Timpanogos (2 page)

Both Mexicans snapped their visors into place and the
Strider rose to its full height.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

*
  
*
  
*

Bullets buzzed through the wood and struck things inside the
springhouse.

Thud!
 
Thud!
 
Snap!

“Ugh,” someone grunted.
 
Clatter, foomph, splash
.

The bullets were hitting people, too, Sam realized.
 
Someone had taken a slug and slipped
into the creek.

“I ain’t hit,” Orrin Porter Rockwell barked in the darkness.

“Nor I,” echoed Ambassador Armstrong of the many names.

“Argh!” snapped a strangled, irascible voice.

“I expect that means President Young has taken the bullet,”
Sam concluded.
 
“Mr. President, are
you still with us?”

“I’m alive,” Brigham Young chomped out the words.

“Good thing, too,” Sam said.
 
“I’ve seen the widow’s walk of the Beehive House, and I’m
not sure it could take the weight of all your widows.”

There was a moment of silence—Sam couldn’t tell if it
was shocked or awkward silence—and then Armstrong started to laugh, a
dark rich sound reminiscent of smoked meat or chocolate or both.
 
After a few seconds, Rockwell joined in
with a surprisingly high-pitched snicker.

“Don’t worry,” Young answered, teeth in his voice.
 
“Truman Angell built that house to my
own specifications, and I made sure he had that piece particularly reinforced.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Young chuckled.

Armstrong and Rockwell burst back into howls of
laughter.
 
Sam wished he had a
Cohiba.
 
He had a craving for the
taste and besides, telling a joke without a Cohiba in his hand felt like doing
a magic trick without a top hat and wand.

“I don’t suppose they’d worry too much, though,” he
continued.
 
“They’d just figure your
cog had been repurposed to a higher level of the Great Machine.”
 
The laughter trailed off, a little
uncertain.

“You’re making a joke, Clemens,” President Young snorted in
the darkness, “but of course you’re exactly right.”

“Good to hear,” Sam couldn’t resist one last crack.
 
“I can’t abide any other outcome than
being exactly right.”

“Are joo badly injured, Meester President?” the Ambassador
asked.

“I’m bleeding,” Young said.
 
“I’ve bled before.
 
Let’s get out of this place.”

“Well, the gun’s outta my reach,” Rockwell explained,
“seeing as it’s up on a rafter and my hands are tied behind my back.
 
Anybody else got the free use of their
hands?”

They all muttered that they didn’t.

“All right, then.
 
The knife’s in a barrel of beans, but it ain’t very far down.
 
All we gotta do is get the lid off it
and dig down into the beans a little ways.
 
I reckon we can do that even with our hands tied behind our
backs.”

“Which barrel is it?” Sam asked.
 
“How do we find it?”

Rockwell hesitated slightly.
 
“It’s the one marked
red beans
,” he said.

Amstrong started laughing again.

“Our hands being tied may not be the most daunting obstacle
we face,” Sam observed.

“Yeah, well, shoot me for an idiot, I guess,” Rockwell
grumbled.
 
“I figured someday I’d
be holed up in here with Injuns shooting at me, or a mountain lion.
 
Never guessed I’d be blind and tied up,
too.”

*
  
*
  
*

CRASH!

Burton was racing through the upper storey of the hotel,
close on Hickman’s heels and chasing the Danite leader through some sort of
bedroom, when the
Liahona
plowed into
the building.
 
The force of it, and
the surprise, knocked him to the floor, and for several tense moments he
thought he would die with Bill Hickman in a tangle of ruined house-carpentry
and cheap furnishings.

When the shuddering was finished and the ruptured hot water
tank had flooded the ground floor, he was still on the upper storey, only one
of the walls of the room had been ripped away, the bed was been torn right out
of the room and the cheap wallpaper was beginning to curl from the steam.

And Hickman was already scrambling to his feet.

Burton fired the Volcanic rifle at his man as the Danite
slipped out the door.

Bang!

A miss, and though the bullet punched through the wall it
still missed Hickman on the other side.

Burton pumped the rifle to fire again.

Click.

He tossed the Volcanic aside.
 
He spared only a second’s thought for the
Liahona
—it had passed by the room he was in, and was
too far away for it or any of its passengers or crew to be of any help to
Richard Burton.

Burton stood and drew the 1851 Navy from its holster.
 
He left the knife in his leg.
 
He’d pull it out when the shooting was
over, but he didn’t want to do it yet, for fear that sudden blood loss would
knock him unconscious.

He was already feeling a bit woozy.

Gun first, Burton staggered out of the room on Hickman’s
trail.
 

He saw Hickman squeezing out through one of the two windows
in the next room just as he entered.
 
One wall was torn away here, too, and the air was wet and hot with
steam.

Burton squeezed the trigger without hesitating, almost
without aiming.
 

Click.

The gun misfired.

“Where’s Brigham Young?” he shouted, pulling the trigger
again.

Click.

“Rostam’s mace!” he swore.
 
The powder had gotten wet in the steam.
 
He shoved the gun back into its holster
and lurched across the room as fast as he could.

Hickman slipped out of sight, sliding down.
 
Burton drew his saber, throwing himself
towards the window.

Crash!

The bedroom’s other window shattered and a man in a short
coat and beaver hat piled through, knees and elbows first.
 
He had one arm up in front of his face
to protect it, and a knife in each hand.

Burton aimed for the man’s shoulder, hoping to incapacitate
him and head off any fight.
 
He was
painfully aware that, outside the window, Hickman was scrambling down a short
shingled roof and headed for some surface that might be the top of a
steam-truck.

He swung, expecting the man to land and lunge—

his attacker dropped and rolled instead—

and Burton missed.

The force of his swing carried him past the tumbling Danite,
and his wounded leg made him stumble and slide off-balance.
 
Together, they put him out of
position—

which meant that the Danite’s knife narrowly missed biting
into Burton’s belly, and instead just cut through his coat.

Slicing open my official correspondence, Burton thought.

In return he kicked the Danite, to keep him rolling and move
him further away so Burton could regain his balance.
 
Teetering as he was, though, and kicking with a knife stuck
in his thigh, Burton’s kick was girlishly weak and ineffective.

The Danite’s hat fell off, but he sprang to his feet and
charged Burton.
 
He slashed with
both knives, arms snapping back and forth in front of him like a willow tree
whipping about in a high wind.
 

Burton longed for an épée, or a spear, or anything else with
a point.
 
A sharpened stick would
have done nicely.
 
The saber he had
taken from the Danite was a chopping weapon only, a clumsy piece of work useful
only to horsemen and hatcheteers.
 
With a pointed weapon, he could keep the knife-wielder at bay.
 
With this saber, he could only hack and
slash, try not to expose himself too much and hope for a major hit on his
opponent.

“Like I’m chopping down trees!” he grunted, not really
realizing he was speaking out loud until he had done so.
 
To emphasize his point, he swung for
the knife fighter’s throat, then quickly stepped aside as the other man lunged
into the space vacated by the sword, slicing and stabbing in short, furious
blows.

Thud!
from
outside.
 
That would be Hickman,
Burton thought, landing on the steam-truck.
 
The Danite would get away if he didn’t do something, and
pretty quick.

He backed away in a circle from a flurry of blows.
 
He felt the steam before he actually
saw the missing wall out of the corner of his eye, and turned sharply to avoid
falling into hot water.

This was like a samurai sword, like the long, one-edged
katana of the bushido warrior.
 
Kendo, he knew the art of fighting with such swords was called.
 
Gliding steps, long arcs of attack and
powerful incapacitating blows.

Impressive to watch, and effective against a similarly armed
fighter.

Useless against a quick man with knives.

Burton backed away again under a rain of razor-sharp knife
blades.
 
The cuff of his coat
sleeve lost two buttons to a slashing attack that he only barely avoided, and
his boot knocked aside the Danite’s beaver hat.

Under the window, a steam engine hissed into life, coughing
vapor up into the curtains.
 
Burton
was out of time.

With his hurt leg, his kicked up the hat, hurling it into
his attacker’s face.

The Danite kept coming, slash, slash—

Burton sacrificed his left arm.
 

He thrust his arm in among the cutting blades.
 
He felt the steel of one knife tear
into the flesh of his upper arm.
 
His heavy coat dulled the attack somewhat, but not enough to prevent the
searing pain entirely.

Burton grunted with pain—

but he closed his hand around the wrist of the Danite’s
other arm, preventing that knife from stabbing him in the chest—

and punched his foe in the nose with the heavy basket hilt
of his stolen saber.

Hard.

The man stumbled back.
 
Burton let him go and grinned a farewell as he tumbled through where a
wall had once been, over the edge and into steam and hot water below.
 
He screamed as he fell, then hit the
ground below with both a
splash
and a
thud
.

Burton had no time to waste on monitoring the man’s fate,
nor on removing the knives from his arm and leg.
 
He threw himself through the window and bounced down the
porch roof, just in time to flop onto the rooftop of the steam-truck’s cargo
compartment a split second before it pulled away.

“Rudabeh’s blessed withers, but that smarts,” he ground out
through clenched teeth as the steam-truck turned and started bouncing down the
field behind the hotel.

He saw the Third Virginia Cavalry, or at least a couple of
dozen of them, arrayed beside the beached
Liahona
behind him, and on the bluff above the steam-truck.
 
They were talking to Poe, and they
didn’t look friendly.

Burton tightened his grip on the cavalry saber.

*
  
*
  
*

Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy ran like the devil himself was after
him (only it wasn’t the devil, was it?
 
because the devil was clearly the thieving little boy who had taken his
gun just when he needed it most, not the ugly monkey whose own machine of death
had apparently run empty or misfired or jammed at the crucial instant… the
devil had better luck than that, didn’t he?).

Weeds whipped at his legs, but they were nothing.
 
The branches of the bloody-damn-hell
trees that poked at his eyes and scratched his cheeks, now those were things to
worry about.
 
What the hell did you
call these things?
 
Mother
O’Shaughnessy never prepared him for trees like these.
 
They had leaves like oak trees, but
they were midgets.

Tiny hell-spawned midgets like the circus freak on his tail.

Tam slapped at the last hedge of branches and broke
through.
 
His foot struck something
invisible in the grass—

pain scorched his ankle—

he stumbled forward, tripped, caught himself on his good
leg, kept hobbling.

If he couldn’t run, he had to fight.
 
He still had the stiletto on his wrist,
and the canister of weird brass beetles inside his coat… whatever they might do
to flesh.
 
Of course, they’d
certainly made a mess of some of the Deseret Hotel’s upholstery, me boy, he
said to himself, so you can likely guess what they’d do to a bit of tender
meat.
 
They’d scared the shite out
of the midget when Tam had pretended he was going to loose them on the child,
anyway.

But the clearing wasn’t empty; there was a little wooden hut
in the center of it, a tiny shack with a hole shaped like a blazing sun carved
into the door.
 
Was that a
shithouse? Tam wondered.
 
Who
wanted to run all the way down from the house, a quarter of a mile away,
holding up the flap of his long woolens with every step, when he had a case of
the trots?
 
A shithouse belonged
right behind the house, not on the other side of the hill.
 
These Mormons were idjits, all of them.