She finally made the right connection, and soon she reached the station, bought her ticket to Fort Chattanooga, and positioned herself comfortably on the last train of the day to the fort as the train prepared to depart.
Maria sat next to the window but turned her face away from it, in case anyone had caught up to her. She had no doubt that whoever’d sent the two men would learn her location soon enough, but there was no reason to make it easy for them.
The train lurched forward and found its rhythm.
And now she had hours before her with nothing else to do but familiarize herself with the nurse’s missives.
The pages were difficult to skim, due largely to the questionable handwriting of the woman who’d composed them. At a glance Maria could see that the nurse had never enjoyed more than a few years of formal schooling, as the earnest, rounded letters showed the charming diligence of a child’s hard-practiced lessons. But there was nothing charming or childlike about the message these shaky letters conveyed.
She checked the most recent letters and saw that the handwriting improved over the course of the correspondence, practice making something closer to perfect. Even so, the early pages were slow going, and the rollicking track of the train gave Maria a case of motion sickness that almost made her quit trying; surely it would be easier to finish the reading from a stationary location.
But a phrase leaped out at her. She drew the page in question up close to her face.
“… if you could hold him still for long enough, a doctor would pronounce him dead.”
Her attention now more fully engaged, she made the effort to peruse the entire section from whence the eye-catching line emerged.
I have now seen four cases here in the underground, and they all go the same: First, the victim breathes up some gas—usually because a mask springs a leak, or isn’t fixed good on his face in the first place. But sometimes it happens because the mask gets knocked off, or one of the tunnels isn’t sealed up as good as everybody thought. Doesn’t matter how it gets inside, it always goes the same.
After a man breathes it, his nose starts running with yellow mucus, and the mucus is sometimes bloody. Sores break out around his eyes, ears, and mouth. It looks like the gas is eating him up from the inside out. Then the heart stops, the pulse quits. No more spit or tears, and the skin around his eyes turns yellow. He starts panting, and it sounds like his lungs are being chewed up into rags. You will never forget what it sounds like, when he breathes. For that matter, if it weren’t for that breathing, you’d never know he was alive. Everything else about his body has done stopped, like he’s been killed by a plague. If you could hold him still for long enough, a doctor would pronounce him dead.
But he won’t stop moving like a polite dead man. Just when he ought to lie down and take a proper Christian burial, that’s when he starts running around, trying to bite people.
Sometimes it happens quicker than other times, from start to finish. The people I talked to say it’s because the gas is very heavy, and it collects thicker in some places than in others. It moves like a real thick liquid, like a syrup you can hardly see.
Maria sat up straight and frowned at the paper. As promised by Captain Sally, the text described a poisonous gas, and it definitely sounded like the walking plague. In fact, the nurse had used both of those words, fairly close together: “walking” and “plague.”
She kept reading.
Once a man’s been bit by a rotter, treatment is pretty much a race against the clock. Whatever gets bit has to get cut off. The bite causes a festering that moves like blood poisoning through a body, or like septic rot, but faster. If a finger gets bit, you’d better cut off the hand. If a hand gets bit, you’d better take the whole arm. If the amputations don’t happen in time, the patient will die within a day or two. I am told that a patient who dies from a bite will not start walking like a rotter, and so far this seems to be true. But I only seen it on three occasions so far, and that is not enough for me to say for certain.
“Gruesome,” Maria murmured with fascination. She flipped to the next page.
Nobody knows how long the rotters will keep moving, but the oldest ones have been kicking around for about fifteen years, by everybody’s best guess. The real old ones are raggedy now, and when you see them, you wonder how they manage to move at all. Most of the skin has rotted off, and the muscles are hardly more than strings. I hear they take nourishment from what they eat, but since their blood don’t flow I’m not sure how that’s possible. And since there is not much to eat inside the walls, it makes me wonder. I guess they have been eating the Doornails or the Station men, but I am told that, these days, it is unusual for more than half a dozen men to die that way in a year. For the most part, people have figured out how to live here without getting eaten. But those first few years after the wall went up, a whole bunch of people got killed by the gas and the rotters. Mostly I think people were trying to get inside the city and either loot it or get back the stuff they’d left behind. And I’d like to tell you that it was a stupid thing for them to do, but until they did it, nobody knew what would happen to them. Now everybody knows.
I know what happens to the men who do the gas-drug, too, but no one will listen to me. I’ve tried to tell people, and to ask for help. I used letters and the taps as best I could, but no one from the Dreadnought has answered—though my friend Angeline says I should try the Texas Ranger again. His name was Horatio Korman, and if you can reach him, he may be of some help to you. You might also ask after the captain on the train, a man by name of MacGruder. I have got to say he conducted himself like a hero, but I doubt you’ll have any means of finding that one, as he’s someplace up north. I am told there’s also an airman named Croggon Hainey who might serve as witness, but him being colored and being a pirate, he’s not likely to be believed.
Maria was startled to see the air pirate’s name. Croggon Hainey was the captain of a ship named the Free Crow (though it was briefly called Clementine). It had played a role in her first case as a Pinkerton agent, the one she’d been reassured had been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction … including the pirate’s.
“Small world,” she said under her breath.
She flipped back to the top of the stack, scanning for a location or an address. Nestled between two stacks of notes tied with twine, Maria found a brown paper envelope with the information she hunted.
The name on the envelope was “Venita Lynch,” at odds with the reports themselves, which were usually signed “Mercy.” “Seattle,” she read aloud from the return address, wondering if she was pronouncing it right. “The Washington Territories.” She knew where Washington was, at any rate. It was as far west and north as you could go, without getting very, very wet … or wandering into Canada. Upon inspection of the postal mark, she saw that the envelope had not been mailed from Seattle at all, but from Tacoma. “Where the transcontinental line ends,” she mused. The two cities must not be far apart.
But she was confused by some aspects of Mercy’s reports. These rotters … they were obviously victims of the walking plague, or something very like it, but she’d implied that they got that way from breathing the air, not taking a drug. What on earth had happened in Seattle?
For that matter, if a catastrophe had occurred, how did people still live there? And furthermore, why?
The mention of gas masks gave her one clue, as did the reference to an “underground.” But if there was more to be gleaned, she’d have to keep reading.