Uncrashable Dakota

by Marino, Andy

Hollis sprang from the divan, riding a fresh jolt of adrenaline, or hatred. He felt clear-eyed, as if the room were lit by the sun rather than a row of bare bulbs. Maggie’s face looked vivid, the plum-colored bruise seeming almost delicious. Chester’s scalp had a juicy little nick from the razor at the very top of his head. Looped around the arm of a divan where Chester had left it was Marius’s leather gun belt. Hollis forced himself to sit back down. Attached to the belt was the holster. His knee bounced. Inside the holster was the gun. They had come here to hide, to regroup, but he didn’t care. He wanted the gun in his hand, pointed at Jefferson Castor’s head, close enough to see the look on his face.

  Chester had managed to open one of the trunks pushed up against his divan. He rooted around inside. Hollis rose from his seat and buckled the holster belt around his waist.

  “There he is,” Maggie said, watching Hollis pace the length of the room and turn. “Wild Earp.”

  It was a cowboy gun, a six-shooter, and the belt sagged along his hip. Marius had probably won it in a poker game in Deadwood or Carson City. At least, that’s the story he would have told Hollis. The fact that Marius’s corpse was now glued to the ceiling of the library, drooling whiskey-sap, cast doubt on his past tales of adventure. He had been nothing but a killer for hire, a coward who shoved an innocent man off a sky-dock for money, or whatever Castor had offered him.

  Hollis reached into his satchel. Would it be satisfying to send a message? Your dad’s a murderer. Thought you should know.

  His fingers brushed against the business card, and he took it out of the bag. The beetle design really was a perfect match with Marius’s tattoo. Bent feelers, twisted pincers. He remembered the way Delia had caressed the living beetle in her dorm room. The little creature had been under her spell.

  He folded the card in half, creasing it with a thumbnail.

  “Hey, Maggie, what kind of place is St. Theresa’s?”

  “Delia never told you about it.”

  “No.”

  “Guess she’s got her reasons.”

  “It won’t be hard for me to find out. You might as well just tell me.”

  “Ask Delia.”

  “I can’t.”

  Hollis tucked the folded card back into the bag. If only Delia were carrying the second transmitter instead of Rob. He could find out if she’d reached the slop room, tell her he wasn’t going to meet her there. Oh, and by the way, are you in some kind of beetle cult? Maybe this was a more accurate glimpse into the future: crossed wires, missed connections, a flurry of breathless messages.

  He sat down and removed the gun from its holster. The metal felt hot in his hand. It seemed like a simple enough mechanism: you pulled the hammer back until it clicked, then you pulled the trigger.

  “You wanna keep that thing pointed somewhere else?”

  Maggie was sitting up now, poised like she was ready to dive to the floor.

  “Sorry,” Hollis said, laying the gun next to him on the divan.

  “How about putting it away?”

  “It is away.”

  “Holster it before you blow your head off.”

  He put his hands up in a surrender pose. “I’m not even touching it, okay?”

  “Hey!” Chester shouted triumphantly. He had popped open a second trunk and was holding a carton of cigarettes, displaying them proudly to Maggie and Hollis. “Chesterfields!”

  On any other day, Hollis would have been horrified to learn that Juniper’s possessions had been even lightly jostled in transit. Now he just reached out a hand.

  “I’ll take one of those.”

  Chester pulled out three and dumped the rest back into the trunk. He stuck the cigarettes in his mouth and patted his pockets until he located a book of matches. He lit all three and handed them out, then went back to rummaging.

  Hollis’s mouth filled with smoke, and he coughed it out in a single explosive cloud without pulling it into his lungs. He hated the taste, but he was trying to think of himself as a killer. And killers, from what he could gather, tended to smoke. Maggie took a satisfied puff. Chester explored an armoire full of motoring jackets.

  Hollis looked at the gun, then at Maggie, who was reclining with her eyes closed.

  “Have you ever killed anybody?”

  She opened one eye. “You serious?”

  He took another pull on the cigarette and scorched his throat. He began to hack and sputter.

  “First time?” she asked.

  He shook his head. Then he dropped the cigarette to the floor and stubbed it out with the toe of a loafer.

  “Do you want to know about just me, or me and Chester both?”

  “Both, I guess.” His mouth was dry. He wished that Chester had found a canister of spring water instead of a carton of cigarettes.

  “Hey, Chester,” she called to him. “How many people you killed?”

  “I lost track.”

  “Me too.” She shrugged, but her mouth twitched with the hint of a smile.

  “Okay, I get it. Sorry I asked.”

  “Here’s a piece of advice from one killer to another.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t point that thing at somebody unless you’re sure you can pull the trigger.”

  “How will I know if I’m sure until I point it at him?”

  Chester pulled a hacksaw and a chisel from a trunk labeled EGYPT. “Killers don’t ask questions like that,” he said. Then he thought for a moment and upended the entire trunk, spilling its contents onto the floor: shovels, pickaxes, and little pieces of sandstone. Leftovers from Edmund’s five-month obsession with archaeology.

  “What kinds of questions do they ask, then?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said, sitting up, looking curiously at her friend. “What kind of questions do killers ask themselves, Chester?”

  He got down on his knees and put out his cigarette on a cracked stone plate. Then he began sifting through the pile. “I didn’t say that right,” he said. “What I mean is, if you have to ask yourself if you’ll be able to shoot your old man’s murderer, then you ain’t got what it takes for killing. Because it don’t get much cleaner than that, when you’re talking about reasons and…” He paused, thinking hard.

  “Justice,” Maggie said.

  Chester examined a spiral-shaped blade caked with dust and pointed it at Maggie. “Justice.”

  Hollis was light-headed. The room was full of smoke. He was angry at himself for letting his rage simmer while they sat among the trappings of Edmund Juniper’s life. He had wasted a rare moment of sharpness. Now he thought he’d be better off just giving the gun back to Chester.

  His divan began to vibrate in a stuttery rhythm.

  “What the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

  It took Hollis a moment to realize that his transmitter was active. He pulled the dictionary from the satchel and opened it up.

  Maggie peered at the machine inside the hollow. “What the hell is that?”

  “I think it’s Rob,” he said.

  LD IN CAPTNS QRTRS

  “LD,” he said. “Lucy Dakota. In captain’s quarters. Why would he tell me that?” He looked from Maggie to Chester.

  “Because it’s a trap,” Maggie suggested. “How do we get there?”

  “You have to go through the bridge,” Hollis said.

  “There you go.”

  He looked at Chester, who was happily sorting the mess of tools into two piles. “Sharp and dull,” he explained.

  Hollis stood up and holstered the gun. “I think we can find another way.”

  Maggie crushed her cigarette into the floral-patterned fabric of the divan. “Wild Earp to the rescue.”

  25

  THE BOOK WAS CALLED Prince of the Cosmos. It had arrived on Rob’s seventh birthday wrapped in Dakota Aeronautics gift-shop tissue paper, a present from his father. Long after he’d forgotten the story (something about a boy and his pet star), Rob remembered the pictures of the constellations. Now, as he gazed out the viewing windows
at the front of the bridge, he picked out Hydra. The storm had passed, leaving a clear, starry night in its wake. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that the Wendell Dakota had begun to tremble. Rob had been on thirty-one airships and never felt anything quite like it. He was used to the constant hum of distant machinery, the churn of the propellers, the rattle of malfunctioning gadgetry. He had witnessed engine fires, turbine failure, and faulty smokestacks. And there was always turbulence. But this was something new: a tickle in his feet that crept into his calf muscles and was making his stomach feel queasy. As soon as the stabilization gauge had confirmed the tremor, ball-bearings quivering in the argon, his father had rushed to the librarian’s side to pore over a map. They seemed to be excited. His father even put his hand on her shoulder.

  Alone behind the gauge, Rob had transmitted Lucy Dakota’s location to Hollis. This he had done without his father’s knowledge, after deciding that his father had lost his mind. Rob didn’t know what a head doctor’s medical diagnosis would be, but his father’s obsession with vengeance had clearly infected his brain, and Rob was the only one who could help. There were people aboard the ship who would not hesitate to kill Jefferson Castor, and others who were fanatically dedicated to helping his cause. Rob’s plan fell squarely in the middle—he was going to save his father’s life and get the airship back down to earth in one piece.

  The plan had been inspired by the story of Hezekiah Castor’s murder. Before his father had even reached the end of the family history lesson, Rob’s mind had begun unspooling plot threads with a fervor he recognized from the nights he’d gulped several coffees to stay up late working on Hunter. Stray ideas stuck fast to one another, forming unwieldy clumps of scenes and endings.

  Samuel Dakota had started it. Anybody could see that. He’d built the company on the backs of lies and death. Rightfully, it should be called Castor Aeronautics. Yes, Rob’s father had acted criminally, but then again, the man had seen his own father shot down before his eyes. Rob didn’t know much about trial law, but he figured a jury would have to take that tragedy into account. The tricky part was getting his father to give up peacefully, and that was why Rob broke transmitter silence: he needed Hollis’s help.

  The lynchpin of his plan was Lucy Dakota. For everything to fall into place, Rob and Hollis would have to sneak into the captain’s quarters and persuade Lucy to change the name of the company. She’d also have to make Rob’s father president of Castor Aeronautics, right there on the bridge, in front of Jefferson’s men. Perhaps she could also proclaim his father captain of the Wendell Dakota for good measure. It would all be for show, of course—but if his father thought he had what he wanted, then perhaps his brain sickness would ease up just enough for him to understand that he had to take the ship back down.

  Jefferson Castor would be arrested at the sky-dock—Rob had no illusions about that—but at least he would be alive. They would all be alive. And Rob could enlist the best lawyers and the best head doctors—

  “Attention! If I could have everyone’s attention, please.”

  His father was resting his hands on the ship’s wheel in the center of the bridge. Rob moved away from the stabilization gauge to join the members of his father’s crew gathered around the wheel in a loose semicircle.

  “When sorrows come,” his father announced gravely, “they come not single spies but in battalions.”

  Rob tried not to laugh. He wondered if his father had ordered someone to write him a speech. And shouldn’t it be “they come not as single spies”? At least he’d forgotten all about banishing his son to the life-ship.

  “But I say to all men”—his father raised his eyes to the table where the librarian and her assistants were ignoring him—“and women aboard this ship that if our sorrows come in battalions, our triumphs on this night shall come in legions!”

  He raised his fist to a smattering of tepid applause. Rob clapped five times, loud and sharp. Behind him, someone gave a fierce rebel yell, and Rob turned to see militiamen spread out along the perimeter. He realized his mistake: Hollis and Delia would probably be shot on sight by some trigger-happy drunk. He had acted too hastily, summoning his stepbrother here. They needed a safer meeting spot, somewhere Rob could outline his plan. The conversation would also involve apologizing to Hollis for punching him—Rob didn’t have any illusions about that, either.

  “So,” his father said, clearing his throat, “I’m told we’re almost there. In just a few minutes, the world of aeronautics as we know it will cease to exist.”

  Rob reached inside his bag. He wondered if it was possible to tap out a message without looking. His fingers wriggled beneath the cover of the hollow dictionary.

  “You are witnessing the end of one era.…”

  His father held up a sign with the Dakota insignia printed on it. He raised it above his head and rotated slowly so that everyone could see. Behind him, a freestanding chalkboard full of equations collapsed onto its face with a hard slap. Two mugs and a stack of papers slid off a filing cabinet. The half-raised shades along the viewing windows began to knock against the glass. Rob’s vision skittered.

  “And the dawning of another!”

  His father flipped the sign to display a sleek letter C enclosing a ramshackle machine—Hezekiah’s whiskey still, Rob realized after a moment. Several hijackers hustled back to their posts, securing unbolted chairs and stray maps. Beyond his father’s Castor Aeronautics logo—still held aloft—Rob spotted fresh activity at the other end of the bridge. Up on the platform, the door to the captain’s quarters was open. Lucy Dakota had emerged, unbound, and was making her way down the stairs. His father, aware of movement behind him, lowered his sign and turned. The librarian was leading a chant in a language Rob vaguely recognized as Latin. The tremors reverberated inside his body, toes to forehead. Lucy Dakota was outlined in jittery ghosts.

  Before Rob fully understood what he was doing, he was striding toward the platform. Hollis was in the doorway of the captain’s quarters, then at the rail, looking out across the bridge. His face and shoulders and arms were coated in dust and splinters. His shirt was lacerated. His hand was full of silver. Flanking him were two equally dirty strangers, a stocky lump of a boy and a frizzy-haired ferret of a girl. The lump held a pickax over his shoulder, the ferret a pointy shovel. Hollis raised his silver hand. Gun. It was pointed over Rob’s head, toward the wheel.

  Hollis is going to shoot my father.

  He screamed his stepbrother’s name and reached into his pocket. Hollis slid his gun along an invisible axis so that it was pointing at Rob, who brought his own pistol up so that Hollis’s face was bisected by the sharky little sight at the tip of the barrel. For a terrible, weightless moment they were frozen like this.

  The last page in Prince of the Cosmos had no words. It was just the boy waving good-bye to his star, which had taken its rightful place in Ursa Major. Rob had drawn a Dakota airship into the picture, a crayon outline hanging awkwardly in the night sky. Once he’d shown it to Hollis. Why had this come to him now? He had the prickly sensation that the Wendell Dakota was alive, that it knew something he did not and was trying to tell him something.

  There was a sound like cannon fire. Had he just been shot? His feet left the ground. The cannon became a steady roaring in his ears. There was a shriek, loud and terrible. Hollis and the lump and the ferret were in the air above the platform. And then the platform ate itself, along with the railing and the door. He wondered if Lucy Dakota had ever reached his father. He wondered if he was dying or already dead.

  At least it didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like anything at all.

  THE HISTORY OF FLIGHT IN AMERICA

  PART

  SIX

  ON THE EVENING of December 31, 1899, three generations of Dakotas were together for the first and only time.

  Wendell Dakota was in the accounting office of the Virginia manufacturing compound, checking the weekly report from the whiskey-sap department. He was mumbl
ing to himself and tapping a pencil against the desk with his right hand, while his left curled around the belly of his infant son, Hollis, as he bounced the boy on his knee. He’d offered to watch the baby for the night so that his wife could accompany her friends to a formal New Year’s ball in Richmond. Big fancy parties made him anxious and uncomfortable. He only attended them to prove that he wasn’t a crazy recluse like his father, Samuel, who spent his days in total isolation, locked away inside his massive personal hangar in the center of the compound.

  Samuel Dakota had never met his grandson and hadn’t seen his son in years. Wendell knew the old man was still alive only because of the endless clanking and pounding from inside the hangar. His father had always been withdrawn and obsessive—quite different from the man profiled in Harper’s magazine at the end of the Civil War, an article Wendell had read countless times as a boy, trying to reconcile the brooding father he knew with the dashing, cavalier war hero he wished he knew. Once Wendell had grown up to marry Lucy and prove himself a capable leader of Dakota Aeronautics, Samuel Dakota seemed to decide that his duties as a human being were finished and abruptly retired to his hangar.

  Then the rumors started. Dakota Aeronautics was keeping Samuel’s body in a top-secret ice chamber to be unfrozen in a hundred years. Samuel had leprosy. Samuel had created a weapon so dangerous it could never be used. Samuel had succeeded in breeding mutant beetles with all sorts of strange powers: speech, artistic talents, poker, and—Wendell’s favorite—invisibility. At first, he had almost lost his mind trying to stop the spread of these rumors off the compound. Then, after his wife yanked yet another silver hair from his head, he decided to stop trying. Let people talk; he had bigger things to worry about. He forced himself not to care.

  Wendell made sure that trays of food were slid daily through a small hole in the door, and his father slid them back when he was finished eating. That was the extent of their relationship, which explained why Wendell almost dropped his own son in shock when the door to the accounting office opened and Samuel Dakota walked in, pulled up a chair, and sat down as if it were the most natural thing in the world.