Free Teancum by D. J. Butler

Burton marched at his
left.  
    Tam followed in the back.   It gave him a good view of the carnage ahead of him, and
when he stopped to retch, belly empty and aching and lungs burning like fire,
which he did every few minutes, he could do it without being stared at.   Also, following at a distance let him
use his sharp ears to good effect, to hear the creak when a fat-eyed Pinkerton opened a door to try to
get the drop on him—
    bang!—
    Tam sent the man to the hell he deserved.
    Or the soft squish and slap of shoe leather as men crowded
in waiting down a side passage—
    bang!   bang!   snick!
    and Tam added three more widows to the rosters of the
beneficiaries of the Pinkertons’ pension and insurance fund.
    Abruptly, he caught up to the others.   They had stopped in an open area not
quite expansive enough to be a room, arguing.   They stood beside another lift door, with its brass and
glass panels and its accordion gate, and beside that a plascrete door labeled STAIRS .
    “If we get onto the lift again, we trap ourselves.”   Burton’s voice was as hard as a punch
to the jaw.   “We did that before,
and played right into their hands.”
    “You said no more fookin’ stairs!”
    “And going up the stairs doesn’t trap us?” Roxie
demanded.   “Do you imagine there
are exits halfway up the tower, if we need them?”
    Tam heard the click and shuffle of bootheels on the
plascrete behind him, and turned in time to plug another bloody-damn-hell
Pinkerton twice with the Model 1.
    “I imagine,” Burton snarled, “that even if we find ourselves
surrounded, in the stairwell we’ll have a fighting chance.   No one will be able to simply cut the
rope and drop us to our deaths!”
    Tam shuffled wearily to the Pinkerton and took his pistol,
shoving into his coat pocket with the others he’d taken from dead men in the
last few minutes and then sliding more brass-jacketed cartridges into Smith
& Wesson.   He liked the Model 1,
maybe even more than he had liked the Hushers.   It reloaded much easier, and sometimes, like this evening,
killing was a game of volume.
    “Can he even make it up the stairs?” Roxie shouted, waving at Edgar Allan Poe.   She had a point there, Tam thought, and
besides, he was puking up his own guts—from the altitude or the injuries
or the alcohol, whichever it was he didn’t care—and the thought of
climbing the mooring tower up to the air-ships on foot didn’t appeal to him.
    For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to go to
the mooring tower at all.   Why not
go down, get a truck, and get the hell out of Deseret?   Go to bloody-damn-hell California, rob
Californian banks of their queer rectangular dollars and look for the easy
life?   But he looked at Poe, dying
on his feet, and Burton, shot all to hell and still fighting for his precious
chubby Queen, and Roxie, who’d seduced two different men to come to the aid of
her husband (and did a woman ever look finer than when she had a pistol in each
hand and blood in her eye?), and found that he couldn’t walk away.
    “Shite.”
    He pressed the lift’s lever from NO CALL to UP .
    No sound, no motion.
    “Damn!” Roxie shouted.
    “It doesn’t fookin’ matter, does it?” Tam pointed out.   “The lift’s dead.   We’re walking.”
    He dragged open the plascrete door.   Poe nodded, wiped blood off his lips
and blew into the silent whistle.   With a click and a clatter of metal nails on the hard floor, the Seth
Beast pushed past Tam and crashed up the stairs.
    “Come on, then,” Tam said, and he offered his shoulder to
Poe.  
    “Thanks.”   Poe’s
voice was a gravelly whisper.   Together, they limped up the stairs.
    Bang!   Bang!
    Burton and Roxie fired at enemies Tam couldn’t see before
slamming the door shut.
    “You know,” Tam grunted, Poe heavy on his arm, “that
pony-dog thing’s so big, if you called it back here, I could sling you over its
shoulders and you could just ride up to
the