‘Are you sure you can get us out of this madhouse?’ Wildflower whispered to Bastian.
‘Can you take me to the commissar’s laundry room?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Then we leave tonight,’ he said, and this time he wanted her.
The commissar clapped his hands.
‘Music,’ he ordered, ‘and more cider for my guests.’
With the rooms strewn with intoxicated partygoers and the staff collecting flagons and sweeping broken champagne glasses off the floor, Bastian and Jambit followed Wildflower to the laundry room. There was a taskmaster sat at the end of the corridor supposed to keep watch but fast asleep in his fine silk clothes. They slipped inside and Bastian and Jambit changed into white suits and kepis, then slowly wriggled their calloused feet into the white snakeskin boots.
On their way downstairs, they saw a wife collapsed on a bed unconscious from opium and gently removed her clothes. The ball gown slipped over Wildflower and her thin grey dress and they walked to the veranda with their hearts pounding. At the stables, Bastian saw the militiaman in goggles smoking another spliff.
‘My friends wish to see the stars a little closer tonight, take us to your balloon,’ he commanded.
‘And Edward?’
‘Edward says he won’t be ready until sunrise.’
The pilot clicked his heels.
‘Follow me to the cart,’ he said.
Bastian held a knife from the kitchens tight underneath his tunic, ready to cut the pilot’s throat should he suspect anything untoward, and his own wrists if necessary. There was a checkpoint ahead, the gatepost guarded by three taskmasters with rifles.
‘Halt,’ one of them screamed.
‘Papers,’ shouted another.
Bastian’s face was dripping with sweat as they approached and he grabbed the reins from the pilot.
‘Open the gate, you fools,’ he shouted back without slowing. ‘Can’t you see I’m a commissar!’
The men looked at one another and rushed to raise the crossbar with the blinkered horses nearly on top of them. Jambit waved as they galloped through. They followed the track deep into the jungle until they reached a clearing. The basket and balloon were anchored to the trees with spent tanks of propane laying between the roots pushing up from the ground.
The basket and balloon canvas were coloured blue and white, camouflaged for day flight and invisible from the ground to prisoners, subversives, and Party rivals wanting to arrange a fatal mid-air collision for Edward.
They calmly alighted the cart and walked under an archway of carefully twisted vines that said ‘soft winds and happy landings’. To the side was a log cabin, and on the door another sign but in crocodile teeth, ‘Welcome to Scotland.’ Bastian was confused whilst the pilot reached into the balloon.
‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ he said, pointing a loaded shotgun. ‘Go and take a look in the cabin.’
All three pushed their noses inside and saw eleven skeletons sat on the floor, legs crossed and arms folded, and each with a single bullet hole in the skull: 12’s retired friends. Wildflower prayed she was next rather than be taken back to the big house and grotesquely murdered.
The pilot was about to grab the distress flare hanging from the back of the door when Jambit kicked the loaded barrel from his hand and Bastian stabbed him in the neck. He picked up the shotgun, his white suit stained with blood.
‘I hope you can fly that balloon,’ said Wildflower, throwing her suffocating ball gown over the dead body.
Bastian helped her into the upright basket and followed her over. He pulled on a pair of gloves and lit the burner whilst Jambit untied the ropes. Too little time to check the tanks, he released some propane to the burner and felt the balloon drag along the ground before the basket bumped into a tree. He threw the attached ballast over the side and Jambit jumped in before they rose into the night sky. They threw their kepis overboard into the jungle.
‘They will kill thirty prisoners for our escape,’ said Wildflower. ‘Ten for each of us.’
‘I heard it was twenty each,’ said Bastian, fixing the goggles in place and hoping there were no gales to throw them off course.
And as they drifted higher touching the dark purple clouds, he wondered why Scotland was off the menu for those wanting dessert in Canada?
Chapter Forty-One
Bastian flew them along the coast. Giant waves crashed into the cliffs reminding him of home. Fingers of sea-spray tried to reach up and grab him from the sky. As a child he would paddle out to sea long before he could understand his parents’ concerned advice, ‘be careful and don’t waste your points,’ unaware of the social upheaval taking place around him as a new social order replaced the old and rusted.
‘You’re sure it’s this way?’ asked Wildflower, with the wind blowing in her hair as Bastian took the balloon above the cloud bank.
There was no better place to feel freedom than the sky.
‘You want to navigate?’ asked Jambit.
‘Carry on,’ she said, looking over the side of the basket and hoping she wouldn’t be raped.
Bastian spat over the side and as it fell watched which way the wind blew.
Angole was 100 miles from Edinburgh and with the prevailing wind they hoped to reach the outer zone before sunrise.
‘When did H first discover you could navigate by the stars?’ Wildflower asked Jambit.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
‘And your friend can pilot, how fortunate for me,’ she said.
Bastian and Jambit looked at one another.
Suddenly, they were all thrown sideways. The sky was much darker as vampire bats swarmed around them with their three-foot wingspans frantically flapping. They beat them away with anything they could find before the storm passed. Jambit fell back onto the hardwood floor after struggling to stand up. Bastian looked up inside the balloon envelope and was relieved to see no damage to the panels.
There was a deep flesh wound above Jambit’s right knee. Wildflower tore a strip from her hem and made a ligature to stop the bleeding.
Jambit continued to navigate through the night before Bastian saw the outer zone, the streets too narrow
