Hellfire (9 page)

“And bring him home?” Ann asked.

Blake opened his mouth to agree, but he shut it again. After a moment, he said, “No, I don’t think so. Something strange is going on.”

“Strange?” Mrs. Kemp asked.

“I’m not sure what else to call it,” Blake said. He decided not to mention Kemp’s monsters. The Rail Agency was suspicious enough. “It might not be safe for him here, or you either. Do you have anyone you could stay with for a few days?”

The Kemp women looked at each other.

Blake tapped his boot against the floor. “I wish I had time to explain… I wish I knew what to explain. But, I have a feeling that something very bad is happening. You might want to go somewhere the Rail Agency wouldn’t be able to find you… or Nate.”

“We could go to the Johnsons’,” Ann said.

Mrs. Kemp nodded. “Belle and Jim would understand. They’re on Moore Street.”

“Good, I’ll take Nate there,” Blake said. “When I find him.”

He leaped onto the stairs, thrusting out his feet to catch himself in a perpetual fall more than stepping down them.

“Godspeed!” Mrs. Kemp called after him.

“I sure can use it,” Blake mumbled.

He burst out into the street. It was empty. Traffic moved at either end in a mix of wagons, pedestrians, and men on horseback. There was no sign of the hunchbacks clinging to the buggy. He’d been so worried about them coming after him that he’d never thought...

“They went that way, sir!” a voice called.

Blake jumped.

It was the messenger boy, pointing up the road. Blake blinked at him a moment and then followed his blue-clad arm.

“North,” Blake muttered. “Toward the airfield.”

Ticks must have been very serious to go back to the airship instead of just catching one of the trains heading west. Blake might have been able to catch up with them at the train station, but once they took flight, he’d never catch up to them on foot. Waiting for a train wouldn’t work, either.

Blake turned back to the messenger. “I need a horse. A good, fast one. One that could get me to Oak Grove faster than an airship.”

“My uncle has a livery stable!” the messenger called. “I’ll take you there for another quarter!”

Blake winced. He’d brought it upon himself by bribing the messenger in the first place. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Twelve

Nate Kemp awoke to the sound of the lock to his cell turning. It clicked several times, as if the key weren’t quite catching. The orderlies must have been having trouble with it.

He wondered what time it was. A little window covered in bars showed warm light, still soft as if it were morning. It was set high on the wall, so anything below wouldn’t be visible. The tops of green trees swayed beyond it against a cloud-speckled blue sky.

If someone had told him the day before that he was going to end up in an insane asylum, he would have snorted a laugh their way. But it was true. Jones was gone, probably lying dead somewhere in a bayou. Gators or buzzards might have gotten him already. Nate closed his eyes.

He’d never had much time for praying. It had always seemed to Nate that if he wanted something done, sitting around talking to mystical forces about it wasn’t as good as taking matters into his own hands. Nate supposed he had all the time in the world now that he was locked in the cell and strapped to a bed. He muttered a prayer for Jones. “Take care of him.”

The white light he had seen as he fell from the airship filled his eyes again. He opened them, and it was gone. All that surrounded Nate were the blank walls of his cell. His heart raced.

Maybe he was crazy.

“No, you’re not crazy,” Nate told himself. The locomotive had really crashed, and it had accelerated while he saved the rest of the train. Something crazy was happening; he was just inside it.

There was a loud clank, and the heavy door swung open. Someone walked in with his head low. He closed the door behind him.

“Who’s there?” Nate called.

“Sh!” the man in the shadows hissed.

Nate swallowed. He strained against the leather straps again, but they held tight.

“Oh, they done you up pretty good,” the man said.

Nate twisted his neck until he could see the man creeping toward him. He was hunched over, taking soft, almost lazy steps. His face was thin as if he hadn’t had a good meal in a week, and he was completely bald from the top of his head on down. He carried a glass bottle gingerly in his hands as if it were a sleeping baby.

“Who are you?” Nate whispered.

“They call me Rodney Flipp,” the man said. He chuckled as if it was funny. He was missing several teeth.

“What do you want?”

Flipp slipped close to Nate. “I wanted to see you. See what kind of person brought in the stink.”

Nate’s own face twist up. “What stink? What are you talking about?”

Flipp didn’t answer. Instead, he took the bottle and held up his nostrils. Twitching fingers pulled the stopper, and he took a long sniff so deep he had to close his eyes. When he was done, he slipped the stopper back into place and opened his eyes. The pupils were dilated to the point his brown irises were slivered rings around them. They didn’t seem to focus.

A waft of the sharp ether settled over Nate. He wrinkled his nose. Asking questions probably wasn’t going to get him far with an ether-huffer. He had tried to explain what had happened to the nurse, and she was stone-cold sober as far as he could tell.

“I should have waited until nightfall,” Flipp said, “but I couldn’t stand it any longer. Besides, I was out anyway.” He looked down at the bottle and chuckled again. “I needed my security blanket.”

“Looks like you got it.”

Flipp narrowed his eyes. “You mocking me?”

Nate shook his head. “Not at all.”

“You want some?” he asked. Flipp held out the bottle.

“No, thanks,” Nate said. “You hold onto it.”

Flipp took a quick sniff. “If you had seen what I’ve seen, you would need it.”

“What did you see?”

Flipp’s eyes suddenly cleared up. His lips quivered. After a moment, he squeezed his eyes shut and leaned back over the bottle of ether.

“That bad, huh?”

Flipp didn’t answer.

“I saw something,” Nate confessed. “Yesterday. It was… a monster, I guess.”

“So you did see it!” Flipp said with a gasp. “I knew it! I knew you’d seen the hellion.”

“Hellion? Is that what you’re calling it?”

“The thing from Hell. I don’t know what else you’d call it. I’ve seen it, but the smell was so much worse. It follows. I smelled it on you, still carrying that stink.”

Nate looked down at his body, wrapped up in the gown the hospital gave the inmates. After his sputtering under the hose and the bristles from the brush when the orderlies washed him, he was surprised he smelled like anything at all.

“I didn’t notice.”

Flipp sneered. “It’s all I can smell. I sucked in a whole cloud of it on the train when the hellion appeared.”

“Train?” Nate asked. He blinked. “You were on a train, too?”

“Yeah,” Flipp said. “It attacked us just outside of Faber’s Bluff.” He stopped, shook his head, and took another long draw from his bottle.

“Faber’s Bluff,” Nate mumbled. He’d heard that name time and again around the rail yard, especially lately. “There was a wreck up that way a while back. That was you?”

Flipp just leaned over his bottle.

“That was a cargo train,” Nate recalled. “No passenger cars. Most of the cars came through okay, even though the boiler blew. Killed everyone.”

“Not everyone,” Flipp said. His voice was low, like a groan.

Nate shuffled under the straps. “Rodney Flipp, right?”

“My name’s not Rodney. It’s Zane.”

“Zane,” Nate repeated. The name was so familiar, but Flipp’s face was so twisted from the drugs that he had to look past them. It took a moment, but then realization flashed when Nate mentally gave him hair. “I know you! Zane Weatherford, right? You work for Gloriana Courier Company!”

Flipp took in a sharp breath. His face suddenly seemed scared. “No.”

“Yeah. We’ve ridden train together. I’m Nate Kemp. I shovel on the mail train out to Shreveport. A few weeks back, I helped you lift a crate onto—”

“No!” Flipp screamed.

Nate pressed himself backward on the bed. The leather straps groaned.

Flipp sat down on the floor. He pressed the neck of the bottle against his nose. After a few deep breaths, he looked up again. “My head hurts.”

Nate watched the man sit. He had seen a handful of cases of Stoker’s Madness himself, men who raved and hurt anyone around them. Some were wild and violent. Others were quiet at first, stealing or fornicating, but ultimately something would make them snap, and then all hell broke loose.

When Nate was young, still working at the bakery down the street, old Palmer snapped. Bakeries on the richer side of town didn’t use Newton’s Catalyst; it made the bread taste like sour milk. In Nate’s neighborhood, they just put up with it. He’d had his own run-ins with the voices from the fire from time to time. They scared him in those days, and he always ran away. Time and again Palmer would find him in the pantry, shivering, even crying, until the voices went away. Palmer boxed his ears every time. The old chef, who dealt with the ovens for hours every day, called him weak. “Just bury it deep down,” he had told him.

And then, one day, a customer said he’d burned the bread. Palmer jumped across the counter with a knife and carved a hunk of his arm out. Two more men were injured until they finally pinned Palmer down, spitting and cussing.

If Flipp had Stoker’s Madness, he would’ve strangled Nate in the bed already. There was something else wrong with him. Nate had just about frozen up after seeing the hellion. After the crash, the only words he’d managed until the sheriff talked him out of it was mumbling over and over to the farmer and his wife, “Train wreck... train wreck...”

“Train wreck,” Nate mumbled to himself. Monsters attacking two trains was too much of a coincidence. He relaxed and turned back to Flipp. “Do you remember the train wreck?”

“The ether helps me forget.”

Nate nodded. “I can see why you want to forget. It was something horrible—tentacles like a squid, claws, eyes…the eyes.”

Flipp lunged up from the floor into a standing position, leaving his bottle behind. He slapped a hand over Nate’s mouth. It stank of body odor. Nate tried not to breathe.

“Don’t talk about it!” Flipp ordered.

He tucked his hand inside the back of his gown. After a grunt, he revealed a twisted piece of wire. Flipp held it in front of Nate’s eyes.

“It’s my lock-pick,” Flipp said. “I use it to get out of my cell, I use it to get into the cabinet in the surgery, and I used it to get in here. If you don’t keep quiet about the trains, I’ll use it to get into you.”

Nate’s eyes went wide.

“I don’t want to talk about trains ever again,” Flipp whispered. “I had to come here to make sure you weren’t a monster.”

Nate shook his head and tried to say, “I’m not,” but his words were muffled.

Flipp seemed to understand him anyhow. “No, I know. But you smelled like them.” He looked upward and swallowed. “I only saw it for a second, with its awful wings and scraping metal feathers… The smell was the worst. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t stop the smell.”

Nate’s lungs burned. He needed to breathe, but he didn’t know how Flipp would react.

“I hate it. I hate it so much!” Flipp shouted.

He let Nate go and dove back to the floor. Nate took in a deep gasp of air. When he had his fill, he turned to look at Flipp. The ex-courier panted over the ether bottle, rocking back and forth.

Nate swallowed and shifted against the leather straps. “Zane—Flip, whatever name you like. I need you to let me out of these straps.”

Flipp looked up at him with eyes that blinked too fast.

“I have to get out of here,” Nate told him. “If I don’t stop it, something very bad is going to happen.”

Flipp stared.

“Please,” Nate said. “I’m on a mission from God. It’s going to happen again. The monsters are going to come back.”

Flipp shook his head. “No. I don’t want them to come back. The last one was climbing out of the fire. The train derailed, and a car full of hardware flipped. Crushed it. I jumped…”

“Undo these straps, and I’ll stop them,” Nate told him.

Flipp stood.

Nate tried to make a reassuring smile.

Behind Flipp, the door swung open. The nurse walked in and screamed.

Chapter Thirteen

There had been a shout down the hall of the violent patients’ wing. Ozzie didn’t make much of it; shouts came all the time. Just about anything could set off their troubled minds. For good reason, the windows were set so high they didn’t show much of the grounds where some of the calmer patients walked or worked the orchard.

When another shout came, it came from the new patient’s room. He must have woken up from his nap. She called Jim to come with her; the freedman walked down the hall behind her with a lunch tray. If the patient, Nathan Kemp, were well enough, she might have one of the doctors come in and speak with him.

She should have realized something was wrong when the door was unlocked. Kemp was strapped in bed, but Ozzie thought Jim should have locked up behind them. She was just turning to ask him about it when she saw Flipp squatting in the middle of Kemp’s room.

She screamed. It wasn’t a very professional reaction, but she would have to admonish herself later about that. At the time, it was all she could do.

Flipp screamed back. He dove to the floor and grabbed something up in both arms.

Kemp shouted, too. “No! Zane! Flipp! Come back!”

Flipp sprang from the floor and charged at Ozzie with his head down. She pulled herself out of the way, and he burst through the doorway.

As he passed, Ozzie grabbed the back of his gown. Flipp squirmed, and the thing fell from his arms. Glass shattered. Flipp screamed again and fell to his knees. He pressed his face close to the floor and took deep gasps.

An overwhelming smell of ether wafted up. Ozzie held her breath until she fumbled to get a handkerchief out of her pocket and held it over her nose.

There was another crash up the hall. Jim ran, leaving an overturned tray with a spilled bowl of stew on the floor. “Miss Ozzie! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” she said. She pointed to Flipp on the floor. “Get him out of that before he suffocates himself!”

Jim caught Flipp by the collar of his gown and pulled him up. Flipp moaned softly and rolled his shoulders. If he was trying to fight, there was already too much ether in his system to do much of anything. Jim dragged him out of the puddle.

“How’d he get out of his room?” Jim asked.

“That was what I want to know,” Ozzie replied.

She knelt down beside Flipp and held her ear to his face. He was breathing, softly, a little more slowly than regular.

Ozzie looked back down at the floor. The bottle was in several pieces now, but it was clearly the ether from the surgery cabinet. She mumbled, “How had he gotten it?”

“Miss Ozzie?” Jim asked.

“The bottle,” she said, pointing. “Mike took that away from him this morning.”

Jim shrugged.

“Go get him cleaned up, Jim,” Ozzie said. “Put him back in his room. I’ll check on the new patient.”

“Yes, miss.”

Ozzie stepped over the broken glass and into Kemp’s room. He was on the bed, held down by the leather straps, his lips pursed as if he were trying not to breathe in.

“I’m sorry for the smell,” Ozzie said calmly.

She turned back to the mess. Still holding the handkerchief over her nose and mouth, she clumsily undid the knot of her apron behind her waist. Even more clumsily, she slipped the apron over her head. She settled onto her knees and picked up each of the big glass pieces. When they were out of the way, she set to mopping up the puddle best she could.

How had Flipp gotten it? Before he had said a doctor gave it to him as medicine, but that was a blatant lie. Childlike Mrs. Tule in the hysteria ward often lied about there being a herd of elephants in the orchard, which was playful teasing. Flipp was hiding something.

“He’s been picking the lock,” a voice called from behind her.

Ozzie looked up.

Kemp had raised his head, topped with its bright red mop, to look at her. “That’s what he told me. There’s a wire on the floor he’s been using.”

Ozzie finished mopping and tucked the apron out in the hall. Standing up, she asked from under the handkerchief, “What wire?”

“Unstrap me, and I’ll point it out for you,” Kemp said.

Ozzie gave a long, slow blink. Nice try. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that without Jim or Mike around.”

Kemp rolled his eyes back and nodded. “I suppose that makes sense. You don’t know me, but, let me tell you, you can trust me.”

“So I can trust your word that I can trust you?” Ozzie asked. She smiled at herself.

Kemp closed his eyes and sighed.

She bit her tongue. Her smart mouth was going again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make fun.”

“Yeah,” Kemp agreed.

Ozzie pursed her lips. She stepped forward and sat at the foot of his bed. “I really am sorry.”

Kemp opened his eyes again. They were a warm brown. “I know. I’m just trying to keep from saying something I might regret.”

Ozzie blinked. Kemp seemed so self-conscious. If he weren’t already strapped to a bed inside the hospital, she would’ve never thought to see him there.

“I sent a telegram your mother,” she told him. “Just like you asked.”

Kemp sat up against the straps. Out of habit, Ozzie flinched backward.

“Thank you!” Kemp burst.

Ozzie blushed. “Oh, um, you’re welcome.”

“She’ll come and get me,” Kemp mumbled. He looked up. “She can get me out, right? I need to get out of here.”

Ozzie made herself give a friendly smile. “She can act as your warden, yes, but we’ll have to review your case with the doctor.”

“How long will that take?”

“Well, that depends on the doctor’s notes, and it’s on a case-by-case basis, so—”

“I can’t wait long. I have to tell people. I have to warn them. There’s something wrong with the fire.”

Ozzie tried not to roll her eyes. She was almost ready to believe him, but then he started in on the fires. Everyone in the ward for Stoker’s Madness talked about fire, how it spoke to them or told them to do strange or awful things. Doctors generally agreed that it had to do with the gradual inhalation of fumes damaging the brain. Fresh air was important. Dr. Kirkbride was right about that.

The stinging ether still clung to the air. Ozzie walked over to the window and pushed it open. The noontime breeze was still cool.

“That’s better,” Ozzie announced.

“It’s nice,” Kemp said from the bed.

She looked down at him. The sheets were ruffled; he had been squirming a lot this morning. With another patient standing over him, it was no wonder.

“Why was Flipp in your room?”

Kemp cleared his throat. “He said he smelled something on me.”

“I understand,” Ozzie said. “He isn’t well.”

“No, he’s not. He’s seen things that would make any man go mad. I’ve seen them, too.”

Ozzie nodded as politely as she could. “We’ll talk with the doctor about them, soon.”

“You don’t understand,” Kemp told her. “He won’t understand either, unless he’s had some experience with it. If anybody had tried to tell me about the monster before I saw it, I wouldn’t have understood.”

Ozzie shivered. It was unnerving when the patients made sense. She turned back to the door and changed the subject. “How did he get in here?”

“Through the door, just like you,” Kemp told her. “He picked the lock. He said he’d been doing that to get the ether, too.”

“With that wire you mentioned.”

“Exactly. It’s on the floor. I saw him drop it when you came in.”

Ozzie studied him a moment. Patients had tried a thousand tricks on her, and she was ready. “Oh? Where?”

Kemp shuffled and rolled his head. His eyes scanned the floor for a moment. “There! About a yard from your left shoe, opposite direction from the window.”

Ozzie blinked. The directions hadn’t tried to bring her close where he could grab her, and he hadn’t tried to talk her into freeing him again. She looked down at the floor. Just where Kemp had directed her, there was a piece of wire, bent like a hairpin.

She picked it up. Even from a distance, she could tell it smelled like filth. Ozzie winced and went back to the door, tucking it into her dirty apron and wiping her hands.

As she stood, she realized it was exactly like Kemp had said from the beginning. Turning back to him, she said, “You’re telling the truth. Flipp really was picking locks.”

“Of course I am,” Kemp replied. “I’ll tell you something else about him.”

Ozzie walked slowly back toward him. Kemp seemed not only sane, but willing to speak. The hospital brought in people of perfectly sound mind from time to time, but as long as they didn’t fight back, it was often no more an issue than a few days’ rest until the doctors worked it out. Kemp might have spent the night drinking too much and ended up in the farmer’s pigpen.

She wanted to test him. “Tell me about Mr. Flipp.”

“His name isn’t Flipp.”

Ozzie stopped and raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“His name isn’t Ray Flipp or whatever you call him. It’s actually Zane Weatherford.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“He did when I met him.”

Ozzie shook her head. “He tells everyone that. He’s a con man that the Rail Agency caught stealing mail. It took doctors several days to gradually break him of his lying habit. Even so, he goes back to it from time to time.”

Kemp looked up at her as if she were insane. Then his eyes went wide. “The Rail Agency, you said?”

Ozzie shifted nervously in her dress. She wished she had another apron, almost like a layer of armor. “Yes.”

“When was he brought in? A little more than a week ago, right?”

Ozzie blinked. How could he know that? The answer was simple: Flipp had just been in his room talking with him. “Yes, a little more than a week ago.”

Kemp threw his head back against the mattress. “They got him, too! He survived the explosion, just like me. The Rail Agents would have questioned him, but he’s so messed up in the head about the monsters, they didn’t just bump him off. They had to stash him somewhere, and why not a loony bin?”

Ozzie cleared her throat to interrupt him. “We prefer the term ‘hospital.’”

His head raised back up with wide, brown eyes looking at her. “I… sorry.”

“Nothing to worry about.”

She looked down at the young man, probably just a year or two older than she was, though those years weighed on his face and hands. There was something about him, but she had to let it go. Remain objective, dutiful but detached.

“Mr. Flipp was brought in by the authorities with a judge’s warrant. This Weatherford character is nothing more than a scheme to escape his crime of theft.”

For a long moment, Kemp didn’t reply. Then he sighed, “Is that what they told you?”

“Yes,” Ozzie told him firmly. “And I have no reason to disbelieve it.”

“I do.”

Ozzie put her fists on her hips. “Oh, and why is that?”

“Because I know Zane Weatherford, and he’s no thief.”

“Clearly you’ve been duped by his story,” Ozzie told him.

Kemp shook his head slowly, over and over again, as if he were talking to a child. “No, you’re wrong.”

She pressed her fists harder onto her hips. She was the nurse here.

He raised up his head again. “I’ve known Zane for two or three years now. He’s a courier from Lake Providence, and he’s ridden train with me, I don’t know how many times. If he was on the mail, it was probably because he was taking a crate up to Fort Smith. More likely than not, the Rail Agency is trying to cover up what happened at the train wreck.”

“Train wreck?”

“Check the newspaper. There was a train wreck up at Faber’s Bluff not too long before Mr. Flipp was brought here to the loon—-hospital. There was one yesterday, too. I was in that one.”

Ozzie looked at the man closely. She had never made a bet in her life, but, if she had to, she would bet all on his expression of sincerity. “Tell me about it.”

“Something evil came out of the fire,” Kemp said. “It was small at first, and I hurt it with my shovel. When I threw it back into the fire, it got huge. The whole thing was tentacles and teeth and eyes…”

He turned away and squeezed his eyes shut.

Ozzie hurried the last few steps back to Kemp’s bedside. It was talk of monsters again, clearly ridiculous. Yet, it was the same thing Flipp had talked about when he was brought in.

She stroked Kemp’s red hair. It struck her that she shouldn’t and pulled her hand back. “What happened, after the monster?”

“It killed Jones, I think. I tried to save him, but he slipped out of my grip since it clawed me on the shoulder so bad. Then I had to get away from it. The locomotive went runaway, and I pulled the pin to save the rest of the cars. When they finally stopped, a farmer’s wife stitched me up. Then the lawmen came, and the Rail Marshal said I was insane.”

He paused and opened his eyes. “I guessed I must have sounded that way. I mean, monsters? That’s crazy talk. But it’s actually true.”