The cattle were upon us now. Hot breath raked across the backs of our necks. With a whip of his arm, Collum pitched me face first into the nearest bolthole, slammed his grandfather into the next, and waved Doug into the last spot on that side. With a leap, Collum cleared the tunnel and burrowed into the empty space opposite, a millisecond before the horns and tawny backs of the herd thundered past.
Dirt and dust and wood particles shivered down. The musk of dozens of animals enveloped me as I pressed myself harder into the tiny space. Behind me, I felt my skirts billow out on the breeze created by the cattles’ passage. I tried to snatch them back, but a hoof or horn snagged in the thick wool. Pain as my fingernails dug into rough planks. Splinters burrowing beneath my nail beds. An inexorable force pulling me, pulling . . .
With a final rip, the material gave. My face slammed hard into the wall as I gagged with relief.
The shouts of angry men followed the hoofbeats. I didn’t look, didn’t turn as the cattle drovers raced past, apparently too engaged in chasing the animals to even glance our way.
After what felt like an eternity, Mac spoke. “All right. I think it’s safe to come out.”
Badly shaken, the five of us emerged from our hidey-holes, Mac blessing the engineer who’d thoughtfully provided the emergency escapes. After a quick jog back to see what was left of the belongings we’d abandoned when the stampede began, a dejected-looking Collum and Doug returned with one tattered carpetbag and a handful of stomped-on and ragged clothing.
“Oh no-o-o,” Phoebe mourned. “Not the watered silk.”
Taking the remnants of the smoky blue ball gown from her brother’s arms, she squeezed it to her. She and Moira had worked long into the night, fitting it to my measurements, embroidering the bodice and neckline with whorls of shimmering silver thread.
The dress was ruined, along with nearly every article of clothing we’d brought and . . . I gasped as I realized the doll was no longer tucked beneath my arm. “Oh, no. No. No. No.” Relief spiked through me when I saw her crumpled on the ground, safe inside the bolthole where I’d hidden. I snatched her up and brushed dirt and wood particles from the yellow silk.
“So your wee dolly survives, but not my spare boots?” Collum eyed the toy with distaste. “Aye, that seems fair.”
Phoebe quickly inventoried the rest, which had been shredded by hundreds of sharp hooves and ground into the dirt-packed floor. There wasn’t much left.
“Think we can salvage this,” she said.
This was a huge-brimmed hat of mauve velvet with clots of garish yellow flowers sewn around the crown.
“Of course we can,” I groaned.
Mac’s shaving kit had been pulverized. Hats and coats and shoes all trashed beyond repair. The only things that made it were in the carpetbag. Hairpins, a diamond hair clip. A silver-backed brush-and-comb set, though the matching mirror was shattered—?an ominous sign.
Only one real bit of good news. Mac had managed to hold on to the black leather case that contained all the bank notes and gold.
“Well, Phee,” Collum said as he clapped a hand onto his dejected sister’s shoulder. “One good thing came of this, aye?”
Grumpy, she snapped, “Oh, yeah? What’s that then?”
“You get to go shopping.”
A few hundred yards down the tunnel, ramps branched off from either side. Filtered sunlight and mooing sounds drifted down, so we deduced that the ramps led up to the cattle pens and instead chose a set of narrow stairs set into the very end of the dark, smelly passageway.
Coated in grime and dust, we ascended into a very different sort of nightmare.
“Holy crap.” I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose as we crowded through the small door. “What is that?”
The smell that met us at the top of the stairs was unspeakable. An entity that inundated the senses, saturating our pores with the stink of blood and death. A cavernous space stretched out before us, lit by skylights that pocked the ceiling two stories above. As far as the eye could see, a riotous assembly line of horror spread out across the straw-covered brick floor.
Through a wide double door set into the left-hand wall, we could see men in gore-spattered aprons heave now-headless bovine corpses onto gleaming metal hooks that swung from overhead wires. A pulley system brought them here, into the massive main processing area. At the first station, hides were stripped away and piled into bins. Hooves like those that had nearly run us down only moments before were chopped off and dropped into buckets. Coiled entrails plopped onto wooden tables and were sorted by grim-faced workers. Blood spattered or dripped or gushed into troughs that ran with a congealing, clotting mess.
“Abattoir,” Doug choked from behind his hand. “Guess we might’ve thought this through a little better, huh?”
“That’s it,” Phoebe muttered. “I am now a vegetarian.”
“Me too,” I agreed.
“There’s the door to the street,” Collum snapped. “Move it, aye?”
Since no one in their right mind would spend one second more than was absolutely necessary amid this disgusting display, we hurried after him.
Sweating men in gore-encrusted aprons eyed us as we passed. Young boys no older than seven or eight rushed by toting buckets of something I knew I didn’t want to see. I tried to keep my gaze locked on the back of Mac’s tweed coat, but when a cloud of noxious steam rolled over me, I cut my eyes away just in time to see a heavyset man hoist a net full of boiled cow skulls from an enormous iron vat.
Behind me, I heard Phoebe gag.
Don’t do it, I begged silently on behalf of my lurching gut.
On a platform high above the abattoir floor, four men in rough suits tracked our movements as we wove our way toward the door. They conferred for a moment before three of them cut away and began to descend the steps, clearly intent on cutting us off.
“Hurry,” Mac mumbled over his shoulder. “This could be difficult to explain, aye?”
I nodded and picked up the pace. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
We almost made it. Only feet away, pedestrians strolled by an open doorway to what looked like an ordinary street, though I noticed each person who passed held a handkerchief pressed to his or her face.
“Help ya?”
“Why no, my good man,” Mac told the sweating, stocky fellow who stepped into our path. “Bit lost, is all. We’ll just be on our way.”
With two smaller men flanking him, the speaker frowned. Heavy jowls drooped as if the bushy red sideburns were trying to shove them off his face. The three spread out in a bid to block our exit as he looked us over.
“And just where in blazes did ye come from?”
For a split second, no one spoke. Then Mac gave a hearty chuckle and clapped the man on the shoulder.
“Och, ye wouldna believe me if I told ye, man.” Mac deepened his already thick Scot’s brogue to match the supervisor’s. “Scoundrel of a steamboat captain went and got himself in his cups. Dumped milady and the rest o’ us off at the wrong landing. Can ye believe it? What a numpty! Nearly got ourselves killed when the cattle ran, we did.”
The man’s squinty eyes narrowed, suspicious. Mac was quicker, though.