Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 82

Of course they'd seen his mouth moving. And they couldn't make out a blasted word.

He gave Flora a push on the shoulder, urging her to stay still as he poked his head out quickly to a.s.sess. The horses were still sidling and stamping, but there was no more gunfire, and they had stopped rearing against the reins. Miss Lil, Missus Shutt, and Missus Jorgensen stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the chamber, each one eyeing a different tunnel mouth. Of the moon man, there was no sign.

Doc yawned to pop his ears, hoping. He could fool himself that the ringing eased a little.

"s.h.i.+t!" Flora snarled, then covered her lips in horror when he looked at her mildly, feeling his eyebrows rise.

"My momma would be scandalized," Doc said, and kissed her quick, sideways across that unladylike mouth. Beside them, Bill rocked back against the wall, looking away quickly.

Doc, he thought, setting Flora back into the alcove, did you just kiss a Negress? Well, that wasn't like him at all.

Of course she didn't stay where he set her. When he stepped out, mincing, his pistol in his hand, she was there too, that shotgun she'd somehow hung on to at low ready. He scuffed his own over with his boot and crouched to scoop it up, hoping he wouldn't have to fire it before he had a chance to check the barrel.

When he started to stand again, Doc coughed hard, and kept coughing. When his lungs spasmed to a stop, before he could make himself look up, he wiped the froth of blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. He had seen it often enough to know it was crimson, a fresh, juicy red like poppy petals and cherry jam-but in the dim blue light of the derelict it was just a dark smear like any blood by moonlight. John Keats, physician and poet, had said upon coughing that red, "I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant."

John Henry Holliday, dentist and son of a consumptive, was no more likely to be misled. But he had already outlived poor Keats by half a decade, and the bullet that was supposed to shorten his suffering hadn't yet arrived.

No doubt delayed in the mail.

A gentle hand brushed his shoulder. Warmth and ease followed the contact. Miss Lil. He pressed the b.l.o.o.d.y hand to his lips so he wouldn't cough in her face and looked up.

"I'm a healer," she said. "Can I help?"

He'd heard of such hexes. Never met one. Even the strongest couldn't heal consumption, or potter's rot, or cancer. But she could probably ease his pain. He imagined the clean pleasure of drawing a breath that would fill him all the way to the bottom instead of one that choked and suffocated like a lungful of stones.

He couldn't speak. He nodded.

She laid one hand on his back between the shoulders and murmured some indistinct words. When she pulled away, he stood up straight and s.h.i.+vered.

"Thank you kindly, ma'am," he said.

She patted his shoulder. "Don't mention it."

They went looking for the moon man, and also for the man with the gun. Miss Lil found the scuffed place in the trash below the tunnel where the moon man had fallen. She followed it to a series of freshly broken flakes of rust across the wall that showed where he'd run, sticky as a lizard, along the vertical surface.

"Well I'll be," Doc said, edging between two mares to get a better look at the wall. "And here's a mark from a ricochet."

He pushed a fingertip against it, judging the angle, and glanced back over his shoulder to confirm. "The shooter was down that pa.s.sage behind the moon man. I don't know how he could have missed. He had a clear shot at the critter's back."

"And the ... moon man ... he ran through us to lose the shooter." Miss Lil hesitated over the term, but once she'd chewed on it for a minute she seemed to accept it. Missus Jorgensen, coming up on their right, paused at the edge of the conversation. Her hair was coming loose around her face in pale wisps. Her holster was still unb.u.t.toned.

Doc shrugged. "In his boots, wouldn't you?"

"He wasn't wearing boots," said Missus Jorgensen, provoking Miss Lil to giggle shockingly, for a woman with Flora's shotgun balanced over one shoulder.

"He wasn't wearing much of anything," Flora said, coming up along the other side of one of the mares.

Doc bit down on his own laugh. He was breathing easier, sure, but he didn't want to push his luck. "You think that was the only one?"

"I think it wasn't threatening," said Missus Jorgensen. "I think it was trying to make friends."

Doc met her gaze and nodded. "Shooter was after a trophy, like as not," he said. "You could get a good price from a side show for a dead moon man."

Missus Jorgensen recoiled, chin tucking as if she'd taken a blow. "But they're ... "

"Obviously intelligent," Flora finished for her. Hard creases pinched along the sides of her mouth. "That never stopped a lot of folks."

"No," Doc said, thinking about the brief resilience of her mouth against his. He hadn't kissed a woman since Kate had left. "It never did."

She jerked her gaze off his after a moment too long. "I say we follow the shooter back along that corridor. He's the threat."

Miss Jorgensen said, "And he might be after the same thing we are."

A glance that Doc couldn't read pa.s.sed between her and Flora.

Flora said, "Our objectives have changed. It's a rescue mission now. Anything that could be learned from doc.u.mentation-anything that could help us reproduce the technology-" She shook her head. "If we promise to do whatever we can to help get it home again, it might just be willing to help us understand its science."

"Indeed," said Miss Lil. "The president will want to interview survivors."

Doc felt his jaw drop. "Call me a daisy," he said, when he got a little bit of air back. "You aren't from back East at all."

The three women looked at him, stricken. For a moment, Doc felt a creeping vulnerability between his shoulder blades. He fought the urge to check his back and make sure Bill and Missus Shutt weren't flanking him.

"I'm from Boston, actually," Flora said.

Doc shook his head, as their funny way of talking, the funny way Flora had said 1881 like it was ancient Rome, the funny way they reverenced him all came together in his head. "That ain't what I mean. You're not just from back East. You're from sometime else. You're from the future."

However they reacted, he missed it, because his chest tightened around the excitement with the pain of an incipient cough, and he doubled over with his hands on his knees. Slow breaths. Shallow. Easy. That was the way. His hands shook and his vision narrowed as he fished in his pocket for the stick of candy.

You'd shoot a horse with a broken wind. Why couldn't he get anybody to put a bullet into him?

The h.o.r.ehound eased his throat. Nothing would ease the tightness in his chest except the solution that had already been so long in coming. Or the touch of Miss Lil's hand, he realized, as she took his elbow and helped him stand upright.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d thing," he said, when he could say anything. "Consumption killed my mother. Likely kill me too."

"I know," said Flora.

He caught her looking, got caught on her gaze. Nodded. "I've got a legend where you come from?"

"Oh," said Missus Shutt. "Yes, Mr. Holliday. You do."

"That's something, then. They got a cure for this, in the future?"

"We do," Missus Shutt answered.

"Good," he said. He felt for his pistol. Took it out, spun the cylinder. Made sure there was a bullet under the hammer.

Bill and the women watched him in silence. The horses crunched grain in their nose bags.

"Well," said Holliday. "Sooner we find this son of a b.i.t.c.h, sooner we can rescue your moon man and head back to town. I don't know about you, but I've worked up a good whiskey thirst."

Doc and Bill hoisted Missus Jorgensen, Missus Shutt, and Flora into the tunnel where they'd first seen the moon man. The first women knelt to help haul Miss Lil over the edge. Then Bill let Doc put a boot in his hands and kick high enough for the women to steady him while he clambered up. Bill himself surprised Doc: He might have been grizzled and a little soft around the middle, but he planted his hands on the lip, brus.h.i.+ng rust flakes and debris aside, and jumped and swung over the head-high threshold in a scattering of rotting metal.

Doc gave the hex a hand to stand while Missus Jorgensen and Missus Shutt kept an eye down the corridor in the direction the gunman must have run. When Doc's gaze met Bill's-Bill's face gaunt and strange in the shadowy blue light-Bill nodded.

Without a word, the six fell into three ranks of two-Doc and Miss Lil in the front with their scatterguns poised. The other four minced softly behind, pistols ready, while the rasp of boots on blistered metal echoed out.

The corridor-or tunnel, or gangway; if this was a star-s.h.i.+p, Doc's store of nautical terminology was insufficient to its engineering-must have once stretched in a bowed line the length of the craft. Now only the first fifty feet were more or less intact-Doc and Miss Lil probed each step with a toe and s.h.i.+fted weight carefully forward-and they picked up the gunman's trail about thirty feet from where the moon man had been hanging by his toes.

Beyond that point, the corridor warped, the metal twisted and crumpled so anyone who wanted to pa.s.s through would have to do so by writhing under the buckled roof like a snake on its belly. Piles of debris had been pushed to one side to allow someone to do just that. s.h.i.+ny scratches showed where that same someone had retreated back through the gap in a hurry.

Doc crouched, keeping his body well to one side, and rested a hand against the roof to brace himself. More flakes of metal dusted his shoulders and hat as he tipped his head down to peer through the gap.

It was dark beyond. The blue-white lights did not penetrate the constriction, leaving Doc with the uneasy sense of staring into a cave that might contain any horror he could conceive of-and a few inconceivable ones as well. At the mouth, caught on a jagged twist of metal, a few strands of yellow-and-black cotton were still damp with blood on one end.

Miss Lil, just as careful not to silhouette herself, crouched on the other side of the gap. She eyed the sticky smudge on Doc's fingertip after he touched the snagged fabric and frowned across. "Somebody was in a hurry."

"John Ringo was wearing a yellow check s.h.i.+rt when we saw him last," Doc said.

"John Ringo?" asked Flora.

"The man who tried to convince you to hire him as a guide when I turned you down that first time," Doc said. "He'd not scruple to follow us out here and lie in wait, ma'am, if he thought you'd anything worth stealing."

"The horses are worth stealing," Bill said.

"It bled," Miss Lil said, bending further to get her head into the crevice. "But a moderate amount."

Flora put her hands against her back as if it pained her. "A sc.r.a.pe like that isn't enough to slow anybody down."

Missus Jorgensen made a sound that might have been a bitter laugh, in a less strained situation. "Not until he comes down with lockjaw in a week or so."

"Do we risk a lantern?" Bill asked.

Whatever conversation took place then was silent, a matter of glances and twists of the mouth, but Doc thought he followed it ... more or less. When Flora said, "I'd just be making a target of myself," though, he balked.

"You're not going first," he said, forgetting politeness in his shock. "A little slip of a thing like you? It don't matter if I die."

"That's exactly why I am going first, Doctor Holliday," she said, in a tone that bade to remind him who was paying whom to be here. "I'll be able to move quickly and freely. Much more so than either of you gentlemen."

He frowned at her, formulating a protest. She let her fingertips brush the pearl handle of Miss Lil's revolver, which she was carrying since they'd traded guns.

"Are you prepared to contest it with me?"

"Never get in the way of a lady when she's made her mind up," he said, and stood up strictly so he could step back. "Will you at least let us sling a rope around you so we can pull you back if we have to?"

"That ..." Flora dusted her hands together. "I think we can compromise on."

Their precautions turned out unnecessary, but Doc still felt the better for having made them. Flora crawled through the crushed section of corridor, dragging a rope behind her, and vanished from sight. After seven or ten palm-sweating minutes, her voice came back: "It's clear on the other side!" and one by one the rest of the group followed. It was a tight squeeze for Miss Lil, who found herself sc.r.a.ped flat and wriggling once or twice, but even she made it.

Doc went last, feeling his way in the darkness, following the line by touch. He'd tied his bandanna across his mouth to keep from breathing in rust flakes. It forced him to regulate his inhalations to what the cloth would filter. He hoped that made it less likely he'd trigger a coughing fit. He could imagine little worse than lying there in the darkness, pressed between sheets of warped metal, coughing his life away.

Corrosion gritted against his knees and palms and where his s.h.i.+rt rubbed between the deck and his belly. The roof brushed his back and disarrayed his hair. He had to push his hat before him in one hand, the coach gun in the other. At one point the pa.s.sageway dropped, and he slithered down on his belly, wondering how he was ever going to manage if it turned back up again. But at the bottom it only flattened out, and his dark-adapted vision picked out a dim sort of reflected glow that seemed to hang in the air rather than come from any place in particular.

The line led him on, and soon he came around a corner and saw the edge of the pa.s.sage widening, and the rust-stained trousers and boots of his companions standing beyond. He had enough room to push himself to his knees, then to a crouch.

He clapped his hat against his hip to clean it at least a little, then set it on his head.

"Well," he said, straightening his stiff spine with an effort. "That was a long poke."

He imagined he didn't look any better than the others-sweaty, disheveled, smeared with varying shades of ochre as if they'd been caught in an explosion in a painter's studio. But every chin had a determined set.

"He went that way," Miss Lil said, pointing. "He's got a head start."

"He had one already." Flora picked up the rope as if to begin coiling it, frowned, and let the end flop again. "I hope there's an easier way out. But if there isn't ..."

"Leave it," said Missus Jorgensen. "We should be moving. Let me go first?"

"Begging your pardon-" Doc began.

But Flora held up a hand. "She's got the best eyes of any of us," she said. "If our invisible friend left us any tripwires or other nasty surprises, she'll be the one to spot them."

"Of course," said Doc. And though it griped him, he stood aside for the lady again.

Beyond the point of collapse, the pa.s.sageway began to fork and meander. Missus Jorgensen led them at a brisk walk, occasionally turning to Doc or Miss Lil for direction when they reached an intersection or a chamber that had been broken open by the force of the crash. The trail was clear; their quarry had run, and left occasional drips of blood behind. He was obviously bleeding freely-though not copiously-from the gash he'd given himself on the jagged metal of the crawlway.

"I think he's lost," Miss Lil said, when they'd been pursuing for ten minutes or so. "Panicking. He just ran nearly in a circle. It would have been faster to have come down that way, and it would have gotten him to the same place."

Doc thought about running through this maze of rotten steel, with six armed men and women at your heels, and actually felt a little sorry for Johnny Ringo. But only a little.

He started to cough and tried to stifle it, though in truth they weren't being so quiet Ringo wouldn't have heard them coming anyway. The echoes rang out, though, and Doc's mouth filled with the seawater taste of blood while Doc pawed in his pocket for the stick of h.o.r.ehound. Miss Lil's touch on his back eased him fast enough, and the candy soothed his throat. Still, he wheezed with the force of the fit.

The echoes of his hacking hadn't died when a male voice echoed back, distorted by corridors and cavernous rooms. "That you, Holliday? Or is it a hyena?"

"It's the angel of the redemption," Holliday called back, his voice threadier than he would have liked. "I understand you have some explaining to do."

Flora shot him a look. He nodded, holding his position in the center of the corridor, and she and Bill and the other women fanned out to either side, backs flat against the walls, pistols and Miss Lil's coach gun at the ready. Doc waited until her gaze jerked down the corridor before he started boldly forward, front and center, walking past the first of several side pa.s.sages before the corridor turned, up ahead.

Drawing fire.

"I hear you coming, lunger," Ringo warned. "I got a sense this funny gray monkey-thing is something you want alive. If that's so, you'll stop right where you are. In fact, you'll crawl back out of here-and you'll leave me those horses you brought, and all the water and food they've got on 'em."

Doc paused. "You're bluffing." But he was already shaking his head at Flora to indicate the truth of what he thought.