At first, I thought it was just his shadow, but that couldn’t be because the sun was in the east still. Whatever this was, moved in the same direction as Abernathy, toward Jean-Pierre and the other men. The men began patting at their bodies as the shadow-thing separated, flowed up their legs, over their chest, and into their mouth and nose. The two men fell to the ground, writhing like the woman.
Abernathy reached the first of the still-bound crew and, like a priest giving the benediction, covered the man’s face with his hand. The crewman’s back arched violently, and he fell backward. He started convulsing too. The other crewmembers struggled, wriggling and rolling from his touch as he made his way up the line, trying to get away from Abernathy. Still, the restraints did their job—the restraints I had tied on at least half of them. They didn’t stand a chance. In my attempt to ensure their safety, I had doomed them all to whatever it was that Abernathy was doing to them.
“We’ve got to help them,” I said, turning to face Chou.
“No!” Freuchen said. “Look.” He pointed down to where Abernathy’s first victim, the woman, lay in the grass. Except now, she was sitting upright. She rose slowly to her feet and stood, staring directly ahead of her, wobbling slightly from side to side.
A man got stood up and waited silently just like her, slowly swaying like a branch in a breeze while we watched in horrified silence as Freuchen worked his way down the line. He sent his shadow after those that managed to roll or crawl away.
“He’s creating a fighting force,” Freuchen said when there were only three people left.
I shuddered and said, “What do you mean?”
Freuchen turned to me. “Why else vould he do this? He’s creating a small army to try to stop us… to stop you. It is the only thing that makes any sense.”
“That’s absurd,” I said, but deep down, I suspected he was right. Below us, the thing that had once been Tommy Two-Thumbs released his final victim. The woman toppled sideways, shivering and trembling, what looked like black foam bubbling from her mouth.
As if he had been aware of our presence all along, Two-Thumbs turned and raised his head skyward. I felt his electronic eyes burning through the space between us. Then, one after the other, the men and women he had changed turned and stared skyward at us too. The eighty feet or so separating us from him no longer felt as safe as it should have. A terrible thought came to me: If Abernathy was able to send whatever that shadow-thing was made of across the ground, who was to say it couldn’t fly too?
“We need to get out of here. Now,” I said.
Chou leaped into the pilot’s seat. A moment later, the propellers were whirring again, and we were ascending. Fast.
I watched Abernathy grow smaller and smaller. Only when I couldn’t see him anymore did I start breathing again.
Thirteen
For the next fifteen minutes, we traveled in complete silence while Chou urged the Brimstone ever higher. But the horror of what we’d just witnessed couldn’t keep us silent for long.
“What was that?” I blurted out. “I mean, what the hell was that?”
Freuchen stared at the western horizon, saying nothing.
“I think it was a trap,” Chou said.
“A trap?” Freuchen rumbled. “Set for who?”
“Us?” I asked.
Chou shook her head. “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Whatever created that sphere seems to have taken over Abernathy with a very clear purpose.”
I tilted my head questioningly.
“To transform Abernathy into something capable of changing people. Changing them into… whatever they were.”
It wasn’t too much of a leap to imagine exactly what was behind it. “You think it was the Adversary, don’t you?”
“That would be the most logical conclusion, I think.”
I turned my attention to Freuchen. “You said you thought he was creating a fighting force.”
“Yes. Vat other reason vould he… it have to do vat he did to those people? He could have just slaughtered them and been done vith it.”
I thought about that for a few moments. “But why would he need to build an army? Why not just come after us himself?”
Freuchen shrugged. “Perhaps he knows something ve don’t.”
“Well, considering how little we actually know, that’s not too high a bar to set,” I replied sarcastically.
Chou said, “Right now, Abernathy is the least of our worries. Look.” She nodded ahead of us.
Where the early morning sky had been clear just minutes ago, black thunderheads now crept insidiously across our path, obscuring the horizon completely. Lighting flashed within the billowing gray and black clouds. Chou slowed the Brimstone to a halt, but still, the clouds crept closer, pushing closer to us by the second.
“Can we outrun it?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Chou answered. “We’re going to have to try to get above it.”
A sudden gust of wind buffeted the Brimstone, rattling the airship’s superstructure. Ahead, the canopy of the Everwood whipped, leaves flew into the air, dancing, and whole branches were ripped from trees and flung about like they were nothing.
“Hold on!” Chou said through clenched teeth. Freuchen and I grabbed onto anything that we could as Chou raised the nose of the Brimstone, and we started to ascend. I squealed as a streak of lightning flashed across the sky to starboard, then I jumped again as a peel of thunder crashed over us.
Chou let out an expletive that even my translating ability seemed incapable of understanding. She pushed a set of levers all the way forward, and I could just make out the sudden rise in the struggling engine’s thrum over the roaring of the storm.
“What’s wrong?” I yelled.
“Strong headwind. It has slowed us almost to a stop. She leaned forward and cursed again, the sky above us blocked by the huge balloon. A violent gust of wind smashed into the Brimstone’s gondola, swinging us like a pendulum. I was flung toward the cockpit window and would surely have cracked my head open if it wasn’t for Freuchen’s quick reactions. He grabbed me by my arm with his free hand, the other holding onto an I-shaped stanchion that ran from the floor to the ceiling. He reeled me into him like he was landing a fish. I grabbed his belt, then staggered to the co-pilot’s seat and fastened the safety harness around my shoulders.
Another bolt of lightning flashed so close to us it seared my eyes, leaving a white ghost of itself on my eyelids.
“Vat happens if ve are struck?” Freuchen asked nervously.
“I don’t know,” Chou said, her lips barely moving as she fought against the controls. “We will probably explode, I suppose,” she added.
“Vunderful. Just vunderful.”
“Can I do anything?” I asked.
Chou shook her head. “No. I just need to get—“
I screamed as we were swept suddenly sideways, swatted like a fly by a violent gust of wind. Memories burst into my mind; of the F-150 and the car crash that had killed my best friend. Of the depression that ultimately led me down the road that brought me to this place. Lights began to blink on the console accompanied by an insistent alarm. Chou flipped a switch, and the alarm stopped. The blinking red light did not.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“We have lost one of the engines.”
“Oh, great.”
“Not to vurry. Ve have three more.”
A second light began to flash next to the first.
I started to say something but instead screamed a warning as something about ten feet long flew through the air toward us and smashed through the cockpit side window. A tree branch, the pithy white interior exposed, passed through the narrow space between Chou and my head and struck the stanchion behind us. A few inches either way and one or the other of us would have been instantly dead. Freezing wind and rain ripped through the hole it had made. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see a disemboweled Freuchen. But instead, he lay on the floor, eyes wide in surpris
e, staring back at me as the Brimstone shook and rattled like it was a runaway freight train. The gondola swung left and right, a prisoner of the ever-changing wind.
Why is this world always trying to kill us? I wondered.
A sudden swirling updraft grabbed ahold of us, and we began to rotate like a corkscrew. Chou’s hands were off all the controls; she’d given up on fighting the storm. We were utterly at its mercy. I felt my stomach surge as we spun faster and faster. Freuchen groaned in discomfort behind me. The world beyond the gondola was nothing but vast globules of smoky grays and blacks like we were trapped in some nightmarish ‘70s lava lamp. The truth was, I didn’t know which way was up or down. For all I knew, we could be spiraling toward the ground.
Chou lolled in her seat. I tried to focus my eyes on her chest, the spinning making it almost impossible; she was breathing, I was sure of it.
I heard someone let out a long panic-filled, “Arrrrrghhhh,” and only realized it was me when another violent buffeting slammed my mouth shut and cut me off.
The nose of the Brimstone dipped violently until my harness was the only reason I didn’t fall out of my seat and end up face-first against the cockpit window. Then we swung upward just as dramatically… and the chaos stopped. The clouds surrounding us thinned and dissipated, replaced by a brilliant blue sky. Gradually, the spinning slowed, then ceased altogether. The sound of the storm faded, replaced by a chaotic warble and trill of numerous alarms.
I was panting like I’d just outrun a pack of wolves.
A hand touched my right shoulder.
“Meredith, are you alright?” Freuchen asked, breathing hard too.
I don’t know. Am I? I thought. “Yes, I’m okay,” I said after a quick self-assessment.
Below us, the thunderstorm whirled and circled like a pack of starving wolves. Chou had done it, I realized. She’d managed to save us all, again.
“Chou!” I said, suddenly remembering that she was hurt. I unbuckled myself and dropped to my knees in front of her. A thin cut ran from the middle of her forehead just above her right eye and extended back past her ear, exposing red raw skin where the branch had caught her with its glancing blow.
“Chou! Can you hear me?” I said as calmly as I could, shaking her knee.
Chou shifted against her restraints. Her head lifted from her chest, and her eyes fluttered open and focused on me.
“Ugh. What happened?” she groaned.
“You literally got hit by a tree,” I said, unable to keep the awe out of my voice as I pulled a quarter-inch splinter from the skin of her neck. She did not flinch. There were a bunch of smaller fragments embedded deeply around the wound that I’d need a needle and tweezers to get out.
“We are alive?” Chou asked.
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
Chou looked out over the storm raging beneath us. We were at least a thousand feet above it now and still ascending. She reached out and silenced the alarms, then with the flip of a couple of switches, she halted our ascent. Her eyes moved over the control panel.
“Two of our engines are down,” she whispered.
“Blast!” Freuchen said. “That cannot be good.”
Chou shook her head slowly. “Not as bad as it sounds. I was running them at full power, and I think they just shut down to ensure they did not burn out.”
Her eyes moved over the panel again, lingering on a set of large illuminated buttons. Two of them were blinking red, the others were all green. “I think if I just—“ She pressed each blinking button in turn. “Yes, that’s it.” The flashing lights turned green one after the other. She eased forward on the throttles, and the Brimstone began moving forward again.
“Here, let me check your injury,” Freuchen said, ducking under the tree limb to get close to Chou. He’d found a first-aid kit somewhere and began slathering an antiseptic cream onto her wound. I showed him how to apply a large Band-Aid to it. Despite the detour, we were making good headway again. The storm still raged below us, but it was continuing its erratic course inland, and we could see its furthest most edge approaching. A little over an hour later, the storm was well behind us, replaced by a thick layer of white cloud that looked like an almost perfect layer of freshly dropped snow.
“Ve are not going to be able to spot New Manhattan from this altitude,” Freuchen mused.
Chou nodded. “We are going to have to descend below the cloud base,” she said. She slowed the Brimstone to a crawl, then began to gradually take us down.
The world beyond the windshield became white.
“Meredith, I need you and Peter to be my eyes. Tell me if you see anything below us. I don’t want to fly us straight into the side of a mountain.”
I nodded and moved myself to the left side of the cockpit while Freuchen took the right.
Slowly, almost painfully, Chou allowed us to drop through the layer of cloud. We could see nothing beyond a few feet, and I felt my old nervousness return. But the cloud finally began to thin, and then we were out of it. Hundreds of feet below us loomed the canopy of the Everwood, still glistening from the downpour that must have washed over it just a short while earlier. The Brimstone continued to descend until it was a hundred feet above the forest canopy. Peeking just above the western horizon was the mountain range we’d crossed when we first landed. Hundreds of streams of smoke rose into the air, scattered across the thousands of square miles of forest between us and the range.
I felt my heart drop.
“There are so many camps,” I said. “How are we ever supposed to find New Manhattan?” I was growing more nervous by the minute, wondering what had happened to Albert and Silas after Freuchen and I had been kidnapped.
“Ve might have to take a best guess,” Freuchen said, his eyes scanning the forest.
“That will be too time consuming and dangerous,” Chou said. “We need to remember that the Brimstone probably raided many of these camps looking for Meredith before they found New Manhattan. We could be met with violence before we even land and explain ourselves.”
“Vell, vat other option do ve have then?”
“I have an idea,” I said.
I’d been watching the mountain range we’d had to climb over as it grew larger with every passing second. “We need to locate the bay where Captain Joel dropped us off. Then we can just retrace the route we took over the mountain. That’ll put us in the best position to spot the camp.”
“Ha!” said Freuchen, smacking a fist into the palm of his other hand. “You are a very smart human, Meredith.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks, I guess.”
Chou must have thought it was a good idea too because she gradually increased the speed of the Brimstone’s engines and began to take us up higher.
I’d made us all a meal from the Brimstone’s galley. It was surprisingly well-stocked with canned food and wild-picked fruit and vegetables. There was a decent-sized freezer that held a stock of fresh mystery meat I thought might be venison but could have been wild boar for all I knew. There was even an electric stove, and what I thought might be a microwave. I settled on pears and apples. Sliced them all up, sprinkled some sugar over Freuchen’s, and took the three bowls back to the cockpit. We ate in silence, watching as the mountain range, now just a few miles away, drew closer.
“How fast can this thing go?” I asked.
“It has a top speed of about sixty miles an hour, assuming there is no headwind to fight,” Chou said. “Faster still if we have a tailwind to aid us.”
“That’s awesome,” I said. This was seriously going to help our journey. I couldn’t guess how far away the collector was, but the Brimstone—God, I was really starting to hate that name—was going to be a huge asset for us.
“Look here,” Freuchen said, drawing our attention to the view beyond the windshield. “We are passing over the mountains.”
Chou and I both stood and stared down at the craggy gray rocks. When we first encountered it, we’d thought it probably ran for a few
hundred miles at least, but now we could see it was much further than that. Beyond the mountains, the sea glistened and scintillated. Somewhere out there, beyond the misty horizon, was Avalon. I wondered how Edward, Wild Bill, Evelyn, Bull, and the rest of our friends were doing. I felt a strong pull of homesickness for them and almost suggested it might be worth taking a quick detour to pay a visit, but I thought better of it.
“There!” Freuchen said. “Those are the same outcroppings ve saw ven ve first arrived. I’m sure of it, vich means that the cove must be in that direction.”
Chou adjusted our direction to take us south. From this height, we had a fantastic view of the terrain for miles and miles, and it wasn’t long before I excitedly yelled, “There! There’s the cove.”
The horseshow-shaped cove looked tiny from all the way up here, but it was the only similarly-shaped landmark within sight. It had to be ours. Chou drew parallel to it, then swung the Brimstone around to head back in the direction we had come.
“That outcropping looks familiar,” Chou said, pointing at a low-lying section of the mountain.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I think that’s it.”
Freuchen pointed at a thick column of smoke rising through the branches of the Everwood just a few degrees off to our left. “Vich mean that has to be New Manhattan.”
I threw my arms around Freuchen and hugged him hard. He stepped back, laughing, and gently swung me around then released me. I took my place in the co-pilot’s seat and watched as the plume of smoke gradually drew closer.
A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2) Page 15
