He straightened and peered from corner to corner, being careful to keep his hands from even brushing past the complicated controls and dangling levers. His mother used to have an expression about avoiding even the appearance of evil, and he stuck to it quite firmly as a matter of self-preservation.
The cargo hold was open and gaping. When Zeke poked his head inside he saw boxes stacked in the corners, and bags hanging from the ceiling. His old buddy Rector had told him a little bit about the way Blight was collected for processing, so he could guess what the bags were for; but the boxes weren’t labeled in any way, and he had no idea what they might contain. So the Clementine wasn’t moving gas; it was moving some other cargo instead.
Outside someone loudly dropped a wrench.
Zeke leaped back as if he’d been struck, though no one was near him and no one seemed to notice that he’d left the doorway where he’d been ordered to stand. He retreated quickly and planted himself beside the portal, where Mr. Guise and Parks were carrying their tools back inside. Neither man gave him a second look, though the captain complained when he tried to follow them. “You’re staying there, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“Good lad. There’s a strap above your head. Hang onto it. We’re shoving off.”
“Now?” Zeke peeped.
Mr. Guise pulled a jacket off the back of a chair and shrugged his shoulders into it. “Twenty minutes ago would’ve been better, but now will work.”
“It’d better,” Parks complained. “They’ll be on our tail any minute,” he said. Then he saw Zeke out of the corner of his eye, and stopped himself from saying more.
“I know,” the captain agreed with whatever abbreviated thought had been on Parks’s tongue. “And Guise is off by about forty minutes. Damn us all for blowing the hour’s head start.”
Parks gritted his teeth so hard that his jawline, visible outside his mask, was as sharp as granite. “It’s not my fault the thrusters were marked wrong. I wouldn’t have hit the goddamned tower on purpose.”
“No one said it was your fault,” Brink said.
“No one had better say it, either,” Parks growled.
Zeke laughed nervously and said, “I’m not, that’s for sure.”
Everyone ignored him. The Indian brothers came on board and immediately began yanking the portal shut. The rounded door stuck, then succumbed to the force of four arms pulling and popped itself into place. A wheel on the door was spun and locked, and everyone assumed a position in the crowded, cluttered deck.
“Where are the goddamned steam vents?” Mr. Guise threw up his fingers and flexed them into a fist.
“Try the left panel,” the captain urged.
Mr. Guise sat down in the main chair and it swiveled and rocked. He braced his feet down beneath the console and tried to draw the chair closer to the control panel, but it wouldn’t budge.
Zeke retreated against the wall and leaned there, his hand tangled in the strap that hung down above his head. He caught one of the Indian brothers—he didn’t know which one—looking at him, so he said, “You uh… haven’t been flying this ship long, have you?”
“Shut that kid up,” Parks said without turning around. “I don’t care how you do it, but shut him up or I’m going to shut him up.”
The captain glowered back and forth between Zeke and Parks, and he settled on Zeke, who was already blabbering, “I’ll be quiet! I’ll shut up, I’m sorry, I was just, I was only, I was making conversation.”
“Nobody wants your conversation,” Mr. Guise told him.
The captain agreed. “Just keep your mouth closed and you’ll be fine, and I won’t have to answer to that deranged old lady. Don’t make us throw you out without a net or a rope, boy. We’ll do it if we have to, and I’ll tell her it was an accident. She won’t be able to prove otherwise.”
Zeke had already assumed as much. He made himself as small as he could, crushing his bony back against the boards and trying hard not to choke on his own fear.
“You got that?” the captain asked, looking him straight in the eye.
“Yes sir,” he breathed. He wanted to ask if he could remove the mask, but he didn’t want to take the risk of angering anyone else. He was pretty sure that any given man on board would’ve shot him in the head as soon as told him “hello.”
The mask’s seals scrubbed against his skin, and the straps constricted his skull so hard he thought his brain would come out his nose. Zeke wanted to cry, but he was too afraid to even sniffle, and he figured that was just as well.
Mr. Cruise fumbled with a row of buttons, smashing them almost randomly, as if he didn’t know what any of them did. “There’s no release latch for those miserable clamps. How are we supposed to disengage from the—”
“We’re not docked like normal,” Parks told him. “We’re smashed against the tower. We’ll go outside and pry the thing out ourselves, if we have to.”
“We don’t have time. Where’s the grapple release? Is there a kit for it over there? A lever or something? We got the hooks to deploy for stability; how do we call them back to disengage? ”
Brink said, “Here, maybe this?” He leaned over his first mate and stretched one pale arm out to grab a lever and tug it.
The sound of something clacking outside relieved everyone inside. “Did that do it? Are we loose?” Mr. Guise demanded, as if anyone knew any better than he did.
The ship itself answered them, shifting in the hole it’d broken into the side of the half-built tower. It settled and listed to the left and down. Zeke felt less like theClementine had disengaged than that it was falling out of place. The boy’s stomach sank and then soared as the airship tumbled away from the building and seemed to freefall. It caught and righted itself, and the dirigible’s lower decks quit rocking like a grandmother’s chair.
Zeke was going to throw up.
He could feel the vomit that he’d swallowed after watching the Chinaman’s murder. It crept up his throat, burning the flesh it found and screaming demands to be let out.
“I’m going to—” he said.
“Puke in your mask and that’s what you’re breathing till we set you down, boy,” the captain warned. “Take off your mask and you’re dead.”
Zeke’s throat burbled, and he burped, tasting bile and whatever he’d last eaten, though he couldn’t remember what that might have been. “I won’t,” he said, because saying the words gave his mouth something to do other than spew. “I won’t throw up,” he said to himself, and he hoped that he gave that impression to the rest of the men, or that they could ignore him, at least.
A left-facing thruster fired and the ship shot in a circle before stabilizing and rising.
“Smooth” the captain accused.
Parks said, “Go to hell.”
“We’re up,” Mr. Guise announced. “We’re steady.”
The captain added, “And we’re out of here.”
“Shit,” said one of the Indian brothers. It was the first English Zeke had heard from either of their mouths, and it didn’t sound good.
Zeke tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t. He asked, “What’s going on? ”
“Jesus,” Captain Brink blasphemed with one eye on the rightmost window. “Crog and his buddy have found us. Holy hell, I figured it’d take him a little longer. Everybody, buckle down. Hang on tight, or we’re all of us dead.”
Sixteen
Swakhammer shined his lantern at a pile of broken and buried crates that had been stacked haphazardly and left to wobble and sink. It seemed to be the only way forward.
“Me first,” he said. “We ought to be far enough away from Maynard’s that maybe we’ll miss the worst of the swarm. Those things are relentless. They’ll try to dig through the floor until their hands wear off, and the louder they get, the more of their number they’ll draw.”
“Away from us,” Briar mumbled.
“Here’s hoping. Let me take a look around up there and make sure.”
He lifted one big leg to stomp on the bottom crate and it sank a couple of inches, squishing down into the muck. Once the crate had stopped drooping, he brought the other leg around and climbed slowly up the rickety pile. A set of reinforcing metal bands peeled back with a splintering scrape that was louder than gunfire in the muffled underground.
Everyone cringed and held silent and still. Lucy asked, “Do you hear anything?” Swakhammer said, “No, but let me look.”
Briar shuffled and lifted her boot up out of the muck, but she was forced to put it right back where it had been sinking. There was no place sturdy enough to stand without feeling the slow, sticky draw of the wet earth. “What are you looking for? More rotters?”
“Uh-huh.” He pressed the back of his shoulder against the trap-door and locked his knees. “East way was plugged up with them. We’ve gone east underneath ’em, but I don’t know if we’ve gone east enough to miss the back end of the swarm. Everybody quiet now,” he said. The crates groaned beneath him and the mud slurped terribly at the cheap pine corners, threatening to bring the whole stack down. But the structure held, and Swakhammer strained to move himself quietly—and to lift the door without making a noise. “Well?” Hank asked, a little too loudly.
Lucy shushed him, but she looked up at the armored man and her eyes asked the same question.
“I think it’s clear,” he said. He did not sound convinced, but the huddled crowd below heard no hint of shuffling, scratching, or moaning, either, so the silence was taken as a good sign.
Swakhammer lowered the door again and addressed the group as softly as his altered voice would permit. “We’re at the apothecary’s on Second Avenue, right underneath old Pete’s storage cellars. As far as I know, there’s no connecting space between this basement and Maynard’s. Lucy, you know how to get to the Vaults from here, right?”