“It’s coming,” El Capitan says. “I say we run too.”
And so they take off, splashing through the marsh, guns held tightly to their chests.
Up ahead, Pressia sees a shape lumbering toward them. They all stop. El Capitan points his rifle out and takes aim.
“Wait,” Pressia says. She can’t help but think that if you were once caged here, it’s your right to reclaim the land. “We’re the trespassers.” She lowers herself to the underbrush.
The mist is so thick that, at first, the Beast is only a dim shape, but slowly, from between the trees, the shape defines itself—a hulking gorilla. It limps; its left leg is splinted by a kind of metal rod. It has rubber covering its entire chest, something deeply grooved, and is holding a baby gorilla, but the baby is limp and partially decayed. Not fused to it, no. The baby was born and now has died. The stench is strong. Pressia assumes that the infant died of dehydration. How could the mother nurse with a chest fused to rubber?
The gorilla cries out angrily.
And Helmud lets out a cry in response.
“Shut it,” El Capitan says over his shoulder.
“She’ll get violent, protecting her baby,” Pressia says.
“What’s left of it,” El Capitan says.
“She hasn’t given up,” Pressia says.
They hear another roar now—this one is catlike, far off.
“Were there lions at this zoo?” El Capitan asks. “Do I even want to know?”
Bradwell sighs. “Unfortunately, they had just about everything. Well stocked.”
“This way,” Pressia says. “There’s a clearing. I can see it through the trees.”
They move slowly at first, backing away from the gorilla. The gorilla looks at them mournfully, as if she’d been looking for help. She grips the baby to her chest and squats on a rock. She lifts the baby to her neck to nuzzle it, and that’s when Pressia sees the gorilla’s hand—hairless, pale, and delicate. The vestige of something human.
Pressia looks away. Was the human consumed completely?
El Capitan and Bradwell have already started running. She feels queasy, hot to her core, but she runs after them, continuing east. On the other side of the trees, there’s a stretch of swamp and more trees. Pressia is out in front now, and as she sprints, the ground abruptly disappears beneath her foot, and she drops forward. Her foot catches the ground again over a foot and a half down. She staggers but doesn’t fall.
Bradwell and El Capitan both take the same tumble. Bradwell looks off east—where the pencil and Capitol Building loom—and west, where the Lincoln Memorial looks like it was chopped down. “The Reflecting Pool,” Bradwell says, searching the water with his boot. “This could be it.”
“The Reflecting Pool?”
“They used to demonstrate here, back when those kinds of things were allowed,” Bradwell says. “They rallied and gave speeches, hoping for change. Right here.”
They push on through the water, which gets deeper for a while. When Pressia is hip-deep, she feels things moving through the dark water. Fish? Snakes? Muskrats? Hybrids of all three? She’s glad the water is dark. She doesn’t want to know. She closes her eyes and keeps going. The water recedes as they step up on the other side of the pool. The obelisk isn’t far off now, and the Capitol is just beyond it.
They run over a small hill, faster now because their goal is in sight. They climb a final hill and it’s there, right in front of them—a massive building. Pressia presses her hand to its cold stone facade.
“It’s just so cocky to leave the airship out here,” Bradwell says, “as if Willux was so damn sure no one would ever have the strength to make it this far.”
“Without Special Forces, we probably wouldn’t have,” Pressia says.
“It’s called irony,” El Capitan says. “We got here because of Willux’s own creation.”
“Own creation,” Helmud says.
They round the building and find the entrance. There’s a large melted glob of iron—what used to be a statue.
“What was it?” El Capitan asks.
“A Righteous Red Wave statue,” Fignan says. “Dedicated to the movement two months before the Detonations.”
They step inside and move through corridors, find an unblocked staircase, and then an upper-floor opening onto a large, airy expanse. The dome is tall and open overhead. The wind pushes through the holes, creating funnels of brisk air.
And there, just as Hastings said it would be, is a large, hard, elliptical shell, propped by metal beams and leashed to the ground by thick wire. Beneath it, there’s a gondola with two propellers attached behind it. The propellers point at a rudder that’s connected to the back of the shell. The gondola has doors with small silver handles. The back of the gondola is a solid material with portholes. But the front third, its nose, is a cabin with wide windows that curve with the conical nose of the airship.
Though gritty with dust, it’s still a thing of sheer beauty.
The airship.
They circle it, awestruck.
El Capitan is the first to lay a hand on it. He spreads his fingers wide on the body of the cabin as if it’s the flank of a horse. He’s talking to himself. “Starboard propeller, port propeller.” He looks behind the rudder and sees a plank running perpendicular to it. “Aft planes.”
Pressia’s grandfather talked about the airship as if it might not be real, as if it were myth or legend. He’d spotted it himself, but still its existence seemed to require an act of faith.
“You sure you can man this thing?” Bradwell asks El Capitan.
“Never so sure of anything in my life!” El Capitan says, but his voice is too loud for the hollow, echoing space, too forced. He’s trying to convince himself that he’s telling the truth. Isn’t that what they’re all doing, on some level—lying to themselves that this trip is possible at all?
Then there’s a grunt. It’s coming from outside the Capitol. Distant, but clear. A grunt and then three sharp, staccato cries.
EL CAPITAN
CLOUDS
IN THE COCKPIT, El Capitan touches every switch, every throttle, every knob. “Look at all this,” he says to Helmud. “Did you think it would be this beautiful?” He’s a little breathless, shocked by the sheer reality of it all.
“This beautiful,” Helmud says, hunkered low on his brother’s back in the tight space.
Fignan buzzes in. “It’s all here,” El Capitan says to him. “You know how these things work, right, Fignan? All retro, throwbacks from the old dirigibles. What’s the name of that famous one that blew up?”
“The Hindenburg,” Fignan says, projecting an image of the fiery crash accompanied by an audio clip of a reporter saying, “Oh, the humanity.”
“Thanks, Fignan,” El Capitan says caustically “That was just what I needed.”
He can hear Bradwell and Pressia talking in the cabin. He doesn’t like the way their voices are lowered, as if swapping secrets. He saw them last night on the cold ground, kissing. He’d come down from his lookout on the train tracks just to report that all seemed clear then stumbled out quickly, trying to catch his breath in the cold air. “What the hell,” he’d muttered. “What? What?” Helmud had kept asking until he told him to shut up.
He can’t think about that now. He unlatches a compartment, finding a checklist and manual. He hands these to Fignan. “You can learn these pretty quickly, right?”
Fignan clamps the two items in his pincers and starts scanning the pages.
El Capitan reaches overhead and grips the control stick for the rudder and planes. The grooves fit his hand perfectly. He touches the gauges on the console, each dial cleanly labeled: FORE-BUCKY, MAIN-BUCKY, AFTBUCKY. “Talk to me, Fignan. How does this baby really work?”
Fignan explains the tanks overhead, made of extremely strong, extremely lightweight, but relatively new molecular structures. A voice narrates an explanation: “The more air is pumped from them, the more lift they will give until they reach a near-
perfect vacuum.”
“So it rises by pumping air out. How long until it’s ready to take off?”
Fignan recites the manual in an automated voice of his own: “The process will take approximately one half hour before reaching flight buoyancy.”
“What about throttles?” El Capitan asks, anxious to get in the air.
“The throttles control the propeller speeds to push the airship forward. There are two sets of throttles for the propellers on either side of the console.”
“And down here?” El Capitan says, pointing below the simple compass with its needle to some kind of screen.
“The navigation display table.”
“Maps?”
“Maps are from before the Detonations.”
“They’ll help some, but not for landings. Who knows what shape the terrain will be in. What about GPS and satellites? They’ve all been knocked out, so how’s it going to navigate?”
“This craft does not rely on GPS satellites or control towers.”
“Willux knew all of that would be wiped away by the Detonations, so what would have been the point? What I’m a little worried about,” El Capitan says, wedging himself into the captain’s chair with Helmud shoved up against his back, “is navigation over the ocean. No reference points out there. Even celestial navigation like sailors once used wouldn’t work, especially without any way to tell time and have star charts and all that. Not that I’d be able to figure that stuff out anyway.”
“There was a new transocean navigation system developed with this issue in mind. It involves craft-launched laser-reflecting tracking buoys coupled with a Dead-Reckoning Integrated Visual, or DRIV, that shows up on a navigation display,” Fignan says. “The ship has a series of gyroscopes and accelerometers that track its position, orientation, and velocity, and from this the DRIV system calculates the change in our location since the last buoy was launched.”
“Sweet.” El Capitan is impressed. “Like medieval and smart-bomb technology mixed.”
“The navigation display table has launch buttons for the laserreflecting tracking buoys. The pilot engages the first one when the aircraft reaches the flying altitude you will maintain, then repeats it every two hours.”
Fignan explains that the energy source for the pumps, the cabin heat, and the propellers relies on cold fusion. And there are masks that will drop from overhead if they get over ten thousand feet.
El Capitan pulls forward a pair of binoculars attached to a seemingly old-world hinged arm connected to the wall. He looks through them and finds that they’ve got a night-vision setting. The airship seems complex, a feat of science, but science applied to a simple machine.
El Capitan scratches his chin and says to himself more than to Fignan and Helmud, “Thing is that the days are so short over there now. It’s winter. The chances of a daylight landing are next to nothing. We have only two days to find the dome at Newgrange, hitting the solstice, and only with short windows of daylight. We have to go now.” El Capitan’s stomach is fluttering with nerves. There’s a silver button to start the energy source.
“Okay then,” El Capitan says. “I’m going to push the power-source button, right? Okay?”
“Right? Okay?” Helmud says, which makes El Capitan self-conscious about sounding so unsure of himself.
“Just tell me if I’m going to do something wrong, Fignan. Got it?”
Fignan flashes a green light.
El Capitan puts his finger on the silver button and then pushes it. His hand poised to lift the three switches, which will start pumping air from the bucky tanks, he looks at Fignan, who flashes another green light.
El Capitan flips the switches.
Bradwell pokes his head through the cockpit door. “How long before we can get in the air?”
“Half an hour or so. The air in the tanks has to be low enough for the airship to rise.” He feels smarter than Bradwell, for once. “Why?”
“I heard more noises.”
“Beasts?”
“Not sure. It was a light scratching sound, but from below.”
“Keep listening,” El Capitan says.
As Bradwell heads back into the cabin, Pressia squeezes past him, so closely their bodies touch. “Everything making sense?” she asks El Capitan.
“It’s straightforward.” This bravado makes him panic. He wants to tell her he’s in over his head, but it’s too late. He’s already lied.
“Really?” Pressia says, staring at the console. “Straightforward?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t you think I can do it?”
“I didn’t mean to doubt you,” she says. “It just looks . . . complicated.”
El Capitan doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks up through the glass ceiling of the cockpit, at the gaping roof of the US Capitol, opening to the gray, windswept sky. He thinks of how he felt about the sky after his father left them for good. “When I was a kid I stared out windows, lay in fields, stumbled around because I kept my eyes up instead of in front of me. You’ve got your head in the clouds! my mother used to say. But she knew I was looking for planes. My father knew how to fly, and sooner or later his plane was going to fly by up there, and I wanted to see it. Each plane offered that possibility. I noticed planes everywhere—books, magazines, toys.” He looks at Pressia. “Maybe that’s how it was for Willux and his domes when he was a kid. When you’re in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual.”
Pressia looks at him as if he’s surprised her. But there’s real respect in her expression, maybe even admiration. It sends a charge through him. He’s used to a kind of respect based on fear, but this is different. He’s glad that Helmud has stayed quiet and let him have his say. For a second, he can almost imagine that they’re alone, that it’s just the two of them.
And then there’s a thud on the hull.
Pressia whips her head around.
Bradwell calls out from the cabin, “I see three Beasts. Maybe more. They’re big.”
The floor of the airship shifts, tilting slowly one way and then the other.
“Holy shit, are they moving this thing?” Bradwell says.
And that’s what it feels like—Beasts beneath the airship, lifting it upward.
But then El Capitan says, “No, maybe not. It’s rising! Isn’t it? Do we have a little lift?”
“Lift!” Helmud cries.
They aren’t off the ground yet, though. The Beasts are now pounding on the hull.
“You should probably sit down back there,” El Capitan says to Pressia. “Buckle up.”
There’s a very loud thud, grunts, and high-pitched cries.
“Hurry, Cap!” Pressia shouts, and she runs back into the cabin.
El Capitan closes the door, quickly lifts Fignan and sets him in the copilot’s chair. He pulls the seat belt around the Black Box, clicks it, and tightens it with a jerk. He sits in the captain’s chair, but he can’t strap himself in. He’s too bulky with Helmud on his back.
The airship is still lifting slowly, losing the rough hold of gravity, rising, but not quite fully airborne.
El Capitan lays his hands on the navigation display, which has flickered to life with a screen. There’s a crude map and, in the center of the screen, a green blip, which is the airship itself.
“What do I do?” he says to Fignan.
“Turn on the port and starboard engines.”
He scans the console. The pounding on the hull becomes rhythmic. The cries have become yowls that sound more like incantations. He finds the right labels, flips the switches.
“Come on, Fignan! Now what?”
The airship feels like it’s no longer bound to the earth. “We’re up! Right?”
And then the airship jerks to a stop, the wire tethers taut on either side. El Capitan forgot the moorings and now he panics.
“What’s wrong?” Bradwell calls out. “What’s happening?”
The yowls grow louder, hungrier.
>
“Release the mooring, fore and aft,” Fignan says.
“Yeah, and how do I do that?” The airship bobbles again. Is it possible that the Beasts are tugging at the moorings?
“Why did we stop?” Pressia shouts. “El Capitan?”
“It’s okay!” he calls out, and he hopes that it is, but he’s not sure. “Fignan!”
Fignan illuminates a reference page, showing El Capitan a picture of a red button under the display.
El Capitan runs his hand along the underside of the display, finds the button, hits it. The wires unhook and recoil, making a loud zipping sound as they retract. The airship lurches upward so quickly that El Capitan grabs the console in front of him so he’s not pitched to the floor. He accidentally flips a switch and a loud siren sounds out.
“Jesus!” he says.
“Jesus!” Helmud shouts.
He hits the switch again and the siren winds down. But this might have been a good thing. The Beasts are crying now, as if the siren frightened them.
“You need help in there?” Bradwell shouts.
“Help!” Helmud cries.
“We’re fine,” El Capitan shouts. The airship has started to rise quickly—too quickly. It’s edging closely to the lip of the broken dome. “Fignan!” El Capitan shouts.
“The propellers control the direction of the airship,” Fignan says, with unsettling calm.
El Capitan grips the propeller levers and jerks them to the left, away from the interior of the dome. But it was too fast. The airship dips. El Capitan loosens his grip. The controls are more sensitive than he’d thought.
He compensates in the other direction, more lightly this time. The airship bobs left and right, teetering close to the edges on either side. El Capitan draws in his breath, an instinct, as if this could make the ship thinner.
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