DOC VANDAL
in
Against the Eldest Flame
by Dave Robinson
A Doc Vandal Publication
Revised Edition Copyright 2017 by Dave Robinson
Cover Illustration by Carlos Balarezo
Cover Design by Queen Graphics
This is a work of fiction. All similarities to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All events, locales, and incidents are either purely the product of the author’s imagination or used for fictitious purposes.
The Doc Vandal Series
Against the Eldest Flame
Air Pirates of Krakatoa (May 2017)
Attacked Beneath Antarctica (Forthcoming)
This novel is dedicated to Kim, without whom I would never have written a word; to Kyrie, and to my brother Neil, who always believed I was a writer even when I didn’t. Also thanks to my mother, Lyn Robinson, and the memory of my father, Clive Robinson.
I would also like to thank everyone who has helped me on this writing journey from the moment I first decided I wanted to create my own pulp heroes to the last word I typed; especially those who have read my works and given the kind of feedback you need to get the best out of a story: Jules Ironside, S.L. Huang, Vincent Collins, Jaap Geluk, and Ian Gill.
I’d like to give special thanks to Brett Booth who served as a much-needed resource when I had questions about dinosaurs.
Any errors are mine alone.
Table of Contents
Attack in New York
Flight to Africa
Survival
Prisoners of Pongo City
Doc on the Run
Flame of Revolution
Afterword
CHAPTER ONE
Attack in New York
Doc Vandal held the autogyro steady over the stricken Zeppelin. Acrid smoke rose from the wounds in the airship’s flanks as it dove towards the New York skyline. It took all his strength to keep his ‘gyro in place against the hot updraft. Without taking his eyes off his target he called to his co-pilot in the rear cockpit.
“Get ready to take over, Vic!” he yelled over the engine. “Just a few more yards and I’m going to jump.”
The stick waggled in his hand, telling him that he’d been heard and she was ready to take the controls. Gritting his teeth, he advanced the throttle and the little plane inched forward. Just a few more feet and he’d be in position. They broke past the updraft and the rotor windmilled like crazy as the gyro dropped toward the Zeppelin’s hull. Doc let go of the controls and pulled himself onto the left wing, trusting Vic to keep control.
Winds buffeted his head, sending his scarf streaming behind him. The airship seemed to rush upwards towards him, the forward hatch growing from a quarter to a manhole cover in seconds. Gathering his breath, he bent his knees and leaped, aiming just in front of the Zeppelin’s forward top hatch. The autogyro shot away barely missing his head, Vic’s long red hair streamed behind the cockpit as she dove for safety.
Doc had barely enough time to notice she had reached a safe distance before he smacked into the airship’s skin. Pulling his fighting knife, he drove it through the fabric, giving himself an anchor. Fighting the wind, he twisted back to face the hatch, which had opened during his fall.
A black furry head popped up through the opening - followed by a machine pistol. Doc rolled sideways as a spray of bullets ripped a line through where he’d been laying. His knife ripped free and he stabbed several times at the Zeppelin’s tough skin before halting his slide. Gripping his knife with his right hand, Doc drew his pistol with his left and snapped off two quick shots. His assailant slumped, and Doc started working his way toward the hatch.
Reaching the hatch, he saw that his assailant was a gorilla brown shirt. “Damn Nazis,” he muttered as he squeezed past the ape’s bulk and into the access tunnel. The metal was hot to the touch, so he knew he didn’t have much time before the ship turned into a torch. Doc slid down the ladder, stopping just before what his memory told him should be the main deck. Slipping his pistol back in its holster, he drew a small rebreather from a pocket in his vest and slipped it in his mouth. Taking two sleep grenades in his right hand, he dropped silently to the deck and drew his pistol.
Moving very quietly for such a big man, Doc made his way forward toward the control cabin. The ship was an older cargo Zeppelin, relying on hydrogen for lift rather than lyftrium, an aerogel of Doc’s invention that had largely supplanted gas on airships built since the end of the Great War. When charged properly lyftrium was either transparent to gravity or fully reflective, and it had created an explosion in air travel few could have predicted. Most of the older hydrogen ships were used in places like Africa and the Mexican Empire, where the lack of roads and other infrastructure let them remain competitive despite their low carrying capacity.
The door to the control cabin had a small window, and Doc pulled a small periscope from his vest. Crouching below the window he extended the periscope to look around. Whistling to high for a human to hear, he counted his targets. The airship had a crew of four, two pilots and two engineers. All four were dressed in rags, and standing strangely still. The flesh that showed through their rags had a pale grayish sheen. A gorilla brown shirt stood in the center of the cabin, a machine pistol slung across his back.
“Put your hands on top of your head, you hairless pig.” The muzzle of a gun dug into his back.
Doc palmed the sleep grenades and slowly raised his hands to the top of his head.
“Now get up!” The speaker punctuated his order with a jab of his gun muzzle.
Concealing the rebreather in his mouth, Doc got up and turned to face his captor. As he suspected, it was another gorilla brown shirt, with a cap pulled over its eyes and a machine pistol looking like a toy in its massive hand. “In there,” the gorilla ordered Doc, gesturing with his gun, and shoving the door open with his free hand. The ape’s eyes held a glint of intelligence, and Doc wondered why it seemed so calm while the airship hurtled toward its flaming death..
“Look what I found wandering around,” the gorilla said, pushing Doc forwards into the control cabin. “Another hairless idiot sticking its flat face where it doesn’t belong.”
“Don’t worry about vermin,” the one from the control cabin snapped. “What about Kerak and the plane? I don’t want to be aboard when we hit the Republic State Building.”
“Kerak’s dead,” Doc’s captor replied. “Somebody shot him in the face. Plane’s ready to go. I unshipped the links and opened the doors.”
That was all Doc needed. He popped the rebreather back into position and triggered the grenades, spraying sleeping gas throughout the cabin. Both apes dropped, but the flight crew just stood there, ignoring the gas.
“Zombies.” Doc muttered around his rebreather. Clenching his teeth on the mouthpiece he turned and wrested the controls from the pilot’s unresisting hands. Whatever the gorillas were using to control the zombies seemed to still be working, which was one piece of good news. The last thing he needed was to be wrestling over the controls with someone who couldn’t feel pain. A glance at the altimeter told him they were already below a thousand feet, and still sinking. Luckily they were still over the water, but Manhattan was just minutes away.
Slamming the helm over, Doc reached for the throttles, adding the right-side engines’ thrust to the flaming rudder. Buildings were growing in the cabin windows, and he had no time to turn the airship around. His only chance was to try to put her into the Hudson and pray he missed any shipping. The Zeppelin started coming around slowly, but it wasn’t enough. Growling deep in the back of his throat, he shoved the port engines’ pitch lever all the way into reverse. They screamed in protest as the
props fought their own turbulence. Just a little longer, just a little longer.
Slowly the Republic State building moved across his view. They were going to miss.
Now all he had to do was get the Zeppelin over the river when the lift finally ran out. Praying everything would hold, Doc reversed pitch on the port props and then dumped ballast, dropping two tons of water on the streets below. A sudden crack from his left told him he’d been two hopeful. One of the port props was locked in reverse thrust. Doc killed the engine, but he had needed that thrust. At least the ballast drop had given him a fighting chance to make the Hudson. They were already so low he could make out people on the streets below. Most were oblivious to the conflagration above their heads, but as he got closer he saw people drop everything and run for safety.
He was going to make it.
Doc could feel the heat of flames licking at the cabin door, but he had no choice. He had to stay on until they reached the river.
Suddenly he felt a hand at the back of his collar, ripping him away from the controls and throwing him on top of one of the unconscious brown shirts. Cold fetid breath washed over his face, making him thankful for the rebreather. One of the zombie engineers glared at him over rotting teeth. Holding the zombie off as best he could with one hand, Doc grabbed the gorilla’s machine pistol and rammed the muzzle into the zombies mouth, shattering teeth. A quick burst blew its head off, buying him breathing time.
Staggering back to the controls, Doc saw they were safely over the river and all the boats in sight were moving away as fast as possible. Not sure if there were any control surfaces left, he pushed the controls forward for a dive and took a running leap for one of the side windows. Crossing his forearms over his face he smashed through the glass and plummeted toward the river.
The Zeppelin had been high enough that he had just enough time to put his heels together and straighten up before he hit the water. The cold river almost knocked the breath out of him - rattling the rebreather he still held in his teeth. Doc kicked hard, driving himself toward the surface in a cloud of bubbles.
His head broke water just in time for him to see the skeletal frame of the Zeppelin hit the water about a hundred yards further out. Something exploded in the cargo hold, but it was drowned by the inrush of river water.
Stowing his rebreather, Doc shook his head and started to swim for the shore where Vic waited with the autogyro.
#
With a grin so broad she would have been eating bugs if not for the windscreen, Vic dove the autogyro away from the dying Zeppelin. She loved flying, and this little ship was almost perfect. It wasn’t fast, and it was terrible for aerobatics, but the way the rotor disk disappeared in the night sky made her feel like she was flying like a bird.
Reducing throttle, Vic brought the autogyro around to follow the Zeppelin; being careful to stay out of the updraft. The airship was streaming smoke, but she was used to flying in bad weather. At least her scarf kept most of it out of her lungs. Once on its tail, she reduced throttle to get below the ship for a better view. From below it looked like a thing out of nightmares, silhouetted by the skyline and lit by a garish combination of flames on its flanks and a handful of running lights. Dark figures filled the control cabin windows like demons in a Renaissance etching.
“Stay safe,” Vic muttered as the flames coursed higher.
The Zeppelin was getting close to Manhattan, and dropping dangerously low doing it. Vic held her breath as it lined up on the Republic State Building. By this point, it was taking some tricky work on her part to hold the autogyro level and the city up ahead was only going to make things worse. Vic waggled the autogyro’s stub wings and dropped a little further back so she had more room to fly.
Light flared on the underside of the Zeppelin, as someone opened the rear cargo hatch. A slim dark figure dragged a bat-winged shape to the opening and dove out of the doomed craft. Vic banked to follow it, but seconds later, a second hatch opened and another bulkier figure took to its own glider.
Unable to follow both, she swooped back around to follow the Zeppelin while the two gliders descended into the darkness. She tried to keep an eye on the two figures, but they quickly disappeared against the Manhattan skyline. Meanwhile the airship drove through the skies the skyscraper.
Moments later the airship lurched in mid-air, tongues of flame shooting skyward from nose to rudder. Water poured from the ballast tanks like a summer storm, soaking people and cars. Vic pulled back on the stick, pulling up and around as the Zeppelin veered to port heading for the Hudson. Seconds later, she was back on its trail, flying parallel between the shore and the Zeppelin.
The airship was about a hundred feet up when it finally seemed to run out of steam. One moment it was clawing for a few more feet of distance, the next it was heading for the drink. A tall figure flew out through shattered glass and plunged into the water.
Vic grinned, and looked for somewhere to land.
A couple of minutes later, Doc was back in the other cockpit.
“You soaked it; you clean it,” Vic yelled over the engine noise. “Also, you missed a couple. They bailed out in gliders and disappeared into the city.”
“We can worry about them tomorrow,” Doc replied. “I need a shower.”
Vic wrinkled her nose. He was right.
#
Ten minutes later, Doc walked out of his private bathroom toweling the last drops of water out of his short brown hair.
“Was that fun?” Vic asked from her seat on one of the leather couches in the corner of the room. She hadn’t bothered to change, and was still wearing her flying gear, which made her look like she’d just stepped out of a magazine advertisement.
Doc smiled. Vic always seemed to think that danger was an essential part of fun. She even played solitaire with razor-edged cards sometimes, though Doc comforted himself with the thought that at least they weren’t poisoned. “Not as much as it would have been for you, I think.”
“You’re probably right,” said the third member of their little group. Augustus Q. Ponchartrain was a silverback gorilla in a custom-tailored suit, complete with gold cufflinks and an expensive wristwatch. The watch was his latest acquisition, complete with a radium dial that glowed in the dark. “However, even if it wasn’t as much fun as it would have been for you, it still raises more than a handful of questions.”
“Such as why there were talking gorillas in Nazi uniforms in control of an airship from the Belgian Congo piloted by zombies that was apparently going to crash into the Republic State building?”
“To put it succinctly,” said the gorilla, “Yes.”
“That’s not a handful,” Vic said, swirling the ice in her coke.
“It will be,” Doc replied. “I’m sure Gus can turn each one of my questions into half a dozen without even trying.”
“Just a matter of applying a superior intellect.”
Doc nodded. “I’ve sent Gilly in the submersible to see if he can find anything else out about that airship.” Crossing the room, he draped his towel over one of the couches and poured himself a glass of mineral water. “From the looks of the crew, they had been zombied in Africa and flown the Zeppelin all the way across without stopping. What I don’t know is what they thought they had to gain?”
“You do live here, you know.” Gus pointed out. “I’m sure a flaming airship would have done some damage to the eighty-seventh floor no matter where it hit.”
“Perhaps.” Doc drained his mineral water. “We don’t know what was in its cargo hold either. It could have been more than just an airship collision.”
“I saw the explosion,” Vic added. “I don’t think the windows would have held up.”
“You don’t give us enough credit,” Gus said, peeling a banana. “Doc and I calculated these windows to stop up to a one thousand pound bomb.”
“And that airship can hold how many tons of cargo?”
“None at the moment,” Doc said mildly, “though you do have a point.”
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The private elevator dinged, and a strange figure in a black leather coat staggered into the room.
“Do I have the honor of addressing Doctor James Clark Vandal?” he asked in a clipped Teutonic accent.
Doc nodded, keeping one hand on the pistol he always carried holstered in the small of his back. “You do.”
“Good. My name is Schmidt, and I’m here to warn you that your very soul is in danger.”
“My soul?” Doc arched an eyebrow, keeping the man’s attention so that Gus and Vic could get into position in case he caused trouble.
“Beware the Eldest Flame,” the man said, and then his eyes went wide as he looked at something behind Doc.
Not wanting to take his eyes off Schmidt, Doc started sidling over to where he could catch a reflection of anything that could be sneaking up behind him. “The Eldest Flame?” Doc asked. “What do you mean, the Eldest Flame?”
Schmidt didn’t answer. His eyes bugged out as a tide of gray rose from his collar and washed out his face. Raising his arms he jumped at Doc, his teeth and nails growing visibly.
“That’s enough of that.” Gus reached out with one arm and caught Schmidt, casually snapping his neck before setting the corpse on the floor. “Zombie interrupted my banana. I hate that.”
“Doc.” Vic pointed at the window behind Doc.
Doc turned to see a gorilla wearing a feathered headdress hanging onto the window with suction cups. Catching Doc’s eye, the gorilla waved a strange flame-shaped amulet then deliberately pushed himself backward away from the window. Doc and the others rushed to the window, only to see the gorilla’s body as a dark speck falling toward the streets below.
“Quick, after him,” Doc barked.
Gus and Vic ran toward the elevator. Doc leaned over Schmidt’s body and loosened the coat. Underneath he saw the man was wearing an SS officer’s uniform with the Iron Cross. The body was cool, but there was a burnt patch on the chest. Doc ripped it open to see a stylized flame branded over Schmidt’s heart. “He was dead before he got in the elevator.”
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