Hearts of Smoke and Steam (36 page)

Bringing his arm around in a lazy arc, he chucked the explosive into the air. It landed perfectly in the lap of the fallen Colossus.

“We might want to duck,” he said to Anubis.

They both dropped to the floor a second before the dynamite exploded in a deafening roar.

Anubis's head and ears were ringing as the smoke from the blast cleared. Looking up, he could see that Clements was now flailing more than ever—desperately trying to free himself from the chairs he had fallen into when the explosion had severed the other end of his metal rope. The remaining wire had finally reeled back into the device on his arm, stopping where the ruptured end refused to go back into the hole.

“Let's go!” Doc Dynamite yelled loudly enough to be heard even through the ringing in Anubis's ears. “You grab the girl and I'll finish blowing that thing apart.”

“We need to get the heart.”

Dynamite laughed. He shook his head and pulled out another stick of dynamite from his bandolier. “Eschaton can go to hell if he thinks I'm givin' that metal monster an operation. If there's anything left after I blow it to pieces, we'll scoop ‘em up and give ‘em to him.”

Anubis nodded. He was in no shape to try to argue. At least it wouldn't be his fault this time.

Underneath the velvet cloth, the Colossus was struggling more violently now. The remains of the stage were collapsing around the metal man as it tried to find the purchase it needed to pull itself up.

Walking past the end of the orchestra pit, Anubis hauled himself up onto the stage near where Sarah Stanton was standing. Every movement was agony, and he wanted nothing more than to find someplace where he could lay down and sleep.

Instead, he pulled himself to his feet and walked unsteadily towards the girl. Standing next to her was Vincent. He wondered what bad advice he was giving her now.

The old man took a step toward him, and he held up his hand. “Not now,” Anubis said firmly, and the man stopped in his tracks.

“Sarah Stanton,” Anubis said. He was still trying to use the deep voice he had mastered to strike terror in his foes, but what came out of him sounded wavering and unsure.

She stepped forward with a look in her eyes that said she was clearly unafraid of him. “What do you want? If you've come to try to steal me away, I can assure you that I won't go quietly.”

Anubis grabbed Sarah's arm and pulled her close to him. “Trust me,” he whispered into her ear.

Sarah looked up at him with a furrowed brow. “Why should I?”

He gave a quick nod in the direction of Doc Dynamite and the White Knight. “Because I don't want to let them get their hands on you.”

Sarah tried to pull her arm free, and Anubis was surprised to find that he still had the strength to hold onto her. Sarah seemed shocked as well. “Let me go!”

He looked at Sarah again and shook his head. He had made many sacrifices by becoming one of the Children, and many more while he had waited for the right moment to strike. Now he realized that the right moment would never come. And while Eschaton had been planning and plotting, there hadn't been lives at stake. But now the madman's plans were being put into action, and people were dying.

Whatever fate Eschaton had in mind for the girl, it certainly wasn't one that Anubis could ignore. Now was the moment to strike, and it always had been.

“Bring her down here,” Doc Dynamite yelled to him. “We need to go.”

Anubis looked back at Sarah. “Did you have a plan,” she asked, “or am I supposed to let you continue to manhandle me until you come up with something?”

He was in no condition to fight against two villains. Maybe it was time to take the girl and run…

But his need to choose was postponed as the ground shuddered underneath him. The man in the insect costume was driving his chisels into the stage, forcing it to collapse around the Automaton.

The mechanical man was attempting to swat the Steamhammer, but he proved surprisingly adept at avoiding the creature's attacks. Or perhaps the machine had simply sustained too much damage.

The Steamhammer stepped under a metal arm and drove the chisels deep into the creature's shoulder, and after an instant the arm dropped away entirely.

“Good boy!” Vincent yelled out.

Sarah pulled her arm free and pressed her hand over her mouth. “No, Emilio! Leave him alone!”

The Colossus freed his remaining arm from the curtain and took another swat at the Steamhammer. Emilio crossed the chisels and managed to catch the limb between them, even as the force of it knocked him down to the floor.

“That's going to be bad,” he heard Vincent say behind him. “Very bad, I think.”

There was a thundering vibration that threw everyone to the ground, and the chisels and arm shattered simultaneously.

When Anubis looked up, he saw that the Steamhammer was no longer moving. The Automaton helplessly flailed its remaining stump.

Doc Dynamite picked himself up off the floor and pulled out another stick of explosive—larger than the one he had used previously.

“Dynamite! You need to stop! You'll kill the Steamhammer,” Anubis yelled at him. The man was clearly not concerned with anyone's survival, even his own—although somehow he always managed to end up coming out of his explosions unscathed.

The Doc lit the fuse and looked up at him. “Go to hell, jackal,” he said.

But before he could throw it, a red-headed woman appeared behind him. “You go to hell,” she said, and shoved Doc Dynamite's arm. “That's my brother.”

The stick flew only a short distance through the air before vanishing into the tangle of instruments and machinery in the orchestra pit.

“Run, Emilio!” Sarah screamed, but before anyone could manage to take more than a single step, the dynamite exploded.

Anubis huddled himself into a ball, his hands wrapped around his head, praying that nothing sharp would strike him as a storm of metal and wood flew through the air. The stage underneath his feet buckled from the blast, and pieces of the shattered instruments rained down around them with the occasional strangled musical note.

After a few seconds, Anubis looked up, his attention caught by the sound of splintering and cracking that seemed to becoming from all around.

The Pneumatic Colossus was thrashing its broken limbs furiously, trying to free the remains of its shattered body from the stage by any means possible. It succeeded in flipping itself over, and propped a stump up onto the stage.

Just as it rose up, there was an ominous groan. This time not only the stage, but the foundations beneath it gave way. As the ground crumbled, the Colossus disappeared from view, tumbling down into the bowels of the theater.

The man in the Wasp costume was nowhere to be seen.

Anubis turned to see the Stanton girl running past him toward the massive hole. Almost without thinking, he reached out and grabbed her, his fingers gathering up a handful of her dress. “Stop.” She jerked to a halt, letting out a strained gasp as her own clothes forced the air out of her lungs. “It's too dangerous.”

She turned to him with fury in her eyes. “Who do you think you are?” She reached out and slapped his face, though it didn't do much except startle him underneath the leather. He had half expected her to knock him unconscious. “Now let me go!”

“Only if you promise not to hurt yourself.” He was trying to be gentle with her, but it was getting more difficult to do anything with control.

“I'll make no promises to you.”

Vincent stood. There was blood on the white sleeve of his costume where a chunk of flying metal had bitten into his arm. “I think you should let her go.”

Anubis waited a moment, considering the possibilities, but he needed allies more than enemies, and he released his grip.

“Thank you, Vincent,” Sarah said, “I appreciate that.”

“But he's not wrong. You do need to be careful, young lady,” the showman added.

Now that he had a moment to compose his thoughts, Anubis looked out into the audience, seeking out his two “allies.” He found the White Knight almost immediately. The man was crawling along the floor toward the exit, his suit badly tattered. By the way he was moving, he was either hurt or had yet to recover from the explosion.

Doc Dynamite and the red-haired girl were both still flat on the floor, and were completely unmoving—knocked out cold or dead and cooling.

“I think we should get off of the stage before the rest of it collapses,” Vincent said with great weariness in his voice, and jumped down.

Anubis tried unsuccessfully to stifle a grunt of pain as he landed on the ground.

Sarah followed, demurely showing off her skills in skirt manipulation— she descended in a manner that made it appear as if jumping off of stages was exactly what dresses were designed for.

Sarah reached out and touched Anubis's arm, but he yanked it away. “You're hurt.”

“A little,” he said gruffly. “Someone hit me in the head—twice,” Anubis reminded her, surprised at his own petulance.

“I'm beginning to feel sorry about that, but at the time it seemed you were with the Children of Eschaton, and…”

He held up his hand and dropped his voice to a whisper. “And the longer they continue to think that, the better it will be for all of us.” He looked around again.

“But how long can you fool Eschaton?”

The girl was smart, just as the Sleuth had been…But perhaps he could do more for her than he had managed to do for him. “I don't need you. You're only a trophy. Eschaton wants the mechanical man's heart most of all.”

Sarah stared into his mask, managing the most passable imitation he had ever seen of someone looking straight into his eyes. “You'll have to kill me before I'd give it to him. You know that, don't you?”

“I don't know anything,” he said looking away. She
couldn't
have seen his real face, and yet he still felt embarrassed and exposed. The pain was weakening him, letting more of the man under the mask leak out…

“I don't mean to interrupt,” Vincent said, clearly intending to interrupt them, “but Emilio is missing, and I think we need to find him before the Automaton finds us.”

“First we take care of the injured,” Anubis growled back. If he spoke slowly, he could manage to almost sound as if he were unhurt.

Walking over to where Doc Dynamite and the girl lay on the floor, he saw blood spattered across the ground. The cowboy seemed to be unpierced. Anubis grabbed Doc Dynamite's shoulders and rolled him over. The man let out a loud groan. “Now that's what I call a
ride
.”

“Are you all right?”

“If I still got two arms and two legs, then yeah.”

Anubis nodded and stood. Sarah had already reached the girl. “Oh no,” she said. “No!” she said again, the panic in her voice rising as she dropped to her knees.

Anubis kneeled beside Sarah, in front of the fallen woman. There was blood on her face, pouring out from a ragged cut that ran from her cheek to her mouth.

He was glad that the Italian girl was still unconscious. He knew that waking up with a wound like that would be no kindness to her, and would leave a permanent scar.

Doc Dynamite's gruff voice came from behind him. “That the
whore
what ruined my aim?”

Sarah looked up with an expression of pure anger, but before she could open her mouth to speak, Anubis stood up in front of her, blocking the cowboy from reaching her or the girl. “She's hurt. Perhaps you could take a moment to…”

He felt a pair of hands in his side, pushing him out of the way. “Whatever you used to get Jack and Eschaton to buy your lies, it don't work on me.”

Anubis shifted his weight and grabbed the man's arms. It was a weak attack, and if he had been fighting an opponent with genuine martial skills, they would have laughed at his graceless form and broken free, but the cowboy's skills were all bullets and bombs. Anubis shoved him backwards. “Leave her alone.”

“I warned you,” the cowboy said, yanking his arms down and managing to tear free from his grasp with nothing more than brute force. Anubis cursed himself silently in his head—that should never have been able to happen.

By the time he could respond, Doc Dynamite had already pulled out his pistol and was waving it at him. “I should do everyone a favor and shoot you both.”

Sarah's look of defiance only grew sharper. Anubis had great respect for the girl, but he knew Doc Dynamite wasn't bluffing: he'd rather shoot than to have to put his iron away cold.

Anubis was about to tell the Stanton girl that she needed to be quiet when someone else spoke out. “Good God man, haven't you done enough damage?”

The old man took a dramatic pose and held up a hand to punctuate his points. “What's wrong with you people? Threatening defenseless women?” He pointed a finger at Doc Dynamite and leaned in toward him. Doc Dynamite just smiled in response. It was a curious, tight-lipped grin. “I was a villain myself back in the day, but I had more sense than…” His speech was cut off by the sound of a gunshot.

Anubis didn't know much about the cowboy's past, but he did know that the man had indeed been an actual doctor, and his surgical precision remained with him. The bullet wound in Vincent's chest was slightly to the right of center—perfectly placed so that the lead projectile would miss the sternum and pierce his heart.

A cold look of shock came over Vincent's face when he realized that his time was over—his expression a tragic mix of helplessness and resignation. “Oh my,” the showman said, and then dropped to the ground.

The cowboy turned the gun on Sarah. “Now, do either of you have any more you want to say, or are you going to shut your mouths and come with me?”

Sarah's lips were pressed so tightly together, it almost seemed as if she were smiling.

Normally this would have been the exact moment that Anubis would have chosen to strike, plucking the gun out of the villain's hand faster than he could pull the trigger. And if he could have done so confidently, he would have. But after all the blows he had taken, he could no longer be sure of his reflexes. “Eschaton wants her alive,” was all he could think to say.

“I don't think he actually cares all that much for this little thing anymore, ‘specially now her daddy's dead.”