Cherie Priest - Dreadnought

He mouthed, Be careful, and turned away.

She was careful, and it was a jerky shuffle from one car to the next, but she made it-faster this time, even faster than when he’d been pushing her along, helping her find the handholds.

She stepped inside the next car, and the wind came billowing up behind her, shoving her cloak over her face and flapping it up around her arms until she closed the door and leaned against it, catching her breath. “How’s everybody in here?” she asked in a hoarse shout.

Half a dozen voices answered, and she couldn’t sort out any given one of them. But she saw two men lying haphazardly over the seats, and half inside the sleeper cars. She immediately went to the fallen soldiers.

One was dead, with most of his face missing-and what was left was frozen in such a state of shock that Mercy wished to God she had something left to cover him. She pulled his body off the seats and drew him back to the corner to leave him there, just like she’d been leaving the bodies in the next car up. Then she reached for one of the sleeper car curtains and yanked it down, popping all the tiny rings that held it up in one long, zippered chain. She dropped the makeshift shroud down over him and went back to the second man, who was in much better shape, if unconscious.

It was Inspector Galeano, with a large red mark in the shape of a windowpane across his face. She didn’t know if he’d fallen or if the window had blown inward, but he was only coldcocked, and not otherwise in serious peril, or so Mercy ascertained as she pulled him onto one of the sleeper beds and gave him the once-over. His prominent, stately nose was broken, but his pulse was strong and his pupils reacted in a satisfactory fashion to light and shade.

Mercy took a moment to wipe the drying blood off his upper lip, and then she slapped at his face, not quite hard enough to sting. “Inspector? Inspector?”

After a few seconds, he answered with a string of words muttered in Spanish. Mercy had no idea about a bit of it, but he was talking, and that was progress.

“Inspector Galeano? Can you hear me?”

“Sí.”

“Inspector?”

“Yes,” he said this time. “Yes. I’m-” He sat up and swooned slightly, but recovered and patted himself all over. “Where is my gun?”

“Can’t help you there,” she told him. “How’s your head?”

“My face . . . hurts,” he said, trying to frown, stretch his cheeks, and wrinkle his nose all at once.

“You’ve busted your nose, but if that’s the worst you get out of the day, we’ll call it good, all right?”

“All right,” he said, but he repeated the phrase as if he wasn’t sure what it meant. His eyes were scanning the glass-covered floor.

“Your gun,” she said, guessing what worried him. “Is that it, over there, under the-?”

He saw the spot she indicated and said, “Yes!” before she could finish. And he threw himself up and off the recliner before she could stop him.

“Watch for the glass!” she yelled, but she’d already lost his attention. He was crawling back up to the window, checking his ammunition and readying himself for more. “Watch for the glass,” she said again, uselessly. It was everywhere, and it wouldn’t do anyone to watch out for it, because there was simply no avoiding it.

Mercy scanned the car for a porter and didn’t see one. She had her backside to the forward door when it opened and Morris Comstock stood in its frame, calling, “Mrs. Lynch!” at the top of his lungs.

“Coming!” she said, rather than ask what precisely he needed. No one ever hollered her name without needing something.

When she rose, she was nearly sick to her stomach, from the incessant motion and the blood all over her hands-with powdered glass sticking to her skin and drying there-but also from the sight of the Shenandoah, because she could now see that she was looking at its two rearmost cars and the engine was pulling ahead of the Dreadnought . On her way to assist Mr. Comstock, she leaned her head around and saw that, yes, the southern engine had passed the northern one; and as she watched, the Rebel craft leaped on the tracks with a burst of speed, as if some final gear had been engaged and this . . . this was the fastest it could move. Even if it couldn’t keep it up long, it didn’t have to.

She said, “Oh God,” and Mr. Comstock took her by the elbow and said, “I know!”

Back once more through the windswept breach, and back once again into the first passenger car, she came face-to-face with the captain, whose old head wound was bleeding again-or else he’d come by a new one, near the same spot. He said, “The inspector!”

He meant Inspector Portilla, who was facedown and being addressed by Lieutenant Hobbes, who was trying to turn him over and wipe away whatever blood he found. Mercy said, “Let me see him!” and rushed to his side. His uniform was scorched, cut, and tattered, and a large hole was pulsating just above his heart, toward the center of his chest.

All the wounds had been like this so far-all the men were firing out the windows, which gave them cover below the shoulders . . . and gave the men on the other train an open target at everything above them.

“Inspector!” she said, and drew him almost into her lap. “Inspector!”

He didn’t answer, and his eyes were rolling, not fixing on anything. “Help me,” she said to Morris Comstock, but suddenly he wasn’t there-so she looked around and saw Cole Byron, who met her eyes and darted to her side. “Help me,” she said. “Gently; we have to move him gently.”

Together they did so, retreating to another sleeper compartment and stretching him out. She tore at his shirt, popping the buttons and revealing a chest with a smattering of salt-and-pepper hair and a hole the size of her fist. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed. “What hit him?”

Cole Byron said, “I think they’re mounting antiaircraft over on the Shenandoah .”

“If they aren’t, they might as well be,” she said. Upon fishing around in her satchel, she realized she was out of rags. Undaunted, she reached for another curtain, yanked it down, and tore it up. The porter followed her lead and helped with the tearing. As she stuffed one wad of thick wool fabric into the wound, she tried to talk to the inspector, even as she was increasingly convinced that the cause was lost and they were about to be short one tall, light-skinned Mexican.

The wound’s pulsing became erratic and jerky. She could feel it ebb and surrender under her hand, where she held the balled-up curtain rag firmly in the wound, just in case there was some miracle imminent and the bleeding might be contained. But no miracle was forthcoming. The heart stopped altogether.

More antiaircraft shells went splitting through the car, and a splatter of someone’s blood shot across her face in a red, hot streak.

“God Almighty!” she shrieked, and came up to her knees shouting, “Who’s next? Who just took that hit?”

“Ma’am!” someone made a weak response, and it was Morris Comstock again-the first man she’d treated on board the train. He was clutching at a place on the side of his chest, and his hand was soaked with blood, and so was his shirt.

“Mr. Comstock!” She ran up underneath him, catching him as he came down from the window like a sack of potatoes. “Good heavens, look at you. Here we are again,” she said, right into his ear, since his head was slumping just above her breasts. “We’ve got to quit meeting this way. Tongues will begin to wag.”

He gave her a pathetic grin, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

She shook him, and lowered him to the ground-once more summoning the Pullman porter. Together they moved this man, too, to the sleeper car where the Mexican inspector had died, though Mercy noted that his corpse had been moved over to the corner . . . presumably by Cole Byron, though she hadn’t seen him do it.