Chapter 16

Interstate 10, passing south through New Mexico just before crossing into Texas near El Paso, was lined on either side with barbed wire and warning signs. Some were faded beyond legibility, but the newer signs read something along the lines of:

DANGER

UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE.

WHITE SANDS MISSILE TESTING RANGE.

DO NOT LEAVE HIGHWAY.

The message was then repeated in Spanish for the benefit of illegal aliens traveling from Ciudad Juarez.

Jesus Merienez had never actually seen any live ordnance during his fourteen trips on this route. This time it was no different.

In fact, at night, far from the interstate, with the sun down and the air cool, the missile testing grounds were delightfully secluded and peaceful.

Then, just as he was tossing away his last Tecate can and preparing to crawl into his bedroll, the earth started shaking under his feet. He screamed. He tried to run. Some American bomb was exploding right under his feet! Exploding very slowly!

No, it was a volcano. He’d never heard of a volcano in the southwestern deserts of the U.S., but what did he know?

All this speculation was immaterial as he clawed and scrambled for freedom from the bucking, roiling sands of the desert. Swimming in the flowing, vibrating soil was more difficult than swimming across the murky Rio Grande. His screams were snuffed out by soil, and his legs were smashed under an unbearable weight. The air filled with bolts of lightning that anchored in his eye sockets. For one hideous instant he felt the vitreous fluid inside his eyeballs come to a boil, then burst.

He knew he was dead. He should have given up, but something made him fight to survive. He clawed through the cover of moving sand, reaching for the sky, and his hand emerged from the soil. He could feel it out in the open air.

He didn’t feel it for long. The weight that was pinning him down settled onto him, tons and tons of gleaming metal, and Jesus was mashed from his belly to his feet like a scorpion killed by a cowboy boot.

The electricity died away and the hatch opened with a clang. The young man who emerged had a sandy-blond buzz cut and a freckled face. Jack Fast leaned out of the earth drill and spotted the hand protruding from the soil.

“I thought I ran over something,” he remarked to himself.

Jack looked around the vast, empty desert, then back at the hand, which twitched slightly as the nerves went through their own death spasms.

“Man, you must be the unluckiest dude ever!” Jack said. “What’re the odds I’d come up right underneath you like that? I’m speechless, too.”

Jack ducked back inside, and an Army-surplus backpack sailed out a moment later, landing in the soft, freshly dug soil. Next came a plastic crate, dark blue, with a dire warning embossed in the plastic: Property of Oberhurley Dairies, Waukesha, Wisconsin. Unauthorized Use Is Prohibited and Will Be Punished to the Fullest Extent of the Law.

Jack emerged from the hatch himself, manhandling a rolled bundle of plastic bubble wrap, large enough to contain a cadaver. The roll of bubble wrap banged against the side of the earth drill, making Jack wince, but he got it to the desert floor without apparent damage.

He turned the tumbled backpack upright. “Would it have hurt ya to lend a hand?” he asked the protruding limb of Jesus Merienez.

Jack Fast unrolled the bubble wrap, revealing a pile of thin metal rods and carefully folded reams of aluminized nylon fabric. The rods were threaded at each end, and Jack began screwing them together.

“Okay, I know, it’s titanium, but tungsten is just too dam brittle” he said to the hand. “Titanium bends. You gotta be flexible, you know?”

The pinkie quivered.

“Course you know. Now, the connects are threaded and they deform when you screw ’em, to lock ’em together. Once I put her together, this baby ain’t coming apart unless you rip her apart.”

In minutes he had the first slender pole assembled, as thin as a soda straw and 114 feet long. He rested it gently atop the yucca plants that peppered the desert floor, then assembled another rod of similar length, which attached to the first rod at one end. The third rod was almost as long, and connected to the other two to form a massive triangle that appeared fragile as ancient parchment.

“Bet you’re wondering what this dude Jack is up to, huh?” he asked the hand. “Well, forget it, I’m not telling.

It’s a surprise.”

He reinforced the flimsy triangle with a series of support bars, all of which met in the center of the structure. That was where Jack put the generator. He had a bad moment as he hoisted the generator and the proton cell out of the backpack and he almost lost his balance. Titanium or not, one of the thin rods would deform under the weight of a human dude like him. He managed to save himself from falling by dropping the equipment into the sand and doing a lot of two-arm windmilling.

When it was over, he leaned on his hands and panted.

“What’re you laughing at, Lefty?” he demanded.

The hand of Jesus Merienez wasn’t even quivering anymore.

Jack was more careful as he attached the equipment in the middle of the titanium frame. He had personally done the math on this device, so he knew what it was capable of, but even he had a hard time believing all those tiny little metal sticks were going to hoist the proton cell and the generator and the cargo.

Well, it would. He knew it would ’cause he was Jack Fast, and he was an engineering wizard and he, had calculated it over and over. So what if he was in high school? Nobody could say he wasn’t a genius.

“Chill. It’ll work.”

The cadaverous hand of Jesus Merienez was, in fact, chilling. Jesus had lost more than two degrees of body heat. He was cooling faster than a typical recently dead human adult male because of the tremendous deformation of the lower torso and extremities. Jesus was literally spread thin.

Now came the trickiest part of the operation. Jack explained. The fabric was a strong synthetic, like the material used in high-performance airfoils, and was reinforced for strength and durability with an ceramic-aluminum thread.

“Are you listening?” Jack asked the hand as he worked. “This is all going to be on the quiz Tuesday. Yes, ceramic-aluminum. Now shut up while I do the hard part. See, I’ve got enough material here to make a mosquito net for a used-car lot. Now, inch-per-inch, Charmin weighs more than this, stuff, so one good breeze could mess me up really good. You sneeze, Lefty, and I swear I’ll kill ya.”

Jack was sweating as he attached the material using tiny clips, then, when it was in place, misted it with a chlorine mixture that turned the material liquid just long enough to adhere it. Once he got rolling, he could adhere a ten-foot strip of material every two minutes. When one side was done he began rolling the ten-foot rolls across the frame and adhered them to the opposite side. It took two hours for the entire frame to be covered in material.

By then, the corpse of Jesus Merienez was down to 90.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The fingers, which had been clenched in a animal-like claw, were drooping like fading blossoms.

“You look tired,” Jack said to the hand. “Me, too.”

He jumped up on the earth drill, and his top half disappeared inside. He came out with a pair of Coronas. He grinned at the hand, then frowned.

“Don’t give me that stuff. Dad says if I’m old enough to steal secret military hardware I’m old enough to have a brewski.” Jack sucked down the first beer, tossed the bottle into the backpack and started on the second one as he inspected his handiwork.

“Oh, no! Look.” He pointed into the middle of his construction. “I’ve got a run in my airship!”

There, amid the vast frame of dark gray fabric, a tiny cactus spine was protruding through the fabric, almost invisible in the starlight. The tear spread for two feet.

“Oh, well, bound to happen. Watch how I fix it. I learned this from my girlfriend’s mom. She uses nail polish when she gets a run in her nylons. I use this stuff.” Jack scrounged out a small spray bottle of thick liquid. “Works even better than Revlon.” He crawled on all fours under the fabric and squirted the stuff over the run, creating a flexible mend.

“Now, we are ready to go.” Jack told the hand, retrieving his beer and sucking it empty. He fished a remote control from his pocket. It had come with a ninety-nine-dollar Nishitsu DVD player that died years ago. It was easy enough to put a booster in the remote and use it to get the thing started. He pressed Power.

The tiny proton cell whizzed up the turbine. It was virtually silent, but a tiny amber LED told Jack it was working. The teenager stood silently, almost thoughtfully as the proton cell did its work.

“See, I didn’t feel a thing, did you?” he asked the hand of Jesus. “There’s something about that proton field, though. It sends those kung fu dudes into conniptions. At least I think it’s the proton charge. Well, whatever.” Jack heard the generator begin working, powered by the proton cell. He was using bursts of electricity to create electricity, but what the heck? It worked, didn’t it? And man, did it give him a lot of power to work with.

“Hey, you ready? I swear you never saw anything like this before.” Jack pressed the channel-up button. The huge framed triangle shuddered, crackled with electricity, then rose in a billow of desert dust. Jack hastily dragged on the plastic filtration mask he had clipped on his belt, and watched the airship rise. It blotted out the stars; it was acres big.

“Is that cool or is that cool?” Jack demanded. His eyes, as blue as the tropical ocean in a travel brochure, glinted with wild excitement. “Fetch, boy.”

He pressed Play, and the airship drifted away in virtual silence.

When he turned back to the drill, Jack found the hand of Jesus was buried in dust up to the cuticles.

“Oh, man, you missed it? Sorry about that.” He pushed off the sand until the hand was exposed again almost to the elbow, then Jack set up his laptop to monitor the progress of the Jack Fast’s Amazing Invisible Airship. Not that he had to do anything. The airship was already programmed to do the work all by itself. Like everything Jack Fast engineered, it worked perfectly.

After an hour, Jack got out the cooler to make some baloney sandwiches.