Chapter Two

Liam McCool trotted briskly along the forest path listening to the monotonous screeching of the katydids, watching the yellow streaks of the thumb-sized lightning bugs that flitted here and there, smelling that cloying flowery smell that always seemed to come out at night here in the sticks and thinking that Central Park was all the Nature anybody really needed. Plenty of leaves, birds, noisy bugs like those pests sawing away in the bushes there—just the thing if you were in the mood for it.

Liam cursed as one of the big lightning bugs zipped past his ear. Back in the city everything was a decent, normal size, or at least it had been when he left. Not like those lightning bugs and the rest of the freakish creatures he’d started seeing around here a while back. He dodged another grotesque bug and shuddered in spite of himself.

People were saying the bizarre fauna had started after Stanton strung up the leaders of the Iroquois uprising, that it was all down to Indian “medicine.” Crazy? A really bad thought, anyway—there were a lot of damned mad Indians around since Stanton picked up where Andrew Jackson’s Indian Expulsion had left off …

Liam jacked up the pace of his jog, desperate to leave Nature behind and get indoors, where he could at least imagine city life. True, he did have a pal or two back home who insisted on dragging him out to the Park to make him play Walden, but when they finally got fed up with the bugs and greenery, he could escape back out to Fifth Avenue, see crowds of people, read a newspaper with today’s news (here in Henderson’s Patch a week old was a new paper), buy himself a beer and a sausage and generally live in 1877 instead of the Middle Ages. Liam had grown up in Five Points, in a Mulberry Bend tenement, and they had all the Nature you could use there only mostly the human kind and enough of that to keep m. de Balzac busy scribbling novels till his hand fell off.

Liam chuckled. He was really sick of Henderson’s Patch and pleased as Punch to be leaving. He might as well have been on the moon during these past months as an unwilling snoop for the Pilkington Agency. The only links to the outside had been the private wire at Boylan’s saloon and the line that Henderson’s Anthracite leased on the Government Wire, so he’d had to go twenty miles to Pottsville if he wanted to send a telegram back to the city. Not that there was much point in it most of the time, since Secretary Stanton’s Eyes read everything on all the wires everywhere and you couldn’t say “boo!” on one of them without expecting a knock on your door later on.

A series of thunderous hoots sounded in the distance—the steam whistle at Henderson Anthracite’s pit-head calling out the volunteer fire department. Liam smiled wryly. There’d be hell to pay over blowing up Henderson’s house, by tomorrow the town would be crawling with Coal & Iron bluecoats like when you kick an anthill. And if the coppers got their hooks into him they’d never believe he’d nearly talked himself blue in the face to keep the Lodge from blowing up Henderson himself along with his house. He’d had to work his jaw like Moody and Sankey preaching hellfire before Boylan agreed to play it smart instead, to warn Henderson that the Mollies had his measure instead of killing him.

And then there was that damned Acme. Liam rolled his eyes just thinking about that miserable hunk of boiler plate. He had seen at a glance it was one of the special calorium-fuelled ones with all the works inside instead of the standard model with the firebox on its back. The new ones could go forever without being refuelled, all you had to do was give them water for steam every eight hours. The trouble was, no matter how desperately everybody else tried to discover it, only the Brits had hit on the secret for refining calorium from pitchblende—which meant that Royce could charge what he liked for his “Imperial” Acmes. So far only the Government in Washington was allowed to buy calorium, which meant he’d just blown up one of the Department of Public Safety’s most expensive toys and they’d be way madder about that than if he’d murdered somebody.

There was a sudden racket of something big thudding through the woods nearby and Liam skidded to a halt like a Steamer with its brakes jammed, dropping to his knees and listening with taut concentration. There’d been a lot of talk lately—hushed talk, looking-over-your-shoulder talk—about strange animals roaming at night, stuff right out of the Delaware Indian legends. Like he’d heard the other day from Paddy Delahanty, a miner whose wife went batty after seeing an owl with a thirty-foot wingspan carrying off a bleating sheep. And truth to tell, the lightning bugs and those pesky katytids were just as bad as the big critters—he’d seen a katydid in the bushes at Maggie’s the other day damn near as big as a nickel stogie, not to mention which, Maggie’s lodger Kreutzer had said they’d taken to stinging now. Who ever heard of stinging grasshoppers?

Damn this place, anyhow! At night in the city you might run into a pack of boozed-up Hudson Dusters looking for trouble, or a hold-up man with a twitchy finger, or maybe even a couple of Eyes trolling the saloons for seditious talk—all bad enough, sure, but he’d rather take his chances with them any day than with some ridiculous yokel nightmare of giant birds and bugs. And ye gods, what was that smell? Liam wrinkled his nose and fought down the urge to vomit. Whatever was making all that noise gave off a stink like the cells in the Tombs: puke and slop buckets, plus something worse—like a whiff of the ripe dead bodies lying under the sun at Gettysburg.

He flattened himself out on the ground, peering into the dark shadows until he caught a glimpse of a big indistinct shape pushing its way through the brush. A moment later it emerged into a dappled patch of moonlight and Liam’s breath caught in his throat: a wolf, but like no wolf he’d ever seen—the size of a brewery horse, panting and looking around as if for him, personally, its eyes glowing like coals, its tongue lolling out and enough teeth for a whole pack of ordinary wolves glinting in the moonlight.

“Blessed Mother!” he murmured involuntarily and the thing looked sharply in the direction of his hiding place. Slowly, gingerly, Liam reached for his Colt (thinking simultaneously that he might as well throw acorns at the beast), when suddenly another sound swelled through the night and seized the attention of man and wolf-thing alike:

From somewhere overhead, growing steadily until it made Liam’s very bones thrum in sympathy, came the sound of a titanic, angry bee. Liam closed his eyes and shook his head: this was clearly a night he should have stayed home in bed, reading Count Tolstoy’s new book. Somewhere not far away, and coming fast, was one of the Secret Service’s Black Deltas—huge, rigid, delta-shaped hydrogen balloons powered by six aerial screws, or propellers, each one driven by its own, silenced Corliss aerial steam engine.

Liam had heard that the Secret Service now had special telescopes for seeing at night, and that worried him even more, since he happened to know that each of the Black Deltas had gun ports for six steam-driven Gatling guns, capable of firing 1,100 rounds of .45-70 ammo per minute. Liam had fired one of the old hand-cranked ones back in the War and had been appalled to see it chop through a 300-year-old oak tree like a knife through a hunk of cheese. He squinched his eyes as tight shut as he could and put his hands over his head, praying. The wolf-thing, on the other hand, spooked suddenly and ran off in another direction, crashing through the brush like a herd of cattle.

Suddenly there was a sparking zzzzzt! from somewhere overhead and the forest lit up as bright as day as a monstrous carbon-arc lamp started playing back and forth across the tops of the trees and a stentorian military voice shouted through a megaphone:

“You, there, below! Halt where you are! I say again, HALT OR WE’LL SHOOT!”

Instantly, without waiting for a response, the Black Delta cut loose with a deafening stream of bullets, glowing incendiary rounds that created a sort of hellish umbilical cord between the Delta and the ground below. Liam prayed without pausing, every prayer he could remember from Sunday grace through the Lord’s Prayer to the Rosary and back again. Finally, after what seemed like days, the firing ceased, the illuminated squares of the gun ports closed—making the Delta invisible again—and then with a throbbing hum the airship veered off to the east and disappeared.

They must have called that thing in from the Secret Service station in Pottsville, Liam thought inconsequentially. He raised himself to a sitting position very gingerly, as if he were made of glass and might break if he moved too fast. The moonlight was glinting off a carpet of little golden tubes on the forest floor around him, and Liam leaned forward to pick one up: a .45-70 cartridge case, they must have fired thousands of them. Somehow that little piece of reality brought Liam to his feet.

“Bad ’cess to ye, Mr. Stanton, and to all your dirty thugs,” Liam muttered, looking skywards. Then he took off loping again towards Maggie’s house. It wasn’t far now, and—winded and mind-blasted as he was—he couldn’t help smiling as he thought of her. If his Ma had still been alive he didn’t know if he could have taken Maggie home to meet her, but then his Ma—who’d been governess to a milord’s kiddies—wouldn’t have been too happy with what he’d made of himself either. Liam McCool, King of the Silk-Stocking Cracksmen? No, he didn’t think so, even though in his day he’d been the best of the best, and he was still a lot prouder of that than of what they’d turned him into by forcing him onto the right side of the law.

Almost to Maggie’s now. Liam slowed to a walk, reaching into his pocket for a comb that he ran through the bushy moustache he’d been affecting since he started this job, that and the long hair he wore tied into a pigtail with a strip of rawhide. Maggie had never seen him any other way and he couldn’t wait till they got to Philly and a barber shop where he could lose the lip-shrubbery and shorten his hair enough so his pals wouldn’t give him the horselaugh when they saw him.

Elbowing his way through the thick underbrush that screened Maggie’s backyard from prying eyes, he suddenly came to a halt. Something was very wrong. By this point he should have been seeing light through the bushes; on this night of all nights Maggie should have had every light in her private quarters lit to welcome him. A sense of foreboding knotted his stomach as he stepped forward into the yard: there was plenty of moonlight, but the house itself was as dark and silent as a tomb.

Liam pushed out into the yard and ran across it and up the back stairs, hoping against hope that Maggie was just asleep, worn out by all the preparations for their trip. He knocked, hoping to hear her joyous welcome from somewhere inside, but instead the door swung inwards. Liam shook his head slowly, trying to deny the evidence of his eyes—Maggie always kept her doors locked tight, ever since a break-in months ago.

He forced himself to push the door the rest of the way open and entered, his steps dragging. The hallway outside Maggie’s quarters was as dark as the inside of a coal scuttle, and he had to fumble back and forth on the wall before he could find the gas jet and strike a match to see where he was going.

There. At the end of the hall the door between Maggie’s quarters and her boarders’ part of the house was locked tight as always and doubly secured by a heavy bolt. But it was the door on his left, the one that led into Maggie’s parlor, that made Liam’s heart drop into his shoes: on the jamb and on the doorknob next to it were smears of blood, and on the hall floor there was half a bloody footprint, its sole in the hallway and the heel-print concealed behind the closed door.