That was the thing. Nobody down there, including the dead.
He picked up his cane off the dirigible’s floor and tested the weight of it. It was a good cane, solid enough to bring down a big man or a small wildcat, push come to shove. He set it across his knees.
The Majestic drooped down swiftly, but Walter was in control. He’d landed in the dark before and it was tricky, but it didn’t scare him much. It made him cautious, sure. A man would be a fool to be incautious when piloting a half-ton craft into a facility with enough flammable gas to move a fleet. All things being ready and bright, and all it took was a wrongly placed spark—just a graze of metal on metal, the screech of one thing against another, or a single cigarette fallen from a lip—and the whole town would be reduced to matchsticks. Everybody knew it, and everybody lived with it. Just like everybody knew that flying post was a dangerous job, and a bunch of the boys who flew never made it home, just like going to war.
Walter sniffed, one nostril arching up high and dropping down again. He set his jaw, pulled the back drag chute, flipped the switch to give himself some light on the ship’s underbelly, and spun the Majestic like a girl at a dance. He dropped her down onto the wooden platform with a big red X painted to mark the spot, and she shuddered to silence in the middle of the circle cast by her undercarriage light.
With one hand he popped the anchor chain lever, and with the other he reached for the door handle as he listened to that chain unspool outside.
Outside it was as dark as his overhead survey had implied. And although the light of the undercarriage was nearly the only light, Walter reached up underneath the craft and pulled the snuffing cover down over its flaring white wick. He took hold of the nearest anchor chain and dragged it over to the pipework docks. Ordinarily he’d check to make sure he was on the right pad, clipping his craft to the correct slot before checking in with the station agent.
But no one greeted him. No one rushed up with a ream of paperwork for signing and sealing.
A block away a light burned; and beyond that, another gleamed somewhere farther away. Between those barely seen orbs and the lifting height of a half-full moon, Walter could see well enough to spy another ship nearby. It was affixed to a port on the hydrogen generators, but sagging hard enough that it surely wasn’t filled or ready to fly.
Except for the warm buzz of the gas machines standing by, Walter heard absolutely nothing. No bustling of suppertime seekers roaming through the narrow streets, flowing toward Bad Albert’s place, or wandering to Mama Rico’s. The pipe dock workers were gone, and so were the managers and agents.
No horses, either. No shuffling of saddles or stirrups, of bits or clomping iron shoes.
Inside the Majestic an oil lantern was affixed to the wall behind the pilot’s seat. Walter grunted, leaning on his cane. He pulled out the lamp, but hesitated to light it.
He held a match up, ready to strike it on the side of the deflated ship, but he didn’t. The silence held its breath and told him to wait. It spoke like a battlefield before an order is given.
That’s what stopped him. Not the thought of all that hydrogen, but the singular sensation that somewhere, on some other side, enemies were crouching—waiting for a shot. It froze him, one hand and one match held aloft, his cane leaning against the dirigible and his satchel hanging from his shoulder, pressing at the spot where his neck curved to meet his collarbone.
Under the lazily rolling moon and alone in the mobile gas works that had become the less-mobile semi-settlement of Reluctance, Walter put the match away, and set the lantern on the ground beside his ship.
He could see. A little. And given the circumstances, he liked that better than being seen.
His leg ached, but then again, it always ached. Too heavy by half and not nearly as mobile as the army had promised it’d be, the steel and leather contraption tugged against his knee as if it were a drowning man; and for a tiny flickering moment the old ghost pains tickled down to his toes, even though the toes were long gone, blown away on a battlefield in Virginia.
He held still until the sensation passed, wondering bleakly if it would ever go away for good, and suspecting that it wouldn’t.
“All right,” he whispered, and it was cold enough to see the words. When had it gotten so cold? How did the desert always do that, cook and then freeze? “We’ll move the mail.”
Damn straight we will.
Walter reached into the Majestic’s tiny hold and pulled out the three bags he’d been carrying as cargo. Each bag was the size of his good leg, and as heavy as his bad one. When they were all three removed from the ship he peered dubiously at the other craft across the landing pad—the one attached to the gas pipes, but empty.
He considered his options.