Authors: Joe R. Lansdale

Steampunked (8 page)

BOOK: Steampunked

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John Feather clung to a cabinet until Steam was standing straight, then he took his stance on the platform in front of the seats and moved from one position to the other, working levers, observing dials.

It was erratic, but John Feather managed to have Steam lurch forward, find his head, and set it in place. Or almost in place. It set slightly tilted to the left.

John Feather climbed into the head and refastened the steam cables that had come unsnapped when the head came loose. He had to replace one from the backup stock. He tried the main controls. The fall Steam had taken had affected them; they were a little rough, but they worked.

John Feather started Steam toward the museum.

Condensation not only came out of the hole in the steam man’s hat, but it hissed out of his eye holes and neck as well. He walked as if drunk.

(9)

Ruckus

The wall came apart and Steam tore off part of the roof too. He grabbed a rip in the roof and shook it. A big block of granite fell from the ceiling, just missed Beadle on the table, passed to the left elbow of the Dark Rider, and got his Moorlock companion square, just as he was sucking an eyeball from the head he had been eating.

Steam ducked his head and entered the remains of the museum.

“I swore what I’d do to you Beadle,” the Dark Rider said. “And I’ll do it.”

With that, the Dark Rider ducked under the table Beadle was strapped to, lifted it on his back, his arms outstretched, his hands turned backward to clasp the table’s sides, and with little visible effort, darted for the staircase.

Steam, head ducked, tried to pursue him, but as he went up the stairs the ceiling was too low. John Feather made Steam push at the ceiling with his head and shoulders like Atlas bearing the weight of the world, and Steam lifted.

The ceiling began to fall all around and on Steam.

The Dark Rider was up the stairs now, heading for the opening to the roof. When he came to the opening, he flung the table backward so that Beadle landed on his face, breaking his nose, bamming his kneecaps, and in the process, not doing his already maligned toes any good.

The Dark Rider grabbed the table and tore it apart, causing the straps that bound Beadle to be released. He grabbed Beadle by the head, like a kid not knowing how to carry a puppy, and started up a ladder to the roof.

When the Dark Rider reached the summit of the ladder, he used his free hand to throw open the trap, then, still holding the struggling Beadle by the head, pulled him onto the moonlit roof.

To the Dark Rider’s right, he saw that the rip in the sky had grown, and that a rip within the rip had opened up a gap of darkness in which strange, unidentifiable shapes moved.

Below his feet the roof shook, then exploded. Steam’s crooked head poked through. And then rose. It was obvious the steam man was coming up the stairs, and he was tearing the roof apart.

The Dark Rider picked Beadle up by shoulder and thigh, raised him over his head. The Dark Rider thought the easy thing would be to toss Beadle from the roof.

Game over.

But that was the easy thing. He wanted this bastard to suffer.

And then he knew. He’d take his chances inside the rip. If he and Beadle survived it, he’d continue to make Beadle suffer slowly. Nothing else beyond that mattered. He realized suddenly that Beadle had been all that mattered for some time now, and when Beadle was dead, he would have only the memory of Weena again. Nothing else to preoccupy his thoughts. No more Beadle, no more steam man or regulators.

With Beadle raised over his head, the Dark Rider growled and started to run toward the rip.

*****

John Feather saw through the shattered eye of Steam what the Dark Rider planned. Painfully, he grabbed at the quiver he had discarded, picked up his bow, took a coil of thin rope from the wall, tied it to the arrow with one quick loop, and watched as the Dark Rider completed the edge of the museum’s roof, which was where the rip in the sky joined it.

The Dark Rider leaped.

John Feather let the arrow fly, dropped the bow, grabbed at the loose end of the rope and listened to the rest of it feed out.

The shot was a good one. It was right on the money. It went through Beadle’s left thigh, right on through, and into his inner right thigh.

John Feather heard Beadle yell just as he jerked the rope with all his might. Beadle came loose from the Dark Rider’s grasp in midair and was pulled back and slammed onto the museum roof, but the Dark Rider leapt into the dark rip with a curse that reverberated back into this world, then was nothing more than a fading echo.

*****

The Dark Rider’s leap had carried him into a place of complete cold darkness. His element. Or so it seemed.

He passed between shapes. Giant bats. They snapped smelly teeth at him and missed.

In time, he thought it would have been better had they not missed.

Because he was falling.

Falling … falling.

His leap had carried him into an abyss. Seemingly bottomless, because he fell and fell and fell, and if he had been able to keep time, he would have realized that days passed, and still he fell. And had he needed oxygen like normal men he would have long been dead, but he did not need it, and therefore he did not die.

He just continued to fall.

He thought of Weena. He wondered if there really was a plane on which her soul survived, wondered if he could join her there, if she would want him now that he was what he was.

And he fell and he fell … and he is falling still… .

*****

But, back to John Feather and Beadle.

John Feather found a knife, dropped the ladder out from under Steam’s ear, hobbled down it and out to Beadle. John Feather, while Beadle protested, cut the arrowhead out of Beadle’s thigh, hacked the arrow off at the shaft, and using one injured, bleeding foot against the outside of Beadle’s leg, jerked it free.

“We’re going to have to help one another,” John Feather said. “I’m not feeling too strong. My hands are seizing up.”

“Did you have to shoot me with an arrow?”

“It was that, or follow him. And if he had gone into that rip, I would not have followed. I’m not that much of a friend.”

The two of them, supporting one another, hobbled back to Steam.

Inside, Beadle found spare pants and shirt and boots and put them on. John Feather doctored his wounds again. Then, in their control chairs, they worked Steam and brought him out of the remains of the museum. They saw a few Moorlocks through Steam’s eyes, but they were scattering. The sun was coming up.

“We should try and kill them all,” Beadle said.

“I’m not up to killing much of anything,” John Feather said.

“Yeah,” Beadle said. “Me either.”

“Without their leader, they aren’t much.”

“I think we’re making a mistake.”

John Feather sighed. “You may be right. But …”

“Yeah. Let’s take Steam home.”

John Feather, in considerable pain, looked through one of Steam’s eyes at the landscape bathed in the orange-red light of the rising sun. There were more rips out there than before, and he saw things spilling out of some of them.

“If we still have a home,” said John Feather.

Epilogue

The astronauts, who had shed their heavy pressure suits and were wearing orange jumps, stopped walking as a green Dodge Caravan driven by a blonde woman with two kids in it, a boy and a girl, stopped beside them.

She lowered an electric window.

“You look lost,” she said.

“Very,” said McCormic.

“I suggest you get in.” She nodded to the rear.

The astronauts glanced in that direction. A herd of small but very aggressive looking dinosaurs were thundering in their direction.

“We’ll take you up on that suggestion,” McCormic said.

They hustled inside. The boy and girl looked terrified. The astronauts smiled at them.

The blonde woman put her foot to the gas and they tore off.

Behind them the dinosaurs continued to pursue. The woman soon had the Caravan up to eighty and the dinosaurs were no longer visible.

“How much gas do you have?” asked McCormic.

“Over half a tank,” she said. “Where are we?”

McCormic looked at the others. They shrugged. He said, “We haven’t a clue. But I think we’re home, and yet, we aren’t.”