Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

XLII

When Mortimer had been in the insurance business, he hadn’t sold anything too glamorous. Residential, auto, the occasional policy on a bass boat. As he pushed himself up from the pile of bodies in the forward section of the cable car, he wondered how amusement parks and tourist attractions had ever been able to afford liability coverage. The premiums must have been murder.

In the last sixty feet of their lightning descent, Ted had thrown the hydraulic brake, had leaned his entire body weight into the lever. A clamp grabbed the cable above, sparks flew against the hideous screech of metal on metal. They slowed, but not enough. The cable car crashed into the station, pitching them all forward into one another. They stood up now, stretched and rubbed bruises.

“Everyone okay?” Mortimer asked.

Bill groaned, picked up his Union officer’s hat and snugged it on his head. “Nothing broken.”

“I’m fine,” Sheila said, but she rubbed her shoulder, winced.

“Old Ted has the hide of an armadillo, the bones of-”

“Don’t start,” snapped Mortimer.

They climbed out of the cable car and looked around. Mortimer reloaded the.45, ready to fend off another band of savages.

“There.” Sheila pointed.

Just past a budget motel, in the middle of the street, the Blowfish bobbed six feet over the asphalt, straining against a thick line tethered to a mailbox. A figure awkwardly lowered himself down a rope ladder, the man with the ridiculous scarf and top hat. He saw Mortimer and the rest, waved them on, frantic, harried.

“That’s Reverend Jake,” Ted said. “Come on.”

They ran to the blimp, and the man in the top hat-Reverend Jake-clapped Ted on the shoulder. “Thank Jehovah you’ve made it. Sorry to overshoot the landing zone.”

“Dumbass.” But Ted grabbed the reverend in a tight hug.

Jake looked past Ted at the others. “These are the ones Armageddon sent?”

“I’m Mortimer.” He introduced Bill and Sheila.

“Let’s get better acquainted in the air,” Jake advised. “We saw more Stone Mountain Goats and they have one of those big arrow shooters. Probably only a half-mile away by now, maybe closer, and coming fast.”

They all climbed the rope ladder, threw legs over the side of the heavy wicker gondola and dropped inside.

Another old man waited for them, wiry and short, barely over five feet. A full white Santa Claus beard and more white hair leaking from under a blue US Navy cap. He wore a leather bomber jacket and jeans and dirty deck shoes.

“This is Chief Larry,” Ted said. “Our intrepid pilot, sky master, he smells the ebb and flow of the air currents, knows the mind of the hummingbird-”

“We’re sinking.” Sheila had her hands on the rail, was looking over the side at the ground slowly coming up to get them.

“Overweight,” Jake shouted.

He and Chief Larry ran around the gondola, yanking on ropes and sending sandbags dropping to the pavement below. The blimp ceased its descent, but it didn’t quite rise either, hovered in place, a slight breeze pushing it in a circle.

“Hell.” Larry grabbed a burlap sack, chucked it over. “There goes dinner.”

Ted and Jake were already pulling at wicker chairs attached with thin rope. They tossed them over, looked around for more items to discard.

Mortimer stood at the rail with Sheila, looked toward the end of the long road where something rolled into view at the other end of the park. He heard a revving sound, the squeal of tires.

Reverend Jake lifted his hands to the heavens. “Dear Jesus, take this flying contraption in your almighty hands and gather us to your bosom. Hear us, Lord, and deliver us from the savages below.”

A truck! Mortimer rubbed his eyes. It was a truck, a pickup, and coming toward them fast. He had not seen a working automobile in years. He gazed at it in wonder, forgetting the truck was bringing a gang of Stone Mountain Goats to kill him. It’s true. The Red Czar’s getting gasoline. Somebody’s producing again.

Larry picked up the heavy ham radio.

“We need that, damn you!” Ted shouted.

“We’re too damn heavy,” the little pilot yelled back. “I didn’t know you were bringing three people.”

Ted lunged for the radio. Too late. Larry heaved it, and it smashed into a thousand pieces on the road below.

The truck was only a hundred yards away. Mortimer saw three Goats across the bench seat inside the cab, another half-dozen clinging in back, waving spears and ad-libbing war cries.

Something else in the back of the truck. A giant spool of cable or thin rope, and next to it a huge crossbow mounted in the bed of the truck.

Mortimer cleared his throat. “Guys, I think we need to get organized.”

Even as he said it, the blimp began to rise.

“That’s it. Out of the way, Ted.” Larry skipped to the aft end of the gondola, picked up what looked like a big weed-whacker, a gas engine at the end of a long shaft. He yanked on the cord three times before the engine sputtered to life. The other end of the shaft went out the rear of the gondola to a propeller, which now turned faster and faster as Larry gave it gas. He held the weed-whacker like it was a tiller on some old Viking warship, leaned into it, and the blimp slowly started turning away from the approaching Goats.

Mortimer estimated they were maybe twenty-five feet up and slowly climbing. Not enough to feel safe. “Higher!”

Larry shook his head. “The propeller is only for steering and forward motion. Lift is all according to weight, and we’ve already tossed everything out. Unless you’d like to jump. That would really help us out.”

The truck screeched to a halt forty yards away, and all the Goats piled out, a flurry of activity. One stood behind the oversized crossbow, used a hand crank to cock it and loaded a five-foot bolt the size of a spear.

Reverend Jake appeared at Mortimer’s elbow, squinted at the truck. “They call it a ballista.”

“I call it trouble.” Bill drew the six-shooters and opened fire, slugs bouncing off asphalt near the truck, one shot puncturing the passenger door. The Goats crouched lower but continued loading and aiming the ballista.

Bill holstered the pistols. “These aren’t built for long range.”

They were forty feet up, with the Goats a hundred yards behind them, when the ballista operator let fly. The spear flew fast and straight, a thin line trailing behind like the wriggling tail of a sperm. It hit the gondola low and aft, punched through the wicker with ease, and caught Larry in the upper thigh, the pyramid-shaped head coming through with a gout of blood and shredded flesh.

Larry screamed, high pitched, fell, letting go of the tiller. He writhed like a spiked trout against the bolt, howling and going a pale green almost instantly. The Blowfish drifted.

Sheila screamed, backed away at the sight of the gushing blood. Mortimer and Jake crowded forward, tried to stanch the wound with their hands, the blood pulsing through their fingers and covering their hands to the wrists in seconds.

Larry sobbed, howled, grunted inhumanly as he gasped for oxygen, convulsed once and threw up on Jake.

Something jerked the Blowfish taut. They were going down.

Mortimer stood, looked back at the truck. Men were cranking the spool of line, pulling it tight and reeling the blimp in like a game fish. Mortimer watched them crank. It was a slow process; there must have been some kind of glitch in the winch, because every fifth or sixth crank, the line would go slack again and the Goats would scramble to fix it. They started again, and this time it came loose after the third crank.

“Cut the line!” Ted shouted.

Mortimer pulled the bowie knife from his boot sheath, bent over the side of the gondola, stretched his hand. The bolt had punctured too far down. Mortimer couldn’t reach it. The line was tied to the end of the bolt, and the bolt was made of some light metal that would take him twenty minutes to get through with a hacksaw.

And he didn’t have a hacksaw.

The Goats kept cranking them in, the blimp edging lower a foot at a time.

“Reload, Bill.”

“I’m on it.” He was already thumbing fresh shells into the Peacemakers.

The rumble of engines. Three more pickup trucks rolled into view, each filled with more bloodthirsty Goats.

He knelt again next to the screaming pilot. “Is he going to make it?”

Jake was covered in the little man’s blood. He met Mortimer’s eyes, shook his head.

“Sorry about this.” Mortimer set his jaw, dug his hands in around the wound, trying to get a grip behind the bolt head.

Larry writhed. “No, please-oh, God.”

Mortimer waited. He needed to time this just right. He felt the pull on the bolt ease and yanked. A wet tearing sound inside Larry’s leg. The little man screamed louder, if that was possible. Mortimer kept pulling. The bolt shaft came all the way through, but the knot caught on the other side of the leg. Mortimer braced himself, heaved, put his back into it. He had to get it through before the Goats started cranking again. Pull. The knot came through in a splash of blood and flesh.

Larry passed out.

Mortimer sawed at the thin rope with the knife. It frayed, came apart, and shot out of his hands, back through the leg wound and the gondola. The blimp bobbed, tilted and suddenly released. Ted grabbed the weed-whacker tiller, aimed them away from the Goats.

“They’re reloading,” Bill said.

Mortimer lifted Larry, dead weight, arms flopping, and let him fall over the side. Mortimer turned away. He couldn’t bear to see the little man land.

Without the weight of the corpse, they lifted much higher, much faster.