Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (12 page)

She closed her eyes and
fought the urge to lie down beside her and weep.

Luke glanced in her
direction. He nodded slowly, stood, took a gun from the hand of one of the men
and handed it to her, took his own gun from her and holstered it.

“You all right, Jess?”

No, she was not all right.
Two men lay bleeding in her front room, goddammit. Her dog lay dead beneath her
mother’s wool blanket. The house was on fire with the two of them inside it.

She may never be all right
again.

“Yeah. Never better.”

The corners of Luke’s lips
twitched, and his features softened a little. “Good. I need you to hold it
together.” He motioned to the bodies on the floor. “Search them for me, will
you?”

Jessie stared at him for a
moment, carefully avoiding looking at what Luke had dragged in. She’d been
pretending they weren’t there. “You want me to go through a dead man’s pockets?
And what? Look for loose change?”

Luke huffed a laugh.

She wanted to scream at him
for being so calm. Being pursued by Confederate soldiers was not normal.
Exploding doors and staying in a house that was on fire was not normal. Killing
two men was not normal. This whole goddamn day was not normal, yet here Luke
was, acting like he’d asked her to get the paper.

Maybe for him death and
danger were normal.

She felt sorry for him if
that were true.

She missed the boy he’d been.
She hated the man he had become, and what he asked her to do. She hated the way
he made her
feel
.

“Take anything interesting,”
he answered finally. As he spoke, he removed cartridges from his belt-loops,
inserted them into the tube magazine of the carbine, and began winding the
weapon again. “Receipts, identification. Hell, anything that strikes your
fancy. I saw four men in the scope, and I can only account for three. I’d like
to keep my eyes on the windows and the exits. But if you’d rather be the one
holding the gun, you’re welcome to it.” He made the offer lightly, but severity
of his expression belied his words.

“Frankly, neither of those
options appeals to me.”

“Too bad you have to choose
one.”

No sense in arguing now. They
were in his world, not hers. She bent to the first body. Her eyes fell to the
holes in the man’s chest, the bright stain of blood spreading across his vest,
and she gagged.

“Breathe through your mouth,
and try to not look at
the wound. Don’t think
of it as a person. It’s just another thing, like a dress you’d see in a store
window.” Luke’s eyes never left the front window. “It will help.”

Jessie gagged again. Gasping,
she asked, “How many times you done this?”

His face was an impassive
mask. “Enough to know I wouldn’t breathe through my nose if I were you.”

Her eyes watered as she
fought the urge to vomit. Opening the dead man’s jacket, she pulled out a
pocket watch, some papers, and a fistful of cash. More money than she’d seen in
a long, long time.

“Good. We can use that.” Luke
studied her for a moment. “It was them or us, Jess. I chose us
.
”

Tears streaked down her
cheeks, her eyes watering from more than simply the sting of smoke. She moved
to the other man and went through his pockets, too, ignoring the wounds and the
smell. She pretended the man she searched was alive, a sleeping drunk, and the
ruby-red stain on his chest was from a broken bottle of port.

Smoke filled her nostrils and
her lungs. She turned, saw flames licking the floorboards, and swore.

The boilers would catch fire
any minute now, and when they did, her home would go up like fireworks.

“Bradshaw.”

Though he continued to stare
at something in the darkness, he gave her a brief nod to acknowledge her.

“The boilers. They’re gonna
go. And when they do--”

“Shit.” He turned his head
briefly to study the flames. Fire crackled, and something popped. In an
instant, Luke was on her, pushing her roughly to the floor as the entire back
wall became engulfed in flames as though someone had thrown kerosene on it.

When the boilers finally blew
in their entirety, this fire now would seem as harmless as a wood fire in the
cook stove.

Jessie pushed herself to her
knees, and clutched his shoulder. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“There’s at least one other
outside. Quite possibly more.”

“We’ll die in here.” Fear
rose with the bile in the back of her throat.

“We’re not gonna die. I’ll
get us out of here once I figure out where the other operative is.” His voice,
like his face, was calm and reasonable. Unperturbed.

Jessie coughed, and it made
her ribs hurt. “The boilers are gonna go. I can’t die in a fire.” Memories,
ghosts of a past long left forgotten, flooded her, burning beneath her breast.
Exhaustion pulled at her hard, and her voice wavered. “I’d rather be shot.”

“I wouldn’t be so worried
about getting shot, if I were you,” Luke said. “I’d worry more about what they’re
going to do to you once they finally get their hands on you. They have plans
beyond your murder. If you die in this gunfight, it’s a happy accident for you
and carelessness on their part.”

The tears pouring from her
eyes were not just from the sting of smoke, and she coughed again. “Don’t let
me die in a fire.”

Abruptly, Luke turned toward
her.

She shrieked, terrified he
intended to honor her request and do the deed himself.

“I’m not going to shoot you,”
he said sourly. He looked back in the direction of the flames. “Guess we’re
going to have to go out the front.” He paused for another moment. “Do what I
tell you. Do
only
what I tell you.
Don’t try to help me in any way. You worry about
you
.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, the gentleness of that
touch shocking in the face of such brutality. “I’ll get you out of here, Jess.
You’re not dying tonight.”

His words sounded like a
promise, and she believed him. It was the first thing she’d believed in a long
time.

“I need you to set off the
flash pots outside.” His voice was as calm as a desert lake on a windless
winter day.

“What? Won’t that attract
attention?”

He turned away, and the small
ripple of the intimacy swimming between them was extinguished. “They already
know we’re here. I’ve killed two men and you’ve set off the Gatling gun. We go
out now, we’re backlit by fire. Let’s give them something else to look at.” He
paused for a moment. “Unless you can’t do it with the shutters open?”

“No, I can.”

“Stay low, then. Don’t give
them a target,” he reminded her.

Jessie had no choice but to
obey.

As soon as the flash powder
went off, Luke grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her up behind him. “Follow
me!”

He barreled out the door and
into the night, lit up by the artificial glow of thermite hissing and popping
against the dark.

Snow fell fast and thick,
pale gray against the white-hot glow of burning thermite, the air cold and raw.
On her front walk, twenty feet away from her door, lay the bodies of one man
and one horse, both riddled with bullet holes.

I’ve
killed a man.

Before she had time to truly
process the thought, Luke shoved her hard, and she went sprawling on her stoop.
He fell beside her, as the sound of gunfire rained down upon her.

Suddenly, the gunfire ceased.
The distant wail of sirens punctuated the brief silence.

Luke
.

He laid a gentle hand upon
her back, and her heart sang with unexpected relief. “You all right, Jess?”

“Yeah,” she lied.

“It was them or us,” he
reminded her over the stock of his rifle. He moved into position and readied
the weapon. “He would’ve killed me and kidnapped you, and God only knows what
he would’ve done to you next. There’s no shame in surviving.”

Shocking how well he could
read her, even after all this time. Had she changed so little in eight years?
Because he’d changed so much.

“I never thought there was.”
But her words were yet another lie.

A series of brief flashes
appeared on the hill.

A heliograph. Communicating with
someone in this valley in the dark.

Looking through his scope,
Luke took careful aim and fired. The light went out.

She closed her eyes against
what that meant. Didn’t want to think about it, so she looked up in the
direction of Virginia City, now obscured by clouds.

Something about the light the
city cast through the clouds was too bright against the backdrop of snow and
darkness. The ore crushers ought to be audible, but all Jessie could hear was
the hissing of falling snow and the wail of far off sirens. And in that
instant, she realized the alarm wasn’t for her, and the fire brigade wasn’t
coming. No one was coming for her. They had bigger problems than a fire at the
Indian girl’s house.

Descending out of the clouds
like a great, round beast was an airship, its oblong body graceful despite its
size, and so quiet she could barely make out the sound of its engines above the
whisper of falling snow and gusting wind.

She hadn’t seen an airship in
Virginia City in the nine years since the shelling, and the sheer size of the
thing as it materialized out of the cloud cover awed her. Staring in mute
horror, she hit Luke on the shoulder to gain his attention.

“What?” he demanded crossly,
and Jessie pointed to the sky. “Shit. That can’t be one of ours. Out, Jessie!
Out, out, out!”

He was on his feet in an
instant. Yanked her up by her wrist only to shove her roughly off the stoop and
into the snow. Pushed her in the direction of the horses as the airship fired
explosive shells into the heart of Virginia City.

Then the bloated beast began
to turn as the airship maneuvered so its massive cannons faced in the direction
of Jessie’s house.

Until the guns were pointed
at them.

“Run!” Luke shouted, shoving
her so hard she stumbled and fell to her knees. “You run!”

Jessie pushed herself to her
feet as a hail of gunfire pierced the sky. Luke dove off the stoop, caught his
balance, and regained his footing without so much as a stutter. Grabbing her
hand, he hauled her behind him. Pain lanced through her chest, the act of filling
her lungs sheer torture. Though she tried, she couldn’t keep up with him and
went down again.

She was done, drawing her
last painful breaths in the gritty snow.

He slung the carbine onto his
back, looped her arm around his shoulders and helped her to her feet. “For the
love of God, Jess,
run
!”

Tears burned her eyes. “I can’t.”

“You have to,” he told her
fiercely. “Don’t break on me now. We’re almost there.”

“I can’t.” Her voice
splintered in her throat. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” He shouldered
her weight when she began to slump. “C’mon sweet, you can do this. The horses
are just over the ridge. We can do this.”

He pulled her along, and she
forced her feet to move.

“We’re almost there,” he
panted, glancing over his shoulder.

Jessie didn’t care what he was
looking for. She couldn’t go any further, and if she got shot, she preferred to
be shot in the back.

Run
,
Jessie
, a voice said in her head. Familiar and not unkind.

She ignored it, and went down
to her knees.

An explosion rocked the
ground beneath them, and she turned her head in time to see her house go up in
flames, the fire burning so hot she felt it even at such a distance in this
weather. Just beyond her burning life, she could barely make out the movements
of the airship through the snow and the darkness. Saw the bright flash as it
fired on her city.

Not her city. Virginia City
had never been
her
city. It had been
her father’s. As she lost it, and his house, she lost him all over again.

“Don’t look at it. Just run.”
Luke yanked on her arm in an attempt to get her to stand. Her ribs and her
aching shoulder shrieked and she resisted him. She was done. Finished. She
accepted death as it came.

She never thought she’d live
that long anyway.

“Don’t fucking do this to me,
Jess.” Real fury burned in Luke’s eyes. “Get a hold of yourself. You’re better
than this. Don’t fucking give up now.”

“I hate you.”

“I thought you were tougher
than this. Never knew you were some wilting flower who’d roll over and die at
the first sign of trouble.”

“You’re an ass,” she snarled.

“Maybe so, but I’m an ass who
will live. Not sure the same can be said for you. I never would have taken you
for a coward.”

She gasped against the weight
of cold and soot in her lungs. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew me at all.”