After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  “Ropes,” she said. “When you slide down those ropes you can burn up your palms pretty bad.”

  “I get a glove?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Why only one glove?”

  “One glove is enough.”

  Bells chimed, one, two, three bells. Lucy looked up.

  “Time to go,” she said. “Time to go to work.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “What you’re here for,” she said, like she was talking to a little kid. “Time to read.”

  * * *

  In the hallway we passed Levi and Ruby. They had grabbed donuts and mugs of tea and were heading aft to the hangar bay. Lucy and I stopped at the galley, got some food and tea for ourselves, then went down to the bridge. Next to the stairs going down was another set of stairs going up.

  “To the catwalk,” Lucy explained. “It runs the length of the blimp. There’s a ladder that goes up through the blimp bag to a crow’s nest on top. Forward there’s a small nacelle with a machine gun. The catwalk is the blimp’s spine—she’s what you would call a semi-rigid blimp.”

  Just outside the bridge, opposite the captain’s cabin, we passed a chubby guy, an older fellow in his fifties, medium height but slightly stooped. He was clean-shaven, with a double chin, big puffy lips. His hair was mostly gray with a few dark brown streaks, and hung in greasy strands over his face. He had a pocket full of pens and a stethoscope around his neck. Glasses as thick as the bottom of bottles made his eyes look like two brown cat’s eye marbles.

  “Doc?” Lucy said.

  The guy stopped, looked up, smiled at Lucy. “Hey, Blue, good morning.”

  “This is Holmes,” she said. “Holmes, Doc North.”

  He put out his hand for me to shake, a small hand, a fat, fleshy hand. We shook.

  “Glad to meet you, Holmes.”

  “Doc, Holmes is a reader. He gave me a name.”

  “That right?” Doc said. He took off his glasses, wiped them on the sleeve of his shirt. “What is it?”

  “Electrolux,” she said. “Lucy for short.”

  “Lucy,” he said. He put the glasses back on, squinted at her. He chewed the word with his mind, then shrugged. “You look like a Lucy,” he said. “Glad to meet you.” He went up the stairway.

  “The guy who put that little scar in your chest?” I guessed.

  “Yeah.” She glared at me, then looked away. We walked onto the bridge.

  In the daylight I could see the bridge a little more clearly. Spaced around the room, below the large windows wrapping across the bow, were several consoles with lots of dials and screens. Most of the screens were dead, like the dusky gray of deep oceans. Nike sat in his big chair, and Bron was at the wheel before him. Outside the windows, the blimp was docked by the bow to a large pylon. Bron stared out the window, listening to the ship, gently twitching the wheel back and forth in small arcs with those huge hands. As he turned the wheel, the blimp swiveled around the pylon.

  “So,” Nike said, looking at Lucy. “This reader name you?”

  She nodded. “Electrolux.”

  “Electrolux,” he said, snorting. “Well. I thought maybe you’d be a Visa or something like that. Electrolux, huh?”

  “Lucy,” she said, “for short.”

  “Lucy, then.” He poked a finger at me. “You, Holmes. You ready to go to work?”

  “Sure. Show me the maps.”

  “Blue,” Nike said, “Lucy, show him.”

  Lucy led me to a console, pointed to a chair. There was a compass bolted to the console and a book of maps next to the compass. I sat down, opened the book, flipped through the maps. My heart raced as I read the names: Kodiak Island, Kenai, Seldovia. A label in each corner said they were something called USGS quad maps, scale 1:250,000. A lot of the names on the maps had been erased, and someone had written new names in. I had to squint to read some of the names that hadn’t been changed: Kenai, Soldotna, Kachemak, Kodiak.

  “You can read them?” Lucy asked me.

  I nodded. “We had crude maps on the Orca, just sketches of the mouths of rivers. Nothing like this.”

  “That’s about all we have,” she said. “Will it be enough?”

  “Maybe.” I read the names on the maps, but most of them didn’t mean anything, though a few names like Kenai stirred old memories. I’d have to put the maps together, see how they connected. Maybe they went all the way north. Maybe. “I’ve heard of some of these names,” I said. “But some of these . . .”

  “They are not real names,” Nike said from the big captain’s chair. “You will not know the names of the places that are not real.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “But they exist—”

  “They exist in another world,” Nike said. “That’s why I erased them. Silly names. Names don’t mean anything. Words, is all. They’re just words.” His gloved hand rose up, and he shook it. “Words don’t matter. Words screw up everything. Words, words, words. I’m sick of them. To hell with words. Words! Damn them!”

  “Nike . . .” Lucy said.

  “Sorry.” Nike panted, caught his breath. “Read the map, Holmes. Plot a course, and make sure we are on course. Take readings as we go, look at the features. Okay?”

  Okay, I thought. I spread a map out for Kodiak. It showed the north part of Kodiak Island, another island called Afognak, and then a bunch of little islands whose names Nike had erased. The top edge of the map said, “Seldovia quad.” I flipped through the book, found a sheet with that name on it, opened the book up, and took the map out. It matched the north edge of the Kodiak map, though the colors were slightly different. The Seldovia map showed the south end of a place called the Kenaitze Peninsula. On the southwest coast of Kenai was a bay called Kachemak, and a town on a finger of land poking out into the bay.

  “It’s a silly question, I know,” I said to Nike, “But do you want to go to the Kachemak that’s a town or the Kachemak that’s a bay?”

  Nike got up from his console, stood next to me. He waved his right index finger over the map, then pointed down at the town.

  “There,” he said. “Kachemak.”

  “What’s at Kachemak?”

  He smiled, a smile that could cool beer. “Oh, stuff,” he said.

  I squinted at the map, noticed a little bomb sketched on the map next to a name: Home-something. The last letter was over a fold in the map, and the printing had been rubbed away. Stuff, huh? I took a pencil, ruler, and protractor and started plotting a course to Kachemak.

  I looked out the ports, beyond the pylon before me. There were some buildings off to the north, a big tower with a windsock to the east. The Wonderblimp was pointed into the wind, but sometimes a crosswind would hit us, and the blimp would wiggle back and forth. Dark clouds were rolling in from the north.

  “Weather looks pretty nasty,” I said.

  “We’ll get above it,” Nike said behind me. “Maybe. You might get some storm duty, Holmes.”

  I turned, looked back outside. Cables stretched down from the blimp to the bottom of the docking tower; as I watched, the cables went slack and were slowly drawn up into the blimp. The blimp began to rock, to pitch and yaw. I saw a man on the ground run away from the blimp, saw a ramp being wheeled away. The man stopped, looked up at the blimp, and waved his arms.

  “Prepare to take off,” Nike said.

  “Ready,” Lucy said to my left. I glanced over at her, saw that she was looking at a console with four red lights on it, four dials next to the lights.

  “Start engines, half reverse,” Nike said.

  “Start engines, half reverse,” Lucy repeated, pressing some buttons on her console.

  From the port side I heard a prop kick, sputter, and then spin into life. Another engine, to starboard, started up, and then two more engines, aft, port and starboard, started. The deck and bulkheads of the nacelle hummed with the vibrations of the engines. I looked to my right and left and could just barely see the props spinning, the engi
nes out on pylons, inside little nacelles. Four lights lit up on Lucy’s console.

  “Engines on,” Lucy said.

  The blimp was pushing away from the tower, straining to get away. I could feel the blimp creaking, hear the skin rippling in the wash of the turbos.

  “Elevation ten degrees,” Nike said. “Two notches,” he whispered to Bron.

  “Ten degrees,” Bron said. He cranked two levers to the left of the wheel. The tail of the blimp dropped slightly, and a pencil started to roll on my console.

  “Release drogue,” Nike said.

  “Releasing drogue,” Lucy said. She pushed a lever forward on her console, and there was a click from the nose of the blimp. The Wonderblimp fell back from the tower and then rose away.

  “Engines full forward,” Nike said. “Okay, up ship!”

  The prop blades stopped, spun the other way, then whirled into thin disks. The Wonderblimp rose slowly, at a slight angle. The tower, the landing strip, and Pillar Mountain slid away below us. Kodiak receded to port, and we headed out over the ocean, at an altitude of maybe 1000 feet.

  “Take her up to 10,000 feet,” Nike said. “Navigator, confirm course heading.”

  That was me. I looked at my course readings. “Thirty-five degrees northeast,” I said.

  “Confirm. Bron, taking a heading of thirty-five degrees northeast.” Nike leaned forward, slid a ring on the compass, smiled at Bron. “Keep the red arrow lined up along that point,” he said quietly to Bron.

  “Okay, let’s head to Kachemak,” Nike said.

  I looked out the window, watched the mountains fade away below me. “What exactly are you going to do at Kachemak?” I asked Lucy.

  She looked up from her console, stared at me. “Hey, we’re nukers. What do you think? The tribe there has a dead nuke, and we know how to fix dead nukes. So: we’re going to trade nukes.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The skin of the blimp bag flapped like an outboard motor. Snow blew through the tear in the port side of the bag, scouring the struts of the catwalk clean. I crawled up the side of the catwalk, to where the spine of the blimp was attached to the outer bag. A big hole gaped just above the edge of the spine, and air was alternately sucked and blown out the hole, as if the blimp were a lung and the hole a nostril. Wiping snow from my eyes, I reached up to a strut just under the hole.

  A crosswind hit the blimp from the starboard side, tipping the blimp to port. I slid toward the hole, grabbed for a strut, heard the cable spool at my belt whir out line, then felt the reassuring tug of the safety cable yank tight on my monkey harness. Light from the revolving beacon on the belly of the blimp lit up the ocean below in stroboscopic flashes.

  Flash: great waves forty or fifty feet high reached into the sky, grabbing for the blimp. Flash: snow whipped by in a roaring assault, swirling, shifting direction in a maelstrom of small tornadoes. Flash: chunks of ice spun off the blades of the props, whirling up at the bottom of the blimp, hitting with soft thunks the rubber of the bag. Flash: wind rolled down the sides of the blimp, rippling the loose sides.

  I ducked back inside and looked down the great cavern that was the inside of the blimp. The light of my headlamp caught shafts of snow piercing up through the bag of the blimp. Two rows of rubber ballonets, six to a row, rose like big planets from the top of the spine. The helium inside the ballonet wasn’t in danger of leaking, but the pressure of the outer skin was falling, and if the bag collapsed, we’d fly about as gracefully as a brick.

  Clinging to a strut, I waited for the wind to shift and the blimp to level off for a moment, then dragged a four-by-eight sheet of quarter-inch-thick rubber up from behind me and laid one side along the edge of a strut on the spine. With a rivet gun hanging from a wrist strap, I popped rivets through the patch and into holes in the strut. Quickly, before the wind shifted again, I threw the patch over the hole. The wind blew across the outside of the blimp’s skin, sucking the patch tight. I scrambled across the inside of the skin, riveting the rubber to the edges of the hole, hoping I wouldn’t push the patch out and into the storm. The roaring of the wind across the patch stopped, and only wisps of air snuck around the patch. I sighed, caught my breath, and scrambled down to the catwalk, then back inside to the bridge.

  My feet left reverse footprints of snow as I walked across the shabby carpet of the bridge. Lucy nodded at me from the engine console when I came in. Bron stood before Nike at the helm, big hands on the wheel, controlling the elevators, feet tapping pedals that controlled the rudder. Bron squinted into the dark, watching the snow and the wind. The deck of the blimp creaked below him. He was in some other state, like he was part of the sea and the wind and had nothing to do with the Wonderblimp or the human race.

  I could still see those waves trying to suck us down into the sea and could feel the wind trying to yank us back up to the sky. With each blast of wind the skin of the bag screamed— but didn’t roar—and the deck of the Wonderblimp shuddered. A crosswind hit from behind, and the deck pitched. I grabbed for a hold and hit the back of Nike’s chair.

  Nike jumped, looked up at me.

  “Holmes . . .” He stared at me, eyes raw and red. He blinked. “Get the hole patched?” I nodded. “Good,” he said, his voice drifting away into exhaustion. “You’d make a good blimper.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I smiled; I always knew when I was a kid that playing on jungle gyms would come in handy someday.

  Nike jerked awake. “Go aft and help Ruby and Levi in the cargo hold. We may have to jettison cargo.”

  “Right.”

  My face still felt numb from the cold, and flakes of snow melted on my mustache. I ran down the passageway from the bridge and through a hatchway back to the hangar bay. Ruby grabbed boxes from the cargo hold at the stern, dragged them out to a pile over the hangar bay doors. Levi cut some ropes loose from around the boxes to open them, so he could check inside and make sure we didn’t jettison anything we couldn’t do without. He looked up when I came in.

  “Pile anything that looks expendable over the bay doors,” he yelled over the roar of the wind. I nodded, went to help Ruby. “And hook up to one of those eyebolts,” he added.

  Levi pointed to some circular bolts painted red. Levi and Ruby had their harnesses on, and I’d never taken mine off. Just as I was hooking up, Doc North came in, hooked up his monkey harness. He came over to Ruby and me, started helping us. Levi was fussing with some tanks of helium on the far bulkhead, trying to unstrap them.

  The bulkheads suddenly shuddered; there was a loud groan just forward of us. The deck pitched and Levi went flying toward the center of the hold. Ruby, Doc, and I fell against the aft bulkhead. A tank came partly undone, hung by one strap from the wall.

  “Jettison the cargo!” Nike’s voice shouted over the intercom.

  Levi quit fussing with the tank, crawled along the wall to a big red crank handle. He looked around at us, made sure we were all strapped in, then yanked down hard on the handle. The hangar bay doors fell away, and the cargo slid through the trap doors. Except. Except a rope tying up one box of food got caught on the edge, and the box didn’t fall all the way out, and banged against the edge of the hole in the deck.

  “Damn,” Levi said. He crawled along the floor, his cable playing out behind him, and went to the open hole. The wind rushed through the opening, and snow flew into Levi’s face. He had his knife out and was cutting the box free when it hit.

  It felt like the sea had dropped a million fathoms. We fell so fast I was almost weightless. We must have hit a cooler pocket of air, something that made the blimp suddenly drop for a moment; then the air caught us. The skin of the blimp snapped, the forward bulkhead of the hold thundered. We pitched about forty-five degrees and all of us went tumbling to port. Levi rolled around the edge of the gaping hole; I saw his knife go flying across the deck.

  Time went molasses. I saw Doc and Ruby go winding back on the monkey cables. The Wonderblimp shifted the other way, and we all fell back, our cable spools whirring
like fishing reels. The tank that was dangling by one strap from the wall broke loose, then hit the eyebolt Levi’s cable was attached to. The blimp shifted again, Levi’s cable went taut, and the eyebolt snapped out of the wall. Levi slid toward the opening, grabbed for the edge of the hatch. He missed, fell through the hole, but grabbed the rope that he had cut halfway through, the rope that the box of food banging against the side of the hole was tangled up in.

  Levi looked up out of the hole. He grabbed for the edge of the hatchway. The rope snapped. Levi’s face went white and his mouth opened and made a strangled sound, like his tongue had been taped to his teeth and someone had kicked him in the throat.

  I kicked out from the bulkhead, my cable spinning behind me, shot over the gaping hole and made a wild grab for Levi’s harness. I caught the end of his cable with my right hand, but it whizzed through my fingers, cutting to the bone. Levi flailed his arms, caught the lip of the bay and hung on with his finger tips. I clawed my way to the edge, reached for his wrist, and caught him.

  My cable whined and I felt like a shark taking the drag to the limit. The wind roared. I was hanging in the middle of the bay and Levi was dangling below me; his right foot was tangled in a loose rope on the box of food. The words on the box were etched in my mind like a brand: “USDA CORNED BEEF.”

  “Kick your foot free!” I yelled at Levi.

  My palm was bloody and my fingers were rods of fire. Levi kicked but the rope wouldn’t come loose. I reached down with my left hand and tried to get a better grip. The blimp pitched, and I went swinging against the side of the bay, slamming my cut hand against the edge. I winced, felt my right hand spasm, looked down, and saw Levi reach up with his other hand, grab my wrist. The blimp pitched again, we swung against the side of the bay, and Levi’s grip slipped. I swung down with my left hand, reached down, grabbed Levi by the end of the long pigtail at the nape of his head, and yanked him up. He yelled something, then closed his eyes. The pigtail ripped off the back of his head, and Levi fell through the hole, tumbling down into the sea.

  I stared down at the blond braid in my hand, a smooth patch of flesh-colored rubber at the base of the braid. A wig. That damn pigtail was a wig. That was what Levi had yelled at me. He had been trying to tell me it was a wig.