Hellfire (24 page)

“Ah, Bastrop, my little village,” the ancient man said. “Do tell me you are taking great care of it?”

Blake stammered. “Uh, I am.”

“Good, good!” The ancient man’s free hand tapped his arm rest as if he were clapping. His head rocked toward Ozzie. “And what of you, my dear?”

She took a mouse’s step and said softly, “Ozera Jacey, sir.”

“Jacey… Jacey… Perhaps part of Erasmus Jacey’s brood?”

Ozzie blinked. “He was my grandfather, sir. My father is H. Robert.”

“Granddaughter!” the ancient man exclaimed. “I remember your grandfather as a young man, unmarried, asking for work at my plantation.”

Husk’s eyes went wide. His village? His plantation? It was impossible.

“No,” Husk blurted. “Aaron Burr!”

He felt a sharp pain of a kick to his knee and fell to the floor. His chained hands were too heavy to catch himself properly, and his face planted deep in the plush carpet.

Ticks hissed from behind him. “Show some respect.”

Husk pushed himself up into a low bow. He was before the man everyone knew as the hero of the Revolution, the Colonel who had served at the side of General George Washington. Others called him the Governor, a position he had served in for more than twenty years building up the state. Burr had fled New York after his duel with Hamilton and started fresh in the West, a model for pioneers in generations to come.

Husk pulled himself up farther and rolled his head to look at the ceiling, finally realizing where he had seen the face of Prometheus before. It was the Romanesque visage of Aaron Burr.

“Come now,” the whispering voice of the ancient man said. “There is hardly a need for such violence. These people are our guests.”

Husk heard Ticks give a quick sigh, and hands seized his shoulders. They pulled him to his feet. When he caught his balance, he repeated again with a whisper of wonder, “Aaron Burr.”

The ancient man lowered his head in a single nod. “In the flesh, such as it is.”

“But, you died. Twenty years ago,” Husk mumbled. He remembered it vividly, as a youngster, watching people weep in the streets and clutch their black armbands in mourning. “You must be over a hundred years old!”

“Precisely one hundred years, actually, this past February. As I came to need these machines, it was clear that I needed to retire to work behind the curtain, as it were. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have a public centennial party, but it is delightfully round enough of a number for my reintroduction into society at the Midsummer jubilee.”

Husk gaped. Questions buzzed through his mind. His eyes flicked continuously back to the living mummy in the chair and the machines pumping behind him. He fumbled instinctively into his filthy, ruined suit for his notepad before he came back to his senses enough to remember it was gone.

“And you are, my friend?” Burr asked.

Husk couldn’t speak.

Ticks prod Husk with enough force to make him stumble forward again.

“I’m, uh,” Husk said, coming back to the world. “My name is Thomas Husk, reporter and editor for the Bastrop Star.”

Burr made a sound like a mechanical gasp. “A crier! What luck! And for days I have been worrying about how to tell my story. Would you care to write it?”

A laugh tumbled out of Husk. He couldn’t believe his ruptured ears: an interview with Aaron Burr, founder of Gloriana, twenty years dead. “Of course! Uh, I mean, yes, sir, of course.”

“Very well, we shall soon enough.” Burr paused to make a rasping cough. “First, though, I must confess I am already well informed about my fourth guest here, Master Kemp.”

Nate Kemp stood silently.

“Marshal Ticks here brought your testimony to me about the happenstance of the fire aboard your train.”

“He tried to kill me,” Kemp said coldly. “Ticks forced the quartermaster to give me faulty catalyst. It killed Jones, the engineer. After he’d tortured my story out of me, he tried to finish me off by throwing me out of a Rail Agency airship. They’ve destroyed three trains at least! It’s a conspiracy!”

Ticks snorted with contempt.

Burr, meanwhile, shifted in his throne to lean forward, far enough that Husk could see behind him. Instead of a back, his uniform coat dangled loosely like a cape. There was no flesh beneath it, just brassy rings that served as connectors to a series of hoses. All the fluids that were pumping through the machines in the wall flowed in and out of the decrepit old man to keep him alive.

Husk’s stomach lurched. If he hadn’t already lost everything he’d eaten that day, he would have then.

Burr pressed the lever in his hand, and Husk watched his chest inflate as the machine pushed air into him to speak. “It was I who gave him that catalyst.”

“You?” Kemp asked. “Why? Why are destroying trains in your own state?”

Burr leaned back. He raised his free hand and scratched his chin lightly. Then he set it down and flipped a different lever.

A panel of the wall opened, revealing men in long, red coats. Light-reflecting mirrors rested on their brows, and sets of lenses with different magnifications circled their faces like the eyes of an insect. They marched toward Burr and saluted.

“I’ve decided on a walk,” Burr told them.

“Aye, sir,” one said in a thick Scottish brogue.

They swarmed around Burr’s back. Levers clicked, and machines stopped. Fluid bubbled up into some of the glass chambers. After a moment, the men set onto the hoses, disconnecting them and reattaching a few into metal cylinders on the back of the throne.

When the tubes were out of the way, a man on each side pulled a long lever. Husk had thought these were decorative bars, but they seemed to drive hidden gears that folded the seat up into a standing posture. Burr’s ancient body leaned back against it. His armrests crossed in front of him to hold his invalid body in place. Yet, the way he laid his arms on the rests was practically regal.

“Your walker is ready, sir,” the Scotsman told him.

Burr gave a nod and pressed forward a lever that had sat near his free hand. The entire throne, now something like a platform, rolled forward on newly revealed wheels. It gave off no steam or smoke, only a high-pitched whine like a lathe.

Husk stared at it. Any engine he knew of would give off some exhaust, unless it was…

“An electric motor,” he whispered. It was one thing to think of electricity carrying a simple message across the telegraph wire, but to see a whole man driven by its invisible power was something else entirely.

Husk’s eyes began to sting, and he realized he hadn’t been blinking. When he opened them again, Burr had turned his platform toward the open panel in the wall. “Follow me, if you will.”

They left the throne room and came into a long laboratory. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves filled with glass bottles and machines like those that had rested behind Burr’s throne. More men in red coats stopped working at tables, where each of them was busy mixing chemicals or tinkering on machines with watchmaker’s tools.

“Have the pleasure of meeting my staff,” Burr called. “In my old age, I’m afraid my continued existence takes diligent work from these fine men. Ah, for the time when I required but a valet, a chef, and a maid!”

Husk’s muscles grew tense. The fluids in the jars held yellow bile, red blood, and a half-dozen more with labels of Latin terms that he couldn’t recognize. One set of shelves held unborn pigs floating in brine. The whole room smelled of chemicals and a vague taint of rot.

“This is wrong,” Husk heard Blake mumble. Ticks hit him in the back between the shoulder blades.

Husk agreed with Blake, but he didn’t want to say anything.

A pair of men in red coats hurried in front of Burr and pulled back a bar on an iron door at the far end of the room. They opened it without a word, and, without a word, Burr rolled through. Blake had fallen back several steps, shrugging his shoulders against the pain lingering from what would probably be a deep bruise. Nate and Ozzie walked close together, the young fireman holding the nurse’s hand. Husk hustled ahead of them.

When he crossed the threshold, his boot scraped over loose grains. He paused and toed the white powder. “Salt?”

Burr interrupted him. The ancient man’s platform spun around in place like a lazy susan. He raised one hand for effect and used the other to push his speaking lever. “Behold!”

Husk looked up, but even before he could see he was struck by a hot wave filled with odor. It was foul yet sweet, the kind of smell garbage took on as it cooled after a day sitting in the sun. Acrid smoke joined in with a hint of almonds.

He peered through tears in his eyes. The room flickered from the light of six ovens along the walls that cast a brooding red glow amid the blackness. The center of the room held a wide wooden table that was covered in glass tubes and beakers, jars of powders, mysterious ground herbs, and papers with strange signs. More men had red coats, but their faces were covered with sheets of dark glass affixed to helmets. Long, leather aprons and thick gloves covered most of their bodies. They all looked up and then turned back to their work, most grinding powders. One reached inside an oven with a pair of iron tongs to bring out a charred wooden bowl.

“What is this place?” Ozzie asked.

“This,” Burr began, pausing to cough, “is my catalyst factory.”

Husk coughed, too. “I thought all the catalyst in the world came from a single factory in London.”

“All of a certain type,” Burr replied. “I’m creating my own.”

He turned back around and rolled through the stifling room. Husk didn’t know how the men in the glass hoods and aprons could stand being here more than a few minutes.

“The legends say that Sir Isaac Newton discovered the crystal-making process in his alchemical studies,” Burr said, “between his time philosophizing on theology and inventing new forms of mathematics. It is a mystical substance that defies scientists to this day: simply adding it to a hot fire makes it burn hotter.”

Husk wondered how often Burr practiced this speech.

“For over a century, people thought of the catalyst as a novelty or at most something to use when pinching pennies on fuel,” Burr continued. “It was the French, just before their revolution, who determined to use it in their hot air balloons, giving us an age of airships that allowed Napoleon to lead his ill-advised invasion of Britain. The Scots, then, applied it to making the steam engine more efficient.

“When I returned from my speech in Congress that defied Jefferson and proved my national loyalty, I determined to import catalyst for the good of my colony. As Gloriana grew, so did the need for catalyst. First, we built factories using the brown coal, lignite, dredged from beneath the bayous, then anthracite from Fort Smith. We grew rich, but we needed more and more catalyst. Often it may be reclaimed, but only after the fire has gone out.” He turned to Kemp. “As you are well aware, I’m sure.”

The fireman’s lips were pressed tight, and his eyes glared.

“I have spent years trying to break our dependence on London. While we have yet to recreate the exact formula for catalyst suitable for our factories and trains, we have come across a few promising discoveries. Several years ago, we learned how to bring our new friends into the world.”

He lowered his hand in a broad swoop directed behind them. Husk peeked back to see the hunchbacks shift as if from nerves in the laboratory. They didn’t seem to even want to approach the salt-covered threshold.

Ozzie shrieked. “You made them?”

Burr’s thin lips pulled back into a grin that showed silver teeth. “They may call me a braggart, but what man doesn’t love to show his works? Come and see.”

He led them into yet another room, this one even darker than the last. There were ovens lining one wall, much deeper ones that were separate entities with wide pipes leading from them. It was not nearly as hot in this room as the last, though the smell was much worse. It smelled of the grave.

Only two men worked here, standing under a single lamp that hung from a rod. Their gloved hands worked on something covered in a sheet.

Burr rolled toward them and then stopped in front of one of the ovens. A smoke-stained glass door stood in front of it. “Our hunchbacked friends, as they’ve been colloquially known, are actually assembled from previously living organic matter. A body is packed with this version of the catalyst and then tucked inside to bake until they arise new.”

He waved a hand. “Go ahead and see. The catalyst is infamous for giving off no extra light, but you might catch a view.”

Curiosity drove Husk toward the glass. He brought his hands around his eyes to block out any reflection from the hanging lamp. The iron shackles clanked in front of his face.

Inside the oven, a man’s body lay. At first, Husk took it to be half-rotten, bloating in parts with others shriveling, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark light, he saw that those parts weren’t human at all. They were closer to the hinged legs of an insect, enormous and covered in thorns. He pulled back from the glass and made a horrified gasp.

Burr convulsed. Husk looked up at his twisted ancient face and determined he was laughing. Without human lungs to blow the air, it was seizures like a sleeper having a nightmare.