The burn on my cheek flared into fresh pain, just at the sight of it.
Bantle leveled a pistol, too, and sighed like I was the biggest exasperation he ever met. “Put the Peacemaker down,” he instructed.
I just then realized it was still in my hand.
I know I should of leveled it and shot him where he stood. But I honestly think if I had, you wouldn’t be hearing this story today. Standish and Bantle had me dead to rights, and even if I dropped Bantle, well … Horaz Standish’s forbearance was unlikely to weather my shooting his boss.
I stretched out my arm and laid the gun on the packed earth, fingertip reach away.
Bantle shook his head. “You whores really are blamed fools. Get that other one out from behind the door, please, Scarlet?”
Scarlet crossed behind Standish, more’s the pity — I would of liked him to foul Standish’s line of fire — and went around the door. He was a medium-sized fellow only, compact, but his arms were as big around as one of Priya’s thighs. And he was as strong as he looked; Priya kicked and fought as he drew her out, but she couldn’t even shake his grip on her wrist. She bit him a good one — I saw blood — and he stepped on my leg fighting her, but before too long he twisted her arm behind her back and gave her the Spanish walk out of the corner.
She never said a word. But there was more light now, and she caught my eye. The toss of her chin told me she’d kill all three of them right now, if she had the means. Though I was chattering with the cold, I agreed with her silent threat 1,006 percent.
Standish lowered his gun. “These girls are soaked to the bone. Let’s get them inside, before they freeze stiff.”
“They’d be less trouble to me under such circumstances,” Bantle said.
“I’ve got a use for at least one of ’em if you don’t,” Standish replied.
Bantle snorted. But he reached down — without holstering his pistol — and though I cringed away, he hauled me to my feet by the hair.
Chapter Twenty-two
I woke up with a drinker’s head and the taste of vomit in my mouth, unable to feel my hands. It weren’t dark — if anything it was too damned bright, and when I tried to open my eyes I slammed ’em shut again right quick, feeling as if somebody had driven an ice pick into my brain.
I hadn’t got more than a glimpse, but I had the idea that I was in a bright, small room, maybe lit with electric arcs. I couldn’t think of anything else that would make such a dazzling light, but I also couldn’t think why anybody’d light an inside room with an arc. It was like killing ants with molten lead: significant overkill.
I moaned and tried to pull my hands down, to see if I could get some blood into them. Something rattled, and I realized they was chained up over my head.
I probably should of faked I was still out, I realized. But I had to vomit again, and I didn’t want to drown in it. It took the sort of effort I’d usually reserve for mountain climbing — if I was a mountain climber, I mean — but I managed to get my shoulder down and my knees up, and toss my chuck over the edge of the narrow metal table I was laying on without either falling off it or puking on myself any more than absolutely necessary.
They’d chloroformed me. Or maybe ether. Whatever it was, it was turning my stomach something fierce. And I still couldn’t feel my hands.
As I lay there, I came aware of a vibration coming up through the table. Like if I was on a train. But I couldn’t hear the rattle of iron wheels on iron rails or the ratcheta ratcheta noise of those wheels rolling over the joints. Maybe a barge?
Either way, I was mostly surprised I weren’t dead. Bantle’d proved in his own parlor that he had a taste for hurting women and that he wasn’t about to draw the line at permanent, long-term hurt.
I pressed my burned face to the cool metal and sighed. Maybe he didn’t like ’em once they was scarred up by his prior attentions. Or maybe he was just saving me for later.
That gave me a fresh well of sick. I tried to vomit again, but all I got for my trouble was hard stomach cramps and a thin, bitter streak of bile. Straining over the edge of the table made my shoulders hurt, and straining to vomit made my belly cramp, and I was feeling pretty miserable already when I realized that I didn’t know where Priya was.
That fear you get for a loved one — that’s a motivator like no other. Even though I couldn’t feel my hands or lower arms, I scooted my butt up, angled myself sideways with my legs off the table, and leaned on the chain so I could use it for purchase to pull myself sitting. The room spun, all right, but I didn’t dare fall over — and if I fell off the table I’d probably dislocate a shoulder, and then I’d really be useful for nothing.
I turned so the chain eased and my hands dropped into my lap. I looked down at ’em, daring my eyes to open. It still hurt like hell.
But the hands were there, and attached, and a funny pale color. I tried to wiggle my fingers and got nothing — not even a shimmer. As I watched, they pinked up again a bit, though. I decided that was a hopeful sign, that blood was flowing back into them. I flapped ’em like a dying fish thumping its tail. They hit my legs like lumps of warm meat. When they bounced on my chest, I realized that the Morgan dollar was still inside my shirt, tucked against the top of my bosom.
No sign of Priya anywhere. I was in a little whitewashed metal room, on a steel table. My feet dangled over a puddle of my own vomit, and those were the only things anywhere near.
The metal walls made me think I was on a ship. That would explain the hum that was still rising up the table legs to numb my bottom. And why that table was bolted to the floor.
I was musing on that when the door swung open.
I braced myself for Bantle, but it was just Horaz Standish. I was ashamed of myself for feeling a spike of relief. He stood there, framed, with a bucket in one hand and a stack of rags in the other, and he looked at me. Maybe pityingly? His face was hard to read.
“Well,” he said, after a minute. “You’ve looked better.”
He came up to me and — stepping around the puddle of upchuck on the floor — dipped a cloth in the bucket and wiped my face clean with lukewarm water. I bit my cheek not to scream when he touched the burns. He dropped the cloth on the floor, then repeated the process. He crouched down and wiped up the vomit, then washed the floor with rags.
When he was done, he washed his hands in the bucket, piled all the dirty rags back into it, and set it by the door.
I thought about kicking his head while he was down there, but somebody’d taken off my shoes, and it seemed like a lot of risk for a more or less Pyrrhic gesture. So I just watched while Standish cleaned up up after me and then came back.
“Before I unchain you,” he said, “you ought to know that there’s no escaping.”
“We’re on a boat,” I said. “Where are we going?”
He laughed. “We’re in a boat,” he corrected. “A submersible ship. We’re four leagues under the Sound, and all the hatches are dogged and pressure locked. You have no way out.”
“A submersible ship?”
He smiled. “Think of it as a mechanical fish.”
“It’s the Nautilus!” I cried. “He really is Captain Nemo!”