Storming

Twelve

HITCH WAS DEARLY hoping to wake up to some sunshine. Aside from the fact that clouds were turning out to be bad luck around here, he could just plain do with a little cheer after last night’s goings-on.

But, nope. Even before he stuck his head out from under his canvas bedroll, the light was all wrong. So he kept his head right where it was for another forty minutes or so—until Earl’s clattering about with the engine finally destroyed his ability to even pretend he was sleeping.

He reared up on one elbow and squinted out from under the edge of the Jenny’s lower wing.

Heavy gray filled the sky. Yesterday, there hadn’t been a cloud in sight—except for that big thunderhead in the middle of the night. Now it was almost starting to look like rain, and lots of it—which was surprising. To hear folks around here tell it, they hadn’t been in a drought this bad for ten years.

The air didn’t smell like rain though, and the wind wasn’t ruffling so much as a leaf on the cornstalks.

He flung back the bedroll and reached for his boots.

The whole field was pretty quiet. Barnstormers only rose with the sun when they had rides to hop or places to go. Earl was the exception. He’d always been an infuriatingly early riser. Right now, he was banging on something overhead.

Rick and Lilla weren’t to be seen. Hitch looked around. Jael either, for that matter.

He knotted his boot laces midway up his shins and rolled out from under the wing to gain his feet.

Earl was standing on the Jenny’s rear seat, checking a wing strut. If the racket Hitch had been hearing meant anything, Earl had to be almost finished with the repairs.

Earl acknowledged Hitch with a glance from under his cap brim.

“Well?” Hitch asked. “Good as new?”

“Good as next to new, I reckon.” Earl swiped his hands across the front of his white coveralls, then gave Hitch a longer inspection. “You look about as fresh and happy as a funeral bouquet. Not so good with the sheriff last night?”

“Could be worse.”

“What’d he want?”

Hitch ducked under the wing to take a look at the engine repairs. “Nothing much. Just five hundred dollars.”

“What for?”

Hitch grunted. “Doesn’t matter. Not right now anyway. This thing ready to fly?”

Earl swung out of the cockpit and onto the ground. He faced Hitch, eyes narrowed. “Don’t change the subject. What about you and this country copper? You know him from back when?”

“Yeah, I know him.”

“And you owe him five hundred smackers?”

“Not exactly, but that’s what it’s going to cost me to get out of town. But never mind. We’ll worry about that later.”

Right now, Hitch’s main concern was more immediate problems: like making sure the plane could still handle the altitude they’d need for Rick’s special drop. Qualifying rounds were tomorrow, and he desperately needed to get Rick into the air for a little practice.

If they bailed on the first day, they could say goodbye to the prize money and goodbye to Hitch’s Jenny. Of course, losing the Jenny might not matter so much by then, since Campbell would heave Hitch into jail and toss the key into the North Platte River. That probably wouldn’t go very far in helping Griff and Nan forgive him for past wrongs—such as they were.

“Just tell me about the plane,” he said. “Is she ready to go?”

“Yeah, she’s ready. But maybe not in this weather. If that wind kicks up like it looks like it wants to, we’re going to have to tie everything down.”

Hitch squinted at the sky. It didn’t look so bad. The clouds seemed socked in, and the wind wasn’t going more than maybe ten miles an hour. “I only want to take her up for a quick one, make sure she’s purring, so you can tweak any last problems.” He turned back. “Where’s Rick?”

“Said something about going to town for supplies.”

Hitch raised an eyebrow. “Where’s he getting dough for that?”

Earl shrugged. “Looking for credit, I suppose.”

“Hah. Like every pilot here isn’t trying that. These storekeepers aren’t going to give us credit for just the week. And Rick knows it. More likely he’s after gin. Didn’t he say something yesterday about finding a speakeasy?” Hitch pulled on his flying jacket and swiveled to look around the field. “For the love of Pete, he knows I can’t take him up if he gets gassed.”

Earl peered at him. “Why am I getting the sense that if we lose this one, we’re in deeper trouble than usual?”

“’Cause that’s exactly the sense of it.” He dug his leather helmet out of the front cockpit. There was an apple in there too. Leftover from Earl’s breakfast probably. “But don’t tell Rick and Lilla just yet.”

“If the weather goes bad on you and you crack up this ship again, I won’t have to tell them.”

“I’ll have her back in one piece in less than twenty minutes.” He took a bite out of the apple and looked around again. “Where’s Jael?”

“Dunno. Saw her headed out across the field. She looked like she knew where she wanted to go.”

Maybe Hitch should have gotten up earlier and checked on her. But she’d seemed all right last night when they’d returned to camp. Honestly, for all that she was obviously—and rightly—scared of this Zlo guy, she didn’t seem like the type to rattle easily.

Hitch frowned. “I thought she agreed to stay here.” But then who knew what went on in that head of hers? Her English wasn’t that bad, but it left more than a few holes to be tripped into.

“Which way did she go?” he asked.

Earl pointed southward, toward town.

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

Earl raised both eyebrows. “Didn’t exactly ask my permission, did she now?”

No, she wouldn’t. And last night she had said she needed to go someplace where Zlo wouldn’t find her. Hitch made himself breathe out. She wasn’t his responsibility—just like he’d told Matthew and J.W. yesterday morning. But having her wandering around in the open wasn’t something he’d choose for anybody in her circumstances.

’Cept Rick maybe.

He huffed. “Well. If she starts knifing people again, there’s going to be trouble.” He squashed down the impulse to go after her. He’d told her she could stay. What more could he do? “If she doesn’t want to stay, that’s her business I reckon.”

The corner of Earl’s mouth twitched, and a twinkle surfaced in his eyes. “Yeah, good riddance to her.”

“Well, she was a nuisance.”

“Oh yeah, I know how you’re always glad to see nuisances go. Especially when they’re as cute as that.”

Hitch scowled. “I mean it. She’s done nothing but cause trouble.”

“Yup.”

“She tried to stab me.”

“Yup.”

“Never mind.” He buckled his helmet under his chin and hauled himself into the rear cockpit. Maybe he’d fly south just to keep an eye out for her. “If you see Rick, give him black coffee and tell him to stay put. Assuming your repairs get me off the ground, I’ll be back before it starts raining.”

*

The weather held up only until Hitch reached the edge of town.

Out of nowhere, a blast of wind smacked into the Jenny’s nose. Raindrops spattered the windshield and peppered his face, dry like rice kernels. The already low cloud ceiling dropped rapidly, and, just like that, visibility went to zero.

What in tarnation? He pushed the plane into a dive to get beneath the cloud and back into sight of the ground. Where were these clouds coming from? This storm cycle was like nothing he’d ever run afoul of. Clouds could roll in fast enough, sure, but they always rolled. You saw them coming, a mobile barricade scudding across the sky.

Fortunately, Earl’s repairs worked fine. The Jenny refrained from even her normal grumbling as Hitch pushed her down. The Hisso snarled steadily, and the reverberation thrummed up the stick into his hand and all through his chest.

The haze parted around the forward windshield, and the wide stretch of a shorn hayfield flashed below him, only a couple hundred yards away. He dropped another twenty feet, then leveled out. He was just beyond the outskirts of town, where the crop fields were bordered by a scattering of houses.

He looked over his shoulder. Toward the center of town, the overcast was even lower. No blue streaks to indicate rain, but thunder rumbled darkly from the cloud’s interior.

Time to get back to the field before he broke the plane, his promise to Earl, or both. He started to swing around.

To either side, movement flashed—on the ground to the left and in the air to the right. He looked up first.

Through the haze, something rose. It was too small and the wrong shape to be a plane, and if another motor was running nearby, it wasn’t loud enough to hear over the Hisso. Whatever it was, it sure as shoeshine didn’t move like a plane. It was going straight up, almost like one of those elevators they had in some of the big city hotels. Color flashed within it and—maybe—a face?

He blinked hard.

The ground movement to the left caught his eye again, and he spared it a glance.

Someone was running full-tilt across the stubble in the hayfield, headed toward where the elevator hung suspended. Someone small and lithe. Someone wearing a red kerchief on her head.

Earl was right: Jael looked like she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

That was more than he knew at the moment. He hesitated between destinations. Jael couldn’t outrun the Jenny, and, in the wide-open of a hayfield, she’d be easy to find if he came back to her in a bit. Whatever was up there in the clouds wouldn’t necessarily give him the same consideration.

He stepped on the rudder pedal and moved the stick to turn the plane.

A flash of brown darted alongside him.

It was a big, brown eagle, like the one Zlo had called Maksim last night. The bird flew level with his cockpit for a moment, easily keeping up with the Jenny’s fifty or so miles per hour. Then, with a scream, it tilted its wings and dove toward Jael.

Great. Rabid birds on top of everything else.

Holding the plane steady, he leaned over the cockpit’s edge and scanned the ground.

Jael was all alone in the middle of the field, running hard in long-legged strides, fast and surefooted. If she heard the eagle’s screech or the plane’s engine, she didn’t so much as tilt her head.

Then from the edge of the field, a man in a bowler hat and a long coat jumped the narrow irrigation ditch and gave chase.

Oh, gravy.

Hitch swung the plane around and dove low. Precious little he could do to help her from up here, save maybe whack Zlo in the head with the landing gear. With luck, the roar of the engine would distract the man from his pursuit.

Or not.

Zlo didn’t even look back. He caught Jael’s waist with one hand and spun her around to the ground.

Hitch swooped on by, then hauled the plane around for another pass, even lower this time.

On the ground, Jael and Zlo struggled. He clawed at the collar of her blouse, going for the pendant no doubt. Flat on her back, under the man’s bulk, she was at a major disadvantage. Still, she punched him in the eye, then managed to squirm free, crawling backwards on her elbows.

Hitch zoomed past once more and craned his head to watch behind him.

She got a leg up and kicked Zlo square in the jaw. Then she was on her feet and running again, one hand clutching at the pendant under her blouse. She looked up at the Jenny, tracking it through the sky. She waved at Hitch with her free arm.

He dove as low and slow as he could, leveling out only a couple yards off the ground. He could hardly escort her to safety in the plane. But if he could get a sense of the field’s condition, he might be able to set the Jenny down right here.

The ground looked smooth enough, so he lined up and set the wheels down. He rolled up beside Jael just as the tailskid touched the ground.

“Fly!” she shouted. “Go back to fly!” As soon as the wing reached her, she grabbed hold of a strut. The whole plane rocked with her weight. The hoop-shaped skid on the wing’s underside nearly bumped the ground.

He scrambled to right the plane before she pulled the whole thing over. “Get off! What are you doing?”

She kept right on coming. Her momentum had given her enough of a start to grab hold of a wing strut and haul her legs up. As soon as the plane was more or less level, she squeezed through the first X of guy wires that stretched between the two wings.

If she put all her weight on the wing’s unsupported canvas, her foot would go right through, and then the jig would be up for all of them.

“Step on the ribs!” he hollered into the wind.

She walked the wing like she’d been doing it all her life. Her face was tight, her eyes huge. But her movements were sure and steady—no shaking as she switched handholds from wire to strut to wire. She’d scaled J.W.’s house without a second thought, so this was probably nothing.

She motioned forward and looked him straight in the eye. “Keep going!” The heavy pendant swung free from her blouse.

The plane still had momentum enough so that it needed hardly any coaxing to pull it back up into the air.

Jael scanned the ground, peering back at Zlo, then looking ahead.

Hitch craned his head around to see what had happened to Zlo.

Either Jael hadn’t kicked him all that hard after all—or Zlo had an iron chin. He was up and running, his ragged coat spread out behind him. He didn’t run like a man panicked—more like one who was determined to get someplace and get there in time.

Hitch scanned ahead. Nothing. He leaned sideways to see around the front cockpit.

Ahead, the cloud had dropped almost to the ground. Wind rolled off it and plastered another round of rain against his goggles.

Not good. A fog like that meant zero-zero: no visibility, no ceiling. Wind and rain only made it worse. He had to get the Jenny back on the ground and fast. He threw the stick hard to the right and pulled the plane around to head in the opposite direction. For that one moment when his momentum and direction were matched up just right with the wind, he heard Jael’s cry.

Halfway up the wing, where her weight was a little easier for him to balance, she had stopped and braced her back against the crossed guy wires. She stared toward Zlo, and once again she curled her hand around the pendant.

Hitch shot a look over his shoulder.

At the bottom of the cloud, the elevator car had emerged. It was a square metal basket, the sides open except for a cross-hatch of iron. A man, wearing a red coat and dark goggles, stood inside. The basket dropped the last few feet to the ground, then bumped back up, and dropped again. The oscillation of a cable cut swathes through the haze above it. The man in the red coat swung open one of the basket’s sides and beckoned with both hands.

Zlo had said he was going home. This must be his ride. But how had he signaled for it? Radio or something?

And what was up there to go home to? Hitch stared up at the cloud. What did that cable have at its other end?

A flash of lightning lit up the inside of the cloud. Thunder clapped immediately, loud enough to block the noise of the motor. Hitch flinched in spite of himself.

Zlo reached the basket, slammed the door behind him, and started waving his arms. The cable jerked tight, and the basket jumped off the ground so fast it nearly capsized the red-coated guy.

The eagle flew over their heads, spiraling around the cable.

Zlo peered up at the bird, then past it, to the Jenny. He tilted his head to his companion, speaking to him, then looked straight up and circled his finger in the air.

Jael’s weight on the wing shifted fast, shaking the plane.

Hitch muscled the Jenny back under control and shot Jael a glare.

She leaned toward him, over the last X of wires and shouted. Judging from the way the cords in her neck were standing out, she was bellowing with all she had. But the wind still whipped away everything but the ghost of a sound.

He rapped a fist against his helmet-covered ear. “I don’t know what you’re saying! What do you want?”

She pointed at the cloud in front of them, which either meant go there! or _don’t go there!_—one or the other.

And he’d thought they had a communication barrier before.

He shook his head.

She stopped hollering and bared her teeth, obviously frustrated. The wind howled past her, whipping her loose blouse and ripping through her short hair. The red kerchief had come off somewhere along the way. She stared at the cloud, and her eyes streamed tears into the wind.

Then suddenly, she was turning again. She swung herself under the wires, so they were at her back. Nothing lay between her and the front edge of the wing except air.

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.