Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century #1) 4

“That’s right. If it’s still standing.”

“Which one?” someone asked. Briar thought it might’ve been Frank.

“The lavender one with cream-colored trim,” she said.

The one Swakhammer had called Squiddy asked, “Where was his laboratory? Downstairs?”

“In the basement, yes. And it was huge,” she recalled. “I swear, it was as big as the whole house aboveground, almost. But…”

“But what?” Lucy asked.

“But it was so badly damaged.” Despite the warming numbness of the alcohol, her anxiety spiked once more. “It’s not safe down there. Parts of the walls fell down, and there was so much glass everywhere. It looked like an explosion in a goblet factory,” she said more quietly.

The memory distracted her with its immediacy. The machine. The destruction downstairs when she’d run there, terrified and searching frantically for her husband. The smell of wet earth and mold; the raging hiss of steam pouring from cracks in the Boneshaker’s body; the stink of burning oil and the wire-sharp taste of metal gears grinding themselves into smoke.

“The tunnel,” she said out loud.

“I beg your pardon?” Swakhammer said.

She repeated, “The tunnel. Er… Varney, is that right? Varney, how did you know which house was ours?”

He fired a wad of tobacco into the spittoon at the end of the counter, and answered, “Used to live up that way myself. Lived with my son, a few streets over. Used to joke about how it ought to be painted blue instead of that purple color.”

“Did anyone else here know about the old house? Where we lived, it wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t the most common knowledge in the world, either.” No one replied, so she concluded, “Right. Basically, nobody knows. But what about the money blocks?”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “The money blocks?”

“The money blocks, the bank blocks, yes. Everybody knows where those are, right?”

Swakhammer said, “Oh yeah. You can’t miss ’em. It’s that section over on Third where there’s no block at all anymore, just a big hole in the ground. Why? What are you thinking, Miss Wilkes?”

“I’m thinking that the hole got there because… oh, we all know why. It was the Boneshaker engine; even Levi admitted that much. But after he ran the thing down there, and after the bottom dropped out of the bank blocks, he drove it back home. As far as I know, the Boneshaker is still sitting underneath the house, parked in what’s left of that laboratory.“

She pushed the mostly empty mug of beer aside and tapped her fingertips on the counter.

“Let’s say Zeke can’t find the house because no one knows where it is. But he does know about what happened with the Boneshaker. He’d have no trouble finding the bank blocks because, like you said, everybody knows where those are—and if he could get down in the hole with a light… he might think he’s got an easy way to find the house.”

Lucy lifted the other eyebrow, then dropped them both into a worried look.

“But dearest, those tunnels haven’t held up—not all this time. They’re just dirt, and dug out with a machine. These days, they’re more collapsed than whole. Hell, if you go wandering up the hill, here and there you can see the spots where the tunnels have dropped into sinkholes—eating up trees and walls, and parts of buildings, sometimes. And then there was the quake last night. No, he couldn’t have gone too far, not through those tunnels.”

“I don’t disagree,” Briar was quick to say. “But I don’t know if any of that would occur to Zeke. I bet you he’ll try it. He’ll try it, and he’ll feel like a genius for it. Hmm.”

“Hmm?” Varney echoed.

“He has maps, I think,” she told him.

Then she said to Lucy, and therefore to the room, “I found papers in his bedroom, and I think he’s got a map or two. I don’t know how useful they’ll be, and I don’t know if they marked out the banks, or the money district, or anything like that. Could you tell me, is there anyone over there—in that part of the city—who Zeke might’ve asked for help? You said Maynard’s isn’t the only sealed place inside the walls. Didn’t you? You’ve carved out these places down here.”

She looked around at the underground bar and added, “I mean, look at Maynard’s. You’ve done something incredible here. This is as good as anything I’ve seen in the Outskirts. When I found out people lived here, I didn’t understand why. But now I do. You’ve turned a place of peril into a place where people can live in peace—”

And at that moment, a low-pitched buzz sounded a dull alarm, and everyone in the bar transformed in perfect sync.

Swakhammer pulled a pair of gigantic pistols out of his holsters and spun the cylinders to make sure they were loaded. Lucy reached under the bar and retrieved a modified crossbow. She flipped a latch and the contraption opened; she placed it upside down on the counter and slammed her mechanical arm upon it, and the weapon affixed itself to her wrist with a hard click. Even white-haired Varney with his fragile-looking limbs was bracing himself for trouble. He lifted up the piano’s lid and retrieved a pair of shotguns, which he held ready—one under each armpit.

“Is that thing loaded?” Lucy asked, jerking an eyebrow at the Spencer.

It was still on Briar’s back, but she retrieved it and held it ready. “Yes,” she said, though she couldn’t remember to what extent it still held ammunition. How many shots had she fired on the windowsill? Had she reloaded it afterward? Surely it had a few rounds left.

Briar asked Swakhammer, since he was standing closest, “What’s going on? What does that noise mean?”

“It means trouble. Not sure what sort. Maybe bad, maybe nothing.”

Squiddy held up a brass canister that looked like a shoulder-mounted cannon and said, “But it’s best to be ready for bad.”

Lucy added, “It’s hooked up to a trip wire down the west entrance—the main door, that is. The way you came inside. Jeremiah guided you past the alarm; you probably didn’t see it.”

And then the buzz was joined by a whistling moan that everyone recognized all too well, coming from the chamber beyond the sealed space of the bar.

“Where’s your mask, baby?” Lucy asked. She didn’t take her eyes off the front door.

“In my bag. Why?”

“In case we get flushed out, and there’s nowhere to go but up.” She might have been ready to say more, but a heavy collision knocked against the door and nearly broke it down. More moaning came from the other side, rising in anticipation and excitement, and gaining volume. Briar put on her mask.

Lucy said to Swakhammer, “How’s the east tunnel?”

He was already there, examining the passageway via slats in an oblong door behind the piano. “Uncertain,” he replied.

Allen asked, “What about the upstairs block? Is that way safe?”

Above them there came a splintering crash, then a loud stumble of decomposing feet rumbled on the floors of whatever lay upstairs. No one asked again if it might be safe.

Varney pointed his guns at the straining door and said, “We have to go down.”

“Wait,” Lucy told him.

Swakhammer returned from the piano corner door to the west tunnel entrance, dragging a railroad tie behind him with one hand and shoving his mask over his head with the other. Squiddy ran to his side and picked up the dangled end of the squared-off log, and between the men they lifted it and shoved it against the door, into a set of slots that held it flush there. Almost immediately, a clattering crack echoed through the bar, accompanied by the splintering stretch of wood that might not hold. The new brace was straining; the brass and steel fittings that lifted it up were leaning away from their mounts.

“What can I do to help?” Briar asked.

Lucy said, “You’ve got a gun.”

“And she can shoot it,” Swakhammer vouched as he dashed toward the back of the room, where he picked up a metal bar and used it to pry up a section of the floor in a big square sheet. Varney took over and propped it with his hip. Swakhammer returned to stand back-to-back with Lucy, his guns aiming at the west tunnel door.

“There you go,” Lucy told her. “You can take a defensive position and shoot for the head of anything that makes it through that door. Nothing else will slow them down.”

“East tunnel’s no longer uncertain,” Frank declared as he whipped the door shut and dropped a metal bar down to latch it. It shut with a crash that sounded in time with another hard push from the other side of the main entrance.

“The subbasement’s intact!” Swakhammer declared. “Do we hold the fort or bail? It’s your call, Ms. Lucy.”

“It’s always my goddamned call,” she swore.

“It’s your goddamned bar.”

She hesitated, and the front door shattered in slow motion, giving way from the middle beam outwards. “Frank, you said—”

“East way’s blocked, ma’am.”

“And that way.” She cringed as one full door slab cracked and a festering eyeball appeared behind it. “It’s hopeless, ain’t it?”

Briar lifted the rifle up to her shoulder, squinted, and fired. The eyeball vanished, but in a moment, another one took its place.

Lucy said, “Nice shot. But God knows how many more are behind him. We’ve got to bail. Bloody goddamn hell. I hate cleaning up after those things. All right. Yes. Everybody out. Varney, you hold the door. Swakhammer, up front. Everybody else, down the hatch behind the bar. You too, Miss Wilkes.”

“No. I’m staying with you.”

“Nobody’s staying. We’re all going to run for it.” Without looking over her shoulder, Lucy said, “The rest of you bastards had better have one foot in the tunnel and the other on a banana peel. When I turn around, I don’t want to see a soul except for Varney holding up the lid.”