Airship Hunters (3 page)

“What then, sir?”

“Well!” the man said with relish. “Then I heard th’voices—a lot of voices. Maybe was clappin’ firs’? Anyway, th’voices sounded like... like a gay party, you know? Like a gay, grand party up in the air.”

Perklee began to drift away with his memories. Valiantine reached out and shook him a bit, by the arms. A stack of books that sat nearby fell over, tumbling and sliding onto the already-cluttered floor. He resisted the urge to pick them up and set them back the way they were.

“Did—did you talk to them?” he asked. “To the voices?”

He heard himself saying the words, but found it difficult to credit them. Was this really what he’d come all the way to Indiana to do? Question a possible mental patient?

“Yeah.” Perklee nodded, his eyes refocusing. “I yelled up at them! ‘Wha’s th’meanin’ of all this?’ I said. Ver’ loud. Ver’ loud. ‘Wha’ may I ask ’s goin’ on up there, m’good people?’”

“And they... they replied, did they?”

“No’ a’ firs, m’fellow. No a’ firs’... but after a mom’nt or two... they t’rew some
food
down t’me.”

Valiantine blinked, wholly confounded. “Food?”

“Yeah,” the man said, “an’ I still got some.”

The lieutenant immediately demanded to see whatever it was Perklee called “food.” The man acquiesced, but only after a promise that Valiantine would not remove it from the cabin.

He brought out a small covered plate from the cabin’s tiny pantry and with a clumsy flourish whisked the cover away. On the plate sat a lump—vaguely cube-shaped—of a pale, porous-looking substance. Valiantine stared at it, then asked if he could observe it under better light.

In the glow of an oil lamp, he saw it resembled bread in a way, yet with no discernable crust or darkened edges. No smell came from it, but it looked reasonably edible, even appetizing. The niggling compulsion to pick it up and bring it to his tongue and lips was strong, but he saw how Perklee watched him and he tamped down on it.

“Where?” he croaked at the man, his mouth gone dry. “Where did this all occur, Mr. Perklee?”

The odd man peered at him queerly in the light of the lamp. “Who are you, sir? Have we been intr’duced?”

Many different scenarios flashed through the lieutenant’s mind, many things he could tell the man, but he chose the truth.

“I am with the United States Army, sir. My name is Valiantine.”

“Oh!” Perklee said, “I heard there wa’ soldiers in th’ area!”

Then he crumpled in a heap on the floor.

“Where?” he asked the odd man again as he tried to pick him up. “Where did it all happen? It’s very important that you tell me, sir!”

In a hushed tone, Perklee described an area only a mile from the cabin, along the shore of the lake and at the foot of some low hills, which were rare in the region. The lieutenant spied a bed in another room of the cabin and he left the man there, nearly unconscious. Making his way out into the woods he picked up a trail he reasoned would lead him to the spot in question.

It matched Perklee’s description well. Once there, Valiantine stood and listened to the night.

It took only a handful of minutes before an overwhelming sense of the ridiculous crept into his mind and took root.

Staring out onto the stillness of Lake Manitou, he saw it all as a fool’s errand, perhaps even some sort of hazing by his superiors for his lengthy convalescence. No matter; he’d see it through to the end, no matter how devoid of prospects.

He thought back over the contents of the file he’d been shown. Many of the reports of airships came from newspapers, and their reporters were surely not above making up stories to sell more copies. How many airship sightings were fabricated? Most of them, he reasoned. All of them, perhaps.

Still... he thought of Perklee. Why had he received the treatment he had at the hands of the men in town? That at least was a fact; they beat him soundly and with malice. How did it figure into his mission?

Valiantine shook his head ruefully. It didn’t, obviously. He’d stumbled into something in Manitou that was none of his business and made connections that had no basis in reality. He’d rectify the situation by steering clear of it and moving north, as he’d originally planned.

Then, a flash of insight sent a sharp, stabbing pain through his brain: he had to get back to the cabin, and quickly.

The lieutenant covered the distance swiftly and arrived at the odd man’s home in short order. Everything looked the same as when he’d left. Opening the door to the abode, he called out to Perklee.

Receiving no reply, Valiantine ran to the bed where he had left the odd man and discovered him to be gone.

Worry and doubt assailed the lieutenant. He turned to go and found himself facing several figures, standing there in the darkness, glaring at him.

The first of the men came at the lieutenant with a roundhouse punch, which he managed to block, but not the second and third such blows. Staggered from the unexpected onslaught, he hopped backward and raised his fists, steeling himself for what was to come next.

One of the other men jumped into the fray, aiming a blow at Valiantine’s midsection. The lieutenant took some of the force out of it by deflecting it off his forearm, but a swift uppercut sent him reeling. With a grunt of exertion, a third man slugged him in the side of the head and what sounded to Valiantine like a chuckle of mirth. He saw stars and heard roaring in his ears, his face reddening over his inability to properly defend himself. Another blow caught him on the collarbone, and yet another on his chin.

Valiantine dropped to one knee, his head whirling, and he knew it was all over for him. The men surrounded him en masse, their fists and feet providing a cacophony of pain. This went on for an undetermined length of time, the impact of the violence playing havoc with his sense of it.

Valiantine’s pistol lay in his valise in his hotel room, back in Manitou. He’d fallen out of the habit of carrying it, and as he rolled with the punches from his attackers, he regretted its absence. In the future, he’d remedy the oversight.

Blessedly, he remembered enough from his past experiences and folded himself up into a ball to take the worst of it in less vulnerable places on his body, though those spots still often ached from his injuries the year before. As he slipped into unconsciousness, the lieutenant hoped he’d be able to walk away from the beating a more-or-less whole man.

The men said nothing during the assault; no warnings or reasons came forth. They left him there in Perklee’s cabin, seemingly caring little if he were alive or dead.

He awoke in a mental fog the next morning. Valiantine uncurled himself to a symphony of aches and pains, but very much still alive.

The cabin’s owner, he found, was still missing, and, he also discovered after a rudimentary search of the place, so too was the “food” from the supposed airship. He wondered if the man himself had taken it or perhaps his kidnappers, if Perklee had been waylaid and taken away by force at all. If he had sobered up, he may have left on his own, taking his precious substance from the sky with him.

Setting a fallen chair upright, Valiantine sat down on it gingerly and fought back a desire to straighten the cabin. This angered him and he chided himself for the foolish drive for order; what he needed to do was to order his own thoughts and decide if Manitou had served out any scant usefulness to him and his mission.

He heard a branch snap somewhere outside and peered out the window to see a human figure standing at the edge of the line of trees, watching the cabin. The lieutenant stood up quickly, his head swimming, and yelled at the figure.

The man turned tail and moved away swiftly, back into the trees, just as Valiantine assumed he might.

Valiantine swore and ran out of the cabin and toward the spot where the figure had disappeared. Remembering the path he’d taken to where Perklee had encountered the ships, he sped off and down it, glancing sideways into the trees, looking for the opportunity to cut the man off somewhere.

Built for sprinting, the wiry lieutenant forged ahead, despite his past injuries and the recent beating. Hearing someone crashing through the underbrush in the woods and slightly behind him, he abruptly veered off at a ninety-degree angle and propelled himself into the woods on what looked like an old path.

Only seconds later he came to a dead stop in front of the fleeing man, his arms and hands up, ready to stop him or fight him, whatever was necessary.

“Lord!” the man spat, grinding to a halt and almost pitching headlong into the brush. His hand disappeared into the greatcoat he wore, but Valiantine saw the movement and kicked out with his booted foot. He caught the man’s wrist with the blow, heard a yelp of pain, and saw a pistol tumble out of the coat and onto the ground.

They stood staring at each other, both of them silent and aware of the pistol lying somewhere between them.

“Law?” the man asked, an average-sized specimen with sandy-colored hair, a short beard, and a forehead littered with small scars. Valiantine remained silent.

The man nodded, his eyes scanning the lieutenant’s face and clothing. “Then... Army. Yeah, I’d say Army.”

Valiantine gave him a curt nod in answer. The man’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled slightly and shook his head.

“Daddy fought in the War of the Rebellion. I was too young, just a child, but I wanted to. I see something of him in your bearing.”

“My father also fought. We have that in common,” Valiantine said, easing back a bit from his position. He swung his chin to one side, back the way from which they had come. “And maybe that cabin.”

The man’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, maybe so. Tell you what; you go ahead and pick up that pistol and then maybe we can have a talk. You look like an intelligent fellow. Maybe we have even more in common.”

As it turned out, they did. The man introduced himself as Awanai. “Just that, nothing more,” he said, and the lieutenant saw the strain of Oriental in him. Together they walked through the woods and to a mostly hidden lean-to among the low hills, not far at all from the spot Valiantine had stood the night before, watching and waiting.

“You live here?” he asked Awanai, walking around the crude structure. “Do the people in... ah, of course they do.

“You’re the regional bandit, the one they talk about in the newspapers.”

The man bowed. “Guilty as charged. Going to turn me in, sir?”

“No,” Valiantine said, “I don’t give a damn what you’re doing, as long as you’re not killing people. The papers say you aren’t.”

Awanai smiled. “Again correct. I’ve even given the people of Manitou a portion of my, well, ill-gotten gains. It
is
my hometown, after all.”

It began to make sense to the lieutenant. The townspeople not only knew Awanai lived outside Manitou, they were most likely ensuring no one else would know. Thus, the beatings and the intimidation of people like Perklee.

The bandit crawled into his lean-to and came back with a bottle. Producing two glasses from a box, he poured out two fingers of the bottle’s clear liquid in each and handed one to his guest.

Inwardly, Valiantine flinched at the sight of the dirty glass. The bandit must have seen the slight tic in his face, for he chuckled and pressed the glass into the lieutenant’s hand.

“The liquor kills the germs. Drink up.”

The moonshine burned an unholy rivulet down his throat but he was determined not to cough as he swallowed. Then, after a good draught of it, he looked back at Awanai.

“How do you know Mr. Perklee?”

The bandit motioned for them to sit down on two tree stumps nearby. Once seated, he swirled his liquor around in his glass and smiled.

“Known him for years,” he explained. “He was a professor of mine, back at Notre Dame. A good man. I learned a lot from him. He’s nothing now like he was before.”

An expression of either disgust or pity or a mingling of both came over the bandit as he spoke.

“But he’s still my friend. Folks in town don’t like him being out here, talking with me. They’re afraid he’s going to spill the beans to someone when he’s in one of his stupors. I like his company, but I’ve asked him to stop coming to visit me out here, for his own safety. He’s not the only folk I entertain.”

“Why does he then?” Valiantine asked, perplexed.

Awanai looked off, toward the lake, then shrugged. “Not entirely sure, friend. He can be a mighty strange old coot when he wants to be. But that shouldn’t earn him a beating. I don’t condone that.”

The lieutenant digested that, unsure of what he could say to the bandit, or what he wanted
to say. The situation grew more bizarre with each passing hour and he needed to simplify things before they became so complicated that he found himself on an even more unsure footing.

The bandit poured Valiantine another measure of the liquor, which he sipped at and which steeled his resolve somewhat. Awanai peered closely at the bottle, seeing only bitter dregs left within, and threw it to the ground with a snort.

“Mr. Perklee spoke to me of... of things he saw. Out here. In the night.”

“Oh,” Awanai said, nodding. “You mean the airships.”