her shoulder.

  Virgil knew he’d just be a blur at her peripheral vision. He crossed his arms over his crotch all the same.

  “Sorry, Jos. It’s hot’s all. Got me sweating like a hog ripe for slaughter.”

  Grabbing a battered iron scoop off a hook overhead, he drove it through the coke trough that ran alongside his chair and used the other hand to open the iron flap in the Burrower’s wall. A tremendous gush of heat spilt into the cabin. He shook the coke down the shoot and shut the hatch.

  “Another couple.”

  If the old coot’d had eyes in the back of her head, Virgil guessed the
y’d have been lit up and smiling. Twice more he drove the scoop into the coke and threw the fodder down the boiler’s throat.

  Reaching overhead, he took hold of a leather loop and tugged several times, feeling the papery air off the bellows feed the cabin and boiler simultaneously. Glancing past Josephine’s shoulder, Virgil saw the needles creep up in the rack of brass and glass gauges. The steering wheel juddered under the old girl’s hands, and he thought he heard her wince despite the wads of muslin she’d taped around the triangulated steel bar. Any other octogenarian shoehorned into the cramped quarters of the Burrower would’ve screamed for death’s release long ago. But Josephine was a wizened fruit, long past the point of any residual softness. She reminded Virgil of a small hunched Asian man in her navy-blue mandarin jacket, loose pants and soft cloth hat, except her fierce single-mindedness was peculiar to the matriarch.

  “Got your mind up top too soon, Virgil Roberts. Long as we’re still beneath, we’re just one mistake away from being buried alive.” Jos’s voice got that molasses quality it always did when she wanted to aggravate him for kicks. “Nothing certain in love or geological exploration, I promise you. By the time we break surface, chances are Carrie-Anne will’ve hooked up with Preacher Richards’ son. Great strapping lad, all thighs and neck and buttocks like quartz boulders. Or Jeffrey’s boy. Part store keeper, part donkey.”

  “In place of a lab rat that spends his time parked behind the arse of some old dame,” Virgil shot back. His mouth twisted. Jos sure liked to tease, but part of him guessed she might be right. Why was Carrie-Anne laying down with a freak like him? He’d spent so much time underground this past year. His eyes had a skim on them like spoilt milk. Likewise, his skin was colorless through lack of sunlight. Danger was, sooner or later, he’d fade right out.

  Even without seeing his face, Jos was astute enough to know what he was thinking. “You’re okay, Virgil Roberts. Wouldn’t choose you for my bedfellow but Carrie-Anne’s got the right to.”

  “It bother you if I said I wouldn’t choose you for a bedfellow either?”

  The old gal snorted. Any retort was cut short by a tremendous scraping noise. The steel undercarriage bucked beneath their feet, the motion immediately offset by the concertinaing of the Burrower’s riveted steel roof plates. It was a filthy, stinking, terrifying ride, thought Virgil, but Jos’s design was immaculate. The torpedo-shaped main carriage had a dual layer of modular pneumatic tiles, or ‘scutes’ as Jos called them in homage to her greatest muse as a bioengineer, the horn-coated dermal bones of the Armadillo. As a geo-engineer, she’d applied similar tessellation logic to the rotating bit of the twelve-foot Tungsten-Carbide-plated nose cone, likewise the corrugated neck frill that funneled the spoil out behind as they pressed forward on sharpened steel tracks. The unstable nature of the terrace deposits was counteracted by gills in the outer walls that released a fine mist to solidify the sand. Hot, thin, rust-scented air was siphoned into the cabin from the tunnels. Water bladders were grouped at the back end of the machine like egg sacks.

  The turbulence abated.

  “Five minutes more. Just time enough to make yourself look pretty for my niece.” Jos adjusted in her seat. She handed a metal pot over her shoulder. “And to empty the piss pan.”

  Carrie-Anne plunged forward in the rocking chair and stood up. She rested her hands against the corner strut of the porch then leant her whole body into it to better feel the vibrations. The keen of ruptured earth was just audible. Dust misted the field beyond the garden.

  “Wesley!”

  The boy was already at the swing door.

  “Momma knows, Miss Valentine. Says she’s drawing Miss Splitz’s bath and fixing Mister Robert’s Gin Sour.”

  “Good.” Carrie-Anne stared at the dry field, littered with entrance and exit wounds inflicted by the Burrower. “That’s good,” she repeated softly.

  The ground shook. There came a sudden explosion of brilliance in the center of the field as sunlight touched the tip of the emerging nose cone. A geyser of dark sand erupted. The cacophonic whirring of the engine ripped through the air. The Burrower wormed up from below like a giant silver maggot castor.

  I shall not run to his side, not this time, thought Carrie-Anne. I will be the lady of the house, patiently waiting on the porch, lemonade glass in hand.

  Though it was hard to stand still as the terrific machine sledged up into the air, slammed back down and coasted forward, its twin steel tracks sending up two great tides of dust. The engine sound changed to a discordant chug. Steam spurted from the side valves.

  “Want me to run down to them, Miss Valentine?” Wesley stared up at her in round-eyed innocence.

  “No, Wesley.” She stuck out a hand as though to brace his chest. “You know better than to get near Miss Splitz’s excavating machine so soon after surfacing. It’s a big old unpredictable cottonmouth till it cools some. Look!” She felt a rush of longing as jets of steam escaped the rivets of the roof hatch. “Even those inside take their time when exiting,” she murmured.

  The roof hatch cranked up. Aunt Josephine was first to emerge, un-crumpling herself as she went with all the decorum of a farm hand. She dropped heavily onto the ground, agitating the dust. For a brief moment, she applied her thumbs to her spine and arched backward. Then she made for the front of the vehicle, kicking out stiff legs as she walked.

  Carrie-Anne’s gaze returned to the roof hatch. He was visible now as a coil of flesh that stretched out to become a tall, thin figure. Her heart got hot at the sight of him. He raised a hand to wave.

  There wasn’t chance to respond. Her aunt was shouting and gesticulating toward the huge steaming drill. Virgil answered her and threw an arm toward the house.

  He’s waving her away, thought Carrie-Anne admiringly.

  Sure enough, the old maid turned heel and began to stomp toward the house.

  Carrie-Anne watched Virgil slide down off the Burrower’s roof. With his shirt sleeves rolled and one suspender dangling loose from his waist, he strode up to the drill and dipped under it, one arm raised as a shield against the heat. Virgil’s in-depth mechanical knowledge made Carrie-Anne aware of her own internal workings; he seemed to grasp them too. And while she wanted to keep her eyes on him, her aunt was already at the garden gate.

  “. . . peach of a ride till we hit that friggin’ boulder. Now the damn drill’s breached. Virgil best check the depth of those gorges good and proper else I’ll be roastin’ his sweet cherry ass on old Bessie . . .” Aunt Josephine plonked down on the porch steps, untied her boots and kicked them off. She didn’t falter in her monologue, “. . . not like we weren’t prepared. Hit wet sand and Virgil was gonna switch from steam to soot mix, gloop the walls to stop them caving in. But we didn’t find one patch of moisture. ’Course it’s bone dry up here on the surface. Just the same, no water bodies, not even fifty foot below? It’s strange. Not strange, it’s unnatural.”

  The old woman stopped prattling suddenly. Her hooded gaze fell on Wesley.

  “Help your momma black the stove?”

  Wesley sucked his lip and nodded.

  “Kept the dirt from growin’ between them fat little toes?”

  The kid caught a foot up in a hand and used his fingers to scoop between the toes.

  “Am all clean, Miss Splitz.”

  The old woman gurned at him and he giggled.

  “Here.” She held out a fist.

  Wesley dropped his foot. He ran over, offering up cupped hands, and Aunt Josephine opened her fist over them.

  “Thank you, Miss Splitz.” The boy eyed his prize then pocketed it.

  Carrie-Anne smiled; she knew the ritual. The treasure was a mundane stone recovered from several miles below ground. Wesley would add it to his collection.

  Hand on the stair rail, Aunt Josephine levered herself up. Stalking over to the front door, she paused to cut her eye at Carrie-Anne.

  “Told lover boy you’d’ve shacked up with a new fella by now.” She slung her gaze ov
er to the field where Virgil had shifted his attention to the cooling engine.

  Carrie-Anne felt panic worm between her eyes.

  Her aunt must’ve noticed.

  “He missed you,” she relented, and shouldered the fly-screen door and disappeared inside. Wesley followed after like a child bound to a witch by invisible silken thread.

  Carrie-Anne rested her forehead against the corner strut. Eyelids lulling, she watched the ghost of a man at work out in the field. Minutes passed. He became less and less solid. Late afternoon ebbed and swelled around her. A cicada soloed ahead of the insect symphony at sundown. Through the open bathroom window, she could hear Aunt Josephine’s prattle and the slow pour from a water jug as Julie endeavored to clean up her mistress. Wood creaked; to Carrie-Anne, it was the sound of the house groaning under the weight of memories impregnating its walls. She listened past the familiar sounds of her environment, out to the dusting plateau of farmland and the drone of nothingness.

  Her flesh crackled. Her eyes shot wide.

  Virgil stood on the porch a couple of paces away.

  Carrie-Anne’s first reaction was indignation at his materializing like that when she expected to watch him approach from the distance of the field, to get used to him closing in. Her anger was blunted by the sight of him, hands and forearms etched in coke dust, shirt savaged at the neck. Lifting her eyes, she saw a death mask of skin so terribly white and dried to the bone. He went against what common decency said a man should look like.Yet his was a salt-preserved masculinity which made her drip away from herself.

  Carrie-Anne let go of the strut and wrapped her arms around her waist. Virgil kept on staring. She felt transparent.

  “Lose your tongue as well as your mind this trip, Virgil Roberts?”

  He smiled and the death aspect was replaced by tangible sensuality. Now she saw a slender man with well-worked shoulders, high cheekbones and generous lips in need of moisture. Only his eyes remained strange with their misted irises and pupils gone over from black to lead gray.