Flaming Zeppelins Read online

  “You, physician fella. Get that damn green man inside.”

  The Master Physician grabbed the monster at the elbow, led him off the promenade, onto the enclosed deck. Through the great glass windows he could see the vague shapes of the biplanes in the darkness.

  Annie was the first to fire. Her shot, as always, was a good one. She hit a pilot in his cockpit. The plane jerked, dove. Moments later there was an explosion and a flash of light as the biplane slammed into the shore near the Pacific Ocean.

  The biplanes were trailing the dark cigar shape, firing their simple guns. Blat. A beat. Blat. A beat. Blat. The guns were designed to fire with the beat of the propeller, slicing through at the precise moment of the blades’ spacing. It was clever. It was tricky. And it didn’t always work.

  Hickok was glad they were not the new German planes which fired dual Gatling guns as fast as they could work till the ammunition ran out.

  On the downside for them, the zeppelin had no real maneuverability. They were like a dying albatross besieged by falcons.

  Wood splintered on the promenade deck, bullets pocked, cracked, or exploded glass on the main deck. One bullet went through the glass, drove splinters into the creature’s face. A bullet tore through his upper left arm.

  He didn’t bleed.

  Another bullet took Buntline’s bowler hat, caused him to prostrate himself on the deck. The monster stood his ground, glass dangling from his chest. His kimono was torn and burned where the bullet had ripped through it and through his arm.

  The planes were attacking the zeppelin itself. Bullets slammed into the great rubber casing, and though it was designed to take terrific impact from hail, flying birds, and small arms fire, the heavy bullets were succeeding in pounding through.

  Hickok heard a hissing sound as the zeppelin let loose some of its helium. The good news was the big bag was actually a series of smaller gas cells. It could lose considerable helium and still stay airborne. The bad news was there was a limit to anything.

  A biplane passed in front of the promenade deck. Bull shot it the finger, then they all raised their Winchesters and fired at its rear end.

  Their shots smacked into the biplane’s tail assembly. A stream of fire raced along the fuselage, rolled around the plane as if it were a hoop the craft was jumping through. Then the flames grabbed at the seat and the pilot, burst him into a human torch. The plane spun. The blazing pilot freed himself from his seat, and even as the plane turned over and over, he dropped free, a burst of meteoric flame driven hard into the ocean.

  The plane exploded on the water. Flames spread on the surface, waves leapt wet and fiery until the fuel burned itself out.

  The zeppelin sailed along rapidly, propelled not only by its motors, but by a strong tail wind. The Japanese pilots no longer exposed themselves to the zeppelin’s defenders; they knew how unerringly accurate they were. Instead, they flew high above it, firing at the defenseless structure of the craft, causing it to collect damage.

  On the zeppelin’s bridge, pilot William Rickenbacher needed more steam. He was not used to working without a copilot, but Cody had insisted on a skeleton crew. William felt sick. Why had he agreed? Cody had given him a choice. He could have gone back with the others. His copilot, Manfred Von Richthofen, had been eager enough. But no. He wouldn’t let him. He didn’t want a dumb kid in command of his ship. Wanted to spare him the danger. What an idiot he had been. He had a wife and children. This was idiotic. He wasn’t a spy, and he wasn’t a fighter pilot. He was the captain of a luxury airship.

  Jesus. What had he been thinking?

  Had he been thinking?

  Not only were the biplanes tearing his craft apart, the storm was slamming it about. He was no longer sure of the difference between sea and sky. The only thing to do was to try and let the ship rise, propel it forward with full throttle.

  “Gib eet more steam,” he called through the command tube, trying to shape his words carefully, so his heavy German accent would not be misunderstood. “Gib eet more steam. Power ees dying. Ve are losing altitude.”

  In the steam room the workers struggled valiantly with coal scoops and chunks of wood, tossed them into the great oven. The heat was unbearable. Steam hissed. Motors hummed. Men groaned. The ship moved slightly faster, rose gradually.

  A biplane buzzed the bridge. William saw it as it passed. A moment later it turned in the darkness, came back. It fired a shot that blew out a fragment of the glass. Cold air embraced William, the blast nearly knocked him down. He turned, could see the plane’s shape, flying fast toward him.

  In that moment he knew there was no time to do anything, knew what was about to occur. His last thought was not of God, but of his wife Elizabeth, and his children, especially his favorite child, his little boy Eddie.

  Then a bullet spat from the biplane, zipped through the already destroyed window, caught Rickenbacher in the throat, opening a wound that looked like two rose petals falling apart. He fell face forward against the control console, blood rushing over the gears and dials.

  Before William’s corpse fell against the panel, the biplane’s pilot realized he was in trouble. In getting close to the zeppelin’s bridge, he had not allowed himself enough time to turn. He didn’t even pretend to work the control stick. The pilot threw his hands over his eyes as the plane struck the command deck, knocked off the propeller, and was driven into the side of the zeppelin like a dart. The front of the plane rubbed William’s body into a red smear. Fuel dripped from the damaged plane, trailed into the night air. Some of it dripped along the floor of the command deck, ran toward the door, slipped under the crack, fled along the corridor, was absorbed by the carpet.

  When the plane struck the zeppelin, there was such a jerk, on the promenade, Captain Jack was tossed forward. He caught the rail, and just when it looked as if he would regain his balance, the zeppelin lurched once more, and Captain Jack went over the side and was silently swallowed by darkness.

  Hickok tried to grab him as he went, but it was too late. The zeppelin tilted dramatically. All the defenders were tossed about. They struggled valiantly to hang on, grabbing at the rail, scratching at the promenade deck with their nails.

  Buntline felt himself flying forward, toward the broken window on the main deck. He knew he was a goner. Through the gap in the glass he went, out into blackness. But just when he was trying to remember the Lord’s prayer and decide if there was time to say it before he was splattered all over the Pacific, his jacket collar was snagged, and he was jerked inside, tossed on the floor.

  Buntline looked up to see the creature looking down on him with a solemn expression.

  “Thanks, old boy,” Buntline said. “You’re peachy by me.”

  Frankenstein’s creation did not reply.

  In Cody’s cabin, the collision of the plane hurled his head off its perch on the dresser. Had it not hit Goober in the side of the head, knocking him down, it might have smashed against the wall.

  The jar lay on its side, the liquid in it sloshing. Cody yelled through the tube. “Get me up. Get me out in the open where I can die like a man.”

  Goober, a knot forming on his head, put one hand to his wound, got his feet under him. He picked up Cody’s head, tucked it under his arm, darted out into the slanting hallway.

  “Check the bridge,” Cody said.

  Goober rushed forward, his head feeling as if it were giving birth to a child. When he reached the hallway that led to the bridge, he could smell the fuel from the Japanese plane. He hustled along, feeling colder as he went.

  When he reached the bridge, he saw a lumpy red smear that might have been Rickenbacher. It was smeared all over the console. The Japanese plane’s nose poked through the side of the zeppelin, and the pilot lay slumped in his seat. A freezing spray was blasting in from the outside.

  “Goddamn,” Cody said, when Goober turned his head upright, moved the jar around so he could see.

  “We’re done,” Goober said.

  “Hush yo
ur mouth, shorty. You are not dead till you’re dead. And you do not quit till you quit. I thought I was dead when I fought my duel with Yellow Hand. He was a tough customer. I was about ready to give up and die. But something in me said, ‘Don’t do that, Buffalo Bill. You stick in there.’ So, I stayed with it. Yellow Hand slipped on his own knife, stabbing his ownself to death. You got to stay with things. You never know how they will work out.”

  “I got a pretty good idea,” Goober said.

  “Quick,” Cody said. “Back to my cabin.”

  “I thought…”

  “Just do it!”

  Out on the promenade deck, the zeppelin began to roll back level. The Japanese planes were now closing for the kill. Bullets slammed the deck from all directions. Cetshwayo took a shot in the side, let out a yell.

  Annie and Hickok grabbed him under the arms, hauled him onto the main deck, laid him down. As they did, a plane came by so close its dual wings edged only six feet from the promenade railing.

  Bull, the only one left on the railing, slammed several shots from his Winchester into it as it retreated. At first he thought he had failed. Then the plane’s motor cut and there was a whistling sound as it went into a dive. This was followed by an explosion and a flash of light.

  Glancing over the railing to see if planes might be coming up from below, Bull was greeted with the sight of the glowing, dangling ladders.

  “Damn,” he spoke to himself. “That how them follow so easy in dark. See ladders.”

  Bull tossed the Winchester to his left hand, pulled his knife from under his jacket, moved around the railing hacking the ladders free.

  The steam man had a fire in its belly. Cody had ordered it kept going until they were out of this business. He wasn’t sure what he might need the steam man for, but he wanted to be prepared.

  His jar fastened to the steam man, Goober inside to work the controls, Cody returned to the bridge. Calling commands to the midget, the powerful steam man’s body shoved at the plane. The pilot, who they thought was dead, lifted his head just as the steam man managed to shove the plane through the wound it had made in the zeppelin’s side.

  “Sayonara,” Cody said.

  The pilot just looked sad as the plane fell backwards, said in Japanese, “Typical.”

  Cody, Goober and the steam machine were hurled backwards as the zeppelin, relieved of the plane’s weight, leapt skyward.

  Out on the promenade, Bull was slammed face down on the deck so hard his nose bled. Inside the main deck, the zeppelin’s defenders experienced the same moment of surprise.

  The advantage, although not immediately known, was that the zeppelin was now lost to the biplanes. They could no longer see it in the dark and the rain. They were also running out of fuel, so there was nothing left for them to do but turn back.

  The downside was the zeppelin had suffered many wounds in its rubber skin. Helium had been lost. The bridge was damaged. The zeppelin had no pilot. The steam man had been damaged by the sudden rise of the ship; it had caused the steam man’s legs to crimp, and it had fallen. Somehow, Goober had gotten the front of his trousers hung up. As the machine lay on its side near the gap in the wall, Goober said, “I’m coming out of this thing, Cody. I’m jammed up in here. It’s pinching my pee-pee.”

  Goober worked the trap door open, tore the front of his trousers loose and slipped out on the floor. He hastened to unfasten the clamps that held Cody’s head in place. Finished, he clutched the jar under his arm as they stood looking at the wheezing steam man lying on its side.

  Cody, peering through the glass, said, “I’m gonna miss that dude.”

  “Not me,” said Goober. “It pinched my pee-pee. And it’s hot. And it’s hard work, too.”

  “Give me a crank, will you?”

  Below in the boiler room all was panic. The great furnace had been in the process of being loaded when the plane came loose and the zeppelin jumped. Flaming hunks of wood and coal had been tossed from the furnace; the three men in the boiler room were frantically attempting to put out the flames with small tanks of water.

  It was pointless.

  The zeppelin dropped as if the bottom had come out of the world, and the ocean, like rolling concrete, came up to meet it on the way down.

  When the zeppelin hit the stormy sea the hot furnace exploded. Flames danced on the water, then hissed out, leaving boiling white smoke, charred lumber and stinking rubber in its wake. Waves crunched the decks and cabins, wadded up what was left of the helium-filled tubing as if it were onion skin paper. The rain cried on the remains. Lightning slashed yellow sabre cuts across the sky.

  The corpses of the boiler room workers, par-boiled, popped to the top, bobbed on the waves like corks. Floating with them was the jar containing Cody’s head. He was cursing violently, calling for Goober.

  The waves shoved Cody up, dropped him in a trough of foaming water; he saw the corpse of Goober float by face down. Then the whitecaps turned his jar and tossed him; water ran down the speaking tube, joined the mixture inside his container. Cody licked at the water. Salty, of course. But it did kind of neutralize the pig urine.

  For once, Cody was glad he didn’t have a stomach; all he could feel was a kind of dizziness.

  Nearby, clinging to planks, were Hickok, Annie and Bull. Cetshwayo and Frankenstein’s monster were nowhere to be seen.

  There were oil-fueled flames burning on the water. In the light they provided, Hickok, clasping his plank, saw the others. The dead boiler room workers, Goober popping about, Annie and Bull clinging to a plank together, and finally, the head of Cody, surfing the waves in his sturdy Mason jar.

  Hickok paddled over to Bull and Annie, pulled his bowie knife from its scabbard, stuck it in his plank, said, “Bull, we got to get hold of Cody, then find a way to lash some of this junk together.”

  Bull nodded.

  Hickok swam to Cody’s jar, grabbed it, swam it over to Annie. Then he and Bull set about building a raft. It was tedious, but by dog paddling about, grabbing planks and cutting strips of floating rubber, they were able to fasten a half-dozen pieces of wood together.

  By the time they finished jerry-rigging a raft, got Annie and Cody loaded on it, they were exhausted; the sun was burning through the haze, the rain was dying out, and the ocean was beginning to settle. Then the sharks came.

  Hickok said, “No rest for the wicked, and the good don’t need any.”

  Unconsciously, Hickok reached for his guns. But his sash was empty. They had been lost. He had even lost the bowie knife.

  There were about a dozen of the beady-eyed bastards circling the makeshift craft. One of them came near, rolled on its side, showed its dark dead eyes. It opened its mouth to reveal a hunk of dark flesh dangling from its teeth. Part of an arm actually. They recognized it. It belonged to Cetshwayo.

  “That not good,” Bull said.

  Cody, in his jar, was singing drinking songs.

  “He’s starting to lose it,” Hickok said.

  “It’s the salt-water in the jar, mixed with his chemicals,” Annie said. “And he could use a crank.”

  Hickok cranked him.

  Cody went silent for a moment. Hickok held the jar in his lap, tilting it so he could look down into Cody’s face.

  “It’s all right, pard. Or as good as it could be under the circumstances.” Hickok turned the jar so Cody could see the contents of the raft. “We’re the only survivors.”

  “All I want is a body so I can fight,” Cody said. “If I can go down fighting, I’m all right.”

  Hickok placed Cody in the center of the raft, leaned back, waited for it to get hot and unbearable. He thought of food briefly, thought of water longer, then the flames on the water died and the sun rose high and hot and their flesh began to burn. The water in Cody’s jar began to bubble.

  Annie thought of Frank. For a long moment she remembered how he held her. Hickok held her, too. He was a passionate lover. But there was an urgency about him, a desire to get on with the act.
Frank wasn’t like that. He was slow about his business. God she missed him.

  She opened her eyes, looked at Hickok. He had his eyes closed. His long hair was wet and matted. His clothes clung to him, drying slowly in the sun. She thought he was gorgeous.

  She closed her eyes, tried to grab back her memories of Frank. But this time, they wouldn’t come. She thought of Hickok again, back on the zeppelin, in her cabin, in her bed.

  Bull looked out at the great expanse of water and thought of the Greasy Grass. Greasy Grass was what his people called the Little Big Horn, where Custer and his soldiers died. The Greasy Grass had looked like a sea of grass, and this ocean, right now, looked much the same way.

  The Greasy Grass. What a fight.

  Bull thought: Bad day for white guys. Big day for red guys.

  He wished he had participated, but it was over by the time he tried to join the fight. He had always felt slighted by that.

  Bull closed his eyes, saw Crazy Horse standing before him, wearing only a loin cloth, lean and strong with braided hair. He wore war paint. Spots on his body. He had the corpse of a hawk fastened to the side of his head.

  He thought of how Crazy Horse had died. Held by his own people, bayonetted by soldiers.

  “Sorry, friend,” he said softly in Sioux. “I will soon join you.”

  Buffalo Bill dreamed of women. All the women he had known and loved. He dreamed last of Lily Langtry. Her long white limbs, her thick dark hair, the darker patch between her legs.

  God, at least Louisa could have let him finish. She already had him dead to rights. What would another half a minute have mattered?

  Oooooh, that was one evil woman.

  Yeah. He had made up his mind. He got out of this pickle, he was divorcing that bitch.

  By midday the sharks had become so bold it was necessary to use one of the two planks they had kept for paddles to fight them off.

  All Hickok could think of was one of them coming up from below, hitting the center of their leaky, poorly lashed raft, sending them all into the ocean to be sorted out by hungry sharks.

  The evil fish came more often. Hickok and Bull fought them back constantly, banging at their snouts, poking at their eyes. Bull wounded one of them bad enough it bled. The others turned on it, biting, ripping, pulling at strands of gut.