stanch the wound with their hands, the blood pulsing through their fingers and covering their hands to the wrists in seconds.
Larry sobbed, howled, grunted inhumanly as he gasped for oxygen, convulsed once and threw up on Jake.
Something jerked the Blowfish taut. They were going down.
Mortimer stood, looked back at the truck. Men were cranking the spool of line, pulling it tight and reeling the blimp in like a game fish. Mortimer watched them crank. It was a slow process; there must have been some kind of glitch in the winch, because every fifth or sixth crank, the line would go slack again and the Goats would scramble to fix it. They started again, and this time it came loose after the third crank.
“Cut the line!” Ted shouted.
Mortimer pulled the bowie knife from his boot sheath, bent over the side of the gondola, stretched his hand. The bolt had punctured too far down. Mortimer couldn’t reach it. The line was tied to the end of the bolt, and the bolt was made of some light metal that would take him twenty minutes to get through with a hacksaw.
And he didn’t have a hacksaw.
The Goats kept cranking them in, the blimp edging lower a foot at a time.
“Reload, Bill.”
“I’m on it.” He was already thumbing fresh shells into the Peacemakers.
The rumble of engines. Three more pickup trucks rolled into view, each filled with more bloodthirsty Goats.
He knelt again next to the screaming pilot. “Is he going to make it?”
Jake was covered in the little man’s blood. He met Mortimer’s eyes, shook his head.
“Sorry about this.” Mortimer set his jaw, dug his hands in around the wound, trying to get a grip behind the bolt head.
Larry writhed. “No, please-oh, God.”
Mortimer waited. He needed to time this just right. He felt the pull on the bolt ease and yanked. A wet tearing sound inside Larry’s leg. The little man screamed louder, if that was possible. Mortimer kept pulling. The bolt shaft came all the way through, but the knot caught on the other side of the leg. Mortimer braced himself, heaved, put his back into it. He had to get it through before the Goats started cranking again. Pull. The knot came through in a splash of blood and flesh.
Larry passed out.
Mortimer sawed at the thin rope with the knife. It frayed, came apart, and shot out of his hands, back through the leg wound and the gondola. The blimp bobbed, tilted and suddenly released. Ted grabbed the weed-whacker tiller, aimed them away from the Goats.
“They’re reloading,” Bill said.
Mortimer lifted Larry, dead weight, arms flopping, and let him fall over the side. Mortimer turned away. He couldn’t bear to see the little man land.
Without the weight of the corpse, they lifted much higher, much faster.
XLIII
Blowfish could not feel urgency, did not know panic or recognize the need to put itself beyond the range of the ballista. Nothing would hurry its steady rise to a hundred feet, then two hundred feet and more. The next ballista shot never came, and the blimp’s five passengers shivered in the blood-soaked gondola as the temperature dropped with the increased altitude.
Mortimer welcomed the wind in his face as it helped dry the panic sweat and wash away the smell of blood.
“Hell, I sure hate to lose a man.” Ted still held the tiller, heading them toward downtown Atlanta.
Reverend Jake took off his top hat. “May the Lord guide his soul to Heaven.”
“You better tell him to guide our sorry asses back to the ground,” Ted said. “Larry was the pilot. I kinda sorta know how to steer this thing. Maybe.”
“And the radio,” Jake reminded them.
“Problems?” Mortimer didn’t need these guys crapping out on him now.
“A moment please while I confer with my colleague.” The reverend went aft, leaned in to converse with Ted in hushed whispers.
Bill plopped down in the bow of the gondola. “What now, boss?”
Mortimer shrugged. “Let’s see what they come up with.”
Bill frowned, pulled the Union hat down over his eyes for a quick nap, arms crossed tight against the cold.
Sheila was back at the rail again, standing close to Mortimer, looking down. “I’ve never seen it like this. I mean, I’ve been up on a mountain, seen what things look like far away, but not like this, with nothing underneath us at all.”
“Afraid of heights?”
“No. I like it up here. We’re disconnected.” Houses, trees, roads, shopping centers, fields, all passed silently
