The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead (26 page)

“Do you think…” but Georgina couldn’t bring herself to articulate what they were both thinking.

“The sooner we get to the engine and breath air that’s filled with honest dirt and soot the happier I’ll be.”

“Me too.”

First, they had to negotiate the poor unfortunate on the floor, which they did by waiting for his movements to create a space and jumping over him. They were very glad to reach the far connecting door. In the glass, Georgina saw her reflection and Death loomed over her shoulder. She turned, horrified, and saw an approaching demon, enveloped in a black mackintosh with a face distorted by giant, blank eyes and a snout bulged at the front. His breathing rasped as the monster pulled the poisoned air through the mask.

Georgina recognised them: “Those masks, the… beaks? Like plague doctors wore.”

“It has bug eyes… go!”

“Pardon?” said Georgina.

“Go! Go! Fly!”

They went through into the next carriage. There was death and dying everywhere, a charnel house of moving corpses. Earnestine and Georgina ran, not stopping to find a safe way to jump over the decaying flesh, but simply trusting to fortune for sure footedness. Earnestine grabbed Georgina’s bustle to hold her up and to stop herself from stumbling. Bones cracked underfoot and their boots splashed in oozing gore.

The next carriage was for baggage. Assigned to each side were crates and luggage while on the floor was a cage filled with rotting chickens, dead but flapping their wings in mindless distress, and the pig was finished too. Earnestine went to a rack to try and find some weapon. There was a set of golf clubs. Earnestine gave one to Georgina.

Behind them gunshots sounded, each single and precise, as their pursuers dealt with the dying.

“We’re done for,” said Georgina as she compared her No.8 iron with the approaching 8 mms.

“Not yet.”

Outside, the sheer blast of air was both clean after the horrors of the train’s interior and overpoweringly cold. A few feet in front of them there was the black wall of steel that was the tender.

“We’ll have to climb the coal store,” said Earnestine, taking off the white covering. Georgina did the same and noticed the yellow stain where she’d been breathing through it. Earnestine had spied a metal ladder and grasped a rung to ascend. Georgina joined her, waiting for Earnestine’s boots to step clear of the rungs. She took hold too and climbed. Above her, Earnestine disappeared over the metal rim and when her own head rose above the edge, she expected to be blasted by black specks and fireflies of burning cinder from the engine, but there was only cold air. Ahead, on her hands and knees, Earnestine crawled towards a geyser of smoke which rose vertically.

A beam of light cut through the darkness causing Georgina to glance at its source. Above them, its rotors labouring to stay steady, was the massive whale–like shape of a Zeppelin. From underneath, blinding when it found her, a searchlight scanned the train. Men dropped on the two ropes, one from either side of the gondola, to land on the train roof further back. The restaurant coach, Georgina reckoned. The first to land, standing stock still, was dressed in black: a black coat, black gloves, black boots, black spiked helmet and a black mask that glistened and it had a snout, while its wide glassy eyes stared along the carriages.

Earnestine was shouting at her, her face distorted and her mouth screaming open: whatever she was yelling was whipped away by the noise and fury of the steam engine. Georgina started forward, crawling across the chaos of coal, her hands and precious skirt ruined by the black muck. When she reached the far end and shuffled round to descend down the far ladder into the cab, she saw the big sad eyes of the masked man gazing across the rocky landscape of the fuel tender.

“There’s a bug eyed man,” she said.

Earnestine was already examining the levers: “Where’s the gee–up control?”

“I don’t know. It needs coal.” Georgina picked up a shovel from the floor. A thought struck her. “Where’s the driver and the stoker?”

“They made a run for it when they train stopped,” said Earnestine. She pointed. Georgina saw two bodies lying some distance away cut down by sniper fire from above.

That would be their fate: it would take time for the first masked man to cross to the engine, but their approach was inexorable. And then what? If they jumped off surely they would turn an ankle at the very least and the men, the soldiers, would be upon them even if they dodged the snipers from above. Being chased in some foreign countryside was no safer than being pursued in the train. On foot, the behemoth of the sky would be able to follow them, pointing them out with its searchlight and allowing the nightmare squad to chase them at their leisure.

The controls were brass and steel, and complicated looking.

“Do something?” Earnestine said to her. “You said there’s a Bug Eye coming.”

“Do what? With what? I’m not armed.”

“You had a golf club!”

“I must have put it down,” Georgina said, looking around.

“You’re holding a shovel.”

“Yes,” said Georgina, “and he has a gun. I’m not armed.”

“Oh, for goodness sake, give it to me,” said Earnestine, and she took the shovel off Georgina. “You get the train moving.”

Georgina turned her attention to the steam engine’s controls. See if she cared if Earnestine wanted to take on the whole Austro–Hungarian army with a shovel.

The dials were in a foreign language that wasn’t French or Latin, so Georgina had no chance of deciphering them. All the writing used that strange German lettering that seemed deliberately designed to be impossible to read. Speaking loudly and clearly in English seemed to work on foreigners, so Georgina thought it rude that they didn’t return the favour by labelling things in English with big letters. One of the dials was in the red and another’s needle jerked around wildly. Didn’t Boys’ Schools do Engineering? She preferred the study of fauna and flora, finding her butterfly collection so much more natural: she made a face at the whole mess of plumbing and metalwork.

She’d have to ask Earnestine.

Her sister was making her way across the tender, wobbling on the uneven surface of the coal. A black shape squared up to her, it huge eyes reflected the firelight from the engine and seemed to blaze like a devil’s.

Earnestine turned sideways, tapped the shovel on the coal as if she was taking a hockey slapshot, except she raised the shovel well above her shoulders, which was not allowed on the playing field. The clang when the shovel connected was satisfying and the bug–eyed creature disappeared as Earnestine struggled to maintain her footing. She moved on, well out of earshot given the racket from the engine.

Georgina went back to controls.

“Coal in here, gets hot…” she mumbled to herself. There was another gauge that was labelled ‘Celsius’, which she knew was something to do with ‘Fahrenheit’: it was high. “Heats up water to create steam like a kettle.”

Although there was no–one to hear her lecture, it started to make sense. Her index finger wiggled this way and that over the maze, until she was fairly sure that one particular brass wheel was important. She turned it.

Oh, and that was a brake! Squeeze and release!

The engine hissed like an angry snake and she stumbled backwards as the serpent struck forward. She fell over the body on the floor and screamed when she saw an inhuman face.

“It’s only a mask,” Earnestine said.

The fight between Earnestine and the soldier must have worked its way back to the cab while she was concentrating.

Earnestine handed Georgina the shovel and picked up the dropped rifle.

“Do you know how to use that?”

“Of course,” Earnestine said, immediately shooting a ricocheting bullet around the cab. “Maybe not.”

“Charlotte would know.”

“I wouldn’t trust her with a gun,” said Earnestine shaking the rifle. “How do you get this thing to reload?”

Above, more figures were sliding down ropes. Although the train was now moving, it wasn’t at a speed fast enough to hinder the boarding party.

“They’re coming,” Georgina said.

They needed more speed. Georgina went and fiddled with controls. The train did gain some momentum and so, above, the Zeppelin appeared to pull away as they moved away beneath it.

“Pressure’s down,” Georgina said.

“How do you know?”

“This gauge, it shows the pressure and it goes up to here, but the arrow’s down here.”

“I see.”

“We’re going ten, just over… dropping I think.”

“Ten sounds fast.”

“It’s in kilometres per hour… so, it’s walking pace.”

“Oh, that’s just dandy.”

Earnestine glanced up and over towards the Zeppelin, and her brow furrowed. She was making the calculation, guessing at the airship’s top speed, the steam train’s, and the distance between them. Her lips tightened in her distinctive way.

“We shovel coal,” said Earnestine.

“This is my best petti…” Georgina began, but then she saw her ruined skirts, blackened and ripped. “Fine.”

The two sisters grabbed the shovels and collected the coal that bounced and jumped on the vibrating metal floor. Earnestine gripped the boiler door with her hand wrapped in a petticoat. There was a blast of hot air from within. Georgina carefully sprinkled the coal into the maw of the machine.

“This isn’t going to work,” she said.

Earnestine glanced up at the receding whirring noise overhead, and said: “It has to.”

“Aren’t we supposed to stack the coal with wood?”

“Just shovel.”

Earnestine left the door open, scooped across the floor and flung the coal into the machine. She repeated this, and then switched to the coal store behind them. Georgina followed suit. They shovelled, each working out a rhythm as they went, and more coal from the tender spilled down the chute to replace the fuel they’d spirited away. Soon they were taking it in turns, Georgina desperately trying to keep up with Earnestine and get her swing between her sister’s, so they’d be like two arms beating a drum. She would swear that the fire was getting hotter, but maybe it was the… woah, the fire leapt forth and flames spilled around the metalwork.

“Pressure, boiler,” she said.

Earnestine understood: “I’ll keep shovelling.”

Georgina went to the gauges and dials, levers and machinery. She fiddled, tapped the gauges with her knuckle as if they were barometers, and something hissed loudly and urgently. Earnestine shovelled, her palms being ripped and rubbed into a mimic of a domestic’s hands. The train was jostling side to side and going much faster, the dark shapes of trees and posts whipping past.

The rail line was making a slow turn to the left, a long arc as it followed the contour of the turning valley. The Zeppelin wasn’t anywhere near. It had turned away, its long shape truncated into that of a black oval against the sky, the last rays of the setting sun catching it.

“They’re moving away,” Georgina said. “Ness, they’re giving up.”

“The railway curves to the left.” Earnestine said thrusting her hand out to show the direction of travel. “They’re cutting the corner.”

Georgina saw that this was true, that the slower Zeppelin was going as the crow flies while their vehicle was taking a more leisurely, almost scenic, route. The airship would reach the far end of the valley before they did, that was obvious, and then they could simply hover over the track until the train passed beneath them.

“Perhaps we could turn round,” Georgina said. “This must have a backwards lever?”

“Do you really want to go back to Austro–Hungary?”

“No.”

“Do think, Gina.”

When they had been powering along the straight, the fire and smoke had been wrenched backwards, sparks bouncing off the carriages as if they were bullets fired from the funnel, but now they were moving around a curve and the billowing smoke flung a line across the valley away from the train. The wind, which the engine had hurtled towards pell–mell, had been like uphill work for the Zeppelin. But now it tacked across the wind and was gaining speed.

“We’d go faster if we had fewer carriages,” Georgina said.

“There must be a connecting clasp or something.”

They scrambled up onto the tender and worked along the coal again. The Zeppelin had turned and was giving chase. Men on the end of the ropes waited for the train to come underneath so they could drop down.

The coupling that connected the tender to the first coach was like two iron claws attached with a pin in a hole. Georgina leaned over dangerously and grabbed it, pulled with all her might, but it didn’t move. There wasn’t room for both of them to do it together, so Earnestine jumped to the coach, leaned in and pulled too. The pin was too big for their cold and dirty hands. It came up and then fell back as a safety chain caught. Georgina churned the links through her fingers looking for the catch as a maelstrom of black pebbles showered across the metal walkway. It was never ending, like a chain of rosary beads.

A masked man, his eyes seemingly larger than ever possible, loomed at the end of the corridor behind Earnestine. His fixed eyes showed no surprise, they did not widen with realisation, but he moved with a renewed vigour towards them.

The chain came apart in Georgina’s hand and the pin came up, jagging as the engine tugged and jostled the fuel tender.

The coupling came apart.

A gap of rushing ground opened.

Without its heavy load, the engine jerked forward and Georgina toppled forward into the widening void. Earnestine pushed her away with punching fists and Georgina fell back on the tiny metal platform.

On the other side of the widening space, the masked man grabbed Earnestine. The wind caught his oiled mackintosh, so that it spread like the wings of a monstrous bat.

Georgina was helpless: her sister was just out of reach.

“Ness!”

Mere feet away, a yard, two yards, three…

The engine began to speed away. Earnestine struggled with the bug–eyed monster, getting smaller and more insignificant, shrinking with every moment as the coaches were left behind, swallowed by the swirling yellow fog belching from the tiny train.