"Tell me that's a storm," Harrow says from the doorway.
"It's not a storm," Clementine says.
"Right. No. Of course not." He looks at the mass of the undead army filling the tracks ahead of us, the green lightning in the clouds above them, the shapes that are very clearly bodies but not bodies exactly. "What do we do."
Not a question. A request.
"How long can you wire the cargo cars?" I ask Clementine.
"Two minutes. Maybe ninety seconds if I skip steps I probably shouldn't skip."
"Skip them."
She's moving before I finish the sentence.
I look at Harrow. "When she's done, you pull the coupling pin. The rigged cars roll into the army. We keep the engine."
"How do I pull the pin?"
"Pry bar. Under the coal bin."
He finds it and heads outside onto the walkway without another word. That's what I've come to understand about Harrow. He complains in advance and then does exactly what's needed.
* * *
The vanguard is everything Vance's notebooks described and worse.
They're not demons. They're the Iron-Spur Expedition workers. Pioneer miners and railroad men, the ones the Barons sent out here and abandoned when the plague started. Dead for decades. The Witherlord's rot didn't let them stay that way. It repurposed them, fused them to their tools, gave them back a purpose. March on the city that left them to die.
I can see the rusted pickaxes welded to the stumps of their arms.
I can see the shredded canvas work overalls.
The engine hits the front line and the sound is wrong because dead men don't scatter right. They don't have the instinct to get out of the way. We cut through them like a boat through water and the shockwaves come through the hull and the lights flicker.
The Commander is fast.
He pulls his skeletal horse clear of the cowcatcher and jumps. I'm on the exterior walkway when he lands, iron-fused armor, no face in the helmet, just darkness and two green lights where eyes should be.
His sword is already coming.
I block with the LeMat barrel. The reinforced bones in my forearm hold the impact and the Commander hesitates, because that is not what happens when iron hits a human arm.
I shoot him twice in the chest.
Green smoke. He staggers. Not down.
"Fuse is lit!" Clementine shouts from above.
"Harrow!"
The clank of the pin releasing.
The engine surges free. The rigged cars keep rolling forward at their own speed, straight into the massed center of the army.
I grab the Commander's throat armor and put the thermobaric shell against his chest.
"I know what you are," I say. "I know what they did to you."
His green eyes flicker.
I pull the trigger.
The blast takes him off the walkway and into the sand.
Forty seconds later, Clementine's trap goes off.
The explosion is so big it turns the sand beneath the army to glass. The green lightning above them breaks apart and disappears. The sound reaches us a full second later like a separate event.
Clementine drops down from the roof beside me and we watch the smoke column rise.
"Those were people," she says.
"Yeah."
"The Barons left them to die in the mines. The rot brought them back. They were coming to collect the debt."
"I know."
She's quiet for a moment.
"Does knowing make it easier?" she asks.
"No," I say honestly. "But it makes it mean something."