I was only half surprised when the pirate whirled abruptly and yanked the water closet door open. Cal had been right—it was a crappy plan.
The pirate stood over me, staring. Finally, he put out his hand.
“I don’t …” Pain made my voice small and insubstantial. “I don’t have anything for you.”
The pirate yanked me up with one hand, and the stench of decay rolling off him added another dimension to the senses-bending agony I was experiencing. He smelled like spoiled meat, like flowers wilted and rotted inside a greenhouse, like diesel exhaust trapped inside a tiny space.
He growled, low, and I got the impression that was the only sound he could make, that some horrible catastrophe had ripped his voice from him.
I panicked. I kicked against him, struggled, shoved. I hit him in the sternum and felt a give under my hands that sent nausea roiling in my guts. Under the jacket, a stain spread, and it fell open to show a mass of green and black flesh with snapped ribs beneath.
It looked as if he’d been in an accident, perhaps the one that destroyed his airship, the steering yoke slamming into his chest and leaving a long dent that crawled with maggots.
I screamed, and lost any advantage I might have had, thrashing wildly. I wanted to fight, but seeing a dead man walking around had driven reason from me.
The other pirates moaned and turned toward us, while the passengers had gone into a blind panic, trying to flee anywhere they could, crying, falling over seats. One of the stewardesses fell and twisted her leg, and I heard bone snap.
My Weird, usually the thing I clung to, was useless. I couldn’t send this creature anywhere, couldn’t even break the dead man’s iron grip.
This might be it, I realized. I wouldn’t be taken, if what I knew of the animated dead from Cal’s magazines and comics was true. I’d be tossed off the side of the ship for amusement—or worse, I’d be food.
I managed to wrench free of the pirate’s grasp, but he still loomed over me, and the pain from my shoulder was so bad I could barely see straight. His origin was definitely the result of the encroachment of the Old Ones—creatures of their ilk always made my bite scar flame with pain.
He raised a rusty wrench twice the width of my forearm. It was so stupid—I’d managed to escape Thorn, survive the Mists and Draven’s madness, and I was going to die by wrench.
Something flashed above me, something gray, like a streak of smoke, and then Cal slammed into the pirate from the side, falling on him, all teeth and claws and ashen, veined skin.
He wasn’t human any longer. The pirate went down as Cal tore at him, and I managed to scramble up and grab the wrench.
“Move!” I shouted at Cal, and raised the wrench over my head. I brought it down, again and again. The pirate’s gas mask goggles cracked, the canvas leaked, and I kept smashing until there was nothing but a crimson smear on the thick carpet of the airship.
Other passengers got the idea and fell on the pirates, using coffee servers and heavy cases and walking sticks to beat on the walking corpses until one by one they fell, snapping and snarling and trying to bite the passengers. I shivered. Looked like I’d been right about the purpose of the raid—food, not jewels.
Fortunately, the chaos meant nobody noticed that Cal had changed, and he ducked back into the closet to reverse into his human shape. His clothes were shredded, but there was nothing we could do about that.
I thought everything was going to be fine until the stewardess with the broken leg pointed at us and started to scream.
“That’s a demon!” she shrieked. “Something from the underground, from my nightmares! Keep it away from me!”
One by one, heads, once finely coiffed or sporting natty hats, now with bloody cuts in their scalps, turned in our direction. Now that the pirates were subdued, the bedraggled, bruised faces were all focused on us.
“Crap,” I muttered. Cal just stared, until I grabbed him and jerked him with me. There was nowhere to go but across the gangway, unless we wanted an angry mob burning Cal alive, or simply tossing us both out a hatch. I thought about pointing out to the ungrateful cow that Cal had probably saved all our lives by giving us an opening to attack the pirates, but I figured she wouldn’t take the truth about what he was well. Humans never did. I turned and ran, my feet clanging on the rusty gangway.
The void below was dizzying, blue sky and orange earth meeting each other in an endless loop above and below the sliver of metal that connected the two ships.
I caught a whiff of the smoke still billowing from the battery compartment, but kept running. Cal clung to me, and angry passengers gathered around the hatch watching us. All we needed was the pilot to show up with his shock pistol and we’d be done for.
I found the clamps to disengage the gangplank after we reached the other side, and let it fall away. We bobbed up immediately, our slight weight in comparison with the huge zeppelin’s making us rise far and away. The entire crew had boarded our ship, leaving theirs conveniently empty for us.
Cal wrinkled his nose and coughed. “I don’t think these fumes are doing us any favors,” he wheezed.
I found extra gas masks hanging in the cargo area and pulled one on. The ship was so small you could walk front to back in ten steps. The abandoned pilothouse, a bubble with the glass screens cracked and half fallen away, sat above the main cabin.
“Put this on,” I told Cal. I checked the gas mask. It was free of blood and skull fragments. The leak must have caused the pirates to crash, but even with no pilot, something had brought them back, made them take to the sky even though they’d been smashed to pieces on the desert floor below.
“Thanks,” Cal said, his voice tinny and distorted through the filters of the mask. “Now what do we do?”
“We …” I looked up at the pilothouse. Blood had painted the console, but the ship was still flying. The balloon bladders were intact, and we had at least a little bit of battery power.
“We should fly,” I told him.
“You think we can figure it out?” I could sense Cal’s skepticism.
“I mean, we have to,” I said. “There’s nothing down there to survive on, and Las Vegas is still hundreds of miles away.”
I looked out at the desert and the low rumple of mountains in the distance. “We have to,” I repeated. “I have to, for Dean.”
“What if there’s nothing there?” Cal asked. “What if this Horatio Crawford is a fraud and there’s no way to bring him back?”
“Then at least I will have tried,” I told Cal. “And I won’t have to wonder anymore if there was something I could have done and didn’t. I won’t have to go through life missing him more than I already do.”
Cal thought for a moment, and I waited, feeling every bit of me vibrate with anxiety. This was the only way. The only way I could try to help Dean.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s see if we can’t get this heap to stay in the air for just a little longer.”
5
To the Walled City
I THREW MY ARMS around Cal and hugged him, hard. He grunted but hugged me back. “You know whatever stupid idea you have, I’m on board for it,” he muttered. “You’re pretty much the only friend I’ve got besides Bethina.”
We climbed to the pilothouse, and I set about trying to figure out the controls. Cal squinted through the cracked windscreen.
“So what were those things back there?”
I ran my fingers over the panel. Dried blood flaked off under my touch and drifted to the scorched deck.
“I don’t know,” I told Cal. “Have you ever seen anything like them?”
“Never,” he said. “Not even down in the Lovecraft sewers.”
They could have come from the Mists, but the things that lurked there were generally alive.
I turned on the aether feed experimentally, but it was dead. We had no navigation systems, just my eyes. The fans clattered, causing more smoke to billow around us and deposit a layer of soot on our exposed skin.
The ship lurched forward when I opened the throttle, and I moved the yoke until the pitch and yaw arrows lined up. I locked the yoke in place and set the compass to true west. At least this way we wouldn’t crash. I kept us lined up with the mountains, tracking the sun as it made its way behind them.
“Aoife?” Cal said. “You all right?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t get the pirate’s face out of my mind, the spray of red, the stench as I’d thrust my hand into his rib cage. I knew in my gut the pirate had been human once, before he’d crashed into the desert. Only to rise again as … what?
Looking skyward, I saw the blot of the Gate that would admit the Great Old Ones and move them into the same sphere as the living world, until they landed upon the earth. The blot was the size of a silver dollar now, larger than the sun by half and impossible to ignore.
You did this, it whispered to me. You’re the cause of all of this—the dead rising, the dreams that are driving people mad.
Crow, the figure who lived in the place of dreams where only a Gateminder could visit, had told me their influence could herald a golden age … or the end.
Judging by what had happened on the airship, it was definitely the latter.
Cal squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “I mean, how hard can it be to get to San Francisco? Not like it’s easy to miss.”
He thought I was worried about piloting, about finding our way to the West Coast, and I let him think that. Eventually, I’d have to admit to Cal, and to myself, the price I’d paid to get my mother back. The price I might have made the world pay. I didn’t know what the Old Ones would do when they arrived, but their influence led me to think it couldn’t be anything that would help the world.
The Iron Land was torn enough as it was—the country was in disarray since Draven’s disappearance, people were openly defying the Proctors, and those were just the obvious changes.
I stared out the windscreen again, watching the desert pass beneath us and trying not to think about what would happen when we landed.
We flew over Las Vegas in the dark, a glittering handful of jewels flung on the carpet of the desert around it, past the black, mirrored expanse of Lake Mead and over the Hoover Dam, aether rising from the refineries it powered in blue, silver and purple streams that buffeted the airship. It made me feel as if I were inside a vast dome made of light.
I didn’t sleep, just sat on the edge of the deck and watched the land glide beneath us while Cal kept an eye on the instruments. I let myself imagine just for a few hours that I’d left my troubles on the ground and when I landed I’d know exactly what to do—about the return of the Old Ones, about getting Dean back, about everything.
The illusion lasted until the airship’s balloon bladders started to lose pressure somewhere over eastern California as the sun was coming up. Relieved that it was at least light out, I started looking for a place to land. Flat land wasn’t in short supply—the earth below was barren, and I followed a dirt highway that was little more than jitney tracks carved out of scarred beige dirt, the sunrise already pale and waning as the day started.
My landing wasn’t going to win any awards, but I managed to deflate the balloon enough that we simply set down, without needing to tie the ship up and use a ladder to reach the ground. It was all I could have hoped for—I was lucky we hadn’t broken to pieces. Reaching San Francisco in the ship had been a pipe dream.
Cal and I stumbled back to the earth, and he squinted up at the sun. “This is cracked. We need to find food and water. And shade.” Ghouls were nocturnal creatures—even in human skin, they didn’t do well in direct sunlight.
“I know,” I said. The road was below us, down a slope covered in scrub and loose gravel. We just had to follow the jitney tracks. “Come on,” I said. “We follow the road long enough, we’re bound to find someone.”
We’d lost everything—my pack, Cal’s bags, all of our meager cash. Walking was our only option.
A sign, pockmarked with buckshot, announced that we were fifteen miles from Bakersfield. “We can make it that far,” I told Cal. “And then we’ll figure something out.”
He sighed, but wrapped his shirt around his head to keep off the sun and trudged after me. That was what I liked about Cal: the situation might be dire and he might be hating every minute of it, but he’d stick by me until the journey was done, and he complained a heck of a lot less than my brother would have.
Thinking of Conrad made me think of being in Arkham, what had happened to my father and how it was likely my fault.
I just had to get Dean back, and then I could help Archie. My dad would have to wait. I could deal with only one crisis at a time.
It took us half a day to get to Bakersfield, and we were parched, sweaty and covered in soot and dust by the time we stumbled into a jitney way station.
A fan made lazy, ineffective turns overhead, and the tile walls and floor put me in mind of a doctor’s office or a madhouse dayroom, a place where nobody could get too comfortable.
A lunch counter, studded with silver rivets across the front, sat to one side and a ticket window to the other. Since we didn’t have any money, I headed for the counter.
The woman behind it regarded us suspiciously from under a severe bun. “Yeah?”
I sat down, and noticed that soot and dust shook off my clothes as I did. Her frown deepened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could we please have some water?”
She pointed at a hand-lettered sign. “Five cents.”
“Oh, come on,” Cal said. “We got stranded and we just walked from the back of beyond.” He gave her his best gee-whiz look. “We only need one glass. We can share.”
The woman pointed again. “Water rationing’s been going on for months now. Five cents.”
“Forget it,” I told Cal, glaring at the woman with at least as much force as the look she gave me. “Some people just aren’t helpful.”
I looked at the arrival and departure board above the ticket window, and then turned to leave. There was nothing for us here.
“Hey,” the clerk said. She was younger but bore a startling resemblance to the witch behind the lunch counter, minus the severe bun and the canyon-sized frown lines.
“What?” I sighed. “We’re leaving, all right?”
“No,” she said. “You should clean up before you go. In the washroom.” She pointed to a blue door in the far wall. “Plenty of water there,” she said in a low, conspiratorial way. “Hasn’t been filtered, so it tastes like dirt, but it won’t do nothin’ bad to you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
Washing off and getting a drink sounded like heaven, but I let Cal go first, to spend a little time in a cool room without any windows. I was sure he needed it more than I did.
“You all have an accident?” the ticket girl asked.
“You might say that,” I said. “We had a long walk, that’s for sure.”
“Sometimes folks come in’ll give you a few cents for toting their luggage,” she said. “Fare to Folsom is only fifty cents, and they have a wire office where you can have someone send you money.”
“Thanks again,” I said. If carting suitcases was what it took to get moving again, then so be it. I wasn’t some snooty rich girl too good to work.
The ticket taker shrugged.
“Just hate to see folks in a bad situation,” she said, and went back to counting receipts.
Cal came out, clean of dirt except for directly around his hairline, and I slipped into the washroom.
I stripped to my underwear, washed and then took a long drink. The ticket girl was right—the water was earthy and bitter but cold, and I gulped it down.
I was getting dressed again when I heard a commotion from outside, and Cal shouting. “Aoife, run!”
Fists landed on the washroom door. “Bureau of Proctors!” a male voice bellowed. “Open this door or we’ll break it down.”
I shut my eyes, leaning my head back against the
tile wall. I felt so stupid—kindness of strangers was something that existed only in cheap romance novels and morality plays. In reality, strangers were willing to turn in their own mothers for a favor from the government, or a few dollars for an informant’s fee.
“Miss, you hearing me?” the man bellowed. “Come out of there!”
“All right!” I shouted. “I’m coming. Don’t shoot.”
I opened the door and two Proctors with shock pistols stood outside, business ends pointed at me. I put up my hands.
Sure enough, the ticket girl was peeking over the shoulders of the four-man squad, two of whom had Cal restrained.
“You—” I started, but she silenced me with a look.
“Save it,” she said. “This isn’t like some fancy city. Out here, you do for yourself or nobody will.”
“Dammit, Sadie,” her mother snapped. “They weren’t doing anything. Just being a nuisance.”
“And if they’re wanted, we might actually make rent this month,” the girl snarled.
“I thought you said you wanted to help me,” I told her, meeting her eyes. If I could instill some guilt, so much the better.
“I’m helping myself,” she said with a serene smile. “I told you, I hate seeing people in bad situations, especially me.”
“You’re horrible,” I told her as the Proctors handcuffed me. The bite of iron caused a flare of pain in my mind, but I tried to push it away.
“Hey!” Sadie shouted, ignoring me. “Is there a reward for them, or what?”
“Somebody will be in touch,” the Proctor grunted, and dragged us out, Sadie squeaking indignation the whole way.
I didn’t bother protesting my innocence. As far as I knew, I was still a wanted terrorist in the eyes of the Proctors, and I’d be on my way to a dark hole unless I thought of something fast.
Cal caught my eye as we were loaded into a jitney, one Proctor sitting across from us.
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