Uncrashable Dakota (20 page)

At the top of the stairs, she was greeted by sounds of laughter and good cheer. She stepped into a second-class hallway decorated in a pretty floral pattern. Passengers overflowed from a bistro, clinking glasses and smoking cigars. The tables inside had overturned, so they’d simply elected to stand. They didn’t seem worried about the change of direction, the turbulence, or the armed crewmen patrolling the ship.

“Is that all you got?” shouted a plump, red-faced man in a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows, shaking his fist at the ceiling. “It’ll take more than that to send the
Wendell Dakota
down to earth!”

He was met with howls of approval. Lingering here was a waste of time, but Delia could only watch, horrified, as a young man escorted his wife to the party.

“You’re being alarmist, Sylvia. I assure you, it’s perfectly normal for an airship to experience periodic bumps, especially since we’ve skirted the edge of that Atlantic storm.”

“There was nothing normal about that!” Sylvia removed his arm from her shoulders. “Something’s terribly wrong, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

“Why, my dear? What are you going to do? Let’s have a drink, and try to remember you’re on an airship that’s scientifically uncrashable.”

21

WENDELL DAKOTA
had never been much of a singer. He was more of a tone-deaf whistler. In Marius’s impersonation, the ghostly voice of Wendell Dakota had sounded, for the very first time, on-key.

Hollis wondered why something like this would occur to him. Did other people’s brains spring these shameful little traps? He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the fleeting confidence he’d possessed in the cent comm shaft. It was no use. At least that burst of inspiration had been for Delia’s benefit, so it hadn’t been entirely wasted.

“I’ll tell you one thing about first class,” Chester said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You people got some good cheese.”

Hollis took a bite of his own ragged, misshapen sandwich, hastily assembled on their journey to the private reading room in which they now found themselves. There were eight such rooms that could be entered from a single hallway, on the other side of which was the library. Each room was decorated to represent one of Wendell Dakota’s superlative qualities. The theme of this particular room was “foresight,” signified by the imposing brass telescope that seemed to look straight into the wall, providing a view of nothing.

“Funny place for a spyglass,” Maggie said, placing her good eye against the scope.

“The lens actually goes all the way through the hull,” Hollis explained. “You’re looking out into the sky off the port side.”

Flecks of crusty baguette fell to the floor. He’d only eaten a third of his snack, while Maggie and Chester were already done. He was a prim chewer, he realized, and then forbade himself to be self-conscious about his
chewing
when they were minutes from confronting Marius. While he waited for Maggie to tell him what he already knew—
it’s stormy out there
—he wondered why the decorator had taken a literal approach and painted so many eyes on the wall. It made him uncomfortable.

Chester arranged his bulk in one of the shiny leather chairs.

Maggie pulled away from the telescope, gesturing for Hollis to have a look. Even knowing what to expect, his heart sank: the
Wendell Dakota
was floating inside a fog as thick as Delmonico’s stew, meaning Jefferson Castor had lost all visibility. He hoped Captain Quincy and Chief Owens were still alive. With Jefferson in charge and the telephone lines severed, Hollis knew the ship could emerge from the storm above the clouds, overloaded with beetles, trapped in an out-of-control sprint for the heavens.

“Okay,” Hollis said. “Status report. What I’m seeing here is that visibility’s at zero and it’s a good bet we’re too high in the sky.”

Chester was cleaning his fingernails with his toothpick. “You can tell all that from one little peek into a cloud?” he asked, mildly interested.

“I’ve lived aboard every airship in the fleet. I can tell when we’re rising above our cruising altitude. The air feels wrong, even inside all these walls. And the thing about low visibility is that rookie beetle keepers always pour on the juice. Nobody wants to crash, so everybody’s first instinct is to load the compartments with beetles and let them feast.”

Hollis paused, listening to every little creak and groan of the ship, trying to anticipate the next shake-up. He imagined the bow nosing down while the stern flipped up like the sudden snap of a diver in midair. He pictured a great gash in the hull and wondered what went through people’s minds when they were plummeting toward the earth.

In the weeks following his father’s accident, Hollis had obsessed over pictures of the D.C. Sky-dock, tracing a finger from the broken railing down to the ground, imagining what his father could have been thinking at each moment. He’d heard the old stories about life flashing before your eyes, but he had trouble imagining what that was like. Did time become so elastic that you relived every moment and felt every feeling over again? Or was it a single blinding flash, a total overload of memory and emotion? Most of all, he wondered what his father’s very last thought had been. His wife’s face? His son’s voice? Or was it just some random brain activity, a tasty breakfast he’d enjoyed one morning in 1906?

“So we’re still uncrashable, yeah?” Maggie asked, startling him. “I gotta admit, you’re makin’ me nervous.” She glanced around. “Maybe it’s just all these eyes, lookin’ at me.”

Hollis considered how best to explain this. “The ship has sixteen lift chambers, which is a record number, so even if we lose a bunch of them in a freak accident, we won’t drop. It’s uncrashable because these new spider machines react to a million different things, like wind and airspeed. They make dealing with the beetles a science, so it’s not possible to fly too high or too low.”

“So then what’s the problem?”

Her genuine curiosity made Hollis feel like they really were working together and that she probably wasn’t going to stab him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“I’m grateful for your help. I thought you hated me.”

“It doesn’t matter if I
like
you or not.”

“I kinda like him,” Chester admitted.

Maggie glared at him. Then she turned to Hollis. “You were talking about the machines.”

“Right. Well, they can be turned off. Or broken. Or just messed up by people who don’t know what they’re doing. If the machines aren’t pulling us down a little bit and keeping us steady, it’s a good bet the hijackers are just working the chambers themselves. And it’s the machines that make the ship uncrashable—it’s not the ship itself.”

“Then what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go see what your friend knows.”

“Marius isn’t my friend.” Saying this out loud made Hollis think of what Delia had said about his name. “He never was. He’s just a guy who works here.”

Chester stuffed a few more slices of cheese into his mouth.

“Did you have those in your pocket this whole time?” Hollis asked. Chester stood up from his chair, ignoring the question, and slipped on a pair of brass knuckles.

Hollis opened the door and peered out into the hall. There were a few passengers milling about, but the path to the library door was clear. Most people had taken to their staterooms following the shake-up, and those who hadn’t were holed up in bars and restaurants. Hollis led them across and pushed open the door-sized mural of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.

The library was sectioned off by topic—they had entered into Military History. The floor was covered in books that had been thrown from the shelves. On the wall was a massive painting of a Revolutionary War battle. There was General Washington astride a horse at the forefront of the colonists’ lines, his hair as white as the stylized puffs of cannon fire that burst around him. How strange to see a battle fought entirely on the ground. Hollis wondered what it would be like to face down a row of muskets.

Chester took the lead, peering around the corner, then motioning for them to follow him past the grinning, bespectacled face of Teddy Roosevelt presiding over Biographies. When Chester’s hand went up, Hollis froze. Maggie pulled the immobilizer from her belt.

There was a wet, mindless gibbering coming from just beyond the next set of shelves. Hollis saw his braver self put a hand on Chester’s shoulder:
Stay here. I’ll take a look.
But instead he just waited for the bigger kid to check it out.

Chester looked, then slapped the non-brass-knuckled hand over his mouth. He stumbled back, wide-eyed. Maggie cursed and leaped to his side, immobilizer at the ready. A second behind her, Hollis wrenched a copy of
Middlemarch
up from the floor and held it over his head, prepared to strike.

It took all of his willpower to keep his half-digested sandwich down.

Marius was suspended in the air. His shoulder nudged a chandelier as he bobbed gently up and down. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only his uniform pants, and his lean upper body was covered in a riot of lurid tattoos ending just below each wrist. In the center of his chest was a distorted picture of the Dakota beetle—its legs and feelers bent and twisted into impossible shapes.

Hollis dropped the book. He’d seen that same corrupted beetle on the business card he’d found in Delia’s satchel. Even more disturbing was Marius’s lumpy, distended belly, which undulated as if something was squirming beneath his skin.

“Is this the guy?” whispered Maggie.

But Hollis was speechless. Marius, on the other hand, was blubbering and smiling to himself, eyes twitching every time he nudged the light on the chandelier.

“Marius,” Hollis said finally.

The floating man looked at Hollis curiously, then began to retch. His body jerked in the air, arms and legs tossed about like a doll’s. A dribble of amber slime emerged from his mouth. Chester jumped back.

Marius began making a hoarse gagging noise. His torso seemed to rise, his entire body in great distress, then he sank a few inches as he expelled a beetle from his mouth. The insect floated over the shelf toward Poetry.

“Hollis,” he rasped, “can you feel it?”

“Um, I don’t think so.”

Hollis noted the empty bottle of moonshine and the containers of sap that littered the rug beneath Marius. Behind him, a holstered pistol was slung across a chair. “Have you been…” The words were hard to find. “
Eating
beetles?”

Marius coughed. “I feel what they feel. I know their mother—
our
mother—isn’t far.”

Chester began slowly working his way along the shelf to the back of the room, keeping as much distance as possible between himself and the floating man. Maggie stood her ground at Hollis’s side.

Marius clearly didn’t have much time. His skin was covered in a sheen of sweat. His eyes were straining upward in their sockets.

“I need to know about
my
mother, Marius. Where is she?”

“Don’t know about your mother,” he rasped. “Only father.”

Hollis shifted his interrogation. “What do you know about my father?”

Marius made a convulsive noise that sounded like a gurgling faucet. Then he fought for control of himself. “So sorry. Always liked you, Hollis.”

Hollis wasn’t afraid anymore. His mind had tinted everything red. He stepped forward and almost lost the sandwich again; the smell was unbearable.

“What are you sorry for?”

“I … pushed him.” Marius began to droop, his head lolling on his neck.

“
Don’t you die yet.
” Hollis gave
Middlemarch
a vicious kick. The book slammed into the wall. “Not until you tell me why you did it.”

At the other end of the room, Chester picked up the gun. “Maggie!” Hollis snapped, pointing. “Stop him.”

Marius lifted his head, ever so slightly. “Castor,” he muttered.

“Castor. Jefferson Castor told you to do it.”

“Mmm.”

“He hired you to kill my father.”

Maggie sprang to life and followed Chester’s path to the chair. Marius began to quiver, then shake violently. His flailing arms snapped their bones. Maggie sank to the ground, burying her face in her hands.

Chester raised the pistol and aimed it at the back of Marius’s head.

“Not yet!” Hollis screamed. Chester’s hand began to shake.

Marius’s entire body was thrust upward into the ceiling, broken limbs splayed, as the beetles inside him feasted. His mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace. His nose leaked fluid. Chester lowered the gun without firing and collapsed into the chair.

“Please,” Hollis begged the floating corpse, “not yet.”

22

THE PISTOL ROB HELD
was heavy and cold, as if it had been kept in an icebox rather than locked in a cabinet beneath a bumpy map of Greenland. Rob looked at it in his upturned palm and tried to imagine pointing it at a person and pulling the trigger. To contrast with Brice Blank’s pacifism, Rob had gleefully made Atticus Hunter very handy with guns, and quick to use them. Now he felt like a fraud and vowed to revise every issue, scrubbing out the weapons with his gummy eraser. The no-going-back consequences of such a thing, the inability to unshoot someone, made his knees feel rubbery.

“I gotta say, Dad, thanks but no thanks,” Rob told his father after contemplating the heft of the pistol for a full minute. Being presented with a loaded gun by the man who didn’t let him keep a slingshot in the stateroom was somehow the most unbelievable horror in the day’s parade of them.

“That is a semiautomatic Colt M1911,” his father explained quickly. “It’s a single-action pistol. You’ve got seven shots before you need to reload. This is the safety—” His father pulled out his own identical gun and clicked a lever on the upper part of the grip. “Make sure it’s off if you need to use it and on when the gun is in your pocket. I don’t have time to teach you how to fieldstrip it. You probably won’t need to do that.”

The alien hadn’t vacated Rob’s father’s body. It had simply burrowed deeper into his brain. Rob had never heard his father mention guns before, and now he was rattling off directions like an army instructor.