Dies the Fire (75 page)

“I wish they
would
surrender,” Havel said. “We could get some useful intelligence. But they won't.”

“Why not?”

“Woburn, for starters. Remember that gallows he's building, in front of the county courthouse?”

“Yeah,” she said, wincing slightly. “You know, before the Change, I was big against capital punishment.”

“Well, we've all had to give up luxuries,” he chuckled. “And considering these guys' records in the armed robbery, murder, arson and rape department . . .”

“Yeah,” she said, her face hardening. “There is that.”

They were two hundred yards away now.
Worth a try,
Havel thought.
It really would be useful to get one for interrogation before we try conclusions with Duke Iron Rod. Is he really going to sit still while we trundle the doorknockers up to his front porch?

“Give up!” he shouted. “Give up, or your ass is grass!”

The reply came back thin across the distance: “Fuck you!” and the three men waved their swords and shook fists.

“You guys called it,” Havel said with a shrug, pulling out an arrow. “Geeup, Gustav.”

The horse was tired, but not worn out. He could feel it gathering itself as he leg-signaled it; it was getting so he was as comfortable riding with the reins knotted on the saddlebow as with them in his hands. And the Devil Dogs hadn't tried to skewer him with a crossbow bolt, which meant they probably didn't have an intact weapon between the three of them.

The horse went trot-canter-gallop. He went close this time, watching carefully and picking his target. The two shieldless men tried to duck under the cover of the dead horse . . .

 

 

 

“I don't fucking
believe
it,” Ken Larsson said, staring at the steam engine.

Randy Sacket darted a triumphant glance at his father, who was about Ken's age; the younger man was in his twenties, with dark hair slicked back into a ponytail and tattoos on his forearms. His hands were big and battered as he traced the water and steam lines on the miniature traction engine—it stood about four feet high at the top of its boiler, with a disproportionately large seat.

“You're
sure
it's not some sort of mechanical failure?” Pete Sacket said.

The older Sacket ran a garage-cum-machine-shop on the edge of Craigswood, or had before the Change—it wasn't far from the spot the Bearkillers had picked to camp. Now he and his son and daughter-in-law cultivated a big truck garden and helped improvise plows and cultivators that could be drawn by horses or newly broken oxen. The steam engine stood in the dirt parking lot behind the sheet-metal buildings, along with a good deal of other abandoned equipment . . . much of it valuable for the heavy springs it contained.

You could throw things with springs and gears; he'd fired up the steam engine for curiosity's sake, and to keep his mind off the fact that his children were out fighting, and him not there.

Its boiler was hissing merrily, and wisps of steam escaped as more and more fuel oil was fed to the boilers—the machine was meant for tourists, and shoveling in coal would have been more authenticity than most at the county fair wanted.

What's happening is that the goddamned pressure isn't going up like it should,
Larsson thought, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

He looked up at the setting sun, feeling a little guilty; there was a working day gone.

“No, it's in perfect working order,” he said. “It's just that no matter how much fuel you put through, the pressure doesn't get high enough to do more than—”

He pointed to the flywheel, which spun—very, very slowly—in its mount on the top right of the boiler. Suddenly he threw the rag down and stamped on it, startling both of them; he wasn't a demonstrative man, and they'd both picked up on that even on short acquaintance.

“I
told
you, Dad,” Randy said. “It's something to do with the Change!”

All three of them glared at the big toy. “How the
hell
could anything make steam engines stop?” the older mechanic said.

“How the hell could anything make radios and gasoline engines stop? All we can do is guess,” Larsson said bitterly. “We're like King Arthur trying to make sense of a cell phone. This tears it, though—I'm morally certain it's some intelligent action. Alien Space Bats
are
stealing our toys. Someone or something's
sucking
energy out of anything that meets certain parameters. And they're doing it selectively—just on the surface of the earth.”

He shook a fist at the sky. “If we ever get a chance at payback, you sick sadistic bastards, you'll regret this!”

“I regret it already,” Randy Sacket said mournfully. He pulled a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim vest. “These are my last smokes. And man, I miss my Harley
real
bad.”

All three men sighed. Peter Sacket snapped off the feed to the little engine's firebox, and the hissing died. The flywheel took another few turns and stopped, and the pressure gauge dropped down from its pathetic figure towards zero.

“You know,” Ken said thoughtfully, “You
could
build a steam engine to operate at the pressures we got here.”

“You could?” both the mechanics said.

“Yeah. Sort of like the first ones ever built, we studied them in our history of engineering courses. The problem is that they'd weigh about half a ton per horsepower with cylinders ten feet long and they'd gobble fuel so fast you could only use them where it was pretty well free—that's why the first ones were used to pump out coal mines. For doing any useful work, and
particularly
for pushing a locomotive or a boat or a road vehicle . . .
forget
it. You'd be better off with an exercise wheel full of gerbils.”

He nearly asked for one of the younger man's cigarettes, but restrained himself. Getting readdicted to a drug about to disappear for good from this part of the world would be extremely stupid.

“So much for the Chinese being better off than the rest of us,” he said.

“Why
should
the Chinese be better off?”

“They still use a lot of coal-fired steam locomotives . . . or did, before the Change. Apparently whoever did this to the human race was quite thorough.”

He sighed and turned back to the weapons he and the mechanics had been working on; gas cutting and welding sets still worked, and would as long as the acetylene held out. They'd already done the frames, wheels and parts to his specifications.

“This is the catapult,” he said, pointing to the first. One of the Sackets lit a gasoline lantern and hung it on a pole. “It'll shoot great big steel spears. This is going to be the trebuchet.”

“Tree bucket?” Peter Sacket asked.

“Tray-boo-shet. It's just a big lever with a weight on the short end and a throwing sling on the long one,” Larsson said. “It'll throw rocks; rocks weighing hundreds of pounds, and throw them half a mile,
hard.
Then this thing is going to be a covered ram, with a sloping steel roof and a big I-beam for the ram. Last but not least, this'll be a pump with a long nozzle controlled by the gantry I showed you the drawings for.”

“Might be useful for firefighting,” Sacket said.

Behind him, his son rolled his eyes.

Larsson grinned. “No, what'll be pumping is a mixture of chopped up tires dissolved in gasoline, then thickened further with detergent—soap flakes.”

“Napalm!” the older Sacket cried in delight. “Christ, I was an armorer's mate in 'Nam and we loaded that stuff all the time. Those sorry-ass bikers will get out of town
fast
when that comes calling!”

“Yup,” Larsson said.
Guess I'd better not mention being an antiwar protester back then.
“Then there are these metal shields on wheels, to push up to the wall—”

He stopped. Neither of the other men were listening to him anymore. Both were staring over his shoulder. He wheeled himself . . .

 

 

 

“That's torn it,” Havel said grimly.

“What?”

Luanne Hutton looked up; she'd been scrubbing blood from the foot-long steel head of her lance with a handful of grass.

Everyone else was doing the chores; piling up enemy weapons and armor, getting the wounded onto their horse-drawn ambulance and headed back to camp with Astrid and her teenagers; the battle had looped around quite close to Craigswood in the course of pursuit and maneuver. And making sure the enemy dead really were. Piling up the bodies and taking tally, too—the Bearkillers were being paid a per-confirmed-kill bonus.

They had taken a couple of prisoners, both wounded, and Pam was patching those up too. The sun was low in the west now, making Cottonwood Butte a black outline across the rolling prairie.

“Signe!” Havel called, cursing himself behind an impassive face. “
Signe!
”

The girl was a few yards away, helping with the captured horses and not looking at the gruesome clean-up work.

“Sound
Fall in!
”

She gave him a startled glance and then scrabbled for the bugle slung across her shoulder. The first try was a startled blat; then it rang out hard and clear. Everyone was tired, but they moved fast; horses were resaddled and everyone ready to go within a few minutes.

“Look yonder,” he said grimly, as Signe fell in by his side.

The balloon had been winched down. Now it was rising again, rising high and paying out southward as fast as the cable could come off the windlass. The propane flame lit the white-and-red envelope from within, turning it into a Chinese lantern of improbable beauty with each flare as it rose against the darkening horizon to the east.

Havel rose in the stirrups and raised his voice: “Possibly I'm being too nervous, but I'm going to assume that means an attack on our camp. We're going home—as fast as the horses can carry us.
Now.
”

He pulled Gustav's head around and clapped the spurs home.

 

 

 

“Buttercup,” Billy Waters said.

The teenager standing guard at the Bearkillers' notional perimeter nodded and replied: “Bluebonnet—advance and be recognized.”

There was a sneer in the words as he gave the countersign, and Waters felt his teeth grind at it.

You'll be laughing out of the other side soon, you little fuck,
he thought.

The twilight was deepening, but the youth's eyes widened at the sight of the men coming up behind the bowyer. A dozen big hairy shaggy men, carrying wrapped bundles in their hands.

“Hey, you guys aren't locals!” the teenager said. He raised his bow. “You stop right there!”

He raised his voice, a warbling yell with a break right in the middle of it: “Camp boss! We got a problem here!”

One of the Devil Dogs shoved Waters aside with a curse; that saved his life, that and Jeb Smith's hand on his ankle pulling him to the ground.

The Devil Dog swept his war-hammer free of the concealing rags and charged roaring, flourishing the massive weapon overhead. The boy on guard fired by instinct, with the same reflex he would have used if he'd suddenly found a scorpion in his bedroll.

The bowstring went
snap
against his leather bracer, and the Devil Dog's roar turned into a scream of pain as the arrow sank to its feathers in his thigh; the sweep of the war-hammer buried itself in the hillside turf.

Smith went
tsk
between his teeth and leveled his crossbow from where he lay. The short weapon gave a
tung!
and the heavy bolt hammered into the boy's body just below the breastbone, and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Waters stared at the figure that jerked and then lay still . . .

“Thought you wanted 'em all dead,” Smith observed, kneeling to drop the spanning claw over his crossbow's string and hook the crank to the butt.

“Uh . . . yeah,” Waters said, licking his lips.
Too late to back out now. Christ, what have I gotten myself into?

“Too late to back out now,” Smith said, and Waters started at the words. “Well, get his bow, man. We've got work to do, and you wanted to see to your family, didn't you?”

Waters nodded dumbly and took the weapon and quiver; he already had a sword and knife at his waist, but he'd never pretended to be a blade man. The bow he could use; it had a lighter pull than his regular one, but just as heavy as the models he'd used to hunt deer. Together they ran on through the growing chaos of the camp; he could see fires and hear screams from the darkened town beyond as well.

I'm gonna be a big man here,
he told himself.
The Duke knows he needs me.

The dark was getting deeper, but only a few of the lanterns had been lit; what light there was came mostly from the hearths and cooking fires, red and glimmering. Figures ran past him amid a rising brabble of voices and the sudden scrap-metal clamor of edged metal striking its kin. Suddenly Smith was cursing beside him; he grabbed the lighter man by the sleeve and yanked him around.

“Jesus!” Smith said. “They're going to see that and Lord fucking Bear's only a couple of miles away. Come
on
!”

Waters's head jerked around. The balloon was rising again, with a booming roar of propane and a flare of light. He ran in Smith's wake, fumbling out an arrow for the bow.