Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure (38 page)

Walter’s stomach stopped swirling around. If Hitch was scared, did that make him more of a hero—or not one at all?

“Fear’s not a bad thing, son. Keeps us cautious. Also gives us that nice little thrill.” He grinned. “If flying didn’t scare me, I probably wouldn’t like it so much.”

Behind Hitch, Earl had stopped yelling. While the doctor tidied up for the next patient, Earl sat there cradling his newly wrapped arm against his chest and muttering.

Jael looked over her shoulder and spotted Hitch and Walter. She walked toward them—or rather she limped. She winced with every step and supported herself, first on the automobiles and then on the bleacher seats above her head. A few steps off, she stopped and listened.

Walter glanced back at Hitch.

“Let me tell you a secret.” Hitch looked him straight in the eye. “There’s no such thing as being brave. We’re all scared, sometime or another—scared down to the soles of our boots—and all we want to do is curl up and cry and shake all over.”

Walter clenched his fists. When had his hands stopped trembling?

“But if you
pretend
you’re brave, well then, you are brave.” Hitch reached out and ruffled Walter’s hair. “And from what I heard, you did a good job pretending today.”

A hot feeling filled his stomach. It was a good feeling—the hot-water-bottle-at-the-bottom-of-your-bed-on-a-January-night kind of feeling. The rest of the world might be all icy cold and howling wind, but you were warm and snug and safe inside. That kind of feeling.

His lip stopped wanting to droop, and he smiled.

Hitch smiled back. “You’re quite a kid, you know that?”

The good feeling spread. Hitch Hitchcock was an explorer and a pilot, and if he
was
scared sometimes, then nobody’d know about it. And he liked Walter. He thought Walter was smart and brave.

Hitch must have seen Jael out of the corner of his eye because he darted a glance in her direction.

She was smiling too—that glowy smile of hers that lit her up from the inside and shone through all her scrapes and spatters. The way she looked at Hitch was kind of funny, like maybe she was saying things with just her eyes, like she was thanking him. She looked tired and hurting and pinched around the corners. But she looked hot-water-bottle happy too, like maybe what Hitch had said to Walter had also given her the safe feeling.

Hitch didn’t smile at her like he had at Walter. The back of his neck got kind of pink, though maybe that was from the drizzle making him cold. He cleared his throat and turned back to Walter. “Anyway, you better get home as quick as you can before your mama thinks you ran off again. We’ve got work to do now. It might not be too safe around here for a while.”

When grown-ups said that to him, what they really meant was they wanted him out of the way. He slumped his shoulders and huffed. If he had to pretend he was brave, then he needed to
keep
pretending. Back home, there was nothing to pretend about.

“Hey, get rid of the long face, huh?” Hitch said. “You can still help us find that thing from home.” He dug around in his jacket pocket and came out with a small pair of binoculars.

Walter’s breath snagged halfway up his windpipe. A real
live
set of binoculars, like soldiers used.

“You take these, and you keep an eye on the sky. You see anything, you report it to Deputy Griff. Can you do that?”

Walter nodded. He cradled the binoculars in both hands, as if they were a baby bird, so Hitch would know he’d take good care of them and bring them back.

Hitch jerked his head toward the parked cars. “Now, get on with you.”

Walter scrambled out. Hitch gave him a little slap on the back as he passed, and Jael laid a quick hand on his head. Walter watched the binoculars—scuffed black with shiny curved lenses and a leather neck strap. He was careful not to drop them.

Maybe Hitch was right. Maybe he had been just a little bit brave today. For some reason that made no sense, it suddenly seemed a whole lot easier to be brave out here where there really was danger, than it did back home with his family where everything was safe.

Twenty-Nine

HITCH WATCHED THE boy round the corner of the bleachers. Walter held the battered binoculars like they’d crack if he so much as jostled them. Crazy kid. He’d been the sharpest and the pluckiest of just about everybody here today—including Hitch. And there he was thinking he was some kind of failure. Did Nan
really
realize what kind of boy she had? With a nudge or two in the right direction, Walter would grow up to be some kind of man.

Hitch glanced sideways at where Jael was hanging onto the edge of the bleachers. She’d probably heard his whole conversation with Walter—and the days of hoping she might not have understood it were long over. His neck warmed a bit more, and he turned back to Taos. So he’d gone a little soft over the kid, so what? Couldn’t exactly leave the boy crying in the rain under a splintery bench, especially if that was going to be the last time Hitch ever said anything to him.

Jael shuffled over. She clung to the bleachers and supported her weight on her arms with each step. She looked worse than she’d been even the day after the lightning. Earl’s arm had been so obvious, Hitch hadn’t given much thought to what might have happened to
her
during the attack.

“That wing didn’t hit you too, did it?”

She shrugged. “No. It is the same hurt from before.”

“I thought that was getting better?”

“Sometimes it is getting better, some other times it is not. There is no sense to it. It was very bad not long ago, but I think maybe now it is becoming better.”

“You should sit down. J.W. seems to have forgotten his car’s here, so I’ll bring it over and give you a ride back to the Carpenters’.”

“Maybe tonight I will stay here. I should be where I can see what is happening.”

“What you should do is go sleep someplace dry and warm. This drizzle’s not going to do anybody’s joints any good.”

He looked at the sky, then let gravity take his head and lean it all the way back on his neck. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t really raining so much as sprinkling, and only a few drops struck his face. Sleeping somewhere warm and dry sounded awful good about now. His muscles stretched all the way down his chest and stomach, and he let out a groan.

“I’m sorry, you know,” he said.

She shuffled a step nearer and leaned a hand on his shoulder to support herself. “For what are you sorry?” She lowered herself to sit beside him.

“I said I’d help you take care of Zlo so you could go home. It’s not working out too well so far.”

“It is not
not
working out. Not yet anyway.”

He opened his eyes and raised his head. “It’s not going to take long for people to figure out you’re one of them. I’m sure Rick knows it, and Livingstone’s figured it out. He’s only keeping quiet so long as I play along with his heroics.”

“You are good at heroics.” The silver in her eyes had dulled to a pained gray. Her damp hair was crimping into curls, and she looked like a bedraggled little baby swan. “I was hearing what you said to Walter.”

He looked down and thumbed mud from the corner of Taos’s eye. “Yeah, I thought you might have.”

“Thank you.”

“Just being friendly.”

“Do you know he thinks you are hero out of his book of stories?”

“He’s a kid, he’s got a big imagination. Nothing revs a boy’s imagination like an airplane.”

“Maybe this is true. But I think he needs to have heroes more than some little boys.”

“’Cause he doesn’t talk, you mean?”

She swiped a raindrop from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I cannot explain it, but he is sad somehow inside. At his house, his family, they love him. But”—she shook her head—“even with them, he is still somehow not
with
them.”

“Well.” What was he supposed to do with that?

The boy could sure have chosen himself a nice string of heroes better than him. That was certainly what Nan was always implying. Why not Griff? He was here. He obviously knew Walter and liked him. Griff would be a far better kind of man to look up to. Not as exciting, probably, but the kind that’d show you how to be there for people when it counted.

Not much Hitch could say about that, so he changed the subject. “You do realize all this talk of Campbell’s and Livingstone’s—and mine—could be so much hot air? Even with the dirigible marked, we’d have to stumble right onto it to find it. Zlo is still square in control of this game, no question.”

She touched his shoulder again. Her palm warmed him all the way through his jacket. “We will think of something. Tomorrow will be different day.”

***

“Heetch.”

Somebody was saying his name funny. A woman. And she was poking him.

He shifted in his bedroll and eased his head out from under the blanket. The morning light—more gray than golden—zapped his eyelids shut just as fast as he opened them. He probably hadn’t gotten to sleep until past midnight, what with all the to-do of cleaning up the field and trying to plan for tomorrow.

Or today, rather.

“Hitch. I have thought of plan.”

He flipped over onto his back and squinched his eyes open.

Beneath the canopy of his Jenny’s wing, Jael crouched over him, one hand still extended, ready to jab him again.

He groaned. “Oof. A plan. Right. A plan.” The words circled in his brain, trying to find enough space to land.

She stabbed him again with two pointy fingers just under his ribs.

“Ow! Stop with the poking already. Give me a chance to wake up.”

“You are very slow with this waking up. Earl has been awake for many hours.”

“Don’t give him too much credit. He probably rolled over onto his busted arm.”

“No.” She rocked back on her heels. “He has been working on plane, to get it ready for when we need it.”

“By himself? With that arm?” Hitch propped himself on his elbow and craned a look around at the front of the plane.

Where the propeller should have been, the naked shaft glinted.

“Matthew Berringer took him to his house to do this carving,” Jael said.

“And he didn’t wake me?”

She shrugged. “He said he did not need you. And that you are”—she squinted one eye, like she was trying to remember a word—“
bear
, when you are woken up.”

“But you’re not scared of bears, is that it?”

She scootched back on her heels, and when she was clear of the wing, she stood. “Walter has bear. It is furry and... sweet.”

“Ri-ight.” He pushed back his bedroll and looked around for his boots. “So what’s this plan of yours?”

“I will tell you in car.” She gestured to J.W.’s jalopy. “Should I drive?”

“No. You should
not
drive.” He laced both boots all the way to the top and knotted them off. Then he raked a hand through his hair, grabbed his jacket, and crawled out from under the wing.

Uniform gray covered the sky, but it wasn’t raining anymore. Along the horizon, the clouds darkened into black streaks that blocked sight of anything past Scotts Bluff.

He turned all the way around until Jael was in view once more. “So we really are blockaded. At least it’s not raining here.” He touched the Jenny’s wing. It was only slightly damp from yesterday’s drizzle. “If it got much wetter, we would’ve had to wait for the spark plugs to dry out before we could take off.” He checked the engine, but Earl had already opened all the compartments to let her dry. “Guess that means the drought’s broken, for what it’s worth.”

“You are very slow this morning,” Jael said. She had rummaged through the grub sack and come out with what was left of Lilla’s biscuits. She held up the plate. “For first meal. Now let us go.”

“All right, all right.” He leaned his neck to first one side and then the other to crack it, then trudged after her.

Today, she hurried to the car with barely a glitch in her stride and climbed into the seat, up and over, without bothering with the door.

He cranked the engine, then slid beneath the wheel. “Guess sleeping cold and damp agrees with your joints after all.”

She grinned. “I thought of something that is very interesting.”

“What?” He turned the jalopy around and bumped across the field toward the road. “That being around Earl is what makes you sore?” Earl would say it was Hitch who had the talent for making people sore.

She bit her lip, still grinning. Her eyes sparkled. All in all, she looked far too pleased with herself. “Not Earl.
Schturming
.”

“How’s that?”

“Lightning is what made me hurt in beginning, yes?”

“Right. Although you’re lucky to be feeling anything, if you want my opinion.”

“Yes, but
how
it is hurting does not have sense. One hour it is almost all gone, and then I am hardly able to be walking.”