Steampunk Willie

New York New was falling. Gunfire echoed in the streets, barking out death and change.

"It's our time, Tom," said my partner. Reese had grown lean and hungry over months of fear and boredom. He leaned across the back of my couch like a pedigreed hound eager to hunt.

I raised my eyes from a newscast of Armageddon on the courthouse steps. Twelve riddled bodies, The Governing Council, littered its white marble.

"They brought that stone up from Earth," I said.

"It's Steampunk, Tom. Steampunk did this - his grand scheme … we thought he was a crazy saw junk, and look at him now."

I looked and remembered.

Willie Wills, Steampunk to his old friends and enemies, appeared in the air before us, simulcasting on all streams to every part of the city-state. His sallow face looked as simple and mean as when I had first met him beneath the streets of NYN.

"My people. I am your new president. Discontinue all armed rebellion and I will –"

Reese drew, fired, and destroyed my TV in one easy motion. Little rings of blue smoke rose from his Colt.

"He wasn't worth saving," he said. He handed me an empty glass vial – a tiny, insignificant thing really.

"His last shot of sawdust," I whispered.

"His oath to us."

"How will we get him?" I asked.

"The worm leaves a hole. We'll crawl up the way he did."

The under bowels of New York New ran hot. Steam kissed our cheeks and made heavy our clothes as Reese and I plumbed the engineered depths.

"Stairs," said Reese, pointing through the gloom, his Colt in one hand, the glass vial in the other. Flickering florescence showed double doors blazoned with this single graffito: DESCENT.

We climbed down twenty-seven floors through gloom and dripping echoes and then trudged east until our spelunking brought us beneath Capitol House.

The carnage began five floors up. Cops and Lunar Guard alike lay in droves, cold bodies splayed upon pools of gore.

Reese spit and said, "We're the Shield now, partner."

Willie's men caught us three floors from the top. Twenty-five of them closed in, net-like, as we stood back to back, hearts pumping acute awareness into our senses.

"Not these. Don't kill these," said a voice from behind the wall of armed brutes.

Rutgers emerged, bald head gleaming in the sticky dark.

"Reese the Poet and Turn-Around-Tom. My stars and heavens," he said with an ivory white smile.

"We want Willie, not you, peon," said Reese.

Rutgers's face pinched the way it always had even before he turned coat and disgraced the Shield. But in a flash the smile returned and he said, "You'd be dead already if Steam hadn't asked for you by name. You's VIPs."

Capitol House wore splendor in rich red carpets, rare wood banisters, and wavy stained glass imported from Earth. No building on the moon bore such prestige as the seat of our city-state.

The Governor-General's office – large, book-lined, and regal – sat beneath a dome whose windows shown on a distant blue and white Earth, floating as if by magic in the depths of space.

"No help coming from there," said Willie when he saw my eyes drift that way. He smoked a cigar behind the High Desk while ham-fisted grunts flanked him with charge rifles. Reese's ancient Colt and my Tearlock pistol lay before the ostensible ruler like pitiful offerings.

"They'll come," spat Reese.

"And what? Nuke us? You think the libs will stand for that? Joint Globe will be in committee about this for the next twenty years."

"Damn the day we saved you," I said through teeth clenched so tight my fillings creaked.

"You made me, Tom, and you Reese. I owe you both. You got me off the sawdust, rehab'd and fit. And here I sit, able to pay you at last. Look at the love I show you, standing there with your hands free. I could have had you killed, but instead I'll make you kings in this city."

Reese's eyes went narrow. "You have no honor, man. We're men of the Shield. We ARE kings in this city. You can't buy us." He tossed the vial onto the desk. Willie stopped it spinning with his stubby fingers.

He eyed it and grinned.

"I bought Rutgers," he said.

The bald man smiled all smarmy and white. "And for a reasonable price, too," he said.

"You bought a snake, not a man," I said and Rutgers punched my mouth.

The time between Rutgers's knuckles connecting with my cheek and Reese's extended index and middle fingers puncturing his left eye was miniscule. I hadn't even hit the floor before his screaming filled the office.

Whump-whump-whump. One of Willie's heavies fired three charges in Reese's direction, but my partner had already dove and rolled so that the desk was between him and the rifle. Rutgers's head had exploded on the second shot. For an instant his body stood, trembling, and then it fell, disgorging blood and smoke from the whole of its neck onto the expensive rug.

I hurled a wainscot chair, catching the shooter in the chest. In the confusion, Reese barreled into the two guards behind the desk. He came up with a rifle aiming down.

Whump-Whump.

I grabbed my Tearlock, but Willie had the Colt. He zeroed on my face. Up close I could see his finger beginning to squeeze. I closed my eyes, expecting to face the black equinox, and heard a terrific - CRACK!

Willie slumped on the desk, his forehead atop the empty vial that had once ruled his life. It was cracked.

Reese stood over him, rifle still raised butt downward.

Like a machine he took the Colt from limp fingers and put a bulleted end to Steampunk Willie's wild ride.

I dropped the glass vial onto the rug and ground it to powder under my heel.

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