Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century 1)

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Should’ve gone down the outside!” the shouty voice accused.

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled, relieved to hear the other person even though she didn’t know if he planned to help her or kill her on sight. Whoever he was, he’d gone to trouble enough to make contact, and that was something. Wasn’t it?

She said, louder, “Get me out of here!”

“Get away from the door!”

Having learned her lesson about responding fast, she sidestepped her way around the hotel’s front desk. A new and catastrophic crash bowed the front door inward, but didn’t break it. A second assault cracked the thing’s hinges, and a third took it clear off the frame.

An enormous man hurtled through it, then dragged himself to a stop.

“You—” He pointed and stopped himself midthought. “Are a woman. ”

“Very good,” Briar said, wobbling out from behind the desk.

“All right. Come with me, and do it fast. We haven’t got a minute before they start reviving. ”

The man with the tinny voice was speaking through a helmet that gave his face the shape of a horse’s head crossed with a squid. The mask ended in an amplifier down front, and it split into two round filters that aimed off to either side of his nose. The contraption looked heavy, but then again, so did the man who was wearing it.

He wasn’t fat at all, but he was nearly as wide as the doorway—though the effect was enhanced by his armor. His shoulders were plated with steel, and a high, round collar rose up behind his neck to meet the helmet. Where his elbows and wrists bent, makeshift chain mail functioned as joints. Across his torso, thick leather straps held the whole thing taut and close.

It was as if someone had taken a suit of armor and made it into a jacket.

“Lady, we haven’t got all night,” he told her.

She began to say that it wasn’t night, yet, but she was winded and worried, and irrationally glad for the company of this heavily armed man. “I’m coming,” she said. She stumbled and knocked against his arm, then righted herself.

He didn’t grab her to help, but he didn’t push her away, either. He only turned around and headed back out the door.

She followed. “What was that thing?” she asked.

“Questions later. Watch your step. ”

The street and walkways were littered with the tangled, twitching, growling bodies of rotters. Briar’s first steps took trouble to avoid them, but her escort was outpacing her, so she abandoned the approach and moved from corpse to corpse without regard for where her feet might land. Her boots broke arms and stomped through ribcages. Her heel landed too close against a dead woman’s face and scraped down her skull, dragging a sheet of flaky skin with it and leaving the flesh wiped upon the stones.

“Wait,” she begged.

“No waiting. Look at them,” he said, as he too disregarded the quivering rotters.

Briar thought it was a ridiculous instruction. She couldn’t help but look at them; they were everywhere—underfoot and down the road, flattened against curbs and leaning against bricks with their tongues lolling and their eyes fluttering.

But she thought she understood the armored man’s meaning. Animation was returning to their limbs. Their jerking hands moved harder, and with more deliberation. Their kicking feet were twisting and turning, trying to work themselves up to a standing position. Every second that passed, they gathered their wits—such as they were—or at least gathered their intuitive sense of motion.

“This way. Faster. ”

“I’m trying!”

“That’s not good enough. ” He threw back a hand and seized her wrist. He yanked her forward, lifting her as lightly as a toddler over another stack of restless, prone rotters.

One of the gruesome things held up a hand and tried to grab Briar’s ankle.

She kicked at its twiggy arm but she missed, because the man in the mask shifted his grip on her wrist and pulled again, past one last clump of bodies where a rotter was sitting up and moaning, trying to rouse its brethren.

“All right, it’s a straight shot now” the man said.

“A straight shot to what?”

“To the underground. Hurry. This way. ”