Johnny Graphic and the Etheric Bomb (17 page)

Of course, Johnny thought. That explained why he felt so breathless. It wasn’t just being scared. The air was actually thinner up here, making it harder to breathe.

Then, quite unexpectedly—

WHAMMMM!

Another wave of tumult slammed into the Eagle, tipping the back of the aircraft down, its nose up. Johnny felt as if he were riding a bucking bronco.

As suddenly as it arrived, what proved to be the last shockwave passed by, leaving them in calmer air.

But Johnny could sense the Eagle wobbling and he didn’t like it. His next thought was interrupted practically before it began.

“Hold on, kiddo!” Uncle Louie screamed to Sparks over the headphones. “We’re stalling!

Johnny had heard enough about flying from his uncle and Nina to know that your aircraft stalls because you lose lift. And you lose lift because of low airspeed or bad angle of attack—the angle of the wings hitting the air.

“Push the yoke forward, Nina,” Uncle Louie commanded. “Hard as you can. Gotta dive fierce and fast to get our airspeed back.”

“
Yessir, Louie
,” Nina yelled back.

Johnny worried that eighteen thousand feet wouldn’t give them enough altitude to get their flying boat horizontal—without tearing it apart. But he knew that this wasn’t the moment to ask Uncle Louie for reassurances.

As they plummeted downward, Nina called out the altitude, one reading after another.

“Thirteen thousand feet.”

There was a pause for a number of seconds.

“Eleven thousand. Airspeed up to one-fifty.”

Nina was breathing so hard, Johnny could hear her inhalations and exhalations over the noisy headphones. Come to think of it, he was breathing hard, too.

“Nine thousand five hundred, Louie,” Nina said. “Airspeed one seven five.”

Gravity squeezed Johnny back into his seat. It was hard even to move.

“Now start pulling your yoke back, kiddo,” Uncle Louie yelled to Nina.

“We’re at seventy-five hundred feet,” she shouted back.

“Get up, nose!” the big man urged the aeroboat. “
Get the heck up!”

Johnny could hear the airframe groaning in protest. And all of a sudden, he realized that he was quaking almost uncontrollably, his clothes drenched with sweat. Not for the first time, a vexing thought popped into his head:
If I die, will I become a ghost? If I do become a ghost, what will it be like?

“Five thousand feet,” was Nina’s next jittery announcement.

“I need your nose higher, Eagle,” Uncle Louie shouted. “Come on now!”

Suddenly, Nina screamed, “
I see some horizon!”

Johnny could sense the big flying boat leveling off from its dive, becoming more horizontal than vertical.

“Fifteen hundred feet, Louie,” exclaimed Nina. “We’re pulling out!”

Some long seconds later she reported again. “Five hundred feet. I can see the foam on the wave tops.”

There was a brief pause.
“Sixty feet!”

“We’ve got her!” Uncle Louie yelled as the Eagle went perfectly horizontal. “We’ve got her! Practically right on top of the waves!”

“We made it, Louie!” Nina screamed.

It hardly seemed possible. Johnny’s uncle and his best friend had saved all their lives.

“I’m taking her back up,” Uncle Louie said, sounding fantastically relieved. “Great job, Sparks. You’re a natural-born flyer.”

“Apart from the threat of a gruesome, instantaneous death,” Nina proclaimed with a nervous sort of vibration in her voice, “this was the most amazing thing I have ever done.”

“Maybe so,” Uncle Louie responded, his own voice quaking, too. “But let’s not do it again anytime soon, okay?”

Chapter 33

Colonel MacFarlane, Corporal Schecter, and Private Underwood flew straight toward the great, roiling mushroom cloud—galloping flat-out. It loomed taller and taller, darker and darker with every approaching mile.

Just as he was a practical and down-to-earth ghost, the colonel had been a practical and down-to-earth military man. He had never come up against anything he couldn’t explain rationally, scientifically. That is, until one day over seven decades ago. The day he found himself standing over his own dead body on the battlefield at Digsby’s Run that summer of 1862.

Those bucolic fields and woods—deep in the heart of the Old Dominion—had run red with rivers of blood. The air had been filled with the screams and moans of the dying and the wounded.

The colonel suddenly could see dozens of semi-transparent soldiers all over the battleground, stunned by their transformation into ghosts. Free-Staters and Dominionists both. Blue and butternut. Joined in the fraternity of death.

A number of horses became ghosts, as well. Most of them, not unreasonably, bolted away in pure terror. But one of them, a chestnut bay, came up to the colonel, as if looking for some kind of reassurance. Not knowing his name, the colonel gave him a new one. Buck. They had been together ever since.

Just as he had during his life, Horace MacFarlane still held to the notion that ghosts and the ether were nothing supernatural. Rather, they were phenomena that science would one day explain. He had never been one to believe in paradise or heaven or whatnot after death. Not a religious bone in his body. Scientists such as Melanie Graphic would, he believed, some day come up with the answers.

But now, soaring over the tempestuous ocean, toward that vast mushroom cloud, the colonel had little thought of delving into those deep waters of philosophy and science. No more than he planned to delve into the deep waters that churned below him.

The mission would only be for reconnaissance: What kind of damage had been done by the explosion? What could they find out about this remarkable occurrence?

The three ghost troopers could feel the mushroom cloud’s furious winds, pulling them, shoving them. As this gigantic monstrosity roiled and churned, it ignited tremendous flashes of green lightning, with thunder that nearly deafened the colonel.

The buffeting gales made jockeying the horses terrifically hard. The three ghost soldiers jigged and jagged, up and down and sideways. It was almost a miracle that they could stay together.

Then they began to feel the nicks and impacts of minute debris and pulverized minerals on their skin. As if they were out in a sandstorm.

Horace MacFarlane gripped his reins tightly, wrapping them around both hands. He urged Buck forward through the whirlwind.

“
Je-hos-o-phat!”
hollered Schecter, staring goggle-eyed off to his right. He pointed urgently, jabbing with his right index finger. “Take a gander at that thing!”

The other two ghosts swiveled their heads and gaped in horror.

It wasn’t actually a gargantuan gray-green hand swinging up from the east-northeast. But it looked eerily like one, slowly clenching itself into a fist the size of a small mountain.

Boiling and churning like Hades itself—if you believed in such places.

Coming right at them.

A lot faster than any ghost horse could fly.

“Out of here now!” the colonel shouted, bringing Buck to a juddering halt. The chestnut bay pivoted and galloped headlong in the opposite direction. Over his shoulder, Horace MacFarlane could see Schecter and Underwood banging along behind him, hell-bent for leather.

Suddenly, the dark green gale slammed into the colonel and Buck, knocking them derriere over teakettle. They tumbled down through the tempest, pushed by the giant hand, spinning and rolling so violently that the colonel couldn’t tell up from down.

The only thing that kept him and the horse from being smashed apart and losing one another was having the reins wrapped around his hand. Dismounted but tethered to Buck, the colonel kept bashing into horse and saddle. Even worse, when they flew apart, his arm felt as if it were going to get torn out of its socket.

But that was nothing compared to hitting the churning ocean.

It was a terrific electric jolt. His whole etheric body burned with pain. As ghost and horse slowly sank into the inky depths, the colonel screamed in agony. His muscles, his bones, his sinews, all on fire.

He thought it a pure misery that he hadn’t the ability to lose consciousness.

When the pain finally ebbed away, all he could see in the blackness was the faint green luminescence of his body and Buck’s—the gentle glow that every ghost gives off in the dark. They were resting on the ocean floor, on fine gray gravel. Several times, bizarre fishes with extravagant fins and needle-sharp teeth swam right through them.

“It’ll be fine, Buck,” the colonel said, patting his horse on the neck and flank. “It’ll be just fine. We’ll swim on out of here and get back to the commander. After we find Schecter and Underwood.”

Just at that moment, the first miniscule voice popped into his head: “Help me.”

Then another, different voice: “Where am I?”

And another: “It hurts, oh it hurts.”

And another: “Awful, awful, awful—”

Then dozens, hundreds, thousands of voices.

As if they were coming down on him like raindrops.

Voices in his head?

Had he gone insane?

Huddling beside Buck, he put his hands up to his ears, trying to block out the agony in all those voices. But he couldn’t make them stop.

To a horse it would have merely sounded like a lot of human jibber-jabbering. But Buck gently nudged the colonel’s shoulder—as if he sensed that something was very,
very
wrong.

Chapter 34

Wednesday, October 30, 1935

Landfall Island

Johnny didn’t sleep very well on the aeroboat that night, as it rocked in gentle seas, adrift. But then, no one did.

The Como Eagle had ended up dead in the water. The explosion’s shockwaves had blown them far off course, and they had to fly many extra miles to get back on their flight path. For all intents and purposes, they were out of fuel. And without fuel, the engines couldn’t run. And without the engines running, the air conditioning system would not work. And without the air conditioning, the temperature inside the aeroboat climbed up above one hundred stifling degrees.

Johnny, though, didn’t lose sleep because of the heat and humidity. All through the night, stretched out in his narrow bunk, he kept opening his eyes—again and again and again. Hoping
this time
to see the dim lightbulb that he knew was burning in the sleeper compartment. But all his damaged eyes could sense was inky, stubborn blackness. No matter how much he blinked, no matter how much he rubbed them. He felt more and more afraid as the hours crept by.

Their destination, Landfall Island, was only a few dozen miles away. As soon as they had splashed down on the water, Nina had called on the radio and arranged for a sea-going tug to come and tow the flying boat into port.

An hour or so after breakfast, Johnny—sitting in his customary window seat—could hear Uncle Louie walking around on the top of the aircraft. His uncle was waiting to shoot off a flare as soon as the tugboat came into view. Mel whacked away on her typewriter in the back of the cabin. And Nina still seemed a little giddy over how she and Uncle Louie had saved the day. Not that Johnny blamed her. It had been a brilliant act of heroism.

The best news of the young day was that Danny had gone to sleep seeing only vague, fuzzy forms, but when he woke up, his vision was almost back to normal. Everyone congratulated him—Johnny, most heartily, because he knew just what Danny had been through. All the while, Johnny kept worrying that he might be one of those occasional victims of flash blindness who never got his sight back.

He couldn’t do anything but sit in his window seat in the sweltering heat. Couldn’t do anything to help Mel, who was typing her story. Couldn’t even dig into his
Captain Justice Adventures
magazine. Nina offered to read it to him, but he had sulkily told her
no thanks
.

Johnny’s whole life seemed as if it had ended practically before it began. He felt as low as he ever had since his mom and pop disappeared.

He tried not to think too much about his parents. But now that there was a tiny scrap of hope that they might be out there somewhere, still alive, they had been showing up in every dream, in every daydream.

It had been his pop who had ignited his passion for photography. Johnny could still almost see his old man, grinning broadly, handing him the gift-wrapped package on his sixth birthday.

Will Graphic had been a short, slender fellow with a thick head of sandy hair, smiling blue eyes, and a kindly, freckled face. His voice was a smooth, rich baritone. No one ever had a better father. And everyone adored Will Graphic. No wonder his ghosts would do anything for him. Even trek deep into the earth to hunt for iron and copper that could be mined.

Remembering that morning of six-and-a-half years ago as if it were yesterday, Johnny could almost hear his pop saying something like, “Here you go, sport. I bet you’ll have a barrel of fun with this item.”

As any typical six-year-old would, Johnny had ripped off the gift wrapping in a rush. The box inside was yellow and black and the glorious printing on it said: YOU PUSH THE SHUTTER! THEN LEAVE IT TO US! POLDARK SNAP-RITE CAMERA™. A picture on the package showed a black box camera with a single button on the top, a knob on the side, two glass lenses, and a glass viewer that the photographer looked down through.

The Snap-Rite was a simple, cheap camera that took fuzzy pictures, but still Johnny had filled up photo album after photo album.

Then Mom and Pop had left for Okkatek Island. They were to be away for only a month.

Soon after Johnny’s parents had disappeared, Louie Hofstedter and Nina Bain came to live in the big brick house. Johnny and his uncle finished the darkroom that Pop had started. Uncle Louie bought his nephew a good folding rollfilm camera. And the dream of becoming a news photog had taken hold.

But now, slouched in his aeroboat seat, in the oppressive heat, Johnny wondered if that dream had died. He knew there were lots of twelve-and-a-half-year-olds all over the world who had it worse than he did. Hadn’t enough to eat. Hadn’t the chance to go to school. Hadn’t anyone to take care of them. Hadn’t good health.