Steamborn (8 page)

“Climb on,” Charles said.

Jacob struggled over the tall seat and the wide saddlebags. He was careful not to catch his pants on the flames near the boiler before he wrapped his arms around Charles. Charles was a bit thicker than Samuel, but he could still reach.

“I’ll see you at the city,” Samuel said. “Be safe.”

Charles nodded, but what he said was, “No one’s safe outside the Highlands anymore.”

The bike surged forward in near silence. The tires on the cobblestones made more of a racket than the engine did, but Jacob wished the bike would roar and scream and drown out the terrible sounds all around them.

He could hear the cries of the Lowlanders as more and more invaders tore through the city. People had been left behind, and the walls were falling. Jacob squeezed Charles tighter as the bike bounced off a large stone.

“Hang on!” Charles twisted the throttle on the steambike and they lurched forward at a terrifying pace. Jacob’s teeth slammed together as they bounced across the street. “Watch our flank and don’t focus on the dead!”

Charles’s warning came too late, and Jacob screamed. He couldn’t see the houses off to the west anymore. The walls were gone, and in their place came a surging tide of invaders. The faster creatures had almost made it to the street they were riding down, but it wasn’t just the creatures that made Jacob scream. People were there, in that sea of invaders. At the edge ran Bradley Piers. A bright blue spear exploded from the boy’s gut, and he screamed as the Walker dragged him to the ground. He vanished into darkness.

Jacob buried his face in Charles’s back. He should be glad Bradley wouldn’t be hurting anyone else, but Jacob felt sick. He saw only the blood now, and heard the screams. How many of them were his family? His friends?

“Charles!” The shout came from the rooftop beside them. Jacob didn’t have to look to know it was Samuel. “Cut east and circle around the Hall. Take the long way up the ridge to the Square. Everything else is blocked.”

“Or buried,” Charles snarled as he jerked the bike to the side. Jacob felt a blast of heat as his leg got too close to the boiler.

Jacob gathered up the courage to peek at where they were. He saw the bank at the corner of the Square pass them in a blur of shadows. Jacob was clamped firmly onto Charles’s back, but he still saw the old man’s head turn to look over his shoulder when a calamity sounded behind them. Jacob could tell another part of the wall had fallen without seeing it with his own eyes and then came a rapid staccato like ten thousand men marching out of sync.

Charles cursed.

Jacob didn’t think the vision could be any worse than what he’d already seen, so he turned his head. A wall of horrible black carapaces chased them. Red wings hummed and buzzed, and their eyes glowed like empty eye sockets. The wings didn’t lift the creatures more than a few feet off the ground, but the churning, roiling chaos was terrifying. Bugs slammed through the corners of stone houses and fell through the tiled ceilings. Mandibles gnashed together as the beetles—known as the Red Death—bore down on them.

“Get the Bangers out of the bag on your right,” Charles shouted over the scream of the wind and roar of the invaders. “The big ones! We need to blow these bastards to kingdom come.”

Jacob’s hands were shaking, but he still made quick work of the buckles. There were two brass cases near the top of the bags. He pulled a lever on one side and the edge of the case popped up, exposing a Banger twice the size of a corkball. Jacob pulled the lever on the smaller case and snatched a Burner out of it. The Banger opened at the press of a button. Jacob pressed the metal nub to activate the Burner before dropping it into the larger sphere. He pressed the button on the Banger. He had no more than fifteen seconds.

“Ready!”

Charles righted the bike and turned slightly, giving Jacob a clear shot at the horde. He didn’t need it. At the speed they were going, Jacob knew where the bugs would be when the Banger blew. Jacob let the metal sphere fall to the ground as it began to smoke.

“Go!” Jacob screamed at Charles as he wrapped his arms around the old man as tightly as he could, pressing his face against the gun across the old man’s back. “Go, go, go!”

Charles didn’t need to be told twice. He leaned forward as he twisted the throttle as far as it would go. They shot up the ridge, heading toward the city walls.

The Banger detonated, and he could
feel
the shockwave. Jacob turned and watched the fireball send pieces of bugs so far into the sky they cleared the opposite wall, falling down the east side of the mountain.

Charles glanced back and laughed like a madman. “Well done.” He leaned the bike into another sharp turn, and they could see the path leading up to the city gates.”

“Don’t stop!”

Jacob glanced up to see Bessie leaping along the rooftops above them. Samuel’s eyes were all for the courtyard, and Jacob followed his gaze.

“Pull the gun out,” Charles said.

Jacob squeezed his knees as tightly as he could and unholstered the gun on Charles’s back. He’d used smaller air guns, so he had an idea of how it worked. Jacob started sliding the long wooden pump beneath the barrel. The gears offered little resistance at first, but three pumps in, Jacob could barely budge the slide.

“It won’t move anymore,” Jacob said.

“Three pumps,” Charles said. “That’s all you need, the way it’s tuned. It’s already loaded. Don’t fire unless you have to.”

The courtyard outside the gates looked like something out of the old stories. The stories Jacob’s father used to tell them around the fireplace—stories meant to scare him, but stories that only lived in old books about forgotten times.

Bugs and men and fires roared in the overrun courtyard. Hot ash fell all around them, and Jacob tried to ignore the tiny embers that smoked when they hit his arms. Smashed carriages lay strewn all around the small fountain. Knights were on the ground, unmoving in pools of dark red liquid. Jacob’s stomach fluttered as he realized the men were lying in their own blood.

“Behind you!” Samuel leapt across the courtyard in front of them. He jumped off Bessie’s back and dove into a knot of Walkers. Bessie followed him in. Countless legs rose and fell as the beasts reared up and struck at the city’s defenders.

Jacob turned, bringing the barrel of the gun around with him. He almost screamed when he saw the huge glinting eyes of a Red Death a few steps away. Something gray and metallic was stuck in the top of its head, but Jacob didn’t have time to care. He raised the gunstock to his shoulder and his fingers squeezed the trigger. The gun sounded like a cannon as it slammed him up against Charles.

Charles shouted and the bike wobbled for a moment, but relief flooded Jacob as he watched the Red Death stumble and collapse.

“Hold on tight!” Charles said.

Jacob put one arm around the old man and kept a death grip on the gun. Charles swerved around the bulk of an invader, and something crunched under the steambike.

As soon as the bike straightened out, Jacob primed the air gun again. “Where’s the ammo!”

“I told you, it’s loaded. Self-feeding, you won’t need to reload before we’re inside.”

Jacob watched as a Widow Maker surged over the enraged Walkers Samuel fought. It raised its front legs and reared back. Jacob knew it was about to strike at one of the Spider Knights. Jacob aimed high. He didn’t want to risk hitting a knight. “Firing!”

Jacob felt Charles tense a moment before he pulled the trigger. The gun boomed, slamming against Jacob’s shoulder as one of the Widow Maker’s legs spun away in a fountain of blue blood. It caught the attention of one of the knights. He ran the spider through with two quick jabs from his spear.

The gates started closing. The knights were falling back, ever closer to them. Charles didn’t slow down. He blazed through the gates, nearly crushing the feet of the gatemen on either side.

Jacob didn’t look back to see how many knights came through the gate behind them. He only prayed that Samuel had made it out. Samuel, he’d jumped into that knot of Walkers with no hesitation. The scene played over in Jacob’s mind. Without Samuel, at least one of the knights facing the Walkers would have died, maybe more. He shivered, and his knuckles turned white where his hands clenched around the gun.

“Are you okay?”

Jacob didn’t really hear the man speaking, or realize who it was, until Samuel grabbed Jacob’s face and tilted it up.

“Are you okay?” Samuel asked again.

Jacob nodded. He wanted to ask where his family was, where Alice was. Jacob wanted to tell Samuel how happy he was to see him, ask him what had caused the huge dent in his chest plate. Every time Jacob opened his mouth to speak, no words would come.

“Dammit, Charles,” Samuel said. “The kid’s shaking like it’s winter.”

“It’s shock,” Charles said, adjusting a saddlebag and pulling out a metal wedge. “It will pass. He’s a tough kid.” Charles stood up, resting the bike against the angled metal piece. He carefully pried Jacob’s hands off the gun, holstering the weapon across his back once he’d gotten it free.

Samuel turned back to Jacob. “I told your parents to go to my uncle’s. We’ll find them there, okay? I’m sure they’re fine.”

A high-pitched scream rang out closer to the gates. There was a man being wheeled away from the gatehouse on the back of a cart. A huge green scythe stuck out from his chest. It took Jacob a moment to realize it wasn’t a scythe, but the foreleg of a mantis, like one of those he’d seen earlier, pulling a carriage. A woman ran beside the cart. Her dress was emerald green where it wasn’t doused in blood. She looked like royalty. The man reached out and touched her hand before he went limp.

Jacob didn’t think the man could possibly survive. There was so much blood, and then, as the cart moved a little farther, Jacob could see the mass of wounded knights laid out before the gatehouse. Some of them moved, some were tended by doctors or friends, but the rest were covered in stained white sheets.

“Alice,” Jacob said, turning away from that awful scene. “Did Alice make it?” He swallowed, trying to get the tremor out of his voice. “I left her … I told her to run.”

“You told her right,” Samuel said.

Something outside the walls screeched, and everyone around Jacob cringed.

“You told her right.”

Jacob and Charles waited by the steambike while Samuel reported in to his commander. Their escape had been a very near thing. Jacob leaned against a polished stone wall once the tremors from adrenaline finally stopped. The building was small for the city, only two and a half stories, but shops didn’t need to be large near the gates. They received more traffic than they could handle on most days, and today saw the stores swollen with wide-eyed citizens, unsure of what to do with themselves.

Children screamed, dragged into alleys and makeshift hospitals by wounded parents. Some people only stood, staring at nothing, as though they could see right through the crowds around them. Several Lowlanders gathered in clusters around the courtyard with nothing on their backs but the Festival clothes they’d worn, slowly getting ushered away by knights and the Highland police force.

Amid all the chaos, a Highlander stopped to ask Charles about the steambike.

“And it stays upright?” he asked. “With only two wheels?”

Charles nodded and ran a hand over his beard. “Same principle as a kid’s bicycle, only bigger, and faster.”

“Amazing,” the man said, leaning down to look at the brass and copper piping around the boiler. He studied it for another minute or so in silence before extending his hand to Charles. “I do appreciate the distraction, my friend. You do good works.”

Charles smiled and bowed his head slightly. “Appreciate it.”

The man wandered away. Jacob’s gaze followed him until his eyes caught the glint of Samuel’s dented breastplate in the city streetlamps. The lights here were more like magic than fire. Not entirely unlike the small lightbulb Charles had been working on, but much larger and much brighter.

“They’re impressive,” Charles said while Jacob glanced between Samuel and the nearest light. “They’re a terrible waste, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“The power it takes to light one of those lamps for a night?” Charles said as he pointed at the soft golden glow. “You could power the water pumps in the Lowlands for an entire month.”

Jacob raised an eyebrow and looked at Charles.

“Don’t believe me?”

“Well …” Jacob started to say he didn't, but then he remembered some of the stories he’d heard. “My dad always said it was different here, in the Highlands. I haven’t been since I was a little kid, but I’ve always wanted to come back. He used to tell me how life inside the walls is a different world from the Lowlands.”

“He’s not wrong,” Charles said. “You’ll find softer people here, and more cunning people.” He kept his focus on the street. “Here’s Samuel.”

“I’m to stay armored,” Samuel said, stepping up beside them as he adjusted the sheath belted at his waist, “but I can escort you to my uncle’s.”

“What about Bessie?” Jacob asked.

“She’s staying at the stables tonight in case the watch needs her, and she’s getting patched up. One of the Walkers managed to crack the armor under Bessie’s saddle.”

“You mean, where you sit?” Jacob asked.

Samuel nodded as they began walking down the street, Charles pushing the steambike.

“Thankfully I wasn’t sitting there at the time. Hard to believe I was better off going toe to toe with one of those Walkers than staying in Bessie’s saddle.”

“Bessie’s okay?”

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Samuel said. “She was bleeding a bit, but we got the dressing on her pretty quick. She’ll heal up after a little rest and some water.”

“That’s good,” Jacob said as they turned a corner and followed the road up a long, gentle hill. The cobblestones here were even, making the footing easy. “The roads are so flat here.”

Charles huffed as he pushed the steambike. “Good thing too, or I wouldn’t make it.”

“You want a hand with that, Charles?” Samuel asked. “I’d be happy to get it up the hill for you.”