Lust Plague (Steamwork Chronicles) (22 page)

“Stay, snake,” he muttered.

At the control panel, Clavis allowed him to unravel it from his neck, but the tail end refused to enter the hole and twisted aside.

“Maybe your head end?” The ruby eyes of the snake glittered. “Dayum, snake. Don’t give me that evil look. Stuff yourself in that hole.” He needed to get this sorted. Every second of time wasted could mean Kaysana’s death.

Hands slippery with sweat, he aimed the head at the hole and shoved. The first counterclockwise squirm of the bumpy metal skin caught him by surprise. Then the snake wormed into the hole, its body screwing round and round as it disappeared into the cavity. With a muted
click
, the last few inches revolved and locked. From deep within the panel, a hum sounded.

“Wow. Done it, Mr. Sten.” Emily nodded appreciatively.

The little frankenstruct canary whirred in and landed on his shoulder, fluffed its feathers, and cheeped.

“Hi, little one, looks like you’re coming too? Hope you can pull your weight. Does this one have a name?”

“Yep. Twitter Rainbow.”

“What? Uh.” Sten grimaced, feeling like he’d swallowed a sour pill. “Twitter will do me.” He stroked the top of Twitter’s head with his finger, feeling the soft feathers. It reached up with open beak and gave him a firm nibble. “That’s the spirit. Now let’s get this rescue humming.”

The little bird flew to the portrait of the Dalai Lama and settled there. The picture was one of the few nonessential things he’d not tossed out. Maybe it’d bring them luck. They needed it.

Staying cheerful on the outside sometimes had the disadvantage of making him miserable on the inside. But…never this bad. Never before. Damn the woman. She'd better be alive, or else.

Cold. Darkness. Snow under her cheek. She blinked. Dead man beneath her.

The last made Kaysana shove her arm into the snow that had leaked in through a corner of the windshield. She frantically wormed off the pilot’s lap and fell backward to land in the snow-surrounded cave that was all that was left of the midsection. Light filtered down from a clear patch in the glass above. The fine lines of the wire reinforcing in the glass made the moon-glazed sky seem like some fairy-tale dream. Outside, the wind was shifting snow across fast, then whipping it away.

At her feet, a canvas-wrapped hose rose like a grotesque worm from the whiteness. The mount of the Gatling gun gleamed, half-buried, with the ammo belt draped over it. Nothing moved except for her.

The entire gyro might be buried by morning. She touched the gnawed part of her ear and winced. Very little blood stuck to her hand. The bleeding had stopped apart from a little seepage. The cold had helped seal the wound. She mustn’t have been unconscious long, or her face and fingers would be frozen. Even so her hands ached.

I need to take stock
. She did a wobbly circle. So dark, she could only guess at what some objects were and had to kneel and grope to see if they were useful.
Gloves. Need gloves first and foremost
. Her jacket and boots and pants were good.

The copilot didn’t need his anymore. Gray light filtering through some patches of the snowed-in windshield let her see a little. She shuddered as she pulled the thick gray gloves from him. His skull was shattered and the right side mostly gone. Inside his skull, the remains of his brain poked up like an island from a sea of frozen blood.

Luckily his hands were small and the gloves were clean and fit her. She wriggled her fingers and swallowed down the nausea. Thirst kicked in.

Traveling outside right now was suicide. In here she had shelter from the wind chill. The temperature would rise with the coming of the sun. Unless landmarks were visible, she’d be best to rely on marking the crash site and waiting and praying for Sten to find her.

He will as long as we were on the logical route to Perihelion.

If she was the searcher, she would be able to find herself. Ergo—Sten would find her. She’d dig herself out and mark the site and wait for three hours.
After that, I’ll walk
. Because after that, maybe he wasn’t coming. Or as Sten might’ve said, shit happens.

No water canteen. No food. No weapons. Just an extra jacket wrestled off the copilot for a blanket after she worked up her nerve. Getting clothes off a man in the depths of rigor mortis wasn’t simple.

Sleep, she told herself, and she made a nest of sorts from a sack and the clothes. But she shut her eyes and the zombies came alive, crawling toward her. She jerked her eyes open, heart pounding, to find only stillness and dark silence. Nothing lived here but her. So she tried again. Every time she shut her eyes, they came for her. Over and over, and fucking over.

Something tapped. She wrenched open bleary eyes to find the wind had lessened. Sleep had come after all.

Morning was out there. Had she slept too late? Could Sten have passed overhead and seen nothing because she was in here, beneath a foot of snow? By luck or some alteration of weather patterns or the angle of the slope they’d crashed on, the circle in the roof glass had stayed clear. Belatedly she remembered the knife she’d stuck in the zombie. How had she forgotten that? With some force and a lot of wriggling of the blade, she pulled it out of his ear.

The blade took ages to wipe clean.

By chinking persistently, the knife tip made a nice hole in the glass, which wouldn’t enlarge at all due to the wire. Her thoughts were plowing through the sludge of concussion and tiredness and dehydration and God knew what else. She gave up on the roof. Half an hour later, she’d forced up the side door. Another half an hour of digging and she found her way to the surface. The tunnel through the snow was just wide enough to jam her body into. She worked her right hand up through the hole to the surface and wriggled her gloved fingers out into the open air. More work needed to get fully out.

Something took hold of her wrist and pulled, hauling her through that last foot of snow, cracking it away in big chunks, and into the light of early morn. She spat out snow, groggily raised her head. “Sten?” And stiffened.

The sizzling orange eyes of the doctor met hers. His fingers were laced with tattered flesh, his eye sockets and goatee were rimed with fine ice, and he grinned at her past those ruined teeth and lips. Congealed strands of red-tinged drool stuck to his chin.

“Greetings. Come with me.” Beyond the doctor a gathering of three more zombies waited, swaying in the ruffling wind and slavering at her as if she was their breakfast.

The knife she’d stupidly lost somewhere in the snow.

“Morning, boys.” She let her mind tick grayly through the possibilities. Couldn’t fight them, and they were going, in general, where she needed to be. Kaysana sagged to the ground. Let them carry her.

And they did. The doctor passed her from one to the other on that mind-numbingly fearful journey. She hung over their backs, resting, despite the maddened pitter-patter of her heart.

If they eat me, they eat me, she told herself endlessly. The litany helped, after a while, and made the monotonous fear a bearable boredom. Besides, she searched the pockets of the coats of those who carried her and found a canteen of water that thawed out slowly in her jacket. She swigged it and tried not to smell their putrid flesh and breath. One had a packet of beef jerky in a coat pocket. It reminded her of Sten.

Her chest ached for a while, until
if they eat me, they eat me
overcame her lovesick notions. She shoved the food into her dry mouth and swallowed it down after what seemed a hundred thousand chews. Strength trickled back into her flesh.

Through the rocking gap beneath the armpit of her zombie carrier and up a slope of snow, she spotted the shining steel walls of Perihelion. Before it, the backs of a mass of zombies heaved like a nest of hungry maggots. Every now and then, a shriek split the air and the growling hubbub of hundreds of zombies rose.

She tried to lever herself up from where she hung upside down across the zombie’s back. With every scream and shriek, certainty wedged itself deep into her being. People, live people, were being tortured up there in some horrible way, and she was being taken to the same doom. Half-covered mounds showed where snow vehicles and gyros were buried.

“Now! You can put me down, now!” She thumped at the zombie’s back. Hoping, praying he’d stop. Nothing happened. He trudged onward, step by step taking her closer to death. Then a glimpse of the sky through the veil of falling snow revealed the red and gold of the
Emshalley
cruising in the heavens.

Sten. He’d come. Thank God. Not that she’d doubted. The man wasn’t the sort to stop at the first hurdle, or the hundredth. Forthright, strong of mind, someone you could depend on…hell, what was she thinking. She was about to get ripped to pieces, and she was pining over a man?

She ripped herself loose from the zombie’s grip…rolled free and ran.

At the extreme altitude, the
Emshalley
sounded like a dying clockwork creature—emitting screeches, pings, clicks, and even groans as it was strained by the blistering cold and the gusts of wind.

Sten shut the cupboard beneath the control panel. The canary was in there inside the haversack, along with a flask of hot tea. No wind chill in the cupboard. The course had taken them coasting through a low valley between the peaks that he’d never have found without the maps Emily had discovered. But it was cold, really cold.

On a pile of blankets on the floor, Emily and Cadrach kept each other warm. The wolf lay across her lap.

Ice crusted the windshield glass. He tapped on it. Thin pieces of the ice broke loose and skittered across the glass, leaving clearer areas.

Down below was their target. Through the drifting white haze, a low building appeared, set back into the side of the mountain, with wide steel doors the main clue that humans lived below.

He lifted the scope to his eye and cycled it through the ranges until the scene shimmied into focus. The gray smudges on the flat area before the doors were not human. No living creature would be gathered there as if at some massive picnic. The image coalesced. Zombies. Hundreds, maybe even thousands.

“We’re here!” he yelled and pointed.

Shivering, hands under her armpits, Emily peered out. Cadrach wove around her feet before nestling into them. Flurries of snow obscured the landscape, but through the gaps, Sten glimpsed a gigantic machine standing tall in a circle of brown earth. Snow capped the top of it and softened the angles of the metal. He pointed again. “Down there! Is that the automaton?”

“Think so. He's big!”

“Ah. He’s turned into a big snowman.” Sten turned the wheel to steer southeast. With compensation for the wind, they’d arrive in a few minutes. When he leaned over the panel, he hissed in surprise as the freezing metal leached heat from his arms. He buckled and buttoned the borrowed coat up tighter, wriggled a pair of thick gloves over his fingers. It would be cold down there.
Not
turning into a human icicle would be difficult.

The billows of snow swept away. Gods, no. He used the scope.

On the periphery where a slope crept up to the crowd before the doors, a person in white garb with orange markings struggled with zombies. He drew in a long, shuddering breath.

“I think that’s Kaysana down there.”

“You sure, Sten?”

“I think so. Where are they taking her?” He screwed the scope’s knob in tight, zeroing in on the center of the crowd.

Stretched out like some strange sacrifice, a man lay prone in the snow, puffed up like a gigantic gingerbread offering, with yellow-gold brilliance spilling from cracks in his skin.

“What the freakin’ hell?”

Two zombies tossed a writhing man onto the splayed-out figure. The glowing yellow man reached out, grabbed him by neck and arm, and tore off his head. Sten swallowed. Impossible not to watch. He had to know. With each gesture of his hand, the glowing man threw pieces of corpse into the crowd. The zombies milled about and threw up their hands as enthusiastically as guests at a wedding hoping to catch the bridal bouquet.

He pushed away from the control panel. “Damn!”

“You okay?” Emily stepped closer.

“I’m okay.” He dragged his hand over his face. “We have to move fast. I think Kaysana is about to be killed.”

“Oh.” The color drained from her face. “What can we do?” The frown between her eyes was deep as a knife cut. “There’s thirty shotgun rounds and maybe twenty for my rifle. How many zombies are there?”

“Hundreds.” He crunched his fingers into the control panel until the pain let him think. “I can’t…we can't save her. Even if I drop into the bloody middle of them with the shotgun, I can't kill them all.”

“No?” Emily chewed her lip, searched his face for a while before she turned to stare out through the glass. “Maybe you should see what’s left of the automaton. I have the operating instructions. Read them on the way here.” She went to the pile of blankets where she’d huddled and drew a blue book from it. “Like you said, not an automaton. Human piloted. Four two-inch cannons, close-range gauss guns, and backup wire-guided rockets. Plus a low-burn ember chamber. There’s a chance we can get it going, Sten. They called it a Hell Machine.”

“Hell Machine?” What was she thinking? He wanted to look out and see
her
again but couldn’t bear to. “It’ll be dead by now. Powerless. I’m going down there. I have to do something. You get away up high and wait. Run…if you have to.” They both knew this was hopeless, and he saw the flatness drop into her eyes.

Her lip wobbled. “No. Fuck it, Sten. If you have to suicide doin’ this, at least do something that might work. God, man. There’s no snow around the base of it. The snow’s melted! Doncha see what that might mean? That ember chamber might be running. Pleease! Try!”

He pinned her with a gaze hard enough to hurt.
Could she be right?
“Then we’ll steer for Mr. Snowman. But…I think she’ll be fed to that thing down there unless we can slow them down.”

“I could get some with the sniper rifle?”