Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure (17 page)

She didn’t yell this time. She just jabbed her finger at the ground.

Now she wanted him to put it down? He looked. Too many hayricks. He couldn’t land without running into one of them.

She pointed again, more insistently.

Maybe the hayrick was what she
wanted
. She was poised, like a diver, knees bent, shoulders forward. If he flew close enough to one of those piles of hay, she was going to jump straight into it. The trick wasn’t unheard of. He and Rick had pulled it a couple times, when they’d wanted to thrill an audience with the old “scorning a parachute” gag. But except for that plunge into the lake the other night, Jael had no experience with either jumping or planes. If she missed, he’d have another busted-up body to take to the sheriff.

Another glare flashed inside the cloud. The glow grew bigger and bigger, and then, with a static crackle, the lightning burst out. It sliced sideways across the sky, seeming to come straight at the Jenny.

Hitch jerked the stick, reflexively. It was a fool move, since he could hardly dodge a lightning bolt.

The shot of electricity crashed past him before he even finished seeing it.

That sideslip took him right over the top of a hayrick. On one side of him, the lightning started another build-up inside the cloud. On the other, Jael jumped.

The plane ripped on past the hayrick, and he swiveled around in the cockpit to see.

Hay puffed from the top of the twenty-foot mound. She’d hit it then, right in the middle. Lucky her. At the speed he was going, one hesitation would have crashed her into the ground.

In a flurry of limbs and hay, she scrambled to her feet, face raised to the clouds. She snapped her pendant free of its chain and held it up in her fist. Her mouth formed a round hole, the wind tearing away her yell.

At least she was safe—and off his wings—for now. All he had to do was put the plane down before the storm got any closer. Summer storms never lasted long around here. He and Jael could weather it out inside that hayrick. He started to face forward again.

The bolt of lightning that had been building inside the cloud streaked past his cockpit. A clap of thunder chased in its wake and rattled everything from his teeth to the instrument panel to the floorboards under his feet. The lightning zoomed straight for Jael’s upstretched hand.

A gust of wind hit the plane, and the Jenny yawed to the side.

Hitch struggled to bring it back to level. All the while, he turned his head around as far as it would go to see over his shoulder.

The lightning slammed into Jael’s upraised hand. It split around her in a blinding nimbus that, for a second, shrouded her from head to toe. The light faded out in a drizzle of sparks, and the hay at her feet burst into flames.

For one more moment, she stood there, staring in shock. The next, she dropped like she’d been brain shot and rolled down the hay mound to the ground.

The clouds let loose the rain and doused the flames.

Hitch froze, open-mouthed.
That’s
what that stupid pendant did?

Under his slack hand on the stick, the Jenny pitched her nose toward the ground. He twisted back around and pulled her up. In the turbulence—and now the rain—she was bouncing around like a half-deflated ball.

He did an about-face and zoomed low over where Jael had fallen.

She was out cold—or worse. She lay with her arms splayed above her head, the pendant a dull wink of metal just past her fingertips.

He’d seen people hit by lightning before. They’d all died. But it hadn’t exactly looked like she’d been
hit
.

He squinted back up at the cloud. The elevator had disappeared.

Zlo had done this to her. Somehow, some way or another, he had brought this storm.

Hitch circled Jael again. Still no movement.

Automobiles were tearing down the dirt roads around the field, some from town, some from the farmer’s house. Somebody’d be along to help her soon. He wouldn’t be able to get the Jenny onto the ground sooner than their arrival.

That meant the only thing Hitch could do for that crazy girl was knock her buddy Zlo right back out of the sky. If nothing else, maybe that’d give Hitch a glimpse of what was up there and where it was headed next.

He turned the Jenny back into the storm.

Rain chattered against the windshield, and the wind buffeted the wings, first from one side, then the other. The plane wasn’t built to take this kind of abuse—even with Earl’s modifications.

But doggone if he was going to just sit here. He opened her up and sent her screaming into the cloud. Up and up. Visibility turned into a big, black nothing. After a bit, it was hard to tell up from down. Every little pull of his engine felt like gravity calling him earthward.

A gust of wind caught him from below and shoved the Jenny straight up. The engine started choking, and the controls got mushy.

He gave her the throttle. “No, no, no, no.”

No good. The engine sputtered and died. For a second, they coasted. The wind sideswiped them into a turn, then another upwards jump.

Through the haze, a tremendous shadow loomed. The Jenny’s landing gear hit something. Hitch pitched forward and whacked his forehead against the front rim of the cockpit.

The world faded out in a blink.

It came back only slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat.

Voices whispered through his head, the words too far away to grasp.

“
Ti s uma soshel
?
Chto mi budem delat s etim chelovekom
?
Luchse bi ego ubit
!”

Or maybe just too foreign.

He tried to drag his eyelids open.

“
Ego budut iskat
!”

Footsteps clattered all around him, and the plane rocked as if hands had grabbed it.

He managed to squinch his eyes open a slit. The world swirled around him. He was still out in the storm? A little more squinching. Nope, it was his head spinning, not the plane.

The voices rattled on, at least two of them nearby and a lot more farther off. One of the men nearby sounded concerned, even a little hysterical. The other sounded somewhere in between ticked off and triumphant. He sounded an awful lot like Zlo.

That brought Hitch to faster than a cold dash in the face. He yanked his head upright. He was in some sort of a vast room. A long narrow passage, full of flickering darkness, stretched in front of him for hundreds of yards.

Nearby, the empty elevator basket leaned in a corner, its crosshatched door hanging open. Beside it, its cable pooled on the floor.

Dozens of men—along with maybe half as many women in long old-fashioned skirts and even a couple kids—worked feverishly at using ropes to lash to the walls barrels and bags and boxes upon boxes of canned goods. Most of it looked just like the stuff he’d seen yesterday in Fallon Bros.

Was that what this was all about? These guys had dropped into town on a shopping expedition?

Rain-speckled wind gusted against the side of his face, and he slid a look to the left. The storm stared straight back. The whole wall on this end was open. The Jenny wobbled on the edge. No way of telling how far a drop was below them, but her skid definitely wasn’t resting on anything solid. She seemed to be balancing on her wheels and the end of the fuselage. One wing stuck through the massive doorway.

Two faces appeared on the opposite side of his cockpit.

A dark-haired kid in a red coat—the same one who’d beckoned Zlo into the elevator—had shoved his goggles up on top of his head. He had a doughy face, framed by cultivated sideburns, and big, puppy-looking eyes. He gaped at Hitch.

Apparently, it was a shocking thing to find an airplane pilot inside an airplane.

“
Ti
!” the kid exclaimed.

Next to him, his friend Zlo didn’t look surprised at all. “You have come to join us, so?” He grinned, hard and determined. “Or maybe not.”

If he’d had time, Hitch might have thought of a name to call him. But he didn’t have time. He had no room to taxi up to airspeed even if he could find somebody thoughtful enough to pull the propeller. That left one chance of getting out of here—and even if it failed spectacularly, at least it’d look good.

He gave Zlo a salute. Then he hurled his weight to the left as hard as he could.

He didn’t have to try twice. The Jenny, her balance already compromised, pitched straight out the door into the swirl of the storm.

Thirteen

SURVIVAL RIGHT NOW depended on how many feet were between Hitch and the ground. There were a lot of other factors, but that was the only important one. Provided he had enough room to recover from the Jenny’s spin and pull her into a glide, he could land her deadstick. Even that hayfield would look like a good landing strip right now.

He wrestled with the stick and the rudder pedals, fighting the stubborn Jenny—shorn of the Hisso’s power—back to level. The storm had slacked off considerably. The wind was headed in just one direction, the clouds had lightened to gray, and the rain was barely spitting.

He eased the plane into a shallow dive and prayed for the clouds to clear before he reached the ground. God must have been listening, because the clouds broke apart a good two hundred feet above dirt. The hayfield wasn’t anywhere in sight. He’d lost all his bearings up there, and who knew how long he’d been unconscious, although it didn’t feel like it could have been more than a minute.

He swiveled his head all around, leaning over both sides of the cockpit. Without the engine running, all he could hear was the wind whistling past, thrumming the wing wires into that eerie song they sometimes sang. Thunder rumbled, but it was away off in the distance.

The broad swell of Scotts Bluff—the crag that gave the town its name—scored the horizon behind him. Town had to be just a dozen miles or so to the north. If it wasn’t for the lingering clouds, he would have been able to see it.

A road, empty of traffic and wide enough to accommodate the Jenny, appeared to his right. He guided her over and held his breath as she glided lower and lower. He got her lined up just in time, dropped her to the ground, and let her roll to a dusty stop.

Ignoring the drum of pain in his forehead, he hopped out to check the engine over. The fuel line needed fixing. After that whole adventure, he was happy that was
all
it was. His legs wobbled a bit, and the ground felt funny underfoot—like it always did after a crazy stunt.

Nobody could tell him he wasn’t lucky. He closed his eyes long enough to huff an exhale. Then he shook the jitters from his hands and got the fuel line straightened out. That done, he gave the propeller a couple heaves, and took off once more.

The hayfield was empty, except for the scorched hayrick, so he circled back to town and landed the Jenny on a backstreet. Scattered tree limbs and broken glass lay everywhere. The storm had hit hard, but the damage seemed to be mostly the result of the wind. No hail, at least.

He left the Jenny and started jogging. He’d seen a hospital on Main Street—a smart-looking three-story building that was brand new or close to. If there was any kind of good news about Jael, that’s where they would have taken her. His stomach cramped. He should never have let her climb on his wings. He should never have flown close enough to that hayrick to let her even think about jumping off.

Unless... had she really pulled that lightning bolt toward her?

Why? To protect him?

That
definitely made him feel better.

What had happened out there? What had he crashed into up in the storm? For that matter, where had the storm come from? And where had it gone?

As he reached the hospital, he scanned the sky. The clouds were already scattering. Blue peeked around their ragged corners.

Inside the crowded waiting area at the front, people packed the few chairs along the walls. More stood, supporting friends and relatives. There was crying and shouting. A harried nurse in a white cap manned the front desk. She seemed to be spending most of her time scribbling and shaking her head.