Boneshaker

Seventeen

The Clementine swooped away from the tower with all the grace of a chick learning to fly, and Zeke’s lurching stomach sent a mouthful of vomit up into his cheeks. He swallowed it back down with an eye-watering gulp and clung to the strap that did nothing except give him something from which to dangle.

He stared at the strap, trying to concentrate on anything but the acid against his teeth and the whirlpool in his belly. It was a belt, he thought. Someone had buckled it and slung it over a brace beam to make a holding spot. The buckle was brass with a lead backing, and on the plate’s front it said CSA.

As the ship dipped, bobbed, and fired off at top speed to a place above the Blight-fogged streets, Zeke thought of Rudy and wondered if he’d deserted from the Union army or not. He thought of a war back east and wondered what a Confederate belt was doing serving as a holding strap in a… and again, the word manifested in his brain… in a warship.

And that gave him something else to consider, apart from the lava-hot taste in his mouth.

Above the console he saw storage panels with hooks that looked like they could hold weapons, and a square drawer that said MUNITIONS on it. Toward the back of the ship, there was a large door with a spinning vault wheel like one you’d see in a bank. Zeke presumed it must be the cargo hold, since a cargo door might have a sturdy lock on it as a matter of general principle, but a wheel like that? And he couldn’t help but notice the way the floors, walls, and seals around that giant door were reinforced.

“Oh God,” he whispered to himself. “Oh God.” He curled himself up as tightly as he could, into the smallest ball of Zeke he could fashion, lodged there in the curve of the ship’s wall.

“Incoming, starboard!” shouted Mr. Guise.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Parks either ordered or declared, though the captain was already on top of it.

Brink tugged violently on an overhead apparatus and a set of levers popped down from the ceiling. He tore at one trapezelike apparatus and the airship’s gas tanks hummed so loudly they nearly shrieked.

“We’re running too hot!” Parks advised.

Captain Brink said, “Doesn’t matter!”

Out of the front windows that wrapped halfway around the oval interior, Zeke saw the horrifying specter of another ship — a smaller ship, but still plenty big — barreling down headlong against the Clementine.

“They’ll pull up,” Mr. Guise murmured. “They’ll have to pull up.” Parks yelled, “They aren’t pulling up!”

“We’re out of time!” the captain shouted.

“What about evasive maneuvers? ” Parks asked with a note of mockery.

“I can’t get the goddamned thrusters to—” The captain quit explaining himself and slammed his elbow on a switch as big as his fists.

The Clementine bolted upright like a nervous deer, pitching its contents and crew backward, and sideways, and up; but the impact wasn’t altogether averted. The second ship clipped it soundly, and there was a terrible squeal of metal and ripping fabric as the great machines grazed one another in midair. Zeke thought his teeth were going to vibrate out of his gums, but they miraculously stayed in place. And in a few seconds, the ship righted and seemed on the verge of escape.

“We’re up!” declared the captain. “Up — do you see them? Where’d they go?”

All eyes were plastered on the windshield, scrying every corner for a sign of their attackers. Parks said, “I don’t see them.”

Mr. Guise griped, “Well, we couldn’t have just lost them.”

Parks breathed in slow, steady gulps and said, “It’s a smaller ship they’re chasing us with. Maybe they shouldn’t have hit us. Maybe their boat couldn’t take the damage.”

Zeke’s ice-white knuckles refused to unlock from the belt, but he craned his head to see out the window, and he held his own breath because no amount of calming talk could keep it steady. He’d never been much of a praying kid, and his mother hadn’t been much of a churchgoing woman, but he prayed hard that wherever that other ship had gone, it wasn’t coming back.

But the sound of Parks saying, “No, no, no, no, no !” did not reassure him.

“Where?”

“Down!”

“Where? I don’t see them!” the captain argued.

And then another righteous crash rocked the ship and sent it teetering through the air. Zeke’s belt broke and his body dropped to the floor, then rolled to the wall and back down to the middle of the deck again. He scrambled and struggled to crawl forward. Given the inertia of the ship’s sway, the first thing he could snag was the vault-style wheel on the cargo hold door. He tangled himself in it as deeply as he could.

Somewhere below, a plate of steel was stretching and splitting, and rivets were flying loose as hard and fast as bullets. Somewhere to the side, a thruster was spitting and hissing, making sounds that no working thruster ought to.

Somewhere in front of them, the Blight was smudging the landscape — and it took Zeke a moment to realize that he could see the Blight directly in front of him because the ship was fully facing down, soaring toward a collision with whatever was underneath the pea-soup air. “We’re going to crash!” he shrieked, but no one heard him.

The swelling back-and-forth of the crew’s conversation occupied them all, and not even the boy’s screams could distract them. “Left thruster!”

“Disabled, or stuck, or… I don’t know! I can’t find the stabilizer pad!”

“This idiot bird might not have one. Right thrust, air brakes. Jesus Christ, if we don’t pull up soon, we’re never pulling up at all.”

“They’re coming back for another round!”

“Are they crazy? They’ll kill us all if they drive us to ground!”

“I’m not sure they care—”

“Try that pedal — no, that other one! Kick it, and hold it back—”

“It’s not working!”

“We’re coming up on—”

“Not fast enough!”

Zeke closed his eyes and he felt them stretching, pushing back in his eye sockets from the pressure of their descent. “I’m going to die here, or I’m going to die down there, on the ground, in an airship. This isn’t what I meant…” he said to himself, for no one else was listening. “This isn’t what I meant to do. Oh, God.”

The airship’s underside dragged itself along a new surface, one that was rougher and made with bricks, not metal; and the dusty, pebbled sound of stones crushed along the ship and rattled to the ground. “What’d we hit?” Parks asked.

“Wall!”

“City wall?”

“Can’t tell!”

The ship was spinning in an uncontrolled orbit that knocked it against hard things here and sharp things there, but it was slowing and then it was rising — so suddenly that the immediate lift and leap brought more bile into Zeke’s mouth. He spit a little spray against his visor.

Then the ship stopped with a pitiless shrug, like the yank of a dog’s leash.

Zeke fell off the wheel lock and went facedown onto the floor.

“Tethered,” the captain said grimly. “Damn us all, they’ve locked us.”

Someone stepped on Zeke’s hand and he yelped, but there was no time to complain. A demanding knock was beating a drum-tune against the main portal. It was the sound of someone big and very, very angry. Zeke pulled himself up and scuttled away, back to his cubby by the cargo door. He hunkered there while the captain and his crew pulled out guns and blades.

They abandoned their buckled seats and tried at first to hold the door shut, but it had been damaged before when the Clementine had hit the Smith Tower, and now it was barely affixed to its hinges. Shoulders shoved and feet braced, but whoever was on the other side was heavier or more determined. Inch by inch, the door came peeling away.

Zeke had nowhere to go and nothing to contribute; he watched from the floor as a coal-black arm reached through the opening on one side and a burly white one burst through from the left. The black arm caught Parks by the hair and beat his head against the frame, but Parks used his knife to cut at the hand until it retreated, bleeding — only to swipe inside again a moment later with a blade of its own.

The larger arm on the other side could’ve belonged to a giant, or one of those amazing gorillas Zeke had once seen in a circus. Though it wasn’t covered in hair, it was longer than any arm the boy had ever personally set eyes upon; and he shuddered to consider the man who might wield it.

The white arm dipped down, took hold of the nearest boot, and pulled. Mr. Guise went dropping to the floor, where he kicked against the arm, the door, and everything else. The monstrous hand retreated for less than a second and reappeared holding a revolver, which it fired straight through the bottom of Mr. Guise’s foot.

Up through the boot the bullet blew, not stopping there but searing in a straight line through Guise’s thigh, and up into the soft flesh of his forearm. He howled and fired his own gun at the door, at the arm, at anything moving on the other side.

But the bullets wouldn’t penetrate the plated doors, and the giant hand appeared unharmed.

The door caved in another half a foot, denting beneath the force of the men who pushed against it. The captain left his spot at the door to come to the vault. He kicked Zeke out of the way, bruising the boy’s leg and ribs as he cast him aside and spun the wheel to open the hold.

“Hold that door!” he commanded. His officers were doing their best, but Guise was bleeding and Parks had a nasty smash that looked like the skin of a rotting fruit on his forehead.

The burly Indian brothers braced their backs against the dented door and held their ground against the encroaching raiders.

On the other side of the bridge, an escape hatch opened with the creak of hinges that were not often used. Zeke watched the captain sling himself outside the ship, clinging to it and crawling along it like a spider, until he’d disappeared and the opened door showed nothing but a square of Blight-poisoned sky. He could hear the man’s feet and knees beating against the exterior of the craft as he climbed along it, seeking the hijacking hooks and trying to yank them out by hand.

Zeke couldn’t imagine it, being up above the earth, heaven knew how high, and scaling a ship’s exterior with no harness, no ropes, no guarantee that anything soft was waiting below. But the captain’s handholds and footholds sounded like small gongs across the ceiling and around the back.

Parks hollered, “What’s he doing?” Zeke could scarcely hear him, for his ears were still ringing with the percussion of the shots fired in such a close space.

“Their hooks!” Mr. Guise said, though he was breathless with pain and trying to daub at his wounds while he pressed his back against the door. “He’s freeing them.”

Zeke wanted to help, but he had no idea how to do so; and he wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go except into the sky and down to the ground, which would surely receive him in pieces.

Beside Mr. Guise, a sharp-pointed bowie knife had fallen out of someone’s reach. Zeke slid a foot across the floor to grab it and pull it close. When no one objected to this action, he pulled it into his hands and clutched it up to his chest.

With a tearing sort of tin-can rip, something came loose and the ship gave a gut-swabbing heave.

The door that stood between the crews of the Clementine and the attacking ship slammed shut, and almost slammed clear out into the sky because there was nothing on its other side; the other craft had rebounded, and they had fallen apart from one another.

“Got it!” Brink shouted, though he could barely be heard inside the belly of the airship.

The other ship’s crewmembers yelped. Someone might have fallen out as the ships swayed apart from one another — Zeke didn’t know, and could not see.

“Get away from that door!” Mr. Guise hollered, and scooted himself away from it, back over to his chair, which he could scarcely pull himself up to reach.

The door was bent in all the wrong ways, and it wasn’t going to hold. The final hinge gave way to the weight of the steel slab. With a tiny squeal, the door dropped to the city below.

Everyone listened, and counted seconds until they heard it land.

Zeke counted almost to four before the crash echoed up from the streets. So they were high up, still. Real high up.

The captain came swinging down into the door on the far side of the cargo hold. He shut the door, sprinted back to the cockpit, and took his seat, despite the teetering angle and missing door that exposed the whole cabin to the stinking sky. “Out of here,” he gasped, fully out of breath and quivering from exertion. “Now. If we can’t get over the wall, we’re done for.”

Parks leaned over the slumping form of Mr. Guise and pulled a lever, then stretched his foot over the slouching body to push a pedal. It was the wrong pedal, or maybe the right one. The ship bounced up, and with a hearty half-roll, it dislodged Zeke from his defensive position by the wheel lock.

He bumped, sprang, and toppled over to the open door.

Without dropping his knife, Zeke lashed out with one hand to seize the frame, or the hinge, or anything else he could catch; but the ship was listing up and there was no helping hand to assist him. The twisted, split hinge cut a gash into his palm too deep to allow him to hold his position — swinging half out of the deck, half out in the air — and by reflex and terror he let go.

He fell.

… And smashed against something hard much sooner than he’d expected, even in his fear-addled state.

And then the giant hand Zeke had seen before grabbed onto his arm with the crushing force of a cabinetmaker’s vise.

Zeke’s head swam with adages about frying pans and fires.

He couldn’t decide whether or not to struggle, but his body decided for him — even though there was nothing beneath his feet but sickly air. He kicked and fussed, trying to twist against the grip of the enormous fingers.

“You stupid kid,” growled a voice that matched the hugeness of the hand. “You don’t really want me to let go, do you?”

Zeke grumbled something back, but nobody heard it.

The big hand reeled him up, to the very edge of the other ship’s deck.

The boy tried hard not to gasp, lest he suck in any more vomit off the mask’s visor. Holding him up by the wrist was the biggest man he’d ever seen, or even heard of. He was crouching in order to fit in the opening where the door of his own ship had been pushed aside — it did not open out on hinges, but slid from side to side on a track. The man’s mask was a close-fitting model without a large breathing apparatus. It made him look bald, and something like a snub-faced dog.

Behind the big man, Zeke heard voices bickering unhappily. “They disengaged! The son of a bitch disengaged us! By hand!”

“So the thief’s a tricky bastard; we knew that already.”

“Get this ridiculous bird up in the air! Get it up, right this moment! My ship is leaving me moment by moment, and I will not lose it, do you hear me? I will not lose my ship!”

The big man turned his attention from the wriggling boy to say, over his shoulder, “Hainey, you’ve already lost your goddamned ship. We tried, all right? We’ll try again in a bit.”

“We’ll try again now,” insisted a thick voice from deeper within the cabin.

But another voice, higher and almost prissy, argued, “We can’t try again now. We’re hobbling, you big jerk.”

“And we’d better get rising!”

“We’re not rising, we’re sinking.”

Over that same shoulder, shaped like a mountain range, the big man said, “Rodimer’s right. We’re hobbling, and we’re sinking. We’ve got to set down, or we’re going to crash.”

“I want my goddamned ship, Cly!”

“Then you shouldn’t have let somebody steal your goddamned ship, Crog. But I might have a hint about where it’s gone off to.” He looked again at Zeke, still held up over the empty, swirling fog that settled like scum at the bottom of the city below. “Don’t I?”

“No,” Zeke said. It almost sounded like he was sulking, but he was just choking and aching from being held up so oddly and breathing through vomit-clogged filters. “I don’t know where they took the ship.”

“What an unfortunate tune you’re singing,” the man said, fluttering his wrist as if he meant to fling Zeke out into the ether.

“Don’t!” he begged. “Don’t! I don’t know where they took it!”

“You were sitting on the crew, weren’t you?”

“No! I was only hitching a ride out of the city! That’s all! Please put me down; put me down inside, I mean. Please! You’re hurting my arm. You’re hurting — you’re hurting me.”

“Well I ain’t trying to give you a massage,” he said, but his tone had changed. He swung Zeke inside as effortlessly as if he were moving a kitten from basket to basket, and all the while he stared at him strangely.

He pointed a finger as long as a bread knife straight between Zeke’s eyes and said, “Don’t you move, if you know what’s good for you.

“Shoot the little bastard if he won’t talk!” demanded the most irate of the voices in the cabin.

“Put a lid on it, Crog. He’ll tell us something in a few minutes. Right now we’ve got to put this bird down before she falls down.” He slung the side door shut on its track and reclaimed a very large seat in front of a very large windshield. He looked back at Zeke to say, “I’m not playing with you, boy. I saw you dropped your knife, but you’d better not be hiding anything else, anyplace. I want to talk to you in a few minutes.”

Zeke crouched on the floor and rubbed at his aching arm and flexed the sore muscles in his neck. He griped, “I don’t know nothing about where they were going with the ship. I only just done got on it, not an hour before. I don’t know nothing.”

“Nothing? Really?” he said, and Zeke assumed from the largest chair — and from the way the others let him do all the speaking — that he must be this ship’s captain. “Fang, watch him, will you?”

From the shadows, a slender man whom Zeke had not yet seen took a gliding step forward. He was Chinese, with a pilot’s gas mask pulled over a ponytail; and he wore the mandarin jacket that was common to his kind. Zeke swallowed hard, partly out of guilt and partly from abject fear.

“Fang?” he squeaked.

The Chinaman did not nod, or blink, or flinch. Even as the ship swayed unhappily downward, drooping through the sky, he did not stumble. It was as if his feet were rooted to the spot, and he was as level and smooth as water in a tilting vase.

Zeke said, to himself since no one else seemed to be listening, “I was only trying to get out of the city. I was only—”

“Everybody hang on,” the captain suggested, more than ordered. It was a good suggestion, because the ship was beginning to spin slowly in a downward spiral.

“Air brakes malfunctioning,” someone said with forced and deliberate calm.

The captain asked, “Any function at all?”

“Yes, but—”

The ship skimmed a building with a sickening screech of metal against brick. Zeke heard the popping shatter of windows breaking all in a row as the hull dragged itself through their frames on the way down.

“Thruster on, then.”

“Right one’s being fussy.”

“Then we’ll screw ourselves into the ground when we land; that’s fine. Just do it.”

Roaring filled Zeke’s ears. He wished for something to hold, but found nothing. He crouched hard against the floor and spread himself out, trying to grasp or lock his feet around anything he found. In the process he inadvertently kicked Fang, who didn’t appear to care and barely moved.

“Going down, folks,” the captain said calmly.

The dark-skinned man in the blue coat — Crog, Zeke gathered — said, “Two in one day! Goddammit!”

The giant replied, “If I’d known you were so lucky I’d have never given you a lift.”

The ground was coming up fast. Every time the ship’s semicontrolled orbit swung to a certain point the earth would appear in the window — and it promised a very hard stop at the bottom.

“Where’s the fort?” the captain demanded. For the first time he sounded flustered, maybe even on the edge of afraid.

“Six o’clock.”

“From which…? From where…?”

“Over there.”

“I see it,” he said suddenly, and yanked at a lever above his head. “I hope nobody’s down there.”

The man in the first mate’s chair said, “If anyone’s there, they’ve heard us coming. If they haven’t got out of the way yet, it’s no one’s fault but their own.” He might have been on the verge of adding more, but that’s when the ship began to stop in earnest, lurching almost belly-up until nothing but sky filled the windows in front of the captain and his crew.

Zeke was certain he was going to vomit again and there would be no stopping it, except that he didn’t have time. The earth caught up to the bottom side of the ship. It landed hard and almost bounced, but instead it got stuck in a groove and started to drag a trench that began at one wall and continued for another fifty yards until the whole contraption was tugged to a stop by the turf inside a compound.

When the world stopped rocking and the ship stopped — almost like it’d been parked on its side — Zeke staggered to his feet and clutched his head.

Something warm filled his glove, and he knew without looking that it was blood. He could feel the slit in his skin, jagged and throbbing. He knew it must look terrible, and perhaps it was terrible. Perhaps he’d killed himself by crashing his skull against the wall, or the door, or whatever he’d hit as the ship had perform its warbling descent. Wouldn’t that be a thing for his mother to hear? That her son had died in an airship crash, somewhere inside the walled city, where he had no business being and no excuse for his carelessness.

He tried to feel resigned about it, but he mustered self-pity and searing pain instead. His feet refused to fasten to the floor underneath him. He staggered, one arm smashed against his bleeding head and one hand held out to steady or ballast himself, or maybe search for an exit.

The ship had landed with a serious list to the left, which had crushed the side entryway through which Zeke had entered. The lot of them were effectively trapped.

Or so he thought, until the ship’s bottom hatch fell open a promising crack.