The Calorium Wars
Also by Dennis O’Flaherty
King of the Cracksmen
Copyright © 2016 by Dennis O’Flaherty
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Flaherty, Dennis, author.
Title: The Calorium wars : an extravaganza of the gilded age / Dennis O’Flaherty.
Description: New York : Night Shade Books, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018017 | ISBN 9781597808811 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | FICTION / Fantasy / Historical. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Steampunk fiction. | Alternative histories (fiction)
Classification: LCC PS3615.F534 C35 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018017
Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-881-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-59780-888-0
Cover design by Jason Snair
Printed in the United States of America
This book is for Mel, my sine qua non.
“… modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic any more…. Why bother? Had their own magic, doin’ just fine, thanks …”
—Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
New York City and Environs
October 31, 1877
Chapter One
Here it was, 9 a.m. on the hottest Halloween since Hell opened for business, and Billy Garrity and Finn McGonigle were stuck humping a brokedown peanut cart from the Manhattan Gas Light Company to Union Square, slogging their way down 14th Street from the East River with the temperature somewhere in the nineties, the right front wheel loose on its bearings and ready to come flying off every time they hit a crack in the pavement, the sweat pouring down them from nerves and the Indian summer swelter, and the both of them so jumpy they were ready to pee their pants just thinking about the secret compartment under the mountains of bagged peanuts, crammed full of hot-off-the-press anti-Stanton rags that could get them shot where they stood.
Billy threw a rebellious glance at Finn, wondering how he could have been such a chump—saying he’d help without thinking twice. If he’d told Finn to sling his hook he could have been cooling off in the river right now, floating on his back and watching the clouds drift by instead of trudging along baking like a potato in his Sunday shirt and pants and boots and the air so thick and heavy with river mist and steam-engine smoke and horse crap you could cut it with a knife. He spat into the street, trying to clear the taste out of his mouth.
“That’s it,” Billy announced, “I need a breather.”
He let go of the push bar and took a slug out of their water bottle before passing it to Finn.
“Just look at this!” Billy said indignantly, wiping his face on his sleeve and waving his hand towards Third Avenue. “Somebody die, or what?”
14th and Third was usually teeming with people and vehicles, but right now it was dead as a doornail, the only action in sight being one of those puke-smelling giant cockroaches they’d been seeing around—this one bold as brass and dragging a dead dachshund towards an alleyway.
“What’s the big deal?” Finn asked, raising an eyebrow and making a show of what a cool fish he was.
“It ain’t normal,” Billy muttered, “that’s what.” He wiped the sweat off his freckled ten-year-old mug. “Where’s all the people at? Where’s the buses? Where’s the steam jitneys? Where’s the noise?”
“Leapin’ jeeze!” exclaimed Finn, two years older than Billy and a chunky, red-haired scrapper already tapped for promotion from the Little Whyos to the main gang. “Ain’t you got no sense? Where would they be once the coppers and the Johnnies rounded up everybody they could lay their mitts on and dragged them over to the Square?”
A swelling roar rose up in the distance, its tone ambiguous, and its volume even a couple of blocks away suggestive of some caged monster goaded beyond endurance. Despite the crazy heat Billy shivered and crossed himself.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“You don’t gotta like it,” Finn said, “you just gotta remember what Danny D said—do this right and you can move up just like me. You wanna spend the rest of your life with the babies?”
But Billy had stopped listening, turning instead towards a weird galloping sound coming down the Avenue towards them: THUMP thump, THUMP thump, THUMP thump, accompanied by a stentorian, twanging bellow: “HAHN, hoo hree, HAHN, hoo hree, HAHN hoo hree horr hahn hoo hree … HAHR LAYOO!”
“Shite on a kite!” groaned Billy. “Johnnies!”
“Can it!” Finn snapped, grabbing Billy’s arm so hard he yelped. “Don’t you move a damn muscle,” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, “they ain’t after us, just make like a cigar store Indian and you’ll be OK!”
That was an easy one—Billy was already paralyzed with terror, only his eyes following the detachment of Gendarmes as they double-timed down the Avenue towards 14th Street with their nickel-plated weapons glinting in the sultry October sun. Every one of them a hulking thug at least six feet tall, sprung from the Tombs or Sing Sing to fulfill the martial fantasies of their boss, Horatio Willard (“Willie”) Pilkington, chief of the Department of National Security’s Secret Service, and all of them kitted out in the uniform of draft-dodging Willie’s favorite outfit: the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry, Duryee’s Zouaves, blooded at Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
Like all the “zouave” volunteers on both sides, Duryee’s regiment had copied the uniforms of the French North African troops, with their short open-fronted jackets, baggy trousers, sashes and oriental headgear, but the New Yorkers’ uniforms had been particularly sumptuous—the jacket and trousers midnight black with red trim, with a red fez, gold ornaments (including a gold tassel for the fez), white canvas gaiters and black leather leggings over spit-shined cavalry boots.
Willie, not content with mere historical realism, had improved on it by issuing all the men brilliantly nickel-plated weapons: Remington pump shotguns, long-barreled Colt Frontier six-shooters, razor-sharp Bowie knives and massive spike-studded brass knuckles, the whole glittering ensemble finished off with a crimson-and-gold cloisonné shield on each man’s breast pocket showing a flaming sword clenched upright in a mailed fist and a crescent of gold letters underneath: NYMCG, for New York Metropolitan Corps of Gendarmes.
All of which was just icing on the cake for Willie, who prized the Johnnies above all for the gleeful zeal with which they followed his orders to execute anyone and everyone guilty of “sedition.” Since this crime was never defined with any precision and since the Johnnies themselves were mostly none too bright, they quickly claimed more victims than the Great Cholera Epidemic of 1849 and seemed set to keep at it till either New York was sedition-free or the giant cockroac
hes took over St. Patrick’s, whichever came first.
Meanwhile Billy just scrunched his eyes firmly shut and kept saying “Hail Marys” under his breath as the THUMP! thump! of the double-timing Johnnies thundered past and started to recede.
“There they go,” murmured Finn.
Billy’s eyes popped open and he followed them as the detachment wheeled right onto 14th and headed briskly west. Billy shivered again.
“They’re heading for the Square,” he said with a tremor in his voice. “What if they catch us with the papers?”
“How many times I gotta tell ya?” said Finn brusquely, as much for his own benefit as for Billy’s. “It’s a lead pipe cinch—just hand out the papers along with the peanuts and first thing you know we’re outa there. Now button yer lip and let’s get this junkheap rolling!”
Three blocks west, on Union Square, the crowd surged and heaved, sloshing around like a patch of ocean working itself up for a hurricane. Hemmed in on three sides by tall limestone buildings and on the fourth, Broadway side by the ruins of the Department of National Security’s New York Headquarters (dynamited a few months earlier by Liam McCool’s gang The Butcher Boys and currently being rebuilt by order of Edwin M. Stanton, the all-powerful Secretary of National Security), the mob of spectators had been herded off the streets at gunpoint by Stanton’s “Eyes” and the NYPD. Teachers on the way to school, bartenders opening their saloons, shoppers with their purchases, sailors on liberty from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, journalists, sales clerks, pickpockets, teenagers playing hooky—50,000 or so sullen, sweating, absolutely unwilling eyewitnesses all jammed cheek by jowl around the periphery of the square, leaving a vast rectangle in the middle vacant for the ceremony.
A horde worthy of Genghis Khan, mused Department of National Security Plain Clothes Officer Hiram Pennywhistle, and if I had my way I’d hang them all if it took a week.
Tall, pudgy, luxuriantly-moustached, his pale gray eyes as glacial as chunks of Hudson River ice, the DNS man strolled back and forth slowly along the front ranks of the mob, peering down his patrician nose at them, his hands clasped behind his back and his chin held aloft by the wings of his brilliantly white starched collar.
Just look at them! sneered Pennywhistle to himself. City trash! A treasonous rabble, the sweepings of all the gutters of Europe and Asia, the scum of the world whether they’re dowagers from the so-called Social Register’s 400 families or barflies from the shebheens of Five Points!
He swallowed hard, fighting down the gorge that rose in his throat at the mere sight of them. Pennywhistle was a Virginian, a country gentleman, forced by circumstances to take a job with the Federals during Lincoln’s war and mired fast now in the toils of the bureaucracy by a spendthrift wife and a relentlessly growing family. Too senior after all these years to even think about giving up that pay packet, he was as much a wage slave as any petty clerk. So when Stanton detached him from the Department of National Security in Washington (and his nearby Virginia home) in order to work for Willie Pilkington’s faltering DPS in New York, there was nothing he could say but “Yes, sir! Of course, sir! Delighted, sir!”
An angry growl swept through the crowd on the 17th Street side of the Square, and as Pennywhistle turned to watch, the ranks of spectators grudgingly parted to admit a huge black steam van approaching from the Broadway corner, its panels displaying the mailed fist and flaming sword of the Department of National Security’s Social Harmony Subcommittee in glittering scarlet and gold. Pennywhistle greeted it with an acid little smile. A prison transport—almost time for the main event, and none too soon. Venting a giant gout of steam, the van pulled up next to the structure in the middle of the Square and screeched to a halt. At the sight of it the crowd abruptly went silent, and in the dead hush the clang of the van’s rear doors flying open was appallingly loud.
For a moment or two, it seemed as if everyone in Union Square had frozen in place. Then, incongruously, a piping voice cut through the silence: “Peanuts! Five cents!”
Billy and Finn were pushing their cart into the crowd from the 14th Street corner of the Square. Billy looked around, wondering what was going on—everybody was just standing there like a bunch of dummies. He picked up a bag off the top of the heap and waved it overhead with a raucous shout:
“Getcher fresh roasted PEANUTS! Nickel a bag!”
There. That seemed to wake them up. People shook themselves like snapping out of a trance, laughing and shouting at Billy and Finn:
“Hey kid! Over here! Gimme a bag! Gimme two bags!”
“Let’s make this fast,” Billy muttered to Finn, “whaddya say we wrap each bag in a paper and see if we can’t get the Hell outa here!”
Finn didn’t like the feel of the place either. “Yeah, good,” he muttered back, “all’s Danny D said was, make sure to move all the papers.”
Suiting the action to the word, they threw open the door to the secret compartment and started wrapping each bag of peanuts in a folded broadsheet, the papers and the peanuts moving so fast that they were more than half gone in a couple of minutes. The calls for more peanuts were slowing down as the crowd around the boys began to get involved in reading the papers and Finn looked around impatiently:
“We gotta get going—let’s move up closer to the front, there’s people waving at us.”
The crowd parted around Billy and Finn slowly, buying peanuts as they went, and by now people were pushing up to the cart and asking for the papers without the peanuts.
“What’s in this rag?” Billy asked, frowning at the broadsheet as he spread it out to wrap another bag of nuts.
“Gimme a break,” snorted Finn. “I can’t read no more’n what you can. Danny D said President Lincoln writ a letter from where he’s hid out saying Stanton’s a bum.”
“He can say that again,” Billy said firmly, and as he wrapped bags of peanuts the front ranks of the crowd flowed back towards the boys, opening a view across the vacant rectangle in the middle of the Square.
“Aw, jeez,” Billy exclaimed, dismayed.
It was one thing to hear about it, it was a whole other thing to see it with your own eyes. The scaffold squatted there, towering and oily-black like it was made out of old railroad ties instead of regular lumber, with the floor of the platform, where the trapdoor was, standing a good ten feet off the ground. The crosspiece stood another ten feet higher, for sure a couple of railroad ties this time, mounted across two thick columns of cut-down telegraph pole. One of those new “brainy” police Acmes (you could tell by the little hump on their head where they had the dynamite charge, plus they were enameled shiny black all over except the gold flaming-sword badge on their front and Danny D said they cost 50 grand apiece which was plain nuts) was busy looping the ropes over the middle of the crosspiece and tying them in place—two hawsers as thick as Billy’s arm, spaced six feet apart with a trapdoor under each, the nooses already tied on the ends and hanging down long enough so the huge coiled knots lay right on the trapdoors.
Meanwhile, another “brainy” Acme was climbing out the back of the DPS van carrying a big bucket of sand; Billy had heard about that one, they always tied it to the rope now to test the drop, ever since the one snapped with that geezer from the Railroad Workers’ Union and they had to hang him all over again with a new rope and him already turning black in the face and pissing his pants …
“That’s the last paper gone,” Finn said, breaking into Billy’s thoughts. “Let’s scram!”
Billy slammed the secret compartment shut and started to wheel the cart around, scanning the crowd nervously for the clearest path.
“What’s in that damned paper? Can’t you make out the headline?”
Secretary of National Security Edwin M. Stanton was starting to get irritated, and the sweat broke out on Secret Service chief Willie Pilkington’s forehead, fogging the eyepieces of his fancy Zeiss Porro-prism binoculars and forcing him to wipe his face on his sleeve. With a disgusted exclamation Stanton snatched the field glasses o
ut of Willie’s hand and moved up closer to the window. Willie and Stanton and “Great Detective” Seamus McPherson, Acting Head of the giant Pilkington International Detective Agency and onetime scourge of the Mollie Magees, were watching the preparations from the windows of the Agency’s HQ on the corner of 14th and Fourth, and with good binoculars the crowd below them could be seen as close up as if they were in the room. There it was, by Gad, he could read it as clearly as a theater marquee!
“DAMNATION!” shouted Stanton.
“Sir?” quavered Willie, who lived in permanent terror of his master’s bad moods, like a pilot fish convinced that its shark might suddenly turn on it and eat it for dessert.
“Mr. Secretary?” brightly queried McPherson, a born survivor who could have out-toadied Uriah Heep.
“It’s that same infernal issue of Freedom,” Stanton growled furiously, “the one with that scurrilous ‘Lincoln Letter’.” He spun around and kicked a wastebasket at McPherson with furious force, forcing the Great Detective to leap back into Pilkington and capsize them both. As they scrambled to pick themselves up, Stanton continued his tirade, his voice rising dangerously:
“A letter, mind you, that would never have come into being without you two for its moronic midwives! Lincoln was totally in my power, locked in a sub-basement of the Smithsonian Institution! I had paid that Russian scoundrel Lukas a fortune to remove Lincoln’s brain and install it in one of those fancy Acmes of his! Lincoln was the Man in the Iron Body, by Gad, and he would never have been seen or heard from again without YOUR HELP!”
As Pilkington and McPherson cringed on the floor, Stanton clapped the glasses to his eyes again, balefully registering the crowd’s amusement as they devoured the huge black headline and the story that followed: “BOW DOWN TO TSAR EDDIE!!!” The writer had had the temerity to laugh at Stanton’s new Emergency Regulations, by far the most draconian version yet and designed by Stanton to fill the public with fear and trembling, not to mention an awestruck reverence for his new title: “Pro Tempore Director of all U.S. Armed and Police Forces.” It looked like Freedom was being handed out by a couple of ragamuffin peanut vendors … where in Tophet were the Johnnies? Where was that worthless NYPD? Ah … there was somebody he could count on—that fellow Pennywhistle that he’d sent up here to keep an eye on Willie and report on his foolishness.