Fiddlehead

Eight

“But Captain, what is it?” Maria asked.

And as the laundry fell, the workwomen sorted, and the crank and grind of the generators and washers drowned out all but the very nearest noise, Captain Sally leaned in close. She said, “They’re notes, from a half-abandoned backwater on the West Coast, in the Washington Territory. They were written by one of my nurses. She’s been sending them every few weeks like clockwork—observations, suggestions, and prescriptions for dealing with a poisonous gas.”

Maria could hardly believe her ears. Was this the connection they’d all been seeking?

Sally continued. “It occurs naturally out there, near a volcano called Rainier. This gas has destroyed one city already, and it’s destroyed countless soldiers here on the fronts, because it converts to a substance that’s sold as a narcotic. There are a hundred names for it, and a hundred names for the men who become addicted.”

A loud shout pierced the workday commotion in the hot, disgusting incoming room, and Sally jerked to attention. Maria checked to make sure the satchel was fastened shut, and she slung it over her chest. “Was that Adam?” she asked. It was too loud to tell. Too many other things were going on around her.

But Sally didn’t know. A second shout led to a third—and soon the laundry commotion began to wane as the laundresses became curious about what was happening outside.

The captain took Maria by the shoulders. It felt like a funny gesture, coming from a smaller woman. “Now go to Washington, and raise some hell.”

Then a gunshot shook the basement, and the laundry women screamed. “Go!” Sally said more urgently. “Not the way we came. Take that side door—over there!”

“But, Captain!”

“Leave us,” she insisted. “Leave, and there’s nothing here for them to take!”

Maria still had a thousand questions, but someone on the other side of the incoming door had a gun. She had one, too, but she also had something heavy to carry. She ran where Sally’d pointed her, dodging dirty laundry, sidestepping puddles, and almost forgetting the smell that surrounded her.

Out the door she fled, into a narrow corridor without any windows—but there was a door at one end, so she raced for it and paused long enough to withdraw her Colt. She jammed the gun into the satchel so its handle was easily grabbable, and she opened the door.

On the other side she found stairs going up, but also leading down. To some kind of subbasement or cellar, she assumed. Only a fool would go down farther, and probably wind up trapped there. No, she’d go up and take her chances.

First floor.

She pressed her ear to the door with the large number “1” painted on it. She heard hollering on the other side. Hollering for her? Hollering at her? No, it didn’t sound like it. These were the shouts of doctors giving orders, and the sounds of wheeled gurneys squeaking hastily between the rows. Maria heard nurses answering the doctors, and asking for supplies; injured men moaning or vomiting, and explanations being cast back and forth across the turmoil. Was it truly loud enough that no one here had heard the gunshots below?

Maria took her chances with the door and opened it, revealing utter chaos: dozens of freshly arrived patients, rolled in on chairs or tables, being sorted and positioned and addressed with professional but imperfect haste.

“Oh, God,” she said into her mask, then pulled it off because she hadn’t realized until then that she still wore it. She dropped it on the floor and pushed her way forward, through the teeming crowd of the wounded and their caretakers, taking a gurney to the hip with such force that she cried out, bounced off it, and stumbled forward around an operating table that had been wheeled into place right beside it.

On the table was a man who was about to lose his leg; even a laywoman like herself could see that for a fact. A nurse held the man down as he writhed and cried, and a doctor struggled to put a molded glass mask over his face for ether, but the patient thrashed. Maria watched, fascinated, unable to tear herself away. The nurse lost her grip on the mangled leg and a jet of blood gushed several feet in the air, spraying Maria across the face.

She could hardly move for the horror of it, but she forced herself toward the rear of the room, where another door promised an exit, or so she hoped. She wiped at her face, tracking a streak of crimson across the back of her hand. Though she blinked and blinked, the vision in her right eye still swam with red. A bucket of clean rags in soapy water sat by the door, and although she remembered what Sally had said about every rag being sacred, she took one anyway. As she retreated, she wrung it out and wiped at her face, working the rag’s corner into her eye even though the soap stung.

Her sight cleared, and she swabbed her décolletage, fretting over a splotch or two on her scarf and another on her bodice. But she’d have to wash them later, there was no time to take a trip to the washroom now. Not when she heard—bang—another gunshot somewhere behind her.

It might’ve been anything, she told herself. Might’ve been some agitated, delirious soldier burning through ammunition, threatening the very people who would bring him back from the brink if he’d give them but a chance.

But she wasn’t prepared to wait around and find out.

As she reached the door that should take her into the main lobby, the stairwell door crashed open and another gunshot rang out.

The reaction was immediate and loud; nurses screamed, patients howled, every able-bodied person ducked for cover. One of the doctors drew a weapon of his own to fire back at the man in the doorway.

Maria only got a glimpse of him and all she could tell was that he was a white man in a long brown coat. He ducked back into the stairs, only to return fire … right into the room where all the wounded were waiting for help.

“Despicable!” she gasped, and reached for her Colt’s handle, but came to her senses before adding to the fray.

Besides, the doctor was returning fire with the skill and calm of a sharpshooter, and maybe he was one, or had been. This was a war hospital, after all, and surely most of the surgeons had seen the field at some point in their service. Maria said a prayer and wished him luck, concluding that the best way she could help defuse the situation would be to leave it behind and let the gunmen chase her to another place.

So she kept running, out the door and into the circular driveway, where four ambulances of military make were jumbled together, having just arrived from the front. Their rear doors hung open, bloody rags and clothing spilling out from within, as if the vehicles had been disemboweled. At least two of these mechanical carriages had been left with their engines still running, pumping black smoke from their exhaust pipes, their idling motors gurgling.

Maria had never driven an ambulance before.

But when she looked inside the nearest cab and scanned the controls, she recognized most of them. The machine wasn’t wholly different from the newfangled taxis she’d driven in Atlanta during one summer’s desperate effort to feed herself.

She came to a decision. She tossed the satchel onto the seat, seized her Colt, and jumped back onto the lawn in front of the house-turned-hospital … and fired her gun twice into the air. “Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Hey, I’m out here! Follow me, boys—I’ve got what you want, so come and get it!”

Silence fell in the wake of her proclamation. For a moment, she didn’t know what to do. Try again? Wait a little longer? See what happened? But the decision was made for her. One of the hospital’s front windows broke as an elbow smashed through it and the barrel of a gun emerged in the hole.

Before the attempted assassin could squeeze off more than a shot, she dived back into the cab of the ambulance and shut the door, hunkering down as low as she could while still operating the controls. There was a clutch? Yes, a clutch. There, that pedal. And the diesel injector, yes. That pedal there. Where was the gearshift? She fumbled around until she found it on the side of the steering wheel—doing most of this by feel, since she couldn’t see much of anything. But she got the vehicle moving.

And immediately struck one of the other ambulances.

She didn’t hit it hard, but the impact knocked her head against the dash, and she swore like no lady ought to.

A bullet shattered the windscreen and she was showered with shards of glass, but she shook her head and brushed them away, then sat up just long enough to see where she was going—and to shove her foot onto the accelerator as soon as she spied an opening.

Over the grass the vehicle hopped, winging a low stone retaining wall as she skidded inexpertly over the driveway and then alongside a ditch, into which the ambulance leaned sharply, threatening to flip and fall. But she urged it up, up, and onto level ground. Now the shooters were far enough behind her that they couldn’t hit her except by the most outrageous accident. Or so she was fairly certain, because she could still hear the shots cracking behind her, but nothing striking home.

She guided the unwieldy craft onto the road and did her best to avoid any horse-drawn carriages, dogs, men or women on foot, wagons, or other motored devices; but it was hard to see with the windshield gone and the sharp, cold air flying into her face without mercy. Maria squinted against the wind and wished for goggles like the airship flyers used … but if wishes were fishes they’d all cast nets. So she drove on, paying so much attention to her technique that she’d gone a mile before putting any thought into where she was headed.

Was she still being followed? Hard to say.

She was rolling toward downtown, and the traffic thickened as she neared the city center. If any assailant followed, he did so with a remarkable obedience to the rules of the road—undoubtedly a better one than Maria herself displayed, as the ambulance stalled out twice, leaped a curb, and ran past a policeman swinging a sign that urged CAUTION.

It was just as well that her career as a driver hadn’t panned out, or so she told herself as she tried to recall what she knew of this city, and where its train station was located. She’d been there before, but it’d been a while, and she didn’t wish to stop for directions while driving a somewhat stolen ambulance and running from armed gunmen.

But she did stop, once she recognized her surroundings and correctly extrapolated the way to the station. She abandoned the ambulance beside a saddle company, and then was off once more, making a beeline for the station. It wasn’t far, and she almost felt better on foot, now that she was reasonably confident she’d lost whoever was chasing her.

Unless she’d become too comfortable too soon.

Over her shoulder she noted a pair of men keeping pace. It might have been anything, or nothing. It might’ve only been two perfectly ordinary gentlemen on an unrelated errand, likewise headed in the direction of the train station. They did not brandish any weapons, and they did not jog to catch up, but something about their carriage and posture reminded Maria entirely too much of Pinkerton agents. Men on missions, staying casually unremarkable for the sake of efficiency and invisibility.

But she was one of them now. She knew how they worked, and these two men were working on her—she was almost certain of it.

There was always the chance they were Pinks after all, sent as backup or as checkup. It’d happened before, that work was spread among agents, and they’d catch one another up in a more or less friendly fashion in their free time.

She angled her next turn to catch their reflections in a shop window advertising warm winter cloaks. Two white men. Both dark-haired and dressed for indoor work, but not expensively. If these were Pinks, they didn’t come from the Chicago office—she would’ve recognized them—but there were four other offices, so she couldn’t assume they didn’t. She could, however, take note of their appearance and shoot a telegram back to her employer. If they were from her organization, she’d raise a stink. She didn’t like being second-guessed.

In truth, Maria did not think they were Pinks. But if they weren’t, they were hired hands from some other corner, and she wasn’t ready to handle that prospect yet. What corner might it be? There were other agencies, to be certain—the biggest and best-known in the South was probably the Baldwin-Felts company. She hoped it wasn’t them, as she didn’t think much of that particular establishment.

Of course, depending on who you asked, the Pinks weren’t much better. But she had a badge for the Pinks, and could reasonably expect to be safe from friendly fire. As for the other, God only knew.

She took a sharp turn, a fast one that she saved for the last second, and kept a brisk pace but did not run. No one runs unless they want to be chased. Better to let the sidewalk crowds buffer the distance between them than become a casualty to whatever might otherwise transpire.

She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. She waited at an intersection because she had to, and when a glass-windowed cabriolet went lumbering by, she scanned its reflections for the men behind her and spotted one of them. Only one? Maybe the vehicle passed too quickly, and she’d missed the other. Or maybe the other man had broken off from the direct chase, and was circling around from a new direction.

While she waited for the traffic director to give her leave, her mind raced.

How much farther to the station? No more than a few blocks, surely. Any available shortcuts? She didn’t know the city well enough to say for certain. She swallowed hard and, when the traffic director waved her across the road, she continued onward, still pretending that nothing was wrong, no one was behind her, and hers was an ordinary errand to the train station—no different from a thousand other ordinary errands performed every day.

Under pretense of stopping to adjust her shoe, she surreptitiously checked and confirmed that one fellow was still on her tail—the fact of this never more obvious than when he realized she’d paused … and he did likewise, investigating a news stand with sudden, intense interest.

“Maybe he’s an amateur, or a Baldwin after all,” Maria griped as she straightened up and resumed her path.

A sign posted beside the road pointed an arrow at the station, noting that she was still over a mile away; so, her recollection of how the city worked had been foggy indeed. She swore under her breath. A mile was a long way to run, and a long way to evade anybody. It gave the men plenty of time to close in on her, cut her off, and do whatever it was they planned to do.

And she still didn’t see the second fellow. He could be anywhere.

However, she did see one of the new electric streetcars clattering toward her. It wasn’t pointed in the right direction, except that right now the right direction amounted to “anywhere else but here.”

Chicago did not yet have these electric street lines, so she had no experience with such things. She sized up the elongated, open-air car. It didn’t look too complicated. When the painted trolley came close enough for her to touch it, she reached out and grabbed one of the vertical poles along its exterior, like she’d seen people do in other places during her travels.

It didn’t move quickly, but it moved determinedly, yanking her off her feet with exactly the precision and insistence she’d hoped for. She grunted with surprise, then smiled as her feet found a step. Tightening her fingers around the bar, she shielded her eyes from the sun shimmering off the frosty city. She spied the first man at the curb behind her, visibly aggravated that he’d arrived too late to join her.

Moments later she saw the second man hunting down a side street. He did not see her hanging off the side of the streetcar like she did this every day, like any of the other passengers who took such a casual attitude toward their transportation and bodily safety.

When she felt confident that she was unaccompanied, at least temporarily, she waited for the next stop and asked the driver if he could help her reach the train station.

The driver delivered the gentle admonition that she’d gone the wrong way, and she pretended she hadn’t known—because every man liked to be a hero, or at least enjoyed being of service to a lady in distress. And why deny the nice gentleman a warm feeling of helpfulness?

She finally made the right connection, and soon she reached the station, bought her ticket to Fort Chattanooga, and positioned herself comfortably on the last train of the day to the fort as the train prepared to depart.

Maria sat next to the window but turned her face away from it, in case anyone had caught up to her. She had no doubt that whoever’d sent the two men would learn her location soon enough, but there was no reason to make it easy for them.

The train lurched forward and found its rhythm.

And now she had hours before her with nothing else to do but familiarize herself with the nurse’s missives.

The pages were difficult to skim, due largely to the questionable handwriting of the woman who’d composed them. At a glance Maria could see that the nurse had never enjoyed more than a few years of formal schooling, as the earnest, rounded letters showed the charming diligence of a child’s hard-practiced lessons. But there was nothing charming or childlike about the message these shaky letters conveyed.

She checked the most recent letters and saw that the handwriting improved over the course of the correspondence, practice making something closer to perfect. Even so, the early pages were slow going, and the rollicking track of the train gave Maria a case of motion sickness that almost made her quit trying; surely it would be easier to finish the reading from a stationary location.

But a phrase leaped out at her. She drew the page in question up close to her face.

“… if you could hold him still for long enough, a doctor would pronounce him dead.”

Her attention now more fully engaged, she made the effort to peruse the entire section from whence the eye-catching line emerged.

I have now seen four cases here in the underground, and they all go the same: First, the victim breathes up some gas—usually because a mask springs a leak, or isn’t fixed good on his face in the first place. But sometimes it happens because the mask gets knocked off, or one of the tunnels isn’t sealed up as good as everybody thought. Doesn’t matter how it gets inside, it always goes the same.

After a man breathes it, his nose starts running with yellow mucus, and the mucus is sometimes bloody. Sores break out around his eyes, ears, and mouth. It looks like the gas is eating him up from the inside out. Then the heart stops, the pulse quits. No more spit or tears, and the skin around his eyes turns yellow. He starts panting, and it sounds like his lungs are being chewed up into rags. You will never forget what it sounds like, when he breathes. For that matter, if it weren’t for that breathing, you’d never know he was alive. Everything else about his body has done stopped, like he’s been killed by a plague. If you could hold him still for long enough, a doctor would pronounce him dead.

But he won’t stop moving like a polite dead man. Just when he ought to lie down and take a proper Christian burial, that’s when he starts running around, trying to bite people.

Sometimes it happens quicker than other times, from start to finish. The people I talked to say it’s because the gas is very heavy, and it collects thicker in some places than in others. It moves like a real thick liquid, like a syrup you can hardly see.

Maria sat up straight and frowned at the paper. As promised by Captain Sally, the text described a poisonous gas, and it definitely sounded like the walking plague. In fact, the nurse had used both of those words, fairly close together: “walking” and “plague.”

She kept reading.

Once a man’s been bit by a rotter, treatment is pretty much a race against the clock. Whatever gets bit has to get cut off. The bite causes a festering that moves like blood poisoning through a body, or like septic rot, but faster. If a finger gets bit, you’d better cut off the hand. If a hand gets bit, you’d better take the whole arm. If the amputations don’t happen in time, the patient will die within a day or two. I am told that a patient who dies from a bite will not start walking like a rotter, and so far this seems to be true. But I only seen it on three occasions so far, and that is not enough for me to say for certain.

“Gruesome,” Maria murmured with fascination. She flipped to the next page.

Nobody knows how long the rotters will keep moving, but the oldest ones have been kicking around for about fifteen years, by everybody’s best guess. The real old ones are raggedy now, and when you see them, you wonder how they manage to move at all. Most of the skin has rotted off, and the muscles are hardly more than strings. I hear they take nourishment from what they eat, but since their blood don’t flow I’m not sure how that’s possible. And since there is not much to eat inside the walls, it makes me wonder. I guess they have been eating the Doornails or the Station men, but I am told that, these days, it is unusual for more than half a dozen men to die that way in a year. For the most part, people have figured out how to live here without getting eaten. But those first few years after the wall went up, a whole bunch of people got killed by the gas and the rotters. Mostly I think people were trying to get inside the city and either loot it or get back the stuff they’d left behind. And I’d like to tell you that it was a stupid thing for them to do, but until they did it, nobody knew what would happen to them. Now everybody knows.

I know what happens to the men who do the gas-drug, too, but no one will listen to me. I’ve tried to tell people, and to ask for help. I used letters and the taps as best I could, but no one from the Dreadnought has answered—though my friend Angeline says I should try the Texas Ranger again. His name was Horatio Korman, and if you can reach him, he may be of some help to you. You might also ask after the captain on the train, a man by name of MacGruder. I have got to say he conducted himself like a hero, but I doubt you’ll have any means of finding that one, as he’s someplace up north. I am told there’s also an airman named Croggon Hainey who might serve as witness, but him being colored and being a pirate, he’s not likely to be believed.

Maria was startled to see the air pirate’s name. Croggon Hainey was the captain of a ship named the Free Crow (though it was briefly called Clementine). It had played a role in her first case as a Pinkerton agent, the one she’d been reassured had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction … including the pirate’s.

“Small world,” she said under her breath.

She flipped back to the top of the stack, scanning for a location or an address. Nestled between two stacks of notes tied with twine, Maria found a brown paper envelope with the information she hunted.

The name on the envelope was “Venita Lynch,” at odds with the reports themselves, which were usually signed “Mercy.” “Seattle,” she read aloud from the return address, wondering if she was pronouncing it right. “The Washington Territories.” She knew where Washington was, at any rate. It was as far west and north as you could go, without getting very, very wet … or wandering into Canada. Upon inspection of the postal mark, she saw that the envelope had not been mailed from Seattle at all, but from Tacoma. “Where the transcontinental line ends,” she mused. The two cities must not be far apart.

But she was confused by some aspects of Mercy’s reports. These rotters … they were obviously victims of the walking plague, or something very like it, but she’d implied that they got that way from breathing the air, not taking a drug. What on earth had happened in Seattle?

For that matter, if a catastrophe had occurred, how did people still live there? And furthermore, why?

The mention of gas masks gave her one clue, as did the reference to an “underground.” But if there was more to be gleaned, she’d have to keep reading.

So she did. And by the time she reached Fort Chattanooga, she had drawn some terrible conclusions about the poisoned city of Seattle, the walking plague, and Katharine Haymes’s diabolical weapon.