Limbus, Inc. Book II Read online

  Dolan rolled over to protect his sore shoulder. He was under the haze and could see another room to the back of the little house. He crawled that way. The building rattled and shook. As the troops closed in on the Union-held ridge to begin their ascent, the cannon fire finally ceased. It was amazing the house had not been hit. It was most likely just under the range of the guns. The fighting was beyond and above them now, fierce as ever, but of considerably less volume due to the distance.

  Dolan reached up and opened the door. It exploded in his hand, and left him holding a wooden latch. A woman was inside the room, a small child at her side. She was young and dark-haired and her eyes were wide with horror. She held a one-shot handgun in her two hands. She’d just missed him. Dolan zeroed in on her face. He recognized her as one of the women he’d seen while lying on the table, the one from the sepia photograph in his mind. He surveyed the room. He crawled closer. The woman screamed and held the child to her side.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Dolan said. “Do you have any place below ground you can hide until this is over?”

  The woman was trembling and pale with terror. Dolan shook her gently. She snapped out of it, nodded her head, and pointed toward the west side of the property, back near the clothes line.

  “I tried to get under,” she said in a whisper. Her accent was unfamiliar. “But when I did so, someone shot at me.”

  The root cellar with the wooden door. Dolan realized he’d gone right by it on the way into the house. That would have to do.

  “Bring the child,” Dolan said. “Follow me and stay close.”

  He duck walked through the low smoke with the woman and child behind him. The kid was crying. Dolan didn’t think anyone would hear that, or much give a damn under the circumstances. Most of the rebels had long left the farmhouse behind. He eased the front door open and looked out. In the distance, when the wind shifted, Dolan could see officers on horseback watching the assault through spyglasses and with shaded eyes. The smoke pretty much covered everything else.

  The area seemed clear.

  “Now,” Dolan said. “Run for it.”

  “Much obliged, reb.” The woman and child ran across the yard, heading for the wooden door to the root cellar. Dolan followed them a few yards behind, already wondering what to do next, if the mission was already over, or if he was actually just going to die here. The woman reached the root cellar. She looked up and to one side and screamed.

  The scowling sergeant appeared in the smoke. He’d stayed behind, perhaps pretending to be wounded, and now saw a pretty woman out in the open. Dolan closed the distance. The sergeant looked his way. He grinned at Dolan as if they were both in on something good. He spat tobacco and stepped closer to the woman and shoved her down on the ground. Dolan raised the rifle but knew he could not fire the long Springfield from this far off without risking the lives of the innocents. He jogged a bit closer. Meanwhile, the sergeant set his own weapon down. He began to undo his breeches, clearly intent on raping the girl. He’d have killed her afterward just to shut her up; that much also seemed clear.

  Dolan closed the gap. He fired. The Sergeant was hit in the leg and dropped to his knees. He glared at Dolan and fumbled for his own rifle to shoot back. Dolan lowered the barrel of the old Springfield and ran the man through with his bayonet. The sergeant screamed and shat himself.

  The women threw open the wooden door and took the child down into the root cellar. She looked back once with wide and grateful eyes but then slammed the door behind her. Dolan immediately ran over to kick some rocks and dirt on top of the entrance to camouflage her hiding place. Dolan heard the sergeant dying noisily behind him. He felt an odd mixture of remorse and primal satisfaction.

  The charge became a rout. Trumpets sounded.

  The men on the ridge began to retreat and come back his way. Dolan got up and a round narrowly missed him to strike a white nightgown hanging on the clothes line. He spun around to see who had fired at him.

  They’d seen him running away. Now the enemy lay on both sides. He was in a sandwich.

  The officers and a few enlisted men raced toward Dolan. They appeared to be summarily executing stragglers and deserters. In truth, Dolan hadn’t given much thought about what to do next. There hadn’t been time. He ran for the house again to hopefully lead the soldiers away from the woman and her child. He made it up to the porch just in time. A round struck the door as he rolled through it.

  Dolan loaded the rifle as quickly as he could, then turned facedown and brought the Springfield up. He sighted on one of the officers on horseback and fired. The man fell backward. Dolan struggled to reload the cumbersome weapon. It seemed to vibrate in his hands. Why was it doing that?

  Just like the Limbus business card.

  Dolan was shifting now, leaving the past, and he knew it. His sense of smell vanished, and then his hearing. The world blurred and then slipped the rest of the way out of focus. He shook on the floor, frothing at the mouth. He could no longer control his limbs. The painful feeling of a thousand pinpricks returned. His skin felt hot and dry and every muscle hurt.

  Dolan wondered if they were bringing him back to Limbus and if the mission was already over. He prayed it was. And if not, that he would die. But a small voice within him disagreed. He’d proven useful again. He was proud of that. He’d won. He was alive and energized and felt good about himself for the first time in ages, even if just for surviving the first test. Did he really want all of that erased forever? Everything he was? Just…gone?

  When the Confederate soldiers burst into the house, they found only an abandoned uniform and an empty .58 Springfield musket, its long bayonet covered with fresh blood. The man had vanished.

  *

  Snake Dolan did not wake up back on the table as he’d hoped. They had not wiped his mind clean. Not yet, anyway. He was not that lucky. He hadn’t died, either. He woke up groggy and shivering and opened his eyes to complete darkness. It was also cold as a cast iron toilet seat. Dolan felt around with his fingertips. He felt damp, sticky earth and chilly water. Back on earth, but somewhere else, and in some other when. He took stock of the situation.

  He was once again naked and on the ground, this time in what felt like a steadily widening pool of mud. Drops of cold moisture fell on his bare skin. It was raining hard. His entire body ached.

  “Shit.”

  White lightning split the sky. Dolan gathered that he was outside in the woods. Maybe ten seconds later, he heard a long, deep, repetitive rumble. He felt relieved to note it was not cannon fire this time, merely thunder. Then the lighting came again, and he counted to six before he heard the booming noise. The worst of the storm lay in the distance. Dolan sat up in the mud. His head throbbed. He rubbed his arms against the cold and watched the sky. Lightning again, thunder after, speeding up a bit. The storm front was moving closer.

  Dolan sat up. He felt around in the dark. Another lightning flash, almost directly overhead and very bright, finally illuminated his immediate surroundings. He was next to a dirt road in the middle of what seemed to be absolutely nowhere. He had no idea where he was or what time zone they had dropped him into. But the dirt road had tire tracks on it. Not wheel tracks, tire tracks. So, automobiles.

  Headlights appeared in the distance. Yes, a car. Okay, Dolan thought, at least we know this isn’t the 1800s. That’s a start.

  Dolan realized he’d be in an exposed position. He forced himself to stand and jogged naked to some waist-high brush. He squatted down to watch the approaching vehicle. He could see it in the moonlight and with the help of the occasional forks of lightning. It was a medium-sized truck. The engine sounded odd, smaller than he would have expected for modern times. The truck slowed down as it bounced through a deep mud puddle.

  Dolan noticed a large tree had fallen across the road. He decided he’d jump the driver when they stopped to move the tree and at least score some warm clothes. But something moved just below Dolan and to his right. He gently nudged some brush out of th
e way. He peered through the shrubbery.

  Two men lay there in the darkness and the mud. They both wore rain slickers and held firearms of some kind.

  It was an ambush.

  Dolan squinted in the gloom, though now his eyes were beginning to adjust. The guns had round cylinders and looked to be from the early 20th century. They’d called them Tommy guns back then. He’d fired one once before, though he’d never owned the weapon. They were deadly and fairly efficient. These two men had carefully laid a trap for the driver and probably planned to steal the truck.

  But what am I supposed to do about that? Why am I here?

  The truck came to a halt but no one got out. The two men who lay in wait stiffened. One of them whistled a poor imitation of a bird. Someone across the road answered in the same manner.

  The bad guys were on both sides of the road; all of them were guaranteed to be heavily armed. Dolan had no idea who was in the waiting truck, but if there was a girl around, she wasn’t likely to be lying around here in the wet mud, clutching a gun, and planning to hijack or murder the driver. She had to be in the vehicle.

  Before Dolan could move, he heard another sound to his left. He went flat in the brush and dirt, naked and wet and acutely aware of his helplessness. He saw another man who was smaller than the others, wearing a floppy hat and a black slicker. The new man crawled to the edge of the road. He carried a revolver in each hand and had a wicked Bowie knife stuck in the pocket of his raincoat. He was fixated on the truck.

  The headlights lit up the area. The passenger door of the stuck vehicle opened. The men around Dolan stiffened and took aim. Whatever was happening, time was running out. Dolan eyed the Bowie knife. A burst of lighting snapped overhead.

  One…two…three…

  Dolan gathered himself and waited for the thunder to arrive. When it did, he rolled down the short slope and pounced on the back of the prone gunman. He grabbed the knife. The man tried to roll over to protect himself but Dolan was too fast. He slit the man’s throat. The gun in his left hand discharged once into the road. The man getting out of the truck promptly shot back. Then someone else began firing. Men shouted and screamed. The entire area was immediately bright with muzzle flashes and the air dense with flying lead. The plants and trees around Dolan were being cut to pieces. It was all-out war.

  Staying low, Dolan stripped the man of his raincoat and buckled it on. He returned the knife to its sheath. He stole the floppy hat as well, and the two hand guns. He crawled back to the side of the road.

  The men in the truck were trying to back it up, but someone behind them had just dropped another tree in their way. It was a perfect trap. The attackers now seemed to be firing down at the tires, perhaps because they did not want to destroy the contents of the truck. One thing was for sure, once they forced the passengers to step outside, this was going to become a slaughter.

  Dolan heard Bartlett in his mind, clear as a bell, saying “Protect the girl.” But she had to be in the truck, not out in the woods. Dolan scowled and wiped the wet mud from his face. Frustrated, he came to a decision. He crawled back to his right. He did his best imitation of that crappy bird sound and cried out hoarsely, “Don’t shoot, boys. It’s me!”

  The two men down below looked up. With all the noise and confusion, they bought it. One went back to firing.

  “Get down here,” the other man said. He lowered his Tommy gun. He looked up again to see Dolan in the raincoat and hat coming down from the brush. The other man stopped shooting but continued to aim at the road.

  Someone far away shouted, “Get out of the truck! All we want is the fuckin’ whiskey!”

  Some other men laughed.

  Above the two thieves now, Dolan raised the pistols, one in each hand. The lightning flashed overhead.

  “The hell?” the man below said. His voice went thick with fear. He could see Dolan’s size and bare legs now. He knew it wasn’t his friend. He frantically tried to bring up his machine gun but lost his balance. He slipped in the mud and fell flat on his back with a splash.

  Dolan shot him and then shot the other gunner in the back of the head. He tucked the two pistols into the pockets of the rain coat. He ran for the machine guns and picked one up in each hand. They weighed a ton, but he was in good shape. His hands shook from adrenaline. He stood up and waved one in the air. The wind and rain whipped his bare legs. Across the road, two other men stood up as well, thinking the battle was over. They seemed to be waiting for orders.

  Dolan shot them, too. That deep rattling noise was all but drowned out by a painfully loud burst of thunder.

  “Get out of the truck!”

  The last man, one apparently stationed in front of the vehicle, appeared as a black outline just outside the glare of the headlights. He had a shotgun aimed at the front windshield. He repeated his demand. “The both of you get out and hightail it back to Canada if you want. We just came for the fuckin’ whiskey.”

  You’re lying to them, Dolan thought. You’re going to kill them or I wouldn’t even be here.

  The man waited.

  Dolan trotted along the mud bank just above the road, one gun in each hand. “We’re comin’ out.”

  The side door opened again and a woman’s legs appeared.

  There she is!

  Dolan could just see the top of her head in the window. She stepped out into the open with her hands up. The woman wore a ridiculously incongruous evening outfit, a beaded white dress with some kind of funny little hat that had feathers in it. Her dress shoes sank ankle deep into the mud. She was crying and waving her arms. She was the younger girl he’d seen in his mind back at Limbus.

  Dolan watched as the man in the headlights waited for the driver to emerge. He kept the man in his sights. He already knew how this would have to end.

  The driver door opened. Someone tossed a rifle out into the mud. A man appeared. He was round and bald and had his hands up. He was nobody’s fool. He went for a pistol at his belt and right then the girl took off running into the darkness. Dolan watched her go, his attention distracted.

  The man in the headlights shot the driver dead.

  Dolan dropped the large guns and charged after the woman. He could not stand his ground and shoot the other man dead and still keep track of where she was headed. It was too damned dark. His instincts told him to flank her in the woods and keep her from getting injured or killed some other way. He figured the last man might be true to his word, though that didn’t seem likely. But if he was there for the hijacked whiskey, it was now his to keep. If he wasn’t, they’d know in a matter of seconds.

  Nope. Either he had orders to kill them all or the man feared leaving a witness. He came after the girl.

  Dolan ran through the mud and twigs and roots. He knew his bare feet were bleeding. He paused by a pine tree and studied the ground ahead. Nothing was moving. And then he saw a flash of the white beaded dress. It made the woman an easy target. He could see in the moonlight whenever she darted into the open or whenever there was a flash of lightning. He heard the man from the road following her from above. They were in a triangle of sorts, with Dolan closing faster.

  Dolan crouched. He saw her go by like a deer in flight and managed to wrestle her to the ground. She fought him like a panicked cat. He covered her mouth and whispered in her ear.

  “Stay down,” Dolan said. “I’m not with them. I won’t hurt you. Let’s just let him run on by.”

  She stopped struggling. Dolan scooped up handfuls of mud in one hand and covered her white dress with it and held her tightly against his raincoat and bare legs. He covered her up as best he could with the dark rain slicker and his muddy body. Her heart pounded against his chest like a small musical instrument. He could smell her cheap perfume.

  The man crashing through the woods slowed down. Then the noise stopped entirely as if he’d sensed something.

  Dolan waited. He thought he’d spotted the man, but wasn’t certain. He had one of the pistols in his right hand now but didn
’t want a muzzle flash to give their location away. He stayed quiet. The girl breathed warm air between his muddy fingers, offering up a small puff of white to the frigid air. Dolan raised the pistol just a few inches. Some liquid, probably just sweat, slipped into his right eye and stung. They both held perfectly still.

  The other man stepped out into the moonlight with the shotgun in his hands. His eyes roamed the woods, searching for the girl. Dolan sat up and took the shot. The girl screamed when the pistol went off and she tried to writhe away from him. He did not let her go.

  “Please, mister.”

  “Wait.”

  The other man did not get up again. Dolan loosened his grip.

  “Go back toward the road, turn right and keep on going,” he whispered in her ear. “Go where you were both heading before the ambush. Get to the next town and just keep your mouth shut and don’t tell anyone that you were ever here.”

  He released her. She seemed confused at first, but then sat up and stumbled away sideways, as if expecting to be shot in the back. He watched her go with a warm feeling in his chest. He’d done well. Then the girl picked up speed and confidence. She headed for the trees, going back the way they’d come and to the right, just as Dolan had suggested. She’d be safe.

  Dolan rolled over on his back. He pictured the Limbus laboratory in his mind. He opened his mouth and drank some rain water. He waited to be picked up. He wondered if he could negotiate a little, now that he’d proven his worth. He wanted a conclusion that didn’t involve any more death. He spoke aloud. “Was that it, Doc? Am I done?”

  The mud became warm and then hot and Dolan felt his exposed skin begin to sizzle like bacon in a pan. His stomach flipped over and tied itself in a knot. His nerves caught up with him. He sat up quickly, which started his head spinning.

  Mistake…

  Dolan vomited the rainwater into the mud. Dizzy, he lay flat again. It had to be over now. He was tired.

  Please.

  He curled up into a ball just as he blacked out.