Reverend Jake lifted his hands to the heavens. “Dear Jesus, take this flying contraption in your almighty hands and gather us to your bosom. Hear us, Lord, and deliver us from the savages below.”
A truck! Mortimer rubbed his eyes. It was a truck, a pickup, and coming toward them fast. He had not seen a working automobile in years. He gazed at it in wonder, forgetting the truck was bringing a gang of Stone Mountain Goats to kill him. It’s true. The Red Czar’s getting gasoline. Somebody’s producing again.
Larry picked up the heavy ham radio.
“We need that, damn you!” Ted shouted.
“We’re too damn heavy,” the little pilot yelled back. “I didn’t know you were bringing three people.”
Ted lunged for the radio. Too late. Larry heaved it, and it smashed into a thousand pieces on the road below.
The truck was only a hundred yards away. Mortimer saw three Goats across the bench seat inside the cab, another half-dozen clinging in back, waving spears and ad-libbing war cries.
Something else in the back of the truck. A giant spool of cable or thin rope, and next to it a huge crossbow mounted in the bed of the truck.
Mortimer cleared his throat. “Guys, I think we need to get organized.”
Even as he said it, the blimp began to rise.
“That’s it. Out of the way, Ted.” Larry skipped to the aft end of the gondola, picked up what looked like a big weed-whacker, a gas engine at the end of a long shaft. He yanked on the cord three times before the engine sputtered to life. The other end of the shaft went out the rear of the gondola to a propeller, which now turned faster and faster as Larry gave it gas. He held the weed-whacker like it was a tiller on some old Viking warship, leaned into it, and the blimp slowly started turning away from the approaching Goats.
Mortimer estimated they were maybe twenty-five feet up and slowly climbing. Not enough to feel safe. “Higher!”
Larry shook his head. “The propeller is only for steering and forward motion. Lift is all according to weight, and we’ve already tossed everything out. Unless you’d like to jump. That would really help us out.”
The truck screeched to a halt forty yards away, and all the Goats piled out, a flurry of activity. One stood behind the oversized crossbow, used a hand crank to cock it and loaded a five-foot bolt the size of a spear.
Reverend Jake appeared at Mortimer’s elbow, squinted at the truck. “They call it a ballista.”
“I call it trouble.” Bill drew the six-shooters and opened fire, slugs bouncing off asphalt near the truck, one shot puncturing the passenger door. The Goats crouched lower but continued loading and aiming the ballista.
Bill holstered the pistols. “These aren’t built for long range.”
They were forty feet up, with the Goats a hundred yards behind them, when the ballista operator let fly. The spear flew fast and straight, a thin line trailing behind like the wriggling tail of a sperm. It hit the gondola low and aft, punched through the wicker with ease, and caught Larry in the upper thigh, the pyramid-shaped head coming through with a gout of blood and shredded flesh.
Larry screamed, high pitched, fell, letting go of the tiller. He writhed like a spiked trout against the bolt, howling and going a pale green almost instantly. The Blowfish drifted.
Sheila screamed, backed away at the sight of the gushing blood. Mortimer and Jake crowded forward, tried to stanch the wound with their hands, the blood pulsing through their fingers and covering their hands to the wrists in seconds.
Larry sobbed, howled, grunted inhumanly as he gasped for oxygen, convulsed once and threw up on Jake.
Something jerked the Blowfish taut. They were going down.
Mortimer stood, looked back at the truck. Men were cranking the spool of line, pulling it tight and reeling the blimp in like a game fish. Mortimer watched them crank. It was a slow process; there must have been some kind of glitch in the winch, because every fifth or sixth crank, the line would go slack again and the Goats would scramble to fix it. They started again, and this time it came loose after the third crank.
“Cut the line!” Ted shouted.
Mortimer pulled the bowie knife from his boot sheath, bent over the side of the gondola, stretched his hand. The bolt had punctured too far down. Mortimer couldn’t reach it. The line was tied to the end of the bolt, and the bolt was made of some light metal that would take him twenty minutes to get through with a hacksaw.
And he didn’t have a hacksaw.
The Goats kept cranking them in, the blimp edging lower a foot at a time.
“Reload, Bill.”
“I’m on it.” He was already thumbing fresh shells into the Peacemakers.
The rumble of engines. Three more pickup trucks rolled into view, each filled with more bloodthirsty Goats.
He knelt again next to the screaming pilot. “Is he going to make it?”
Jake was covered in the little man’s blood. He met Mortimer’s eyes, shook his head.
“Sorry about this.” Mortimer set his jaw, dug his hands in around the wound, trying to get a grip behind the bolt head.
Larry writhed. “No, please—oh, God.”
Mortimer waited. He needed to time this just right. He felt the pull on the bolt ease and yanked. A wet tearing sound inside Larry’s leg. The little man screamed louder, if that was possible. Mortimer kept pulling. The bolt shaft came all the way through, but the knot caught on the other side of the leg. Mortimer braced himself, heaved, put his back into it. He had to get it through before the Goats started cranking again. Pull. The knot came through in a splash of blood and flesh.
Larry passed out.
Mortimer sawed at the thin rope with the knife. It frayed, came apart, and shot out of his hands, back through the leg wound and the gondola. The blimp bobbed, tilted and suddenly released. Ted grabbed the weed-whacker tiller, aimed them away from the Goats.
“They’re reloading,” Bill said.
Mortimer lifted Larry, dead weight, arms flopping, and let him fall over the side. Mortimer turned away. He couldn’t bear to see the little man land.
Without the weight of the corpse, they lifted much higher, much faster.
XLIII
Blowfish could not feel urgency, did not know panic or recognize the need to put itself beyond the range of the ballista. Nothing would hurry its steady rise to a hundred feet, then two hundred feet and more. The next ballista shot never came, and the blimp’s five passengers shivered in the blood-soaked gondola as the temperature dropped with the increased altitude.
Mortimer welcomed the wind in his face as it helped dry the panic sweat and wash away the smell of blood.
“Hell, I sure hate to lose a man.” Ted still held the tiller, heading them toward downtown Atlanta.
Reverend Jake took off his top hat. “May the Lord guide his soul to Heaven.”
“You better tell him to guide our sorry asses back to the ground,” Ted said. “Larry was the pilot. I kinda sorta know how to steer this thing. Maybe.”
“And the radio,” Jake reminded them.
“Problems?” Mortimer didn’t need these guys crapping out on him now.
“A moment please while I confer with my colleague.” The reverend went aft, leaned in to converse with Ted in hushed whispers.
Bill plopped down in the bow of the gondola. “What now, boss?”
Mortimer shrugged. “Let’s see what they come up with.”
Bill frowned, pulled the Union hat down over his eyes for a quick nap, arms crossed tight against the cold.
Sheila was back at the rail again, standing close to Mortimer, looking down. “I’ve never seen it like this. I mean, I’ve been up on a mountain, seen what things look like far away, but not like this, with nothing underneath us at all.”
“Afraid of heights?”
“No. I like it up here. We’re disconnected.” Houses, trees, roads, shopping centers, fields, all passed silently below, too distant to detect the destruction and decay. “You could almost believe everyt
hing was okay down there.”
Dorothy coming back from Oz, thought Mortimer, floating in the wizard’s balloon. There’s no place like home. Except this time when Dorothy lands, sees Kansas up close, she’ll see it was torn apart by a twister.
Reverend Jake returned from his conference with Ted, cleared his throat. “We think it might be best to put down in one of the nearby open spaces, a field or parking lot maybe. Ted’s dubious ability to steer Blowfish might become hazardous if we were to venture among the taller buildings and narrow avenues downtown.”
“And then what?” Mortimer asked.
“And then we walk,” Jake said.
Landing involved a controlled deflation of the blimp. There was much pulling of lines and opening of valves. Nothing seemed to happen at first, so lines were pulled further and valves opened wider.
Then suddenly they were dropping rapidly.
“Shit almighty, too much,” Ted yelled. “Close the valve. Close it.”
They were not plummeting, but neither had they achieved the gentle descent they’d intended. The ground grew big beneath them, and Ted jerked frantically on the tiller, attempting to guide them toward an overgrown suburban baseball diamond.
“Brace yourselves,” he shouted.
They set down hard but without incident and climbed out.
Mortimer pointed to a set of bleachers. “Bill, get as high as you can, look around.”
“Right.” Bill jogged toward the stands.
Mortimer looked at Ted. “I need to talk to you.”
“Talk.”
“Is there a plan B?”
Ted cackled, shook his head. “There was barely a plan A.”
“Tell me.”
Ted explained. He was part of a ragtag, underground army whose goal was to wrest power from the Red Czar. Here’s how Mortimer would help. He would get close to the Czar and find out his evil plans, specifically when the Czar planned to attack Armageddon. Warned ahead of time, Armageddon would be able to organize a surprise counterstrike. It had been Ted’s plan to take Mortimer all the way to downtown Atlanta via Blowfish, landing under cover of darkness on one of the tall buildings. Using the ham radio (now smashed on the road back in Stone Mountain Park), Ted would have coordinated with their “man on the inside,” one of the Czar’s trusted men, to capture Mortimer and take him to the Czar. By then it was hoped the Czar’s spies would have reported that Mortimer had recently busted out of Armageddon’s prison with secret knowledge of Armageddon’s defenses, his military strength, etc.
“The Czar won’t be able to resist. Once you get close to him, you find out his plans, kill him if you can.”
Mortimer sighed, looked up, taking in the blue sky and puffy white clouds, scratched his chin. “That’s a pretty feeble plan.”
“Well, it’s a fucked-up plan now,” Ted said. “We’ll have to improvise. First, we need to get Blowfish out of sight. The Goats will spread the word and the whole metro area will be on the lookout for it.”
They deflated the blimp, the compartments going flaccid as it collapsed in on itself. They shoved the thing into one of the Little League dugouts. All of them together pushed the gondola into a small circle of trees, covered it over with branches.
They walked, Reverend Jake on point a hundred yards ahead of them, ready to signal them into hiding if necessary. They zigged and zagged through a residential neighborhood, finally finding an abandoned house with a fireplace just after sundown. They were all exhausted and slept like rocks.
They yawned and stretched awake at the first crack of sunlight, Mortimer spewing a string of curses after remembering they’d lost the coffee the day before. “I wish we’d been able to hang on to our gear.”
Bill hid a yawn behind the back of his hand. “I still have a few of the cigars in my shirt pocket if you want one.”
“Later. You sleep okay?”
“Could have been better. I was right next to Ted. Guy has bad dreams and talks in his sleep. Man, he sure hates Jane Fonda.”
“We have a long march ahead of us,” Reverend Jake told them. “Let’s start the morning right with a quick prayer. O Lord, hear us in our time of need as we march into the bowels of Satan’s stronghold, to wrest a once-prosperous city from his evil clutches. And if it is Your will for us to be gutted and beheaded and our heads put on pikes for the crows to eat our eye sockets hollow and the black flies to plant maggots in our ears, then so be it, although, naturally, we’d prefer that not to happen.”
“Amen,” Mortimer said.
XLIV
The five of them marched steadily, either Reverend Jake or Ted scouting ahead, finding the open path. They passed the debris of an extinct nation, hollow Exxon stations, Subway sandwich shops, Dollar General, Cracker Barrel, check-cashing places, pawnshops, banks and a Laundromat with a yellow Hummer crashed through the front window. On the back of the Hummer was a bumper sticker that said I BRAKE FOR GARAGE SALES.
They passed through another residential neighborhood and crossed into a park on the other side: swings, slides, trees, benches. The grass was long and brown.
“Break for lunch here,” Ted told them. “I need to scout around, get my bearings.”
Ted left them in the park.
“Benches over by that odd-looking tree.” Mortimer pointed. “We can take a load off.”
They walked toward it and realized it wasn’t a tree at all but something fabricated of metal and wires, meant to look like a small weeping willow. When they were standing right in front of it, Mortimer saw that the trunk of the tree had been fashioned from several car bumpers welded and bent. The limbs were car antennas. Headphones and iPods and electrical charge cords hung from the limbs, draped nearly to the ground.
Sheila knelt, ran her hand over a wooden plaque, letters burned neatly into the surface:
NEW WORLD WILLOW
—ANONYMOUS
“L’art pour l’art,” Reverend Jake said.
Mortimer looked at him. “What?”
“Nothing. Let’s eat.”
They sat on the benches. Lunch was meager. Jerky and stale bread, what some of them happened to have in pockets. Most of the food had gone over the side in the mad rush to lighten the blimp.
Mortimer munched jerky without enthusiasm, considered the willow again. Somebody had decided to do that, had decided to stop in the shadow of a dangerous city, had paused in the necessary ongoing routine of gathering sustenance and finding shelter, had simply put it all aside to make this thing. To make art.
Mortimer couldn’t decide if that was dedication or stupidity. Maybe the harder you fought to live, the more obligated you felt to live for something.
He looked at the dangling wires, headphones, MP3 players, computer gadgets. Many were corroded, covered in bird poop. The new world willow had been here awhile. Maybe years. Maybe the artist was dead now. The willow might have been the last thing he ever did.
“I used to have an iPod,” Bill said around a tough chunk of jerky. “I used to love to download songs from the Internet. Man, I loved Christina Aguilera. And Moby. I wish they still had music.”
“They do still have music,” Sheila said.
“I mean like on CDs and digital and all that,” Bill said. “You go into Joey’s and the band plays and that’s fine and everything, but it’s not like going through ten thousand songs on Napster and picking and choosing whatever you want.”
“Electricity’s coming back,” Mortimer said. “People are going to start using things again, microwave ovens and CD players. Maybe even the Internet.”
“It’s not the same,” Bill said. “Not like being connected with everything while it’s happening. You can scavenge old CDs and a player and make it work, but it’s always going to be leftovers. It’ll never be now.”
“We’ll make a new now,” Jake said. “It’ll be tough, but we’ll fight and hang on and make things new again. Here comes Ted.”
Ted had found the path. He led them until nightfall, and they camped withi
n spitting distance of the ruined Atlanta skyline.
XLV
Mortimer tossed another stick on the fire. “It’s decision time.”
The others looked up from their places around the camp, eyes wide and curious. They hadn’t realized an announcement was coming.
“This is up to me now,” Mortimer said. “We’re about to get neck-deep in Red Stripe territory. I have a personal stake in this. As you know, I’m looking for my wife. I need to see her. Anyway, it’s enough to say that in addition to putting the brakes on this Czar asshole, I have my own motivations, which are nobody else’s problem but mine.”
Sheila frowned, broke eye contact.
“You can shove your hero speech up your ass,” Bill said. “If you think I’m the kind to cut out on a partner, then I guess you don’t know me very well at all.”
Mortimer smiled. Damn, he’s a good pal. I’m going to miss him when I get my dumb ass killed. “I appreciate that, Bill. More than you know. But it’s a one-man job, and there’s just no sense in risking everyone.”
“You’re stupid.” The venom in Sheila’s voice startled them. “We live in a time when the most valuable thing a person can have is somebody to look out for you and that you can look out for,” she said. “And you treat that like it’s not anything. We are here for you. Did your fucking wife come looking for you? Fuck no. Fuck you.”
Mortimer’s mouth fell open. He shut it again. He was simultaneously touched and offended.
“I…” Mortimer shook his head. So tired. “Okay. Thanks, guys. Sorry. Should have known better than to try that hero bullshit.”
Sheila turned away, curled up with her back to the fire.
“Damn right,” Bill said. “We’ll figure it out as we go. You’ll see.”
“Sure.”
Mortimer shot Ted a look across the campfire. The old man offered a slight nod in return.
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel Page 20
