Deseret

Deseret

City of the Saints, Part
the Second

By D.J. Butler

Cover Art and Design by
Nathan Shumate

Copyright 2012 D.J. Butler

Read more about D.J. Butler
at
http://davidjohnbutler.com

I worked hard to produce this book.
 
Pirating this book means stealing from
me; please don’t do it.

City of the Saints
is
an adventure in four parts:

Part the First is
Liahona
.

Part the Second is
Deseret
.

Part the Third is
Timpanogos
.

Part the Fourth is
Teancum
.

If you like
City of the Saints
, you might also enjoy
Rock Band Fights Evil
, my action-horror pulp fiction serial.

Rock Band #1 is
Hellhound
on My Trail
.

Rock Band #2 is
Snake
Handlin’ Man
.

Rock Band #3 is
Crow
Jane
.

Rock Band #4 is
Devil
Sent the Rain
.

Rock Band #5 is
This
World Is Not My Home
.

Chapter Six

Mexican Stridermen evacuated the
Liahona’s
passengers so the crew could pump out its furnace
and restart it.
 
They had just
happened along, a few hours after the big steam-truck had shattered the bridge,
bound for the Salt Lake Valley, and by then the passengers clustered on the
truck’s deck were bored, restless, and ready to be helped ashore.
 
Other than the showman, Archibald, or
Poe, whatever his real name was, who seemed to be keeping out of sight.
 
Dick Burton looked furious, like a bear
in a pit, snapping at anyone and anything that got in his way, and he stuck to
the steam-truck’s captain like glue.
 
Absalom made sure to steer clear of both of them.
 
Captain Jones, if anything, looked even
angrier than Burton, so Absalom was happy to get off the
Liahona
for a little while.

Absalom rode across to the west bank of the river in the
folding back rumble seat of a Strider with a long-faced woman he didn’t know
and her two children.
 
He had tried
to maneuver to get into the same Strider as Annie, but when passengers had
lined up to board, he hadn’t been able to find her.
 
He was polite, though, doffing his damaged hat and smiling
at the children even when one of them kicked him in the shin.
 
Some of the baggage had floated away
with the flooding of the
Liahona’s
belly, and the Stridermen chased that down too, in their jerky, long-legged
vehicles.

Absalom had never before seen a real live Mexican or one of
their Striders, and he found them fascinating.
 
They looked vaguely chivalrous, like knights of the trash
heap, with smoked-glass visors on their bulky helmets, cup-like padding on
knees and elbows and shoulders, high riding boots and many-buckled leather
harnesses belted about their hips and chests.
 
They behaved like knights, too, deferential and helpful and
modest, though they kept their visors down.
 
With their rifle-fired suction harpoons, they had quickly
snared the larger pieces of luggage.
 
One of the Striders had knelt down and disgorged a Striderman, who had
waded into waist-high water with a long pole like a boathook and dragged in the
last of the passengers’ drifting things.

One of the final items recovered was a smallish trunk that
Absalom recognized as his own, and he had rushed over to the Striderman as he
dragged it up onto the bank.
 
“Thank you!” he cried.
 
“Thank you, er, officer!
 
Sir!”

The Striderman pulled off his helmet and shook out long
curling black hair, down past her padded shoulders.
 

“I am not a sir,” she said in a rich Mexican accent.

She was beautiful.
 
Her skin was cinnamon-dark and her eyes were coal and her lips were full
and she looked like she might just punch Absalom in the face.
 
He swallowed hard.

“Ma’am,” he corrected himself.

“No, cabrón,” she insisted slowly.
 
She talked to him like she was talking to a backward
child.
 
“Si yo fuera oficial… if I
were an officer, I would be a
Sir
.
 
Man or woman makes no difference, all
officers are
Sir
.
 
But I am not an officer, I am a Master
Sergeant.”
 
She edged one shoulder
in his direction, as if the chevrons stitched onto it were supposed to mean
something to him.
 
“And Master
Sergeant is as high as I go.
 
The
Ejército Nacional has a policy of
not
promoting its best gunners out from behind their guns.”

“Yes, ah, I see,” Absalom lied.
 
“How shall I address you, then?”

She turned partly away from him and mounted the bent leg of
her Strider.
 
The vehicle reminded
Absalom of the tales of Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut that his Russian
grandmother had told him when he was a small boy.
 
It consisted of a cockpit the size of a couple of sofas
jammed together, protected from the elements by a glass windscreen and a
leather membrane on an accordion skeleton that could be pulled over to protect
from inclement weather.
 

Inside the cockpit were two chairs and the folding rumble
seat, and around the outside of it were built compartments like steel
saddlebags and holsters.
 
A
swiveling platform with several cannons protruding from its nose rose at the
back of the carriage, but the entire thing was studded with tubes like guns of
unknown make and power—Absalom had seen the Mexicans shoot harpoons out
of some of them, but at least one big one in front seemed to have a
spring-loaded hammer on the top of its many-chambered cylinder, and Absalom had
seen an open pouch full of things that might be bullets, built into shiny brass
jackets.
 
Two legs sprouted from
the right and left sides, or shoulders, of the carriage.
 
Each leg dropped through two powerful
pistons and a large, flexible ball joint to terminate in a crude four-toed
claw.
 
The Striders
hissed
and
clanked
when they moved, and emitted a constant puff of thin black fumes out
their tail, and they looked like giant, menacing chickens.

“No creo que sea necesario.
 
I don’t really see that joo will need to talk to me again at
all, inglés,” she said, sounding completely indifferent.
 
“Peró en caso que tenga ocasión, joo
can call me Master Sergeant.”
 
She
hopped with practiced nonchalance up the bent leg of her Strider and vaulted
into the carriage.
 
Now that he
knew she was a woman, he wondered how on earth he had missed it before.
 
Even through her padding and bodysuit,
he could see now that she was curvaceous and very feminine.
 
“Master Sergeant
Jackson
, if joo need to tell me apart from Ortiz allá.”

Absalom wondered if Ortiz was also a beautiful woman.
 
Maybe they all were, though he thought
if President Tubman’s Ejército Nacional consisted entirely of ebony-skinned
amazons, Mexico City would have been a more desirable Foreign Office posting
than it was.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!
 
The Strider rose smoothly to its feet,
pistons sliding, steam hissing from its joints and fumes chugging out its
tail.
 
Master Sergeant Jackson
dropped her smoked glass faceplate back into place and said something to her
companion in the carriage.
 
She
didn’t wave to Absalom as the Strider turned its back on him and crunched off
through the tall grass to join its fellows, resuming their collective trek into
the Kingdom of Deseret.

She didn’t look back to see
him
wave, either.

*
  
*
  
*

“You’re being real brave, boy,” Jed told the big-eyed
youngster.
 
“Keep it up, we’ll be
outta here in no time at all.”

What the hell are you doing, Coltrane? he wondered.
 
Ten years ago you would have killed
that kid the minute you saw him on top of the
Liahona’s
wheelhouse, killed him with your bare hands and then
fed him to the beetles.
 
Of course,
it would have been crocodiles back then, you hadn’t ever met Horace Hunley or
any of the crew that the Richmond set like to call
Whitney’s boys
and you were doing flips on the circuit with a
shit-eating grin on your face, catching nickels they threw at you with your
toes, or working the Ikey Heyman with one eye out for Johnny Law, in case the
patch money didn’t hold.
 
Hell, how
long has it been since you wrestled an alligator?
 
Or even saw one?

Government work’s making you soft.

That was a real problem, since it wasn’t a government he was
working for.
 
Not yet, anyway.
 
Right now it was just a bunch of men.
 
They
wanted
to be a government, Jed thought that someday they
might
be a government, but right now they were traitors
and hard men and desperadoes in the halls of power.
 
He couldn’t really afford to get crosswise with his bosses,
especially not over some damn kid.

Jed sighed.
 
He wriggled
and twisted, the ropes that the beak-nosed Irishman had used to tie him chafing
at his wrists and forearms and ankles.
 
He and John Moses—also tied hand and foot—sat in a big
bathtub like two wiggling peas in a porcelain pod, with a white curtain, three
shut doors and most likely a
Do Not Disturb
sign between them and the hall.
 

“We could yell for help,” John Moses suggested.

Of course that seems like a good idea to him, Jed
realized.
 
He lives here, he’s
innocent, he’s just a kid.
 
Me, I
yell for help and even if someone
does
hear me through all the doors and the hissing of the pipes in the walls, I
gotta start answering questions I’d rather not, like for starters probably
what’s
a cracker dwarf from Shitsville, Arkansas doing hog-tied in a bathtub in the
Deseret Hotel
, and eventually maybe even
hey,
midget, what do you know about the disappearance of a Pinkerton detective from
a honeypot stall in Bridger’s Saloon in the Wyoming Territory night before
last?

It hardly mattered, anyway.
 
If there were any chance of their being heard, the Irishman
would have gagged them.
 
Or cut
their tongues out.
 
“You go ahead
and give it a try, John Moses,” Jed suggested, jerking one shoulder to try to
dislocate it on purpose.
 
Not Sam
Clemens, though.
 
Sam seemed to be,
what?
 
Merciful?
 
Fair?
 
Aloof?
 
Undecided?
 
Ironic?
 
The dwarf wasn’t sure, but he knew if
their places had been switched, he’d have killed the Union man and thrown him
off the steam-truck.

Or maybe not, given that Jed Coltrane seemed to have become
a complete sissy.

The Irishman, now, he’d have killed Jed for sure, if Clemens
hadn’t interfered.
 
The little man
stopped his writhing long enough to shudder.
 
As soon as they had checked in, the evil-looking red-head
had spent all of three minutes experimenting and had figured out how to work
Hunley’s scarab cylinder.

It wasn’t any great trick; the thing only had two
buttons.
 
But the way O’Shaughnessy
had gone about it took a certain determination and a dark bent of mind.
 
After shaking both his tied up prisoners
out of the steamer trunk in which they’d come up to the hotel room, he’d said
nothing.
 
Instead, he’d made a show
of pouring the scarabs out over the little boy.
 
Then he’d pantomimed pressing the buttons.

“No!” Jed Coltrane had shouted, and the Irishman knew then
what he had in his hands, or at least he could guess.
 
Two destroyed seat cushions later, he’d packed the cylinder
back into his greatcoat pocket, and when the two Yankees had left, the scarabs
had gone with them, along with both the Maxim Hushers.
 
The Irishman was going out among the
Mormons dressed to kill.

Jed had expected John Moses to be hollering now, but the boy
just stared at him with patient, observant eyes.
 
He stared back, a little fiercer than he needed to, to make
a point.
 
“What?” he wanted to
know.

“You’re brave,” John Moses said.
 
“You’re the bravest kid I know.”

Jed Coltrane’s effort to dislocate his own shoulder fell
apart in the paroxysms of his own laughter.
 
“Oh, that’s good,” he laughed.
 
“That’s really rich.”
 
He sighed, some of the tension shaking out of him, and then he scrunched
up onto his knees and tried to poke his head through the tub’s curtain.
 
“Let’s try some tumbling.”
 
He’d never been good at the
contortionist stuff, anyway.
 
He
curled forward as he let himself roll out of the tub, so he completed half a
somersault and landed on his own shoulder, relatively painlessly.
 
His falling body jerked the curtain
open and it stayed.

John Moses was puzzled.
 
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
 

Jed wormed his way across the floor on his belly and the
boy’s voice, resounding from behind the curtain and within the tub’s recessed
niche, echoed and bounced as if far away.
 
He hoisted himself to his feet by pushing off against the wall with his
head.
 
The doorknob was too big for
his teeth, but he thought if he hit it just right with his head—

crack!

Nope.

“Look, John Moses,” Jed grunted, not really sure why he was
bothering to explain, “you ain’t ever seen a kid like me before.
 
You ain’t seen a kid as hairy as me, as
ugly as I am, as foul-mouthed or as drinks as much.
 
That’s ’cause there ain’t no such kid, not in this whole
wide world.”