Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

“You'll have to get it towed to a garage,” he said. “You can't drive it anymore until it passes inspection."

  “Thank you, officer."

  “Fascist pig!"

  “Have a nice day, ma'am."

  I planted her in front of the television and put away the groceries, keeping out the lye, glue and duct tape. I added them to my kit—baby-oil, boning-knife, heating coil, scissors, pliers, saw, drill, camcorder—and hurried to the basement. Thank God my father had been an idiot. He had converted it to a soundproof bomb shelter during the Cuban missile crisis.

  I'd wasted four whole hours! The subjects tend to wilt when you leave them too long. One subject even vomited in her gag and died on me.

  I stared for a moment, wondering where the hell my new subject was, until she jumped from behind the door and hit me over the head with her chair. I should have waited until I had tape. You just can't trust clothesline. If only I'd had the time that everyone conspires to waste for me!

  The trial, prattle prattle, dragged on, the appeals dragged on, the goddamn new trial dragged on. But at last, at long last, they got around to executing me.

  Now they can't bury me because my subjects’ families are suing the state for my body so they can donate it to some goddamn place to prattle about my brain and my genetic makeup. God knows how long they'll dick around!

  I don't know how much more of this I can take.

  * * *

  The Flight of the LZ-D1

  Look as if you know what you're doing: that was the trick to being a good spy, Hereward knew, and a good spy was a live one. Wearing a dead man's uniform and carrying a weighty pair of rigger's pliers, he strode into the building that housed the Kaiser's most zealously guarded secret weapon as if he were coming home.

  But he was unprepared for it. From the outside, Hanger Five at Wilhelmshaven was merely enormous, but he had seen enormous hills, he had seen the Pyramids. Never had he stood inside a hollow hill or a hollow Pyramid.

  He froze for a moment and gawked. Outside the night was clear and starry, but in this incredible room the breath and sweat of men rose to condense among the girders near the ceiling and descend as a silvery snowfall. Several hundred men bustled about, all in naval uniforms of various sorts, but the space was great enough to make this crowd seem thin.

  Empty, this room might have awed Dante. Filled as it was, monstrously filled, it might have awed Satan himself. Other rooms are built for human beings, but this one had been built for the silvery egg that filled it, and it diminished men to a freckling of ants around its nest.

  “Schmidt!” That name had been spoken before, and with some urgency. Hereward despaired to realize that it meant him. “Emil Schmidt!"

  The uniform had done it, the uniform of the man he had regretfully strangled. It held a distinguishing mark he hadn't noticed in the foul, desperate darkness behind the canal-side brothel. He took a proper grip on the massive pliers. He would strike first, strike hard, run like hell—and no doubt fall to a burst of machine-gun fire. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, the Huns would question him.

  He spun on his heel like a proper sausage-eater, saluted briskly. “Sir!"

  Incredibly, the porcine man in the uniform of a chief boatswain didn't bat one of the translucent lashes that emphasized the lunacy of his bloodshot stare.

  “Emil, your manners have improved since your last visit to the brig! One could almost believe you were a little English lord, eh?"

  Though no one would have called him little, Captain Hereward, Lord Fleetwood, of the King's Own Scottish Borderers was in fact Fifteenth Earl of Nether Dunwich, and the remark so stunned him that he maintained the robotic stance he had thought fit for a German sailor. A millennium ago, when the People of the Cutlass had burst upon Britain's shore, they had left close kin behind in Saxony. One of these blond and blue-eyed homebodies had been the ancestor of a distant cousin called Emil Schmidt, and Hereward thanked the ghost fervently.

  “Sir!"

  “Stow your pliers, pig-dog, and go topside to machine-gun bay three. You will have a lovely view of the stars on our cruise to England, and—” here the chief's heavy irony became heavier sarcasm—"the glory of shooting down any Sopwiths or SE5's that fly above thirty thousand feet.” Sarcasm switched to explosive fury: “Memories of Hannelore may keep you warm!"

  “England?” Hereward said, appalled. The Luftschiff Zeppelin-D1 was an experimental craft, he had been told, not scheduled for a raid on his own country.

  “Would you prefer to bomb Algeria? I'll speak to Kapitan Himmelfahrt.” Although he couldn't know their true cause, Hereward's obvious misgivings embarrassed the chief. Waving toward the far end of the hanger, he said, “Check out your cold-weather gear. Smock-sniffing scheisskopf though you are, we must keep you alive for at least half the trip."

  “Machine-gun bay three is...?"

  “Above the upper keel, dumb-head! The last bay aft. For all your sins, I thought you were a proper airshipman.” The chief peered at him near-sightedly. “Emil—you are Emil Schmidt, aren't you?"

  “Who else?” He hit upon a trick to distract the chief from his ever-closer scrutiny: “And ... for what it's worth, I'm sorry about Hannelore."

  “Get out of my sight, you plaything of a perverted pig! I will laugh as I pry your frozen corpse from the gun and throw it over the side before we come home!"

  Hereward ran before the chief could unleash the blow that vibrated in his burly right arm. He found a queue of men checking out their high-altitude gear.

  Much good it would do. The German Zepp service was an unrelieved horror. Advances in British incendiary rockets and aeroplanes now forced the Hun monsters to fly five miles above the earth, where men froze in the cold and strangled in the thin air. Preparing in England for his mission, he had tried to interview prisoners who were little more than vegetables. Burnt vegetables. No more impervious to heat than tallow candles, such men traveled in intimate contact with tons of explosive hydrogen that could be touched off by a bullet, an electrical spark, very nearly by a sneeze. And once the hydrogen went, so did the further tons of fuel and high explosives.

  He admired bloody Fritz. He would rather have admired him at a safe distance.

  “Schmidt, Emil!” he announced to the quartermaster's clerk.

  “You are not on my list.” The thin man's steel spectacles bored into Hereward, saw through him.

  The Englishman waved vaguely. “Ask the chief. A late replacement."

  “You must sign for these,” the thin man said. He snapped his fingers, signal for a lesser Goth to hoist lambswool underwear and sealskin suiting onto the counter.

  Evading the steely glare, Hereward surveyed the activity around the airship behind him. One man stood out from the ants. He seemed to wield authority, but his strangely patterned robe and slouch hat could not have been confused with even the most idiosyncratic uniform of a naval officer. One eye, or the absence thereof, was covered by a black patch. A raven perched on his shoulder. These oddities might have gone unnoticed in the huge hanger if not for a singular face that Hereward almost recognized. Could this be the infamous Graf von Zeppelin himself?

  “That man—” he started to ask the clerk.

  “Is none of your concern, Schmidt. Next!"

  Passing him, Hereward saw that the unmilitary ancient carried a staff; and, under his breath, he seemed to be chanting. Typical, the Englishman thought. In his social circle it was a given that Fritz had only recently lurched out of his primeval forest to spout incoherent philosophy and make boring music, and that he felt more at home raping nuns, eating babies and dancing naked around bonfires. It was hardly remarkable that a shaman should be present for the maiden flight of their most barbaric engine of destruction. Nevertheless, this wizard gave him the jim-jams.

  Inside the hull, a crypt of oppressive gloom, the lower keel was a vee of aluminum girders where airshipmen scrambled in felt-soled boots: sparking Hun hobnails were banned. A bewildering cobweb of wires and cables made the kee
l a hopeless maze. Close overhead, great swollen bags of hydrogen strained against their confining nets.

  Hereward had no clue how to get to his assigned station, but he assumed he could not go far wrong by picking his way toward the stern. No one else picked his way, however. The Huns who swarmed past from either direction, buffeting him and cursing him for a lubberly swine of a Hollander, were no less nimble than fleas. He pushed his fears aside and dashed along with the best of them, forcing himself to swear in German whenever he came a cropper.

  Apart from its obvious disadvantages, something was wrong with this airship. Years at the front had impressed him with the tidiness of the enemy. One of the strongest motivations for capturing a German trench was the prospect of enjoying a dry, clean, rat-free home for a few days, until his own savage kilties mucked it up. But this Zepp....

  He came to a wide spot in the road, a plywood platform that truncated the vee of the keel. This was the crew's quarters, and the stowed hammocks and duffel-bags that defined the space were so white and neatly stacked as to make Lord Nelson weep with envy.

  He drew aside and pretended to busy himself with the ubiquitous wires while he sifted his impressions. Only then did it dawn on him that the ship stank. Hydrogen was odorless, but this odor suggested hydrogen sulphide, and decay, and the ophidiarium at Regent's Park. Were the unspeakable sods carrying poison gas?

  Having drawn more than one suspicious glance from the swarm, he rejoined it and hurried aft until he came to a spidery ladder. He leaped on and hauled himself upward, instantly regretting this move. Whoever Hannelore was, and whatever Emil had done to her, this ladder was sufficient penance and then some. The rungs were little more than wires, and his felt boots were no protection against their cutting edges. He had to put almost all his weight on his leather-gauntleted hands to hoist himself upward while the rungs snagged and twanged against tender parts. Peering up, he saw that the torture went on forever.

  Miles above the keel, or so it seemed, he was nearly shaken off when the airship lurched and began to move. They were walking it out of the hanger, a hundred sailors holding lines, and doing it while a brass band struck up bloody Wagner.

  What were they playing? The Valkyries’ ride would have been the obvious choice. A sardonic maestro might have chosen Brunhilde's immolation to send off this flying bomb. But this was neither. Complete with bloated tubas, it was the entrance of Fafnir, the dragon, from Siegfried.

  He resumed his climb, but was nearly shaken off again as the engines coughed to life. There were eight of them, each suspended in its own pod. He didn't envy the mechanics who kept them running, crammed into hellish cubicles that they could enter or exit only by means of flimsy ladders in the open sky. But a gunner on an upper bay could spare them no pity. While they broiled, he would freeze. While they filled their lungs with carbon monoxide, he would suck on a heady vacuum.

  He railed against his prankish humor, which had got him into this mess. Drawing on a pre-war year at Heidelberg and a gift for mimicry, he had sometimes rigged himself out as a Hun and popped across No Man's Land for a glass of schnapps and an informative natter with Fritz. Word of these larks had filtered up to the highest levels of imbecility, where the notion took hold that he was a master spy. To whom the gods would destroy, as the old Greeks might have put it, they first granted a sense of humor.

  But he would never suffocate. He had averted his mind from his clear duty, but he knew it. He had come merely to gather intelligence, but he was aboard a ship that would murder English civilians. He had no choice but to turn it into a spectacular fireworks display.

  But how? He could hardly stroll into the control cabin and ask the captain for a lucifer. The gun, of course! He would shoot the damned thing down, hoist it by its own petard! He hauled himself more vigorously up the endless ladder.

  The smell persisted, and he realized that this stench alone could not account for his uneasiness. He sensed, rather than felt or saw, a sliminess, an uncleanness in the way the gas-bags pushed against their nets. The bags were no doubt made of some disgusting animal product, but each bulge that pushed through an interstice of the ropes had an unaccountable hardness. In the gloom above and below, they appeared to shimmer with an iridescence that was weighted toward the greenish part of the spectrum.

  Bloody nonsense, he was breathing poison gas and dreaming things! He hauled himself up faster.

  He'd had no idea how wretched a Zepp-gunner's life could be. Coming at last to the machine-gun bay, he found that he must perch on a narrow canvas strap, his felt-soled feet braced against the razoring ladder, his head buffeted by Himalayan gales.

  The gun, unfortunately, was a masterpiece of German ingenuity. Sliding it around the ring of his cockpit, he found no way he could traverse the hull of the dirigible, nor could he aim it at the monstrous fin towering behind him. Checks had been built into the system to keep an enthusiastic gunner from shooting his own ship down, and he had no tools to disable these checks.

  He might use brute force to bend it into shooting where he wanted, and he was attempting this when he noticed the gunner fifty yards ahead of him making urgent gestures. He desisted and waved back. “Up your Kaiser, Fritz!” he shouted, confident of being misheard as the infernal engines bellowed to full power. He had heard that ghastly racket down in the trenches. Up here the noise was infinitely worse, but oddly different. Once again he was reminded of Satan, who had “called so loud that all the hollow deep of Hell resounded,” and he found it hard to shake the notion that this was no mechanical noise at all, but the roaring of a great beast.

  Glancing aside, he was startled to see the streets of Wilhelmshaven beneath him, neat German toyboxes. Far away to the other side, the North Sea lay like a vast tin shield under the moon. Swiftly and inobtrusively, the Zepp had lofted itself to a height of a thousand feet. He caught himself wishing he had been born a sodding Hun, just so he could have joined their marvelous airship corps.

  He recalled himself sternly to his duty. He couldn't shoot the thing down, but he had been issued a stout knife. He could puncture the gas-bags. If he got enough of them before he was caught, the airship would be crippled. The Zepp might limp back to base, where he would be shot, but at least this particular mission would be scrubbed. It lacked the Apocalyptic finality he had hoped for, but it seemed the most he could do.

  He eased himself down the wire ladder. Without the hanger lights, the darkness of this pit was greater than the night outside, and he was oppressed by a foul dampness and an unaccountable warmth. He got the impression that he wasn't descending into a sterile machine, but into something loathsomely fecund.

  He pulled off a gauntlet and held it in his teeth while he felt for the hydrogen cell pushing against the ropes. He jerked his hand away when it encountered a texture that was most peculiar.

  Steady on, lad, he told himself and forced his hand back into contact with the cell. The texture was satiny but hard, almost metallic, not at all like a rubbery membrane. He fumbled for other sections pushing through the ropes, but he was thoroughly bewildered when he found no ropes. He had seen the damned ropes all the way up the ladder! But now the individual segments seemed to overlap like scales.

  He took deep, steady breaths, even though he realized that might do more harm than good. Unable to see anything, he must be suffering a tactile phantasm, like a child at a party who believes that the grapes in his hand are a witch's eyes. Whatever it felt like, it was a bloody gas-bag. He thrust his knife in with more force than was probably needed.

  The blade sank only an inch or so, and there was no rush of escaping gas. He forgot about his cover and swore in fluent English as the bag shifted ponderously, like nothing so much as a vast animal twitching at an insect-bite. Recoiling in loathing and panic, he dropped through empty space.

  He had expected a vertical descent in the well, but he was soon rebounding from unexpected slopes and sliding on unlikely surfaces. He had feared coming to grief on the cruel ladder, but the ladder had vanish
ed as completely as the ropes. He rolled at last to a stop on a relatively horizontal surface.

  As he gasped the foul air, his mind scrambled desperately for a logical explanation. The hull was riddled with tunnels among the gas-bags, he had seen that much on the way up. Through instinctive brilliance, he must have kicked himself into one of those tunnels when he fell off the ladder. But he could remember no such act, instinctive or otherwise. He had been paralyzed with fear when his descent began.

  “Emil, is that you? It's me, Franz."

  Hereward had retained his knife, and he very nearly used it on the man crawling toward him in the darkness until he reflected that the chief was a fellow human. God alone knew what this Zepp was.

  “Where's the ladder?"

  “A good question, Emil, but I have a better one: where are the engines?"

  “I heard them start up. I still hear...."

  “Do they sound like the engines of any Luftschiff you ever served aboard?"

  Hereward listened. The racketing engines had achieved harmonic resonance, so that they sounded like the steady pounding of a drum in an echoing abyss. Under this rhythmic beat was a noise that suggested wind howling in a cave, accompanied by an irksome twittering that might have been off-key pipes but that was probably just noisy valves.

  “No,” Hereward answered honestly.

  “I went below to look,” the chief said. Hereward couldn't see him, and he found it hard to reconcile his memory of a beer-swilling barbarian with the thin, shaky voice. In his terror, the chief had apparently sought out his mortal enemy as the man he knew best. The Englishman tried hard not to be touched. He tried harder not to be infected by a fear that could unstring even a Hun airshipman.

  “Number one pod was empty,” the chief whispered, “as was number two—not just missing an engineer, but missing an engine, with the prop spinning in the breeze like a child's pinwheel. I was on my way to number three when they started jettisoning the pods into the sea. This ship is driven by magic, Emil."