Fiddlehead

“There!” he called out. At first Maria thought it was a strange reaction to being grabbed by a woman, but that wasn’t his point at all. He was looking off to the right, where a dirt road passed between the trees.



The crawler shuddered to an idling stop. Thomson asked over his shoulder, “Sir, you think this is it?”



“It’s about right, so far as the map goes. If it doesn’t take us right to the spot, it’ll get us close, and there will be fewer trees to mow down. Just take the turn, if we can make it.”



“Oh, I can make the turn. I’m just not sure we can make that road. It’s barely big enough for a pair of horses.”



“Try it and see. We’re out of plans, and we’re running out of time,” he said.



He was right, and Maria knew it. The Baldwin-Felts men might have been hysterical, but that didn’t mean they were wrong. She could hear it, too, behind her: a different frequency of hum—an off-beat vibration that drummed up against her spine. The bomb’s integrity was failing. The jostle of the rolling-crawler couldn’t be helping matters, and it only grew worse when the vehicle turned right in a slow, perilous arc, then began its passage between the trees on a road even worse than the one it was leaving.



Maria thought it wasn’t possible for the ride to get any rougher, but she’d been wrong before, and here was another fine example.



“Get your head down!” MacGruder ordered her—and perhaps the rest of the men, though she took it personally.



He was right to make the command, as the trees at the road’s edge had sharp, low branches. Their limbs were bare and cold, and they whipped viciously against the crawler and its occupants. Maria huddled down low, ducking as far as she could behind Thomson, who valiantly held the thing steady and forced it forward, ever forward, in the lowest gear imaginable.



“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Sanders shouted.



“It can barely go this fast!” Thomson replied, jerking the steering wheel as it reeled against him, the wheels having snapped against some dip that threatened to trap them. “But if we stop, we’re damned! We’ll never get it moving again!”



So they fought onward, their bones rattling with every turn of the wheels. With each foot the weapon behind them grew a little weaker, a little louder. A little harder to ignore.



“That must be it!” Thomson hollered, pointing at a pair of structures no bigger than shacks. He drew the crawler up close beside them, and let the motor rumble.



One of the shacks was barely a roof on timbers, a covering for a hole in the ground. The structure beside it had a sign out front that said, CUMBERLAND CAVERNS! ONE CENT PER PERSON! SEE THE WONDER! AT YOUR OWN RISK! SUPPLIES AVAILABLE!



“Someone’s selling visits to the cave?” MacGruder wondered aloud.



“It’s not uncommon,” Maria informed him. “But it’s deserted now,” she said aloud, to herself more than anyone else. “It must be.”



“Thomson, get the back of this thing as close to that hole as you can manage!”



“Yes, sir! You get out and guide me. I’ll do my best!” he vowed.



MacGruder flung himself over the side and went to the rear, hollering instructions and giving whatever guidance he could—and finally the crawler was positioned with its back deck beneath the overhang, almost immediately above the open hole below.



“That’s as close as you’re going to get!” the captain called, and made a throat-cutting gesture that told Thomson to stop the motor.



When he did, the crawler fell silent, except for the pops and pings of the engine cooling almost immediately in the bitter air. But the forest wasn’t perfectly quiet, even without its raucous growling. The crisp afternoon was interrupted by the slow hiss, sizzle, and creak of the Maynard bomb shifting in its housing.



“Captain…” begged Frankum. “You have to let us go!”



“And I will,” MacGruder told them. He reached into his boot and pulled out a knife, then leaned into the compartment and cut the ropes that bound Frankum and his men. “Get out now. You’re going to help us shove this goddamn thing into that goddamn hole.”



The Baldwin-Felts men agreed to this immediately. They might as well. There was no time to run.



They climbed out of the rear and rubbed at the sore spots on their wrists as Sanders untied the ropes that held the tarp over the awful device.



When he was finished with the knots, he whipped the sheet away, revealing the monstrous creation: a smooth, elongated box with round edges, banded with steel and rivets. Its nose was fixed with gleaming copper plate, and in its tail lurked a vast tangle of tubes, coils, and wires. Three tanks were mounted atop it, side by side like pig iron from the smelter. These tanks were the source of the hissing, the creaking, and other ominous sounds of something tight beginning to split under pressure.



It horrified Maria to her very core. This object could kill millions, if the weather was right. A terrific device, indeed, intimidating on the outside, even without ever releasing its deadly power. But compared to what it was capable of … it looked deceptively small. Nothing that could fit on the back of a crawler should be able to wipe out a city.



Frankum also stood staring, without speaking, until he said what Maria was already wondering. “I don’t know if we can lift it, Captain—just us men, and her,” he said. “We haven’t the strength between us, not even if we had a team of horses!”



“You idiot, the back of this thing is on a hydraulic lift. It was built to carry and dump construction supplies,” the captain said. He gave Thomson a signal, and a different motor kicked to life—something quieter and smoother, but still wildly loud in the otherwise silent woods. With painful slowness, the back compartment rose, tilting the bomb by tiny, incremental degrees. “We won’t have to pick it up and carry it; we’ll just have to climb in and give it a push, until it starts to roll.”



As predicted, the crawler’s bed wouldn’t go high enough to let the bomb drop of its own accord, so all the men climbed in behind it. Maria stayed on the ground at their insistence—partly for all the usual thickheaded reasons, she was sure; but partly because space was limited, and there was only room for the strongest bodies.



The men braced themselves and pressed their feet against the bomb, and while Maria crossed her fingers and prayed, they shoved with all their might, rocking the big device back and forth like Thomson had rocked the crawler itself to get it moving.



They strained, swore, sweated, and pushed. The grade of the crawler’s bed was so steep that Maria tried not to worry about what would happen if they just toppled right in after it.



Finally, Maynard wiggled.



It creaked back and forth, just moving by inches at first. Hardly noticeable at all. Then it rocked. Then it rolled, tumbled, dropped.



And fell.



Right into the cave, careening with the weight of a city’s dead, crashing through the earth and settling down somewhere below, farther than any of them could see when they scrambled after it to stare into the hole.



“Where is it?” Frankum asked, leaning over so far that Maria was tempted, for one nasty second, to give him a shove. The pirate soul she harbored within her corset objected to her decency, but now was not the time or the place. Like she’d told the captain, they had to play fair. After all, they were not alone. Soon, the world would be watching. And someone had to save it.



The captain said, “No idea. Too dark. Anyone have a light?”



“Just the lantern on the crawler, and I can’t pry that off without my tools,” Thomson told them.



Echoing up from below, the sound of failing machinery grew louder as it bounced and rose off the rocks.



Behind them they heard the telltale clomp and clatter of a horse’s hooves. Maria guessed that it was Evans with the dynamite, and it was indeed him, carrying a promising pack on his back.



“Hurry up with that!” the captain yelled, and Evans did his level best.



He yanked the horse to a sliding stop and dropped off the saddle to his feet, tossing the pack to the captain. “Wire it up, sir! I’ve got the line and pump in the saddlebags.”



The captain went to work immediately, with Frankum lending a useful hand—for once in his life, Maria added disparagingly in her head. But it was his life, too; his, and theirs, and everyone else’s. So he planted the sticks, threaded the wire, and ran with the rest of them back to the far side of the crawler—where Evans had already secured the horse, as far from the trouble as he could put the poor animal.



The captain paused while he checked the settings and connections on the pump, then set it on the ground.



Evans turned his nose to the air. “Sir … do you smell that?”



He did. He must be able to—Maria could smell it, even though her nose was so cold she couldn’t feel it when she wiped it with the back of her scraped-up hands.



It was a toxic smell: rotten eggs and ruin, sharp death and troubled sleep. It stank of chemicals and poison, and it grew stronger while they sat there, mulling it over and wondering what could possibly smell that way?



The captain shook it off first, that numbing, stupefying creep of confusion and curiosity.



He shoved the plunger. A jolt went down the wire, along the ground, and into the hole.



And the earth exploded.



Twenty-one



The night ticked by in seconds, in minutes. In bullets, fired one-two-three from the woods and answered one-two-three from inside the house. It was not a stalemate, not exactly. From a second-floor window—the window almost directly above Abraham Lincoln in his library—Gideon watched the other men amass, and he knew that this relative peace could not hope to last the night. More men had joined the siege crew outside, and now they numbered fifteen by the scientist’s count … though, given the gloom outside, it was always possible that he’d missed a couple.



He always built some wiggle room into all his assessments and plans—not because he didn’t value precision, but because the universe was sometimes imprecise, and prone to hiding things.