The Clarity of Cold Steel

CLIPPER’S BACK FROM his jaunt to the God Pillar station, crippling along at a careful pace through the crowd, his hunched back prominent amongst the press of bodies surging toward work or the polar opposite.

I’d have gone myself but like I said, a Hindu sussing out train fares up the Vatican’s way is only slightly more preposterous than a hunchback. Clipper is white, though, so there’s that. He sallies past us through Tinkertown Square, head down, lips working as he murmurs to himself. Occasionally, his head peeps up, his eyes wide with animal panic barely reigned in, and takes a quick panoramic gander. He doesn’t see us, which is good.

I gave Clipper a second shot at this cause Brooklyn’d been harping on me about it and I finally folded. Sometimes I’m too good. Plus, I figured, how dangerous can it be casing a train station?

Brooklyn and I tail Clipper at arm’s length out of the square and onto Fourth Street and into the tattersall maze of downtown Tinkertown. The streets are all at right angles, laid out in a proper gridwork. Warp and weft in stifling precision. Clipper heads along toward our rendezvous, taking a left onto Rigby, a right on Mormont then ducks inside an unlicensed huff-joint on the basement floor of a rendering factory on the corner of Ninth and Tremont.

Brooklyn and I follow, jogging down the concrete stairs and through the open door.

The joint inside’s as silent as a pedophile’s funeral. Off-duty machinists sit on low three-legged stools, their heads buried between their knees and stuffed down into barrels whose bottoms are filled with a concoction of low-grade petrol and dreg bourbon and whatever else the owners of the joint could jungle stew together this fine day. Most of the patrons have their leather work aprons tossed over their heads and shoulders, forming tents over their respective barrels, confining the fume. Greedy muckers.

The noxious conconction’s taste is thick in the air; despite my ash-mask it cloys onto my tongue and roof of my mouth, the inside of my nose and sinuses, an oily film that burns. And not unpleasantly. It’s cheaper than a handle of booze but not as getting belted in the temple with a steam-jack. The results are about the same.

Clipper ducks inside an empty booth, and I slide in after him with Brooklyn on my six.

A low trilling music box titters along hauntingly from somewhere in the shadows, accompanied by a ventilation mate rowing a squeeze box fore and aft accordion style, almost to the music, pumping the stifling mix out in exchange for the soot-reek outside. Clipper’s sitting there splayed out, clutching his chest, trying to catch his breath.

“This is hell and away the wrong place for that,” I say, sliding into the booth. A circle of empty buckets sits at our feet. I pull my ash-mask off, “By Brahma—” gasp, and immediately put it back on as futile proof against the fumes. I’m already feeling it. Feet and fingers tingling. Woozing. “You okay?” I latch onto the booth for support.

Clipper holds up a finger, gasping mute as a trout.

“Cops, I think…” he gasps finally, eyes wide, and manages, “spotted me.”

“Relax.” But I raise an eyebrow Brooklyn’s way. “You eyeball any?”

“No.” He stands alert, eyes on the front door.

“Check the back, too,” I say, and Brooklyn offers a nod, adjusts his leopard-skin ascot, and takes off.

Clipper’s eyes follow Brooklyn’s retreating form, and I lay a hand on his hunched shoulder, shake him from his funk. “Easy.” He blinks. Sniffs. Wipes his nose with his hand. Then he nods. “Good, you’re back.” I scoot over for a panoramic view of the joint.

Brooklyn slides out the front door.

“Nice joint.” I shake my head. “Could you have found a cheaper and more illegal place to meet? Maybe a kiddie whorehouse dealing ghost on the side?”

“I … I need it.”

“Not a good time.” I eyeball the front door, the back door, the side door. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

“Figured it’d be quiet.”

“Figured right.” A shadow blots out the light from the back door. I coil ready to stand for a second, reaching for my piece, but the shadow passes. I swallow, dry mouthed already. Shit. Nikunj is out there somewhere, so there’s that. I take a deep breath, ease, settle.

Everyone in the joint’s pretty much still gone ostrich, heads buried in buckets except for the ventilation mate and the filler who comes out a side door and is cruising our way, a backpack full of concoction slung yoke-wise across his shoulders.

Clipper raises a hand, catches the filler’s eye. He shambles over, his round glass gasmask eyes staring at us bug-like. Clipper sets a rusty coin down. The filler inserts a nozzle into Clipper’s bucket and squeezes. A dark liquid sprays out, hissing under pneumatic pressure, and the filler’s back on his merry way, pumping a hand lever. Clipper’s on his knees, head buried neatly in the bucket and drawing euphoria a moment later.

“You made it to the station?” I ask him.

Clipper gasps up, “Mostly,” and ducks back down.

“What the hell’s ’mostly’ mean?”

“Damn guards wouldn’t even let me through the front gates.”

“You tell them you were looking to donate a kidney?”

Aimless, swaying, drooling, Clipper nods. “Still wouldn’t…” He wipes his jaw, dives in for a third huff, talks hollow into the barrel. “On account of my deformity. An unsound demographic. Got to be healthy. Said if I want to be donating, it’s got to be done down here.”

“Okay, but did you at least find out how much for a topside run?”

“Some blokes heading in said it’s two hundred flat for a donor. But, you got to sign an agent’s contract. Essentially, you’re selling your organ to him before it’s even cut out of your body. They’ve legal rights to it the second the ink dries. You pull a runner…”

“Shit.” I turn as a shadow darkens the back door.

It’s Brooklyn, gliding down the aisle and back into our booth, kneeling low next to me an instant later.

“Clipper’s right sharp,” Brooklyn hisses. “Lawmen are coming. From the fore.”

“For us?”

“Don’t know. Maybe.” He glances around. “Maybe just a raid. They’ve squads set up.”

“Fuck.” I grab Clipper by the arm, wrench him away from the bucket he’s trying like hell to asphyxiate himself in. Then we’re up and on the move through the maze of booths, making a hot shot toward the back. “You see Nikunj?”

“No,” Brooklyn says as a voice barks out from the front—

“Everyone please remain seated!”

I think three assholes in the joint hear it, and I’m one of them. The voice sounds familiar: Constable Ruben. He stands in the front door, gun drawn, pointed. And he ain’t alone. Can he see us? I’m betting no. It’s dark in here, light out there, and I hustle on, hunched over like Clipper, dragging him flailing along, hoping against hope we’re lost to the shadows.

Almost to the back door, I halt in my tracks.

“Stand up straight, Mister Shakteel.” A shadow blots out the light from our destination. “Release Igor and raise your bloody hands.” It’s Detective Vortex. She stands supple and relaxed, a dual bolt-action scattergun held in her two hands and aimed at my favorite person in the world.

I raise my hands. Slowly.

“Now don’t move.” She slides in through the back door, neat as you please. “And don’t talk.” A pair of heavy-duty cops appear at her back, marching in step with her. “Don’t even breathe.”

I do none of the above.

“What kind of bastard allows another to take his proxy in prison?” Detective Vortex queries, her shoes clicking on the smudged concrete. “He was hanged yesterday, by the way. Aiding and abetting. His name was Vihmal. Did you even know it?”

A cold beast hibernating in my gut twitches awake and extends a tentacle of hoarfrost guilt jagging through my innards.

All around us, heads begin to rise lazily, a herd of geriatric antelope drooling at the waterhole and suddenly catching on changing wind the scent of an encroaching lion pride. Dilated eyes try to work out just what the hell’s going down. They calculate. Estimate. Prevaricate. One bloke rises from his booth and stumbles out into the aisle, followed by another. The first one trips. Someone vomits in the shadows.

“It’s a raid!” someone yells. Me.

Then it’s on.

The rest of the doped herd scatter-dash as one. It’s a mad melee through ink and light. My grip is iron, and it’s on Clipper’s collar as we’re dodging through the morass, getting smashed and battered as bodies slash past. My bell gets rung by a bowler-hatted bloke with elbows of iron, but I’m through the side door an instant later, smashing shoulder first into a wall then hauling on down a coffin-dark hallway.

A dim light wavers up ahead, and I see flights of stairs, one up and one down, the lion’s share of bodies roiling up. The cops are behind, yelling, screaming, busting heads, being cops.

I make for the flight up, but a figure steps from the shadows and grunts, “Follow me.” It’s Nikunj, and he’s barrel-assing down the stairs and into darkness before I barely register. But I do, and I give chase. Down. Down. Down. Three flights.

Sparks explode off the bannister an instant after I hear the dog-woof of a pneumatic piece discharging rapid fire from above. Clipper gasps, and I’m not sure if he’s shot, but he starts gimping on overdrive.

“Halt, you bloody fuckers!” Constable Ruben bellows, his jackboots pounding down the stairs.

We deign not to obey.

Clipper trips to a knee and struggles to rise.

“Kid!” I hiss over shoulder without stopping. “Grab him!” Brooklyn’s on the other side of Clipper instantly, grabbing him under the right arm as I’ve got his left, the both of us dragging his sorry ass. “Clipper, you—”

“Shut it—” Nikunj warns from ahead, and I can see the wisdom in his words.

We’re off the stairs and through a door and into a massive cellar an instant later.

Nikunj slams the door shut behind us with a resounding boom and wedges it dead with a stave of oak clipped off a junk pile looming large. He sparks up a skull-torch, and the cellar turns into a long narrow junkyard carrying on off into infinity. Shit’s stacked in two great piles to either side of us, piles of brick and burlap bags of Gods know what, piles of scrap metal and old fence pickets, rusted gears and sprockets and everything and anything in between, and they loom above like twin mirror waves set to crash down.

“Where are you hit?” I pull Clipper’s face up by the chin. He’s limp, pale, doesn’t answer.

“No time,” Nikunj says calmly, tearing Clipper’s arm from me, kneeling, and lifting him across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Then he’s off and hauling down the narrow path. Don’t know how that skinny fucker’s so strong.

As if to punctuate his statement, a shattering boom resonates in a shockwave through me, pig iron ingots off to the side chattering in dance as the door concaves inward like a crash-wagon just rammed it which is basically what did just happen.

“Steamjack,” I say, and Brooklyn and I are off after Nikunj, racing through the brick and stone warren, following the retreating star of his skull-torch as it drives off through the night, illuminating the netherworld escarpment.

I hear the door give behind us, blown off its hinges on a second blow as I plow through a camp of itinerant croppers subsisting on bioluminescent mushrooms riddling the surface of near everything from floor to ceiling. Women and children scuttle from our path and men above suspended by harnesses scowl down at us as they cultivate the ceiling growth.

“Apologies,” I huff.

Their camp leader rises from atop a throne of anthracite iron, all jagged with rust and fungal chitin. An old flintlock muzzle loader sits in his hands, but he does not raise it. His wide-brimmed hat slopes out three-sixty round his head, mirroring the grim physiology of his crop. His eyes are a glossy white, the color of blind worms, as he watches us pass through his midnight domain. Can he even see? As children descent upon the path behind, a machine whirs into life somewhere ahead, chugging into function beyond the vertical fields of lustrous fungus.

A boom resounds and I hear a metal door crash open. A wall of stacked ferron-crete block looms ahead. The building’s foundation. We’re at an impasse. A dead end.

“Shit,” I groan. “Nikunj…?”

“Here,” he hisses from somewhere.

I catch movement from around a stack of railroad ties, beat feet around them and Nikunj is there, Clipper laid out across the floor of a freight elevator. Blood’s slashed black across Clipper’s face and neck, his exposed chest. Brooklyn slams the cage door shut as soon as we’re in and then mashes a button.

Jackboots stomp our way en masse, the clatter of ordnance peppering the crashing staccato. Detective Vortex’s high-pitched voice barks orders through the gloom.

“This thing work?” Brooklyn asks, voicing my very doubts.

“Cross your fingers.” Nikunj folds over a handkerchief and presses it to a bullet hole in Clipper’s chest. Then suddenly we’re moving.