I took my copy of the I Ching out and threw the coins. Once I had my hexagram built, I looked it up and read what the oracle had to say. For me the I Ching came back with— ooh, the mother—KUAN, Contemplation (View), which said this:
Contemplation. The ablution has been made,
But not yet the offering.
Full of trust they look up to him.
Well, I sure as hell hoped so. But the image the I Ching gave me was not as reassuring. It said:
The wind blows over the earth:
The image of contemplation.
Thus the kings of old visited the regions of the world,
Contemplated the people,
And gave them instruction.
I had two changing lines I had to pay attention to, a six in the third place that said:
Contemplation of my life
Decides the choice
Between advance and retreat.
And a nine in the last place that said:
Contemplation of my life.
The superior man is without blame.
Now, with those changing lines in there I had a whole new hexagram to consider, one that would give further advice. And this new one was a doozy—my old pal CHIEN, Obstruction. I’d seen that one before. It was like Number One on my all-time hit parade of Hexagrams Most Often Thrown. Every damn thing in my life was an obstruction, if I believed the I Ching.
Chien told me that, yes, there was a little obstruction in my path—Mr. Nuke there purring away on my bed—but, no, not to worry, such things were good for the “superior man,” because “an obstruction that lasts only for a time is useful for self-development.” The Ching advised one to “join forces with friends of like mind and put himself under the leadership of a man equal to the situation.” Well, okay: I had to trust that I was going to come out of this alive.
Maybe that’s what the Ching is good for: confirmation of one’s own best hopes. I closed the cover of the Ching, put the coins back in the pouch I wore around my neck, and said a brief prayer of thanks to the Oracle. It seemed like forever had passed and then Lucy knocked on the door.
“Time to go, Holmes,” she said. “We don’t want to be late, do we?”
We sure didn’t.
* * *
Myers had sent a sleigh out to get us—a Mercedes sleigh (I recognized the hood ornament): a Mercedes car body with the wheels removed and steel runners bolted to the axle. Two big horses—the driver called them Belgians—pulled the sleigh. The driver was dressed in the height of Vert liveryperson fashion, I guess: green tights and a green velvet cape, with a big floppy hat. Lucy and I got in the back seat; I gingerly set my knapsack, with the nuke, on the floor.
We clip-clopped down the streets of Kachemak, past the air field, and onto the Spit. The houses got scungier the farther down the Spit we went, until the Vert dwelling units ceased to become houses and were more accurately called hovels. Lots of hovels. Our driver explained that we were in Spit Rat territory, the Spit Rats being sort of a splinter group of the Verts, “like they take the whole back to the earth thing too seriously.” She pointed out the window at a group of Spit Rat children, their clothes in rags and their faces smeared with dirt.
“Back to the earth does not mean groveling in it,” the driver added.
Snow on the Spit road had melted, so that the track was only hard frozen asphalt. On the beach the tide had washed the snow away, but left little icebergs in its wake. The roofs of the various shacks along the Spit were covered with snow, big long icicles melting down the edges so they almost met the ground. We went down the Spit to the end, then stopped at a small cluster of silver-gray log buildings, low to the ground, except for an octagonal lighthouse in the midst of them. The liveryperson got out, opened our door for us.
“The Spittoon,” she said.
I slung the knapsack over my shoulder, and walked in. A bartender was wiping the top of a long bar, but there wasn’t a soul in the place. I glanced at my watch: 4:45. The nuke would go off at 5:15. Myers had better get there soon. Lucy and I walked over to a big room beyond the bar. The bartender followed us in, the right side of her body twitching every now and then, and we ordered beers. I put my knapsack on a long wooden table, took out the nuke, gingerly set it down. The bartender came over a few minutes later with two steins of dark, frothy beer and, shaking, set them down on the rough table, the foam slopping over the edge.
“A shaker,” Lucy whispered when the bartender had gone. I nodded. One of the side effects of the Zap: some folks got this palsy that made them twitch all the time.
I looked at my watch again. 4:55. “Where’s Myers?” I asked.
“He’ll be here,” Lucy said, but the way she bit her lip didn’t convince me.
The ceiling of the Spittoon hung low, almost to the top of my head. Flags had been draped on the ceiling, as had hats, bras, dirty jeans, and other stuff I couldn’t quite identify in the dim light. There was a big red flag with gold stars in the pattern of a dipper tacked on the wall—the PRAK flag. “Eight stars of gold on a field of red,” I remembered Orca Captain singing when we first came into Kodiak and saw the red flag flying over the town.
The door swung open and banged against the wall of the Spittoon, and in stepped a small army of Verts, Myers at the lead. He wore a big green sword slung from his belt. The Verts flowed in behind him, men, women, and a few children, all in . . . well, the wonderful clothes that only Verts could wear: green, pinks, rainbow outfits, like they had been covered with honey and rolled through a warehouse of costumes. Whatever stuck to them they wore.
Myers came up to our table, looked down at the thermos bottle silently humming away. He looked over my shoulder, under the table, down at the floor.
“Well, where is it?” he asked.
“Where’s what?”
“The nuke? You bring the nuke?”
I tapped the thermos.
“That’s it?” he asked. I nodded. “That was the nuke on the blimp. That’s it? That little ol’ thing?”
I shrugged. “You’ve seen nukes before. You gave us one just like this.”
“Only it don’t work,” Myers said. “I kinda thought when you got them working again you might gussy ’em up. You know, make ’em look like real bombs.”
“They’re not supposed to look like real bombs,” Lucy said. “That’s the idea.”
“Well, okay,” he said. “As long as it works.”
I smiled again. “Oh, this baby works, all right. This baby works.”
The Verts crowded into the room, pulled up chairs. The bartender brought over a couple of pitchers of beer, and they settled into a party. I didn’t feel so joyous, but I had to try to see it their way. This was a big deal. They were getting a nuke.
“Let’s get started,” I said. Lucy had coached me on the whole procedure: start quickly and cut the crap, she’d advised. Time was of the essence. No shit. I looked at my watch again. Five o’clock. Time to book.
“Before I hand over this working nuclear device,” I said, “there remains one issue we have to settle. Do you have the hostage?”
Myers put his arm around one of the kids: a small boy, cute as a button, with big blue eyes, light green hair, dressed in paisley knickers and a big purple sweater. “My son, John Deere,” he said. “But how does this hostage deal work?”
I sighed. This was the tough part. “You know how the bomb is armed?”
“Press a button, right?” Myers looked back at his friends. “Then, KA-BOOM!”
“Sort of,” I said. “But think about it. You wouldn’t want just anyone blowing off a nuke, right? I mean, suppose someone got drunk. They might make a mistake.”
Myers nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I’m head of the Verts. I should be the only one doing any nuking, right?” The Verts nodded.
“You got it. So we have this like code thing, the football.” I pulled a piece of copper, about an inch long, half an inch wide, from a pocket in the knapsack. “And see, if you want to fire the nuke, you
have to slip the football in this slot”—I slipped it in a small crack on the bottom of the nuke— “and that starts the sequence.”
“Hey,” said Myers, “did you just arm it?”
“No, no,” I said. “I just had the nuke punch a new code. See, this is your football. We can’t use our football on the nuke now. But if I wanted to arm it, I’d just slip the football back in.”
“Uh, don’t do that,” Myers said.
“Oh, I won’t. See, now you have this football. And you want to keep it safe. Like we have our footballs for the nukes we have on the Wonderblimp, and we keep ’em someplace real safe. Lucy here has the football for this nuke,” I lied. “Where do you suppose she keeps it?”
Myers grinned. “Up her pussy?” The Verts burst out laughing.
I waited for them to quiet, then said, “Not exactly.” I walked over to Lucy, started unbuttoning her jumpsuit. “Excuse me, Lucy.” Some Verts started giggling. I unbuttoned her suit until her cleavage and that nice white scar were showing. Lucy tried to look dignified. I stroked my finger down that scar. “Lucy keeps her football in here,” I said.
“But . . . but how do you get it out?” Myers said. His forehead was starting to sweat. The Verts got real quiet.
I slipped my knife from its sheath, threw it point down into the wood. It made a nice thunk sound, then quivered for a few seconds. The Verts didn’t utter a peep.
“With that,” I said.
“You . . . you cut her open?” Myers asked. His cheeks trembled a little.
“We cut out her heart,” I said. “The football is in her heart. See, the piece of copper is snaked up through her arteries inside her heart, and the design—the code—is branded on one of the arteries. If you need to fire the nuke, you need two codes: your palm print on the handle, and the football. You cut out the heart, remove the branded artery, flatten it, and let it dry. But don’t let it dry too much; it has to be fresh, and if you don’t insert it within a day, the code’s no good. When you’ve prepared the football, you slip it in this slot here on the nuke.” I pointed to the slot at the base of the thermos. “The nuke ‘reads’ the code on the artery, and it’s armed.”
“But, . . .” Myers said, “but if you cut her heart out, that would kill her.”
“Probably. That’s the idea.”
Myers wiped a big green bandana across his forehead. “So, in order to arm the nuke, I’d have to cut out someone’s heart to get the football?”
“John Deere’s heart. We’ll put the football inside John Deere.” John Deere was holding on to his father, biting his lip. “It won’t hurt him. Doc North’s a good cutter. The doc will make a little ceremonial scar, like Lucy.” Like me, I thought.
“Christ,” he said. “So let me get this straight: in order to use that nuke, I’d have to kill my own son?” I nodded. “But . . . I could never do that.”
I nodded again. “That’s the way we figure it. You still want the nuke?”
Myers bit his lip. “I—I don’t know. We’ll have to think about it.”
I looked at my watch. “Don’t take too long. This bomb is going to blow in about five minutes.”
“What?!!” Myers jumped up, put his hands on the table in front of me. “It’s going to what?”
“Blow,” I said. “Like you said: KA-BOOM. I lied. It really is armed. It’s been armed for about two hours. I can’t stop it. If you want the nuke, and if you don’t want it to blow, you have to put your hand on the handle. It’s coded to stop at your palm print.”
“You—” Myers stopped. I knew what he was thinking: “On the blimp, three weeks ago. I touched the nuke?”
I shrugged. I remembered Myers holding the nuke. Lucy said they always wanted to touch the nuke. “We kind of knew you would,” I said.
“Shit.” He looked around at the Verts. A lot of them were nodding their heads. “Goddamn you,” he said.
Myers put his hand around the nuke. There was that flash, and then he jerked his hand back, gray powder falling from it. The thermos quit ticking. I sighed.
“Okay, she’s all yours. There are a few other things we have to go over about its operation, but I can brief you later.” I held up the piece of copper I’d put in earlier, rubbed it between my fingers, and it fell apart into green ash. “We have to make a new football, but we’ll do that when we get John Deere on the table. The football tarnishes and falls apart a minute after it’s exposed to air.” I put the nuke inside the knapsack and handed it to Myers.
“John Deere?” Lucy said.
John Deere looked up at his father. “Dad?”
“It’s okay, son.” He gently pushed John Deere toward us.
Lucy put an arm around John Deere. “You like to play football?” she asked him.
“Yeah!” he said.
“Well, you’re going to be a quarterback. We’ll give you a jersey and everything.”
“Neat!”
We walked to the door. Myers and the Verts sat, slumped, real quiet. They had thought it was going to be a party. I could have told them otherwise. Nukes are never a party.
“Hey, Lucy,” Myers said.
We stopped, turned around. “Yeah?” Lucy asked.
“You guys are cruel bastards.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Some of us are cruel bitches. You don’t like it? So nuke us.”
I opened the door and we left the Spittoon.
CHAPTER 6
Damn Verts. That’s gratitude for you: give ’em a nuke, and the next thing you know they think they can push anybody around—even us. Doc North had just patched up Myers’s kid and sent him home to his momma with instructions on when to take the stitches out. It was about oh-dark hundred when Ruby, up on watch in the observation platform on top of the blimp, noticed a big cloud of snow burning its way up the Spit and toward the Wonderblimp. Later, Ruby said the only reason she saw the cloud was because it passed by a big Spit Rat bonfire. Nike and I climbed up there with Ruby to see what the fuss was all about.
“Damn jerks,” Nike said. He handed me the night binoculars—yeah, their toys were getting fancier by the moment— and I had a look-see.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Net catapult,” Nike said. “Someone tried the same trick on us once down south. Crazy damn fools! Always trying to catch the blimp. Catch the blimp, catch the blimp. What do they think we are? God? God Christ! Jerks! Jerks!” Nike pounded the handrail around the edge of the crow’s nest. “Jerks.”
“Nike, calm down,” Ruby said. “Let anger become action, and words become strength.”
“Yeah,” he said. Nike shook his head, took a few breaths, then shouted into the ship’s intercom. “All right, let’s move it. Up ship, ASAP!”
I scrambled down the ladder back to the bridge with Ruby and Nike. “How does a net catapult work?” I asked Nike on the way down.
“Blimp trap,” he said. “They shoot a net over us—one of their fishing nets, I imagine—and stake us down. No way we can lift off.”
Nike went forward to the bridge and I scrambled to my mooring post—front nacelle, port—and got ready to release. Over the wurrp-wurrp of the blimp’s Klaxon on the intercom he shouted the order for full props. Ruby had gone down to the hold; I saw the gangplank cranking in. Bron was on the bridge with Nike. Lucy, I knew, had been helping the doc, and had—
—and had helped Doc take John Deere back to his dad’s. I punched the intercom, got the bridge. “Nike, Lucy and Doc are at the Spit with the Myers kid.”
“Damn,” he said. “Set up. Okay, we’ll wait a few minutes.”
Someone on the bridge punched the searchlights on, and the bottom of the blimp bathed the ground in acres of light. Two figures were running from a sleigh and toward the blimp. The Wonderblimp was still moored. Ruby threw a rope out through the hangar bay; at the end was one of the slings we used to haul cargo up—a big net, really. Smart move. The two people running to the blimp dove into the open net, and it was gathered up aro
und them like they were crabs.
“Blow the drogue and cut the lines!” Nike yelled.
From the nose I heard a series of pops as someone blew the explosive bolts. The landing cone ripped from the derrick, still stuck to the nose. I grabbed the little hatchet we kept by the moorings just for the purpose, swung it, and severed my rope with a resounding thwack. The line slipped out of the nacelle, and I saw other lines joining it on the ground, like shorn hair. The Wonderblimp burst free of the ground just as the catapult pulled up to the landing field. We cut the lights and rose into darkness.
* * *
By the time I got back to the hold, Ruby was pulling the two crew out of the net. It was dim in the hold, so I couldn’t see exactly who they were. I held my breath, then sighed when I saw that blue braid come out and grab Ruby’s wrist. Lucy. The doc came right out after her.
Nike called me up to the bridge. I hugged Lucy, went to see what was up. When I got there, Nike had a crinkled map spread out on a table, a sister to the Kodiak map I’d looked at earlier. This one was for the next quad north, and ended at the top of the Kenaitze Peninsula. Like the Kodiak map, it had a lot of names either erased or altered.
“Plot a course, Holmes,” Nike said.
“Where we headed?”
“Someplace called Naptown. A memor gave me a message in Kachemak.”
Him too? I thought. I felt bad; I hadn’t had time to do Khim’s reading for her. “Khim?” I asked. He nodded. “What did she tell you?”
“Khim said we should go to Naptown,” Nike said. “ ‘The first fork of the big / river north, after the fort / where the bridge crosses.’ When we get there, some guy named Rei will have another message for us.”
“That’s it?”
Nike nodded. “Yeah. Rei could have a nuke for us. Or he could have—nah, you don’t need to know. So now, you tell me: where’s Naptown?”
After the Zap Page 7