by Sean Wallace
They had no weapons, the barracks regularly searched. While they were encouraged to make their spaces as home-like as possible, the dwellings were searched to prevent people from possessing anything they should not. Given Yamamoto’s long reach even within camp walls, one might procure anything, given enough time. But guns, no one had managed guns.
Inside the kitchen of a neighbor, Dorothy put her hands on a tire iron, having no idea where it would have come from. No one owned cars, but perhaps once they had. Perhaps the iron was a symbol for them, of what they had lost and what they hoped to one day reclaim. For now, the iron was a good weapon, and Dorothy put it to quick use, notching it into the face of the lieutenant who strode into the kitchen. Blood burst from his mouth and he didn’t move once he’d gone down; she didn’t know him, but took great pleasure in the way he dropped like a stone. Dorothy stepped over him and moved back into the night.
She moved toward her own dwelling, meaning to get her parents to some form of safety, but never reached it. Out of the smoke-cloaked night there emerged a figure, so large and hulking, she thought at first it was an automaton that had escaped detonation. Dorothy took an uneven step backward and lifted the tire iron, having no hope of taking such a thing down. It would be equipped with guns. It would take her down without so much as an independent thought.
But as the figure parted the smoke, she found herself face to face with someone familiar, one Master Sergeant Minsky, who looked considerably more put out than he had at their last encounter. His face was streaked with soot, his uniform burned around the edges, and he strode forward with the look of a man who would not be put off. Dorothy lowered the tire iron.
“Minsky?”
His paw of a hand closed around her arm, pulling her out of harm’s way as another plummeting automation met its doom. The roof nearby crumbled under the automaton’s exploding weight and debris scattered wide. “Sakata.”
Minsky hauled her in the opposite direction of where she meant to go, and she tried to twist from his hold. Around them, night exploded with fire. “Minsky – my family—”
“Is the least of your concern.” Minsky gave her a hard shake and hauled her against the barracks’ wall.
Dorothy could not pry herself from his hold; his hand had fastened around her like an iron band, unmovable. As the sky above them erupted in more fire, she swung with her free hand, the one holding the tire iron. Minsky deflected it with a broad forearm, the makeshift weapon ricocheting into the stucco wall. Dorothy dropped it before the reverberations through the iron could rattle her arm off.
“You listen to me, Sakata,” Minsky began.
Dorothy did listen and what she heard caught her off guard.
“I came here with a deal for you, and this . . .” He looked at the violent night sky, erupting in shades of fire and soot, then back to her. A muscle in his jaw leapt. “This was not in the plan.”
Minsky’s words were unsteady, but not due to the conflict around them. Something else had brought him here – she wondered if his had been the plane earlier that day – and this conflict had complicated his already complicated plans.
“What plan?” She tried again to free herself from his grip, but he wouldn’t let her go. She became aware then of the shaking in his arm, of the unshed tears in his eyes. Maybe it was just the smoke, or maybe it was—
“Your storm cloud. It’s back.”
Dorothy didn’t know until that moment how long she had been holding her breath. More than a year, she decided, because now that it had come, now that the storm that wasn’t a storm had returned, she felt herself exhale. Something inside her let go. All this time, she had waited. She had wanted someone to believe her story, and now Minsky did. But—
“That’s not all,” she murmured, because he was more troubled than a single cloud would make a man of his years and military experience. “What happened?”
He released her arm, but didn’t take a step back, and Dorothy didn’t feel inclined to move. She felt rooted, her hair whipping in the exhalation of distant explosions as she waited for Minsky to deliver the rest of the news. He did this as capably as any military commander, giving her the cold, hard details without a trace of emotion.
The cloud had reappeared a month prior, in the skies over Nevada exactly where Dorothy had claimed an encounter with it. The storm hadn’t done anything other than fume, spewing tentacles of cloud edged in lightning; it hadn’t seemed to send out any communications or ships. All attempts at remote communication with it failed, and so they sent a plane inside – a plane that didn’t return. This plane was followed by a second. And then fighters were deployed en masse.
The battle, if one could call it that, proved devastating. Every plane sent in was vomited back out in a tangle of metal and bodies. The sky around the cloud had grown thick with the disfigured aircraft, Minsky said; they never fell to the ground, but hovered in the sky as if in orbit of the cloud-storm. Though they hadn’t sent any new craft in, the cloud continued to spit mangled planes out, as if to display its might while creeping closer toward California and Mines Field. At the same time, similar storms had been reported over London, Tokyo and Berlin.
Storms, Dorothy thought – no, points of entry.
“Command told me to get you,” Minsky finished, his gaze dropping from the fiery skies to take in Dorothy once more. “Because you came out of that thing and might know what the hell to do.”
Dorothy stared at him in disbelief, and then she laughed. She moved now, mostly because she wanted to shake the awful feeling that had crept into her, the feeling of those strange hands prying her ribs apart. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to remind herself that she was whole and unbroken, that those things hadn’t gotten inside, but the memory was too clear and she couldn’t shake it.
“Sakata, we need you. We are absolutely clueless against this thing.”
She tried to enjoy his admission and that idea: that the military was baffled and that she, a civilian pilot, a Japanese-American pilot, a female pilot, might be the one to save them all, but there was no joy. The memory of the storm terrified her, the ghosts of Ina and Ruth rarely allowing her to sleep in peace, and there was no joy, the camp around them still falling to dust.
“You came here with a deal for me,” she reminded him softly. She hadn’t forgotten those words.
Minsky nodded, his face shadowed by more than soot now. “I can get you out, get you flying regular again.”
Dorothy’s stomach flip-flopped at the very idea. Once, that would have been enough, a life outside walls, a life in all that sky, but now . . . She looked at the camp exploding to ruin around them, and by Minsky’s face, she knew that he already knew.
“We won’t live behind walls, Minsky. Any of us. You raze this and every other camp in this nation – how many are there? You burn them to the ground and let these people go.”
“You know I don’t have that kind of author—”
“Then I don’t know what the hell you are talking about! Clouds that eat planes? As if.” The anger that flooded Dorothy surprised even her. She strode back to the wall, picked up the tire iron, and pointed it at Minsky’s face. “Maybe they’ll put you in a camp for safe-keeping.” She spat the words, recalling too clearly her last conversation with Minsky.
“All right!” Minsky lifted his hands, his expression absolutely hopeless as he stared at her.
“All right what?” Dorothy advanced on him, tire iron still lifted, but he didn’t give up his position. He didn’t back down or look away. Broad-shouldered and tall, Minsky stared her down, not flinching.
“None of you will live behind walls, Dor— Sakata,” he said. “None.”
Dorothy never lowered her eyes from his steady gaze, giving no ground as the camp around them continued to crumble, and, not knowing if she genuinely believed Minsky or if the lure of flying again was simply too much, lowered her tire iron.
Beyond the cockpit windows of the Corsair, the disturbance resembled a normal
thunderhead, blossoming and bruised clouds spread across a bright blue sky. But contained within was the familiar anomaly, the tornado tipped on its side. Dorothy tried not to flinch at the sight of it, but the response was automatic; she remembered too easily how the Black Dragon had been pulled inside, how she had woken with no memory of landing. How Ina and Ruth had never been found.
And those gremlin hands.
She flinched again at the memory, the violent spin of the storm spawning tentacles of black, lightning-cracked clouds. Scattered at the mouth of the storm, within the writhing tentacle clouds, dozens upon dozens of wrecked aircraft hung as if caught in the storm’s gravity. Dorothy flew cautiously closer, noting the familiar shape of a broken Corsair wing, a shattered fuselage still showing remnants of its nose art, a pin-up girl cut cruelly in two by whatever power had taken the plane apart. She saw fragments of Mustangs and Black Widows, but as she circled again, she saw something even stranger. Amid the debris were wings and fuselages marked with the flags of Britain, Japan and Germany.
Despite the storm and the wreckage of armies strewn before it, a wave of happiness rose inside Dorothy. Being back in the sky and having a plane under her control were two things she had longed for. She hadn’t forgotten the feel of the stick in her hands, or the way a cockpit rattled as the plane gained altitude, but she had forgotten the way a plane smelled in the air and the way the air crept inside to chill hands and cheeks.
Despite her best intentions to not think of it as such, Dorothy pictured the entire storm as the great and monstrous eye of an ōkubi, a face of cloud staring down upon the world, come to prophecy its doom. Dorothy pushed that nonsense to the side and banked around the storm.
She took another pass, conferring with Minsky on the radio all the while. They wanted a reconnaissance pass, didn’t want her inside yet, but Dorothy suspected the storm wouldn’t let her go. Whether truth or fancy, she knew it was aware of her; the cloud arms crackled through the Corsair’s propeller, skimming the plane’s long nose before butting against the windshield. There, the cloud broke into dozens of wriggling offshoots, all eagerly trying to press through the glass. Dorothy swallowed her nausea and turned the plane away, just as the storm grabbed hold.
Much as it had been the first time, Dorothy felt the plane spiraling downward, and nothing she did resulted in dislodging the craft from the lightning-grip. The radio sparked and cut out, Minsky fading to shouts of static as the cloud wall closed over the Corsair. It was like being pulled under water, so quickly did the day’s light vanish. Shadow filled the cockpit, erased the world, and Dorothy fought to maintain consciousness even as the air grew thin as if she were being hauled into the oblivion of space. In her swimming vision, on the hazy outskirts of the plane, she thought she saw the fluid beings once more. They wrapped their liquid bodies around the plane the way morning glories wrapped themselves around poles. Under this force, the plane began to stall and Dorothy could do nothing as it rolled over on one wing. She envisioned it flipping, but the Corsair stayed steady and true, despite the creatures pulling it down.
She woke in a hangar, much as she had the first time, but this hangar was not empty. It was littered with other planes, most broken to bits, but three stood whole. Still, judging by the dust that coated them, they had been here a good long while.
“Minsky, you hear me?” She tried the radio a final time, but there was only a final burst of static before the entire thing went silent. She pulled her headset off, and wondered exactly how much time would pass inside this vessel before she got out this time. The idea of leaving now was attractive, but so was the notion that she might learn something, that she might—
“Find Ina and Ruth, goddamn it,” she whispered. “Eight months lost in this thing, what’re you going to do this time?”
She unbuckled her shoulder harness and cracked the cockpit open, the motions practiced, unforgotten despite the time in the camp. Before exiting the plane, her fingers ghosted over the pistol she wore in a sling holster over her flight suit. She didn’t like the idea they’d given her a weapon this time around, because it meant they believed she might genuinely require it.
Dorothy climbed out of the cockpit and onto the broad, gray wing of the Corsair, legs more steady than she expected. The hangar was colder than she remembered, the ground crackling under her boots like ice on a lake might as she dropped from the wing. Just as last time, she made a slow circle of her aircraft, to ensure nothing strange had befallen it.
“Well,” she murmured, and laughed to herself. “Perhaps we need to define strange, given the circumstances, Sakata.”
As she rounded the tail of the Corsair, she noticed a body splayed in the hangar debris. Dorothy dropped to a crouch, one hand on the butt of her pistol. She didn’t draw, only watched and listened to the hangar around her. She expected the strange gremlin creatures to appear, to slide their hands into and through that body, but all appeared still. Dorothy picked her way through the debris and under the wing of a still imposing B-24 Liberator; the plane was banged up, but still looked flyable. Where the hell was her pilot?
Dorothy reached for the body, discovering it was a woman – a woman with a pulse hammering in her neck. Dorothy waited for relief to flood through her, because surely it should have been relief at the sight of another living human being in this vessel. But there was no relief, because as she brushed the softly curling strawberry blonde hair away from the face, she saw the woman was more like a caricature than an actual woman of flesh and bone. She looked like she had been drawn – painted – into life. She was clad in a bright sapphire blue bathing suit, a large bow fashioned into a flower against her plump backside. Her feet sported illogically high heels, black and shiny, exactly like—
Dorothy looked back at the B-24, taking in the minor damage, the broad wings, but it was the nose art she took the most interest in. The lettering was still there, STRAWBERRY BITCH spelled out in gleaming red paint, but the pin-up that had once decorated the metal was gone. Unconscious in the debris before her, Dorothy thought.
She pressed her hand against the pin-up’s flawless cheek. “Can you hear me?” The woman didn’t stir and Dorothy patted the cheek with a little more force. “Hey.” Her mouth twisted at the very idea of what she was about to do. “Strawberry?”
She didn’t expect the woman to actually wake, but she did, blinking wide blue eyes in astonishment as she came upright. Then, she started screaming.
Dorothy didn’t rein in the impulse to slap Strawberry. Her palm cracked across the flawless cheek and Strawberry took a stuttering breath, blinking tears from her eyes as she stared at Dorothy.
“Oh . . . It . . .You’re not them.”
A chill rolled through Dorothy. She didn’t have to guess which “them” Strawberry meant and glanced around the hangar to be sure they we still alone. “Can you stand?” Dorothy asked, but Strawberry was already doing so, easily in those crazy heels, as if they were a part of her. “Them who?” It never hurt to ask.
Strawberry shuddered, her hair curling over her bare shoulders. “Those things that run this place. They . . .” Her eyes darted to the B-24 and back to Dorothy again, worried. “They took me and . . .”
If gremlins had actually peeled a painted woman from the fuselage of the Liberator and breathed life into her, Dorothy told herself. she would swallow a bullet whole. As it was, she just stared at the figure, somehow transfixed. She was as three dimensional as anything in this room, and yet . . .
Dorothy strode toward the end of the hangar, where it branched into hallways. “You got a name? Where are you from?” Dorothy looked into the empty halls, then back at Strawberry who was pressing her hands against the sides of the B-24.
“Says right here,” she whispered. “Strawberry Bitch . . . what kind of name is that?” She looked down at herself and scoffed at her clothing. “I should be nothing more than paint and dreams, but I’m . . .” She lowered her hands from the plane and pressed them against her belly. “They made me so they co
uld . . .” But she trailed off, unable to finish the sentence because she was staring in naked panic at something beyond Dorothy’s shoulder.
Dorothy wheeled around, expecting the fluid gremlins, but no. Another pin-up approached them, seeming as baffled as Strawberry was.
Diamond Lil, if one judged by the lettering left on the fuselage behind her, wore a floor-length black gown, diamonds glittering in a trail between her high breasts. Her hair was a glossy waterfall of straight black, eyes as blue as the sky Dorothy had just flown through.
“This isn’t possible, you realize,” Dorothy said, more to herself than the two pin ups before her. “It’s probably an effect of the . . . drowning . . . or however they brought me down . . .” She couldn’t explain it beyond that because how, and why, would gremlins do such a thing? She didn’t want to understand, didn’t want . . .
Deep within the ship, down the empty hallway, something caused the ship to tremble. Dorothy braced one hand against the wall, drawing her pistol with the other. If she was hallucinating, nothing mattered, so she strode into the hallway and trusted the pin-ups would follow if they were so inclined.
The floor was terribly solid beneath her boots, telling Dorothy she wasn’t hallucinating, and when the sound of Strawberry and Lil’s heels came behind her, Dorothy felt as though she wanted to vomit. She couldn’t unravel the game at play here, because nothing presently made sense. Her only hope was the idea that somewhere on this ship, other human beings lived and struggled to solve the same game.
And maybe Ruth, her heart whispered; and maybe Ina.
The source of the rumbling didn’t make itself readily known to Dorothy; the hall curved into another wide space, showing Dorothy the same jumble of items she remembered from her first time inside. A massive corridor lined with conduits, hurdles, ports and tracks. A corridor much like the one she had flown to escape. She glanced back at the pin-ups, staring at them in confused silence. If she was hallucinating . . . How did one interrogate paint?