Flaming Zeppelins Read online

  We found ourselves clinging to the limbs of the pine, the shattered pieces of our former airborne ride raining all around us, and slowly above us the bright balloon lost its special kind of air, withered like a geriatric woman’s breasts, fell down over us and the top of the great tall tree, concealing us in a rubbery darkness.

  Carefully, we climbed from beneath the balloon, clutching at limbs.

  It was decided that the others would go to the ground, and that I, being a poor climber, would wait amongst the pine limbs, draped over them like a lumpy rug.

  They went down to search for the scattered supplies, and in time, a metal box that had been in a compartment under one of the cushions was recovered. There were all manner of things inside. A pistol. Ammunition. Flares. A first-aid kit. A large hacking instrument. A kerosine lantern wrapped tight with cotton and cloth. A corked bottle of kerosine, also wrapped in cotton and cloth. And, for me, most importantly, a rope.

  Mr. Twain climbed up to help me, which for a man his age was remarkable. He removed his coat and shirt and managed a rig for me out of them, so the rope wouldn’t cut into me too badly. I was also protected by my vest. The rope was attached to me and dropped over a strong limb. Below, Verne and Passepartout helped lower me down.

  While Mr. Twain restored himself to his shirt, and I rubbed my chest with my flippers, trying to dispel some of the rope pain, for in spite of shirt and vest, I had been temporarily indented, Passepartout clambered monkey-like back up the tree, slipped under the balloon. Using his pocket knife to cut the rubber around the cables loose, he managed, with much effort, to push the balloon free of the pine. It dropped to hang in the boughs of another tree.

  On the way down, Passepartout, in continued monkey-like fashion, swung over to that tree, and with a bit of effort kicked the balloon loose of that tree. It fell in a flutter and a crash to the forest floor, not far from where we stood.

  When Passepartout was on the ground, Mr. Verne said, “And why, may I ask, did you bother with that business?”

  “Because we may need shelter,” Passepartout said. “I thought the balloon might make quite a good one. At least for keeping the rain off. From the lushness of this island, it is my guess it rains frequently.”

  Mr. Verne thought about that for a moment. “Of course. Sam, what do you think?”

  “What’s to think,” Mr. Twain answered. “He is as right as rain, so to speak. Thing I’m worried about at the moment is food. What little we had, those crackers, got knocked all over this island or jostled out at sea.”

  “Tubers,” Passepartout said. “There are quite a few of those about. We can dig those up. And we do have matches.”

  “And, with the sea nearby,” Mr. Verne said, “we should be able to wash them and clean them. We might even catch some fish.”

  “We have quite a fisherman right here,” Mr. Twain said, nodding at me.

  I pushed my chest out with pride.

  A fish would have been good right then.

  Several would have been better.

  Fish are good to eat and they give me solace.

  Like masturbation, they relax me.

  Did I mention that I think it is okay to masturbate?

  “It is my guess that Ned would very much like to dip himself in the sea,” Mr. Verne said.

  I wrote on my pad:

  THAT’S RIGHT. I WOULD. I LIKE THE OCEAN AND SLOW SWIMS AND EATING FISH.

  “What a strange place,” Mr. Twain said. “Visibility on the ground is good, but the mist, it hangs high up, and from what we could see, almost to the edge of the beach. Can you explain it, Jules?”

  “Perhaps the foliage, a number of large beasts. They breathe air in, but they breathe out something quite different, like humans. It maybe makes the mist.”

  “That doesn’t work for me,” Mr. Twain said, “but it’s better than anything I can come up with it.

  I wrote:

  IT COULD BE MAGIC.

  “I do not believe in magic,” said Mr. Verne.

  “What we don’t understand, even if there is an explanation, might as well be magic. So, I’m with Ned. Magic it is.”

  We decided to break into two parties. Mr. Twain and I were given the task of taking me to the sea for a dip, as well as a search for food or water. Since we could hear the crashing of the ocean from where we were, there was little chance we might get lost. There was, however, no true trail that we could see, so we assumed our journey might be a tedious one.

  It was made a lot more pleasant than it might have been for my belly, but for the discovery of the cruiser. It was popped out to full size, and Mr. Twain and I climbed on board. I worked the switch, and with a hiss it rose off the ground.

  “Seems no worse for wear,” Mr. Twain said.

  “We’ll start building a shelter,” Mr. Verne said. “Maybe recover some of the food that was dropped out of the balloon basket. You might want to be back here before dark, however, considering what attacked us up there, no telling what there is in the depths of these woods, or even along the beach.”

  “Daylight won’t protect us,” Mr. Twain said.

  “No, but at least you can see it coming,” Mr. Verne said.

  “Good point,” Mr. Twain said.

  “There is the large knife…the machete from the survival box,” Passepartout said. “You may have to make way for the cruiser. Take it.”

  Mr. Verne opened the box, took out the machete and gave it to Mr. Twain.

  I felt Mr. Twain and I had gotten, as Buffalo Bill might say, the better end of the stick. Our task, daunting as the undergrowth might be, was child’s play compared to finding a few dirty crackers strewn about the forest floor, and possibly a water bottle.

  We started out, and it was a rough go. Limbs smacked us, and several times Mr. Twain had to get out of the cruiser and hack us a path. Tired and wheezing, he would gratefully mount the cruiser again, and off we would go. This was our method for some time, inching our way through the jungle, me following the smell of the sea. And let me tell you, dear readers, that smell, to me, was as fine as any whiff of French perfume.

  After some time, we burst out of the thick growth and moved beyond the edge of the mist, sweaty and dirty, onto the white sand shore and the sight of waves crashing fast and furious in rolls of foam.

  “I wonder where we are,” Mr. Twain said. “We must be off the coast of Spain or Italy… But which island is this? It seems unlike any I’m aware of in the Mediterranean.”

  I took my pad and marker and wrote:

  THE WIND WAS HIGH. WE SAILED FAST. WE COULD BE ANYWHERE.

  Mr. Twain nodded. “You’re right. We could be anywhere.”

  I stared at the sea and licked my lips.

  “Go,” Mr. Twain said. “I intend to dampen up, myself.”

  I pushed my pad against my vest, removed my fez, waddled to the water and went in. It was beauty itself. For now I was sleek and fast and part of the great sea, and in that moment, I was no longer Ned, but just a seal, a creature of instinct and muscle. I dove deep, and swam far, seeing silver flashes of fish. A free lunch, if I could catch it.

  And I could.

  I ate my fill. It was delightful to have a belly full of fish. I decided to catch more, take them to shore so that they might be carried back. But then, as I rose out of the water, looked back, saw Mr. Twain stripped of his clothes, frolicking in the sea, I smelled something that made my whiskers twitch and my flippers flip.

  Seal nookie.

  I might have been civilized by a better brain, by experience and books, but when that smell hit my nose, I was nothing more than a horny seal with a little pickle dick hard as a coral reef.

  I found her sunning on a rock. Her and about fifty other seals. She flirted with me a bit, finally gave me her rear. I mounted her. And then it was over and she was gone, back into the sea with the others.

  I had no real urge to follow them. There was no real regret when they swam out of sight. I was no longer of their world, but I felt empty. I
had mated, but it had been nothing more than that. A cheap, sordid moment on a warm rock. I was embarrassed. I hoped, that from where Mr. Twain was, he could not have identified that it was me. Though with the metal cap on my head, shining in the sunlight, it was quite possible that during my moment of digression I was visible, hunkering up there on the rock, wetting my wick like a common beast.

  Embarrassed, I entered the water again, found a large fish, nabbed it by the head in my teeth, and swam back to shore with it.

  Unfortunately, I ate it before landfall. So, I had to go back and catch another. Luckily, it was an even larger specimen.

  I dropped it on the sand just as Mr. Twain was coming out of the sea, nude, dripping, and tired. I made a noise, and he saw me and my fish, and smiled. It was good to see him smile. In that moment, I think he must have felt pretty good. The sea is such a revitalizer of spirit.

  I went back into the sea. Went three times. Each time I came back with another fish. Now there were four fish. All were rather large. I had lived up to the praise Mr. Twain had given me.

  Mr. Twain dressed while I replaced my pad and pencil, pushed my hat on my head.

  We started back, and as we went, the sun dipped down and turned a fiery red. It fell toward the sea, and made a flaming fruit on the far side of the ocean, then melted slowly into the sea. It would have been a strange and beautiful sight, had we been returning to Mr. Verne’s beach house, but out here, not knowing where we were, it was hard to feel jovial, and that mist above and beyond, hanging there hour after hour, gave me a sensation of creepiness that made my slick seal hair stand up like porcupine quills, made the long whiskers on my face twitch involuntarily.

  “I believe we have let this beautiful sunset keep us from doing what Jules suggested. Be back before dark.”

  There was, however, still a slash of red in the sky, and we used it to guide us as we climbed onto the cruiser and started back.

  Things were good in that moment, but my experiences had taught me one sure thing.

  Never feel too secure. Life always has a loose sphincter somewhere, and it will let go when you least expect it, drench you from head to toe. Or, in my case, nose to tail.

  Thirteen: Ned’s Journal Continues: Back at Camp, Shelter and a Fish Dinner, a Cry in the Night

  We were all heroes that day. We had all done well.

  Mr. Twain and I returned with fish. Mr. Verne and Passepartout had built a shelter out of the balloon. And it was a nice one. They had cut strips of rubber from it, stretched it over limbs and drooped in on two sides and at the back. Only the front of our shelter was open.

  They had found a fistful of crackers, a water bottle, and not twenty feet from where we had crashed, a small spring feeding a narrow, slow-flowing creek.

  They had also gathered wood, and using matches from the supply box, we had a fire, and soon, cooking fish. I confess that I did not mention that I had already eaten many fish. I like fish, you see. I like them raw just fine. But cooked is all right. If you have the patience. Having already eaten several gave me the patience.

  For the moment we had shelter, water, food, and companionship, and by eating my piece of fish cooked, I could perhaps appear a bit more sophisticated.

  It was bad enough I had been driven by my baser instincts to mount a seal I didn’t even know, but I had also stuffed my belly like a glutton, thinking not once of my hungry partners. I was grateful that in the end I had had enough ambition to go back into the deeps and bring out dinner for everyone else.

  After dinner, Mr. Twain, full of fish, having had a drink at the stream, began to talk, and he was very funny. He gave two of his after-dinner speeches, then recited a very funny story about how it was to go the barber, and finally he quoted aloud from an article he had written called “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.”

  Mr. Verne was howling, and I was rolling about on the ground, the both of us having read, or attempted to read, the long-winded, aimless tales by Mr. Cooper. Passepartout just grinned. He had not read the stories.

  Except for the fact that by having read the Cooper tales we were familiar enough with them to enjoy Mr. Twain’s oral article with an expulsion of great soul-satisfying mirth, I am of the opinion that Passepartout was, in fact, the luckiest of we four. For unlike us, he had not had the original pain of trying to digest and make sense of the stories.

  After a time the cooking fire, which was too warm for comfort anyway, burned low, and the conversation turned to females. Mr. Twain told us of the great love of his life, his wife Olivia, and Mr. Verne told us of his life and loves, but Passepartout was a veritable rabbit packed with sexual adventures. Many of them harrowing and funny, and, I must confess, stimulating.

  I, having only a small erasable pad to write with, and being bashful, did not feel driven to try and sort out dim memories of my matings with the female clan before my brain enhancement. Nor did I wish to recall the earlier events of the day, desperately hunching a warm seal on a warm rock in the ocean.

  Finally, after being coated in water from the creek by Mr. Twain, (he carried it to me in the water bottle that had been found) I turned in, as did the others. Our beds were soft piles of leaves, the air was warm, our bellies full. Soon, we were fast asleep.

  This was our life for several days. Eating fish that I caught, and the roots that the others dug, drinking from the spring and telling tales into the night.

  At that moment in time, I felt that our lives were good ones. In Europe, probably all over the world, Martian invaders were wreaking havoc, and here we were, relatively cozy, no immediate worries other than me easily catching a few fish, the others digging up tubers like lazy bears, sitting around the campfire at night telling tales, and me in the dark, when they weren’t looking, pulling the old tuber. I suspected they might be pulling tubers as well, but I felt it impolite to ask or lie awake listening.

  It was quite the wonderful life.

  And it made us all feel guilty.

  The lot of us wanted to return to Europe, and see what we, as earthlings, could do to combat this ugly Martian menace. It was my opinion, that if they could be stopped, they might be edible. There could turn out to be a really positive side to the whole thing. A lot of people, and at least one seal, could be well fed on the bodies of those Martians.

  After all, it wasn’t like eating human or seal flesh.

  They were just big octopi, or octopussies. Whatever the term might be.

  Kill them. Stop them. Eat them. Sounded like a plan to me.

  I don’t know exactly how long we lived like this, because I lost track of time after seeing the sun go down seven times, and it is my guess it may have gone down another seven times before fate, as I originally suggested it would, let its sphincter go.

  We were asleep, having had a particularly entertaining night of talk and excessive food (I caught a lot of fish that day, not counting the ones I ate while at sea, and we all ate an excessive amount of cooked tubers), and I was dreaming of a fish the size of Jonah’s whale when we were startled awake by a cry in the night.

  It came from some distance, but it was loud.

  “It sounds like someone in pain,” Mr. Twain said, rising up on one elbow.

  “Or someone who is very angry,” Mr. Verne said. “Or both,” Passepartout said.

  “Could it be one of those sky monsters?” Mr. Twain said.

  “It could be anything, Samuel,” Mr. Verne said. “But what did it sound like to you?”

  “What I said originally. Someone in pain.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Since it isn’t any of our business,” Mr. Twain said, “I suppose we will check into it.”

  Mr. Verne was already up, slipping on his shoes. “I think that we must.”

  Mr. Verne took the pistol from the box, made sure it was loaded, then dropped the box of ammunition in his loose coat pocket.

  Mr. Twain picked up the machete, and Passepartout found a heavy but not too long limb to carry as a club. I carrie
d with me only my wits.

  I doused myself in spring water as a refresher, and soon as Mr. Verne brought the collapsible cruiser into full service, I, along with the others, mounted it. Lighting the lantern from the box, fastening it to the front of the cruiser, we started out, Mr. Verne at the controls.

  The sound, which was now more of a groan than a cry, continued, and we pushed on through the dense foliage in pursuit of it.

  A part of me thought this a foolish idea, but another part of me, and I almost said the human part of me, for I had been changed considerably by the introduction of a larger brain and by the friendship of others and the addition of thumbs, which was the device that allowed me to pull, rather than lick (on occasion, I still do that) the old tuber, knew we had to give it examination. It might be someone in pain, in need of our assistance. And a gentleman did not sit on his hands, or flippers, when there was a cry of distress.

  Or it might be a scary monster that wanted to eat us. And in that case, sitting on your hands, or flippers, is appropriate.

  The night was not very bright because of the mist that surrounded the island, but the full moon, like a greasy doubloon seen through cheesecloth, provided far more light than one would have thought possible in a land of mist, and, of course, we had our lantern.

  Still, it was not high noon, and we went along, bumping up against trees, having to get out and clear brush (actually, I didn’t get out; I would have slowed us down considerably), looking this way and that for a trail.

  Finally, we decided it was best to just head to the beach, listen from there, and then find our way back in. Trying to thread our way to the cries in the dark was impossible. But, out on the beach, once we located the cries, perhaps we could ride directly to them. It was my surmise that the sounds were not too deeply in the woods, but along the edge.

  We found the trail that Mr. Twain and I had cleared, and once on that, our time picked up. As we neared the beach, we realized that the sound had been coming from there all along, not the woods at all. Something about the island, the trees, the crashing sea, had made the source and distance of sound hard to determine.