Dieselpunk: An Anthology (14 page)

Madge knocked curtly on the door.

He took everything in at once. The overlarge suite, with its pompous ceiling and glass chandelier. The balcony view overlooking a small garden below. Vane, seated behind a thick desk at the back of the room, puffing on a cigar. A ridiculous potted yellow iris on the desk. The woman from the soda shop, lying face down on the parquet floor, her neck bent roughly to the side. The security team, flanking him with silenced flash pistols drawn.

Blooms of acrid vapor hissed from the fluted ends of the pistols. Madge vaulted sideways, crashing against the door. The shots went wild. Madge reached for his own pistol — and grabbed air. In his haste, he had neglected the one thing he never went anywhere without.

Another snap of superheated gases, and a blinding flash. The shot hit home, square over Madge’s heart. He looked down, expecting charred flesh and a bubbling ooze of vitality. His clothes were burned crisply and evenly around the blast mark. His chest was red, like he had stayed overlong in the sun.

His attackers fired again, and again. The superheated plasma stung like a hundred furious bees as Madge felt the heat wrap around inside his ribs and carve its way across his shoulder and back to his fingertips.

Power arced forward, unbidden. Madge lunged with the surge, releasing the energy at the group. The pain intensified, frying his nerves and melting his muscles. The first quasi-soldier fell to his knees, followed by the second. The two remaining men acted as one, dropping their pistols in favor of knives. Madge hunched forward, his vision blurred, barely registering the impending threat.

One knife aimed for the middle of his back while the second waved upward for his throat. Madge deflected the knife aimed for his throat, jerking the wrist of his attacker sideways. Their footing tangled; the guard wrapped around Madge in a lethal dance, the blade dangerously close to his jugular.

A squish of metal into skin, a shriek of pain. The guard on Madge’s back flailed wildly; Madge controlled the immediate danger, grabbing the wrist of the man and writhing out from under his weight. He snapped the arm backwards, directing their turning bodies at the final threat. It sank home with a final crunch.

Madge stepped away and did a cursory check for blood loss. It was all theirs. So far so good.

The cigar in Vane’s mouth drooped. “Well now, Madge, good show. You’ve saved me from a hell of a tight spot — can’t thank you enough! Gave me quite a scare—”

Vane’s jaw flattened along with the cigar, blood spurting from a broken lip. Madge cracked his knuckles. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” he said, his eyes cold with hatred. 

Vane shrank back, afraid of his monster for the first time. Just then, the muffled snap of a flash pistol caught Madge’s attention — right in his gut. He kicked the miniature flash pistol from Vane’s hand. Vane fumbled for it. Madge reached out — and smashed the clay flower pot into Vane’s head. Vane twitched once, twice, and went limp. He was a garish clown with his teeth smashed in and a clump of sod resting on his temple.

“What a bloody mess!” shouted Corty from the doorway, all smiles. “How am I supposed to get any work done in a place like this?” Corty walked past the still warm bodies as if it were commonplace to see dead saboteurs in an office.

Madge stared blankly at the barman.

“Shame about Layla, but you got rid of the whole shebang, looks like. Madge, I’m your ‘friend’,” Corty said plainly. “I tried to do you a favor when you was in the hospital. Now that slimy grease pit is out of both our hairs, how ‘bout we do some business together, you and me? No obligation, just friends looking out for each other?”

Madge shifted uncomfortably and remembered he should be bleeding to death. He looked down. “Well damn. I just got this shirt, and now look at it. Ruined.”

“I’ll buy you another shirt — I’ll take it out of the eight dollars you paid me for them chairs. I did good though, with your doctor friend, I see,” he said and grinned. “You ain’t dead yet — and I’d say that’s pretty good given the circumstance.”

“Tell you what, Corty.” Madge fingered the silver dollar still in his pocket. “Promise me you won’t do me any more favors, and we’ll call it a deal.”

Back to Contents

Cocktails on the Street of Bones

By Jack Philpott

Up here is freedom. Endless horizons stretch out on all sides and the only walls are intangible cloudscapes and the hard, cruel world below. Liberated from the drag of earth, one can soar as an eagle, or as an angel. The surface world can keep its boundaries, for up here the compass is the only guide and the simple rules of the winds over your wings are the only constraints. Today the sky gods couldn’t be more accommodating. The air is clear as a young girl’s wink. The jostling gusts of the trade winds are quiet save for the occasional nudge.

The sky is an endless frontier no man may claim for more than the transient moments his aircraft may grant him. And for these moments, the sky is mine, a fleeting embrace from a fickle lover. I would stay here forever were it possible, but the most I can do is stretch out my finite time. My hand strays to choke down the fuel mixture and bring the RPMs up a little. Airspeed and fuel consumption rates drop slightly as
Estrella’
s two engines settle into a comfortable background purr. Leaning back, I take in the panorama of chicory skies and sapphire waters, white-rimmed bands of
emerald cays ringed by azure shallow
s, a high sun, nearly white, casting a warm beam through the overhead glass. Don rests in the co-pilot’s seat, eyes closed, enjoying the heat of that sunbeam. He opens them briefly, giving me his usual empty stare, then settles back into his torpor with a toothy yawn. Taking his lead I settle back myself. For a heartbeat or two I relax into one of those perfect moments of pure serenity.

Naturally, it has to end.

A stream of red-orange sprites dance in front of the cockpit glass. It takes me a second to realize what they are: tracers! A split second later, there’s a roaring
whoosh
as a floatplane fighter zips past
Estrella’
s starboard side. Bolting back to attention, I richen the mixture, push up the throttle, and scan the horizon for more aircraft.

“
What in the name of the Santos was that?” yells a feminine voice over the engines’ roar: my passenger. I look back through the companionway. She’s still laying back on the tattered starboard bench, her journal and fountain pen still in her hands.

“
A Coronado fighter from the looks of it,” I answer. “Cubano or Floridiano, most likely.”

“
Well,” she demands, “what do they want?” Her Portuguese has a strange, exotic accent.

“
How the hell should I know?” I say. Whatever they want, they’re serious about it.

“
Well, can’t you outrun it or something?” She slams the journal and bolts up, sticking her head through the companionway into the small cockpit. Her black hair cascades down onto my shoulder. It smells of jasmine. I try to focus on the task at hand.

I point to where the small floatplane fighter is banking quickly off to the left, receding in the distance. “See that little thing tearing off like São Chango’s Serpent, Donna? That’s a Coronado fighter. It’s got a cruising speed several dozen miles an hour better than this old girl can do throttles to the wall. And those red lights zipping by were machine gun tracers. She’ll have a wingman too, probably behind us right now. We try to run and you’ll find out exactly how fast this plane will fly, pitching straight down without a tail.”

“Well, you can’t just sit here!”             

“
Watch me.”

“
They’ll kill us!”

“
If they wanted us dead we’d already be spiraling into the sea. I have to assume they want something.” Damned if I know what that is. I’d been diligent about filing the proper flight plans and customs papers and all that bureaucratic ballast. I’ve flown the Habana-to Roanoketown-run hundreds of times without incident. Are the Cubanos saber-rattling over the Cays again? Whatever the story, I’d just been painfully reminded that just because you can’t see the borders up here doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

“
Y-you can’t just…what if they find something?” the donna asks.

“
Find what? Five crates of mangoes, fifteen boxes of cigars, a crate of Cubano rum, and a haughty Mayan donna?” I’ll admit my words were a little disrespectful.

“
You’ll watch your tone with me, Sr. Lagarto,” she says sharply, using the High Blood tone of voice. “Just because we’ve shared a couple hours in your little seaplane doesn’t make us peers.”

“
My apologies, Donna,” I say demurely, hoping the sarcasm I feel doesn’t reflect in my voice.

To port, an alto buzzing, higher-pitched than the baritone hum of
Estrella’
s portside engine, becomes audible. We look over and see the second Coronado slowly lining up to our port. The white orchid logo of the Floridiano Air Corps stands out against the mottled blues of her camouflage. Her oxygen-masked pilot points a leather-gloved hand out from the open cockpit, his index finger motioning down. “He wants us to land,” I say.

“
Where?” asks the donna. “In the middle of the sea?”

“
Cayo Hueso, I’d assume. We’re about forty nautical miles southeast of it.”

“
Cayo Hueso…‘The Island of Bones,’” she translates, using English, of all languages. I knew a little English from my stops in Virginia. As far as I know, Virginia is the only place outside of the British islands themselves that actually speak it. “Sounds like a horrible place,” she adds after a moment, returning to her flawless but accented Portuguese.

“
Well,” I say, dutifully setting course for Cayo Hueso, “it’s not a place you want to vacation.” The donna stands there, bracing herself with the back of my seat as we rock a little through the turn. For a second her long manicured fingers brush my shoulder and she jerks her hand back.

“
Look, Sr. Lagarto,” she says, “I don’t know about what people of
your
station come to expect, but one of Santa Maria de Tikal blood is not ordered around by Floridiano swamp men.”

“
With all due respect to the donna’s rank and status,” I say, “she does whatever even the lowliest of swampies want when the choice is a fiery death. I doubt those pilots know of or care about your elite status, and neither do their bullets.”

“
Then I’m calling their masters and letting them know!” she says, moving to get into the co-pilot’s seat. “This abominable wreck of yours has a wireless, yes? Ahh!” That last shriek comes as she nearly sits on Don, who rears and hisses spitefully at the looming silk-clad noble arse. No accounting for taste. “There’s a lizard in your plane!” she screams.

“
Donna Magdalena, meet Don, my co-pilot.”

She shrinks back towards the companionway. “You have a lizard for a co-pilot?”

“Iguana,” I specify. “And yes. Best co-pilot you could ask for. Never once had to fight him for the controls.”

“
And you have declared it a don?” she adds, her dark eyes burning with noble rage.

“
Nothing wrong with an iguana don.”

She tosses her head contemptuously, sending a jasmine whiff through the cockpit, and retreats back to the couch, muttering beneath her breath. “Make sure you belt in for landing,” I yell back to her, earning a derisive snort audible even over the engines.

We fly on towards Cayo Hueso and whatever fate awaits us. The dark, abysmal blue of the straits vanishes, supplanted by the warm azure of the shallows. White stripes of sandbars and the green clusters of mangrove poke out here and there above the waters. Swarms of pink spoonbills scatter as we fly over. It would be majestic were I not so distracted by the possibility of fines or jail time.

Tangled scrub forests occasionally give way to tiny hermit homesteads and lime orchards as we fly over the larger cays. This is the Caribbean at its wildest: remote, almost inaccessible, and often malarial. These cays would be forgotten by man altogether but for one simple fact of geology: they command the channel between Florida and Cuba. The Floridianos have claimed the natural harbor at Hueso. Farther west the Cubanos have scraped a small patrol base out of the coral and sand of the Dry Tortugas. “Incidents” between the two are not unheard of.

We reach Cayo Hueso, a small white scorch on the aquamarine waters. The pilot of the Coronado to our left motions for me to land in the harbor and then breaks off. “Time for that seatbelt, Donna,” I call, choking back the throttle and lowering the flaps. I’d normally want to make a pass to check the state of the waters and survey for obstacles. I have the feeling, however, that deviating from the landing course would be met with a less than amicable reaction by our new guests. Don yawns and blinks. I say a quick prayer to São Cristóvão and lower
Estrella
down to the water of the bay. She gives me a slight tremble as her breast cuts the bright waters. She shakes now, and throws two giant plumes of foamy water to either side. With a final shudder she settles into the water’s embrace. We have arrived in Cayo Hueso, the Island of Bones.