Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure (33 page)

She knit her brows, staring up. “It is not maybe. The way it pulled from me—it caught on something. What if it is still there?”

“Small chance of that.” But still, he craned a look upwards.

She clenched her fists against her bent knees. “He is wanting it because if he has it, he can go to anywhere he wants. Do all things he wants. And things he wants are very bad.”

“Well, even if he does have it, he obviously doesn’t know it. And there is no guarantee it snagged on something up there. More than likely, it fell right to the ground.”

She shook her head. “Then he can make storms nowhere but in this place. He will not like that. He will do his threats.”

“Give to me
yakor
and eighty thousand dollars,” Zlo shouted.

Jael put a hand on Hitch’s shoulder and started to push herself up. “I should go—”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down. “You can’t seriously still want to go back?”

“No. My people—maybe they are letting Zlo do this thing, or maybe they cannot stop him. If it is first, then they are betrayers. If it is other, I can only help them if I help all of you.”

“And you’re telling me Zlo is a man of honor?”

“Honor?”

“Is he the kind that keeps his word, that gives a Lincoln penny about whether anybody down here thinks he’s a good guy or not?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. So you stay put. If he finds out you don’t have that pendant, then he’s got no use for you. He’s likely to shove you right on out of there again. And this time you won’t be wearing a parachute.”

Her gaze flickered from him to
Schturming
, then to the people huddled in the grandstand. “But—”

“Look, I got enough on my mind right now. So just you promise me you’re not going to go turning yourself over. Trust me when I say that’s not going to do anybody any good. The man’s a pirate. He’s going to try to wring that money out of the folks down here whether you go up or not.” He rattled her arm. “Promise me.”

Her gaze came back. Her throat bobbed in a swallow. “I promise.”

The next trick would be keeping everybody else from figuring out who she was and forking her over to Zlo anyway. He huffed.

Earl thumbed Hitch in the ribs. “You better pay attention to this.”

One of Zlo’s men kicked a rope ladder out the door. It unfurled with a snap and swayed a foot or two above the ground.

“What happened?” Hitch asked.

“The sheriff’s going up to talk.”

“Oh, well, that’s swell.”

Griff pushed through the crowd behind Campbell and spoke to him for a second. Campbell waved him off, took hold of the ladder, and started hauling himself up. Hands on his hips, Griff stood watching. He looked as happy about the whole thing as Hitch felt.

Campbell would do his best to bring Zlo to his knees. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just getting the ship out of the county now. Zlo had challenged him, and like Campbell’d said, he didn’t take it lightly when folks threatened things he thought belonged to him. That meant, from this moment on, Campbell would be dead set on bringing down
Schturming
any way he could.

If Campbell figured things out, that probably didn’t mean anything good for Jael.

Hitch growled. There had to be another way around this. Something
he
could do. He was, after all, about the only person on the ground right now who knew what was really going on here.

He scanned the length of
Schturming
’s gas envelope, then squirmed around in the dust to face Earl. “I’m going back into the air.”

“What for?”

“To see if I can pop their bubble.” He pointed at Jael as he got up. “You stay here, you cotton?”

She frowned. “You are going to do what?”

He left without answering. As soon as the bleachers were between him and
Schturming
, he straightened and started jogging toward the Jenny.

Two pairs of footsteps sounded behind him.

“What’s your plan?” Earl asked. “Please don’t tell me it’s to ram it with your propeller.”

“It’s like a balloon, right? Stick a pin in a balloon and it pops.” He reached the Jenny and hauled himself into the rear cockpit. “Give her a crank.”

Earl scrunched his face. “What are you going to puncture it with?”

Hitch pointed at his left wing. “The handkerchief hook.”

“Oh, fantastic.” Earl rolled his eyes. “That’s brilliant. You hook that hulk, and you’ll rip your whole wing off. Anyway I don’t think it’s quite that simple. The air chambers are probably pocketed. You could blast it with a shotgun, and it’d still float. And even if it did work, you’d have to hope your exhaust didn’t ignite the whole thing when the gas spurted out.”

“Well, I gotta do something, so crank her.”

Earl threw up his hands and walked around to the propeller.

A frown creased Jael’s forehead. She gripped the cockpit rim. “I am coming with you.”

“No sense both of us buying it if this doesn’t work.” And Earl was right. It probably wouldn’t.

“I am part of what is happening here.”

“There’s nothing for you to do right now. Just stay out of sight.”

Her brows came down, looking pretty stormy themselves. But the spin of the propeller and the cough of the engine kept her from saying anything more.

The engine sputtered and backfired once, and the propeller jerked to a stop.

Hitch circled his finger in the air. Earl spun it again. This time the engine caught with a chuckle that rose to a roar.

Overhead, Campbell’s megaphoned voice shouted: “All airplanes have to stay on the ground! The man says if any more take off, he’ll bring the storms!”

Hitch pushed the throttle forward anyway. Better to take a calculated risk and call Zlo’s bluff than sit here and do nothing.

Jael flung herself at his cockpit again. “No! He will do it!”

Frustration cramped his throat. He hesitated, fist still tight on the stick.
Schturming
was in reach
right now
. If it disappeared again, Zlo could unleash all the storms he wanted from his invisible perch in the sky.

Jael shook her head hard.

But if she was right and going up only brought the storms that much faster, that’d hardly do anybody any good. He loosened his grip and reached for the switch to kill the engine.

Jael whipped her head around to look at the western sky.

Hitch followed her gaze, his hand hovering over the switch. He heard the rumble over his own engine’s before he saw them.

The rest of the competitors were finally roaring in.

“That’ll work!” He caught Jael’s arm and pulled her in close enough to shout in her ear. “I can take off under the cover of their engine noise. Zlo’ll never hear me.”

She still shook her head, but the crease in her forehead eased a bit.

“Once I get up there and distract them, you and Earl see if you can’t figure some way to mark that undercarriage! I’ll try to force it lower!” So long as
Schturming
couldn’t blend into the sky, they might have a chance of finding it again if it ended up getting away.

Overhead, the plane engines screamed in louder. The pilots would be wondering what was happening. Half of them would probably think the dirigible was some stunt of Livingstone’s. They’d close in right over its top just to get a look. With any luck, they’d spot Hitch, realize what he was doing, and follow his lead.

Jael nodded and stepped back, out of the prop wash.

He exhaled, faced forward, and opened the throttle.

“Hitch!” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Be careful of cannon!”

Cannon—?
Even as the plane taxied past, he jerked a look back at her.

She was kidding. Surely, she was kidding.

Except Jael never kidded.

He faced into the wind again and tried to pretend his gut hadn’t just done a snap roll.

Twenty-Five

WALTER’S STOMACH TWISTED in pain. He was
that
scared.

Now Mama Nan really would be sorry she’d let him stay.

He clenched both fists over his middle. He should be praying—like Mama Nan was praying, out loud. But his mind couldn’t seem to find any words. All he could do was stare and try not to huddle on the ground with his hands over his head as if he was a little baby like Evvy and Annie.

After she’d yelled at Hitch, they’d walked almost all the way back to the automobile before she looked at Walter with a sad face and sighed. “All right, Walter. We’ll stay and watch, but only for a little while, hear?”

He gave her the hardest hug he could manage, then ran back to stand next to the Berringer brothers in the shade of the grandstand, where he could watch Hitch’s red plane. And then, during the race, that
thing
smashed one of the planes out of the sky and stopped everybody cold.

It could kill them. It could kill them all right here and now. Inside his ears, his blood pounded.

Out of the corner of his vision, a red plane streaked from behind the grandstand.

Hitch’s plane! It had to be. The knot in his stomach convulsed. That hurt too, but it was a better kind of pain. He pressed his fists together.

Of course Hitch would do something.
He
was brave. He was the only one here brave enough to do something. Even Sheriff Campbell might be giving in to the pirates up there. But Hitch—he was like the pilots in the storybooks.

The plane darted around the field, like a red wasp, and circled to join the oncoming swarm of racers. Hitch shot over the other pilots’ heads and took the lead. He swooped so low over the white balloon that his landing wheel seemed like it might have skimmed the surface of the monster’s skin.

That’d teach those pirates! Walter jumped and shook a fist. A whoop stuck hard in his throat, and that kind of hurt too. Death to pirates! They didn’t stand even a little chance.

The air exploded. The balloon quavered, and near Hitch’s tail, a black blast of smoke puffed.

Walter froze.

Everybody started screaming and ducking all over again.

Another blast pounded, and another, one after the other. Puffs of smoke chased behind Hitch’s tail, like huge smoke rings from one of Mr. J.W.’s cigars. The red plane ducked and dived. It rolled all the way over, as it screamed down and then back up again.

Next to Walter, Mr. J.W. clenched his fists at his sides. “Durn furriners! They’re shooting at him!”

Nan gripped Walter’s shoulders with both hands and stared upwards. “Hitch, you crazy fool. You always did have more backbone than brains.”

The crowd swarmed all around. Half the people ran to their automobiles to try to get away. The other half stayed, hunching over and wailing, probably scared too much to move. Deputy Griff and Col. Livingstone were shouting and trying to direct everybody. Nobody listened.

Clouds swirled out of the clear sky, and thunder blasted over their heads. Far behind, the twin propellers began blatting against the air.

From behind, Jael and Earl shoved through the throng. They’d know what to do.

Walter caught at Jael’s hand.

She glanced down long enough to see him and stop. Her eyes sparked, afraid one minute, just plain angry the next. “Hitch cannot fly away from cannon and lightning forever!”

“He’s doing a pretty good job so far,” Mr. Matthew said.

Earl stopped in front of the Berringers and hollered to be heard, “He’s going to see if he can force it a little lower. We have to find a way to mark that undercarriage, so we can find it again if it gets away.”

“Mark it how?” Mr. J.W. asked. “Paint?”

Mr. Matthew shook his head. “Take too long to put enough paint on that to make it visible from far away.”

Jael stared up, her whole body fidgeting. “If we could maybe be tying something to it...”

“Have to be something awful big,” Earl said. “But not too heavy for us to lift.”

Walter swung his head around to look. About twenty yards off, just shy of the grandstand, the scattered remains of the first lightning-struck plane still smoldered. One of its wings, almost as red as Hitch’s Jenny, flashed in the fading sunlight.

His heart skipped and his stomach went all hollow for a second. He yanked on Jael’s arm.

She turned her head—slowly, slowly, like the drip of sap in the crook of a tree—and finally looked at him.

Still hanging onto her, he pointed.

She followed his gaze, and then her face lit up. “Wing. He is right. If it is not burned, it is good color and not too heavy.” She started running, but she was slow again, wincing with every step.

Earl and the Berringers took off after her.

Overhead, the plane engines howled. More explosions slapped the sky, each one like a punch in the chest.