M.J. Markgraf
patreon
Tarnished Chapter 57
🕑 Added 2024-09-09 12:00:14 +0000 UTCJohn picked up the rifle, Seline dropped, before he scooped up the unconscious woman. After she was safely in his arms, he made his way toward town but didn’t get far before he heard shouting over the sounds of a steam engine puffing.
“Seline!” Travis yelled as his auto-cart rolled into view.
John hadn’t seen the man since before the fighting started. That wasn’t a surprise, the man was not a fighter.
Travis eventually spotted John and swerved toward him. He came to a stop a dozen feet away and hopped off the wagon. The man ran toward him with a worried look on his face. “Is she-”
“-She’s unconscious but alive. I’m not sure what other injuries she might have, she was limping before she passed out.”
“We need to get her to Doc Hawthorme, can you carry her to the cart?”
John obliged the worried man. He was fully prepared to carry her to the Doc, so this saved him time.
The old man hurried over to the back of the wagon and climbed inside to clear up space for his niece. John gently placed Seline into the wagon and closed the gate after jumping back out.
“You’re not riding along?” Travis asked in confusion.
John shook his head and nodded toward the battlefield. “I wanna check on some things.”
Travis nodded. “You think some of the townsfolk survived? Do you want me to send some people out here to help?”
It seems the man misunderstood what John was actually going to do. “That won’t be necessary, I don’t expect to find any but I still wanna look.”
“If that’s how you feel, I won’t argue with you. Stay safe, John, we don’t need to lose you along with the Sheriff on the same day.”
The man’s concern was slightly surprising. John tilted his head in acknowledgment and the man turned his cart around and headed back toward town.
John waited until the cart was out of sight before his face turned hard and he turned toward the still suit that Jacob was inside. He pulled Bertha off his back and reloaded the weapon as he walked toward the automaton while staying well outside its reach.
“You going to keep playing dead, Jacob?” There was no response to his question. John grunted. “Suit yourself.”
He skirted around to the backside of the automaton and the hole that Seline had punched into it. Before he got a clear shot of the weakened section, one of the suit's hands whipped out and covered the spot.
A muted chuckle came from inside the suit as the head followed him. “What gave it away?”
“Nothing,” John admitted. “I was just going to shoot you a few more times to make sure you were dead.”
“I’m not sure which of you is more sadistic, you or mother.”
“You’re one to talk,” John stated.
“That little gun may have punched through the damaged armor, but it’s never getting through anywhere else. I’ve already fixed some of the damage that damn woman did, soon I’ll be mobile again, and I’ll keep my promise, John.”
John walked out behind Jacob. “You’re right, Jacob. This gun won’t cut it.”
“Where are you going?!” the man demanded to know.
He ignored the question as he walked over to the broken walker. He started throwing aside splintered chunks of wood and he could hear Jacob’s automaton making some awful noises as he tried to move it.
“You’ll never get to it before I fix the damage!” the man stated, but John could hear his panic.
“Feel free to hide inside there, or come out and fight me, either way, I don’t much care.” John found what he was looking for.
He yanked the cannon out of the wreckage before going back inside to retrieve some powder and a cannonball. It took a bit to find, but there was some left.
John filled the powder into the barrel while whistling a tune to drown out Jacob’s increasingly loud and panic-filled vitriol.
“You can’t do this!” the man declared as John rammed the cannonball into the barrel and aimed it toward the back of the automaton.
“Sure I can,” he replied calmly as he pulled out a match. “I would say this is for the Sheriff, but Seline already covered that. This is for everyone else whose lives you destroyed on this quest for revenge. I don’t even know why you bothered. I never even knew your mother was pregnant, let alone that she had a child. Had you just approached me, like a normal person, I would have apologized for abandoning you to her clutches. But you decided that killing people and leading me by the nose for these last few weeks was somehow a better idea. Goodbye, Jacob, you won’t be missed.” With that, John lit the match and touched it to the cannon wick.
There was a metallic squeak and a form jumped out of the front of the armor only moments before the cannon went off, tearing a hole straight through the center of the armor.
Like the coward he was, Jacob got up and ran. With deliberate slowness, John pulled Bertha back off his shoulder and leveled it at the screaming man. Just before Jacob crested the berm, John pulled the trigger.
The large bore round tore the man’s spine in two and carried out through where his heart would have been if he had one. John wasn’t so sure the man had considering the messed up things Jacob had done.
He walked over to the body and removed the head to make sure there was no chance the man would somehow recover. There was a loud crash behind him, when he looked back, he saw the large suit of armor had finally toppled over.
Despite his warnings for people to remain inside, the noise drew a large group of armed townsfolk. They looked at the wrecked suit, then at the headless body. “It’s over?” one of them asked.
“It’s over,” John stated as he rose off the ground and wiped the dirt from his hands that he had used to clean the blood off.
The group started to cheer now that they knew the battle was truly over and John couldn’t help but smile.
***
As much as everyone would have simply loved to rest, they needed to deal with the aftermath of the battle. They couldn’t just leave all the bodies that were choking the streets and river or disease and wild animals wouldn’t be far behind.
The cleanup was a quiet and somber affair as everyone pitched in to dispose of the bodies of the attackers in a large pit. This work excluded the injured such as Seline, who was still unconscious. She had suffered a broken leg and multiple broken ribs from her crash, but the Doc gave her good odds of a full recovery.
That wasn’t true for everyone though. The surviving members of Ember Creek had been reduced to a little over two hundred. John didn’t have a good idea of how many the town had before he arrived but he knew hundreds had died during the fighting over the last week.
He lifted up another Harc’otti corpse and tossed it into the wagon next to him. Beneath that body was another missing member of the city. He carefully extracted the dead man and carried him back to a collection site where the local priest was performing the last rites for them.
John smiled sadly and nodded at Cassi as he passed her. The Madam of the Silken Riches gave him a minute nod in response, wincing slightly at the movement and putting her hand to the bandage that covered the side of her face.
She had taken a grazing bullet to the cheek. The wound would take time to heal, but it would leave a scar. Then again, very few survivors weren’t scarred by this battle, both physically, and mentally.
Once his cart was full, the bodies were dumped in the very convenient pit that had knocked the train off the rails. Men with masks were shoveling in coal to keep the fire going, while four armed men watched for animals that might be drawn by the smell.
Ideally, they would have simply buried the bodies, but nobody wanted to spend the time digging a trench deep and wide enough to accommodate the thousand-plus dead.
A week passed like this before Travis came to get him. “I got it fixed up,” he stated without his usual exuberance.
He could understand why, Seline had woken up but now she was fighting off an infection. There was nothing either of them could do for her. All they could do was hope she was strong enough to fight it off.
John nodded to the man and followed him over to the improved four-legged walker. Gone was the armored top. Now two cannons faced forward with another two off to each side.
“You’re sure it’ll get us there?” John asked. Jacob had done a number on the automaton during his fight.
“Yeah, I made sure everything was good. Let’s get this over with.”
John motioned for the remaining deputies to follow him and Travis.
It took a few hours to ride the much faster automaton back to the airship. The ground around the ship was torn up from the intense battle they had against the Harc’otti as well. But the ship was still intact, minus the front cannon that had hounded them as they fled back to Ember Creek.
Someone on board blew a whistle at their approach, and he saw the cannons off to the side try to orient toward them. Travis stopped outside of grapeshot range and John stood with a brass cone designed to amplify his voice.
“Vernon Hensley is dead!” he shouted through the device. “Come out with your hands up, and your lives will be spared. If you don’t comply within the hour, your lives will be forfeit!”
With his ultimatum given, John sat back down next to Travis and waited. After most of the time had passed, people started walking out of a side door on the ship.
There were over a dozen men, all with their hands up as they slowly approached. John was glad he had brought enough manacles.
Four of the deputies watched the gathered crew while the other two placed each man in cuffs and strapped a chain to them.
John hopped off the automaton with Bertha and a set of pneuma pistols since his ammunition was all gone. He walked toward the airship and entered it without challenge.
By the time he was done clearing the vessel, the deputies had all the crew secured. They had all surrendered. Before leaving the ship, John poured oil down the wooden ramp as he left and lit it up. They didn’t have the manpower to remove the cannons from the ship, and he didn’t want them falling into the Harc’otti’s hands, if any were still around, or the Kleins.
They were far enough away that the explosion from the remaining gunpowder stored aboard was only a muffled boom. That was followed shortly after by the airbag above the ship finally igniting and turning dusk back into day for a short time.
