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Mary-Todd, Jonathan.
Shot down / Jonathan Mary-Todd.
p. cm. — (After the dust settled)
Summary: When a bullet knocks Malik and the Captain’s hot-air balloon out of the sky, landing them in the Kentucky wilderness, they are chased by man-hunters who believe hunting the weak is their post-apocalyptic duty.
ISBN 978–0–7613–8329–1 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Hunting—Fiction. 3. Kentucky—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M36872Sh 2012
[Fic]—dc23 2012006864
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 – PP – 7/15/12
eISBN: 978-1-4677-0015-3 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3071-6 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3072-3 (mobi)
To my boyhood dog, Macbeth—
the events of this book
do not reflect the depths
of my affection
CHAPTER ONE
A
fter something shot through the Captain’s hot air balloon and we started sagging toward the ground below, I tried to remember the Gene Matterhorn Wilderness Survival Guidebook Path of Action in a Crisis. It came to me right before I hit the water. Or maybe right after. In a crisis, these things are hard to keep track of.
Step One: Scope Out the Scene.
I spat back the foamy water that had started to fill my mouth and looked around in every direction. High hills formed walls around us. Tree branches split off above me and reached out like veins across the sky. The river’s current slid me forward ’til I grabbed a fallen log. Rocks ahead, I thought. Hold on.
Step Two: Take a Personal Health Check.
“Captain!” I shouted, the taste of river water fresh on my tongue.
My mind spun, and I rubbed a free hand along my shaved head. No cuts, no blood. I shouted for the Captain again. It’s crucial to determine your own well-being before attempting to help others, the guide says. No noticeable wounds would have to be good enough.
I looked again and saw the Captain ten or twelve arm’s lengths back. He was floating facedown in the water, half-hidden by his blue overcoat. I took my arms off the log and swam back his way, pushing against the current.
My arms burned by the time I dragged the Captain’s huge frame onto shore. A small whine drifted out of his mouth—breath. I started pushing down on his chest, trying to remember as I went how many times the guide said to do it. The Captain didn’t move.
I spat out more river water and lowered my mouth down onto his damp orange beard. Two breaths into his mouth—nothing. It wasn’t ’til I started pumping his chest again that the Captain opened his eyes. He coughed up water, bubbling like a pot at boil, and then heaved forward, panting for air.
“Ack!” he said. “I just about bought the farm there, didn’t I?”
“What?”
“Figure of speech—ah, never mind. I forget sometimes you grew up in the middle a’ nowhere.” He shook his head, his beard flinging water in all directions, and leaned back against a clump of grass. “Thanks for the, eh, life-savin’, by the way.”
Step Three: Inventory Your Remaining Resources
Together we walked up and down a stretch of riverbank, gathering what we could from the balloon crash. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a compass—cracked, the little arrow in the center bent. Useless.
A dozen steps away from where I’d lugged the Captain out of the river, I spotted a red-and-brown lump. My backpack. It had hit the ground when the balloon crashed, or maybe dropped out while the craft plummeted, but there was nothing inside that would’ve broke. Mostly clothes, a couple blankets, my worn copy of the Matterhorn guide.
The Captain shouted up ahead, “I found the food bags! The sack with the jerky got tore open, but you can look forward to dried leeks tonight, as per the usual.” He started humming to himself and stuffing the stray snaps of jerky into his wet pants pockets.
The humming stopped as the Captain reached a clearing away from the riverbank. “Ah jeez,” he murmured and dropped to his knees. “It’s toast.”
Inside a circle of ash trees, strung across twigs and dirt patches, were the ruins of his hot air balloon. The basket we had flown in—smashed. The reinforcements on the bottom were bent or in pieces. I stepped over a dented length of aluminum for a closer look.
The Captain looked up at me, pink-eyed. “I’m not sure there’s any fixin’ this,” he said. “I can’t even find my tools...”
A hiss grew louder and louder as I looped around the wreckage. Not like a snake’s—steadier. I pushed back some shrubs with my foot and found the round white canister that had let us fly.
“Captain! The propane burner’s over here.”
“Well for goodness’ sake, Malik, get away from there!” he shouted. He rose and moved to drag me away. “That thing could blow at any minute.”
I took a few steps back. “Will it do that?”
The Captain heaved his soaked overcoat atop the burner. “Err. It might. You’d think it woulda already, if it was gonna, but then again...Gah! A thing like that’s irreplaceable.”
For a moment we stood and listened to the burner’s muddled hiss.
“Should we duct tape it?” I asked.
“Yeah.” The Captain nodded. “Let’s duct tape it.”
After I’d cautiously patched up any place where a leak might be, the Captain prepared to wrap up the burner in the balloon’s envelope, the big tarp up top that fills with hot air. That was also too valuable to leave behind, the Captain said. He settled on tucking one inside the other.
As I was shoving the tape back in my bag, the Captain swore some curse I didn’t recognize under his breath. He coughed for my attention and then stretched out a piece of the envelope in front of me. His hands shook: light shone through a circle-shaped tear.
“I didn’t wanna call it ’til I knew for sure,” he said, “but this’s gotta be a bullet hole. Rifle fire, I’m guessin’.”
Step Four: Make a Plan.
I took a long look at the hole. I asked why, like the guide suggested. Someone made a mistake, maybe, and fired a shot off on accident. Or, more likely, someone wanted to keep outsiders away. That was the story at a lot of places.
But for a plan? A real plan? I couldn’t think of anything except hiding and hoping a better plan came to mind.
CHAPTER TWO
I
met the Captain in a place called Des Moines. It was north of the Kentucky hills where we crashed, and colder too. I’d arrived there while heading away from the Frontier.
The Frontier Motel was
where I spent my youngest years. Most of my clothes, my blankets, I’d taken from there. Even Gene Matterhorn’s Wilderness Survival Guidebook had spent years sitting in the motel common room.
My mother had stopped at the Frontier before I was old enough to even read. I barely remember the first year or two. They were the days when the world stopped working.
People were worried, my mother would say. She’d always mention how people’s phones didn’t work all the sudden. The motel was a place where people could stop and rest before they got where they were going. When everyone started to panic, my mom got off the road.
At the motel she got news of fighting in the east, bad storms all over. Some people headed back out, hoping to learn more. My mother stayed. Since I left the place, I’ve met different people who were sure of different things about what happened.
The Captain says he thinks it might’ve been aliens. But he also built his own hot air balloon in the middle of a city.
The Frontier was a safe place, away from whatever storms were out there. Nothing around it but trees and a gravel road. After a while, my mom and some of the other families that’d stopped decided to build a life there. I learned to hunt, learned to cook, and learned not to go very far. It wasn’t ’til sickness hit the place, when I was fourteen, that everyone set out.
When I met the Captain in Des Moines, he’d seen some dark things too. He was living as a warrior and a mechanic, fighting off attacks, hunger, the cold. By the time he put his balloon together, I was ready to see the rest of the world. What was left of the world. We floated south, aiming to help people when we found them. Just looking for signs of life.
The Des Moines winter had turned into a gentle southern spring by the afternoon we got shot down. The Captain sat in the balloon’s basket with his legs crossed, tying fruit along a string to dry out in the sun.
“So you never heard a’ pretzel-style?” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The way I’m sittin’. When I was a kid, I guess we called it Indian-style, but in yer adult life you realize that certain things like that tread on people’s sen-suh-tivities,” the Captain said. “Pretzel-style means yer legs are sorta shaped like a pretzel. It’s a food.”
“Growing up we ate deer and green beans. Then we ate more deer and green beans. I never had a pretzel.”
The Captain pressed the wool hat he kept in his pocket against his sweaty brow. His grin showed rows of teeth like unripe corn. “Well, Malik, with sea salt and some nacho cheese, they are dee-licious.”
He strung the fruit up with a tug and squinted into the horizon. “What I could really go for is some hash browns. I wonder sometimes if there’s still a diner up and running somewhere. The Diner at the End of the World. No tellin’ what kinda shape the southern hemisphere’s in right now, but I tell ya, I’d trade this balloon some days for a hot cup of real coffee...”
I felt the wind change directions as I frowned at the Captain.
“This is one of those times we talked about,” I said, “where you think we’re having a two-person conversation, but I don’t understand most of—”
The crackle we heard next could have been anything. To us up in the air, anyway. It could’ve been a tree falling or a thunderclap, I thought at first. But the sky was blue and the ground below was still. Above our heads, the balloon’s patched-together envelope started to buzz like a swarm of wasps as air rushed out of it. And before I had time to wonder if we’d been right to jump from the basket, I was underwater.
CHAPTER THREE
W
e gathered up everything we could find from the crash, everything we could carry. Then we headed uphill. The Captain talked without stopping as we put more distance between us and the river.
“Looks sorta rocky up here, but all these trees’ll keep us covered. Protect us.” He stopped for a moment and eased his shoulders forward when the envelope holding the hissing burner started to slip down his back. “Coulda been an accident, of course...”
“The shot?” I asked.
“Yeah, the gunshot.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“Malik,” the Captain said, “I believe we shouldn’t take that chance. We lay low, as much as we can. These days, people tend to get defensive.”
Defensive of what? I wondered. Most of what I saw around me was winding trees and green bushes, a few big chunks of rock rising out of the ground. But I’d grown up in a place that was hidden by woods. I tried not to trust everything I saw.
“You said it was a rifle that did it?” I said as the Captain leaned against a rock behind me. He’d been sweating hard since we’d started the climb.
“Yeah,” he said. “Think so. Meeeaan weapon.”
As we started to walk again, I kept thinking about who might’ve shot us down. Why they might’ve shot us down. I didn’t know that much about what was out there in the world. Not really. That was part of why I’d said I’d travel with the Captain. Maybe they’d had a good reason, whoever did it. Though I couldn’t believe they’d had trouble come from hot air balloons before.
I thought about the people I’d met since leaving home, too. I’d been attacked more than once: different people, different places. But of anyone I’d met whom I came to trust, who wanted more than to take something from other people—they never just attacked first. They wanted to trust people too.
The Captain got a rush of energy as the sun started getting lower, around the same time his coat dried out and started to stink. He shuffled between stones along a path made from the shade of broadleaf trees. I kept my head down, watched the ground, and followed his heavy footsteps ’til he stopped.
“Look there,” he said. He pointed sideways to a long rock overhang. It lay like a small cliff over a short stretch of hillside. Beneath the overhang was flat patch of grass and dirt stretching a few body-lengths back into the face of the big hill.
“That’s our campsite for the night,” the Captain continued. “All the protection from the elements that a cave offers, without the risk of accidentally tripping over a sleeping bobcat.”
We agreed to no fire for the night. Either the flame or the smoke could give us away to whomever might be looking. I told the Captain that in the morning I’d use the Matterhorn guide and go see if I could find any plants we could eat.
“Worse places to be shipwrecked than Kentucky,” the Captain said as he started to fade. “Assumin’ this is definitely Kentucky. There’s probably no place around that still makes bourbon, but a man’s gotta have dreams...”
• • •
I woke up sore in the morning. I couldn’t get a sense of how long I’d slept for, but the sun was high. A few lengths away, the Captain was still out. He opened his eyes to a gun’s thunderclap.
The sound wasn’t near, but it burst out from someplace closer than when we’d been flying. I yanked up my backpack, and half the stuff inside dropped out the top: spare clothes, the duct tape. The Captain pulled together everything around him but didn’t move his feet. We looked to each other, silent, and waited for another shot. Somewhere a dog howled.
Before the next gunshot came a weak hum of voices. No clear words—too far away—but it was people speaking. Another crack from a gun filled the air. The voices grew, but just barely. I stayed as still as I could and tried to figure out the how far they were away, what direction they were coming from. Then came the sound of running, louder from moment to moment. One person, rushing closer.
The Captain and I kept silent and stepped deeper under the overhang. Somewhere to my left, above us, I heard the runner’s feet crush twigs and bushes until he fell with a grunt. A breath later, we saw a man begin to limp across the ground in front of us, underneath the edge of the overhang.
For a moment he stopped and stared. The man was middle-aged, with dark eyes and a cracked face. His beard was black with streaks of white, and black curls ringed the back of his head. He wore torn clothes, with one pale-blue shirtsleeve dangling under
an armpit. Gasping for air, he took his hands off his bleeding shin and shook them, whipping his head from side to side.
I understood: stay quiet.
From down the runner’s path I could start to make out voices:
“I think you dinged him, Dad!”
“Sssh! Pay attention now, Kyle! As long as he’s alive, you stay on your guard. We’ve already let him out of our sight...”
Fear flashed through the panting man’s eyes. One more time, he begged in silence for us to stay quiet. He didn’t look like a danger to anybody. As the voices got closer, he took a last look at me and the Captain and then skipped off to my right, favoring his good leg.
The Captain and I stayed as far back as we could under the ceiling of the overhang, sticking to the wall of rock behind us. I closed my eyes and heard a final shot. A clipped but savage scream trailed over from the runner’s path. And then a kid’s voice, a boy’s:
“Nice shot, Pop-Pop!”
A grown man’s voice responded, warm and rich. “I think he’s down now. I meant each word of what I told you, son. When I was your age, your grandfather taught me everything I know. And he can still shoot like the best of them!”
The men were close enough that I could hear the soft crunch of the bushes or branches they pushed out of their way. Three of them, maybe four. Somewhere above us, behind the overhang. The distances away steadied for a while—they were walking a straight line through the trees toward the body, not curving around the top of the overhang. They’d miss us, more than likely.
The man spoke up again.
“Kyle, I want you to wait here with your pop-pop. Past that ledge, the hill can get steep. You can hold the rifle if you like.”
“But Dad, I wanna help you find the kill!”
“That’s why we bring these guys, remember?” the man said. “This is when we release the hounds.”
CHAPTER FOUR
T
he Captain gripped my shoulder. His paw of a hand twitched.
“Ah jeez, Malik,” he said, “they’re manhunters!”
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