Cold Copper

Chapter Twenty-two

Rose ran back into the warehouse and quickly closed the door behind her. “There are men coming.”

Captain Hink still had his gun drawn. Pointed straight at Mr. Wicks’s head. Mr. Wicks held his gun at Hink’s belly. Apparently, they hadn’t pulled the trigger to decide who was boss yet.

“I suggest you settle real quick if you’re going to work together, or just kill each other,” Rose said. “There are men coming. Men who won’t want us to be nosing around their warehouse. Do we hide? Fight?”

“Hide,” both Hink and Wicks said simultaneously.

“Dammit,” Hink added.

Then they both offered their hands to her. Rose just rolled her eyes and jogged down the row of boxes on her own, looking for decent cover in case the men came into the warehouse and decided to put on a light.

Hink and Wicks did the same, all of them settling near one another between a stack of boxes and a boarded-up window.

“How many?” Captain Hink asked.

“I heard maybe six voices.”

“How far?” Wicks asked.

“Close. Very.”

The door opened and Rose curled down lower.

“. . .isn’t any better, I’m telling you,” one of the men said. “Hob, get the light.”

“How can you know?” another voice, this one accented with a southern sort of drawl, asked. “They aren’t like buffalo. Can’t just stand on a hill and count out the herd. Ain’t no bones left behind either. Might be we’ve done our part to kill them off. Might be this is the last night we’ll see them on the street.”

“You can’t be that dumb,” the first man said. “Until we go a full moon without someone losing their youngest, they aren’t gone. Maybe not even then. It ain’t just children they snatch. There’s crops going bad, and that bout of fever that set in last spring? Brought on by the Strange, plain and clear.”

A switch snapped, metal against metal, and gaslights caught one to the other in a line across the top of the building. Rose blinked hard to get her eyes adjusted to the bright, and hunkered down a little tighter. They’d chosen a good enough hiding place, and the men, five she could see still near the door with Hob walking back from a little farther off, didn’t seem to suspect they were anything but alone in the big building.

The men were of a height to one another, most of them wearing beards and mustaches cut trim to their faces. She’d guess them all of an age too, maybe even as old as thirty or so. They wore a mix of styles: pants in dark, heavy wool plaid, plain leather, or sturdy denim blue; boots in black polish or oiled hide. The only thing their coats and hats had in common was they all looked warm and useful in the hard weather.

But there was one other thing that they each sported—a wide-muzzled gun of some sort with a copper box attached to it, hanging at the side.

One look at that gun sent her mind spinning with possibilities. She’d never seen anything like it, and her fingers itched to figure what it was made of and why, exactly, it was modified in such a manner.

A hand reached out and pressed gently downward on her arm. She glanced up. It was Hink. He wasn’t looking at her, but crouched as he was at her side, he must have sensed her coiling up with curiosity. He must have known she was pulled by the knowing of something worse than a cat by yarn, and given too much a chance, might just walk up there and ask those men what the guns were for and how, exactly, they worked.

“Mayor says there’s an end to them,” the second man said. “Won’t need a second warehouse, and this one’s nearly full. I say there’ll be no ghosts in the night come spring.”

The men each hung their guns on wall pegs, then freed the copper boxes from the contraptions by thumbing off a couple latches and giving them a good tug.

“Want to put money on that, Sal?” one of the other men asked.

“Didn’t say I’d bet for it.”

“Here now. A man who ain’t willing to back up his opinion with money shows you exactly what his opinion’s worth.”

The men chuckled and walked off with the copper boxes, heading deeper into the warehouse, out of Rose’s sight. In a moment, a clattering of cogs and wheels and chains filled the quiet of the place as some large device was activated. After a bit, there was silence.

“Should we follow them?” Rose whispered once the racket had died down.

“No,” Hink whispered back. “We stay here.”

“We do not stay here,” Mr. Wicks said. “We investigate.”

Hink just shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how you can’t seem to understand a two-letter word, but let me try again: No.”

“As your director, I order you to follow my orders, Mr. Hink.”

Hink snorted.

Mr. Wicks scowled at him. He stood and very quietly and quickly made his way down the aisle, pausing at the end of the stack of crates and peering around the corner to where the men had wandered.

“Blasted yatterhead,” Hink whispered. He turned and gave Rose a look that said she would share the blame if Wicks got them all killed.

There was no use calling out—the other men would likely hear them. So Rose did the only thing she could think of. She pulled her gun and got ready to shoot if Wicks was discovered.

Thomas didn’t dash out from behind the crates. But it wasn’t long before the men were back, talking over more mundane market prices of buckwheat and potatoes. They crossed over to the door.

Wicks ducked down out of their line of sight as the men reconnected the copper boxes back to the guns, shouldered them, shut down the lights, then left through the same door they’d come in.

Rose’s heart thumped for a minute, maybe two, as her eyes, once again, got the hang of darkness. Then Captain Hink was on his feet, just as quiet as Wicks, but twice as large and twice as temperamental as he strode in a killing sort of way down to where Wicks sat.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hink growled.

“Gathering information.” Wicks stood, dusted his coat, and adjusted his hat, though neither looked out of place to Rose.

“They could have found us.”

“Yes. Then we would have killed them, I suppose,” he said nonplussed.

“Idiot,” Hink grumbled.

“‘Sir,’” Wicks added. “You will address me as ‘sir.’”

“When hell burns holes in my boots,” Hink said. “And not even then.”

“What exactly will convince you of my station above you, Marshal Cage?”

“Paperwork signed and sealed by the president. Don’t have that, do you?”

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Wicks dug in the satchel he carried, thumbed through a small stack of paper, and pulled out one clean sheet.

In the dark of the place, Rose could just make out a seal of an eagle worked up in red and blue ink.

“Will this do?” He handed the paper to Hink.

Hink took it and tipped it to the meager light slipping in through the cracks in the ceiling.

“Anyone could forge a document. There’s practically a printing press on every corner nowadays.” He shoved it back at him.

Thomas paused, looking for a moment like he might have just noticed the depths of Hink’s stubbornness.

“Yes. Well,” he said. “I want to know where they went with those copper boxes. Go and see where they put them and report back to me.”

Hink inhaled. His hand clenched into a fist.

She didn’t know if he was fighting the urge to yell at the man or just fighting the urge to fight.

“Lady said she wants to go to town,” Hink said. “Find a nice hotel and a bath. I say that’s the way I’m walking.”

“I’m sure Miss Small won’t mind one little jaunt to see what’s behind that door.” He pointed.

Rose walked over to the both of them. Then walked past them so she could see what he was going on about.

There at the far end of the warehouse was, indeed, a door. “Armory?” she suggested.

“Won’t know if we don’t look.” Wicks took the distance at a quick clip, placed his hand on the door handle, and leaned in a bit as if listening for something moving behind the door. Then he tried the latch.

The door opened. Wicks turned, grinned, and stepped over the threshold.

“Idiot,” Hink said. “And a fool. We should leave, Rose. Now.”

“You want to know what’s in there,” she said. “You know you do. Doesn’t matter if he’s your superior or a horsefly. You’ll always wonder what was really back there. Got a case of the curious in a bad way.”

Hink glanced at the boarded-up windows, then shook his head, a smile easing the edge of his anger. “Woman, the trouble you find.” He turned and stormed off after Wicks.

“I like to keep my eyes out on the world,” she said.

“Thought you wanted a bath.”

“I do. After we find where they went with the copper boxes.”

Hink pulled his gun again, and stepped away from the stacks of crates and into the darkened room. “Wicks?” he called out softly.

Thomas seemed to melt out of shadows, a small flame tucked tight in his hand so as not to give more than an ember of light to his face. “Some kind of device here. I think it’s a hoist for the goods. The men used it.”

Captain Hink never seemed to fail when a light was needed and this time was no different. He pulled a flint and steel from his pocket and lit up a small torch.

“You hear that?” he asked.

Rose nodded. “Like trumpets, but higher? And…water? Maybe there’s a waterwheel that runs the equipment under here?”

“No,” Hink and Wicks said at the same time.

“You first, Marshal Cage,” Thomas said.

“Call me Captain Hink. I don’t go by Marshal unless I’m about to bring someone to law.”

“Really? Seems a hassle to change your names around like that. Why not just Cage for Captain and Marshal?”

“Because no glim pirate should be known as Marshal Cage. They’d shoot the ship right out from under my feet.” Then he said, “Down.” He nodded at the platform in the middle of the floor between a rise of gears and pulleys surrounding it.

From the look on his face, Wicks didn’t like to be ordered around either. Still, he strolled over and stood on the boards of the hoist. “I assume you understand how to set this device to working?”

“Haven’t run across a matic I can’t figure. Rose?”

“What?”

“Get on the platform with him.”

“You want me to go down there with him? I thought you didn’t want me anywhere near the man.”

“He didn’t?”

“No,” Hink said.

“Yes,” Rose said.

“No,” Hink said a little louder. “You aren’t going down there with him alone. We all go. Don’t plan to turn my back on you now, Mr. Wicks. Fancy papers or no.”

Hink set the matic in gear and then mounted the platform next to them. He pulled a lever and the entire contraption lowered, far more smoothly and silently than Rose expected. They dropped only one floor down, into a basement.

But that basement was massive, carved out of solid stone and at least three times as large as the upper floor. A series of connected tunnels with arched ceilings braced by metal connected to this huge center room and splayed out in every direction like the petals of a half-bloomed flower. All the tunnels and ceilings were lit with what must be electric light, strung with copper lines and shining like dewdrops catching sun.

The floor was water-smooth with rails down each tunnel and crossing at each junction.

A train station? No, Rose knew it wasn’t just that. Perhaps it was built for transporting something: coal or some other valuable.

Against the wall stood massive tanks and coils that looked like huge snail shells lit up from within and wrapped in copper wire. That copper wire ran through tubes across the ceiling, down the metal bracers against the walls, and looped across hundreds of other wires that suspended huge glass balls in a dozen colors, each glass ball wrapped in even more copper.

It was a fairyland of wires, cogs, glass, and power. Ideas she’d never been brave enough to imagine sat right here, already a reality. She knew what this was, though not what it was being used for.

“Power,” she said. “Acres and acres of power. Generating it. Storing it. And pushing it down those cables, I think. It’s…magnificent.”

“What in the world is this for?” Wicks asked. He glanced over at Captain Hink. “What do you know about it?”

“Rose.” Hink stepped off the platform behind Rose, who was already wandering out into the chamber.

The wonder of the place set her head to buzzing. She couldn’t seem to take it all in, to know what it all might mean. And she so very much wanted to.

“It’s connected,” she muttered as she started toward the towering tank on the nearest wall. “All of them. They’re made of…what is this? Copper? It’s the wrong color, too green and white, almost turquoise.” She stopped directly in front of one of the huge contraptions and stretched her fingers to touch it.

“Rose.” Hink pulled her hand away, then stood in front of her. He wasn’t big enough to block her view of the entire thing, but just the sight of him made her realize she had been foolishly wandering the place like a moth drawn to fire.

“There’s glim involved,” he said, not letting go of her hand. “And there’s Strange. Look.”

He turned her about so that her back was toward him. Across the room, stacked from floor all the way up to the ceiling, were dark metal shelves filled with copper and glass devices. Just like the copper and glass battery they had found in the train and put in the puppet man.

But instead of the glass globe in the middle of all that copper being empty, each globe was filled with something alive and skittering.

“God in heaven,” Rose breathed. “Something’s trapped in there.”

Hink, for just a moment, wrapped his arm around her waist. For just a moment, she was held against him, protected in the strength of his arms, his body.

“It’s the Strange,” he said very quietly. “Can you see them?”

Rose nodded.

“So can I, though I don’t usually. Do not touch them,” he said.

Then he gently let go of her and walked across that room toward them like he was approaching a wall full of rattlesnakes.

It took all the will Rose had in her not to turn and run from this place. The Strange were evil, mindless, brutal creatures that enjoyed nothing more than torturing people. She’d seen what they could do. She’d seen them make the dead walk. She’d seen them do worse.

Suddenly, she was too hot and too cold at the same time. She wanted to be anywhere else but here, yet she could not make her feet lift to run.

Hink was almost at the globes. He was going to touch them. He was going to reach out and then there would be nothing but a thin curve of glass between him and the creatures that were destroying the world.

They’d kill him. Draw him in. Devour him.

“Lee.” She said the word all in an exhale. “Please, Lee. Don’t touch them. Don’t leave me.”

Hink didn’t stop. Didn’t pause. He stepped up to the towering stack of caged Strange and stared at them, making a decision. Then he reached out and pressed his palm against the glass.