I moved onto my back. Freuchen stood, his hand extended down to me. There was no sign of Bartholomew.
“Come on, Meredith. Ve need to get out of here.”
But I didn’t move. Instead, I stared past him, my eyes moving over the burning wreckage of the five or six cabins, following the twisting lines of black smoke up the walls of the pit to the pure blue sky far above… and the huge, cigar-shaped airship that hung suspended above New Manhattan. A single word was painted in giant red swooping letters on its silver fuselage, and I strained my eyes to make it out.
I mumbled the word aloud.
“Vat? I can’t understand you,” Freuchen said, still staring down at me, oblivious to the airship floating high above us.
I raised a hand in slow-motion. Freuchen reached for it. I avoided his grasp and jabbed my finger skyward. “Brimstone!” I repeated.
Freuchen turned and looked up, muttered what must have been an expletive, turned back to me, and without another word, grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet.
“That vas dynamite or grenades,” he yelled. “Ve’re going to be trapped like fish in a barrel down here. Ve need to get to the surface right now.”
I nodded, and together we started to make our way up the path.
“Where’s Bartholomew?” I asked.
“Last I saw him, he vas running toward Emily’s cabin.”
Smoke and fiery embers swirled and danced around us, caught in the updraught created by the burning cabins and numerous fires that ignited bush and brush along the path. A woman screamed above me, and I looked up in time to see a man falling backward off the edge of the pit, clutching his side. He hit an outcropping of rock, spun like a rag doll, then disappeared through the roof of a burning cabin with nothing but an explosion of sparks to mark his passing. More voices screamed incoherently, but above all of that commotion, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Short rapid bursts of gunfire.
The screaming stopped.
Freuchen pulled me sharply toward a cabin and then around to the back of it, and we paused momentarily in the narrow space between the cabin and the pit’s wall. The smoke wafted and twirled like fog obscuring our view to the surface. There was the sound of more shooting, followed by more screams.
“Ve cannot let you be seen,” Freuchen said.
“What? Why? You’re not making any sense.”
“Meredith,” he continued, “vat if they have been sent here by the Adversary. Vat if they are here for you?”
His words hit me like a sledgehammer between my eyes. In my literally shell-shocked state-of-mind, I had forgotten about the Adversary. Then an even worse thought crashed into my brain. “Oh shit, what if they tracked us here? What if they somehow followed me? What if I’m responsible for all this?”
Freuchen brushed off my questions. “It does not matter. They are here, and ve must get back to Chou and the others.” He pulled me along the back wall to the corner of the cabin. He leaned out far enough to assess whether it was safe, then grabbed my hand again and pulled me at a half-run, half-stumble across to the next cabin.
I coughed loudly as I inhaled thick woody-tasting smoke that stung the back of my throat and made my lungs constrict and my stomach heave.
“Stay here, I vill be right back,” Freuchen whispered. Before I could protest, he edged carefully around the side of the cabin, then, after a quick glance left and right, disappeared. I heard movement within the cabin and realized that it was our cabin.
A minute passed before Freuchen reappeared. He had his backpack slung over his shoulders and my pack in his left hand, my sword strapped tightly to it. In the other, he held the pistol that he’d taken from the Nazi officer and insisted on bringing with him. I’m not a fan of guns, but I have to admit, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it. He handed me my backpack, and I slung it over my shoulder. I began to untie the bindings that held my sword.
“No time for that,” Freuchen warned. “Okay, ve are going to make a run for it.”
I nodded.
“Follow me.”
We sprinted to the next cabin, the sound of chaos only growing louder around us. There were two more almost-intact cabins ahead of us, which took us practically back to ground level, give or take a hundred feet or so. But the cabin between them and us was on fire, burning so intensely I could feel the heat from where we hid. Thick black smoke billowed skyward, but an ever-increasing pall of it was expanding outward onto the path. I coughed again as a hot gust of wind blew a cloud of smoke directly over Freuchen and me. I spat black spittle onto the ground.
“Ve are going to have to use the smoke as cover,” Freuchen said. “You vill have to hold your breath, okay?”
I nodded again.
“I vill count to three, then ve run and ve do not stop until ve reach the trees. Chou and Silas vill have heard the gunfire and explosions. They vill be coming for us. Ve do not stop for anything or anyone, you understand?”
I nodded once more.
“Okay! Vun… two… three.”
I sucked in a huge breath, held it, then took off after Freuchen, who had already vanished into the wall of smoke covering the path. A few steps in, half-blinded, I ran into Freuchen’s broad back. He’d slowed to a walk so I could catch up with him. He reached behind him and found my hand, pulling me after him. My eyes stung. The heat from the burning buildings singed my skin, and the roar and crackle of the fire kept out any other noise. I stumbled over some hidden obstacle lying in the path, and my hand slipped from Freuchen’s grasp. I went down hard, skinning the palms of my hands. I let out a gasp of pain and instantly regretted it as I sucked in a lungful of smoke. Coughing and retching, I reached frantically around me, hoping to find Freuchen. Instead, I found the body that I had tripped over. For a second, I thought it might be Freuchen but then felt my hand brush against the person’s hairless face. Pushing myself to my feet, my eyes watering so badly I couldn’t see a damn thing, I staggered blindly in the direction I thought Freuchen had been taking us. Snot and blood filled my nostrils. My ears still rang from the explosion. I felt a gust of cool air blow over me, and darkness changed to light as I stumbled out of the bank of smoke and onto the path. Freuchen was nowhere to be seen, but I was less than ten feet from ground level, and I thought that perhaps he’d made it up already. I blundered along the path, the smell of the forest barely registering through my clogged nostrils.
There were several bodies sprawled on the ground around the top of the pit. My eyes were streaming, making everything appear as blobs of color with no definition. I wiped them with the back of my hand and knelt next to each body individually. None of them was Freuchen, but I recognized Denise. She lay on her back, her sightless eyes staring up at the silver Brimstone high overhead as though she were captivated by its grace. The shaft of a wooden spear protruded from her chest, and blood still trickled from the wound, soaking into the dirt.
Another gunshot jerked me back to reality. I was a sitting duck out here. I began crawling on all fours toward the forest, which was nothing but a swirling mass of colors to my smoke-stung eyes. When I reached the edge of the forest, I got to my feet and began to run, only to trip over what must have been a root of a tree. Crashing into the carpet of leaves, I stayed there a few moments, catching my breath, trying to orient myself. I rubbed at my eyes, which only made them sting more, but after a few excruciatingly long seconds of pain, I opened them again. My sight was back. Or at least, enough for me to quickly assess where I was in relation to where I needed to be. I was on the opposite side of the pit from where we had initially arrived the day before. Across the pit’s open mouth, I saw the two cabins Freuchen and I had passed between when we had surrendered to the guard—what was left of them, anyway. They were now flaming ruins. If someone didn’t tend to them, the fire would surely take hold of the forest and potentially burn everything to the ground.
“Meredith!”
I squinted, scanning the opposite side of the pit, then felt my heart lurch in my chest a
s I spotted first Chou, an arm raised above her head waving to attract my attention, then the golden form of Silas as he strode into view. I heaved a sigh of relief.
“Hello, dearie,” a woman’s voice, husky, with a distinct English accent said.
I spun around, straight into the barrel of a rifle pointed at my head. My right hand began to move to grab the barrel.
“Uh, uh, uh,” the woman said, taking a step backward, sensing what I was about to do. “Put your hands up.”
I did as I was told, unable to move my eyes from the black hole of the rifle’s barrel to see who held it. Then, fingers were in my hair, and my head was pulled sharply back.
A man’s voice said, “Is that her? It’s her, right?”
The woman said, “Yeah, that’s gotta be her. That one in white just called her Meredith.”
There was a metallic click, and the man’s voice said, “Baroness, Jean-Pierre here, I think we have her for real this time.”
This time? What does he mean this time? I thought.
There was a momentary hiss of static, then a woman’s voice said, “Excellent! Bring her on board.”
A deep rumbling ululation—a cross between a whale’s call and feedback from a subwoofer—rolled across the sky from the airship above us. It repeated once more.
The man named Jean-Pierre yelled, “Move out. We got what we came for. Back to the Brimstone… now.” The command was echoed by other voices, both male and female.
“Move, now,” he ordered, prodding me painfully in the small of my back with the barrel of his rifle. “I said, move. Faster!”
I stumbled off in the direction he indicated, just as thirteen more grim-faced and smoke-smeared men and women, all armed with rifles or spears emerged from the pit. Some paused to point their rifles back down into the pit and fire off a couple of rounds covering their comrades’ retreat.
“Stop!” Jean-Pierre ordered. I did as I was told but managed to steal a glance across the open mouth of the pit. I spotted Chou and Silas through the smoke, sprinting toward me. They were still several hundred feet away.
“Watch your heads,” someone called out.
I looked up and gasped when I saw that the airship, the Brimstone, was now only about thirty feet above us and descending rapidly. It was easily two hundred feet long. Attached to the bottom of the balloon was a gray gondola that ran almost its entire length. At the front of the gondola was a large glass canopy where the pilot sat. There were two doors, one at the front, the other at the rear. Two rows of portholes, one above the other, ran between them, suggesting there were at least two levels. Four large propellers, two at the front and two at the rear, jutted out from the sides of the gondola. The actual balloon was built from some metallic-looking silver material, but the top half was covered in something like solar panels.
As the Brimstone descended, the attackers backed up, occasionally firing at anyone from New Manhattan brave enough to pop their head up.
Beneath the gondola, ski-pad-like feet ran its entire length. The moment they made contact with the ground, the two doors on the side of the gondola closest to us flew open. The men and women around me surged forward, and I was pushed along with them.
I needed to buy myself time— time for Chou and Silas to reach me and... what? There were at least fifteen heavily-armed men and women on the Brimstone. What could anyone here do against them? All I could do was trust that they would do something, because if my kidnappers got me inside the airship and it lifted off… that would be it. Game over.
Jean-Pierre pushed me toward the gondola door. “Get in,” he ordered.
A surreptitious glance in the direction I’d last seen Chou and Silas showed me that they were now only a matter of seconds from reaching me. In what I knew was probably a futile attempt to delay them, I threw both hands against either side of the door opening and locked my elbows in place.
“No!” I yelled, “I’m not moving.”
“What the hell is that thing? Is that a… it’s a robot?” someone screeched behind me. Their voice was a mix of surprise, fear, and awe. There was no doubt they could only be referring to Silas.
I allowed myself a smile. If they thought Silas looked scary, just wait until Chou got ahold of them.
Jean-Pierre’s head swiveled in the direction I’d last seen Chou and Silas approaching from. The man yelled into the open door, “Baroness, we got a problem. Starboard side. Coming in hot and sweaty.” Then he turned his attention back to me. “I said get inside.”
I gasped in pain as his fist connected with my kidneys. It wasn’t a wild punch or particularly violent, but it was delivered with the precise amount of force needed to buckle my knees. My body suddenly turned to jelly. My fingers slipped from the doorway, and I collapsed onto my back, half-in, half-out of the airship. From this new vantage point, I saw that on the other side of the door was a corridor running the entire length of the gondola. Several doors lined the one side as well as three other corridors that bisected the main one. There was a stairwell a few feet from my head with a neatly-painted sign that read UPPER DECK and PILOTHOUSE.
A broad-shouldered muscular man came down the stairs taking them two at a time, struggling to negotiate a large metal object which he cradled in both arms through the narrow stairwell. It was some kind of multiple-barreled weapon, I realized as he stepped over me—like something out of an old Western.
“Well, don’t offer to help,” the man spat at Jean-Pierre.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” came the reply, followed by a bout of laughter. “Better hurry up or that robot’s likely to screw us all up.”
The big-man grunted as he hefted the machine-gun onto a large L-shaped metal spindle fixed to the gondola’s inner wall. He popped a latch on the wall and pushed open a four-by-three section of the gondola, then swiveled the multiple barrels of the weapon out through the opening. He took hold of the two metal handles at the opposite end, then swung the weapon in Chou and Silas’ direction.
I managed to squeak “No” before the machine gun opened up, but my words were lost to its deafening roar. Tracer bullets spat from the multiple barrels and arced through the air splitting trees apart where they hit. Chou and Silas zigged away, diving for cover as the barrage of lead sought them out.
And that was the last I saw before I felt myself lifted by the scruff of my sweater and dragged inside. The door closed behind me as the man swung the machine gun back and forth. His face was a mask of ecstasy as he continued to fire, hundreds of spent cartridges hitting the floor like metal rain around his feet.
My stomach lurched suddenly as the airship began to ascend. The machine-gun-toting man continued his barrage until the last round was fired. Then he reversed the process, disassembling the gun and closing the window.
“Did you get ‘em?” Jean-Pierre asked.
The big man turned and looked in my direction for the first time and smiled. “Pretty sure I nailed both of them.” His grin grew wider when he saw my obvious despair.
“Oh, don’t be sad,” Jean-Pierre said with mock sympathy, as he grabbed me by my arm and jerked me to my feet. “You’re about to make a whole bunch of new friends.” He shoved me toward a door at the end of the corridor.
When we reached the door, Jean-Pierre pointed at my backpack and, snapping his fingers, said, “Give me your backpack.” I undid the fasteners and handed the pack to him. He tossed it into an alcove adjacent to the door.
“Now, turn around and put your hands against the wall.”
I did as he said and tried not to react as he ran his hands over my clothing and checked all my pockets.
“Wait,” he ordered as he pulled out a key and unlocked the door. “Inside, now.”
As I stepped inside, I felt a hand push me hard between my shoulders, and I stumbled across the threshold, falling face-first onto the bare wooden floor. The door slammed behind me, and the key turned in the lock with an efficient sounding thunk.
I lay there for a while, trying to process what t
he hell had happened to me. I stood and looked around. The room was about eight by six with no windows and no furniture other than a disgustingly filthy plastic bucket for a toilet in one corner. There was no bed either, just a worn gray blanket crumpled in the corner.
I grabbed the blanket. It smelled of mildew and other things I didn’t even want to try and identify. I sat back down and pulled the blanket around my shoulders, not because I was cold but because it offered me just a little comfort.
These people had swooped in and kidnapped me. And if their comments when they captured me were anything to go by, they had been specifically looking for me. Which meant only one thing: they were agents of the Adversary.
I felt my spirits sink even further when I remembered that the woman who’d been firing the machine gun when I was being dragged onto the airship seemed convinced that she’d hit both Silas and Chou. I couldn’t bear the idea that my friends might be hurt or... worse.
I pulled the blanket tighter around me.
I’d lost Freuchen in the smoke. Hopefully, he was okay. But what about Albert? If Silas and Chou had been injured trying to rescue me, who would look after the boy? I consoled myself with the knowledge that Albert was a smart kid. He would get to New Manhattan. Emily and her people would surely look after him. Assuming Emily was still alive. I pushed that thought from my mind. What I needed to worry about now was how I was going to get off this airship and back to my friends.
And how exactly I was supposed to do that, I had no idea.
Eight
I settled into the corner of my cell, wrapped the smelly blanket around me like a shawl, and tried to form a plan. At some point, my kidnappers were going to come for me—it was surely only a matter of time. I had no idea what it was they or the Adversary wanted from me, but they had not killed me outright, so that meant they needed something important. I took a few deep breaths to try and make my thumping heart slow, but it wouldn’t. I kept seeing the machine gun flash and the heavyset man’s gleeful delight when he said he thought he’d hit both Silas and Chou. I wasn’t worried about Silas so much; the Nazis we’d encountered back on Avalon had shot him multiple times to no effect. But Chou was, in the end, only human. If she’d been hit… No! I just couldn’t think that way. The best thing I could do right now was try to conserve my energy. That way, I would at least have some of my wits about me when my captors did show up. I pulled the blanket tighter, leaned my head against the wall, and closed my eyes.
A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2) Page 8
