by M. E. Parker
Sindra fiddled with the star in her pocket that had already saved her life once today and held it out for Lalana. Sindra ran her finger over the scrawled letters. Sindra’s star. It made her want to learn how to read words, recognize her name, and spot the shape of the letters that formed words like star.
“Where did you get that?” It was jagged in places, but at least one side had been hammered to a smooth point. Lalana handed Errol a flint rock to get a hot fire going outside to sterilize the blade. She pulled Myron’s good leg out of the way. Kneeling down beside his wound, she unwrapped the burlap knots around his leg. “Uh oh.”
“What is it?”
“Looks like he’s coming around. I sure hoped he’d be out cold for this part.”
Sindra studied each line in Myron’s face, his nose, the length of his eye lashes. He was certainly handsome in his way, with jaws and cheeks as though they were hewn from sandstone. His eyes were as big as his dreams, and seeing them open again renewed her faith that they could somehow make it out of here.
Myron coughed and mumbled then he tried to sit up. He fell back down with a moan. “We have to go.”
“This’ll pain you up something awful.” Lalana shoved some dried leaves into his mouth. “Under the tongue. That’s all the billet thistle I got left.”
“How you doing with that star?”
“Here it is. Nice and hot.”
“No.” Myron struggled to sit up until Sindra held him down. “Don’t burn any of that coal.” Myron blurted out his protest with a shallow breath. “It’ll take every bit of it to get us over the Gorge.”
Lalana pulled out a short length of rope from her bag. “I’m cutting into you now, Myron. Bite down on this rope.”
“What happ—” Myron stopped mid-sentence when Lalana spread the wound open. He bit down on the rope, his face pulling in opposite directions as though he had a hook in each side of his mouth.
“Keep him still,” Lalana said.
“I’m trying!” Myron’s shoulders tensed, the tendons in his neck drew taut.
“There you are,” Lalana whispered as she fished for the bullet. “Trying to hide from me, but I see you.”
Sindra’s eyes passed between the agony on Myron’s face, all the blood seeping onto the bench, and the concentration on Lalana’s face as she navigated Myron’s wound, taking care not to rip flesh with the other points of the star.
Lalana smiled and dropped a blood-streaked metal fragment into Sindra’s hand. “Errol, stoke your fire.”
Sindra held her hand behind Myron’s head when the air filled with the odor of burning flesh as Lalana cauterized the wound.
“Is he going to make it?” Sindra whispered.
“He’s got as good a chance as any of us, now. Lordy knows what’s going to roll across that bridge,” Lalana said. She tied two fresh burlap strips around Myron’s leg and leaned back with a sigh. “Time to rest, now. Everybody needs a bit of sleep.”
Lalana put them at ease telling stories of her childhood and her life of working on the last menagerie train with her father. After that, they fell asleep to the sounds of her voice, humming a mournful tune.
Myron had a fitful sleep. His wound throbbed and itched as he dreamed of giant beasts feasting on his leg, like those in the traveling menagerie Lalana described after the surgery, with stripes and horns and long necks. He’d slept in Sindra’s arms, and every time he awoke to what he thought were the sounds of the factory floor, Sindra’s hand patted his chest back to sleep.
He wanted to wake up, but he couldn’t open his eyes, as he tried to emerge from a deep hole, taking hollow breaths, drowning in black nothingness instead of water. Finally he pried his eyes open, expecting to feel comforted, finally with Sindra. Instead, he awoke confused and disoriented, first, in a field behind his grandfather’s house, then, seeing the empty room, back in his quarters in 14-C. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. The pain in his leg jarred his memory.
When he lifted his head, the world spun. He looked around, concrete walls, narrow strip of daylight. After a few moments, in the violet of dawn filtering through the turret vent, his environment came into focus. The bunker, he remembered. “We made it.”
After all the planning and work, the time had come. They were here. They had the pieces. He could assemble the airship, and they could make their flight over the Gorge. But problems he hadn’t anticipated quashed Myron’s excitement. When he planned his original escape, he’d counted on having a blanket of smoke from the factories to hide in as he crossed the Gorge. And on a sunny day, with the threat of E’ster artillery, his airship would resemble a swollen tick hanging in the sky waiting to be popped. If they waited until nighttime—the E’sters would probably have taken Jonesbridge by then. Compounding the danger, there were now more people. He and Sindra, they might be able to make it, but Errol, he’d want to escape, too, and Lalana, and Coyote Man. That would be far too much weight to make it.
Considering the possibilities, Myron grew nauseous. E’ster artillery—it was either that or contend with the Jonesbridge watchtowers, so he checked that one off in his mind as a wash. The clear sky versus nighttime—he didn’t see waiting as an option. The extra weight, though—he did have an idea for how he could solve that dilemma.
The situation resembled the word problems in his ancient physics book. Even loaded with all the extra weight, if it flew at all, his balloon full of hot air wouldn’t fall right out of the sky. It would descend. How rapidly, he didn’t know. He could think of only one accessible hill tall enough, with enough clearance: the summit of Iron’s Knob. And at the bunker, they were already halfway to the top.
“We don’t have much time. We have to assemble the airship and get it to the top of Iron’s Knob.” He stopped to catch his breath, surprised at how exhausted he was. “That’s the only way we’ll all make it across.”
“Oh Lordy. That’s crazy talk. That mess of a contraption out there is a death trap.”
Errol lifted up off the bench and leaned on the wall. “You’re a good kid, a survivor. We’re all survivors. That’s why we’re here and not dead in a heap.” He pointed to the embattled hillside. “I want out of this place, same as you. But if I wanted to off myself, I can think of fifty ways I’d rather go than falling out of the sky. Rethink this craziness,” he nodded at Sindra, “for her sake.”
Myron tried to stand and fell against the wall. Pain radiated from his wound all the way to his chest. His blood rushed to his head, and the four concrete walls spun. Rays of daylight scattered through the turret vent. He stabilized himself against the wall and stumbled for the stairs, not looking at Sindra, afraid to see hesitation on her face, too. He conceded that the airship didn’t look like much in its current state, but if he assembled it, they would see, they would understand that it could work. “Coyote Man, he thinks it’ll work.”
“That wild man is dead. He was an E’ster spy, anyway, he and that administrator fellow,” Lalana said.
“But Coyote Man changed,” Sindra insisted. “I saw him. He wasn’t really an E’ster. Not anymore.”
As peculiar as Coyote Man was, this news struck Myron. He’d grown to like him. His survival out on the rim had inspired Myron, and in some ways, maybe it was his beard, he reminded him of his grandfather.
Sindra threw Myron’s arm over her shoulders and helped him up the stairs. Limping out of the bunker, Myron gazed up to where they would have to begin their decent, to the hill’s crest that cast a jagged shadow across the creek bed.
Lalana used her hand as a visor, shielding the glare from the sun as she gazed into the valley. “The stables. That’s really the best place to hide out, for now, anyway. We won’t starve if we go there. Plus there ain’t nothing there the E’sters want.”
Errol searched the ground for a suitable walking stick. “Think this through.”
“Come with us,” Lalana said. “I have more medicines for that wound down there, too.”
Myron finally mustered the courage to look
at Sindra, unsure of what he would do or say if he spotted doubt in her eyes, how he would convince her, but she looked back at him, her resolve unmoved, and took his hand. “We’re going over the Gorge. And we’re not stopping until we run out of coal.”
Lalana clicked her tongue. “If you young ones are the future, I’m sorry to say I don’t think we have one. This may very well be the end.” She motioned Errol to begin their journey back.
Myron and Sindra exchanged glances, as though one or the other would call out to stop Errol and Lalana from leaving, but neither spoke as they watched them amble down the creek bed in the direction of Old Town.
“We are going to make it, Myron.”
“One step closer to Bora Bora.”
Myron instinctively searched the fold in his smock until he remembered that they’d taken everything when he was arrested. His postcard of Bora Bora had moored him to his dream, and having it confiscated by the ghosts, no longer able it to look at to reassure him, to infuse his plan with hope, left him as rudderless as the day he first received it.
• • •
Myron followed his grandfather to the barn, turning his head away as he did every time he passed the set of two graves, his mother’s flanked by his own that had kept him out of the hands of the orange shirts for ten years. When the barn door creaked open, his grandfather pulled a canvas tarp from a pile in the corner, the only part of the barn that had been off limits since Myron’s mother died. Myron spotted the large basket stuffed with a giant roll of fabric.
“Why now?”
“My gut says go now.” His grandfather tugged the basket into the open field. “The older you get, the more you trust your gut over your heart.”
“Where can we go?” Myron had always believed that nothing remained of what he’d read about in the books, envisioning only wasteland beyond Richterville.
Myron’s grandfather reached into the chest beside the basket and pulled out a worn rectangle of cardboard. He handed it to Myron with a rare smile. “Maybe here.”
The colors on the card struck Myron, green and blue, a bright yellow sun overhead and waves lapping at a sandy shore, two arching palm trees and a bird soaring out to sea. Two words written at an angle across the top read Bora Bora in faded letters.
Beside his mother’s keepsakes, Myron spotted two Old Age books, The Atlas of the Modern World, and a physics book, along with a few other odds and ends, such as a fishing lure and bob. “Almost ready.”
Myron ambled over to a large metal pan where his grandfather stoked coal. Above the pan, the lightweight cloth billowed from a folded apron into a wavering patchwork cloud of hundreds of beige and blue and orange swatches sewn together in irregular patterns. “This, my boy, is not just a balloon,” his grandfather said, holding his hand out over the seat. “This is an airship.” He yanked two levers up and down as a triangle-shaped rudder creaked back and forth over the propeller. “A balloon goes where the wind takes it. An airship goes where the pilot takes it.”
Myron settled into the basket next to his grandfather. The bellows stoked the coal. The airship swayed, lifted off the ground, and drifted over the barn, over the two family graves. Behind him, the tiny house Myron had lived in the last eleven years shrank into the background.
“Look down there,” his grandfather pointed to a row of black chimneys, each one with a trail of gray searching for an air current. They looked so strange from above, like hundreds of little mouths blowing out pipe smoke. The air was thick with brown and gray until, at last, they rose high enough to breech the low hanging smoke clouds.
Myron was afraid to speak, as though a sky that clear might shatter like a pane of window glass. The harder Myron pedaled, working the bellows, turning the propeller, the hotter the fire in the bin, and they continued to rise.
Up to that moment, that was the greatest day of Myron’s life. His grandfather placed a hand firmly on Myron’s knee, a worried look in his eyes. The airship wobbled, and the coal pan creaked. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Too much weight, maybe.”
The basket under them moaned, followed by a snapping noise above them. One by one, white-hot coals slipped out of the bottom of the broken coal pan, streaking sparks and ash across the sky. “The coal!” Myron and his grandfather squirmed to avoid getting burned. The supply chest came loose.
Myron reached for the handle on the chest. The ground spun in the hazy distance beneath them. “I got it.” Leaning over the side, holding the chest by one arm, the airship tilted, spilling more of the coal.
“We’re going down.” The balloon billowed above them and they began to descend. “Drop the chest, Myron. Hurry!”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. Now.”
Myron yanked the chest up and flung the lid open. With his free hand he snagged the postcard of Bora Bora and anything else he could grasp. “We need something to stabilize the coal pan.”
Below them, on the main road, a whole squad of orange shirts had assembled, pointing to the deflating balloon, trying to pinpoint the spot the airship would land.
Myron’s grandfather spoke quickly as the ground continued to rise. “Listen well. If you get away, if you want to survive, make them think you are as dumb as a post and ready to serve.” He whispered faster as a group of orange-shirts assembled directly beneath them. “When I give the signal, run. Just like you did that day, but, this time don’t come back. Run, walk, fly, swim as far as you can go.”
“What about you?”
The men in orange gathered around the collapsing balloon as Myron and his grandfather made a hard landing. Myron tucked the postcard of Bora Bora and anything else he’d rescued from the chest into his jacket.
“How old are you?” The leader of the orange shirts stood over Myron.
“Seventeen.” Myron stood up, looking to his grandfather for a signal.
“Seventeen? This kid’s been shirking out here for ten years.” He scowled at Myron. “Name?”
“Myron Daw.”
“Okay. Ship Myron here off to Jonesbridge.”
They reached for Myron’s arm, and his grandfather gave him the signal. “Dispose of the old man.”
Hearing those words, Myron counted the orange shirts, calculated the odds of winning a fight and broke for the hillside, running until his legs felt like melted butter ahead of the footsteps of cursing orange-shirts. When he reached the draw on the other side of the hill, confident he’d escaped, Myron stopped to catch his breath and look behind him for the first time.
“Gotcha.”
He caught only a glimpse of orange before a burlap sack slipped over his head and cinched up around his neck.
• • •
Myron clutched his leg and eased down beside the airship basket. He unpacked a bundle near the balloon, and a variety of nuts and bolts spilled out onto the ground. Sorting through them, finding the largest of the group, he attached the propeller to the pedal gear behind the basket.
As he viewed the pile of junk in front of him, not the grand design he envisioned while he relayed materials the past few months, he understood Errol and Lalana’s reservations and plunged into doubt himself. The base structure looked solid, though: a basket he’d woven from pine bark, roots, and burlap by twining them around six of the longest, rigid shin-pine trunks he had found. Incorporating the same technique for the propeller blades and rudder made the whole thing look like furniture someone might find on an island like Bora Bora. The only metal on the contraption was the pedals to turn the propeller, salvaged off a bicycle carcass near the chapel.
Myron’s hands trembled as he filled the pots with the hot coals, white sides up, now thankful that Errol had gotten the fire started. He assembled the bellows for stoking the fire and fitted the nozzle into a hole at the base of the coal pot before making his final adjustments. He limped backward to admire his creation. His stomach fluttered, picturing the view of the Gorge from above. The soiled, grayish fabric began to expand as he stoked th
e coals.
With the airship assembled, Myron searched the ground for the stabilizer, something that might have saved them the day his grandfather’s airship went down. It was a long piece of wood with fasteners at each end to keep the basket from moving around too much as the coal burned and shifted. “One more piece. I can’t find it.”
He tied the airship down as it had already begun to lift. Pain shot through his leg as he limped toward the bunker to comb the entire area where they’d all helped move the airship parts. A light snow began to fall, powdery and brown before it ever hit the ground, but they still had a clear view of the valley. Myron and Sindra held hands without looking at one another, fixated on a squad of ghosts headed their way, double time, gesturing at the enormous mass of ladies’ sanitaries, now a balloon, billowing on the hillside.
Chapter 18
Sindra scanned the ground for the missing airship piece, but the rising balloon, made of discarded underwear, stole her attention.
“What does it look like?” Sindra combed the area around the bunker.
“Long and thin. It’s not here.” Myron ducked into the bunker. “It’s a stabilizer.” The concrete muffled his voice.
Sindra gazed into the valley and saw that the orange shirts had made it halfway up the hill. “Do we have to have it?”
“I don’t know.” Myron emerged from the bunker, his face pale.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Sindra heard the crunching of boots on snow. “Come on, Myron.” She tugged at his smock.
“Last time, with my grandfather, we almost crashed without it.”
“Shh.” She pointed to the other side of the draw.
Myron kept his eyes on the ground, studying every rock and twig in search of his stabilizer. Sindra yanked him by the smock. When he refused to give up the search and make a run for the airship, Sindra grabbed him by the hair and pulled him toward her, gritting her teeth and nodding toward the balloon that sat against the sky like a boil in need of lancing. Given their two options, crashing into the Gorge or letting the ghosts get them, she chose the Gorge.