After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  I’d looked at the map, figured it would be just as easy to head up the inlet to Kaditali Station if that’s where we wanted to go. But whoever wanted us at Kaditali wanted to make sure we got there. Whoever that was had sent the locomotive down to give us a ride up through the passes. Well, that was okay— their ticket. We’d save fuel.

  Nike lowered a rope down, a feeder to the cable. Bron and I caught it, dragged the rope over to a winch on the back of the locomotive. I walked up to the cab of the engine, woke up a black woman dozing on a cot in the back of the cab. Thin must have been the dominant body type in the Coop’s universe; this lady could have turned sideways and disappeared into the second dimension. Her hair looked like a puff of pink cotton candy. She wore big, baggy green wool pants, a tea-colored anorak, and mukluks made out of the hide of some spotted animal. Snapped to a nylon web belt around her waist was a big brass double snap. I’d seen some snaps like that on some people in Kachemak; Lucy had explained that that meant the person was a dog-driver, kind of a totem they wore.

  “Hey, goddamn,” she said, waking up. “Who are you?”

  “Holmes,” I said. “The Wonderblimp. You the engineer?”

  “Yeah,” she said, stretching. “Man, I thought you guys’d never get here. My name’s Rindi. You hitching up?”

  I nodded. “How’s the winch work?”

  She smiled. “Let Rindi take control, babe.” She flicked a switch on the engine panel and the winch started humming. I looked back, saw the rope turn around on a big drum on the back of the locomotive. The rope pulled the cable down to the engine. She turned the winch off, and I followed her back to the cable drum. Rindi carried a big open-ended wrench.

  The cable wound under two big rollers, around a small horizontal drum, then onto the big vertical drum. Rindi fed the end of the cable—a big hook—inside the drum, then turned the winch on again. She let the winch pull the cable around and across the drum until the cable had made about ten revolutions, then she turned the winch off.

  “That should hold it,” she said. “But suppose you want to let go?”

  “That might come in handy,” I said.

  “You bet.” She nodded. “Oh yeah, a blimp like that. Now and then, you might want to let go.” She walked to where the cable came off the small drum. Rindi placed a long half-cylinder on top of the cable, bolted it down. She attached two wires to the cylinder, stood up. We walked back up to the cab.

  Rindi pointed to two switches: a toggle switch marked with a pictogram of a cable, and a red push-button switch marked with a pictogram of a cable cut in two. “If you want to blow the cable,” she said, “flip the toggle switch, then press the red button. There’s a stick of dynamite in that cylinder; it’ll blow the cable apart.”

  “What about the train?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, it might blow the train apart, too.”

  We tightened the cable down a few more notches, then waved up to Nike on the bridge of the Wonderblimp. He flashed the landing lights.

  “You coming with us?” I asked Rindi.

  “Heck, yeah,” she said. “It’s my locomotive. How else am I going to get it back?”

  I nodded. “Good point.”

  “Besides,” she said, “I live at the Redoubt.”

  I hopped out of the cab, yelled up to Nike. “I guess we’re ready.”

  He leaned out an open window, yelled back. “Bron, stay down there. Holmes, come up here on watch.”

  I clapped Rindi on the shoulder. “See you around.” I walked over to Coop, coming down the gangplank. “Any messages for us?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing especially for you, except this:

  Watch out for pennies

  Wired to batteries that make

  Dynamite go boom.

  I winced. “Thanks. We’ll watch out for pennies.”

  I walked back up the gangplank, raised it after I was on board. We cut loose from the mooring mast and tightened the slack on the cable. Rindi fired up the locomotive and we were off.

  * * *

  Now that I think about it, we should have dumped Private First Class Odey, gold lamé dress and all, right there at Moose Pass. Let him find his own way home. But Nike wanted to keep Odey on board because, as he said, “Sometimes hostages come in handy in the PRAK.” So we stripped the guy, searched him, then gave him a pair of blimper blues and told him to keep his nose out of trouble.

  It was that “Hammer will have my ass” comment that made Nike curious. Odey knew the Hammer. The Hammer was the guy we were going to see at Kaditali Station. I guess it made sense at the time. When you head into strange territory, sometimes it’s a good idea to take a guide with you.

  And sometimes it’s a real stupid idea.

  Nike wasn’t saying what this stuff was we were hauling up to Maxwell Silverhammer Everton. Whatever it was, the Wonderblimp had been hauling it for some time, long before Kodiak. I kind of stumbled across the stuff one night when I was on watch.

  Nike kept the inactive nukes—they were down to one—in a lead-lined locker in the back of the blimp, aft of the hangar and far from where anyone slept. Why flirt with gamma rays? One night when I was on watch the rad counters we had ticking away back there let out a little peep. We had a leak. I put on a radiation suit—a suit of lead—grabbed a rad meter, and walked back there to see what the problem was.

  The radiation leak wasn’t anything serious—someone hadn’t sealed the nuke lockers properly—and I got the problem cleared up quicker than you could say X-ray. But while I was in the vault checking the matter out I noticed a pile of dark green metal boxes. What was in the boxes? I asked myself. I set the rad meter down, clicked it off, and unsnapped the lid of one box—they had some sort of watertight lock on them—and opened it up.

  Crammed end to end in the box were maybe twenty clear plastic bags of some pinkish white powder. I squinted at my eyes, shook my head. Pink powder? I didn’t know. I opened a bag up, dipped a finger in, took out a pinch of the powder, and sniffed it.

  Searing light shot through my eyes. Lightning ran through my muscles; boiling water washed like a tidal wave through my blood. My head seemed to grow ten times in size, and I became conscious of every tic of my muscles, every twitch of my bones, every beat of my heart. I was aware, aware like every sense had been dialed up to high, like every thought and sensation went straight to my brain, no stopping at the intersection of the lower brain to pause and chat. I felt completely conscious, and as I learned my new power I became aware of small sounds I hadn’t heard before: Doc North snoring down the hall, Lucy tossing in her sleep, the whir of the magnetos on the props, the slight hiss of gas leaking from an aft ballonet. And I felt and heard and sensed the slight padding of feet coming down the passageway, felt a hand gently easing the locker door open. I whipped around, residue of powder still on my finger tip.

  Nike stood in the doorway, arms folded across his chest, shaking his head. He sighed, a sigh that sounded like a rushing of wind.

  “I was hoping to keep it a secret,” he said, but I heard, “I WAS HOPING TO KEEP IT A SECRET.”

  “What a secret?” I asked softly, my own words pain to me, both the thought of the words and the utterance.

  “WHAT?” Nike yelled. “SPEAK UP.” He grinned, a grin that seemed to me like lines cut in stone. As I looked at him, Nike seemed to glow, and slight electrical discharges seemed to whirl around his body.

  “KEEP WHAT A SECRET?” I asked.

  “THAT,” he said. Nike walked over to me, his footsteps making great booming sounds on the deck. He pointed down at the open box, then lifted my finger up, flicked the little pink crystals off of it. “WAIT,” he said, and then, softer, “Wait.”

  I waited. The sighing of the ship ceased. Doc quit snoring. My blood slowed its pounding. Nike stopped glowing. The world wound down to its normal appearance, and my senses did not sense too much.

  “Wait,” Nike said again. “Okay?” he asked in a normal voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. �
�What is that stuff?” It had been the pink powder I’d sniffed: some kind of drug.

  “Pink Snow,” Nike said, “the Little Zap, some call it— lazy, for short. It’s pure, high grade cocaine laced with a nasty little hallucinogenic drug. Fast, powerful, and not too long lasting. You felt what it does.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was still trying to shake the lightning bolts out of my head. “That’s powerful—”

  “Shit,” Nike said. “Shit would be a good word to use here.”

  “Yeah, powerful shit.”

  “And very expensive. Very, very, very expensive. The price of this one little bag”—he held up the bag I’d broken—“could feed a tribe for a year. And there are ten boxes, each with twenty bags.”

  I whistled, shook my head. Nike handed me the bag, and I kneeled down to put it back in the metal box. As I kneeled, I bumped the rad meter, and it clicked on. The rad meter started clicking like a happy cricket. I looked up at Nike, raised my eyebrows, waved it over the pink powder—the lazy. The rad meter clicked louder. I put the bag in the box, sealed it, and the clicking slowed to a slight tick every few seconds. I took the lid off, and it clicked like a cricket again. I held the wand of the meter right down next to the powder, and the clicking became a screech. I put the lid back on and turned the meter off.

  “This stuff also seems to be very, very radioactive,” I said.

  Nike rolled his eyes. “Yeah. So it seems.”

  “This your stuff?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not all of it. We get a cut, but most of it belongs to . . . well, this guy. It’s kind of a tribute.”

  “Some tribute. Guy must not be too picky about radiation sickness.” I tried to calculate how much of a dose I’d gotten up my nose. Maybe a rad or two. Not enough to worry about, I hoped. But over time, that lazy could kill.

  He smiled. “No, he isn’t.” He motioned toward the door. “Lock it up here. Let’s go talk on the poop deck.”

  I followed him out, then up the ladder through the middle of the blimp and to the open deck on top of the blimp bag.

  “You ever hear of the chest bomb?” Nike asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Okay. Well, the chest bomb was this hair-brained scheme to put a knapsack nuke in a person’s chest. They only did it to one guy: Maxwell Silverhammer Everton. Max the Hammer. Name ring a bell?”

  “The Hammer Odey mentioned?” I said.

  “Yeah. Know who he is?” I shook my head again. “Okay. Max the Hammer was—is—this nuclear physicist who got convicted of selling state secrets to the Soviets. He was caught when they picked him up on a murder rap. The old USA federal government said he bludgeoned his lab assistant to death. They executed him.”

  “But you said—”

  “Yeah, I said. Lethal injection—it’s an easy death to fake. The Hammer had agreed to participate in the chest bomb experiment. They put the bomb in, and then . . . and then it turned out the Feds were wrong. The Hammer was innocent.”

  “But the nuke—”

  Nike nodded. “Yeah, they screwed up, didn’t they? So how do you make it up to him? You’ve not only ‘killed’ him, you’ve put a nuke in his chest and probably condemned him to a slower death. So the Feds made him an offer. They gave him a square mile of land in the PRAK—it was just Alaska then—and set him up in the dope business. He dealt mostly cocaine. Then they told him they were going to send up this new stuff. See, the Feds could never stop experimenting. They wanted to see what this stuff would do.”

  “And then the Zap came.”

  “Yeah. The Zap came. So we’re a little late with his shipment.”

  I looked down at the locomotive chugging away, pulling us through the night. Great clouds of steam rose up and enveloped the blimp, so it appeared like we were floating through a cloud. “Hang on,” I said. “How come you—the Wonderblimp—are delivering—were delivering—the shipment?”

  Nike laughed, a little snort. “Crap, Holmes, don’t you understand who I am? I am the Feds.”

  “The Feds?” I thought about it for a moment, and it made a lot of sense. The pre-Zap Feds, of course. Who else could have a blimp? Who else could have gotten nukes like that? “You’re the army people who gave out the nukes before?”

  “Nah,” Nike said. “Not them. I don’t really know who they are.”

  We stood there on the crow’s nest, watching the train chug down the track before us, mountain sliding by. I thought about what he said. Yeah, the Wonderblimp could be a Fed airship. That made sense. A flash of memory came back to me, of gray airships floating through sunny skies. I didn’t know where that thought came from, or where I’d seen ships like that before. But it felt right that they were Fed airships. And the nukes? Sure, the nukes had to have come from the Feds, like Nike had said all along. The Feds—the USA government—had blown the Big Zap (some said) in the first place. Then I thought of the pink powder, lazy, Nike called it, radioactive, purring away like a sun-washed cat.

  “So you’re going to give this Hammer guy the lazy?”

  Nike smiled. “Great double-cross, huh?”

  “I don’t think the Hammer is going to be too thrilled when he gets the lazy.”

  “Oh, no,” said Nike. “He’s not really going to get the lazy.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  Nike grinned. “One mystery at a time, Holmes. You’ll keep your mouth shut about this?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ll keep my damn mouth shut.” And I looked at him with the glare I refined after a lifetime of lying to sons-of-bitches. Yeah, I’d keep my damn mouth shut . . . until I had a reason to open it. The kind of stuff Nike was delivering . . . heck, I figured I’d have a reason soon enough.

  * * *

  We should have killed Odey. Forget dropping him off at Moose Pass. We should have killed him, cut his throat and left his bones for the bears to pick clean in the spring.

  The railroad came out of the Kenaitze Peninsula at a place (the map said) called Portage. Nike, Doc North and I were up in the bridge; Bron and Ruby were back in the hold, keeping an eye on that guy Odey. The hold seemed like a good place to put Odey—keep him out of trouble.

  Wrong.

  Lucy was down on the locomotive with Rindi, watching the tracks. Rindi told us that Portage was a hot spot, that we should be careful going through there. Nike had the helm and I was watching my maps.

  We went through Portage with no trouble. Portage pops up out of broad flats at the end of the mountains. We came screeching down the mountains into this valley. The flats were broad expanses of silt, land tossed up by the sea over years of tidal action. On the edges of the flat were great forests of silver trees, dead trees, row upon row of bleached poles. Rindi said that there had been an earthquake here long before the Zap; the land had fallen five feet and the trees were flooded. West of the flats was a long, narrow bay, an arm of water curving northwest.

  The railroad tracks followed the arm for a bit, headed into the mountains, then came out at a place called G-something-wood. G’wood looked inhabited. Off in a valley I could see a haze of wood smoke hovering over the forest. One mountain had some sort of a cable lift system set up on it. Ski lifts. I was idly watching the face of that mountain when I saw a puff of smoke kick up from a building high up on the face. A few seconds later a screaming whipped over our heads and a stand of trees exploded to port.

  “Goddamn,” Nike said. “Mortars. Stations, everyone.”

  The blimp thundered with the sound of feet running deck to deck. I stayed put, to spell Doc North at the helm if he needed it. The intercom crackled.

  “I’m hit,” Ruby said, panting.

  “How bad?” Nike yelled.

  “Just a scratch: not bad, but I can’t fire the machine gun.”

  “Damn,” he said. “Holmes, can you handle the machine gun?” I nodded; Ruby had shown me how at Naptown. “Okay. Get up there and bring her down, then take the guns.”

  I ran aft and up to the catwalk. Ruby lay on the
catwalk just forward of the main nacelle, both hands bleeding, holes ripped in the skin of the catwalk. I helped her up, started with her back down, but she shrugged me off. “Go,” she said. I nodded, ran up to the forward nacelle.

  The .50 caliber machine gun was ready, 110 round belts loaded. I swiveled the barrel down, tracking. A target. I needed a target. Half a minute later, I had it.

  Dog teams. Those G’wooders, whoever they were, came out of the woods on big twenty-dog teams. They had a driver on the runners and a person standing in the basket. There were four teams, two on each side of the tracks. The people in the basket pulled tarps off something in the basket: machine guns mounted on tripods, looking a lot like ours.

  Bullets started zinging past me into the blimp. The blimp bag bounced back with each shot, but the sound of metal hitting metal meant some bullets were getting in and hitting the superstructure. The thing we had to worry about was a bullet, or a mortar, hitting the hydrogen in the bags on top. But that was why the hydrogen was on top and not down below. We ain’t stupid.

  I slid the bolt back, fired a spray in front of a team to starboard. It was hard to hit those dogs; they leapt up and down in an irregular cadence. I got one dog, but it didn’t slow the team down much. The dogs behind and next to him snapped at the lines holding the dog in and the dead dog fell away behind the sled.

  “Stand by to blow the cable,” I heard Nike announce over the ship’s intercom. I looked down; Rindi and Lucy were still on the locomotive, pinned. No way were they going to come up.

  “Nike,” I said, hitting the intercom switch. “Lucy and Rindi are down there.”

  “I’m staying down here,” I heard Rindi say. “I’ll take care of the kid. You watch the blimp.”

  “Nike—” I said.

  “She’s right, Holmes. Bron—” Nike was calling Bron back in the hold, where the cable would be blown. “Stand by to blow.”