Relieved, Ben embraced his dog, not caring how the movement made his injured bicep burn. He buried his face in the soft neck, while Buddy wagged his tail.
Outside, shuffling steps came up on the porch.
Buddy flattened his ears.
“It’s all right,” Ben whispered, not sure whom he meant to reassure. “We’re fine. It’s all right. We’re all right …”
The slow steps crossed the porch and back again. A second person joined the first, and a third, and a fourth and more, until Ben thought the porch must be crowded so thick with bodies that no one could move.
All was quiet. Then the window exploded.
Ben shook shards from his hair and looked up: An arm reached through the remnants of glass to grasp at nothing.
“Run!” Ben shouted, and he and Buddy did just that.
With the front door blocked, he had a choice: the living quarters upstairs or the cellar. He had no wish to bring the horde down on his parents, who were, as far as he knew, still in bed; at least, they had not been in the street. So down it was. He heaved on a length of rope in the floor, and a trap door opened.
Father liked to tell told how the men of Severance dug out the cellar by the sweat of their brow and built the Feed-and-Farm over the hole. He often dragged out that old gem when he wanted to teach his sons about teamwork and community; Ben just wanted to know why no one had finish the job. The cellar was, literally, a hole: walls and floor of dirt, roots sticking out like long, crooked fingers to snag clothes and hair if you got too close.
He coaxed Buddy down the steep stairs and closed the door.
They waited.
Footsteps shuffled above them. Lantern light shone through cracks between the floorboards, and dust fell in a fine cloud onto Ben’s heads and arms. It tickled his nose when he dared to breathe.
Horrified, he clapped a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. He sneezed.
The shuffles stopped, then changed and became the deafening stomp stomp stomp of hunters trying to flush out prey that had gone to ground. Jars of jellies, fruits and pickled vegetables tumbled from shelves. Floorboards creaked and bent against their support beams until, finally, one cracked in half and a bare, bloody foot dropped through, followed by a leg up to the thigh.
Hands tore at the boards, breaking, splintering.
The hole grew wider. A second leg followed the first, and a woman plummeted into the cellar.
Another followed, and another.
They made straight for Ben.
He climbed atop a barrel. “Come, boy,” he said to Buddy, but the dog did not come. He set back on his haunches and growled at the horde falling through the ceiling like drops from a leaky water pump. “Buddy, come … come, boy, now … Come!”
A man in boots and soiled chaps drew closer, maybe a ranch hand, perhaps with a wife and kids, but now he had deep, raking gashes from temple to jaw and horrible, mindless moan. Buddy ripped his teeth into the man’s leg, but someone else stepped on his tail, and he yelped. Another man fell onto him.
The diversion gave Ben time to slide along the dirt wall to the stairs. With the cellar so crammed, the store above was again empty. Once he reached safety, he looked down for some sign of his loyal friend, but Buddy had vanished beneath the pile of ravaged bodies.
There was nothing he could do. Ben sobbed, shut the door and turned the lock.
Dawn. The eastern sky lightened from black to deep blue, just enough to give reassurance that today would not be the first without a sunrise. After the night that had just been, Ben had doubted even the sun’s reliability, so this was a relief.
No dirigible waited in Main Street. The horde also had gone, except for those trapped in the Feed-and-Farm cellar. However, they had left a trail even a child could not miss: a wide track of broken vegetation and red streaks in the dirt.
By the time Ben caught up, he had a plan.
The dirigible had landed a half-mile outside town, amid several hundred head of the Blackburns’ best cattle, which showed no interest in the strangeness among them. One had even taken to grazing under the airship’s rudder.
Ben used the cattle as cover to infiltrate the horde. The Blackburns and their ranch hands did not spot him, busy as they were with their human herd. Besides, they probably assumed Ben had been ripped apart and left for dead.
He snatched a hat from some man’s head. It settled halfway down his forehead and covered his ears but did a decent job hiding his identity, if no one looked too closely. He found Andy deep in the crowd.
“Hey, it’s me. You gotta snap out of this. You have to remember who you are. You’re stronger than this. Ah, come on …”
The coaxing produced no response, so he tried a new tact: He grabbed Andy by the neck, as Tommy Blackburn had grabbed him. This time, Andy did not turn on him but followed where he led.
Toward the dirigible.
Clark Stanley had set up a makeshift field hospital a few hundred feet from the airship to treat the self-mutilations the horde had committed on its overnight march. He was bandaging a woman’s forearm while she calmly chewed on the other. The scene reminded Ben of his own injury, which he had forgotten during his panicked escape. Now it throbbed when he probed the skin.
He guided Andy into the untended dirigible and shut the hatch. From outside came the muffled hiss of steam from valves, while from inside came another kind of hissing.
“Stay here,” he told Andy.
He lit a lamp and, doing his best to ignore the snakes that surrounded him, he made his way to the cabinet. It was locked, so he pounded a brass lantern against the door until he managed to punch a hole through the thin wood, and he reached through to trip the latch from the inside.
The bottles within read like a witch’s laboratory: essence of lavender, mineral oil, venom, arsenic. At last, tucked in a corner behind a jar of eyeballs, he found two bottles of anti-elixir.
He poured the concoction into Andy’s mouth.
The white drained from Andy’s eyes. He blinked as though waking from a sleepwalk. “Ben? What? Where the hell are we?”
“In the airship, in the middle of a horde of God-knows-what, and the sun is up, so we can’t sneak away.” Ben’s words rushed out atop one another. “The town has gone crazy. I mean everyone. Remember Tinmath and Caldwell?” Andy nodded. “That’s happening to Severance now. I heard something Horace Blackburn said, and I think Clark Stanley is stealing people to sell as laborers in the mines. The Blackburns are helping him. I think after everyone’s gone, they’re going to take all the land. The whole county will be theirs.”
“Whoa,” Andy said. “Just slow down.”
But Ben couldn’t go slow. He was running on pure adrenaline. “We can’t let them get away with it,” he said. “It’s up to us to rescue the town, and there’s only one way to do it: We gotta fly the dirigible.”
Andy stared. “You’re shitting me. Say you are.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t remember any of this.”
“That’s because you were crazy, too, but I saved you.”
“Wait, wait.” He ran his hands through his hair, making a mess of it. “We have to fly the airship? We can’t!”
“How hard can it be?”
“I’ve never been in one before, and neither have you.”
“There’s a first time for everything, right? But there’s something we have to do first.” Ben pressed one of the bottles of anti-elixir into Andy’s hand and explained.
The dirigible’s beauty was in its simplicity: helium to keep it aloft and a rudder to steer. Without a means of propulsion, however, it would simply hang in midair, and that was where the steam engines came in. Many larger ships Ben had seen in photos had six or eight engines, each powering a propeller, but this ship had only two - one on each side, accessible from rungs on the outside of the deck.
Ben took one and Andy the other.
The key was to avoid being seen.
Ben took the side facing the horde.
Never had he needed his talent for avoiding notice more than now. Quickly, he climbed.
Tall grasses rustled, while birds chirped their morning song in competition with moans from the horde. The air was so crisp and clear, Ben could make out snow caps on the mountains far in the distance. A perfect day in the offing.
At the top of the deck, he unscrewed the engine’s boiler cap while clutching a rung with his other hand. The cap slipped from his fingers and fell 20 feet to the grass. Ben shuddered; that could have been him.
Excess steam wafted from the boiler. He took the anti-elixir from his waistband and poured it in.
“Hey!” someone yelled. “Hey, there’s someone up there!”
“It’s Ben Puckett,” said Tommy Blackburn.
Ben scrambled down. Andy waited at the hatch, which he shut and locked as soon as Ben was inside.
“You got yours in?” Ben asked.
“Yeah. What now?”
“We take her up.”
“Better do it quick,” Andy said and pointed. Milk-white eyes appeared at a porthole, and the man banged his forehead against the glass. Fists pounded at the hatch.
They pushed buttons and twisted dials but nothing happened.
The man continued to smack his head on the porthole. It cracked. In seconds, he would be through.
“Come on, come on,” Ben said.
“What about this?” Andy pulled on a lever at the far end of the control panel. The airship rumbled, swayed and began to rise.
“How do we steer?” Andy yelled over the engines.
“Let me. I saw this once. In a dime novel.”
Were this not such a dire situation, Ben knew he would be having the time of his life. He took the ship’s wheel in hand and spun it. The floor tilted out from under him. Andy hollered and slid, and Ben would have followed but for his grip on the wheel. He yanked it back the other way, and the ship righted itself.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said.
From where he was thrown against the wall, Andy peeled a snake off his stomach and tossed it aside. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
“I said I was sorry.”
Andy stood and looked out a porthole. “We’re too high.”
Ben eased the wheel back toward himself, ever so gently, careful to keep it steady this time. The sinking in his stomach told him they had changed direction and were now headed down.
“OK, that’s good,” Andy said. “Right there. We’re about 10 feet up, and the steam cloud is hitting everyone now. See if you can fly around the field without crashing.”
“You got it.”
“Hey,” Andy said softly. “Are you sure this will work?”
Ben meant to answer with a confident “yes,” but nothing came out. He stood there, looking at his brother.
Andy nodded in understanding. “Just keep going.”
Ben gave them a fright once more, when a snake slithered over his boot and he jerked the wheel. Other than that, it was smooth flying for another 15 minutes or so, until Andy signaled they should land. They did so with a thump.
Outside was a mess. The cloud of anti-elixir had done its work, but Ben wondered whether, in disbursing the cure, he and Andy could have done anything crueler. Most folks sat in their nightclothes, staring in dumb silence at where they had once had fingers or toes. The boy whom Ben had seen in Severance, who had chewed off his own tongue, lay sobbing in his mother’s lap.
Ben let his tears fall. “They won’t thank us for saving them when they’re stuck like this.”
“They’re alive. That’s something.”
“Not everyone is,” Ben said, remembering Mrs. Hopper and Buddy and those trapped in the Feed-and-Farm cellar. “If this is what adventure is, I don’t want it.”
Andy pulled Ben into his arms.
Those who had not mutilated themselves had gotten organized enough to round up the Blackburns and their ranch hands and held them at point of their own guns.
Clark Stanley was nowhere to be seen.
“Get the folks out of here,” Sheriff McCoy said to his deputies, “or at least move them away from the cattle. We don’t want anyone to get stomped. And take these scum” - he nodded toward the Blackburns - “to the town lockup.”
Following those orders took most of the morning. Wagons were brought in from Severance to cart the wounded to back to town. Ben and Andy helped. By noon, Ben thought he might collapse from exhaustion, and his stomach growled.
“I could sleep for three days,” he said.
“Me, too.” Andy said and perked up. “Hey, did you see that?”
“See what?”
“In the grass by the dirigible. Someone’s out there.”
“That’s just crazy. Unless …” The Blackburns were accounted for, and the townsfolk wouldn’t slink off into the grass. That left only one. “You don’t think …”
“I’m sure he wants his airship back.”
“He’s just out there. Waiting.”
Andy grinned and went over to Sheriff McCoy. “Everyone’s in town now, right? There’s no one left out here?”
“That’s right. We did a thorough search. No one’s quite sure what happened, but it seems we owe you a debt of gratitude.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Andy waved him off. “Can I see your gun?”
Andy marched out toward the herd, aimed the pistol at the sky and fired; a few cattle trotted away before resuming their grazing. Ben joined him. Andy fired again. This time the boys also whooped and waved their arms and ran at the cattle.
That did it.
Sheriff McCoy grabbed back his gun. “What are you doing?”
“Giving someone a taste of his own medicine,” Andy said.
Ben groaned at the joke. Together, they watched as several hundred head of the Blackburns’ best cattle bore down in a thunderous stampede on Clark Stanley and his marvelous flying machine.
From a young age, Jennifer Campbell-Hicks wanted a career in creative writing but realized at the ripe old age of 13 that such an endeavor would likely leave her living below the poverty line. So she got a degree in that other profession where an understanding of grammar and an ability to tell a story come in handy: journalism. She reconnected with her dream of getting published about two years ago and now spends most of her spare time writing imaginary people into horrible situations and then finding a way to give them a happily every after.
When she is not writing or at the day job, Jennifer is likely out for a run in the thin Colorado air, coaching her son’s soccer team, devouring the latest novel or (most likely of all) spending time with her husband and three children.
The Murders Over In Weirdunkal
by
James Patrick Cobb
Sheriff Joe Conroy was having the breakfast special at the Weird Uncle Café while his sweetie waited tables. A harried young man burst into the diner and gave everyone, within earshot, the news, someone had murdered Sam Barber, the barber.
Joe sighed and hurriedly finished the remaining scrambled eggs on his plate. He kissed Lilly on her dimpled cheek. “Guess I should get over there,” he said, sighing, a bit of fried egg stuck to his bushy mustache.
You do what you need to do, honey,” she said, dabbing away the egg with a napkin.
Joe slid a couple of coins on the table to pay, picked up the toast off his plate and walked two blocks to Sam's shabby cottage. Chick was already there gazing nervously at Sam's mangled body; a thousand holes poked in it, bled out all over the front stoop. There'd been quite a fight.
That Phelps boy, the one who doesn't ever say anything to anyone, was the one who found Sam. They said the kid looked as white as a sheet but couldn't have been whiter than the two lawmen.
After briefly looking around the crime scene, the men plunked down in Sam’s cottage at his wobbly table on uneven rickety, chairs that Sam had built for himself. Sam had been a better barber than carpenter. Nobody would have actually hired Sam to build something out of wood.
A couple of ugly pictu
res painted by one of Sam's old San Francisco girlfriends hung on the bare adobe walls. An antique Franklin stove sat in the corner of the room. It could have once warmed the founders of the country.
Sheriff Joe’s hand rubbed the whiskers of his weathered face. He put the toast down on a corner of the table having lost his appetite.
“I’d reckon whoever killed Sam made themselves some kind of tool to do it. The holes are spaced just so. It almost looks like they made it out of some kind of cactus spines. See how they’ve broken off?” the sheriff said, standing and going outside to point at some flecks on the deceased's shirt. “Why would someone go through the trouble?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why not a knife?”
Chick shrugged. “That ain’t right. Sam never did nothing to nobody in his entire life.”
Joe sighed wearily and sketched the scene. He petitioned the mayor and council for a camera because it said it was useful in Scientific Law Enforcement, a book he'd been reading to find out how he was supposed to work as the law in town. Though the council said they'd get him one, Joe was still waiting.
“Could he have been stuck full of holes before or after he was dead?” Joe wondered aloud. The book said to consider the possibilities.
“Don’t know he would have set still to let someone stick him full of holes while he was alive,” Chick said.
“Hmm.”
An hour later, Sheriff Joe had Chick send a telegram to the U.S. Marshal over in Tucson.
NEED HELP CHARLIE. AN UGLY DEATH. STUMPED. JOE CONROY.
Charlie Malone, the marshal, still hadn't gotten to Weirdunkal when two more people– sweethearts- died like Sam.
The Weirdunkal Town Council had set aside a stretch of land for a park. The land for the park had yet to be cleared and there wasn't money in the coffers to pay anyone to do it. As of now, there was only a broad path through the middle and a couple of donated benches from the Beautification and Temperance Association. It was on one of those benches where Arlo Stern and Millie Weirdunkal had been sitting when they were murdered by the maniac.
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