Free Steamborn by Eric R. Asher

rooftop beside them. Jacob didn’t have to look to know it was Samuel. “Cut east and circle around the Hall. Take the long way up the ridge to the Square. Everything else is blocked.”
    “Or buried,” Charles snarled as he jerked the bike to the side. Jacob felt a blast of heat as his leg got too close to the boiler.
    Jacob gathered up the courage to peek at where they were. He saw the bank at the corner of the Square pass them in a blur of shadows. Jacob was clamped firmly onto Charles’s back, but he still saw the old man’s head turn to look over his shoulder when a calamity sounded behind them. Jacob could tell another part of the wall had fallen without seeing it with his own eyes and then came a rapid staccato like ten thousand men marching out of sync.
    Charles cursed.
    Jacob didn’t think the vision could be any worse than what he’d already seen, so he turned his head. A wall of horrible black carapaces chased them. Red wings hummed and buzzed, and their eyes glowed like empty eye sockets. The wings didn’t lift the creatures more than a few feet off the ground, but the churning, roiling chaos was terrifying. Bugs slammed through the corners of stone houses and fell through the tiled ceilings. Mandibles gnashed together as the beetles—known as the Red Death—bore down on them.
    “Get the Bangers out of the bag on your right,” Charles shouted over the scream of the wind and roar of the invaders. “The big ones! We need to blow these bastards to kingdom come.”
    Jacob’s hands were shaking, but he still made quick work of the buckles. There were two brass cases near the top of the bags. He pulled a lever on one side and the edge of the case popped up, exposing a Banger twice the size of a corkball. Jacob pulled the lever on the smaller case and snatched a Burner out of it. The Banger opened at the press of a button. Jacob pressed the metal nub to activate the Burner before dropping it into the larger sphere. He pressed the button on the Banger. He had no more than fifteen seconds.
    “Ready!”
    Charles righted the bike and turned slightly, giving Jacob a clear shot at the horde. He didn’t need it. At the speed they were going, Jacob knew where the bugs would be when the Banger blew. Jacob let the metal sphere fall to the ground as it began to smoke.
    “Go!” Jacob screamed at Charles as he wrapped his arms around the old man as tightly as he could, pressing his face against the gun across the old man’s back. “Go, go, go!”
    Charles didn’t need to be told twice. He leaned forward as he twisted the throttle as far as it would go. They shot up the ridge, heading toward the city walls.
    The Banger detonated, and he could feel the shockwave. Jacob turned and watched the fireball send pieces of bugs so far into the sky they cleared the opposite wall, falling down the east side of the mountain.
    Charles glanced back and laughed like a madman. “Well done.” He leaned the bike into another sharp turn, and they could see the path leading up to the city gates.”
    “Don’t stop!”
    Jacob glanced up to see Bessie leaping along the rooftops above them. Samuel’s eyes were all for the courtyard, and Jacob followed his gaze.
    “Pull the gun out,” Charles said.
    Jacob squeezed his knees as tightly as he could and unholstered the gun on Charles’s back. He’d used smaller air guns, so he had an idea of how it worked. Jacob started sliding the long wooden pump beneath the barrel. The gears offered little resistance at first, but three pumps in, Jacob could barely budge the slide.
    “It won’t move anymore,” Jacob said.
    “Three pumps,” Charles said. “That’s all you need, the way it’s tuned. It’s already loaded. Don’t fire unless you have to.”
    The courtyard outside the gates looked like something out of the old stories. The stories Jacob’s father used to tell them around the fireplace—stories meant to scare him, but stories that only lived in old books about forgotten