Dustbowl, Chapter One

Dustbowl

In his dreams, the man was dying.

He lay sprawled in the middle of the road, a broken figure surrounded by a starry sky of glass on a pall of wet bitumen.

It was silent save the rhythmic patter of the rain and the high pitched whine that exists only when there is no other sound to hear. There had been screaming and the roaring of air and then a sickening crack which he'd known with terrifying certainty had been his bones breaking – and then that high whine had flooded in to fill the space that noise's departure had left behind.

He felt everything and nothing. His nerves screamed in pain and in their struggle to be heard, they drowned one another out. He could feel the cool droplets of water as they slapped his skin and he could hear naught but the whining of silence.

A single cold blue eye blinked open, taking in the view of bitumen and glass and pooling water.

A red high heel stepped into view – a fiery presence framed by the dark mouth of the alley in the distance. Black, fishnet stockings and a leg that seemed to stretch up forever. He couldn't move to take in more of the view. The disembodied leg, the glass, and the ominous dark of the alley were his vista.

He could remember the fall like a man grown remembers some detached childhood memory. The snippet of a bath taken with siblings or the way the sun felt on a particular July afternoon. There was the terror and the howling wind and then the moment where he had ceased to be himself and started to be something else entirely. His fears and anger and confusion left him and all there was was the rapid approach of the dark street below and the realisation that there would be nothing beyond it.

In a strange way, it had been a comfort.

“He's not dead,” a woman's voice, sweet like honey. She spoke as if she were observing the weather from the window of her living room. If she cared about his situation, her voice betrayed no such feeling. Did he recognise that voice? He didn't think so.

“He will be,” a man's voice rasped. A man noticing a cockroach in its death throes. Another unfamiliar voice.

The wounded man wanted to speak. Wanted to ask for help, but it was all he could do to keep his eye open. He was tired. Damn tired.

“What should we do?” the woman spoke again, and in the silence that followed her words, the dying man could hear sirens in the distance. Help coming for him? It would be too late.

“Nothing,” the raspy voice responded, “We've done what we needed to”.

Bright light flared. The blue eye winked shut. Heat by his face and the soothing familiarity of cigarette smoke. A hiss signalled the butt's death rattle. Then there was just the cold and the dark and the drumming of rain.

“Let's go,” the woman again, “I'm cold”.

“Sure,” came the reply, “We're done here”.

The man felt a single warm droplet on the naked skin of his neck. The raspy man had spat on him. Footfalls as the two left. The spit cooled and soon he was left with only the rain and the whining of near silence for company. And beyond that, in the distance, the sirens he already knew would be too late.

He was tired.

So tired.

--------------------

The captain of The Incorrigible reclined in his chair and stared blankly out at the setting sun through the grimy glass. His red velvet uniform was moth eaten and his red fez, which he'd always found so demeaning to wear, sat in his lap. His name tag was dark with tarnish and rust.

Captain Kaleb Byrne

Today was a special day. Today marked Kaleb's fiftieth year as the captain of The Incorrigible, a Class III passenger zeppelin owned and maintained by The Company and under contract to Freelance City Council.

Fifty years in the service of his company, his city, and his nation – and he'd spent the last twenty seven of them dead.

Being dead was not the problem it should have been. The Incorrigible had not carried a passenger in the past three decades. Its first class cabin; once home to Elvish actresses, Dwarfish mining magnates, and Orcish Death Bowl stars, now housed only dust and cobwebs. Where once a smiling employee had paced the aisles offering refreshments as the ship did its tour of duty – now only starving mice raced about their mouse business.

In fact, for the last two years of Kaleb's unremarkable life, he had continued his route despite the lack of passengers. He would fly from city to city, tie up and clean, and wait for passengers that never came. The hubs were empty. The great greeting halls were darkened and littered.

At first he thought there might have been a plague or a travel ban in place, but if that were the case, nobody at head office ever thought to inform him. And so he continued to fly and clean and, every other Sunday, he continued to collect the pay check that waited for him in his pigeon hole.

Then, one day the checks just stopped coming. No notice of termination. No explanation. Just an empty pigeon hole staring dumbly back at him.

He didn't need the money. It hadn't been about the money. The Incorrigible took care of him. It woke him every morning with a cup of black coffee and an order of hash browns from whatever fairy kitchen The Company had installed. It fed him a beef salad sandwich every day at midday. Each evening he had his choice of chicken breast on a bed of lettuce or a vegetarian lasagna. And, once a year on his birthday, he would wake to find a chocolate fudge cupcake with a single lit candle on it.

Kaleb was not a bright man. The Company had expressly hired all of their pilots to fit a very simple mold: capable and not likely to ask questions.

Kaleb had never thought to question where the food came from or how the zeppelin stayed afloat without ever having to refill its balloon. He never daydreamed about how the cabin stayed at a constant temperature or how his ship knew when his birthday was.

And, although he was disappointed when the checks stopped coming, he never thought to get on the horn to head office and ask “What gives”?

He waited two weeks. Four weeks. Six weeks. Eight weeks.

Then he clambered into the cockpit, pulled on his uniform, and blown his brains out.

They had since become another unrecognisable stain on the windscreen through which his sightless eyes now watched another glorious Freelance sunset.

The zeppelin whether out of programming or some incomprehensible feeling of loyalty towards its former captain, kept the mice out and, like it had every year, put out a cup cake with a single candle every year on March 17th. The mossy green pile of them sat in front of Kaleb, but he'd not once moved to grab one. And God knows, a man has got to be hungry after twenty seven years.

But today was a special day for another reason. Today was special because, for the first time in thirty years, The Incorrigible had a passenger.

He sat in seat 23-B with his head resting against the window and one leg sprawled up over the arm rest that divided B from A. He had no ticket. Not that it mattered either way. Percy Evergreen had stopped showing up not long after the passengers had. Kaleb had never liked Percy. He was a college educated boy too spoiled to understand the service industry. But The Company paid well and it liked its attendants good looking and quick witted.

Percy, like Kaleb, was dead now. Gunned down in an alley thirteen years ago with his pants around his ankles and a screaming half-Elf woman watching on with wild eyes and torn panty-hose. Her husband had turned the gun on her not long after that and when the authorities had come, he'd turned it on himself.

No, there were no tickets needed for The Incorrigible.

Everybody rode for free these days.

The passenger groaned in his sleep. Possibly having a nightmare. The leather of his seat groaned in complaint. It had not had to bear a passenger's weight in a long time and had become accustomed to its solitude. Its red leather was faded and cracked. Foam oozed from the cracks like puss from a boil. The aisle had a coating of dust an inch deep – mouse prints dotted it. It was their own private snowfield.

The wind howled unhappily in a broken window two seats behind the passenger – probably done by some looter destined to be disappointed. The wealth went with the passengers – The Incorrigible was a floating museum now. A tribute to prosperous times and the unbending will of The Company.

The passenger moaned in his sleep again. Sensing his discomfort, his seat reclined. The gears of the mechanism may have been driven by magic, but they needed oil like any other. They squeaked their protest.

The passenger, a man in his middle twenties, groaned again but did not wake up.

For her part, The Incorrigible bobbed in the hot afternoon air like her nautical counterpart might have in calm seas. The red sun bathed the ship and the dusty tarmac in the same ruddy red. Her mooring line, magically shielded from the elements, looked the same today as it had the day Kaleb Byrne had repainted the interior of his cabin in brain matter gray.

She was the last of her kind. The others in her fleet – a fleet that had once connected Freelance to other cities and other worlds – were long gone. The Company's shining jewel had been reduced to a single fading, pilotless zeppelin roasting in the hot summer sun.

Indestructible had had a nasty run in with irony when it had been flying in over the Bay of Sorrows. Why The Company had opted to build the Freelance Zeppelin Hub on the stark cliffs overlooking the vast, stormy bay is a question shareholders must have asked in the wake of that public relations disaster. Seventy two souls had gone to their early graves when an errant bolt of lightning had struck the Indestructible and proved her to be anything but. Its passengers either died in the flames or drowned in the rough seas three thousand feet below.

Desire and Justice had been tied up alongside The Incorrigible the day that Kaleb had decided to hand in his resignation with a bang – but the magic that kept them afloat had long since faded. They lay at the bottom of the bay with the sharks and the bones of Indestructible's unfortunate cargo.

They'd been forgotten like a child's balloon once the carnival lights disappear over the horizon and the magic fades. They'd bobbed about brightly for a while and then, when it was clear nobody wanted to play with them anymore, they'd popped.

Jubilee, Courage, and Serendipity had simply not come back from their final flights. Like so much else, if The Company had known of their whereabouts, they'd never thought to inform Kaleb. Shot down over Rundari territory, perhaps. Hijacked by birdman pirates. Crashed. Stolen. Sold on to a new contract.

Kaleb had not been known to think, but he had thought long and hard about the whereabouts of the rest of the fleet. Even the simple need company, and he'd had none of that in the three years between Percy's departure and the punctuation he'd given his life with the sidearm The Company had given him to celebrate ten years of loyal service.

Sensing the heat outside, the zeppelin attempted to adjust the temperature of the first class cabin. It was out of practice. What should have been a cool summer evening was instead a chill winter morning. The passenger woke shivering despite the heavy trench coat he wore.

For a moment he lingered in his dream, a broken body lying in an empty street, and then those icy blue eyes flickered open – the wet road and angry orange glow of the cigarette butt replaced by the back of the chair in front and a magazine whose color had been consumed by the sun and whose corners were curled.

The Freelance Bugle

A grainy photograph showed a tenement in flames and a teary eyed, ash faced woman staring wildly over the shoulder of whatever photographer had snapped the shot.

Pit Lord Fazi burns Old Town!

It's headline proclaimed in angry, bold print.

Disorientation gripped the man as it does all of us when we wake in unfamiliar territory. He glanced frantically around for some landmark or familiar face that might root him in this world and assure him that he had just woken up from a terrible nightmare, and not some grim memory.

There was no sign of the two who had so casually stood over him dying in the street. No sign also of the broken bones that he had been sure would kill him or the rain that had soaked him through.

“Just a dream,” he reassured himself, but it had seemed to real.

Where was he? A train? A bus?

The view out his window showed what looked like a government building. It loomed up, gray and oppressive, its shadow traversing the smoldering red soil between its open doors and the window he peered out. He shivered.

The tarmac was littered with papers and discarded crates. What looked like a newspaper danced merrily in an eddying breeze. A pair of ravens argued over the corpse of a fat mouse that hadn't quite made it back aboard its zeppelin home when the dawn had come.

A fat rope trailed from a thick metal pole outside his window and joined up somewhere with the bus or train or whatever it was he was sitting in.

His eyes settled on the bright blue lettering that stood over the open doors of the building.

Freelance Zeppelin Hub

Zeppelin?

“Huh?” he grunted stupidly. He sure as shit didn't remember getting on a zeppelin. Hell, he didn't even know they still made them.

But sure enough, when he stopped to think, he could feel the way the cabin bounced on invisible waves. He rushed to the other side of the aisle and stared wildly out the passenger window. The hazy sky stretched out for as far as he could see. If he craned his neck to look, he'd have seen that it extended down forever too. The ocean lay beneath a cloud of dust and steam.

“Huh,” he grunted again, slumping down into the chair and massaging his temple. He had a splitting headache.

He strained to remember some detail that would explain his presence on the zeppelin or the dream or anything. But that was the problem. He couldn't remember anything. Not how he got here. Not where he'd been going or where he'd been coming from.

He couldn't even remember his name.

Nothing. Just a sense that he was who he was, and that he was not from here.

But there wasn't nothing. Not really. He could not put a name on the face that looked back at him from the reflection in the window, but he could attach some memories to it. Those cold blue eyes had seen a lot of pain. He could remember, in the detached way you might remember a scene from a movie, those eyes wet with tears as a much younger boy stood by the bed of an old man. His grandfather or father, perhaps. He couldn't be sure. It was his memory, but without a context, it was just mannequins in a store window. They looked like life, to be sure, but he felt nothing for them.

Had his nightmare been a memory too? If so, what had come between lying in the street dying and waking up alone in this dusty old flying machine?

He shook his head. He should have been terrified or panicked, but he wasn't. Maybe that was some indication of who he was? Was he a man used to dealing with unusual situations?

“Wallet,” he chided himself for not thinking of it sooner, and fished around in the pockets of a jacket that was far too heavy for this time of year. If he had known where he was going, he sure as shit hadn't packed accordingly.

A cigarette lighter, a pack of Marlboro, a deck of cards, and an unremarkable stainless steel hip flask that seemed about half full.

“So, I smoke and drink and gamble,” he mused to nobody in particular, “Sounds like I'm a real pillar of society”.

He patted the pockets in the torn blue jeans he wore and felt something hard and cold. A knife.

Useful, no doubt, but it gave him no idea of who he was. No wallet. No cellphone.

He might as well have been a ghost.

Frustrated, he crammed his meager possessions back into his pockets and headed back to his seat. Perhaps the faded magazine could shed some light on his where and how.

Its dateline read 585. That didn't even make any sense. He might have no memories, but he knew that 585 was a long time ago. Why the hell had he been riding on this dusty, beat up old thing? And why had he been riding alone?

The names and places mentioned in the stories didn't ring any bells either.

Mayor Elranis commissions Organised Crime Task Force

Rundari forces seize Gru'an

Council: Borders to remain closed

He had no idea where he was, but he knew one thing for certain. Wherever here was – he was not local.

He tossed the magazine onto an abandoned chair and sneezed at the cloud of dust it threw up. A cockroach scuttled angrily out from a crack, shook a tiny fist at the passenger, and went back inside.

He walked unsteadily down the aisle towards the door marked 'Exit', the zeppelin uncooperative as it rocked from side to side on a troublesome wind. Whoever he was, the passenger was no sailor. He fell twice before he got to the door and rested a grateful hand on its rusted handle.

Cobwebs covered its ornate mahogany face and the hinges were near black with rust. It looked as if nobody had used this door in years.

He glanced back over his shoulder to look for another exit the way he'd come, but this was it. How the hell had he gotten on board?

Either he'd been here a long, long time or he'd come on some other way. Through the broken window? It was possible. His possessions didn't exactly paint the picture of an upstanding citizen. Maybe he'd just broken in looking for a place to sleep?

He gripped the door handle and yanked it down.

Nothing.

Then, terrifyingly, a feeling as if something was pushing against his brain. Like how it felt when you had an injection and you felt the foreign fluid shoving its way into the bloodstream. Only this was ten times worse – a fat, careless finger rooting around and not caring what it bumped against. It was the worst kind of rape.

“Welcome to Freelance,” a cheerful female voice spoke up from everywhere and nowhere. The passenger could see no speakers. It was as if she spoke only to him.

“We hope that you enjoyed your flight from....”

Her soothing voice tapered off into the angry hiss of static. The man shook his head and smiled wanly. Even the damn ship didn't know where he'd come from.

“I'm sorry,” the woman's voice pressed on, “We seem to be experiencing technical difficulties. Please accept this free meal as a token of our appreciation for choosing Company Zeppelin”.

The wall beside the door shuddered and then collapsed forward, becoming a tray on which a single cup of steaming coffee and a beef salad sandwich sat. The passenger sniffed at it tentatively – in a ship as old and beat up as this, where would the fresh food be coming from?

But it smelled good. The bread was soft and fragrant, the lettuce green and crisp, and the beef seemed as if it had been cut off the spit just seconds earlier. His stomach grumbled its appreciation. He bit into it and groaned his satisfaction. Whoever he was – he was starving.

“If you would please disembark,” the voice gently prompted him, “The ship needs to be made ready for its outgoing flight”.

The man chuckled around a mouthful of sandwich.

“I don't want to be the one to break it to you,” he replied, “But I'm it by the looks of it”.

Still, he didn't see the sense in antagonizing a flying machine that conjured food out of thin air and could poke around in his head. He nodded thanks to nobody in particular and tried the door again, relieved to feel it swing out and let in a gust of hot, dry air.

“Thank you for choosing Company Air,” the woman's voice called after him, “We hope you will consider us for future travel”.

“Sure thing,” he turned and saluted the zeppelin with his coffee, “See you in the funny pages”.

Downing the last of his coffee and tossing the mug on the baked red earth, he shrugged off his jacket and slung it over one arm. Then, sighing, he headed towards the terminal.