Steven Harper - The Doomsday Vault

“Race?” she called.

“First one to the crossroads wins!” Gavin yelled, and Tree said, “WINDY.” They thundered up a hill and down the other side, frightening a herd of cattle on the other side of a hedgerow. Alice shouted like a little girl and ran. She was one with the mechanical now. Its legs were her legs; its arms her arms. Power thrummed through her, and she ran and ran and ran. Beside her, Tree rustled and thumped, scattering leaves and bits of bark. Gavin lost his hat. They reached the crossroads at exactly the same moment and came to a stop.

“A tie!” Alice shouted. “Well-done!”

“It was!” Gavin called back. Then he jumped and abruptly twisted in his seat so he could turn the crank on the backpack. The backpack squealed, spat static, and spoke, though Alice couldn’t make out the words.

“What is it?” she asked.

“That was Lieutenant Phipps. Simon and Glenda weren’t able to capture the clockworker they went after yesterday.”

Alice started. She had forgotten all about the grinning clockworker’s reappearance. “And?”

“He vanished, but now he’s resurfaced with more plague zombies in the City. We might be able to catch up with him if we cut over to City Road. We’ll pass right by St. Luke’s Hospital and into the center of London.”

“Isn’t the Third Ward already there?”

“Two bombs exploded not far from headquarters. No one was hurt, but they dropped rubble across streets and clogged traffic in a dozen directions. And the dirigibles are out of the country. Our people can’t get to the location. The clockwork must have planned it that way.”

“What is he doing?”

Gavin said, “He’s trying to storm the Bank of England.”

They left the little road, stepping over hedges and ancient stone walls. The earlier exhilaration that came with the speed left Alice, replaced with a grim urgency. Not only had the grinning clockworker returned; he was endangering lives. By forcing a group of plague zombies into a crowded, daylight street, he was potentially infecting dozens, even hundreds of people with the clockwork plague. Every thought of propriety left Alice’s head. She didn’t care what happened to her or her reputation-no other families would suffer from the clockwork plague as hers had; not if she could stop it.

They reached the wider, cobblestoned City Road. Horse, carriage, and foot traffic moved along its length, but they wove around or through it all, leaving startled horses in their wake. Drovers shouted and shook their fists, but Alice didn’t respond. When they reached London proper, the City Road became brick, and Alice heard the screams. Gavin did, too, and they steered their respective mounts toward the sound. City Road became Moorgate and Prince’s Street, with their staid, respectable buildings. Alice and Gavin angled east, and chaos greeted them. People milled everywhere. Half of them were trying to get away, and half were trying to get a better view of the happenings. Panicky horses pulled carriages and wagons into a hopeless snarl. Glass from shattered windows crunched under hundreds of feet, and a broken gaslight had erupted into yellow flame. Over it all, Alice heard eerie music. Memories from a year ago sent a chill down her spine. For a moment, she was wearing The Dress and facing a horde of zombies at three in the morning.

People scattered when they saw Tree and the mechanical, though it was still tricky to maneuver around the snarled vehicles. Ahead of them, Prince’s Street met Threadneedle and four others at odd angles to make an intersection the size of a marching field. Looming over it was the Bank of England, a white structure begrimed with decades of coal smoke. The building covered multiple acres and was built around an irregular network of courtyards, ramps, staircases, and pillared halls. At the moment, it was being attacked by a crowd of zombies. Alice stared. Gold bouillon, no doubt what the clockworker was after, lay buried in vaults deep underground. The zombies, nearly a hundred in all, were attacking what amounted to a tiny corner of the bank, and they had no hope of getting to anything worthwhile, but that didn’t seem to stop them. Zombies created a sea of bodies three and four deep around one small part of the building. They flung themselves at the heavily barred, arched doors, attacking with stones pried up from the street or with their bare fists. A bell on the bank roof rang and rang in a call for help, but Alice knew the police wouldn’t want to get involved directly-they stood the same risk of infection as anyone else. Fear twisted in her own chest at the thought of a zombie’s touch, but she remained determined to help.

In the center of the zombie crowd stood the grinning clockworker. His brown coat nearly reached the ground, and his ragged top hat, out of place so early in the day, poked up like a smokestack. The white mask covered the upper half of his face, and his lower face kept that impossibly wide grin. He was playing the strange instrument Alice remembered from their first encounter. Clearly he had repaired it, and perhaps had even made some improvements. It still looked like a bagpipe with strange little machines attached to it, though the clockworker didn’t blow into it. The dreadful music poured ceaselessly from the instrument, and it seemed to be driving the zombies into a frenzy. The sickly men, women, and children, gaunt and ragged, pounded at the building, moaning and crying with inhuman ferocity.

Tree and the mechanical worked their way to the intersection. A trio of policemen waved their arms, trying in vain to restore order, and a fourth officer on horseback wrestled with his mount to keep it under control, though none of the officers approached the zombies or the clockworker. People screamed and pointed or simply fled. A carthorse lay on its side, its eye fixed upward in death. Gavin halted Tree within running distance of the bank, opened a cupboard door concealed by Tree’s bark, and extracted a violin case.

“Can you play tritones on that?” she shouted across to him, her voice barely audible over the clockworker’s music and groan of the zombies.

“Not effectively.” He was already climbing down, leaving the sleeping Barton chained to one of Tree’s branches. “But I have a different idea.”

He sprinted toward the zombies-and the clockworker in their midst. Alice, unused to trousers, fumbled through her pockets. “Gavin! Wait! I have the tuning forks!”

But he was already too far away to hear. He reached the edge of the zombie crowd, put bow to strings, and played. His fiddle blended with the clockworker’s otherworldly song. The grinning clockworker spun, flaring the tails of his long coat. He stared at Gavin, but didn’t pause in his own playing. His fingers continued to skitter over the controls of his instrument, and the terrible music rippled from it in endless waves. Gavin stared back, and something passed between them. The clockworker nodded once, and Alice held her breath. Her hands went cold on the controls of the mechanical.

Gavin set his shoulders and played louder. His fingers flew up and down the fiddle’s neck. His melody wound around the clockworker’s, combined with it, and created a new one. The zombies paused in their rampage. They turned, entranced by the duet.

The clockworker changed the tune, and the zombies screamed with one voice. Alice clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the horrible noise. It was like listening to the dead. They went back to attacking the doors.

“ROCKY,” Tree said beside her. “LOOK.”

A man poked a rifle through the bars of an upper window of the bank. Alice instantly came to herself. She didn’t like the clockworker and she feared the plague zombies, but the man with the gun might hit Gavin. Without thinking, she reached down with her mechanical hands, tore two chunks of brick and mortar from the street, and hurled a piece at the man. The chunk was only the size of cat, but it clanged hard against the window bars. Startled, the man dropped the rifle and jerked himself back inside.