The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [66]
“Wait!” Beckett shouted at them. He held up his shield and gun. “Wait. Let me handle this. Okay? I’ll take care of it.”
Beckett immediately threw open the copper-banded door, and was met by a small army of gendarmes with greenglass goggles and blue armbands. Surprised, both at the appearance of a human being and, no doubt, by Beckett’s fades-ravaged face, the men fell away from the door, leaving a relatively large semicircle into which Beckett stepped.
“Sir,” one of the gendarmes grumbled. “You’d better get out of here. We’ve come to make arrests.”
“You’re not arresting anyone.” Beckett brandished the bronze emblem of his rank. “I’m with the coroners. I am conducting an investigation here, pertinent to the safety of the Empire. You don’t get in until I’ve finished.”
The gendarmes looked at each other. None of them seemed to have firearms, but there were plenty of cudgels, short swords, long knives, and bronze knuckle-dusters to make Beckett nervous. “Coroners. You Elijah Beckett?” One of them asked. “We’ve got standing orders to bring you in, too.” He tapped his cudgel on his thigh. “Regardless of condition.”
“Haha.” Beckett offered by way of reply, grinning meanly. He drew his pistol and fired all six bullets into the man’s chest, a succession of gunfire that sounded almost like a single peal of thunder.
The Feathersmith revolver that Beckett carried was huge, at least the length of his forearm, with a barrel as thick around as his thumb, and almost ten years out of date. The barrel wasn’t rifled, so the huge bullets that it fired would tumble end over end through the air, shattering bones and punching holes in men. It made a sound like a mortar when it fired. Beckett liked it because the amount of incidental trauma the bullets caused was enough to bring down a Reanimate, and because the gun was big and heavy enough that he could easily beat a man senseless with it.
The suddenness of Beckett’s attack, which left the gendarme slumped bonelessly in the snow and bleeding from great rents in his chest, caught all of the gendarmes off-guard. They backed away, hesitant and uncertain.
In the few moments that he had, Beckett slowly opened the revolver and dumped out the shells. His mind knew that it wouldn’t be long before the men realized his weakness and would simply rush him, but he was counting on their fear and confusion to give him enough time to reload. He forced himself to remain calm, slowly taking each bullet out, carefully pressing it into its chamber. His numb fingers were a liability; if he dropped a bullet, or showed even a moment’s hesitation, he’d be dead. So he took his time, and loaded the gun carefully. His nerves thrummed against the clamp he kept them under. They wanted to make him sick. They wanted to make his hands shake with fear and excitement. He didn’t let them.
One of the men decided that he’d had enough. He rushed Beckett, who managed to close the revolver at the last possible second, allowing him to club the man across the face. The massive weight of the Feathersmith knocked the gendarme senseless, and Beckett had his gun up and aimed at the remaining men.
The implication was clear: the gendarmes could rush him, but whoever went first would die. Ultimately, because the gendarmerie represented the dregs of Trowth’s citizenry, those too weak or too cruel or too petty to be taken by the pressgangs, Beckett was surrounded by cowards.
Almost immediately, the men in the back of the group slunk off into the Mudside labyrinth, already looking for easier prey. The rest fled after one vicious, “Fuck off.”
Beckett turned back into the sharpsie home. He could hear, in the distance, more men shouting, sharpsies screaming, and the sound of gunfire. “You need…” he said, but couldn’t think of anything. What were they supposed to do? If Mudside was crawling with armed gendarmes, if the Committee for Public Safety had sent a substantial force in to the sharpsie neighborhood, what could they do? They had nowhere to run to, no armaments to