Dead Boys (19 page)

“Comprehend me, challenger!” said the reaper. “The Horde suffers no alliances in the Plains: nay, not even a band of four! We have fought for centuries beyond reckoning and have seen tiny threats grown large when some untested urchin rises to command. Such audacity must be answered with swift disassembly, for the role of the Last Man Standing is too important to leave to chance.

“Leave it to the Horde, instead. Once we have cleansed the Plains, we shall elect our King as champions ought: in a civilized tournament, wherein each warrior faces her brothers until all have fallen but one.

“We tell you this that you may spread our message from the ground: the Last Man Standing shall a Hordesman be!”

“Can I hit her now?” said Remington.

“You can certainly try,” said Etienne.

As the crow took wing in fright, the reaper met the signpost’s swing with a flick of her wrist, puncturing the metal with her scythe. Their weapons thus entangled, she and Remington wrangled them to and fro in the air like long-distance arm-wrestlers until the reaper let go with an irritated sigh. The weapons crashed to the earth, and when Remington bent to extricate his, she pulled a cleaver from the folds of her robe and swung it with a butcher’s surety towards the curve of his neck.

In that terrible moment, a quintet of Hordesmen strode forward, eager to scatter the pieces of their defeated opponents; Remington, distracted by a sudden squawk from above, glanced up at the reconstructed crow, who’d been forced to swoop in order to avoid a severed head launched with great, mechanical force from afar; and the head, an airborne blur, howled, “
Vengeance
!”

Before the cleaver struck, the head pounded the reaper’s back like a cannonball, the collision making it clear why the Hordesmen’s joints were banded together, as all the unsecured bones burst from her frame and skittered across the rocky floor behind her knife. She scurried after them in a panic, fitting the bones into her skeleton before they were lost to her consciousness, and shrieking, “The Collectors! The Collectors approach, from south-southwest!”

A second head struck, pounding a Hordesman full in the chest but failing to scatter his bones.

“Interesting,” said Etienne. “That one expected the blow.”

“Thy doom drops from above, body-robbers!” cried the head, bouncing past Remington’s feet. “Draw near, that I might gnaw thy hated ankles.”

Its fellows were falling like hailstones now, and the Horde, enraged, charged to the south-southwest, toward a distant congregation of wheeled catapults whose operators bore severed heads by the bushel. Before the clash between these mighty battalions could be glimpsed, however, the Horde’s exit drew a dusty curtain over the southern Plains.

“Well, enough gawking,” said Etienne. “Adam, Eve, arise!”

The headless stood, and with Remington’s help divided the halves of Leopold and Jacob between them. Remington put Jacob’s knapsack (thankfully undamaged) over his shoulders and carried his upper half. Eve hefted Leopold’s torso with her good arm, leaving Adam to lift two filthy pairs of legs over his shoulders.

“Should we find the stone-thrower?” said Remington.

“He’s lost,” said Etienne. “At least his arms were attached when they threw him. Maybe he’ll crawl away before the Plainsmen come back.”

The northern Plains were eerily calm. “Where are all the fighters?” said Remington.

“At the Armory, most of them. Sometimes you’ll find thousands milling around those markets, more or less peaceably. Then they’ll all run out and start fighting again, as if someone had struck a bell.”

“And the Armory’s that away, so we should be able to get these two to the Medic before they wake up.”

“I hope so, but it’s too early to celebrate. Although—hold on, is that the Rim?”

“Oh, yeah! Look at that. It wasn’t too far after all.”

“Which means the ground we’ve covered in all this time is negligible.”

“I won’t tell Jake if you don’t.”

As they neared the stitchery, they were startled to see hundreds of warriors standing in an ungainly column before the Medic’s tent, all waiting for attention from within.

“Imagine if the Horde could see this,” said Remington. “All these squadrons in one place! That reaper girl would go ballistic.”

“Remington,” said Etienne in a low voice. “I want you to walk right past this line, like you’ve got a special pass. And while you’re at it, find any spools of thread that might remain in Jacob’s knapsack.”

Just ahead, a chopped-up warrior came noisily to her senses, forcing her squadron to realize that they had no hope of seeing her reassembled. Making hasty apologies, her fellows dropped her, without ceremony, right where they’d been standing. The rest of the queue, in their haste to fill the vacated space, kicked her parts out of the way, half to one side, half to the other. As the poor woman’s head distracted the crowd with screaming, Remington took the opportunity to trot down beside the line, and got about halfway without provoking comment.

But before he reached the end, a rattling voice cried out for the destruction of “them varminty line-cutters,” to which Etienne responded with a startling, nasal cry: “Supplies! Supplies! Thread-and-needle man, make way for supplies!” While the men in line gaped at the equipment in Remington’s hands, which certainly looked more medical than martial, Remington slipped into the stitchery.

Within was a scene of utter chaos: disassembled corpses who’d failed the mallet-test were strewn about the floor, crawling and bemoaning their newfound predicament when they were not attacking one another outright; barrels and cabinets had been overturned in a desperate attempt to find forgotten supplies; and four angry corpses in threadbare Royal Air Force uniforms were thrusting their proffered payment across the table while demanding that Flak-Jacket Josie be sewn up with sinew from the Medic’s own arse if he were in fact out of wire.

“There’s a bleeding red cross hanging off your tent,” squawked an aggrieved flyboy. “Now get on with the red-crossing, or we’ll pull the bleeding thing down!”

As fists struck palms with increasing velocity, the RN pretended to search for a spool of thread, using the pantomime as an excuse to fortify a bulwark of empty containers tossed between the operating theater and the front of the tent. Behind her the Medic jiggered open the lid of their strongbox, rapping on its side to let her know the time was ripe to lock themselves inside.

“Supplies!” squawked Etienne as Remington, Adam, and Eve clambered over an overturned filing cabinet. “Here you go, chief: three spools of stitch-grade medical thread, in exchange for the immediate reassembly of these two scrimmage-rats.”

Remington slapped the spools on the operating table. “Here you go, chief!”

“Good timing,” muttered the RN, and the Medic, who had already climbed inside the strongbox, popped out immediately, motioning for the halves of Leopold and Jacob to be laid out on the operating table posthaste.

“Now look here,” shouted a flyboy, “we was here first, and we’ll be served first!”

“With what?” answered Etienne. “We don’t get paid, they don’t get the supplies, and your friend don’t get stitched. Now pipe down and move outside the tent, before I cart this crap to the Armory and sell it for twice the price!”

Cursing, the flyboy dragged his squadron outside, where the news that reinforcements had arrived set off an argument that broke the informal ceasefire, distracting attention from the tent for a few precious moments.

The Medic bowed in thanks, and the RN hopped onto her step stool. “You guys are a godsend,” she said, tossing the mallet into the Medic’s hands and emptying the last handful of double-headed hooks from a jelly jar.

“Problems, boss?” she asked, for the Medic had slapped the table with his open palm in alarm.

For their benefit he repeated himself, striking first Jacob, then Leopold on the noggin: the top halves of the two men jerked, but their bottom halves were still.

“Separation of consciousness,” said the RN. “Tough luck, but you know, a body can get by with only an upper half. What do you say we sew some work gloves on their hands, maybe tidy up their torsos, in exchange for two of those spools?”

“No need,” said Remington. “Just sew them up like normal, and I’ll handle the rest.”

“You’re the boss,” said the RN, and while the Medic weighed his misgivings against three spools of thread, she prepped the table.

They set to work with astonishing speed, rolling back the edges of shirts and trousers, puncturing flesh with needles, and filling the air with a flurry of jerks and tugs. Before the flyboys had time to complain, Leopold and Jacob, still unconscious, were carted outside on a stretcher borne by Remington and Adam. At a safe distance from the tent (which was experiencing an unholy rush now that the flaps had been thrown open again), he laid them belly-up on the ground in the long shadow of the Rim.

“I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to test your art this way,” said Etienne, “but since it’s their only hope of walking south, I wish you the best of luck.”

“I’ve got it under control,” said Remington. He hummed to himself as he laid his hands on each man in turn, caressing forehead and shin, chest and thigh, until a jolt ran through him.

“All set,” he said, dusting off his hands. “They’re fused, both of them.”

“How can you be sure?”

“One way to find out,” said Remington, picking up a fist-sized rock with which he struck Leopold on the forehead, eliciting a full-body jerk. Before he could repeat the test, however, Jacob moaned, then sat bolt upright, staring around like he’d woken from a nightmare.

“Can it be?” he cried, slapping his legs. “I’m awake! I’m intact! I can stand!”

In his excitement, he strove to demonstrate this last statement, but found it more difficult than he’d anticipated; he staggered and swayed for several long moments before he could steady himself enough to stand still.

“Take it slow,” said Etienne, but Jacob was too perplexed to stop. Stepping forward, he felt his feet thudding beneath him as if he were miscalculating the distance to the earth.

“Jeez, Jake, you’d think you’d never used those legs before!” said Remington.

Jacob, seized by a sudden dread, bent down to inspect his trousers, and found, beneath a thick coat of desert grime, that they were made of purple corduroy. “Why have you dressed me in Leopold’s pants?” he cried, clawing at the zipper like a man in a nightmare.

As Leopold himself began to come around, the purple trousers fell to the ground. The first thing he saw when he awakened was his own proud member standing at attention below Jacob Campbell’s grimace. As soon as he found his footing, Leopold began staggering around like a newborn colt and shrieking, “I’m a monster! That crater-faced quack has Frankensteined me! I’ll have his head sewn between his legs! Malpractice! Malfeasance! Abomination!”

“We’ll fix this at once,” said Jacob, glaring at Remington as he wrestled with his trousers. “Won’t we, Remy?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” said Remington, soothing the crow, who’d been ruffled by the noise. “I fused you guys pretty good. I don’t think cutting you up again is such a good idea.”

“Really, you haven’t suffered any harm,” said Etienne, who was trying not to laugh, “and for all we know, there are limits to Remington’s gift.”

“For all we know,” cried Leopold, “there are none at all! If our bits are as interchangeable as this, why the deuce can’t we swap them back? Why not chop them up and slap them higgledy-piggledy back together again? It’s time we learned precisely what the demon-boy can do, before—”

“Hah!” cried Jacob.

“What is it?” said Remington.

“Hush!” said Jacob, pacing in an oval precisely the length and width of his old flat in the Preservative District.

“A hint, perhaps?” said Leopold.

“Shut your damned mouths, I’m thinking,” said Jacob, and that was all he would say for almost an hour. When he finally shared his epiphany, however, even Leopold forgot all the fuss.

“There’s only one problem,” said Etienne when the excitement had worn off. “Your plan calls for everything you have in the knapsack. Without that, what do we have to trade for weapons?”

Jacob opened his mouth and shut it again. “Damn!” he cried. “You’re right, of course. We’d need a benefactor to pull this off, and we’re in the wrong part of the world to be looking for charity.”

“A benefactor, you say?” said Leopold, who was hopping from one of Jacob’s former feet to the other, his spirits restored. “Well, my hearties, tell me how this strikes you: I, Leopold l’Eclair, shall fund this endeavor entirely, providing whatever supplies might be necessary for our ascension, in exchange for command of the army, effective as soon as we reach White Gate.”

“Fund this endeavor—with what? Your pockets are empty!” said Jacob, pulling them inside-out.

“Jacob,” said Leopold with an obvious thrill, “I must confess that I’ve been holding out on you.” He pulled the skin clean off of his head, revealing a lily-white skull with a curious carving in its brow.

“Leo, you were a debtor?” said Remington.

“Oh, no, nothing so desperate as that. But I found it helpful to dress like one to get my hands on these.” Plunging his fingers into a hole drilled through his crown, Leopold withdrew a black velvet pouch. Out of it he pulled five functional timepieces, one of which, a burnished, golden pocket watch of ingenious design, was still ticking.

Jacob gaped. “But that’s—”

“A fortune,” said Leopold. “The Magnate’s fortune, in fact!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Last Man Standing