“The medicine I’m used to?” Allen grumbled. “I’d sooner die, if you want the truth.”
“Swakhammer’d maybe rather die than get cleaned up by a Chinaman,” Lucy said as she used her uncommonly strong mechanical arm to brace Jeremiah’s back. “He’s scared to death of them. But I’m willing to scare him if it keeps him in one piece.”
“Momma?”
“What, Zeke?”
“What about us?”
Briar hesitated, though she dared not hesitate long. Jeremiah Swakhammer was being toted away under the straining backs of his friends, and he was leaving a dripping blood trail like a ball of yarn unspooling behind them. Upstairs the sounds of rotters moaning and stomping continued. Their infuriated, starving demands grew louder and louder as their numbers climbed, and they struggled to find their way inside the pried-open crannies and left-open entrances.
“They’re everywhere,” Briar said, not really answering his question.
“Down’s going to be as bad as up. I don’t know how this room has stayed so clear,” Lucy said with a grunt. “Where’s the Daisy?”
“Here!” Briar said quickly, like she’d had the same thought at the very same moment. The massive shoulder cannon was half buried beneath a slab of ceiling, but she pried it out and held it up with no small degree of effort. “Christ,” she said. “Zeke, this thing weighs almost as much as you do. Lucy, do you know how to work it?”
“Roughly. Turn that knob there, on the left. Turn it all the way up; we’re going to need all the juice that thing can give us.”
“Done. Now what?”
“Now it’s got to warm up. Jeremiah says it has to collect its energy. It gathers up electricity in order to fire. Take it with us—come along, come over to the lift. Fire it inside the lift—that’ll be the best place, don’t you think?”
“You’re right,” Briar said. “The sound will carry from floor to floor, not just the one. That will work, if we can get to the lift.” With that thought, she handed the Daisy to Zeke, who strained to hold it. “Take this,” she told him. “I’m going to go ahead and clear the hallway. There were rotters there before; they might be there still.”
She readied the Spencer and ran ahead of the clot who carried Swakhammer, and ahead of her own son, whose back was bent backward nearly double as he tried to balance his body’s weight against the weight of the gun.
Briar kicked open the stairwell corridor and charged down unopposed.
“Stairway’s clear!” she shouted to the group behind her. “Zeke, come ahead of them with that gun! Lucy—how long until it’s warmed up properly? It ain’t been fired lately. Please tell me it’s not a quarter of an hour!”
“Not if he didn’t fire it. Just give it a minute,” the answer dribbled down through the stairwell.
Briar didn’t hear the last part. The corridor on the guest floor was peppered lightly with rotters in varying states of gruesome decay. She counted five of them, shambling between the bodies of their comrades and gnawing on the limbs of more freshly fallen men. Thus distracted, they barely noticed Briar, who picked them off quickly, one after the other.
The floor was cluttered with limbs that ought to stink, but then she remembered that she was still wearing her mask and that’s why she could only smell the charcoal and rubber seals. For the first time since arriving, she was glad for the singular odor of her own face.
Here and there an arm had fallen away from pure decomposition; and over there in a corner, the decapitated forms of other seminaked, putrefying corpses were collected as they’d toppled. It bothered her for a moment, wondering who’d decapitated them. But then she decided that she did not care and it did not matter. All the living—even those who fought amongst themselves—had a common enemy in the rotters, and whoever had separated those heads from those bodies had her gratitude.
She kicked at the limbs she could easily move, trying to clear a path and test the state of the prone and prostrate forms. One faker opened its lone remaining eyelid and bared its teeth, which Briar promptly shot out of its face.
Zeke popped out from the stairwell corridor with the Daisy shoved behind his neck, his arms draped over it so he could support it like a set of stocks. “Momma, what are we going to do?” he asked with real urgency, and Briar heard a question that she wasn’t quite prepared to answer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we need to get out of here, that’s plain enough. We’ll start with that.”
“Are we going with them? To Chinatown?”
“No, don’t,” Angeline said.
She was the one who emerged first from the stairwell, still bearing Swakhammer’s leg over her shoulder. Behind her came Frank with the other leg, then Squiddy and Lucy with the rest of the unconscious man borne between them.“I beg your pardon?”
“Get yourself to the fort. Go to that ship, the one they fixed there. It ought to be ready to fly,” Angeline added, each word abbreviated and stressed with her own exhaustion. “It’ll take you out.”
“Out of the city?” Zeke asked.
“Out of this part of it, at the very least,” Lucy said from underneath Jeremiah’s neck. “Help us get him on the lift, and then send us down. And as soon as we’re gone…” She shifted Jeremiah’s weight, and he let out a tiny moan. “You get on the lift, Briar Wilkes, and take that goddamned gun and fire it. And then you get up, and you get out of here.”
Still uncertain, Briar followed the first part of the order and helped maneuver the big man onto the lift. They rested him against Frank and Squiddy while Lucy poked through the levers up above. She said, “Once we hit bottom and get Jeremiah off to the tracks, I’ll send it back up, you understand? You’ll have to jump for it, ’cause it’s not going to stop.”
“I understand,” Briar said. “But I’m not sure—”
“I’m not sure of anything, myself,” Lucy told her. “But this much is for damned sure: You’ve got your boy, and this station is about to be overrun full tilt by those rotters, and anyone who stays in here is going to get eaten.”
Zeke said, “Are you the one who let ’em inside?”
Lucy gave a hard toss of her head to Frank and Allen and said, “Turnabout’s fair play, ain’t it? I only wish I knew they’d make it this deep. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“We could go with you. We could help,” he insisted.
Briar was thinking the same thing. She added, “We could see you safely back, at any rate.”
“No, no you couldn’t. We’ll either make it or we won’t. He’ll either make it or he won’t. We don’t need no one else to carry him. But you two, well. You, Miss Wilkes. You need to go tell the captain you didn’t die down here. He needs to know that he paid a debt, not that he incurred an even bigger one. He’s down at Fort Decatur, where they’ve fixed his ship and he’s waiting to take off, out of the city. He knows your boy’s down here, now. He told me so, when I gave him Minnericht’s message.”
Swakhammer’s shoulders stretched and he made a gurgling sound like something trying to breathe with a chest full of tar. The last part of it came out in a whimper, which tore Briar up. It wasn’t a sound that Jeremiah Swakhammer ought to make, ever. “He’s dying,” she said. “Oh God, Lucy. Get him out of here. Get him to your Chinese doctor. I thank you, and I’ll be seeing you again sometime, I swear it.”
“On my way,” she said. She didn’t even bother to close the iron gate, just yanked a pulley overhead. The lift began to drop. As the crew was lowered and they disappeared a foot at a time, Lucy said again, “You’ve always got a place with us in the Vaults, if you want it. If not, it was an honor to fight beside you, Wilkes.”
And then the precipitous slide of the lift down its cables and chains took them out of sight.
Briar was left alone with her boy.
The great gun was almost too much for him. He strained against its weight, but he did not complain, even though his knees were shaking and the back of his neck was burning from the warmth of the slowly heating metal.
At the bottom of the lift shaft, something stopped.
Briar and Zeke heard Lucy shouting orders, and she heard arrangements being made, and Swakhammer being toted and dragged off the lift and into the deepest depths of the underground levels. Hopefully there was a mine cart down there someplace; and hopefully, Lucy could take him somewhere to get him help.
With a rustling clank of cables and chains, the lift began to rise once more, climbing back to Briar and Zeke.
They held their breath and prepared to jump for it.
Briar and Zeke held the Daisy between them, and when the lift climbed into view they chucked it onto the deck and followed it. Once they were safely aboard, the lift rose slowly but steadily, a fraction of a floor at a time. Briar rolled the gun over and propped it up on its butt end.
A trigger as big as a large man’s thumb jutted out from the undercarriage.
The whole machine was buzzing with pent-up energy, ready to fire.
Briar said, “Cover your ears, Zeke. And I’m very, very serious about that. Cover ’em good. This’ll stun the rotters, but only for a couple of minutes. We’ll have to move fast.”
Leaning as far away from the gun as possible, Briar waited until the top floor came dawning into view, and then she squeezed the trigger.
The pop and the pulse pounded up, and down. Compressed by the shaft, it echoed and bounced and crashed, coursing from top to bottom and spilling out from floor to floor in a series of waves that might have amplified its power—or might have only dispersed it. The lift rang and rattled; it shook on its cable supports, and for a dazed, almost blinded moment Briar was afraid it was too much. She feared that the lift couldn’t handle it and couldn’t hold them, and at any moment it would drop them both to their deaths.