Текст книги "Dreadnought"

Автор книги: Cherie Priest

Соавторы: Cherie Priest
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“Or stand up against the cargo nets,” the captain said under his breath, like it was a private joke.

The sheriff didn’t pay any attention to him; she just showed Mercy over to the wall beside the cargo hold, where a wide net was hanging behind a bench that had straps attached to it. “You and me, and either Huey or Zeke-depending on who loses that argument-will sit right over here. You just buckle one of these harnesses over you, and it’ll keep you from sliding around too much if we hit rough air.”

Mercy took a look at the apparatus, generally understood it, and sat down to fasten herself into place. Briar Wilkes took a seat beside her, and immediately the two boys bickered over who got to sit in the engineer’s chair. Zeke lost the ensuing battle and was subjected to the indignity of sitting beside his mother.

The boy asked Mercy, “You ever flown before?”

And she said, “Once. A few weeks ago. I flew from Richmond to . . . to Chattanooga, sort of.”

“Sort of?” his mother asked.

“Long story,” Mercy summed up.

As the steam thrusters hissed themselves to full power, the captain gave the order to unhook from the pipe. He pressed various buttons, and the ship drifted upward in a lazy rise.

No one spoke while the Naamah Darlinglaunched-the quiet was an easygoing superstition, until the craft was tipping its crown up against the low, heavy clouds above Tacoma. Then the captain took the steering column and moved it smoothly, thoughtlessly, to swivel the craft to face the north. The thrusters were fired, and the hydrogen vessel began a leisurely flight.

Once these things were under way and there seemed little chance of distracting the captain from something important, Briar Wilkes cleared her throat. “Speaking of long stories,” she began, even though no one had spoken of such things for several minutes. “Now’s the time, I guess, to ask you what you might’ve heard about Seattle.”

“Seattle?” Mercy wrinkled her forehead. “Well, I guess I don’t know much. There was a gold rush up north, and it went through it, isn’t that right?”

Zeke muttered, “Something like that.”

His mother elbowed him. She said, “Go on. What else?”

She thought about it, and answered slowly. “I thought there was an earthquake or something, a long time ago. I had it in my head that the town was pretty much torn down, or just abandoned. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know anybody lived there, much less that my dad called it home.”

Briar nodded. “You’re more right than wrong. There was an earthquake; that’s a fact. But it was made by a big mining machine, and it tore up the city but good. A lot of people died, and a bunch of buildings were destroyed, but most of the city proper is intact.” She hesitated, as if that was not the correct spot to end her commentary. So she added, “In a sense.”

The captain chimed in, talking over his shoulder while he stared out the big glass wraparound windscreen. “It’s all still there,” he said. “Everything that didn’t go down with the Boneshaker is still standing.”

“The what-now?”

The sheriff said, “The mining machine.”

“Oh.”

He went on. “That’s right. But whatever that machine did, tearing up the foundation like that, under the mountains . . . it stirred up a real nasty gas. The gas makes people sick as hell, and it kills them. In a sense,” he concluded with Briar’s qualifying remark.

“In a . . . sense?” the nurse repeated. She felt something warm and awful in her stomach and she could almost imagine where this was going, but she wanted to be wrong, so she went ahead and asked. “How does something kill somebody, but only in a sense?”

Briar Wilkes cleared her throat. “I hate to say you’ll have to see it for yourself, but I’m afraid that if I tell you, you won’t believe me and you’ll think I’m out of my mind.”

“It might surprise you, the things I might believe.”

“All right, then. The gas-we call it Blight-turns people all rotty, like they’re dead and walking, decomposing even though they’re still moving. And still,” she paused, “hungry.”

Mercy nodded. She had spent so many nights wondering where the gas had come from-the stuff from which the sap was made-and now, inexplicably and horribly, she was fairly certain she had her answer.

The captain said from his chair, “Anyway, that’s the sum of it.”

Inside the Naamah Darling,all was silent except for the whistle and clack of the ship’s inner workings. Then Mercy asked, “So this gas, it just comes up from the ground in this city?”

The sheriff said, “Yup. And there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it.” She hemmed and hawed. “Except for the wall they built.”

“A wall?”

“A wall. All the way around the city, holding the gas inside.”

Mercy’s eyes narrowed. “And holding all the dead folks inside, too?”

“That’s right. I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution. I’m just saying nobody knew what else to do, so that’s what they did. And the thing is, inside the wall, where the city’s all dead and full of gas . . . some folks live inside down there.”

“How?”she asked, wondering wildly if her father weren’t one of the undead, living down inside the gas like that.

Briar waved her hands like she was using them to weigh how much information she ought to dish out. “I ain’t going to lie-it’s complicated. You’ll get the hang of it real quick, though. You’ll see. Mostly it’s a matter of pumping fresh air down from outside the city, down to the underground where everybody lives, in the sealed-up parts.”

“In the . . . sealed-up parts. All right,” Mercy mused, calmer at having an explanation. “That sounds like a righteous mess to me, but I think I see where you’re going with it. And my daddy lives down there? Down in this walled-up city?”

The sheriff nodded with tremendous relief. “Yes. That’s it. He lives down inside the poisoned city. A bunch of us do. Me and Zeke here, and Houjin, and maybe a few hundred others, all told. The captain and Mr. Fang come and go-they don’t live there, but they know their way around. That’s the story of it, at least the hard parts.”

Mercy bobbed her head, considering all this, and matching it against what she’d seen on her trip out West. But she did not say anything to the sheriff or the captain. Not yet. There’d be time for it later-time for examinations and explanations, and questions and deductions. It could wait. She could sit on it for another few miles, maybe another few hours. Maybe another few days, just until she was certain and she understood more about how this strange northwestern world worked.

And when the Naamah Darlingarrived at the Sound, and the walled city rose up underneath the dirigible like some dark, immense castle from a fairy tale that never knew a happy ending, Mercy knew that this world would be strange indeed.

Briar Wilkes unhooked herself from the harness and said, “I’ll get you a mask.”

“A mask?”

“A gas mask, yes. It’s not safe to breathe in there until you get underground, into the sealed-off quarters. But those quarters aren’t equipped to handle an airship landing, so we put down at the old fort and head underground from there. And until we get underside, you’ll need a mask.”

Mercy watched as the captain and Fang donned their equipment. The boys also pulled out masks made of leather and glass, affixing them to their faces until everyone looked insectlike. Briar retrieved one from the cargo hold and gave it to the nurse, who’d never seen anything like it and wasn’t positive how she ought to wear it.

The sheriff saw her confusion and sat down beside her on the edge of the seat so she could almost face her. She pulled out her own mask and held it up, showing how the straps and seals were the same as the one in Mercy’s hand. “Like this,” she said, taking off her hat and stretching the mask’s straps to fit around her skull. “The seals need to be real fitted around your face, so it’s airtight. Make sure you don’t get your hair caught in them, or the ties from your cloak.”

“All right, I see. I think.”

And with a little help, Mercy matched the rest of them-her face turned buggy by the contraption she wore. It was uncomfortable and strange, and it smelled odd. Inside the rubber thing with its charcoal filters and thick glass lenses, everything tasted like medical tubing and the Dreadnought’s smokestacks.

“Everybody ready?” asked the captain. When he’d received a positive response from absolutely everyone on board, he said, “Good. Here we go. Dropping altitude and setting down at Fort Decatur. Approximate arrival time is, oh, I don’t know. Three or four minutes. Wind’s calm, and Petey’s got his flare showing all’s well. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now landing in the city of Seattle, such as she is.”

Mercy strained her neck but didn’t see what the captain was talking about, so she took his words on faith. When the ship began its dipping drift downward, she held on to her stomach and was very faintly glad that no one could see her face very well. She wasn’t going to be sick, not from the ride, at least. But the weight of the last month settled on her with a vengeance, now that she was very nearly at her destination.

She was there,in the place where the yellow sap came from-she was virtually certain of it, even before she could see the smoggy air smearing itself across the windscreen, leaving nasty wet smudges the color of boiled yolks.

She was there, in the town where her father had disappeared to all those years ago.

As the ship dropped lower, deeper into the thick, awful air, she struggled to remember the flashes of her childhood that had come to her throughout the trip. The way he’d taught her to shoot. The smell of his beard when he’d come inside from the farm. The bulk of his arms and the plaid of a shirt he wore more days than not.

None of it sparked to life. None of it gave her the sweet ping of nostalgia she was hoping for. All of it felt foreign and dreamlike, as if it had happened to someone else and she’d heard about it only secondhand.

But here she was.

The ship came to rest with a thud, jarring her bottom against the metal bench. Then it came back up a few feet to hover, and the whole thing shook softly as the anchoring chains were detached and affixed to something outside. Finally, all was still.

Through the small lenses of her mask and through the great lens of the windscreens she could see lights strung together. The lights were steadier than mere torches, but they were fuzzy bubbles without too much definition, and she couldn’t discern their actual nature. They showed a sickly yellow-tinted world, and a wall made of logs that must’ve come from enormous trees-bigger than anything she’d ever seen down South. The wall disappeared in each direction, but that might’ve meant nothing. Through the fog, she could see perhaps only twenty yards, and those yards were none too clear.

Her chest hurt, and she felt quite distinctly breathless, as if she’d been running. She reached up to the mask to adjust it, or move it, but the sheriff stopped her hand.

She said, “Don’t. I know it takes some getting used to, but we’re down in the thick now. Once the anchor claws have been deployed, you can’t trust the air in here.” A pop and a sigh interrupted her. When they’d faded, she said, “And that was the sound of the bottom hatch opening.”

Mercy shook her head. “It just . . . it feels . . . I can’t . . .”

“I know, and I understand, but you can. You have to. Wear it or die, at least for now. But I promise, not for long.” Briar’s eyes behind her own mask tried to convey reassurance, and a lift to her cheeks implied a smile.

Mercy tried to smile back, and failed. Against her expectations and her will, her eyes filled up.

The sheriff leaned forward and all but whispered, “It’s all right, darling, I promise. Pull yourself together if you can, not because there’s anything wrong with crying, but because having a stuffy nose in one of these things is a goddamn nightmare.” She patted the young nurse’s arm, then squeezed it gently. “There’s time for crying later. All the crying you like, and all the crying you can stand. Come on now, though. Let’s get you unlatched. It’s time to go see your daddy.”

Mercy fumbled with her harness and extracted herself with difficulty. By the time she was finished, she noticed that the captain and the boys had already disappeared down the hatch, down into the fort.

Briar helped, untangling the last canvas strap and setting it back in place against the ship’s interior wall. She stood up straight and urged Mercy to do likewise, and she brushed a stray bit of travel dust off the taller woman’s shoulders. “You’re going to be just fine.”

“I don’t know. It’s been so long, and he’s never said a thing. We ain’t been close. I ain’t never heard from him, not since I was little.”

The sheriff nodded at all of this. She said, “I’m not sure what it’s worth to hear me say so, but he saved my life, when I first came down here. He’s got a reputation for it-for looking after newcomers and helping people learn their way. This is a dangerous place, but, your pa . . . he makes it lessdangerous. People love him because he looks out for them. He looks out for all of us. When people thought he was dying, they moved heaven and earth to give him the last thing he wanted. The last thing he asked for.”

“Me.”

“You. And I know you figure that I don’t understand, and that maybe I’m just being nice to you. And that’s true, partly. I amtrying to be nice to you. But you ought to know: I lost a husband too, a long time ago, before Zeke was even born. I also lost my father; and, like you and yours, we weren’t none too close. It’s a world of widows and orphans down here.” The sheriff looked away, out the massive windscreen, as if she could see past the fog, and past the log walls.

Then she finished, “But all the things we think we know about the folks who spawned us or raised us . . . well . . . sometimes they’re wrong, and sometimes what we’ve seen isn’t all there is to know.”

Twenty-two

By the time Mercy had unloaded herself from the Naamah Darling,Zeke and Huey were nowhere to be seen. The captain was talking with a man-Petey, presumably-who was holding a flare on a pike. All around her, the world was latticed with lights that hummed and buzzed against the fog; and above them she could see the glittering eyes of birds-long rows of them, seated atop the sharpened ends of the log walls that were clearly failing to deter them from sitting there.

Briar Wilkes saw her looking at them and said, “Don’t pay ’em no mind. People get funny about the crows in here, but they don’t ever bother anybody.”

“I thought nobody could live in here, breathing this air?”

The sheriff shrugged. “Somehow, the birds manage. But I couldn’t explain it. Come on now, I want to introduce you to somebody.”

Somebodyproved to be another woman, somewhere between Mercy’s height and Briar’s, and wider than the both of them without appearing fat. Her hair was dark but tipped with gray, and one sleeve of her dress was pinned up to her chest so it wouldn’t flutter emptily. She had only one arm, and that arm moved strangely. It was covered in one long leather glove.

“Vinita-I mean, Mercy-this is Lucy O’Gunning. She’s one of your father’s oldest friends, and she’s been helping Mr. Chow nurse him back to health.”

“Hello, Mrs. O’Gunning.”

“Missus! Don’t you bother with that, you darling you. I’m Lucy and you’re . . . Mercy, is that what she said?”

“It’s a nickname, but I think I’m keeping it.”

“Works for me!” she declared. “Come on back, now. Jeremiah’s going to be tickled pink!”

Mercy murmured, “Really?”

And although Lucy had already turned, ready to lead the way down and under, she stopped and laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. Tickled pink’s probably not the right way to put it. I think he’s as nervous as can be, now that he knows he’s going to hang around awhile. The idea of saying a quick good-bye looked good to him, but . . .” She trailed off, then waved her one arm to draw Mercy and Briar forward, back into the fog and into a corridor leading to a long set of stairs that led down into a very black darkness. Her voice echoed around in the stairwell. “He’s not much of a talker, your dad. And now I guess he’s figured out that there’s a whole passel of stuff he should tell you. Since there’s time, and all.”

The nurse was almost glad to hear it, that she wasn’t the only one with a belly full of rocks.

Lucy O’Gunning led Mercy and Briar down to a door with a rubber seal around it, which she opened with a latch that was built into the wall beside it. “Be quick, now,” she said. She led the way; then they both dashed inside behind her. The door closed with a sucking snap, and a glowing green light along the floor showed another portal immediately ahead. Lucy told Mercy, “One more door, and then we get to the filters. The more barriers we can put between ourselves and that air up topside, the better.”

So the next door opened and closed, and so did the subsequent two, which had panting filters made of sturdy cloth and seals of wax or rubber around all the edges. The underside breathed in long, hard gusts that came and went, inhaling and exhaling. Off in the distance, Mercy could hear the rolling, mechanical thunder of machinery working hard.

Briar told her, “Those are the pumps. They keep the air moving from up over the wall and down to us. They don’t run all the time, though. Just a few hours, most days. Did you see the air tubes, when we were coming in? The yellow ones? They’re propped all over the city, up past the wall so they can grab the good air.”

“No, I didn’t see them,” Mercy replied. She wondered what else she’d missed, but kept such wonderings to herself as she followed down the tunnels, hallways, and unfinished paths that wound through the underground.

“Once we get on the other side of the next seal, you can take the mask off,” Lucy informed her. And, indeed, in a moment they all peeled the things off their faces, stashing them under arms or in bags, except for Mercy, who wasn’t sure what to do with hers.

“Keep it,” Briar told her. “Put it in your bag. We’ve got plenty more, and you’ll be needing it later. We’ll get you some extra filters for it, too.”

“How much farther are we going?”

Lucy said, “Not much. We’re going down into Chinatown, because that’s where the only decent doctor is for a hundred miles. And yes,” she snapped before anyone could contradict her, in case they’d been planning on it, “I’d count Tacoma in that, too. Anyway, we don’t have much farther.”

Seattle was a great rabbit warren of a city, there under the earth. In some places it looked almost normal: Mercy walked wide-eyed past rows of apartments and rooms filled with cargo, all of them perfectly ordinary except for the lack of windows and the persistent use of false lights and candles stashed in every corner. The whole underground smelled damp and mossy, like a hole dug in a yard, since that’s what it was.

They passed curious men and no other women, which Mercy noticed right away. But all the other residents nodded, dipped their hats, and offered friendly greetings. When Mercy looked perplexed at this, Lucy explained that everyone knew who Mercy was, and why she was coming. Mercy didn’t know how to feel about this, but she tried to be polite back, even as she was ushered along. Always down stairs and up steps with rails, or no rails, and down corridors with floors of polished marble or no floors at all-just damp earth like a root cellar.

She found herself imagining what it looked like, up there in the city itself. She occupied her thoughts with speculation about the roving dead who she’d been warned roamed the streets, and considered that they very likely looked much like the afflicted Mexicans who’d nearly brought down two trains in the Utah pass. And just about the time she was out of things to wonder about, she became aware that all the men she was passing were Chinamen like Fang, and they also wore their hair in ponytails or braids shaved back away from their foreheads. They regarded her with curiosity but no malice, and they did not speak to her, though some of them hailed Lucy with a few quick words that she didn’t understand.

Finally. Inevitably.

They arrived at a door at the very moment an aged Chinaman was exiting from it, trailed by gruff swearwords and a general air of aggravation in the room beyond. “And I don’t need that goddamn potion. It tastes like shit, and I’m just not going to drink it anymore!”

The old man rolled his eyes, making Mercy think that everyone everywhere who had ever had a grouchy patient must make that same face. He said something to Lucy, who nodded.

The one-armed woman lowered her voice and said, “Don’t judge him too harsh. He’s lived hard, and nearly died to save the lives of strangers. And you were the only thing he wanted, when we would’ve done anything to make him happy. So I want you to know that I’m glad you came, and even impressedthat you came. Because not every daughter would’ve done it, and I think it speaks well of you. Briar, honey?”

“Lucy?”

“It’s time for us to go.”

Mercy wanted to argue with them, to demand that they accompany her, to accuse them bitterly of leaving her just when she needed them most.

But she didn’t.

And they didn’t stay.

They slipped away, and back, these two women whom she’d known for not even a day. One old enough to be her mother; one an older sister, or a young aunt. Her only connection to anything above, and her only way out if she refused to step through that cracked-open door.

She put a hand on it. Took a deep breath of air that smelled and tasted stale, and faintly like sulfur. Pushed the door an inch, then stalled. Recovered her willpower. Pushed it far enough to admit her.

She stepped into the doorway of a room with all the fixtures of a hotel. A basin stood against a far wall; a dresser with a mirror squatted beside it. The walls themselves had been painted with cheerful stripes in a bright red that was almost orange, and a deep blue that was almost purple. These were illuminated by a pair of gas lanterns on the end tables on either side of the bed.

On this bed was a man half-propped up against a mountain of pillows, and looking quite peevish about it.

He lounged there with one leg braced up and reinforced in a cast composed of wood stays and canvas. Around his torso was a similar set of stays, nearly corsetlike, and Mercy understood at a glance that some of those ribs had been broken, and that his chest had been carefully immobilized to keep the pointed bits of bone from doing damage to his lungs or other organs. She took all this in and admired it, even approving of the partial hat he wore over an otherwise shaven and naked head. She understood that this, too, was a bandage, and that some head wound must’ve rendered the covering a requirement.

It was easier for her to see him that way, as a patient.

She’d dealt with many patients on many beds, and there were a handful of types, but no real mysteries to any of them. She could look him up and down and gather that he’d survived some hideous trauma, and even glean the nature of if she looked closely enough: A badly broken leg; compound fracture, no doubt. An assortment of broken ribs. A head wound that must’ve gone down to the bone and might even have splintered the hard bits beneath the skin. The telltale pockmarks and seams that showed where stitches had been removed, and where a cut or a puncture had conclusively agreed to remain closed.

But it was harder to look at the man and know she hadn’t seen him in so very long. It was tough to see that battered face with the flattened nose (broken long ago, she could tell, as easily as if he wore a sign) and the broad cheekbones that she’d inherited, giving her the same wide face that looked almost square in the right light. And it was a struggle to meet his eyes, which were watching her back from underneath fluffy eyebrows shot through with the first threads of silver. One had a scar that cut across it, healed years ago, by the look of it.

She took all this in, and she stood in the doorway without knowing what to say, or how to move, or if she should take up the chair that his physician had used to examine him, there beside the bed.

He took her in, too, and did not say anything either, did not seem to know if he should invite her inside or ask her to leave. His stubbly face was turned on the pillow, pressing against it so he could get a look at her. He cleared his throat with a wet, weak sound that probably wasn’t the noise he’d meant to make.

Finally, he said, “Nita?” Both syllables cracked against his uncertainty.

She clutched the door’s latch and stood in its frame as if it were a magical space that would protect her from whatever happened next. But she replied: “Daddy?”