Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (30 page)

That little voice in the back of White's
mind, the one that came with years of the working for the law
behind it, was chattering again.

"Is that him?" White asked, jabbing McInnis
in the arm and pointing at the suspicious individual.

McInnis hesitated. The
beginnings of a word formed in his mouth, but something held him
back. A process of cognition—an uncertain deliberation. White could
tell he wasn't trying to determine
if
that was the person in question,
but rather, whether he ought to say anything about it.

That was all the confirmation White
needed.

The stranger turned his head to the left,
then to the right. One of his eyes caught the sight of the sheriff
in his unmistakable ivory jacket.

Privately, White gasped. The stranger's other
eye, lazy as it was, brought the face back to the fore of White's
memory. The assassin wasn't a man at all—it was that
broad-shouldered, angry Jameson girl. Old Man Beaumont's
neighbor.

A look of panic washed over her face, and
White knew he'd been recognized.

The space between two heartbeats stretched
into a song, while White's reflexes kicked into gear. His right
hand went to his holster. His left leg stepped forward, as he
lowered his center of gravity.

The girl's .45 made its way out of her
jacket. But she did not take aim at White. Instead, she returned
her gaze towards Susanna. She raised the barrel, and fired one shot
before White let off a round of his own.

Two bullets ripped through the air in
competing paths.

The would-be assassin collapsed. Her hat
traveled along its own separate impact trajectory.

As people nearby began to register what was
happening, panic radiated outwards in all directions.

White tried to make sense of what was
happening, but it was all happening very quickly. A shriek erupted
from near the girl White had just shot. It was coming from a woman
whom White recognized as the Spanish duchess. Her face was now
drenched in the deep red blood of the Jameson girl, who'd
collapsed, limp, into her arms.

A human mass began to push against White and
McInnis. McInnis, on his one leg, was quickly felled.

People were panicking. This was going to be a
stampede.

White turned around to appraise the
situation. He had to get a handle on it.

Those who hadn't been able
to squeeze inside the factory before now stuck their heads
in
every entryway to get
a better look.

The two sides—those trying to get out, and
those trying to look inside—were working against each other,
creating an inflexible human wall.

White turned around again to see if Susanna
had been struck by the assassin's bullet. But she was nowhere to be
seen.

Susanna wasn't quite sure what had happened
to set off the insanity; she hadn't even registered where the shots
had come from. She just knew the factory was descending into
pandemonium.

She leapt down from the rear of the stage,
out of the crowd's vantage. Back here, it was just her and a
football field's worth of assembly line equipment. She started to
run for the rear exit.

Where was Wayne? Where had he gone? Her heart
was racing. She couldn't remember the official escape plan. It had
all gone too real, and now her fight-or-flight was kicking in. She
just needed to get out of here. The agonized screams of those being
trampled by the human swarm bounced around the walls of the
factory. Unavoidable.

She took one look backward,
despite her better judgement, and watched as those trapped inside
the factory smashed the large glass windows, sending deadly, heavy
fragments of it flying into the crowd. Previously civilized people
climbed over one another, indiscriminate of age or gender, to
escape. Emboldened antagonists, meanwhile, climbed over the
escapees to get inside. They carried the biggest rocks they could
find, and began smashing everything they could. It was as if they
were doing their best to recreate the workers' revolt in Jesse's
film. She was watching
The Robbery of
Bridgetown
play out, just as she'd read
about it.

"Wayne!" she called out. But she could barely
hear herself, yet alone hope anyone else could.

Rioters were climbing over the barricade now,
and spilling out onto the factory floor. They began to destroy
everything within sight with a Luddite zeal, tearing metal from
metal with inhuman strength.

They tipped the gleaming Mark III off its
rotating dias, sending it slamming into the concrete floor.
Shattered glass and chrome accouterments spilled out across the
polished surface.

Susanna had to get out before they found her.
She ran.

She didn't know where she was going.

She glanced back. A vandal spotted her, and
raised the factory piece he'd ripped from the wall as if it were a
club.

She kept running. Close to the exit now.

The door was within reach.

She threw open the door, and cast herself out
into the blinding light of the desert. Sunlight hugged her
flesh.

There, not far from where she stood, she saw
a familiar sight: a Jeep.

Jesse's Jeep.

She looked into his eyes for the first time
in nearly a month. "Why did you do this?" she asked, between
panting breaths.

"We didn't," he replied. "The people of
Bridgetown did."

We?
She didn't feel anger, exactly. There was too much futility
in what she felt to classify it as anger. Confusion, yes.
Frustration, certainly.

"You should get in," Jesse said. "Let me take
you away from here."

"I don't need you to rescue me, Jesse."

"Not a rescue. A way out."

She could feel the mob at her back. They'd
find her if she stayed any longer. And they would lynch her.

"I'll only come with you on one condition,"
she said, unsure if she meant it.

"Okay."

"Take me to Black. I want to talk to him. I
want to understand everything."

"Everything?"

"Yes," Susanna said. "Everything. Why this
just happened. Why you made your damn movie. How we ended up here
in the first place."

"Alright," Jesse replied. "But you have to
promise me one thing, too."

Susanna glanced back reflexively. She
imagined that man with his club catching up with her, and what he
would do to her if he did.

"What?" she asked.

"If I find a way home—if Black can get us
where we belong, after all this dust is settled—you have to come
back with me."

"Okay," she said, but it sounded hollow, even
to her. She'd thought just like him once, years ago. But it was
laughable to focus on escape, now, when there were so many more
immediate issues to address. Still, she climbed into the Jeep, not
once looking him in the eyes.

He floored the gas, and began to drive away
from the factory into the wilderness of the hills beyond
Bridgetown.

Susanna watched as the factory—her
factory—receded into the distance of the rear-view mirror. She
wondered if she'd ever see it again, or if everything had been
snatched from her hands for the last time.

* * * *

Sheriff White observed the scene before him:
A line of a thirteen hastily-erected tents, their canvas fluttering
in the nighttime wind, constituted the makeshift emergency relief
site outside the factory. Somewhere inside them were sixteen
bodies. A dozen of the poor souls had been trampled inside the
factory as the crowd stampeded for the exits, and four more had
been shot to death by White's own police force in the melee. One
additional man had been severely burned by a small fire that broke
out, and the doctors were unsure whether he would survive. That
wasn't even accounting for the young assassin White himself had
shot dead.

What a bloody day this had been. Goddamn
Wayne for ignoring his warnings about exactly this sort of thing.
Goddamn himself for not putting up a bigger fight, for not arguing
with Wayne, and instead allowing Cole to get his way once again.
Now the whole city would pay the price. Whatever value Wayne was
hoping would be attached to Cole Automotive thanks to this event
was clearly gone. Instead, the whole of the country would know
Bridgetown only as a great place to start a riot.

In the hours after the chaos, White had put
all of Bridgetown on lockdown. He was testing the limits of his
authority, but he'd managed to get the cabbies to agree not to take
anyone in or out of town. His deputies were keeping Main Street and
other probable meeting spots clear of lingerers. Wayne was back on
his property, apparently camped out in some kind of secret bunker.
There was still no sign of Mrs. Cole.

Also of conspicuous absence was Jane Carlyle
and the SLPA. Clearly, they had the good sense to hightail it out
of town while they still could. White was convinced she and her
cronies must've been the ones to throw the first stones, to have
stormed the factory doors and incited the deadly panic. And now she
was gone, evaporated into the mist as suddenly as she'd
arrived.

Termites…

White looked back at the town, its lights
glowing in the distance. Downtown was way at the opposite end of
the road to the factory. Nevertheless, he could feel something
beckoning him. It was the same uncanny sensation he sometimes felt
transmitting into his consciousness from Devil's Peak. He suspected
it happened to everyone in Bridgetown from time to time, only most
people weren't comfortable talking about it, and so everyone went
on about their way, thinking they were crazy. But this time, the
feeling wasn't coming from the mountain.

He scanned the crowd with his eyes, finding
Harry over by the third tent, where the most critically wounded
were being tended to as best was possible. Harry must've been
trying to get more news about the burned man.

"Harry!" White called, making his way over to
his deputy.

"Colonel," Harry said, sounding deflated.

"Listen, I've got something to take care of
downtown."

Harry raised his eyebrows, dubious.
"'Something to take care of?'"

How to explain it? "I'm hoping I might shed
some light on who's behind this," White replied.

"I thought it was pretty clear who's behind
this—"

"Hear me out, Harry. I need you to keep the
peace down here. Hold down the fort, make sure there's no trouble,
and I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Okay," Harry said, his response trailing off
with implied uncertainty.

White gave him a nod and began his march to
downtown. To the red light district.

The door to Clayburn's was shut, but the
lights were on and the muffled, raucous sounds of the saloon still
leaked out into the shut-down street. White opened the door,
walking into a haze of smoke, and shut it behind him.

While the lockdown had most of Bridgetown
feeling like a ghost town this night, the saloon was roaring with
activity. The atmosphere buzzed with what felt like celebration,
even.

Anger burned within White's chest as he drank
in the sight of dozens of black-coated bandits—practically in
brazen uniform as Lotus Boys—drinking and pokering and telling each
other stories. A few of the men saw him in glances, but none
allowed their eyes to linger on his conspicuous presence for too
long. Best to ignore him and, hopefully, remain invisible that
way.

White walked in that deliberate,
shoulders-back manner with which he'd confronted the crowd of
activists days earlier. He made his way down the long hall—past the
poker tables, past Clayburn, polishing glasses behind his bar as
usual, and towards the door on the far wall.

There it was. Though he could barely remember
his dream, the sensation of recognition told him, proof-positive,
that it was this door which he had seen in it. It was this plain
rose-lacquered door that had been calling to him.

Two Lotus Boys stood by the door, hands on
their belts, talking. As White reached out to turn the knob, one of
them put out a hand to block him.

"This door's off-limits without permission,"
the gangster said, his words escaping from between uneven,
tobacco-stained teeth.

White pointed to the badge on his jacket.
"Official police business. Now, if you don't let me through, I'll
be happy to throw you in jail for the obstruction of justice."

The man looked to his partner, muttered
something in Spanish, then turned back to White. He shrugged. "Suit
yourself." Then he turned the knob, and opened it for White.

The sheriff found himself staring down a
steep staircase carved out of the earth that seemed to go on
forever into the void. A sudden, dizzying sense of vertigo hit
him.

"You're gonna want that lantern," the Lotus
Boy said.

White took the lantern hanging from a nail in
the wall. "Thanks," he said, a bit bewildered, and lit it with a
match.

He took the first few steps down the shaft,
keeping an eye on the gangster to make sure he didn't try to put a
bullet in his back. The Lotus Boy closed the door behind him. A
chill ran down White's spine. Nowhere to go now but down.

He took the next few stairs. Each footstep
landed with the sound of dirt scraping under his boot—the wooden
planks were covered in a disconcerting patina of debris, and he
felt liable to slip and fall at any moment. Each step was a few
inches too short for comfort—he almost had to angle his feet
outward to keep on them. His free hand remained on the clammy
tunnel wall for security, breaking contact with it only
occasionally, to clear the cobwebs.

The farther down he went, the more distant
the sounds of the saloon became. What did it mean that this
passageway existed underneath the saloon? It certainly wasn't on
any official documentation inside city hall. How long had it been
here? White got the creeping sense that he was only now discovering
a secret that had been hidden from him in plain sight for
years.