Hellfire (5 page)

Nate lowered his head and charged, slamming into the giant’s chest.

Biggs grunted, but didn’t move. He caught Nate up in a bear hug and squeezed.

The air leak out of Nate, gurgling in his throat as it went. He tried to breathe back in but couldn’t. Dull sounds of joints popping ran through the insides of his ears.

The huge hunchback carried him out of the room and into the narrow hallway that ran the length of the airship. Nate tried to wriggle, but the hunchback’s grip was too strong.

His body stank of spoiled meat. Nate gagged again and tried not to breathe as he fought. His vision spun.

The hatch at the back of the airship swung open. As Biggs turned to drag him out into the cool night air, Nate at last had room to take a breath. It was free of cedar, but smoky with carbon and sulfur from the nearby air-screws.

Parvis skirted around him. The short hunchback closed the hatch and wheezed out giggles. His long arms trembled under his coat.

Beyond Parvis, Nate saw the distant horizon, over the dark strip of the Mississippi and even onto the land. The outskirts of Lake Providence were below him, twinkling like stars. His mother and sister were out there. What were they going to do without him?

Biggs raised him up over the waist-high rail.

Nate’s boots peddled, trying desperately to find something solid in the empty air. He whispered, “No, please.”

Biggs only grunted and let go.

As soon as he felt his freedom, Nate swung out his hands. He aimed to grab Biggs and save himself, if only for a moment. He would even pull the hunchback down with him if he had to.

Nate’s right hand caught Biggs’s arm. He gripped the oilskin coat as hard as he could. Sharp pain ran through each stitch in his shoulder, but he held on.

His left hand found the hunchback’s mask. Biggs lurched backward. A sharp rip sounded, and the mask came loose in Nate’s hand.

Rumors said the hunchbacks wore their masks to make them ready for any weather, as with their heavy coats and wide hats. Other people liked to say it was because the hunchbacks were so ugly.

“Ugly” did not begin to describe the horrors of Biggs’s face. It was like a bat’s face, the nose nothing more than loose flaps of skin. The skin was leathery and dark with splotches of oozing sores. His eyes were inky beads that flashed red in the starlight.

Nate screamed. He could not hold onto anything so horrible. He actually began to push, shoving himself away, even if it did mean his death.

Biggs screamed back. The sound came like a cat in heat. His mouth had rows of sharp, crooked teeth.

Nate shut his eyes and turned away, but still the face haunted him. He rolled his body into a ball, holding himself as tightly as he could. The scream rang in his ears.

The cold night air rushed around him as he plummeted.

Chapter Eight

Open your eyes.

Nate heard words without anyone speaking them. This had happened before; he didn’t know how many times. It had always been the scaly voice of the fire, whispering out to him, putting pictures in his mind. He ignored it.

Open your eyes, it repeated.

There was something different about this voice. It was sweet, yet it was firm, not noisy and harsh like the light of a fire. It was the stern word of a parent.

Nate slowly peeked out of slits under his eyelids. The night had been dark except for the stars and the streetlamps of Lake Providence. Now it was as bright as day. It was too bright. It hurt to look. Nate clamped his eyes closed again.

Don’t be afraid.

Nate shook his head. It was too late for that.

He was falling hundreds of feet from an airship. The air around him was cold, but what shook him was the thought of what would happen to him when the falling stopped. Would it hurt? Would his spirit linger? Would he just cease to be?

In the darkness behind his eyelids, the horrid face of the hunchback flashed. Then, the even more horrible thing from the firebox writhed before him.

Open your eyes and leave your fears behind.

Nate started to shake his head, but he stopped. He wanted to leave his fears behind. As a kid he’d been afraid of being weaker than the other boys because he was smaller; it had gotten him into more fights than he could count. When his father died, he was afraid of what would happen to his ma and little Ann, so he worked even when his back was sore and the fires told him awful things.

Now his life was about to end, and for once in it, he was done being afraid. Nate opened his eyes. The light was bright, but he refused to turn away from it again. There was something in the light. It looked like a man. “Who are you?” Nate asked.

You are right to ask who I am. You do not know me.

Nate grunted. “That doesn’t answer my question. What’s going on? Am I… dead?” He didn’t remember hitting the ground already.

Now is not your time. I have work for you to do. There is a great evil coming to this land, and I have chosen you to stop it.

“Me?” Nate blurted. “What good work can I do? I’m just a fire-stoker!”

I work in mysterious ways.

Nate gritted his teeth. That’s what the minister had said at his father’s funeral. “What kind of loving God takes a man away from his family? Why would I have anything to do with you?”

The voice was quiet.

“Just leave me alone!” Nate told the voice. “I can take care of myself! Myself and my family!”

Can you?

“I can! I’ve done it so far!”

Again, the voice was quiet.

Nate wanted to scream at it more, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want anyone’s help, but he did need it. In one day, he had lost a friend, destroyed his train, been arrested, and seen the world fall apart around him. Now he was about to die.

Something welled up inside Nate, and he cried. His face twisted itself up so much it hurt. Hot tears rolled. It had been a long time since he cried.

His life was hard, but he bore it well. The stoking was rough or a yardman yelled at him for being late or his mother gave him a look for visiting the saloon. Day in, day out, those feelings dragged him down. He hurt. Nate had always waited the hurt out or lashed back at them or drowned it in another drink if one were handy. How many times had that only made it worse?

Now he had nothing. He didn’t want to die. Not like this, not with so much left to do.

Nate called out to the voice in the light. “Help me!”

The voice didn’t say anything.

“Please!” Nate screamed through his tears. “I need you!”

Softly, firmly, the voice spoke. You do.

“I know I haven’t been the most… righteous person,” Nate said. He coughed out the last of his tears. “But I need you.”

I am with you.

The words warmed his chest. Nate almost smiled.

Trust me.

Nate nodded his head slowly. “I will.”

Out of the light, an image came. It was Lake Providence, surrounded in flames. The city warped, shrinking and growing, as if he were seeing it through a bubble. It was what he had seen on the train before letting the engine go runaway. Nate didn’t know what it meant, but he knew in his heart it was very bad. That was his work.

The light faded. As it left him, Nate felt cleansed somehow. Pain lingered, but the air smelled fresh and cool.

Nate called out in the softening light, “Why did you have to take my father?”

It was his time, the voice replied simply.

The light became darkness again. A few lights twirled. Nate didn’t know whether they were stars or lamps.

He was still falling. Nate blinked at the wind whipping in his eyes. He should have fallen only a few seconds, but he was still in the air.

Then the ground crashed around him.

Chapter Nine

The Gloriana State Mental Hospital had been completed only the year before, but already Ozera Jacey noticed cracks in the plaster. Now was not the time to worry about them, though. She clutched the glass bottle of ether in her hands and rushed as fast as was polite to go.

The huge new hospital had been built along the architectural designs of Philadelphia’s Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. Ozzie hoped to meet him one day. She had a few critiques for him.

Kirkbride’s psychiatric advice was to heal the patient’s minds by happy surroundings. It meant a great deal of fresh air and windows, and Ozzie agreed completely. Unfortunately, giving every room its own window meant the building was long and thin with sprawling hallways. Sometimes the end of the hall was so far away with so many uniform doors on either side, it made her dizzy to walk down them. She doubted that could be good for the patients.

This wing of the hospital was quiet, reserved for patients who suffered hysteria and needed peace to settle their nerves. Most of them had not woken up yet, except for the few who had not yet gone to sleep and spent their time looking out the many windows. The soft padding of Ozzie’s shoes was the only sound in the long hallway.

“Nurse!” the doctor called from beyond the end of the hall.

Ozzie winced and dashed the last few yards into the spacious receiving room. Past it was the more unsavory portion of the hospital, the wing dedicated to violent patients. She could hear the grunting mumbles of their newest patient already inside the surgery ward.

Ozzie slipped into the room. It was all white with large windows to let in plenty of sunlight for the surgeons to see their work. “I’m here.”

Their new patient lay on the table strapped down with leather belts. Those hadn’t been enough, and two of the black freedman orderlies held him while they watched on. The graying-haired Dr. Sims stood behind them, scratching his chin.

Ozzie handed the glass jar of ether to him.

“At last,” Doctor Sims said. He was a red-faced, portly Yankee, constantly sweating in the warm weather of the South. His bushy eyebrows and equally bushy mustache twitched. “How many times have I told you to keep this cabinet locked?”

Ozzie didn’t reply. She had no key to the cabinet with the chemicals, so it couldn’t be her fault. Still, the doctor needed someone to take the blame, and she quietly accepted it.

Dr. Sims carefully poured ether onto a cloth. “Now, then. We’re going to give you a little anesthetic and then deal with those old stitches.”

The patient jumped again. The straps caught him, whining as the leather pulled tight. The orderlies readjusted their grips. After a moment of pinning him, the patient gave up and fell back limp onto the table.

“No, there’s no time,” the patient said through gritted teeth. “I have to warn someone! I have to warn everyone!”

No one replied. It was another rant from another patient brought in by locals. Ozzie had been folding bandages when the patient had been brought to the hospital. She still had a great deal of work to do to make sure all of the patients with recent surgeries had clean bandages, but they could wait a few minutes. There would always be more work to do.

A pair of farmers had brought the patient in, saying they had found him stumbling though the muck at the edge of one of their pigpens, covered head to toe in mud and filth. They had initially tried to chase him off their land, but the man seemed shaken, in some kind of trouble. When he said he’d fallen out of the sky, they decided to take him to the state hospital.

The patient’s story of needing to warn people was a tame one. Ozzie had heard worse.

Orderlies hosed him down and got rid of his ruined work clothes and boots. That was when they discovered the stitches in his right shoulder. After they’d dressed him in one of the patients’ white gowns, they took him straight into surgery.

Dr. Sims leaned over the patient with the ether-cloth. “Take a few breaths. We don’t want to hurt you when we explore that wound of yours.”

The patient grunted, but there were enough hands on him that he had no choice but to breathe in the ether. He mumbled something into the cloth. Finally, his eyes rolled back into his head. The orderlies gingerly released their grips, ready to tackle him if he was only pretending. At last they were convinced and stood back with arms crossed.

“Nurse,” the doctor called and held out the cloth.

Ozzie took it from him. She lined up the medical instruments and waited.

The doctor leaned over the patient’s shoulder. “These stitches should have been taken out a week ago. He’s practically healed up.”

Ozzie nodded. The patient had been fairly healthy, just a bruise along his backside. It did look like he’d fallen, strangely enough.

“Scissors,” the doctor called.

Ozzie handed him the tiny pair of surgical scissors from the tray. The patient didn’t move as the doctor snipped them one by one.

The patient was handsome, in a rugged way. His hair was fiery red, and though he was a head shorter than the orderlies who had dragged him in, he was strongly built. Judging from the scars along his arms, he had spent a good deal of time with furnaces.

Ozzie pursed her lips. It was most likely another case of Stoker’s Madness. She hoped he was one of the lucky ones who hadn’t listened too long and let the voices get too deep.

Gloriana had the most cases of Stoker’s Madness in the nation. New York and all those men from foundries in Ohio and Pennsylvania jockeyed for second place, but the huge plants and the railroads throughout Gloriana’s progress came at an unfortunate price. In days past, the madmen had been locked away in the old hospital or hanged, considered casualties of progress.

The famous Dorothea Dix had come through the state five years before and found conditions deplorable, dank holes with mold and little light. Like most of the girls of society, Ozzie had gone to listen to her speeches calling for care and comfort for the afflicted. Unlike most girls, Ozzie wasn’t satisfied only raising a few dollars with tea cakes and raffle tickets.

“Pliers,” the doctor said.

Ozzie placed them in his hand and took the scissors from him. The blades had muddy stains from where they had cut the dirty stitches. She would wash them. People might think it was a waste of good well water since they hadn’t gotten any blood on them, but Ozzie didn’t care. The patients deserved clean instruments. Even Galen the Greek physician in ancient Rome boiled his tools.

The thought made Ozzie wince. She could already hear people tell her, “You read too much.”

Reading too much, as if there was such a thing. Benjamin Franklin endorsed it, and so did Mrs. Andrew Jackson when she taught her husband, the president. Still, people said it distracted her from things a young lady should be thinking about: managing a home, snagging a husband, raising up children. Maybe reading could help her with that. Or maybe she didn’t want that at all.

“There,” Dr. Sims said. He stood back and took a deep breath. “Bandage him, nurse.”

Ozzie nodded and stepped forward. There were a few drops of blood from there the stitches had been pulled, but the shoulder looked well enough. She probably wouldn’t even need to put on a new one when it came time to change the bandage.

The patient groaned softly. Ozzie froze. The orderlies stepped forward.

They hadn’t used enough ether. It was such a tricky thing. Too much, and they could have killed him, but too little wouldn’t have much of an effect.

“He’s waking up,” Ozzie said.

“Let him,” Dr. Sims told her.

Ozzie frowned. Bandaging a sore shoulder wasn’t going to be a delightful thing even with a haze of ether over his mind.

“Perhaps a little more might ease—,” she began.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Sims interrupted. He took the glass ether bottle and put it into the wooden supply cabinet. A little, metal skeleton key latched the door shut, and he tucked it into his pocket.

A fire boiled up inside Ozzie, but she pursed her lips and quenched it. There was no use arguing. She was just a nurse. All arguing would do was let the patient wake up further from his stupor and make bandaging his wound all the more painful.

She set to work with her steady hands. They were calloused, and the nails were short. They were the hands of a girl who was willing to work, not one whose only additions to the household were a few needlepoint trinkets. Ozzie wore gloves at home. Her mother always swooned when she saw how rough her hands were.

Ozzie set a pad of clean cotton against the red spots on either side of the healed-up cut. She wasn’t quite certain what could have made it. It was not deep enough for a machinery accident, yet it wasn’t ragged like an animal bite. Whatever it was, it would make an impressive scar, one that even dwarfed the marks spitting fires had left on his arms.

She lifted the patient’s arm and wound bindings underneath, over his shoulder, and around his neck to hold the pad. He groaned again.

Ozzie bit her lower lip. She worked fast and gently.

She tucked his arm back next to him on the surgery bed. He shifted. His eyes opened briefly. They were soft and brown, nothing like his rugged face.

“Take him to the empty room beside the last one,” Dr. Sims ordered. “We’ll keep him as long as we have the room for charity.”

Without another word, he walked out of the room. Ozzie watched him go. The orderlies lifted the man from the table and laid him into one of the wheeled chairs that sat along the wall. The patient’s head rocked back and forth as he came out of the ether-coma.

When she was certain Dr. Sims was out of earshot, Ozzie called to the orderlies. “Jim, Mike, do either of you have a key to chemical cabinet?”

“No, ma’am,” the taller of the two orderlies, Jim, told her. “The doctors keep those keys. And Mrs. Netter for when she has to count them at the end of the month.”

Ozzie nodded. “Hm.”

“This about the missing ether?” Mike asked, his voice deeper than Jim’s.

Ozzie nodded again. “Yes.” She thought a moment. “When was the last time we saw it?”

“Two days ago,” Mike told her. “When that patient was gardening and cut her finger up.”

“And has anyone been in the surgery room since the last time it was out?”

“No, ma’am,” Jim said again. “The last time I saw it was Dr. Sims consoling that patient with a little before he stitched her finger. I watched him put it back in the cabinet when he was done.”

“So it should have been in the cabinet,” Ozzie said. “Nothing was broken, and nothing else was stolen. Whoever went after it meant to get it.”

She hummed again as the orderlies buckled the patient around the waist with a cloth belt that would keep him from falling out. Then they buckled leather straps over his wrists.

“Is that necessary?” Ozzie asked.

Jim nodded. Mike shook his head and grunted.

“This one’s a fighter,” Jim said. “Those farmers what brought him in, when he saw this was the loony bin—”

“Don’t call it that, Jim,” Ozzie said. “These are sick people, just like at any hospital.”

Jim winced. “Sorry, Miss Ozzie.”

Ozzie smiled. “Thank you, Jim. What about the farmers?”

“He tried making a break for it,” Mike said. “Gave one a black eye and nearly beat the wind out of the other. If me and George hadn’t gotten out there to take him down, he probably would have broke free and run all the way to Lake Providence. We had to shackle him to the floor to get him cleaned up.”

Ozzie looked down at the redheaded fireman. As his head lolled in the ether-nap, it was hard to imagine him hurting anyone. “What did they say his name was?”

“He didn’t,” Mike told her. “All he’s been doing is ranting about monsters eating us all up.”

Jim shivered. “Let’s get him back to his room before he wakes up and talks about that anymore. It’s too much for me.”

The taller black man pushed the wheelchair, and Mike settled into line behind him. Ozzie hurried two steps after them. “I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t you need to clean the surgery?” Mike asked.

Ozzie clenched her teeth and glanced back over her shoulder. It was her duty to toss out the old stitches, and she wanted to make certain the tools were scrubbed. Yet, the mysterious fireman seemed to call to her.

“I’ll come back to it,” Ozzie said. “I want to make sure he settles in all right.” She then added, “And maybe he’ll wake up and tell us a little about himself.”

Mike shrugged and turned back to follow after Jim. Ozzie picked up her skirts and hurried after them.

The corridor was long and dim. While each of the patients’ rooms on either side had large, barred windows to let in plenty of light while keeping them safely inside, only a little of that light slipped under the locked doors into the center. Things were noisier in the violent ward, where many of the rooms had iron rings built into the floor for chains and shackles. Footsteps pounded from early rising patients pacing in their rooms. Someone murmured loudly to himself. Unintelligible words leaked into the hallway.

Ozzie wanted to tremble, but she wouldn’t let herself. She was a nurse.

Suddenly one of the doors banged beside her. She let out a soft scream and dove to the opposite side of the hall.