Timpanogos (3 page)

Tam shot a glance over his shoulder—the dwarf lagged
behind, probably slowed down even worse than Tam by the fake oak trees because
he was such a runty little thing.
 
His head wasn’t even visible above the trees’ claws; Tam only knew
generally where he was by the rustling of grass and the shaking of
branches.
 

He had a few seconds’ lead time, but not much more.

Perfect.

Tam opened the canister.
 
He cracked the outhouse door and lifted the plank seat worn
smooth by years of straining Deseret buttocks, exposing a dark and reeking
pit.
 
He threw his scarf onto the
edge of the hole—that’d catch the dwarf’s attention and make him
hesitate.
 
Then he scattered brass
beetles around the floor inside, over stones worn flat by use and the curling
back half of a Sears Roebuck catalog, advertising hoop skirts and panacea
tablets and wooden hobbyhorses and hunting rifles.

Leaving the door open a touch, he gimped as quickly as he
could around and behind the outhouse to hide.

He looked at the canister while he listened for the dwarf’s
approach.
 
There were two buttons
inside the lid.
 
He’d figured which
button activated the bloody things back at the Deseret Hotel, turned them into
unstoppable chewers and devourers of matter, but in all the excitement since
he’d forgotten which it was.
 
He
let his imagination run wild for a few seconds, thinking about the irritating
dwarf being chewed down to bones and buttons by a swarm of clicking brass
beetles.

“Heh heh,” he chuckled.
 
You’ve got the little bastard now, me boy.

But which button to press?
 
He’d forgotten which was which, and they weren’t labeled or
marked in any way.

He heard the soft
thud
and
swish
of little dwarf feet
coming through the clearing.

To hell with it.
 
He’d press both buttons, and St. Brigit would do the rest.
 
Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised him
to be a coward.

He held the canister in one hand and kept his knife hand
free, just in case (but the stiletto still tight against his forearm, to keep
one unpleasant little surprise in store for an appropriate moment).
 
If he had a bit more of a head start,
he reflected, he might have loaded the Maxim Husher, and that would have given
the midget an entertaining jolt.
 
Oh, well.

The door creaked open.

“The hell?” the midget muttered.

Tam jammed his thumb down over both the canister’s buttons.

Click-clack-clatter, click-clack-clatter
, he heard from the outhouse.
 
He grinned, stood up and limped two
steps away from the outhouse.

“Shit!” the dwarf yelled, there was a
thump
, and the outhouse rattled, like the dwarf was
wrestling someone inside.
 
It was
as good as a stage show, it was, all that shaking and noise and Tam bursting at
the seams with laughter all the while.
 
Tam imagined the little corn-pone-nibbler fighting all the beetles at
once in there, maybe swarming together like a cloud into the shape of a
fighting man, or maybe the beetles swarmed together into the shape of a bigger
beetle.

It was like having a genie in a magic lamp.

He rubbed the canister fondly, feeling very satisfied and
wishing he could have a nice drink of whisky to celebrate.
 
Maybe the beetles could bring him some,
if he rubbed their little brass bellies and asked nicely.

The outhouse stopped moving.

Then he saw a glistening brass carpet, edging out from under
the outhouse door and swarming in his direction.
 
It was the beetles.

And as they came, they devoured.
 
He saw tiny brass bug-jaws tearing at grass and sticks on
the ground and even little stones, shattering it all and ripping it to shreds.

Tam took a long step back.

Click-clack-clatter.

Surely, the little creatures were heading his way because
they’d done their job, and now they were coming home to their jar to go nicely
back to sleep again, weren’t they?
 
He’d jammed both buttons, and one was the
eat
button and one was the
go to sleep
button.
 
They’d eaten, and now they were going to go to sleep.

The swarm kept coming.
 
Behind it, the ground was gnawed clean.

Tam took another step back.
 
“Easy, lads.”

Could the dwarf have taken control of the bugs somehow,
countermanded Tam’s attack order?
 
Tam shook his head, that notion made no bloody-damn-hell sense at all.

Click-clack-clatter.

Or did it?
 
An
ether device, a timer, a code of some kind only the bugs knew or could hear, a
secret communication by vibration, Brigit’s belly button, even telepathy?
 
In a world in which flesh-eating metal
bugs could be poured out of a can like so many oats, what
wasn’t
possible?
 
Tam’s heart pounded like a railroad piston.

The swarm was almost on him.

Tam threw the canister away to his left, into the trees, and
lurched away several steps to his right.

The metal bug swarm followed the canister.

Tam stopped and watched, realizing that he was sweating and
shaking from nerves.
 
Where the
canister had landed, he saw grass fall over as if it were mowing itself, and
then a tree snapped and toppled to the ground, and then another.

He watched for thirty seconds, or maybe a minute, until
there was a circle of scoured earth around the canister and the beetles had
crawled inside.
 
No more
click-clack
, and his heart was starting to slow down, but Tam
didn’t dare go pick the canister up.

Not yet.
 
He’d
let it lie a while.

Still, if the little bugs had done so much damage to the
local flora, he had to imagine they’d made short work of the cracker
midget.
 
Tam chuckled, shook his
head to clear out the adrenalin, and walked around to the front of the outhouse
and its open door.

The seat was down again.
 
There was no sign at all of the Sears Roebuck catalog, with
its skirts and guns and toys and snake oil.
 
Shame, that, Tam reflected, too late.
 
The Sears Roebuck catalog made nice
reading in idle moments, he should have kept it.
 
No sign of the scarf or the dwarf, either, though.

“Bad luck, that,” Tam chortled.
 
“Shitty way to die.”
 
He laughed out loud, cackling like the vulture he resembled.
 
“On the other hand, it seems I’ve lost
my good scarf.”

Click.

Tam froze.

“You lost more’n that, Irish.”

Tam looked up.
 
Above the outhouse door, on the inside, was a little shelf.
 
The dwarf was perched up in the
ceiling, wedged there with one hand on the little shelf and both feet against
the far wall.

“Monkey!” Tam gasped.

“Proud of it,” grunted the little man.

In his free hand, he held a long pistol, cocked and pointed
at Tam O’Shaughnessy’s birdlike head.

“Fookin’ hell,” Tam commented.

“Guess you forgot I could climb.”

“You had another pistol?”

“Believe it or not, I found one in the crapper.”

Tam slammed the door shut and threw himself to one side.

Bang!
 
Bang!

Splintered holes erupted in the desiccated wood of the
outhouse, but the bullets missed Tam and he sprint-hobbled for the canister
again.

The bloody-damn-hell metal beetles might eat him alive, but
they might not, and the midget certainly would.

Thump!

Tam heard the door kicked open behind him and he knew the
dwarf was only seconds from blasting him to oblivion.
 
He staggered through grass, cutting across towards the
artificial clearing where the bugs had
click-clack-clattered
everything right down to the ground like hyperactive
sheep, or termites.

Bang!

Tam felt the bullet burn through his coat, narrowly missing
his ribs.

He saw the canister and jumped, throwing himself headlong
and grabbing for it like he was a drowning man it was a rope.
 
He clenched his teeth and squinted at
the thought that he might be throwing himself to his own death, but he didn’t
see any of the little buggers on the ground—

he hit,
oomph
,
grabbed the canister—

and rolled to his feet.

“Brigit!” he howled, pain lancing through his twisted ankle.

Miraculously, all the bugs stayed inside.
 
They were quiet and still, and Tam
jammed down both buttons again.

Click-clack-clatter, click-clack-clatter
, he heard in the canister as he raised it over his
head.

The midget froze, gun pointed at Tam.

“They’re activated, you little ape, do you hear me?
 
They’re turned on!”

The dwarf spat slowly on the ground.
 
“I can hear ’em,” he admitted.

“Shoot me and I throw the little buggers!
 
Then we both die!
 
Is that what you want?”

The midget seemed to be considering.
 
“I want you to leave the boy alone,” he
said.

“I don’t give a fook about the boy!”
 
Tam felt hysterical.

“Then what the hell do you want?”

Tam considered, for a split second, the possibility of
telling the dwarf.
 
Maybe they
could reach a deal.
 
They could
both agree not to talk to the Pinkertons, to lie low, and soon enough he and
Sam Clemens would have finished this rotten mission and be out of the Kingdom.
 
Tam could go off to California, or Novy
Moskva, or somewhere else where the Pinkertons would never find him.

Hell, he might even be willing to go back to Ireland.
 
Potato blight or not, he’d learned
there were worse places to be.

Tam shook his head.
 
No, he could never trust the midget.
 
The man was crooked, he might turn Tam in for reward money,
or worse.
 
He might turn him in
just because Tam was a Union man, and the dwarf was with the South.
 
Or maybe he hated the Irish.
 
The southerners were notorious for that
sort of ill-will, and the little fellow had that horrible loping sound to his
voice that marked him as a Mississippi monkey, or Louisiana, or something… Tam
wasn’t very good at telling those accents apart.

He had to bluff, or threaten, or fight.

Tam drew back the arm with the canister in it, like he was
going to throw.

The dwarf cocked his pistol.

“Stop!”

The voice rang through the confusion of Tam’s thoughts and
over his thudding heartbeat like a bell.
 
It came from somewhere over in the tall grass.
 
Tam tried to split his eyes, send one poking around to look
for the source of the voice while the other stayed fixed on his opponent.
 
He could see the dwarf doing the same.

The voice belonged to the boy, John Moses.
 

He stepped out of the grass and into the clearing.
 
“Stop fighting,” he said.
 
“It isn’t nice.”

“Oh yeah?” Tam sneered.

“Yeah,” John Moses said.

Then Tam noticed that the little boy held the strange
rapid-shot gun.
 
It looked gigantic
in his childish hands.
 
He
struggled, but he managed to lift it and hold the barrel more or less
level.
 
Level enough to mow Tam
flat, judging by what he’d seen it do to the front of the hotel.

“I said stop fighting,” John Moses repeated himself in his
wee piping whistle of a voice.
 
“And I mean it, you fooks.”

“Shite,” Tam said.

*
  
*
  
*

“You’re all under arrest,” called one of the cavalrymen in a
loud, trumpet-like voice.
 
The men
were out of their ordinary uniforms and wearing the strange gray outfits, but
the speaker had two chevrons on the sleeves of his jacket.
 
Poe inferred that the chevrons marked
him as a corporal.

“By what authority?” Poe demanded.

“On what charges?” Roxie chimed in.

“Who in blazes are you?” asked Captain Jones.

“Authority be damned,” the Corporal drawled, “charges go to
hell and I, you shiftless truck-gypsy, am the
government
.
 
Haven’t you heard?”

“We’re armed,” Poe called out.
 
He very deliberately didn’t raise his pistol—he didn’t
want to provoke an actual shooting match, outnumbered eight to one as he and
his allies (if they really were allies) were—but it felt heavy and
conspicuous in his hand.
 
“You may
not find us so easy to govern, Corporal.”

The Corporal rode his horse-machine down the slope, and half
his men followed his example.
 
The
rest stayed up on the slope, looking down on the
Liahona
, guns ready.
 
The dozen cavalrymen stopped below the steam-truck’s ladder and the
Corporal looked up at the passengers and crew.