Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century 1)

Zeke wasn’t sure where he was. The room looked a bit like the lobby of a train station. And he didn’t know who any of these people except Lester were, or why they were fighting. Some were wearing masks and some weren’t, and at least three of them were dead, sprawled across the shiny-hard surface—two facedown, one faceup. The faceup man was missing most of his throat and his eyes were open, glazed, and staring at nothing but heaven beyond the ceiling.

But one of the facedown men was wearing a mask.

And to Zeke’s total astonishment, the burly, armored fellow who’d confronted him in the corridor was in the process of stripping that mask away. The dead man’s neck wobbled like an empty sock, and with a slip of a final strap, the mask came loose.

The armored man turned around, seeking the corridor entrance and the door behind it. Seeing that the door was open and Zeke wasn’t there anymore, he swore loudly and spun in a circle. A bullet pinged against his shoulder blade with the light chime of a cymbal, but it didn’t seem to harm him any.

He spied Zeke jammed behind the crates.

For a moment, Zeke thought that the man was going to pull that enormous gun down off his back and fire it, and then Zeke would dissolve into a thousand pieces and not even his mother would recognize him.

Instead, the man palmed the mask, wadded it into ball, and chucked it into the boy’s lap before turning around and pulling an oversized six-shooter out of his waistband and firing it again and again and again. He made a line of bullets from one side of the room to the other, creating cover for his own getaway or for Zeke’s—suddenly, Zeke wasn’t sure.

At the far edge of the room there was another door, and something big was beating against it from the outside. Or maybe it wasn’t something big. Maybe it was something many.

It wasn’t one beating bash, like a battering ram or a machine. It was a constant, pounding, pushing, thrusting pressure being forced against the door—which seemed to be strongly reinforced. Even from his own limited perspective, Zeke could see that the door was barricaded as if it expected an army to fling itself against it.

Was this that army?

The door was holding for now, but the armored man was shouting, “Go on, go back downstairs! Find another way out. Ezekiel!” he added, in case his audience wasn’t clearly enough defined. “Get out of here!”

Zeke wrung the mask into a knot and stood to a crouch.

Off to his left, behind a curtain, a man shrieked and flopped to the ground, dragging the curtain down with him. It covered him like a shroud. Around its bottom fringe a puddle of red crept and sprawled across the gray-and-white swirls of the polished floor.

Twenty-five

Zeke’s eyes flicked back and forth, scanning the room from corner to corner in search of some other exit. Wasn’t that what the armored man had said? Find another way out? But except for the door that strained against some shoving force on its other side, and the corridor through which the boy had initially come, he didn’t see any other outlets.

The man in the steel suit was out of bullets.

No, only one of his guns was out of bullets. He jammed the empty piece into his belt, against his belly, which was guarded by a metal plate. There was another gun wedged between his belt and his hip; he pulled it out and began a firing retreat.

Zeke counted eight more quarreling, shooting men holed up behind the chairs and around the occasional crates. He assumed that at some point they’d all run out of ammunition and everyone would have to stop. But for the moment, lead crashed in piercing straight lines, splattering like hail driven sideways by the wind.

Zeke wanted out. And the big man’s back was closing in on the corridor—he was trying to flush Zeke back downstairs, and maybe that wasn’t the worst idea in the world, after all.

It was a straight shot across the floor, and he had a big man in a suit of armor drawing all the bad attention away from him. On the other hand, the big man in the suit of armor was no doubt going to follow him downstairs. But here, upstairs, there was nothing but death and confusion.

Zeke decided to take his chances.

He took a leap that became a very short, very low flight from the crates to the middle of the floor—and he finished up his course with a sprinting scramble that sent him headfirst down the stairs on his hands and knees. Fifteen seconds behind him the armored man came backward, more gracefully than Zeke would’ve expected.

He grabbed the door and closed it with the full force of his weight at exactly the moment someone else came slapping against it from the other side.

Zeke tumbled down, tripping and catching himself and falling around the corner until he couldn’t see what was happening above him—he could only hear it. He was back downstairs. It was much quieter there; even the blasts of the guns upstairs were muffled by the ceiling and the stone walls around him.

Back where he’d started from, he felt a sense of failure, until he remembered the mask he clutched like a lifeline.

Minnericht had said Zeke couldn’t have one, and he’d been wrong about that, hadn’t he? Granted, it had come off a corpse, but the boy tried hard not to think about the face that the visor had most recently covered. He tried to take the philosophical view that the other man couldn’t use it anymore, so there was nothing wrong with taking it, and that made sense. But it felt no less disgusting when he smudged his thumb along the inside of the glass and felt the dampness of someone else’s dying breath.

Now that he had a mask, he didn’t know where to go or what to do with it. He wondered if he ought to hide it—maybe stash it in his room and wait for things to settle down—but that didn’t sound right.

At the top of the stairs the armored man was holding his ground, but Zeke had no way of knowing how long that would last.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the corridor with the row of doors and the lift at the end, there was nobody around but Zeke.

Whether this was a good or bad thing, he had no idea. He couldn’t escape the impression that something had gone off the rails, and that the quiet supper he’d so recently escaped had terminated in a terrible situation. The chaos above was swiftly working its way down, held at bay by only one stairwell door that was under a steady assault.