Kill or Die (10 page)

“Get that thing in the air, Mr. Ritter,” Sebastian Lilly said. “Mr. Cobb wants the bank robber caught and dead. Preferably a death that's a long time coming.”

“Look at the sky, Lilly,” Ritter said. “This is gonna be a big storm.”

The thunderstorm had made landfall to the south after churning across the waters of the Gulf. Already a wind rattled and rippled the loose planks stacked for the sawmill and the tents flapped and strained against their guy ropes. A smattering of rain made Vs across the water and the swamp was white with lightning.

“I don't give a damn,” Lilly said. “My orders are to get that flying machine up and find the robber. Mr. Cobb says he's probably in the swamp somewhere giving the bank's money away.”

“It's only dawn. We can wait until the storm clears,” Ritter said.

“Do I go back to Mr. Cobb and tell him you refused to obey his orders?” Lilly said.

“Hell, man, I could lose the airship and the crew,” Ritter said.

“Mr. Cobb will get you a new airship and a new crew,” Lilly said. “Now get it done, Mr. Ritter.”

Ritter locked eyes with Lilly, the only sound the rain ticking on the roof of his tent. Finally he said, “It's easy to give orders when you're sitting in a dry office in Budville.” He turned away and opened the tent flap. A guard wearing a slicker stood outside. “You, get me Professor Mealy, Byng the engineer and Travis Kershaw,” he said. “And you'd better bring Bonifaunt Toohy as well.”

The guard was surprised. “Now?”

“Yeah, damn it, now,” Ritter yelled.

The guard hurried away and a couple of minutes later the four men crowded into Ritter's tent. “Professor Mealy, you're taking the airship up. Travis, you and Byng will go with him.”

Mealy looked stricken. “Mr. Ritter . . . the storm.”

As though he hadn't heard, Ritter said, “Scout the whole damned swamp and beyond. You're looking for a man wearing a buckskin shirt with a sack of Mathias Cobb's money. He was riding a paint horse. If you see the horse, you've found him.”

Leander Byng said, “Boss, he'll be holed up somewhere. We'll never find him in this storm. And we could lose the
Star Scraper.
”

“And our lives,” Kershaw said.

“A hundred dollars bonus a man,” Ritter said. “I know you won't find him. You know you won't find him. But Cobb wants it, so go through the motions. Quarter the area with the dirigible and then come back down.”

“Two hundred dollars,” Kershaw said.

“Cheap at that price,” Toohy said.

“All right, two hundred,” Ritter said. “I'll see that there's hot coffee and black rum waiting for you men when you return.”

Thunder shook the tent and the sound of the rain grew louder.

“Mr. Ritter, this is very dangerous,” Professor Jasper Mealy said. He looked like a man trying to crawl into his top hat.

“I know it's dangerous,” Ritter said. “That's why I'm paying you two hundred dollars to get the job done.”

“And if we refuse?” Byng said.

“Then I'll kill all three of you,” Ritter said.

“The man isn't joking about that,” Toohy said. “Byng, I'd think long and hard before I said anything else.”

The
Star Scraper
frantically tugged at its securing lines like a bird struggling to get free of a trap. The balloon bounced up and down on the gondola, eager for flight, and made boarding a dangerous proposition, rife with the possibility of broken arms or legs.

After several tries the three men managed to clamber on board, Kershaw with his rifle. By the time the steam engine was fired up, the thunderstorm hit with considerable force. Rain hissed like an angry dragon and lightning clashed, sizzling white in the swamp.

Byng yelled to the men to loose the lines and after a moment's hesitation the dirigible took to the sky, gained altitude and immediately careened over the swamp, driven by the blasting south wind.

“Mealy, can you hold her?” Byng shouted as the balloon hurtled just above the tops of the cypress. The professor held hard to the tiller but he briefly raised a hand, cupped his ear and shook his head.

Byng left the steam engine and staggered his way to the stern. “Can you hold her?”

Mealy nodded. Like Byng he wore his goggles. He pointed north and then swept his arm to the west before grabbing the tiller again. Thunder roared and lightning flashed and the airship rocked wildly. Byng held on to the rim of the gondola until the moment passed and the
Star Scraper
settled again, like a foundering ship in the trough of a wave. Far from scouting the terrain below him, Travis Kershaw, his face green, was being violently sick and had thrown up all over the gondola and himself.

Byng scrambled back and checked the steam engine. So far so good. The propeller spun with a steady rhythm and the boiler pressure was normal. But how much longer could the ship take this pounding? When he glanced to the stern Professor Mealy looked every bit as worried as he did.

Then disaster struck.

The birds were tiny, no bigger than wrens, but they came in a hurtling white cloud driven by the venomous wind. Thousands of them tore across the shattered sky like buckshot from a hundred shotgun blasts.

Hunched in the stern, Mealy took the brunt of the bird strike. His top hat, pulled low onto his ears, was hit multiple times and flew off his head and sailed away in the wind. The back of his head was a crimson mess. Running blood mingled with white feathers and wood splinters from the wrecked propeller. The professor cried out in pain and alarm and dived for the floor of the gondola. Travis Kershaw had raised his head and turned just as the birds struck and he took multiple hits to his face, each one splitting skin and hitting bone. Kershaw stood, his arms cartwheeling as he tried to fight off the birds. But the gondola was an unstable platform for a standing man. It lurched from a furious wind gust just as the sky exploded into thunder and lightning struck the balloon. Kershaw tipped over the side and screamed all the way down. Like Mealy, Byng hugged the floor and escaped serious injury. But the balloon was shredded and the airship violently dropped its nose, flaming from the red-hot coals that erupted from the steam engine's furnace. Trailing a ribbon of black smoke, the dirigible crashed into the swamp, just yards from where Travis Kershaw's body hung in a U shape, his belly rammed through by a sharp, smoking stake, all that was left of a lightning-struck willow.

 

 

Sam Flintlock, a man who enjoyed thunderstorms so long as he wasn't riding in one, was sitting on Evangeline's deck polishing the maple stock of his Hawken when he saw the dirigible get into difficulties. He called Evangeline and O'Hara to come see the sight and they stepped onto the deck just in time to see the smoking airship disappear behind the cypress, followed by the sound of a crash.

With commendable understatement Flintlock said, “Well, there's a thing you don't see every day.”

Evangeline, still frosty over Flintlock's bank robbery and the retribution it could bring down on the swamp, said, “We must help them.”

Flintlock let a clap of thunder pass, then said, “No need, Evangeline. They're probably all dead, and besides they're Ritter's men.”

“Sam, I'm not talking to you,” the woman said. “But if I was, I'd tell you to go see if there are any survivors. We can't leave injured men to the alligators.”

“There's a thunderstorm, Evangeline,” Flintlock said.

“Oh, very well then, I suppose I'll have to go by myself,” the woman said.

Flintlock read that female warning sign and said, “O'Hara, let us charge to the rescue.”

“I said I'll go,” Evangeline said.

“No, you won't,” Flintlock said. “Here, take ahold of my Hawken and don't drop it.”

Evangeline, who'd planned to visit Cornelius that morning, was dressed like a librarian in a long gray skirt and severe shirt of the same color with a white rounded collar and black tie. A straw boater with a black and red band sat atop her piled-up hair and Flintlock thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life.

 

 

“She's the most beautiful woman I ever seen in my life,” Sam Flintlock said as O'Hara poled the pirogue through the swamp, pausing every now and then to scan the tree islands for wreckage.

“She's all of that,” O'Hara said. “Evangeline could make a glass eye blink, an' no mistake.”

“Ah well, back to business,” Flintlock said. “You see anything?”

“Nothing. That flying thing probably broke into—wait! What's that noise?”

“I don't hear anything.”

“Sounded like a man yelling.”

“Where?”

“Straight ahead of us, Sammy.”

“Well, punt this thing, O'Hara. Put your back into it.”

“You ever think of taking a turn?”

“No. I'm the white man here, remember?”

“You never let me forget it,” O'Hara said.

The knees of a huge bald cypress that might have been a thousand years old stuck out into the channel between two tree islands. O'Hara punted his way around the obstacle and into a large area of clear water. About a hundred yards ahead of them was a small island, covered in willow. Rain lashed the bayou and ticked from the branches of the trees. The thunder had growled its way northward and the air smelled of smoke, rotting vegetation and the sharp ozone tang of the lightning.

“Man over there, Sam,” O'Hara said. “See him among the willows?”

Flintlock squinted through the trees and at first he thought it was old Barnabas come to haunt him again. But as the canoe drew closer . . .

“For God's sake look at that,” Flintlock said. “Seems like one of them fell out of the airship and landed smack on a willow.”

“Is he still alive?” O'Hara said.

“I can't tell. We'll have to get closer.”

O'Hara grounded the canoe and he and Flintlock investigated the fallen man. A man impaled through the belly on the pointed spike of a broken tree is as dead as he's ever going to be. “Damn,” Flintlock said. “I hope he didn't live too long.”

“Terrible death for a man,” O'Hara said. “Help me get him off of there. Dying like that is an obscenity.”

Flintlock and O'Hara were both strong, stocky men but it was a five-minute struggle to remove the body from the tree. When they were done the body lay at their feet and the stake was covered in blood.

Then, from the other side of the tree island, a man cried out in mortal terror.

Flintlock and O'Hara exchanged a startled glance then drew their guns and headed toward the sound. There it was again, louder this time, the shriek of a man facing certain death.

The ground under their feet muddy, Flintlock and O'Hara did their best to quicken their pace. They were in time to see Professor Jasper Mealy die in the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The animal dived and then went into its death roll, tearing its prey apart. The churning water turned red then the alligator swam away, what was left of Mealy's body in its jaws. A severed arm, still wearing an elbow-length leather gauntlet, bobbed to the surface and then a top hat appeared, goggles on the crown, and drifted away on the muddy current.

Flintlock looked sick. “I couldn't get a shot at him,” he said.

“I'm sure that was Basilisk,” O'Hara said. “I think your bullet would have bounced off him.”

“I wanted to shoot the man, not the alligator.”

Feet squelched in mud to Flintlock's right. He swung around, his Colt coming up, and saw a tall man wearing riding breeches and tall lace-up boots. “Who are you?” he said. “State your intentions.”

The man stopped dead still in his tracks. His hands rose above his head as he said, “My name is Leander Byng. I was on the
Star Scraper
.”

“On the what?” Flintlock said.

“The dirigible,” Byng said. “We got hit by a flock of birds and then lightning and came down.”

“Put your hands down,” Flintlock said. “But be notified—I may shoot you later.”

“When the alligator attacked Professor Mealy I ran away,” Byng said. “Oh my God in heaven, is that his arm?”

“Yeah, it is,” Flintlock said. “The alligator got the rest of him.”

“There was nothing I could do,” Byng said. He seemed to be on the edge of hysteria. “I never carry a gun.”

“What do you do for Brewster Ritter?”

“I'm an engineer. I'm setting up the sawmill to process the cypress.”

“You were setting up the sawmill,” Flintlock said. “You ain't doing that any longer.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Byng said.

“That depends on how mean I feel,” Flintlock said. “It won't take much, a mosquito bite might do it.”

Byng looked around him as though checking for mosquitos in the immediate area. Then he said, “Have you found Travis Kershaw?”

“Young feller, wore a gun?” O'Hara said.

“Yes. He always carried a gun.”

“He fell onto a broken tree and impaled himself,” Flintlock said.

“Then he's dead?”

“As a rotten stump,” Flintlock said. He looked at O'Hara. “Do we gun him or take him with us?”

“Sammy, you're in bad enough with Evangeline already. We'd better take him.”

Flintlock's eyes were ice-cold on Byng. “You got lucky in the crash, engineer man, and you got lucky again. Let's go.”

“Should we bury Travis first?” Byng said.

“The alligators will bury him,” Flintlock said.