Blood Ties (10 page)

Jake dove away from the opening between the crates and out of the line of fire. His legs pushed off hard and fast, carrying him eight feet in a tumble that had him rolling, up, and running in an instant. A chorus of panicked animal sounds erupted from the livestock area as the strange machine gun roared behind Jake and then cut off. Another opening in the crates loomed to his left, and Jake, assuming there would be someone back there, blindly fanned the hammer of his Colt, spraying one round after another into the gap as he raced by. He leapt again, aiming for the hallway that ran down between the animal stalls, desperately trying to make it there before anyone behind him could put a bullet in his back.

He heard the distinct report of Cole’s pistol sound off twice, followed closely by the harsh electric whine and chatter of the strange repeater. As Jake made it into the wide corridor between the stalls, a second whine-chatter of a repeater sounded off from behind and to his left. The rounds sent chunks and splinters of wood spraying in the area where Jake had just been. The animals raised another cacophony of neighs, bleats, bellows, and other mixed barnyard sounds. One of them pricked up Jake’s ear.

His Officer’s Colt now empty, Jake yanked his Peacekeeper and fired behind him. Several animals spoke up again, and he heard the one he wanted. Jake saw Cole moving backwards toward the entrance to the cargo hold as he tumbled to his left and came up in front of a stall door somewhat wider than the others.

“Cole! Get help!” Jake shouted as he lifted a heavy steel bar that secured the stall before him. He yanked on the handle, slid inside, and slammed the thick, oaken door as loudly as he could. A massive animal shuffled in the hay, and Jake turned slowly, stepping to the side as carefully as possible.

“Hi, Lumpy. Did ya’ miss me?” Jake moved up along Lumpy’s massive body and patted him on the top of his head. Lumpy twisted his head, forcing Jake to duck under the horns as the bull sniffed, recognizing Jake’s scent immediately. “I need you do to me a favor, boy,” Jake whispered, “and I’m sorry for what I’m about to do.”

The foreigner called from outside the stall in his strange accent. “Do you feel safer in there, Mister Lasater?” The man sounded perfectly confident. Jake heard a steady set of boots slowly approaching the door.

“Well, now that you mention it, I do feel a little safer,” Jake replied easily. “It’s actually pretty cozy in here.”

“You don’t think that door will stop my chaingun, do you Mister Lasater? These rounds are quite special. They can even pass through metal. I wonder if your pistols would be as effective.”

“I was sorta hoping the door might be enough,” Jake admitted slowly. “Any chance you might come on in here? I’ll introduce you to my Peacekeeper. I may even have a bullet in here with your name on it. I never did catch your name, by the way.”

“What does it matter?” The boots came closer, and Jake moved his way slowly along Lumpy’s body.

“I like to know who I’m killing before I do it. I’m funny that way,” Jake remarked. “Call it etiquette.”

“I have heard you are a man of honor, and I can certainly appreciate the sentiment.” The man laughed. “Why else do you think I was at that poker game?” Jake’s ears perked up at that one. “However, I doubt you’ll be doing any killing today.” There was a thoughtful pause, and then the foreigner continued. “Very well. I have a little more time, and you’ve appealed to my sense of honor. You have the pleasure of meeting Colonel Radu Szilágyi.” Jake heard a metallic click, like the receiver of a shotgun being opened. Then he heard another, like the clip of a Gatling gun clicking into place. “It’s quite ironic, Mister Lasater, but I was not planning on killing you for several more days. You’ve altered time, and you do not even know it.”

“Altered time?” Jake took off his hat and scratched his head, a confused look on his face. “What the hell are you talking about? Do I know you? I don’t recall shooting anybody with an accent like yours, so it seems you’ve got me at a bit of a disadvantage.” The boots stepped quietly in front of the door, and Jake could see the man’s shadow along the crack at the bottom.

“Allow me to introduce you to my little friend.”

“Actually,” Jake said, raising his hat high, “I thought I might introduce you to one of my
big
friends. Say hello to the man, Lumpy!” Jake slapped his hat down on Lumpy’s rump as hard as he could.

The electric whine of the chaingun started up, but the only thing louder than Lumpy’s yowl of terror was the sound his back hooves made when they hammered into the door. The door slammed open and crashed into the Colonel, silencing the chaingun and sending him flying like he’d been shot out of a cannon. The door swung all the way against the next door stall and then came back, hitting the doorframe and swinging out slightly.

“Colonel!” shouted a man’s voice from the open area of the cargo hold. He had the same accent as Szilágyi. “
Ralin! Ajuta-l ducem la scara! Te voi acoperi!
” Heavy boots stomped quickly across the cargo hold floor.

“Sunt bine,” Jake heard the groggy Colonel say tersely. “Să plecăm de aici. Am realizat ceea ce am venit sa facem!”

A burst of chaingun fire chewed into the stable door at a shallow angle, and the force pushed it closed. Lumpy groaned and shifted around in the stall, shoving Jake against the wall.

“Easy, boy,” Jake cooed, hoping Lumpy wouldn’t start bucking. If Lumpy went loco in the stall, they’d have to mop Jake up and pour what was left of him into a bucket.

Another burst hammered into the door, sending splinters inward. The angle was still too shallow to let any bullets get near Jake. Lumpy shifted again and Jake stepped around the bull’s rear end and put his back to the wall closest to the foreigners. Kicking the door open, he stuck the barrel of his Peacekeeper through one of the holes. He fired off three rounds in a wide fan, then pulled his arm back as the electric whine fired and another hailstorm riddled the door. Jake reloaded his pistols as quickly as he could. Seconds ticked away as he wondered what the foreigners were doing.

“Jake, you okay?” Cole’s voice rang out from the far side of the cargo hold. Jake hoped Cole had come back with help—
lots of it
. “That’s two I owe you,” he soothed as he patted Lumpy’s side. He slipped the last cartridge into his Peacekeeper, kicked the door open and dove out of the stall, crossing the eight feet, tumbling, and coming up against the far wall with both pistols pointing into the main area of the cargo hold. A Winchester barked once, and Jake heard the round hit the wall far down along the livestock area.

“Hold it!” Cole barked from the doorway they’d first come in through. “That’s Jake!”

Jake nodded to Cole who had six men behind him, including the big steward from the salon. They were all armed. Jake rushed forward to the edge of the livestock hallway and peeked toward the open cargo hold doorway. The clamps attached there released and disappeared from view. Jake knocked off his hat, closed his left eye and dialed the lens of his ocular, letting in the light.

He charged across the cargo hold as Cole and the rest of the men rushed past the luggage. Tossing his Peacekeeper to Cole and freeing up his left arm, he dropped down onto his hip and slid across the floor toward one of the ropes coiled by the luggage. His boots slammed into the luggage. He gripped the end of the rope tightly with his left hand and pushed off the luggage as hard as he could, angling his body straight out the cargo bay door.

“
Jake!
” Cole screamed as his partner disappeared over the edge and into the freezing midnight darkness of open air.

Chapter Twelve – Hard Questions

“When it’s my time, the good Lord, or whatever is up there, is welcome to take me.”

~ Jake Lasater

Wind whistled past Jake’s ears as he fell. He could just make out the pitch black shape of a smaller zeppelin forty feet below, and drifting away. He closed his right eye and opened his left. The night opened up to him and he spotted a man sticking out the top of the zeppelin, reeling in a long, metal ladder.

The man looked down through the hatch, as if someone called him, and then he looked up and saw Jake. As he let go of the ladder, someone shoved him aside from below. Jake saw the barrel of a chaingun point out from the hatch. Jake’s Colt and the chaingun went off at the same time. The flashes from both weapons filled the night, casting the surface of the zeppelin in flickering orange light.

A hailstorm of bullets lanced towards Jake, but he kept firing. His third shot found its way home in the chest of the man who had been coiling the ladder, and he dropped down on top of the one with the chaingun. Both disappeared into its dark interior.

Jake let loose one last round into the hatch and then prepared for the inevitable jerk, hoping only that the rope and the hand Tinker Farris had fashioned would hold tight enough to keep him from plummeting to his death. He tightened his grip on the Colt and clenched his teeth.

The rope tightened, snapped taut, and swung his body around with a tearing pain that shot through his shoulder and back. If he’d been falling straight down, Jake was certain he never could have held on, either that or his arm would have been torn out of its socket. His arc out of the hold carried him out far enough to lessen the force of his fall, and he swung back under the looming shadow-on-shadow of the
Jezebel
above. The frozen air bit at his face, and he prayed the men above would be able to hoist him back in quickly. As the arc carried him back, he saw Cole leaning over the edge, along with several other men, their eyes popping out at the sight of Jake still dangling below them.

Cole stared at Jake and shook his head, his face full of disbelief and awe. The faces of the men behind him were equally stunned, and they all kept staring as Jake swung beneath the gondola.

“Help me back up, god damn it!” Jake shouted at the top of his lungs. He turned his head to see the black zeppelin turning sharply and accelerating away into the darkness. Even with his eye, he found it difficult to see it against the backdrop of the night sky.

All of the men in the cargo hold moved as one, disappearing for a few beats of Jake’s pounding heart. And then a few more beats.… And a few more.… “What the hell are y’all doing up there? Having a conference?” he shouted.

Suddenly Jake lifted up a few feet and dropped back down. Then back up a few more feet, holding there for a few seconds and back down again. He tried to imagine what they could possibly be doing and then remembered that he weighed over three hundred pounds. Jake was suddenly terrified that they wouldn’t be able to lift him back up.

He rose ten feet and then stopped once again. “Will you quit screwing around?” he screamed into the night.

Cole stuck his head out of the cargo hold once again and looked at Jake, grinning like an idiot. He raised his right hand, gave the OK sign, and then disappeared. The rope slid from the left hand side of the cargo hold to the right and Jake rose almost as fast as he had fallen. The hold door loomed, and Cole peeked out once again, checking on Jake’s progress. When Jake was a few feet from the lip of the hold, Cole turned his head back over his shoulder.

“Okay, hold it right there!” he hollered.

Jake’s progress slowed and then stopped. His left hand, gripped like a vice around the rope, was right at the edge. Jake heaved with his left arm, pulling himself up and over the lip enough for Cole and the big steward to grab his right arm and yank him onto the safety of the cargo hold floor.

Jake lay on the floor, panting and cold. He turned his head and looked where the rope led. It tracked down into the stable area and beyond into the next cargo bay. He could see a loop of it tied around Lumpy’s horns.

“Cole,” Jake managed to get out between breaths.

“Yeah, Jake?”

“I think I love Lumpy.”

Cole thought about it for a minute. “I can see how you might. Check your leg, Jake … and your boot.”

“What?” Jake asked and looked down at his legs. A rip in his right pant-leg exposed the intricately pattered brass metal of his thigh, sigils and characters gleaming across the surface. A gouge about three inches long interrupted the complex patterns. There was also a hole in the top of his boot, and he could see the glint of metal inside. “Aw, damn it! These were brand new boots!”

“You okay, Jake?” Cole asked, wondering if his partner was insane.

“Yeah,” Jake almost whined. He slapped his leg once and rubbed the toe of his right boot over the hole in his left. “The metal will repair itself after a while,” he said to Cole and then started fretting over his boots again. “Man, would you look at that?”

The big steward stepped into Jake’s field of vision and stared down at him, looking upside down to Jake, holding the same Winchester he had in the salon.

“I hate to break this up, but you boys wanna’ tell me just what in tarnation happened in here and why one of my men is dead?” Anger filled his voice, but it didn’t sound like it was aimed at Jake … not yet at least.

Jake turned the lens on his ocular, shutting out the light to his left eye, and got to his feet. He faced the big steward, with a pained look on his face. “Bear?” he asked sympathetically, feeling ashamed about whining over the hole in his boot.

The steward nodded slowly. Jake looked over in the corner and saw that the first chaingun burst that had been aimed at him caught Bear in the chest. Bear went down exactly where he had been standing, and it looked like he’d simply fallen backwards, stiff as a board. He still held his arm out to his side, halfway to his pistol.

Jake noted that while the big steward’s Winchester wasn’t pointed at him, it wasn’t necessarily pointed away from him either. Jake certainly couldn’t blame the man for being cautious, considering what had just happened. Jake heard another one of the stewards closing the cargo bay door and turned to see the man securing it with a large, heavy-gauge latch.

Cole handed Jake his Peacekeeper, and Jake slipped it home.

“My name’s Jake Lasater, this here’s Cole McJunkins, and frankly, we ain’t got no idea what’s going on.” Jake held out his hand.

The big steward took it in an iron grip, his massive paw of a hand making Jake’s disappear. “Tyler Jones,” the big man replied, the edge still in his voice.

“New Mexico, right?” Cole spoke up, recognizing the mild accent. Tyler nodded, turning his big bright eyes to Cole. “Santa Fe?” Cole asked.

Tyler shook his head. “White Rock,” he said, the anger in his voice smoothing out just a bit, “but that’s a stone’s throw from Santa Fe.”

“Roswell,” Cole said and held out his hand. Tyler got a curious look on his face and then smiled, his shoulders easing noticeably.

“So what the hell happened in here?” Tyler asked. “Who were those guys?”

Jake started his story with seeing the flashes outside the zeppelin and wanting to check it out. He mentioned Szilágyi but deliberately left out what the Colonel had said about killing him later. He finished with getting pulled back on board.

Tyler spoke up. “And you don’t have any idea who those foreigners were or where they were from?”

“Not a clue, and that Colonel, he sure as hell knew me. The first time I ever saw him was tonight at the poker game.”

“The poker game?” Tyler asked.

“Yeah. He left shortly before the ruckus with that cowboy.”

The Steward’s eyes narrowed. “O’Malley!” He shouted as he turned and faced the small Irishman.

“Yeah?” he replied, stepping up with a lightweight salute.

“Did you see any of these men?”

“I got a brief look at one of them, the one that pushed them crates on top of Mister Lasater, here. But we high-tailed it out to get help when he told us to.”

“I want you to go talk to Bobby and Mister Grimes, the ticket taker. See if they remember seeing these.…” he paused and turned to Jake. “How many did you see?”

“There were three of them at the poker game. I can’t say for sure if there was more of them in here. Oh, and that foreigner with the sash and the saber, Colonel Szilágyi, I suspect he doesn’t take that thing off. Make sure you mention it.”

Tyler turned back to O’Malley. “See if they remember seeing these three guys, and find out where they got on.

“But what if Bobby and Grimes are asleep?” O’Malley asked.

Tyler shot O’Malley an
Are you dumb?
look. “You think anyone is asleep on this crate after all the shooting that just happened in here? Now get going!”

“Yessir,” O’Malley replied and turned.

“Wait a minute,” Tyler blurted at O’Malley’s back. O’Malley stopped and turned around. “How the hell did they get by you?”

“Sir?” O’Malley cocked his head to one side, not understanding the question.

“Well, think about it. You and Bear were on duty from eight o’clock till now. Them foreigners were at the poker game at just shy of midnight and sending these signals sometime after. They
had
to have gotten past you.” It was a bewildered accusation.

O’Malley got a confused look on his face. “I don’t know. I see what you’re saying, but we were at our post until Mister Lasater and his friend showed up. I don’t see how they could have.”

“I think I can answer that,” Jake said confidently.

Every head in the cargo hold turned as Jake strode over to Bear’s body. He reached down and picked up the bottom portion of a shattered glass vial. There was still a droplet of gray liquid in the bottom. Holding at arm’s length, he walked back to Tyler, who took it from him carefully.

“What the hell’s this?” Tyler asked and moved what was left of the vial up to his nose.

“No! Wait!” Jake shouted just as Tyler sniffed at the vial.

Tyler’s eyes blinked several times, and then his eyes rolled back into his head. He stood there motionless, breathing slowly.

“Aw, shit,” Jake mumbled.

“What happened,” asked one of the stewards.

Jake reached into his vest pocket and pulled out his father’s pocket watch. He opened it and noted the time. He handed the vial to Cole who held it at arm’s length.

“Don’t worry, if I’m right about this, he’s just fine, but it’ll be a bit.” Jake stepped away from Tyler and walked over to where his hat had landed. He picked it up and placed it back on his head. Lumpy had turned around and bumped Jake’s arm. Jake looked the big bull in the eyes and patted his head fondly. “That’s two I owe you, Lumpy.” Jake pulled the rope off Lumpy’s horns and dropped it on the floor. “Get back in your stall, boy.” Lumpy looked at him, blinking his big brown eyes. “Go on, now, get in there.” Lumpy snorted once, bumped Jake again and clomped into the stall. Jake closed the door behind him and walked back to where Tyler still stood, frozen in the same position. He looked at his watch again and then stood there waiting.

More time passed and then Tyler blinked his eyes a few times. “Hey! Where’d it go?” he asked, looking at his empty hand and then at the floor.

“Two minutes thirty-five seconds,” Jake said.

There were mutters and a few “god damns” from the men standing around Tyler.

“What?” Tyler asked bewildered.

“That’s how long you were out. Two and a half minutes.” Jake pointed to the vial in Cole’s hand and then tipped his hat. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“Any of what, and where’d your hat come from?”

A few men chuckled, but Jake had a sober look on his face.

“This stuff, whatever it is, is one hell of a cocktail. I ain’t never heard of anything like it. Paralyzes and knocks out all in one fell swoop. Somehow them foreigners hit Bear and O’Malley with this stuff while they were on guard.”

“But we would have seen them open the door, just like when we spotted Mr. Lasater,” O’Malley protested.

“Maybe they sprayed it under the door or something,” Cole offered.

“Probably,” Jake concurred. “One of them had a satchel when he left the bar. Lord knows what was inside. These guys are well-equipped, whoever they are.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Tyler agreed. “Those guns they had—”

“Szilágyi called ’em chainguns.…” Jake injected.

“Those chainguns are the devil’s own peashooter. You’re lucky to be alive, Jake.”

“I sure would like to know who the hell they were,” Jake said.

“You and me both,” Tyler added. “O’Malley, you go on and talk to Bobby and Grimes. Find out what they know. And tell the engineer to check the envelopes for holes. That last burst from the guy on the zeppelin may have hit something important.”

“On my way,” O’Malley replied as he turned and walked out.

Tyler turned to his men. “I gotta report all this to the captain. Kelsey, Biggs, heft Bear on outta here and put him in the freezer.” O’Malley headed out of the cargo hold while two of the larger men stepped over to Bear’s body. “We gotta take him back home, and I’ll have to let his wife and kids know what happened, damn it.”

“Jake, Cole, why don’t you boys head back to your cabin. I reckon you’re fair tuckered out after tonight. It’s possible the captain will want to talk to you before we land in Carson City, but maybe not. I’ll give him the whole story.”

“Thanks, Tyler,” Cole replied.

“Yeah, thanks,” Jake added. “I’m bushed … and I think my heart has finally slowed down.”

“If either of you thinks of anything that might be helpful, let me know, would ya?” Jones asked.

“Actually,” Jake spoke up, “there is one more thing.”

“The code!” Cole said, reaching into his pocket.

“I managed to get some of what they were saying to each other, but I don’t know what it says,” Jake added.

“How do you mean?” Tyler asked. Cole held out the bill and showed it to Tyler. “Looks like Morse.”

“Well, if it is,” Jake said, “the letters don’t make any sense. I’ll see if I can put it all together and get it for you in the morning.”