Uncrashable Dakota

by Marino, Andy

  “Marius isn’t my friend.” Saying this out loud made Hollis think of what Delia had said about his name. “He never was. He’s just a guy who works here.”

  Chester stuffed a few more slices of cheese into his mouth.

  “Did you have those in your pocket this whole time?” Hollis asked. Chester stood up from his chair, ignoring the question, and slipped on a pair of brass knuckles.

  Hollis opened the door and peered out into the hall. There were a few passengers milling about, but the path to the library door was clear. Most people had taken to their staterooms following the shake-up, and those who hadn’t were holed up in bars and restaurants. Hollis led them across and pushed open the door-sized mural of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill.

  The library was sectioned off by topic—they had entered into Military History. The floor was covered in books that had been thrown from the shelves. On the wall was a massive painting of a Revolutionary War battle. There was General Washington astride a horse at the forefront of the colonists’ lines, his hair as white as the stylized puffs of cannon fire that burst around him. How strange to see a battle fought entirely on the ground. Hollis wondered what it would be like to face down a row of muskets.

  Chester took the lead, peering around the corner, then motioning for them to follow him past the grinning, bespectacled face of Teddy Roosevelt presiding over Biographies. When Chester’s hand went up, Hollis froze. Maggie pulled the immobilizer from her belt.

  There was a wet, mindless gibbering coming from just beyond the next set of shelves. Hollis saw his braver self put a hand on Chester’s shoulder: Stay here. I’ll take a look. But instead he just waited for the bigger kid to check it out.

  Chester looked, then slapped the non-brass-knuckled hand over his mouth. He stumbled back, wide-eyed. Maggie cursed and leaped to his side, immobilizer at the ready. A second behind her, Hollis wrenched a copy of Middlemarch up from the floor and held it over his head, prepared to strike.

  It took all of his willpower to keep his half-digested sandwich down.

  Marius was suspended in the air. His shoulder nudged a chandelier as he bobbed gently up and down. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only his uniform pants, and his lean upper body was covered in a riot of lurid tattoos ending just below each wrist. In the center of his chest was a distorted picture of the Dakota beetle—its legs and feelers bent and twisted into impossible shapes.

  Hollis dropped the book. He’d seen that same corrupted beetle on the business card he’d found in Delia’s satchel. Even more disturbing was Marius’s lumpy, distended belly, which undulated as if something was squirming beneath his skin.

  “Is this the guy?” whispered Maggie.

  But Hollis was speechless. Marius, on the other hand, was blubbering and smiling to himself, eyes twitching every time he nudged the light on the chandelier.

  “Marius,” Hollis said finally.

  The floating man looked at Hollis curiously, then began to retch. His body jerked in the air, arms and legs tossed about like a doll’s. A dribble of amber slime emerged from his mouth. Chester jumped back.

  Marius began making a hoarse gagging noise. His torso seemed to rise, his entire body in great distress, then he sank a few inches as he expelled a beetle from his mouth. The insect floated over the shelf toward Poetry.

  “Hollis,” he rasped, “can you feel it?”

  “Um, I don’t think so.”

  Hollis noted the empty bottle of moonshine and the containers of sap that littered the rug beneath Marius. Behind him, a holstered pistol was slung across a chair. “Have you been…” The words were hard to find. “Eating beetles?”

  Marius coughed. “I feel what they feel. I know their mother—our mother—isn’t far.”

  Chester began slowly working his way along the shelf to the back of the room, keeping as much distance as possible between himself and the floating man. Maggie stood her ground at Hollis’s side.

  Marius clearly didn’t have much time. His skin was covered in a sheen of sweat. His eyes were straining upward in their sockets.

  “I need to know about my mother, Marius. Where is she?”

  “Don’t know about your mother,” he rasped. “Only father.”

  Hollis shifted his interrogation. “What do you know about my father?”

  Marius made a convulsive noise that sounded like a gurgling faucet. Then he fought for control of himself. “So sorry. Always liked you, Hollis.”

  Hollis wasn’t afraid anymore. His mind had tinted everything red. He stepped forward and almost lost the sandwich again; the smell was unbearable.

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “I … pushed him.” Marius began to droop, his head lolling on his neck.

  “Don’t you die yet.” Hollis gave Middlemarch a vicious kick. The book slammed into the wall. “Not until you tell me why you did it.”

  At the other end of the room, Chester picked up the gun. “Maggie!” Hollis snapped, pointing. “Stop him.”

  Marius lifted his head, ever so slightly. “Castor,” he muttered.

  “Castor. Jefferson Castor told you to do it.”

  “Mmm.”

  “He hired you to kill my father.”

  Maggie sprang to life and followed Chester’s path to the chair. Marius began to quiver, then shake violently. His flailing arms snapped their bones. Maggie sank to the ground, burying her face in her hands.

  Chester raised the pistol and aimed it at the back of Marius’s head.

  “Not yet!” Hollis screamed. Chester’s hand began to shake.

  Marius’s entire body was thrust upward into the ceiling, broken limbs splayed, as the beetles inside him feasted. His mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace. His nose leaked fluid. Chester lowered the gun without firing and collapsed into the chair.

  “Please,” Hollis begged the floating corpse, “not yet.”

  22

  THE PISTOL ROB HELD was heavy and cold, as if it had been kept in an icebox rather than locked in a cabinet beneath a bumpy map of Greenland. Rob looked at it in his upturned palm and tried to imagine pointing it at a person and pulling the trigger. To contrast with Brice Blank’s pacifism, Rob had gleefully made Atticus Hunter very handy with guns, and quick to use them. Now he felt like a fraud and vowed to revise every issue, scrubbing out the weapons with his gummy eraser. The no-going-back consequences of such a thing, the inability to unshoot someone, made his knees feel rubbery.

  “I gotta say, Dad, thanks but no thanks,” Rob told his father after contemplating the heft of the pistol for a full minute. Being presented with a loaded gun by the man who didn’t let him keep a slingshot in the stateroom was somehow the most unbelievable horror in the day’s parade of them.

  “That is a semiautomatic Colt M1911,” his father explained quickly. “It’s a single-action pistol. You’ve got seven shots before you need to reload. This is the safety—” His father pulled out his own identical gun and clicked a lever on the upper part of the grip. “Make sure it’s off if you need to use it and on when the gun is in your pocket. I don’t have time to teach you how to fieldstrip it. You probably won’t need to do that.”

  The alien hadn’t vacated Rob’s father’s body. It had simply burrowed deeper into his brain. Rob had never heard his father mention guns before, and now he was rattling off directions like an army instructor.

  The pool of blood oozing from Chief Owens’s big lifeless body had been black, not the vibrant candy red Rob had always imagined. He looked his father in the eyes.

  “I don’t know if I can take this.”

  “I’m not asking. Now listen to me.” All around them, his father’s crew paced grimly. An atmosphere of tense preparation had descended upon the bridge. “These men who cut the lines, I can promise you, they’re not going to stop with a single act of sabotage. So this is what you’re going to do. You know how to get to the life-ships?”

  The life-ships were emergency sky-canoes; larger versions of Samuel Dakota’s
original. Each one was equipped with the proper number of beetles for a safe descent, along with a portable mixing kit that injected moonshine whiskey into the beetles’ normal diet of sap to produce buoyancy at a moment’s notice. On the Wendell Dakota, there were eighty-four of these ships docked in hollows inside the hull. Larger collapsibles for third-class and steerage passengers were stowed belowdecks.

  “I’m not leaving you here,” Rob said.

  “Yes, you are. Take the gun and go. I’ll send two of my men with you.”

  “Have you seen the weather out there?”

  “Do you know what staying in here will mean for you? Do you think the men coming to break down the door will stop to think about who is in their sights? They will be firing at anything that moves. And make no mistake, if you can’t pull that trigger, you don’t belong here right now.”

  Rob closed his eyes. Hijacking. It sounded like a thing that happened to other people, unfortunate souls who weren’t Rob Castor. If he stayed with his father, did that make him a hijacker, too? Once he accepted the gun, his innocent-bystander status was probably revoked.

  His father grabbed his shoulders. “Focus, Rob. I need you to be strong. What would what’s-his-name, Brice Blank, what would he do?”

  Rob opened his eyes, surprised his father even knew the name of the funny-book hero. “Brice Blank hates guns, Dad. He’d probably turn himself in because of his faith in the legal process.”

  His father frowned. “Oh.” He pulled Rob close and buried his face in Rob’s suit jacket. Rob heard sniffing.

  “Dad, are you smelling me?”

  “I’m so sorry,” his father said.

  “If I’m gonna go, I need to understand why you’re doing this. Because if I don’t get to see you for a while, if something happens … I have to know.”

  Slowly, his father raised his head. Rob’s shoulder felt warm and wet from his father’s tears. He had never seen the man cry before.

  “Jefferson!” the librarian yelled across the bridge. “A word, please.”

  His father ignored her.

  “Sir!” A mercenary with bullet belts worn across his chest came running up. “The prisoner wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.”

  His father closed his eyes. For a moment, he was very still. Then he pressed his palm against his forehead and slid it down his face as if it were a towel.

  “Come with me.” He led Rob across the bridge, ignoring crewmen at two different chart stations pleading “mission-critical” issues. Halfway down the port side of the bridge, a gap in the viewing windows was filled by a raised platform encircled by railings. It reminded Rob of a pedestal for a politician on a whistle-stop tour, in which an airship dripping with campaign banners would descend upon small towns all over the country and hover just above the ground while the politician gave a speech.

  “It’s time for you to know that the invention of flight was dependent upon a Castor just as much as a Dakota.”

  “A Castor?” Rob asked as they ascended the steps. Every child knew the story of how Samuel Dakota had changed the world with his special blend of whiskey and sap. He didn’t see how one of his own ancestors could possibly have played a part in such a well-known tale.

  They crossed the platform and paused while Jefferson unlocked a door marked CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS. There were several keys attached to a loop of his belt, and while his father struggled to find the right one, Rob switched the gun to his other hand so he could wipe his sweaty palm on his jacket. He told himself that as long as he didn’t put the weapon in his bag, he hadn’t officially accepted it. Willing the key to be missing, he shifted anxiously from heel to toe and back again. Rob didn’t want to meet his father’s prisoner. He didn’t want his father to have a prisoner.

  “It’s just me!” his father called out as he knocked twice, then unlocked the door.

  The sole occupant of the sparsely furnished room was Lucy Dakota. She was sitting in a chair between an empty shelf and a bare desk. Rope bound her wrists and ankles to the arms and legs of the chair. Flustered, Rob slipped the gun into his pocket. He hoped she hadn’t seen it in his hand.

  “The ship is too high,” she said immediately, ignoring Rob, addressing his father. “Don’t tell me it’s not. And we’re still ascending. Why aren’t the chambers lowering our altitude? Where are we? Where’s Hollis? What’s going on out there?” She craned her neck as best she could, as if a single glance out the door would explain everything.

  “It’s not your concern,” his father said.

  “Everything about this airship and this company is my concern. There’s a reason my name isn’t Lucy Castor.”

  Rob had heard them use these exact words in arguments about the price of candles for the second-class spa and the brand of peanuts for the third-class bars.

  “Just be quiet for one minute, Lucy, please.”

  “Is Chief Owens still in charge of the chambers? Eliminating him would be a disaster. I hope you know better than that.”

  “This is my ship. And soon it will be my company. These concerns are mine alone.”

  “Jefferson. Listen to yourself.”

  “No. You listen to me. It’s a simple matter of justice.”

  Lucy looked at Rob for the first time. “Well,” she said, arching her eyebrow at him, “this ought to be good.”

  THE HISTORY OF FLIGHT IN AMERICA

  PART

  FIVE

  SHENANDOAH SURPRISE!

  Aerial Navy Routs “Stonewall” Jackson

  The Washington Evening Star

  August 12, 1862

  Steel-Frame Air Boat Deflects Enemy Fire;

  Secretary Stanton Orders 500

  The Philadelphia Inquirer

  August 29, 1862

  The Army of Northern Virginia Retreats;

  General Lee Vows Counterattack

  Charleston Mercury

  September 15, 1862

  Portrait of a High-Flying American Hero:

  Samuel Dakota

  Harper’s Weekly

  October 2, 1862

  Richmond in Flames! Dakota Bombers

  Scorch Confederate Capital

  New-York Tribune

  October 27, 1862

  * * *

  ON A CRISP AFTERNOON in November of 1862, Samuel Dakota left the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia and walked down the stone steps to his personal sky-canoe. He had just witnessed the complete and unconditional surrender of the Confederate forces. As predicted, Samuel Dakota’s airships had ended the war in months rather than years. The Congressional Medal of Honor had been draped over his neck by Lincoln himself, and the picture of the ceremony made the front page of all the major northern papers. He had renewed his contract with the United States government for half a million dollars.

  So much sky left to conquer, he thought as he gazed up at the clouds drifting lazily above the courthouse. He closed his eyes and saw fluffy outlines against the backs of his eyelids. They looked a bit like twin sky-canoes, with smoky wisps connecting the stern of one to the bow of the other. Gradually they expanded into bursts of radiant color. Inspired and deeply moved, Samuel realized that he was a visionary, and like most blessed men, the next phase of his life was to be a lonely one. He snapped his eyes open, jumped into his canoe, and rummaged beneath the seat for his sketchbook.

  Every man’s journey to the heavens is lonely, he told himself—I’m just lucky enough to be able to get there on my own terms. Suddenly his hand brushed against something glassy and smooth, and his heart sank as he pulled out a bottle with the letter C scratched into the bottom. He glanced around the bustling town square and up the steps of the imposing courthouse at the jovial men in dress uniforms. There was no sign of his tormentor, but Samuel had long suspected the man had help. Perhaps even a friend at Dakota Aeronautics.

  Inside the bottle was the expected note.

  HEY MISTER DIKOTA,

  KILLIN MEN IS EASY FROM UP IN THE SKY, AINT IT? WHEN YOU DONT HAVE TO SEE THERE FACES?
/>   H.C.

  Samuel stuffed the note back into the bottle. It was as if Hezekiah Castor could read his thoughts. Attacking from the sky hadn’t even felt real, raining bullets and bombs down upon the little gray ants and their tiny model cities far below.

  But his life was about to enter a new and glorious phase, and if Hezekiah Castor was going to be a constant thorn in his side, the man would have to be dealt with. As much as it irked Samuel to have to revisit that shabby little corner of his past, it was time to put an end to this. Who knew when Castor might graduate from threats to sabotage?

  Samuel Dakota spread the whiskey-sap along the sides of his ship, removed a few choice beetles from their golden box (a gift from General Grant), and set them in place. Much to the surprise of the Union dignitaries who had been promised an escort back to Washington by Sky Captain Dakota himself, everyone’s favorite war hero rose into the sky above the town square and caught a light westerly breeze. President Lincoln and his cabinet shielded their eyes against the glare of the noonday sun as Samuel’s sky-canoe disappeared beyond a distant ridge.

  An hour later, he touched down in a clearing in the dense woods a few miles from the Dakota manufacturing complex. His heart was pounding as he checked to make sure his pistol was loaded and holstered securely at his side. At the far end of the clearing was a decrepit, lopsided cabin with a roof that sloped down low enough to graze the tops of two old rocking chairs.

  Next to the cabin was the broken-down, rusty still where Hezekiah Castor had made his moonshine. Inside that moonshine was the combination of fermented grains that, when mixed with sap from certain Virginia maple trees, became the fuel that inflated the beetles and released their gases. He remembered the day in his other life as a Union Army soldier (had it really been less than a year ago?) when his regiment had crossed this very clearing and encountered the skinny, unkempt man with sunburned arms and a floppy straw hat. Surprisingly, it had taken four men—including Samuel—to wrestle him down and hog-tie him. Then they had taken their time drinking from his still, filling bottles for the road. All the while, Hezekiah Castor watched helplessly, squirming and sputtering in the dirt. And as a parting shot, Samuel had grabbed an ax that had been leaning against the side of the cabin and smashed the still to pieces, obliterating tin cups and copper pots that had been marked with the letter C.