Full Vessels (14 page)

After waiting to see if the guards would
react, he slipped off the loading dock to search for an improvised
weapon. The area was bare, so he contented himself with pulling
free a loose cobblestone.

As the guards discussed how the governor's
stubborn refusal to pay damages was costing the entire island the
coal it needed to operate – coal the saltpeter refinery needed –
Hess slunk up behind them. When he was in range, he lifted the
cobblestone high and to one side, then brought it down with a
mighty twist of his frame and all the force of his arms. The blunt
instrument struck hard, sending the guard tumbling from his
seat.

In a blink, the other guard jumped up and
sunk a short dagger hilt-deep in Hess's eye socket. Hess stumbled
back from the strike, tripped and fell. His hands hovered around
the protruding hilt, afraid to touch it.

The guard opened his mouth to shout, then
gasped as Erik's sword slipped into his side. Strong hands reached
through the gate's slats and pulled the guard close. Erik seized
the exposed throat and crushed it like cardboard. The hapless guard
broke free and screamed a high-pitched fluting noise through his
broken trachea.

He screamed and screamed, till he had to take
a breath, whereupon he discovered the air only went one way in his
throat. The guard sank to his knees beside Hess. In a final act of
defiance, he aimed his collapse to hammer the knife deeper into
Hess with his forehead.

Even as Hess swore at the renewed pain, he
felt admiration for the man's grit.

“Open the gate, dagger-face.”

Hess fumbled at the pockets of the guards
until he found a key. He stumbled to the gate and fitted key to
lock. With a twist, the gate opened to admit Erik. “Pull that
fucking thing out of your eye.”

Hess backed away from Erik. “The blade will
vanish when I heal.”

“Whatever. Give me the keys.”

Erik opened the door to the loading dock and
went inside the building.

They bumbled through the darkness, scattering
haphazardly stacked pans, stepping into boxes of dirt, and
colliding with industrial stoves. Finally, Erik located a lantern
that he lit with a flint and steel.

Holding the lantern aloft, Erik led Hess
deeper into the three-story building he had scaled earlier. The
immense first floor held hundreds of desks with oversized mortars
and pestles. Prominent signage in every direction read “ABSOLUTELY
NO FIRE”.

They halted their tour of the desks to return
to the original room by the loading docks. Erik kicked in a locked
door to reveal bags filled with saltpeter. He hefted one. “Five
pounds a piece, I think. How many do we need?”

“Four hundred pounds.”

“Please say you're fucking kidding me.”

“I wish I could.” Hess noticed light from
outside and went to the nearest window. In the receiving yard, a
handful of people stood around the corpses of the guards. Hess
thought he saw a musket and at least two swords in the group.
“While we're making wishes, I'd like those witnesses to not be
here.”

Erik scowled out the window. “To state the
obvious, this ain't good, Hessie. Way to go, Mr. Screamy Guard. The
whole fucking town's coming out to check on their precious
refinery. What the hell even makes this operation a refinery? It
looks like a dirty bakery.”

“Let's go out one of the windows,” Hess
said.

“You get started on that. I'm going to
disobey some signage. The fire brigade will have to earn their keep
tonight.”

Hess loaded a cart with bags and pushed it to
a row of windows facing the yards of houses abutting the refinery.
He shattered the glass and began dropping bags one at a time,
counting as he did so.

When he returned to refill the cart, a
frantic Erik ran into him. “We got to go. This saltpeter shit turns
wooden desks into fucking matchsticks.”

“More bags first,” Hess shouted. Together
they piled the cart high and then raced the smoke filling the room
all the way to the window. They tossed bags by twos and threes, not
bothering to count, not caring that a man ran towards them through
the yard with a fire iron in his hands.

Hess jumped to the ground, twisting an ankle
as he landed on a shifting pile of five pound saltpeter bags. The
man raised the fire iron above his head and glared down at
Hess.

And Erik crashed into him, burying a shard of
glass into the man's neck mid-air. The man and Erik found their
feet at the same time. The man noticed gushing blood and fell back
with a look of horror on his face. Erik slapped blood-slicked hands
to his cheeks and screwed his face up into the mirror expression of
the man's. “Oh no, I cut your neck!”

Erik punted the toe of his foot into the
man's testicles, then slammed the man head-first into the brick of
the refinery. He flashed a big smile at Hess. “We should do this
more often.”

They moved the bags to the front of the dead
man's property, doing their best to balance speed and stealth. A
bucket brigade was storming the refinery while an unheeded man
shouted at no one in particular that water couldn’t put out a
saltpeter-fed fire and they were throwing away their lives. In the
confusion, Erik took a hand-drawn wagon from an old woman under the
pretext of hauling back water to fight the blaze. She had sent her
two sons with Erik to assist in loading “a dozen full rain barrels
from the hotel” but the boys had vanished by the time the wagon
pulled up in front of Hess. He pointedly avoided asking Erik about
them.

After piling the wagon full, they dragged it
down the main street and turned down the harbor road. The gloom
painted the world in shades of gray, darker at the tree line,
somewhat less so along their path. At one point, their wagon
overturned in a rut they had doubtless carved themselves in
previous trips with their travois. It took fifteen minutes to
collect and reload as many of the sacks as they could find.

Hess ran ahead when they were close to start
a fire and bring water to a simmer. It wasn’t until then that he
realized his blunder. “We need a scale,” he told Erik in
greeting.

“Well, too fucking bad. We ain’t got time for
shopping.”

“Chemistry is done by weight, not volume.
Help me rig up a scale. We can calibrate with the five pound
bags.”

“There ain't time for perfection. This is the
eleventh hour. Guesstimate.”

Hess snatched a bag from Erik, dumped it into
the waiting water, then eye-balled approximately half the volume of
sugar and added it to the solution. He did the same for a second
pot, then alternated stirring each pan while Erik retrieved more
water in a bucket, setting it close to the fire to preheat it.

When the mixture thickened, Hess removed it
from the heat, rolled it into snakes, and pinched off lengths. Then
he put fresh ingredients in each pan and put them on the stove
again. They moved at a rapid pace, their process limited solely by
the time it took water to boil. Batch after batch of solid state
rocket fuel came out of the crude shack, to be placed in the
emptied five pound sacks on a freight wagon already loaded with a
portion of their conventional fuel.

Not long before dawn, they stopped their
production. They had processed somewhere around forty of the
five-pound bags. Both of them sagged with exhaustion as they loaded
the freight wagon and watered their draft horses. They would need
to make at least two trips to the pier to load the steamship’s
fuel.

“I still need to get the rest of the supplies
from the hotel,” Hess said.

Erik sighed. “Leaving me to load the rest of
the damn logs.”

Hess began the trek back to the hotel.
Pushing hard, he managed to reach the town just past dawn. As he
trudged past the solemn town, sucking down gasps of stale smoke,
angry shouts sounded. Hess looked up to see a group of five angry
townies charging at him.

He shuffled back the way he’d come. At the
first alley, he slipped down the gap between the houses and huffed
towards the tree line, his pursuers hard on his heels. A sword
flashed past his face, bare inches from flesh. Hess reached out a
hand and seized the smooth trunk of a tree in passing, turning his
momentum and sending his opponent past him.

Hess paused to catch his breath as the second
man in line reached him. With a snarl on his face, the man executed
a sloppy lunge. Hess stepped to the side of the blade, letting it
rush past him. He seized the wrist and used his opposite hand to
backfist the nose. Then the saber was his.

At the same time, the other men arrived.
Three approached from the front while the one who had raced past
him came from behind. Hess glanced to the man sitting on his behind
with a bloody nose. He couldn’t afford to leave behind potential
enemies. With a practiced lunge, Hess pierced the neck, driving his
blade from one side of the trachea all the way through the neck to
pierce the vertebrate.

While his first victim collapsed, Hess moved
to place one of the men between himself and the rest of the group.
The first rule of fighting multiple opponents was to
not
fight multiple opponents. Serial single engagements were much more
survivable than a single parallel battle. He closed the distance,
holding his blade at the ready. The man struck first. Parried. The
man struck again. Parried hard. The man struck a third time. Hess
dipped his point below his opponent’s blade, brought it up,
established a clear line, and lunged to place steel through the
upper rib cage. This time he got the heart.

Hess pulled his blade free, moved to place
his next target between him and the two other men, and watched his
previous opponent collapse. When they hesitated, Hess feinted a
slash to the face and then opened the man’s middle. Now they
couldn’t retreat without abandoning a friend. He approached a
different man and pointed his blade at his face. When the man swung
at his blade, Hess jumped in to kick the side of the knee. The
third man turned to run and received a stab in his back.

“I’m sorry this was necessary,” Hess said.
“None of you deserve to die. But I’m committed to my survival.” He
finished off the two wounded men as humanely as possible. He
avoided people for the remainder of his journey to the hotel,
skirting the tree line for part of it, then slinking through alleys
and jogging down empty streets.

Back in his room, he disassembled a lamp to
dump the oil and scrubbed out some of the residue with a pillow
case. Briefly, he considered washing it with soap and water. A
quick sniff deterred him. A little olive oil in their water
wouldn't hurt them.

Hess went to the communal bath and lifted a
mirror off the wall hook. Before the other man present in the room
could complain, he took one of the lamps and returned to his room.
He cleaned up the second lamp, then tinkered with the metal
brackets until he was able to attach the two lamp bases
together.

One of the lamp bases would hold saltwater
and sit on top of the mirror. Water vapor would rise to condense
along the glass of the upper portion of his still, where it would
roll down the sides to be absorbed into rags placed around the
perimeter for that purpose. They would be drinking small amounts of
water wrung from rags, but at least it wouldn't be saltwater.

He raided the linen closet, using two nails
to pick the lock. All of it went onto his bed, where he wrapped the
breakables, then made a sling to carry everything. When he
finished, he went to the first floor to check the time piece. It
read a quarter past nine.

He jogged into the conference room,
transitioning to a quick walk at the threshold. To Erik's silent
query, he returned a somber nod.

“How nice of you to show up,” Greg said.
“It's nice to know you can be counted on to out-do the rest of us,
even when the competition is demonstrating complete disregard for
our mission.”

Hess placed a hand on the man's shoulder as
he passed. “Shut your jaw, Greg, or I will break it.”

All eyes on him, he spoke as he sank into the
last available seat. “I apologize for being late. For anyone who
hasn't heard, Erik and I are escaping the island tonight so we
don't have to die when Jerome opens the sky. There is a lot of prep
work involved, some of which has me avoiding the authorities.”

Hess caught his before continuing. “I would
like to share two observations with the group. The first I had at
the very beginning. The great flaw in the worlds is the inability
of the people to work in their own best interests. They are so
short-sighted that they cannot understand how less for them today
can translate into more for everyone tomorrow. They treat life like
a zero sum game, scrabbling after pieces of the pie when they could
be playing a positive sum game and making more pie than everyone
together can eat.

“To my way of thinking, the people are their
own greatest problem. I saw them in Iteration after Iteration and
thought that their lives were not worth living. I blamed the
Creator for bringing into existence flawed beings who could never
be happy. It seemed perverse to me.

“Then several of you decided to throw me in a
crypt for a few hundred years. Between begging to die and trying to
escape the inescapable, I went crazy. At the start of Iteration one
forty four, I became Zack Vernon, the most pathetically miserable
person I have ever had the displeasure of knowing.

“His greatest desire was to stop existing.
Every moment of life brought pain and relief refused to come. With
all of my past suppressed, I couldn't understand how other people
could be happy. I obsessed over the question. I considered the
possibility that they were too stupid to grasp the tragedy of their
lives, but I could never commit to it. So I watched them.
Constantly, I watched them, trying to figure out the key to the
puzzle.”