The Brothers Cabal (33 page)

Cabal belatedly realised that his rhetorical skills, never his strongest suit, had been blunted still further by his illness. ‘Yes,' he replied, wisely cutting his losses.

‘Right.'

By this point, the woman from the Copperhead had joined them. Cabal noted that she, too, wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. Her flying helmet, however, concealed shoulder-long auburn hair that had not enjoyed being forced under the leather of the helmet. She dropped her gloves into the helmet she held in one hand while she ran her fingers absently through her hair in an effort to separate the locks and make them flow, rather than sit unbecomingly in a mound on the crown of her head. Where the Dutch woman was, he gauged, somewhere in her mid-twenties, the Copperhead pilot looked to be in her early thirties and comported herself with the confidence of a leader. Even if Cabal had not already identified her from her aircraft, her manner would have done the job just as well.

‘That Horst's brother?' she asked of Dea.

‘The necromancer,' confirmed Dea, never looking away from Cabal. ‘Right.'

They both looked at him without further comment for a period that started to grow uncomfortable.

Are they
judging
me?
thought Cabal, with a growing sense of umbrage.

‘Ginny! Dea!' said Horst, joining them. He smiled, and they smiled back at him, dropping Cabal from their attention like an overripe haddock.

Thus was it ever
, thought Cabal.

‘This is my little brother, Johannes,' he said, and unwisely made to ruffle Cabal's hair before remembering why it would be unwise in much the same way that making to tickle a feral polecat under the chin may be considered unwise. ‘He's the brains of my family.'

‘While Horst laid claim to several other organs,' said Cabal. ‘I'm delighted to make your acquaintances, Miss Montgomery, Mevrouw Boom.' He looked as delighted as a rabbi inheriting a pig farm.

They, however, had been warned of his icy demeanour, and took no offence, which he found unsettling. Causing offence at first acquaintance was his forte, and he considered himself more than commonly good at it.

‘You must be shattered after all that flying,' said Horst. ‘Do you need to rest?'

‘We're okay,' said Virginia. ‘We set down to refuel at a French aerofield just over the Channel. Grabbed some shut-eye while we had the chance. We're good for a few hours now.'

‘I made you some coffee and sandwiches.' Horst produced a calico shopping bag adorned with a floral pattern so unmercifully twee that Cabal was sure only the poor light saved him from blindness, specifically by clawing out his own eyes. From the depths of this radioactively pretty receptacle, emitting fast particles in the quaint spectrum, Horst took two packets of greaseproof paper and two metal cylinders.

‘Those are dewar vessels,' said Cabal jealously, ‘from
my
laboratory.'

‘Are they? I thought they were thermos flasks. Well, never mind, I'm sure they'll do just as well.' Horst passed them to the pilots, who accepted them gratefully.

‘You wouldn't be so keen on that coffee if you knew what had been in those vessels previously,' muttered Cabal, at pains to make it loud enough to be heard.

‘Ignore him. I got them straight from their boxes in the store cupboard.'

‘Is nothing sacrosanct?' muttered Cabal at the same muttering volume as previously.

‘And I ran them through the autoclave just to be safe. Believe me, they're surgically clean.'

‘You used my autoclave,' said Cabal, so outraged that he forgot to mutter, ‘for
washing dishes
?'

‘Yes,' replied Horst. He smiled, unabashed.

‘Your brother's a lot of fun,' said Dea, addressing Horst but looking at Johannes.

‘True,' replied Horst, the spirit of ingenuousness. ‘Although some days he's in a bad mood.'

‘I can see my brother has already inculcated you into his comedy troupe,' said Cabal. ‘So, unless anyone has any other morsels of rollicking humour with which they wish to bless this gathering, perhaps we can get along, the sooner to kill Maleficarus.'

‘Your brother doesn't beat around the bush none, does he, Horst?' said Virginia, showing a small sign of warming slightly to Cabal through the agency of a half smile. ‘Calls a shovel a shovel.'

‘Actually, I call it a “spade”,' Cabal said.

She looked at him, and an eyebrow raised. The smile, however, remained infuriatingly only-sort-of there and only-sort-of not.

Cabal frowned suspiciously. ‘Are you
flirting
with me?' he demanded.

Horst clapped his hands, startling them all. ‘Right!' he said with forced bonhomie. ‘Let's get our gear packed, I can take up residence in my luxurious stateroom, and we can get back to the saving of the good old world. Can't we?' He smiled a slightly desperate smile at them all. ‘Get back to the good old train? In our good old entomopters?'

‘Oh!' said Dea. ‘I forgot to tell you, Ginny. There's a problem with the train.'

Virginia and Horst exchanged worried glances whose main function, it seemed to Cabal, was to make him feel still more supernumerary. ‘Mechanical?' Virginia asked.

‘Mechanic. Becky's exhausted. The footplate men from the freight train who helped her get the train away from the town left.' She shrugged. ‘You can't blame them. They have families to go to. But it means Becky's doing everything—keeping the train and the 'mopters going and driving the train. She's running on coffee and willpower. She's going to start making mistakes, Ginny.'

Virginia did not argue the point, but nor was she happy. ‘We can't just put an ad in the classifieds, “Train crew required for monster-battling expedition. No money, limited life expectancy”.'

‘Maybe Becky can stay driving the train and we find a good 'mopter mechanic somewhere?' suggested Dea.

‘No! Hell, no. Would you trust somebody to fool with your 'mopter just like that? No. Becky's the best grease monkey I've ever seen. We can't just replace her, and it would break her heart if we even tried. Horst, you helped her drive once. Could you take over at the footplate?'

‘Well, I suppose I could.' He did not sound at all certain. ‘But … won't I be needed for the fighting? All the stuff with the strength and the fangs and suchlike? And my working hours are a bit limited anyway, remember?'

‘It isn't a problem,' said Cabal. They all looked at him. ‘Yes, I
am
still here.' He unslung his bags and handed them to Horst. ‘Load those aboard, would you, Horst? I shall be back shortly.'

Horst hefted the longer of the two bags. ‘This is really heavy for a fishing rod,' he said, a little ironically.

‘It's an elephant gun,' replied Cabal blandly. ‘And ammunition. You mentioned Maleficarus's pets tend to be on the big side.' He turned to go back to the house, paused for long enough to add, ‘I suspect he's overcompensating for something,' and walked off.

They had just finished putting away Johannes Cabal's gear in the
Buzzbomb
's cargo space and were discussing Horst's travelling arrangements, when Dea shouted ‘Zombies!' and went to draw her pistol. Horst and Virginia whirled to see Cabal walking towards them, a coil of rope in one hand and apparently unaware of the two corpses that walked behind him.

‘Zombies?' he said. ‘Really? Where?' He turned and saw the two monsters barely a yard away from him. ‘Oh, I see. Not technically zombies, but an easy mistake for the layman to make. Laywoman. Layperson.'

For the third time in one night, Horst was astonished. ‘You're kidding, Johannes? You've still got them?'

‘Waste not, want not.' He walked to them and stopped, and the dead men following him stopped, too. Close to, Virginia and Dea could see that these were not at all like the undead who had attacked the train and, later, the town. Where those things had been relatively fresh, fleshly, albeit discoloured, malodorous, and slightly drippy, these examples of the necromancer's art were dry, clearly not at all new, creaked slightly as they walked, and their flesh seemed to be coated with varnish over clown make-up. One stood tall and thin, and the other shorter and not so much stout as sagging where once it might have been fat. They wore filthy coveralls, and perched upon their heads were Casey Jones engineer hats, grimy and cobwebbed. With a horrible crunching noise as of a thousand ants eating a popadam next to a microphone, they smiled at the women. The women did not smile back.

‘What,' said Virginia in a terrible whisper, ‘the living hell are
those
?'

‘Dennis and Denzil,' said Cabal, as if introducing old school friends. ‘Despite appearances, they have their uses. Specifically, they can drive a train.' He looked at them and frowned. ‘Possibly Denzil and Dennis. I forget which is which. It doesn't really matter.'

Dennis and Denzil nodded in agreement. They had long since come to understand that it mattered only to them and, even then, not always. They were currently just glorying in the sensation of not being in the shed at the bottom of Cabal's back garden where they had been sitting patiently waiting for him to remember them for a little over two years. In this time they had kept themselves amused with any number of little plans and shenanigans, some of which had taken them from the confines of the shed. This Cabal did not know, which was just as well. Still, they had always come back to sit and wait, while spiders made webs around them and millipedes processed across their boots.

This, however, was clearly a special occasion, as Johannes Cabal had remembered them and they were out of the shed and under an open sky at his prompting and with his blessing. There were also two women present, who, the dusty archives of their memories assured them, were attractive, although any reason why that should be relevant eluded them. They had just been introduced, so obviously they would be going out on a blind date with them. Things were certainly looking up for Dennis and Denzil.

*   *   *

Dawn found the
Spirit of '76
and
Buzzbomb
airborne and heading towards the Continent. Through the blue skies, barely marked by a few half-hearted nimbi rolling in from the southwest, they whirred in a mist of multiple wings and exhaust fumes. Their pilots squinted through sunglasses as the morning sun struck them, driving Horst Cabal into a deep sleep where he lay curled in the Copperhead's stowage. He no longer dreamt as he slept, but at least he knew why he had for a while, and why the dreams had all featured Johannes wandering around in a strange world of wonder and terror.

For his part, Johannes Cabal now only troubled the Dreamlands in his dreams, which was his current activity. Hat pulled down over his eyes, he sat slumbering in the front seat of the
Spirit of '76
, markedly unimpressed by the whole business of aerotravel. As he had climbed into the seat, he had said he much preferred entomopter travel to aeroship, a statement that to the average man on the street was as ridiculous as saying a pogo stick was a finer way to travel than cruise liner. It had won the kind regards of the pilots present, however, and all the more so because the sentiment was so plainly sincere; Johannes Cabal was evidently not a man given to dissimulation.

The
Buzzbomb
was bearing an unexpected cargo, but one well within its capabilities. On either side of the fuselage below the level of the cockpit and forward of the leading edges of the moving wings were two further short, stub-ended wings. Once, their main function had been to carry external armaments. Now, instead of bombs, rockets, or fuel pods, each wing bore a living dead man, tied firmly around their midriffs with lengths of rope. The slipstream battered them, but they did not care; this was the most fun they had ever had, living or dead. With their engineer hats firmly joined to their heads with rusty staples, they looked to the dawn and greeted it with joyful hoots and groans.

 

Chapter 14

IN WHICH JOHANNES CABAL MEETS ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE WHO WOULD LOVE TO KILL HIM

The journey was uneventful, though tedious. The only great complication was that the flight required two halts for refuelling, both of which raised the question of what to do with two happy dead men, neither of whom were likely to be popular nor welcome at even the most cosmopolitan of aerofields. They devised a simple plan wherein Johannes Cabal, Dennis, and Denzil would be deposited in an out-of-the-way sort of place as near the aerofield as possible, and then the aircraft would refuel and pick them up again.

The first time this was attempted, Virginia and Dea returned to find Cabal asleep with his hat over his face and the two hideous corpses slowly fighting one another over some imagined slight. Virginia Montgomery awakened Cabal a little pettishly and admonished him for not keeping an eye on his charges. He said nothing.