Airship Hunters (15 page)

Eventually the Aero-Marshals stood by Randall near River Road looking at the thicket Cabot had faced that morning. The lieutenant asked, “How far does this extend?”

Randall shrugged. “Miles. And a ways along, it spreads to both sides of the road. Big patches of swamp in there, too.”

By the edge of the timber, the hound heaved against its handler’s leash.

Cabot said, “The woods are thick enough that we’ll be at a disadvantage. Randall, tell Chief Taylor we need more men—at least twenty. With guns.”

“Ten gauge shotguns, if you’ve got them,” Valiantine said. “Loaded with buckshot or solid slugs.”

Randall’s eyes widened. He nodded, and then tramped away.

Valiantine scowled at the sky. “I don’t want to be in that tangle after dark with that thing.”

“No,” Cabot said. “No, you don’t.”

“We will form an L,” Valiantine directed. “From the top of the slope bordering the river along the front edge of the timber, then up alongside the road. When the woods spread to the other side of the road, the wing of the L will swing across the road, and we’ll have one straight line advancing through the trees. I’ll be at the hinge of the L.”

“I’ll be at the head of the L, by the river,” Cabot said.

The lieutenant surveyed the men arrayed before him. “Everyone armed? Take your places.”

The line of men advanced. The bloodhound put its nose to the ground and pulled its handler forward. Cabot and Valiantine each carried a shotgun brought by the Police Department.

The thick growth of trees and briars impeded their forward progress. The tangles of limbs clutched at the men’s clothes, scratched at their faces and eyes, and slowed their advance so that the searchers were sweaty and weary after only an hour.

BANG!

A gunshot halted the advance. The men dropped to their knees or dodged behind the bole of a tree, guns at the ready.

Valiantine bellowed out, “Who’s shooting?”

A reedy voice replied: “Me, you sunnavabitch! You got my dog but you ain’t gettin’ me!”

The lieutenant muttered a curse. “We’re the police. We don’t know anything about your dog. We’re armed, and we outnumber you. We’ll shoot you down if you fire again. We’re coming forward.”

He paused a moment for a reply. Hearing nothing, Valiantine nodded, and the line of men advanced.

They reached a shack assembled like a crazy quilt of driftwood, scraps of corrugated metal, broken boards from shipping crates. A scrawny terrier of a man with an unkempt beard stood with a Spencer carbine in his hands. He challenged them: “I ain’t done nothin’ to you. Leave me alone!”

Cabot had come up from his end of the line. “We’re looking for a murderer.”

“A monster,” Valiantine interjected.

“I saw somethin’,” the hermit said. “Size of a bear. Did that to my dog.” Tears came to his eyes when he gestured at a carcass lying twenty feet away: a large dog, its body ripped in two.

“I’m sorry,” Cabot said. “We’re not here to bother you. We’ll keep on our way. But if you see the thing again, shoot to kill. Or hide.”

The man glowered from within the nest of hair that hid most of his face. The police line moved forward again. Before departing back to his place in the line, Cabot spoke to his partner: “We’ve been at this more than an hour. It’ll start getting dark soon.”

“Every third man has a lantern.”

Cabot’s breathing felt too shallow to fill his chest. “We don’t want to meet this thing after dark. And the danger of the men shooting their fellows if we do—”

“We must stop this thing.”

Cabot looked at his partner. He nodded, and returned to his place at the head of the line.

The sun had dropped below the horizon, and the light was fading from the sky. Cabot paused and surveyed the river. He saw a mass of clouds building at the crests of the Indiana hills across the river to the northwest. Rain would make the search truly impossible.

The agent tromped onward, pushing through waist-high brush and past gnarled, scrubby trees twice his height. He still could see the man to his right, a few yards off. Soon he would be a featureless figure visible only because he moved among the motionless shapes of the thicket, and his presence would be known only by the sounds he made in the darkness.

The dusk was nearly complete. The nighttime breeze was picking up from the river. Cabot glanced in that direction. The cloud formation was very large now, and had detached from the silhouette of the Indiana hills to drift to the east. Cabot prepared to shout out to call off the search, but stopped to watch the cloud.

It was a dark mass, darker than the twilight-thickening sky. It moved faster than the breeze Cabot felt on his face, but he supposed the wind might move more quickly at a higher elevation.

And then he saw the lights: a there-and-gone glimmer of pinpoints shining from within the cloud itself.

Cabot stood mesmerized a moment. He noticed he had unconsciously raised the shotgun to his shoulder and pointed it toward the cloud. He raised his voice: “Valiantine!”

And then he heard shouts behind him.

He turned. Many yards away the hound began to bay in a strangled fashion, followed by a strange, canine squeal that suddenly cut off. A human scream. The
boom
of firing shotguns. He heard Valiantine yelling orders.

Cabot heard the crash of plants ripping and breaking as something charged through the thicket.

Toward his position.

Cabot felt a rising tide of panic flood his chest. He glanced at the cloud, the outlines of which were melting into the greater darkness of the sky; he turned and faced the oncoming threat.

He aimed the shotgun toward the source of the approaching noises.

“Stop!” he shouted.

The crashing came closer. Rapidly.

“Halt!” he yelled, louder.

The crashing grew louder.

Thirty feet away.

Twenty feet.

Ten.

Cabot fired.

The half second after he pulled the trigger, Cabot heard a tremendous bellow. A hurtling weight smashed into him. He lost his grip on the gun and cart-wheeled through space.

The agent splashed into the river. He thrashed his way to the surface and gulped for air.

A bolt of light cut the dark from the body of the cloud overhead to the river’s rushing surface. Thunder boomed and bright flashes lit the interior of the cloud. Geysers of water shot up from the river.

Cabot wasted no breath on swearing, but kicked at the water and helped the current take him westward away from the immediate violence. After the
booms
he heard shouts, followed by more booming.

At some point he grew aware he lay on the muddy shelf of the river bank. His feet and legs remained in the water, and the river tugged at his limbs. He drew up his legs. He’d lost a shoe.

Cabot hadn’t even been conscious of clawing his way to shore. He sucked down deep, rattling breaths. The booming had ceased. He heard no more shouts.

The agent wasn’t sure where he’d come ashore. Somewhere between the ruckus and the wharf, he guessed. Once the trembling in his limbs stopped, after he’d regained some composure and a bit of energy, he would stand, climb the slope, and determine his whereabouts.

Right now, he concentrated on simply breathing.

And while his breathing settled, he focused on the image burned into his mind: the beam of light from the cloud that had illuminated the beast in the water, the monster he had shot, the thing that had knocked him into the water—the momentary flash of a child’s frightened face.

ABOVE IT ALL

Jim Beard

September 1897

C
hagrinned at a miniscule spot of some unidentifiable matter that defied his covert attempt at removing it from his coat with a fingernail, Lieutenant Michael Valiantine sighed and turned his gaze to the denuded cherry trees outside the window. The sight of them only served to depress him more.

Major Wellington looked up from his reading of the lieutenant’s report, apparently jostled from it by the sigh. Frowning slightly, the major returned to his perusal of the papers. Valiantine looked at Agent Cabot, who sat next to him in front of Wellington’s desk.

He’s not in a good state
, Valiantine thought to himself, observing his partner.
Hasn’t mentioned his Yankee Bligh all day
.

Valiantine figured the man’s funk stemmed from the events in Kentucky and whatever it was Cabot saw there in the river. From then on, the younger agent had been reluctant to discuss it, no matter that Valiantine urged him to do so. The lieutenant made up his mind to not press him, that he’d soon enough care to talk. Or not.

“Ridiculous.”

He looked back to the major to find his superior’s eyes upon him.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

Wellington glared at the lieutenant, weaving his fingers together and pressing them down upon the report he’d let fall to his desktop. Valiantine steeled himself for an outburst, though he couldn’t reason why one should come if it did.

“This report, Lieutenant,” Wellington said. “Proud of it are you?”

The two agents had written the report together, more or less, and had held almost nothing back, even Cabot’s thoughts on the final moments of their latest case. Valiantine thought it would be somewhat eye-opening to the major and his fellow bureaucrats who had dogged them with demands for information throughout their trip to Kentucky. What it all exactly meant, though, was still murky. If anything, the lieutenant believed it to show progress in his and Cabot’s investigations of the airships.

He told the major just that, and with a clear conscience.

“Nonsense,” the man replied. “More than nonsense, actually. This report is utter fantasy.”

Valiantine’s face grew warm and he found himself unable to speak; this wasn’t what he expected. He’d assumed there’d be some small resistance to what they’d uncovered, but his superior’s outright denial of the report set him on unstable ground.

“I say again, Lieutenant,” Wellington continued, “are you proud of this and your other reports? Proud to be wasting my time in this fashion? Wasting the government’s
time and money?”

Valiantine began to find his voice, but was silenced when the major suddenly slammed a fist down on his desk, disturbing a nearby ink bottle.

“Damn you, be quiet,” he growled. “Don’t speak. You were sent out to look into a matter of possible great importance to this country and you’ve done nothing to this point but flit here and there, looking up at the sky and writing reports about clouds and vapors. Valiantine, I expected better of you, honestly.”

The lieutenant’s breath caught at the rebuke, but before he could muster any return fire, his partner waded into the fray.

“Apologies,
sir
,” Cabot seethed, sitting forward in his chair, “but I can’t understand you. We’ve done everything that—”

Wellington tore his gaze from Valiantine to skewer the Treasury man with it.

“Hold your tongue, Cabot. I will not have you speaking to me in that tone here in my own damned office.”

The younger man stood up, his swift gesture knocking his chair back on its rear legs. In a split second of starling clarity, Valiantine saw what was to come next.

“I question your authority over me,” Cabot said in a calm voice. He turned away from the major’s desk and moved toward the office’s door to the corridor outside.

Wellington thumped his desk again with his fist, but did not rise from his chair. Instead, he sat back, almost casually, and stared at the departing agent.

“Doesn’t matter, Cabot,” he said with some smugness, bringing the Treasury man to an abrupt halt. “You’re mistaken in your opinion, but it doesn’t matter. You and Valiantine here are being put on ice.”

Both agents turned to fix Wellington with questioning looks, then each other.

“What do you mean?” Valiantine asked his superior.

The major smiled grimly, looking back to his desk and clearing away the report he’d discarded.

“You’re both suspended from duty,” he told the duo without looking up at them. “Temporarily, until I confer with others as to the worth and future of the investigation. Until then, Department A-13 doesn’t exist anymore until I say otherwise.

“Dismissed.”

Cabot found the lieutenant three days later, at the Smithsonian Institution, deep among the bric-a-brac displayed throughout its halls.

Looking up with mild interest at his partner, who stood there hat in hand and somber, Valiantine sighed and raised an eyebrow, as if to bid the man to speak.

“Thought I’d find you here, or someplace similar,” Cabot told him. “You seem like the sort that—”

The lieutenant turned his back to him, cutting him off with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“You don’t know a damn thing about what I seem or not seem, sir.”