Cherie Priest - Fiddlehead

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.

“Leave me alone,” he ordered the nameless, blank-faced agent who walked in his shadow. “Stay right here, and don’t move until I return. I can look after myself for ten minutes in the washroom, for God’s sake. No one’s here today, anyway.”

Secret Service indeed. Couldn’t keep secrets. Didn’t perform much in the way of service. He should’ve done as Abe suggested and sent them away. Better a paid force than a government agency. Better to have a receipt.

Besides, Grant had bigger guns and better reflexes, never mind more experience and a faster eye. In his entirely unbiased opinion, he could’ve outshot any of the young bucks they assigned to him—knowledge of which didn’t make him feel safer in the slightest. He abandoned these silent, suited men every chance he got. They felt too much like crows on a laundry line. Vultures in a tree.

The agent knitted his brows and twisted his lips in a disapproving grimace, but he followed orders and held his position.

And with one or two fierce, insistent glances backwards to make sure the man stayed put … Grant was free to roam unobserved.

Desmond Fowler had an office in the Capitol Building. Just like everyone else these days, or so Grant thought as he walked the gleaming, echoing halls in search of the door with the right name stenciled on the glass in black paint and fancy lettering. This plan was ludicrous and he knew it—so ludicrous that he wanted to be sober for it, and had a headache for his pains. And he’d kept it from his wife, who didn’t need to know anything about it.

He was the president. He could wander the building on a Sunday if he liked.

He was clearing his head, if anyone asked. Heading for the washroom, like he’d told his forced companion. Taking a little stroll.

Or he could even tell the truth, to a point: I’m looking for Fowler, and I thought he might be here.

On the contrary, he very much hoped that the Secretary of State was out, and planned to stay that way for the afternoon. He hoped it so much that he assumed it, partly because he’d made his secretary insist on a rare weekend meeting at Fowler’s estate on the other side of town to sign and clear up some paperwork. Scheduled for this very time. Why on a Sunday? So the signatures and all their attendant useful seals could be filed first thing Monday morning. That’s what Fowler wanted, wasn’t it? Immediate approval and full cooperation? Well then, he could do a little work on a Sunday, and perhaps the Lord would forgive him.