Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure (44 page)

Ground attack? That’s what this was? Hitch snatched his arm from Jael’s. Zlo had come back down to finish the job?

Hitch whipped his gaze skyward. “It
is
here. That’s why you’re hurting.” He swiveled. The lantern bobbled in his upraised hand, pushing light only a few yards into the fog.

On the ground, Zlo could have only two goals: kill people or destroy planes. Since there were far fewer planes than people—and because most people would cease to be a threat without the planes—it was a good bet which he had chosen.

Jael gasped. “Your Jenny.”

“You go back and make sure it’s all right. Find Earl and whoever else you can. Tell them to do whatever they have to do to protect any planes that still work.”

She nodded, then took off in a loping, limping run.

Somewhere in the darkness to the south, an eagle screamed.

Where the eagle was, Zlo would be. Hitch’s blood fired and he started running.

Sounds of cracking wood and ripping fabric reached his ears before his light showed a plane—or what was left of it. It was pitched forward on its nose. The tail hung free, like a broken bone. The wing fabric flapped in the wind. Zlo’s eagle perched on the upended fuselage.

Zlo kicked at the lower wing, once, twice, until it snapped. Then the bird squawked, and Zlo spun around to face Hitch.

Hitch slowed and immediately cussed himself for it. Keep going, use his speed and surprise to bowl Zlo over, that’s what he should do. Too late now. He approached slowly, lantern high, and circled around to get a clear angle at the guy.

Zlo bared his teeth, and the silver-capped ones in front glinted. “And so. The man who was so brave this morning.” He spread his arms and sidestepped out from the corner of the wing. “I thought maybe you were not so stupid as you look.” His tone was light, but his jaw tightened and something hot sparked in his eyes.

He was good and steamed, no question about it.

Hitch flashed a grin. “Liked my little trick with the cannon, did you?”

Zlo’s eyes looked about ready to pop from his head. Veins stood out in his temples. Then he smiled—which somehow only made him look more dangerous. “You think you are smart man, yes? You think you are brave. You are hero!”

“If you want to start handing out medals, I’ll be happy to accept ’em.” Hitch sidestepped some more, going as much forward as he did sideways. With any luck, Zlo wouldn’t notice. One more step, and then he’d charge—and pray God Zlo wasn’t packing anything.

Zlo clucked. “No medals for you. That would be mistake. Your town does not give medals to fools who endanger them, do they? Your
glavni
—your Sheriff Campbell—he will see to that I think.”

Hitch dropped the lantern and charged. His lowered shoulder caught Zlo beneath the breastbone, and they both went staggering. Zlo skidded underneath the plane’s wing, while Hitch plowed right into it. The weakened wing frame cracked beneath his weight and gave way.

Behind him, the lantern must have been rolling, because the light spun around in crazy circles. Tough to tell whether he was dizzy or the world was. He blinked hard and turned around.

Zlo loomed in front of him, a wing strut raised in both hands. His silver teeth flashed, this time in a snarl, and he swung the strut at Hitch’s head.

Hitch backpedaled, arms windmilling. His heel caught and he tripped. The end of the strut barely caught the top of his head. But it was enough.

He hit the ground. The back part of his brain was still running, mostly just with the general shock of being consciously unconscious, but his body refused to move. He was going to get whacked again, his brain knew that much.

Footsteps crunched nearer. Then more footsteps, running in from far away. Voices shouted, hazy and wordless. Something that sounded a whole lot like a gunshot crashed through his head, and the pain pounded its way back through the darkness.

Warm, callused hands cradled his face. Jael’s voice—muttering about
cheloveks
again—drifted in.

His body remained unresponsive, but he managed to crack open an eyelid.

She huffed and closed her eyes. “
O Bozhe.
”

“What happened?” His arm was working again now, so he pushed himself up. Instantly, pain spun around in his head. He flopped back down, head on her knees. That was much better anyway.

“We chased them all away,” she said.

“Damage?”

She hesitated. “Earl and I—we saved your Jenny.”

“And?”

Another hesitation. “That is all.” She lowered her face a little closer to his. “Hitch, listen. If we give him
yakor
—if
I
give him
yakor
—he will go away from here.”

Since when had she started caring more about saving the town than stopping Zlo?

“I am knowing he will,” she said. “We have to find it. It is only way left.”

Hitch might be dizzy and hurting, but he wasn’t that far out of it. Throwing Jael at Zlo’s mercy and then turning Zlo loose sounded like the worst idea yet.

He found her hand and gripped it. “Not happening.” The words croaked a little.

He closed his eyes again and blocked out the murmuring and shouting of the gathering crowd. For just the moment, he let himself wish he and Jael were far away, some place where no one knew where they were—not Griff or Nan or Campbell, and definitely not Zlo.

It was a fruitless wish and he knew it. No way he was letting her sacrifice herself, no matter how stubborn she decided to be. But there was also no way, this time, that he could run away—which meant he could hardly take her away either, even if she’d go.

Thirty-Four

WALTER WAS AS far from home as he’d ever been by himself. At least, not without somebody knowing where he was.

He stood in the prairie meadow between town and the Bluff. The tall grass tussocks had turned golden brown at the top with their prickly loads of seeds. They swayed and swirled in the wind, like a sea of green soda pop with golden fizz on top.

Somebody had to find
Schturming
before anybody else got hurt, and it didn’t appear anybody besides him had thought to look out here. He clenched the binoculars Hitch had given him and looked ahead at the tan-colored spine of five dusty bluffs jutting maybe a thousand feet out of the flat ground.

His heart beat harder inside of him, and he looked over to where Taos was busy sniffing at a gopher hole. Walter slapped his leg like Hitch always did.

The dog looked around, pink tongue lolling, and trotted to Walter’s side. Taos had stayed under the porch all night. Mama Nan hadn’t known about it, and Hitch must have forgotten about him after his fight with Deputy Griff.

Walter’s stomach tightened. At school, the big boys—and sometimes the little boys too—would fight. But never like that. Never like they hated each other so much they wanted to pound each other’s teeth out of their heads.

And the things they’d said...

Deputy Griff was one of the best men in town. Everybody knew that. Mama Nan was always wanting Walter to spend time with him—go fishing or ride in his car when he did his patrols—and Deputy Griff was always plenty nice to him.

But Deputy Griff hated Hitch.

And Hitch was Walter’s
uncle
. They were related. Kind of, anyway. If Hitch had been married to Aunt Aurelia,
that
would have made him Walter’s uncle, so that had to mean that being married to Aunt Celia—who nobody ever talked about—meant the same thing. If they were all related, it made even less sense why everybody was so mad at Hitch.

Walter frowned.

Maybe Hitch hated Deputy Griff too, but he hadn’t looked like it. There at the end, his eyes had grown big and almost shocked-like. He’d stopped the fight himself, even though he’d gotten hit in the face an extra time for it. And he’d said he was sorry for whatever it was exactly he’d done.

Nobody
was on Hitch’s side. Except Jael.

And Walter. Walter was on his side.

When the family had all gone back into the house, after everybody else left, Mama Nan had huffed out the deepest breath ever. Then she buried her face in Aunt Aurelia’s sopping collar and flat-out bawled. Everybody, even Papa Byron, stood there and stared. Mama Nan
never
cried. She got mad and hollered and sometimes sat at the table with her hands covering up her face. But she never cried.

Even though Aunt Aurelia was the one who’d near drowned in the storm, she patted Mama Nan’s back and said, “There, there.”

Walter curled his fingers in Taos’s ruff, squared his shoulders, and started marching through the tall grass toward the Bluff. Deputy Griff had said this all was Hitch’s fault. Walter frowned harder. There wasn’t a lick of truth to that, of course. Nobody was fighting harder or was more brave than Hitch. Brave people didn’t do bad things. Brave people were heroes.

This morning, when Walter sneaked out of the kitchen, Papa Byron had banged in through the other door, into the sitting room, and told Mama Nan the sky people had come down last night and ruined most of the airplanes.

“God help us,” Mama Nan had said. “Have they found the airship yet?”

“No. It could be beyond the Bluff by now.”

That’s what had given Walter his idea. He had pulled open the kitchen door, nice and slow, so it wouldn’t screech, then slipped out. He slapped his leg to Taos and started down the road. He walked maybe a mile, and then that Miss Lilla friend of Hitch’s gave him a ride the rest of the way and dropped him off.

That’d been a good hour ago. If it hadn’t been for all the clouds, the sun would’ve been way up past the horizon by now.

He followed the old wagon wheel tracks, embedded so deep from the pioneer days that they still striped the hard ground. The air was mostly calm, the clouds socked in instead of rolling—except along the horizon where the steely curtains of rain closed in all around the valley. Every once in a bit, a raindrop would splat against his face, and he’d wipe it aside with the back of his hand.

He walked with the binoculars held up to his eyes. They were a little big for his head, so he pressed one lens against his eye and squinted around the corner of the other. He followed the trail down into a gully near the base of the Bluff. A raindrop hit the main lens in the middle and spread out to wobble his whole vision.

He stopped and turned the binoculars around to rub the spot off on his overalls’ bib. The material there, thick with his pocket, was too stiff to do the job, so he raised a knee and rubbed it there instead. That’d have to do. He’d forgot his handkerchief. Mama Nan was always telling him for goodness’ sake remember your hankie, someday you’ll need it. Guess that meant she was finally right.

At Walter’s side, Taos yipped in the back of his throat. He perked both ears, although the floppy one wouldn’t go all the way up. He was seeing something with his good dog eyes. But what?

Walter raised the binoculars and stood on his toes.

Only twenty feet away, nestled in the curve of the Bluff, plain as a coon in the corn, was the great ship hanging from its inflatable sail.

His heart scooted up his windpipe into his throat. He almost choked.

Breathe, keep breathing. Pretend to be brave. But the breath wouldn’t quite come. He threw himself onto the ground, behind a spiny yucca. Breathe! He gritted his teeth and sucked air through his nostrils. A lot of dust came with it and scraped in the back of his throat. He swallowed hard to keep from coughing and hoisted the binoculars back to his eyes.

The ship was snuggled against the Bluff, where it’d be hard to see from any angle but this one. The pirates had brought it in low to the ground, only a couple dozen feet up. Men were running all around it, and their shouts drifted out to him. The words were hard and growly-sounding and sure not English.

His heart beat faster. He’d found it.
He
, him, he! Nobody else, just him. He could take the news back to town, tell Hitch, and Hitch would fly out here and beat them all up. Maybe that’d make folks stop thinking things were Hitch’s fault when they weren’t. Maybe that’d make them
both
heroes.

Little carts were being hoisted up and down between the ground and the ship, carrying men and boxes and burlap sacks of what might be supplies. Some other men were gutting a couple of mule deer. The cannon rested on the ground, half-hidden in the tall grass, while up on the balloon, men with ropes tied around their waists scurried around the cannon’s track, making repairs. Men with revolvers stood guard in the gaping doorway at the front end of the ship.

Toward the back, some of the other men hammered away at a big hole. More of them worked on the propellers, which seemed different looking—wrong somehow. He squinted. Yessiree, the tip of one of the blades was missing.

It was broken! It couldn’t move. Hitch could hunt it down right here.

Walter would just have to get up and run back down the trail. It would be easy.