Johnny Graphic and the Etheric Bomb Page 4

  “Officer Danny Kailolu,” the young co-pilot said.

  “All right, all right,” the captain agreed with a frown. “Just a few shots. That’s all.”

  Johnny understood only too well that this was no comic book adventure. If the Steppe Warriors took out two more engines, the big flying boat would go down—with Mel and himself and everyone else on board. But that didn’t mean that he should stop doing his job. If everyone survived, he knew these shots could end up on front pages all around the world. And the two pilots would be big heroes.

  He squeezed by Melanie in the dim, cramped cabin, sneaking another peek at her fuzzy upper lip. He groaned under his breath, regretting his stupid prank. How was it she hadn’t noticed yet?

  Johnny held the Zoom 4x5 up over his head, aimed down at the captain and co-pilot, and pressed the shutter release. The bulb made an audible pooosh sound as it went off, blasting the cabin with light.

  After a few more shots, the captain told him to go back to his seat. But Johnny argued that having another pair of ghost-seeing eyes up on the flight deck could only help. Again, Danny Kailolu took his side and the captain yielded.

  “Now get ahold of Jonesville,” she ordered the radioman. “Have them telegraph Babbitt Tower. We should be getting back on toward dawn. Tell ’em we have two engines out. Nothing about ghosts and cavalrymen and bows and arrows. No details!”

  Captain Merrick gently turned the steering yoke toward starboard and began the Goose’s long, slow about-face. The deck tilted, the stars shifted lazily in the sky, and the moon disappeared for a time, reappearing on the other side when the aeroboat arrived at its new course and altitude.

  Mel and Johnny leaned over the pilots’ shoulders, scanning the night sky. The troopers of the First Zenith Brigade held position all around the giant flying boat, shimmering eerily in the moonlight as they galloped along. Johnny wished the captain and Danny could see them. It was an amazing sight.

  With absolutely no warning, a rain of silvery arrows plummeted out of the heavens—making a dreadful drumbeat on the aluminum skin of the aircraft.

  “Here they come again!” Johnny screamed.

  He saw the attacking Steppe Warriors do everything they could do to bring down the giant flying boat. And the First Zenith Brigade did everything possible to keep them away.

  The two opposing troops of ghost soldiers circled, shifted, soared, and dived through the moonlit sky.

  Bows snapping. Arrows flying. Revolvers banging. Sabers slashing.

  Somehow, the dead combatants managed to keep up with the flying boat, which was cruising along at about two hundred miles per hour. They were easy for Johnny and Mel to see because—like all ghosts—they glowed green in the dark. Of course, the captain and the co-pilot couldn’t see a thing.

  Before long, only the colonel and one of the Steppe Warriors were pounding along in front of the aeroboat. The rest of the battling specters seemed to have fallen behind.

  The two remaining ghost soldiers slashed and cut at each other. Again and again. Thrusting, chopping, parrying. It scared Johnny, thinking what could happen to the colonel.

  Finally, with a spot of luck, the colonel won the advantage, hacking his saber deeply into the Steppe Warrior’s neck. In a flash, the colonel’s opponent tumbled off his mount and vanished from view.

  Johnny blinked, and the colonel disappeared, as well. Johnny was amazed that so much could happen in just a matter of minutes. The sky had been raging with battling ghosts, but now it was calm and empty in the moonlight. A beautiful night to be airborne.

  Johnny glanced at Mel—still, alas, solidly mustachioed—and said, “I don’t see them anymore, do you?”

  Mel shook her head. “They’re all gone.”

  “Gone?” the captain asked in her loud voice. “The ghosts are all gone?”

  “Well, for now,” Mel said, scanning the sky. “They went at it pretty hard at first, then fell away. I bet by now they’ve gotten scattered all over the place.”

  “You think we’re safe then?” the radioman bellowed from his panel of controls.

  Mel shook her head. “Not by a long shot.”

  “Who was winning?” the captain asked.

  “Since we haven’t crashed,” Johnny said, “I’d wager that the colonel and his troopers put up a pretty good fight.”

  That’s when engine number one on the starboard wing let out a resonant BOOM, like a giant firecracker under a garbage can.

  “Blast it!” Captain Merrick swore. She leapt up out of her seat, glaring at the flame and smoke billowing from behind the slowing propeller.

  “Starboard one,” Danny Kailolu shouted, glancing out of his side window. “Shut her down!”

  The captain pulled back one of the throttles with a loud snap, and rapidly flipped a series of switches on the broad control panel.

  Just then a woman’s blood-curdling scream came from back in the passenger cabin.

  Johnny rushed to the flight deck door, threw it open, looked down, and gasped.

  “Mel-a-neeeee…” he yelled. “You’d better come here!”

  Chapter 9

  From the flight deck steps Johnny and Mel watched an astonishing and frightful scene play out in the passenger cabin.

  Facing away from them was a Steppe Warrior with braided black hair down his back. He moved purposefully among the center rows of seats. He held his horse’s reins in his left hand and the animal followed along docilely. The wraith was hunting for someone among the agitated passengers—through whom he passed invisibly, with no one realizing it.

  In his right hand he gripped a curved sword, tipped backward, resting on his shoulder. The blade dribbled black oil on the head of a sleeping passenger. Maybe that sword is what damaged the third engine, thought Johnny.

  In the aisle off to Johnny and Mel’s right, a steward was trying to revive an unconscious young woman. Johnny figured that she must have been the source of that awful screech—no doubt she could see ghosts. And he didn’t blame her one little bit for fainting.

  Johnny whispered beseechingly in Mel’s ear. “Get back up on the flight deck, Sis. I’ll try to get rid of him.”

  Mel sharply shook her head just one time and stepped down into the passenger cabin.

  Before Johnny could say anything more, Mel hollered, “I think you’re looking for me!”

  The eyes of every passenger rotated from the woman who had been screaming—now unconscious—to Mel. Johnny knew just what they all must have been thinking: Apparently there was a second lunatic escaped from the asylum. Another young female, but with a mustache.

  A few passengers answered her declaration, assuring her that they weren’t looking for her. A slim, ruddy-faced steward began to approach Mel. But Danny Kailolu had just come down from the cockpit and ordered the man to leave her alone.

  The Steppe Warrior slowly turned and regarded Mel with empty, bleeding eye sockets. Johnny had never seen a ghost so terrible to look at. And Johnny had seen many ghosts.

  “Sir, we need to talk,” Mel said, quaking in her moccasins. “Who sent you? Why are you killing my friends? If you have a problem, I’m certain we can come to some reasonable arrangement.”

  Johnny wished Mel had not done what she just did, but he was prepared to get between her and the ghost, if he had to. He wondered, over the course of a few heartbeats, what kind of weapon a Zoom 4x5 camera would make.

  The wraith dropped the horse’s reins and walked slowly forward toward Mel, through center seats and passengers, halting fifteen feet short of her. Peering out through his stomach was the face of an elderly female passenger, unaware that she and the medieval assassin simultaneously occupied the same space.

  The Steppe Warrior held his gaze—such as it was—on Mel. Then he tilted his head in amusement. A ghastly smile turned up the corners of his lipless mouth. He chortled deeply, menacingly.

  “Do all the women in your family grow such splendid mustaches?” he hissed.

  Johnny shuddered and stole
a glance at his sister. She looked quite baffled. An idea popped into his head straight out of nowhere. Mel’s life might depend on what he was about to do. Hoping no one would notice him, he slowly sidled off to the left aisle.

  “What?” said Mel. “Mustaches?” She put a finger to her upper lip and gave a little gasp.

  The Steppe Warrior’s dreadful smile vanished. He moved toward Mel, raising his saber for the killing stroke.

  Johnny swiftly brought his camera up and jammed down the shutter release. The flashbulb went off, creating a dazzling burst of light. Almost all the passengers blinked wildly, some rubbing or covering their eyes. And just as Johnny had hoped, the explosion of light distracted the Steppe Warrior for several very precious seconds.

  Snarling with anger, the ghoulish specter pivoted to his right and lunged at Johnny with his oil-blackened sword. Johnny leapt backward, stumbling and falling into the lap of a startled tourist.

  No one but the Graphics and the Steppe Warrior witnessed what happened next.

  With a furious shout of “CHARGE!” Horace MacFarlane and Buck came blasting through the back of the cabin. The colonel slashed powerfully at the flank of the little Steppe horse with his saber. The terrified animal screamed piteously and dove straight through the cabin floor.

  The eyeless Steppe Warrior turned, roared, and launched himself straight at the colonel, blade aloft.

  But the colonel had too much momentum and speed. As the Steppe Warrior’s blade came up in a vicious backhand, the colonel’s came down with full force, parried it, and sliced his opponent’s upper arm.

  Before the colonel could come around again, the Steppe Warrior shrieked in pain, then dropped like a rock through the cabin deck. Just as his Steppe pony had.

  For a moment, Johnny—struggling to his feet, apologizing to the poor tourist who had caught him—thought the colonel was going to pursue the Steppe Warrior. But the old horse soldier halted in mid-passenger cabin, leapt off Buck, and rushed to Mel.

  “Are you all right, Commander?” the ghost officer asked with a tone of extreme concern. “Are you hurt?”

  Johnny arrived a second later and asked a similar question.

  Then it was Danny Kailolu’s turn. “Miss Graphic, what just happened?”

  Wide-eyed and dazed, Mel looked from the colonel to Johnny to the co-pilot. She gestured at the empty air over the first rows of seats, where dozens of shaken passengers were chattering away. “He didn’t want to talk,” she said with a look of shock. “He was going to kill me. He was actually going to kill me.”

  Somehow, Johnny managed to quickly flip his camera’s film holder and snap in another flashbulb. With a flare of light and another pooosh he took a picture of Mel’s startled face.

  “Who was going to kill you?” Danny asked, almost as wide-eyed as Mel. “One of the ghosts?”

  “I think that I need to sit down,” Mel said, going frighteningly pale.

  The co-pilot managed to catch her just as she blacked out.

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday, October 8, 1935

  Zenith

  The Zephyr Lines Night Goose came in over Zenith Bay just after dawn, battered and cruising slowly, having lost three engines. She splashed down in the South Bay and was met by a flotilla of tugs, police launches, and boats with news reporters and curiosity seekers. Johnny watched the whole business from one of the starboard windows and took several pictures.

  A little over an hour later, he and Mel found themselves in a windowless meeting room in the bowels of the National Office Building. The man who had taken them off the aeroboat—Managing Agent Wilton Crider of the National Police Bureau—trod through the door. Behind him came a tall, meaty man in a black suit. Except for a little white pencil mustache, he didn’t have a hair on his head, not even eyebrows. The man’s left hand twitched constantly.

  “This is Assistant Director Santangelo of the Ministry of Etheristics,” said the pugnacious, red-haired Crider. He plopped down across the table from Mel. “Miss Graphic, I need you and your brother to tell me—”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong!” Johnny snapped.

  “No one said you did,” replied Crider.

  Johnny didn’t care for this situation one bit. It was terrifically unfair. He was a member of the press and they couldn’t haul him off like this unless they were going to arrest him. They couldn’t keep Mel and him from talking with their Uncle Louie and Johnny’s colleagues from the Clarion. But they had.

  “Then why’re you keeping us here?” Johnny grumbled.

  “You and your sister are material witnesses in a criminal investigation,” said Crider. “Let’s just begin at the beginning, Miss Graphic. Tell me about the Hausenhofer Gesellschaft.”

  Mel nodded tiredly. “Before he died in the Great War, Oskar Hausenhofer posed a question: Just how, scientifically speaking, can wraiths touch and affect the physical world? Some kind of physics is operating here and there has to be a rational answer. Our small group looks for that explanation.”

  “And what have you actually discovered?” sneered Santangelo. “Scientifically speaking.” His left hand continued to twitch incessantly.

  Johnny, as a rule, liked most of the people he met—alive or dead. He thought of himself as a friendly sort of person. But this Santangelo character somehow gave him the creeps. And not just because he was showing Mel that snotty attitude. This guy wasn’t to be trusted.

  “Have we uncovered the basic secrets of the ether?” asked Mel, scowling at the bald man. “No. But thanks to the work of my parents, we’ve harnessed the intrinsic glow of ghosts to allow them to prospect for metals far underground and to diagnose illness inside living human bodies. I was flying to La Concha to work on an etheric photo film that might let us photograph wraiths.”

  “But you still don’t know the basic science,” the bald man said. “You still can’t tell us why an oral contract between etherist and ghost allows the ghost to operate in this dimension.”

  “That may be true,” Mel allowed. “But I fail to see how that has any bearing on this series of terrible murders. Or on the attempted mass murder of the innocent people on the Night Goose.”

  “There’ve been two more Gesellschaft killings overnight, Miss Graphic,” Crider said grimly.

  Mel almost came up out of her chair. “No! Who?”

  Crider took a telegram out of his pocket and unfolded it. “John Addison in Neuport. Machine-gunned to death by a gangster ghost. And Hans Wallin in the Duchy of Steinberg. You would have been the ninth.”

  Mel’s chin began to quiver and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Johnny reached over and patted her arm. She sure has had a bad night, he thought. But there would be no “I told you so” from his direction.

  Crider let Mel collect herself, then continued. “Is there anything that members of your group could have done or written about that could be perceived as a threat by others? I’m trying to get at the possibility of a motive for these crimes.”

  Still sniffling a bit, Mel said, “I’ve read every article ever published in The Annals of the Hausenhofer Gesellschaft, and I can’t imagine anything our members have said that could provoke others.”

  Johnny looked across the table at Crider and Santangelo, and felt pretty proud of Mel. She was holding her own against these two tough guys. But then, he always knew she had guts. He’d seen plenty of that in the days after Mom and Pop were lost.

  “Here’s an idea,” Mel said, sitting up straighter in her chair. “Why would a ghost be willing to do such bloody work? What reward would motivate him? Of course, the ghost of a psychopath or some other monster might enjoy killing again. But most of these murders are being done by dead soldiers—men of discipline. What would motivate them? I’m wondering if we have to consider the Two Impossible Things.”

  Crider looked puzzled. “The Two Impossible Things?”

  “They’re practically an obsession for ghosts,” Mel explained in a rush. “Approximately ninety-seven percent of
living humans who die move on to heaven or the great unknown or whatever you want to call it. Their spirits, souls, essences are gone, vanished from this world and the ether. No one knows where they go or how. But the remaining three percent end up as ghosts.”

  “And the Impossible Things?” asked Crider.

  “The First Impossible Thing is to become alive again. The Second Impossible Thing is to pass over to the great unknown. No human or animal ghost has ever returned to life, nor passed from the ether into the unknown realm. So far as we know.”

  Johnny regarded his sister with admiration. Did that girl have a big brain, or what? It made perfect sense. What else would a ghost really want, but to get out of the ether?

  “You’re suggesting that someone has figured out how to achieve one of the Impossible Things?” said Crider. “And he’s using that to reward these wraiths?”

  Mel thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded. “I suppose I am.”

  Chapter 11

  The very moment Johnny sauntered into the sprawling Zenith Clarion newsroom, his fedora tipped at a rakish angle, people started shouting from all over.

  “Johnny-boy, glad you’re okay!”

  “Way to go, kiddo!”

  “We got the exclusive, right?”

  Reporters, editors, copyeditors, copy girls and boys, secretaries, and sub-editors mobbed Johnny as if he were a baseball hero or a movie star. His back was slapped too many times to count. I could get used to this, he thought. All that’s missing is the brass band.

  No one paid much attention to Uncle Louie, Nina, and Mel, who trailed in after Johnny. Uncle Louie and Nina had extracted the two siblings from a scrum of reporters and photographers on the front steps of the National Building. Then they drove directly over to the Clarion skyscraper on First Avenue.

  From the far end of the newsroom came a hoarse, powerful bellow. “Back to work, people.”

  Johnny’s eyes swiveled around.

  Standing in front of his glassed-in office was Carlton Cargill, the Zenith Clarion’s editor-in-chief. An unlit cigar rolled from one side of his mouth to the other, and back again. His face looked flushed and angry. But Johnny remembered that the chief’s face always looked flushed and angry. Maybe it was because he always wore suits that fit his fireplug figure a little too tightly.