Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure

by K. M. Weiland

  To either side of him, running footsteps tromped through the tomato patch. Next thing he knew, two gun barrels were pointed at him. Not at them. Just at him.

  “Now hold up, sonny,” Matthew said.

  J.W. prodded Hitch with the .22. “Let her go. Don’t know what Matthew’s got to say about this, but I won’t have no manhandling of ladies on my property.”

  Hitch’s chuckle sounded forced even to him. “Let’s all calm down here, shall we? You remember me? I used to work for you when I was a kid.”

  Matthew leaned his head back and surveyed Hitch through the round specs perched low on his nose. He was closing in on seventy, but his face was still smooth and hardly jowly at all.

  “Well, bless my suspenders, so you did.” He, at least, lowered his shotgun. “Hitch Hitchcock. Never thought we’d be seeing you again. How long has it been?”

  Hitch huffed a sigh. “About nine years, I reckon.”

  Matthew glanced at the girl. “And who are you?”

  She wasn’t fighting anymore. She stared, first at the guns, then at the sky. The planes were almost overhead now.

  “Don’t know who she is,” Hitch said. “But she’s crazy. And she doesn’t speak English.”

  J.W. gave him another poke in the ribs. “Let her go anyway.”

  The years hadn’t been quite so kind to J.W. The top of his head was almost completely bald and peeling with an old sunburn. He still had his mustache, but it was stone gray now and in need of a trim.

  “You heard me right enough,” J.W. said. “I won’t have no manhandling around here.” The way he had of jutting his grizzled chin made him look like a badger on the prod.

  “I don’t think letting her go is such a great idea,” Hitch said. “She already tried to stab me.”

  “Might be she had good reason, eh?”

  Hitch glared. “I didn’t do anything. She came in here, stole Matthew’s clothes, and about scalped me.”

  “You’re bigger’n her. Seems to me that evens the odds.”

  “Let her go,” Matthew said. He looked at her. “You won’t run, will you, miss?” He reached to tip a hat brim that wasn’t there.

  She stared at him, then at J.W., then finally at Hitch. She licked her lips and nodded.

  “Fine, but you boys are asking for it.” Hitch released her wrists.

  She took off like a whitetail deer—but not toward the knife. In long-legged strides, she hurdled the water tank and bounded into J.W.’s yard.

  “Watch the tomatoes!” J.W. shouted.

  She reached the house and jumped to catch hold of the ornate porch railing that ran all the way around. Like some kind of squirrel, she hauled herself onto the railing, then shimmied up the support post to the porch roof.

  J.W. started running. “What do you think you’re doing? Get off my house, woman!”

  Hitch and Matthew followed. By the time they reached the yard, she’d already clambered past the second-story balcony’s roof and was half-running, half-climbing up the steep roof to where the third-story gable joined with the jutting tower.

  Hitch stopped beside the house and shaded his eyes. “Get down! You want to kill yourself?”

  The planes were shrieking into view now—Jennies most of them, all painted red, white, and blue. Little stars-and-stripes banners flew from their wingtips.

  Col. Bonney Livingstone and His Extravagant Flying Circus had arrived—just as audaciously as they had all those years ago in Tennessee when Hitch had first worked for him.

  His heart gave an extra pump.

  “We have to do something,” Matthew said. “She’ll get hurt up there.”

  She didn’t seem to share their concern. Wedging herself between the tower and the chimney, she practically bounced up to the tower window. Another second more and she was on the tower roof. She hung off the lightning rod, one foot braced at its bottom, the other dangling into nothing.

  The planes buzzed past—over her head, on either side of her. The pilots waggled their wings and waved. Their turbulence whipped her oversized clothes and her chopped hair. She flung her free hand out to them and laughed. It was a crazy thing to do, but she actually didn’t sound that crazy. More like delighted.

  Which made no sense at all if somebody in an airplane had tossed her out last night. If it hadn’t been a plane she’d been tossed out of, then... what did that leave?

  Five

  THE BUZZ OF the engines began to fade back out. The girl dropped her waving arm to her side and watched the planes until they were specks on the blue horizon.

  “Now get back down here,” J.W. said. “Before you fall off and break your durn neck.”

  Whether she understood or not, she lifted her shoulders in a sigh, then swung around the lightning rod to face them.

  “Careful!” Matthew said. He looked at Hitch. “Maybe one of us should go up and help her.”

  Hitch gave a little groan, but took a step anyway.

  If the girl was aware of their gallantry, she didn’t seem too flattered. She dropped to the seat of her pants and slid down the steep roof as unconcernedly as she’d gone up.

  Hitch lunged to the porch railing. “Hold on!”

  She caught herself on the eaves and swung around until her bare toes found the tower windowsill. Half a minute later, she’d scrambled back down to the porch railing. She stood on the balustrade and looked them all over, eyebrows knit. She was probably wishing she’d kept the knife. But a little of the wild look from before had faded. Her eyes shone, as if the sight of the circus had filled her up with both adrenaline and joy all at once.

  She definitely wasn’t scared of the planes.

  “Well,” Matthew said. “Since we’re all still in one piece, how about some breakfast?”

  “Good luck getting her to stay,” Hitch said.

  She cocked her head. “Brakk fast?”

  J.W. looked at Hitch. “Thought you said she didn’t speak English.”

  “I think she understands more than she can say.” Hitch imitated forking food into his mouth and chewing. “Breakfast. You know, food you eat in the morning.” He offered her a hand down.

  She contemplated his hand for a moment, then gave him a good hard look. Considering she’d only just gotten over thinking he was a threat worth knifing, her distrust made a fair amount of sense.

  “I don’t bite,” he promised. “And I’m sorry about the scuffle.”

  She grunted. Then, ignoring his hand, she hopped the remaining five feet to the ground as if it was nothing.

  He took a step back to get out of her way.

  At first glance, she hadn’t seemed like much to look at. Pale, almost transparent. But up close, she was pretty enough. She had high cheekbones, a sloping jaw, and a straight nose that might have looked harsh on someone else. But on her, it was tempered with an overall softness—a buoyant sweetness.

  Of course, that sweetness was less than convincing in light of his throbbing shins.

  She raised an eyebrow at his scrutiny, practically daring him to go on looking.

  He gave her a wink and stepped out of the way.

  Matthew turned back to his house. “C’mon.”

  “Hold onto yourself,” J.W. said. “What gives you the right to go hogging the company?”

  “The fact that I already have the skillet on. Mind your tomatoes, why don’t you?”

  J.W. snorted and stayed where he was.

  Inside the sun-washed kitchen, Matthew propped his shotgun against the stove and set about cracking eggs, frying sausages, and flapping jacks. “Have a seat and tell me where this girl comes from. Where you come from, for that matter.”

  Hitch let the screen door bang. “Heard this big flying circus was coming to town. Decided it was time for a visit.” He left it at that and held a chair out from the table for the girl. “As for her...”

  She settled gingerly onto the edge of the chair and sat with her back straight, her fists knotted in her lap. She darted quick glances around the kitchen. Wh
en she caught both Matthew and Hitch watching her, she jerked her gaze down to her hands, then right back up: fear followed by defiance.

  “I am having knowledge about you,” she said. “Groundsmen. I am having knowledge how you are treating each other—even your people who are related.” She jerked her head toward J.W.’s place.

  Hitch took a chair across from her and turned it around so he could straddle it. “So you do speak English?”

  “Ingleesh?” She leaned forward, as if trying to read his lips. Then she touched her mouth. “This?”

  “What we’re speaking, yeah.”

  “Um, yes. The Sobirateli—the... Foragers. They are where I am hearing from.” She knit her eyebrows and stared at him. Maybe trying to ask if he understood her.

  “And who are the Foragers? They’re... Groundsmen?”

  “Nikogda. Never.”

  He tried a different tack. “But they taught you English?”

  “No. Teaching they are not.” Her eyes flashed. “Being allowed to be knowing this Ingleesh is not for me. Just hearing them, and reading.”

  “You mean you read books in English? Taught yourself to speak it?”

  She nodded. “Yes. But—” She tapped her ear. “Different from how—” She pointed to her eye.

  He had to think about that for a minute. “It sounds different from how it looks?”

  She nodded again.

  Matthew put a pan lid over the crackle of his eggs and sausage. “Takes a heap of brains to do that.”

  If anybody knew about brains, it was Matthew. He’d always been the sort to read books most other folks had never even heard of. He was smart enough to have been more than a farmer—just not rich enough. Or maybe brave enough.

  Matthew brought the first plate of flapjacks over to the table and set them next to a small blue ceramic pitcher of maple syrup. “Here you are, my dear.”

  “Tonk you.” She looked at the plate, then picked up one of the flapjacks. It was so fluffy it compressed by nearly half between her fingers. She tore off a piece, glanced questioningly at Matthew, then dunked it in the syrup pitcher.

  “Whoops, not like that.” Hitch reached across the table and poured the syrup over the top of the flapjacks, then handed her the fork.

  She took a bite of the pancake. When it hit her tongue, her eyes lit up. “Prekrasno.”

  “You don’t have to look so surprised,” Matthew said.

  Hitch hiked his chair a little closer. “So... where do you come from?”

  She kept right on eating and pointed toward the ceiling.

  Hitch glanced apologetically at Matthew. “She keeps saying she’s from the sky.” He turned back to her. “Meaning you work with flyers?” Or maybe just meaning she’d snorted a little too much water when she’d hit the lake last night.

  Her delight in the airplanes flying over just now might not be the reaction of somebody who was afraid of them—but it also wasn’t the reaction of somebody accustomed to spending a lot of time around them.

  Matthew turned all the way around and gave her an appraising look.

  “What about your friend?” Hitch asked. “The trigger-happy fella from last night? What happened to him? And how come nobody taught him about not using flare guns around a silk parachute?”

  She flashed a look up and clenched her fist around her fork. “He is not friend.”

  “Okay.” So the guy had been trying to light her on fire. “What happened to him?”

  She curled her lip and shrugged. “Everything, I have hope.”

  Hitch glanced at Matthew.

  But Matthew seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, shooting the girl a sideways look or two. In a moment, he put a folded towel down in the center of the table, then set the pan of sausages and eggs on top of it. After he’d pulled up his own chair, he served first Hitch, then himself.

  Hitch got up and turned his chair around so he could eat.

  The girl looked at each of the three plates, then at the empty fourth spot. She pointed at it, then at the door, toward J.W.’s place. “What about... gromkiy chelovek?”

  “My brother prefers to eat in his own kitchen.”

  She didn’t seem to quite get that, but Matthew didn’t volunteer anymore and Hitch didn’t blame him.

  The Berringer brothers had been feuding for as long as he could remember. Something about a girl—Ginny Lou Thatcher, a fiery redhead of a gal. The story went that both of them had been crazy about her, but their competition to win her hand had spilled the bounds of brotherly affection. As it turned out, neither of them got the girl.

  After their father died, they split the farm in two. Matthew kept his family’s old farmhouse, and J.W. built that crazy mansion across the property line. Life had been a competition ever since, although J.W. seemed to take it a mite more seriously than Matthew.

  Matthew poured milk for each of them. “I’m afraid my brother and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms.”

  Footsteps stomped on the porch. Rifle still in one hand and a basket in the other, J.W. loomed outside the screen door. “If we ain’t friendly, I reckon it’s because certain parties think they can hide away the pretty misses at their table. Now, what’s your name, girl?”

  She stopped shoveling in the pancakes and licked a drop of syrup off her lower lip. She looked around the room, stopping to study each of their faces.

  Then she swallowed. “Jael.”

  “Name like that, I’d say she’s not from here,” J.W. said.

  Matthew had grace enough to refrain from pointing out they’d already covered that. He didn’t invite J.W. in.

  “You got any family around here?” J.W. asked. “Friends?”

  She shook her head.

  “You headed someplace?”

  “To home.”

  Hitch stabbed another medallion of sausage. “Great.”

  “What’s so bad about it?” J.W. asked.

  Matthew salted his eggs. “She claims she lives in the sky.”

  “So what?” J.W. jutted his chin at Hitch. “You’re a birdman, aren’t you?”

  “Not that good a one.”

  Jael finished her last bite of pancake and ran her finger around the edge of her plate to catch the remaining syrup. She licked it off, then looked at Hitch. She hesitated, her eyes dark with something: fear, uncertainty, desperation maybe.

  She pointed at the floor. “Groundsworld.” She pointed at the ceiling. “Schturming. To Groundsworld I am falling. Now I am having to go home before time is too late. Please. But you cannot be talking of this—to any persons on ground.”

  Hitch cleared his throat. “Right. Well, we won’t say a word.” He glanced at Matthew and J.W. “But in the meantime, you got any place to stay?”

  She shook her head.

  “She could stay here,” Matthew said. “A bit of company wouldn’t go amiss.”

  J.W. scoffed. “Where would you keep her in this mousetrap? I’m the one who’s got plenty of empty rooms.”

  “That, J.W. Berringer, is your own fault.”

  “Like thunder it is.”

  Hitch swiped up a dollop of yolk with the last of his sausage. “Maybe she should stay closer to town. In case somebody she knows comes looking for her.”

  Matthew thought for a second, then nodded. “You’re right. The gossips wouldn’t find it proper anyway, a girl like her staying out here with two old bachelors.”

  J.W. harrumphed.

  Hitch rocked his chair back to its hind legs. “Well, then, you know somebody who will take her?”

  “You’re the one that found her, son,” Matthew said.

  “Me?” He looked at her, then at J.W. and Matthew in turn.

  “If she’s from upwards, that would certainly seem to be more your purview than anybody’s, don’t you think?”

  “Probably,” J.W. said, “she’s with that fancy flying outfit that just buzzed over. You best take her over that way and see if she belongs.”

  Hitch shook his head. “She’s not a flyer
.” She wasn’t a jumper either, unless he missed his guess. “So when I get her out there to the pilots’ camp and nobody has a notion who she is, what do you think I’m going to do with her then?”

  “Find her a place to stay.”

  He laughed. “I haven’t got time for that. I’ve got to make some money. You wouldn’t know of any day jobs around, would you?”

  “That ain’t the point here,” J.W. said. “The point is you found this girl, so you gotta do something about it.”

  Hitch didn’t have time to deal with this. He could barely find bedrolls and meals for his own crew, much less an addled girl. “I found her in Matthew’s backyard.”

  She looked at him from across the table, steadily. Who knew if she understood what was going on, but those smoky gray eyes seemed to look right through him—still fearful, still distrusting.

  And that was ever so slightly irritating. Most girls thought the devil-may-care lifestyle of a gypsy pilot was the most romantic thing ever. But of course, most girls weren’t crazy.

  He stared back at her. Was she crazy? Or was she smart, like Matthew said, and just as sane as he was?

  Of course, Hitch’s family—and Celia too—wouldn’t have said sanity was his strongest point. He was a pilot after all.

  But he’d seen enough of the world to know what crazy looked like. And this girl didn’t look crazy. Wild, like an unbroke filly, definitely. Maybe a little reckless, judging from the way she’d scaled J.W.’s house without a second thought. But if flying had taught him one thing, it was that reckless and crazy didn’t have to be the same thing, so long as you knew what you were capable of.

  This girl wasn’t crazy. She was lost and she was scared. After last night, who wouldn’t be? There was no reason to think the guy with the flare gun wasn’t still around—and still trigger-happy. Reuniting Jael with him obviously wasn’t an option. But if Hitch could find the guy, that just might answer a lot of questions—and give him a lead on what he could do with her.

  He thumped the chair back onto all fours. “Fine. I’ll take her with me. Maybe somebody’ll know where she comes from.” He stood and beckoned her to follow.

  She stood up warily. “To where do you go with me?”