Cherie Priest - Dreadnought

He looked her up and down, his eyes stopping on the gunbelt she wore and the pieces she’d picked up on the battlefield. He pointed at her waist and asked, “Do you know how to use those?”

“Well enough.”

He hesitated and stepped down off the chair, to face her directly. They made a little island in the swirling bustle of frantic men seeking positions. He told her then, “Get up to the engine and help them there. That’s the most important thing right now, really. We’ve got to protect that engine. If we can’t get the engine moving again, none of us are leaving this pass alive.”

She drew up to her full height, took a deep breath, and said, “You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m going. And I’m going to do my best.”

Mercy Lynch had seen enough salutes in her time to feign a pretty good one, and she did so then, snapping her heels together.

A peculiar look crossed the captain’s face. Mercy couldn’t place it. She didn’t know what it meant, and there wasn’t time to ask him.

“Inspector Galeano!” the captain called.

“Here,” he answered.

“Accompany Mrs. Lynch, please. We need people up front, protecting the engine. And I’ve seen you shoot.”

“Absolutely,” the Mexican replied, and he hurried to her side, checking his ammunition.

The Dreadnought ’s whistle blew.

The nurse turned and ran, the inspector beside her. They ran out through the forward door and shoved their way through the gold car, using their elbows to clear a path. When they finally pushed into the gleaming brightness of the snowy afternoon, they were both startled-very startled-to find that there was no snowplow attachment between them and the next car.

Mercy couldn’t imagine where on earth something so enormous could’ve possibly gone, but then she saw it being winched around on a cart. The wheeled platform it had been attached to had been levered off the track, and was being worked toward the front of the engine with a pulley system that defied description.

The sight made her pause, marveling at the smoothness of it. Three porters and two rail hands, whom she’d seen once or twice in the caboose over coffee-that’s all it took to maneuver the thing. It hardly seemed possible, yet there they were . . . and there it went.

The conductor shouted something to someone, and Lieutenant Hobbes’s voice rose up over the snow. Mercy caught only the last words, and they weren’t meant for her, but the inspector said, “Señora Lynch!” and spurred her forward, over the gap with a leap. There they met another soldier and another porter, who was carrying a tool that was nearly as long as he was tall.

“Ma’am,” he said to her in passing. “Inspector.”

The porter dropped the tool like a hook over to the other platform and, with the help of the soldier, began cranking the two cars together, closing the spot left by the snowplow attachment’s absence.

They pushed farther forward, into the fuel car with its stink of iron and condensed steam, and copper tubes and charcoal and smoke. Between the two sections of this car, there was a walkway, and on either side were the great reservoirs of coal and the immense processing equipment that produced and delivered the hydrogen. It loomed up above them, tall enough to close out the gleaming white sky and white cliffs. But through it they ran, and up into the next car, which wasn’t really a car so much as a wagon piled with crated ammunition that was affixed to the Dreadnought itself.

“Go on, you first,” Mercy told Inspector Galeano, who nodded at her and made the leap to the engine.

“I’m right behind you!” she said. And there, at the edge of the engine, Mercy Lynch eyed the ledge between herself and the machine. She crossed it with two short steps-grabbing the handrails on either side of four stubby stairs that led into the engine’s pilot chamber-as she watched the retreating feet of the Mexican inspector climbing above her and disappearing over the side.

Behind her, something screamed.

It didn’t sound like a woman, or a man either. The scream was parched and broken, and it was god-awful close.

Mercy turned around and saw-right behind her, nearly on her heels, in the spot between the ammunition cart and the back edge of the Dreadnought -a man who was not a man any longer.

She saw his face and it reminded her of other faces. The wheezers in the Robertson Hospital. The dying men in Memphis, lying strapped to cots and begging for the very thing that was killing them. The bodies in the sealed-up caskets that had been in the rearmost compartment of the train only hours before.

This face was the same.

It was grayish, with yellow pus and sores around the edges of every membrane. Its eyes were sunken and dry, withering in its skull like raisins. It sat atop a body with flesh that was beginning to slough off, wearing clothes that were only mostly intact, missing buttons, patches, pockets, and other pieces that could be snagged and removed.

But this face.

This face was snarling, and approaching her.

The corpse-man reached for the handrails, just as Mercy had done. While it grabbed, its mouth tried to grab, too-it gnawed at the air in the space between them and snapped at her shoes.

And although she’d spent her adulthood saving lives . . . and although she’d never, not even accidentally, killed a man . . . she seized one of her guns and she fired at the wrinkled space between the corpse-man’s eyes.

He was so close that when his skull exploded, bits of his brain and face splattered across everything, including Mercy’s cloak and dress. Pieces of him slid down slowly off the hem of her skirt, dripping and plopping down between the tracks.

The rolling noise of grunts and screams and groans was all around her now, closing in and pinning her down like a tangible pressure. But she shook it off, and she turned and she climbed-up into the engine, where the inspector was holding his hand down to her, calling, “Here! Climb up!”

She scrambled and seized his hand, and let him help her up over the side, where Lieutenant Hobbes and the conductor were frantically throwing levers, pressing buttons, and shouting directions to the men who were trying to affix the snowplow to the front of the train.

But the swarm was upon them, as if that first corpse Mercy had shot down was only the scout, and the rest were right on its heels. She climbed up on a bin and saw the men out front trying to move the snowplow into place draw their guns and begin shooting, trying to clear a big enough patch that they could work those last latches, bolts, and pulleys and get the train moving.

Behind her, the boiler was coughing and straining its way to full power once more. The stretch of the superhot metal made ghastly whimpers, as if it, too, understood the necessity of leaving, and leaving now .

Lieutenant Hobbes leaped to the foremost edge of the western wall, leaning forward and aiming outward. He fired, providing cover for the men below.

Mercy positioned herself on the east side, and Galeano climbed up to stand with his feet planted apart atop the conductor’s shed. He flexed his wrists, checked his bullets, picked his targets below, and with an anguished shout, opened fire on his undead countrymen.

The nurse followed suit.

She fired off one shot, then two. Aiming down, hitting them in the heads and necks. Exploding their skulls away from their bodies, leaving their arms and legs to splay and sprawl and collapse to the ground. She refused to look past the circle where five men were ratcheting the snowplow into place. Right there, in that circle, the undead were sweeping down on the workers in ones and twos. But beyond that circle, appallingly close, they were coming in fives and tens. In dozens. In hundreds.