“Is it—?” asked the old woman whose name Mercy still didn’t know. “Are we—?”
“No!” barked the captain. “Wait! A little—”
Mercy thought he might’ve been about to say farther, because something snapped, and the craft dropped about fifteen feet to land on the ground like a stone.
Though it jarred, and made Mercy bite her tongue and somehow twist her elbow funny, the finality of the settled craft was a relief—if only for a minute. The ship’s angle was all wrong, having landed on its belly without a tethering distance. From this position, they lacked the standard means of opening the ship to let them all go free. A moment of claustrophobic horror nearly brought tears to Mercy’s eyes.
Then she heard the voices outside, calling and knocking; and the voices rode with accents that came from close to home.
Someone was beating against the hull, and asking, “Is everybody all right in there? Hey, can anybody hear me?”
The c
aptain shouted back, “Yes! I can hear you! And I think everyone is . . . ” He unstrapped himself from his seat—the only seats with straps were in the cockpit—and looked around the cabin. “I think everyone is all right. ”
“This a civvy ship?” asked another voice.
“Says so right on the bottom. Didn’t you see it coming down?”
“No, I didn’t. And I can’t read, nohow. ”
Their banal chatter cheered Mercy greatly, purely because it sounded normal—like normal conversation that normal people might have following an accident. It took her a few seconds to realize that she could hear gunfire in the not-?very-?distant distance.
She disentangled herself from Ernie, who was panting as if he’d run all the way from the clouds to the ground. She nudged him aside and half stepped, half toppled out of her seat, bringing her bags with her. The crewman came behind, joining the rest of the passengers who were trying to stand in the canted aisle.
“There’s an access port, on top!” the captain said to his windshield.
That’s when Mercy saw the man they were speaking to outside, holding a lantern and squinting to see inside. He was blond under his smushed gray hat, and his face was covered either in shadows or gunpowder. He tapped one finger against the windshield and said, “Tell me where it is. ”
The captain gestured, since he knew he was being watched. “We can open it from inside, but we’ve got a couple of women on board, and some older folks. We’re going to need some help getting everyone down to the ground. ”
“I don’t need any help,” Mercy assured him, but he wasn’t listening, and no one else was, either.
Robert was already on his way up the ladder that he and Ernie had both scaled earlier, though he dangled from it strangely, so tilted was the ship’s interior. He wrapped his legs around the rungs and used one hand to crank the latch, then shoved the portal out. It flopped and clanged, and was still. Robert kept his legs cinched around the ladder and braced himself that way, so he could work his arms free.
He reached down to the passengers and said, “Let’s go. Let’s send some people up and over. You. English fella. You first. ”
“Why me first?”
“Because you ain’t hurt, and you can help catch the rest. And Ernie’s got his hand all tore up. ”
“Fine,” Gordon Rand relented, and began the tricky work of climbing a ladder that leaned out over his head. But he was game for it, and more nimble than the tailored foreign clothes let on. Soon he was out through the portal and standing atop the Zephyr, then sliding down its side, down to the ground.
Mercy heard him land with a plop and a curse, but he followed through by saying to someone, “That wasn’t so bad. ”
That someone asked, “How many are there inside?”
“The captain, the copilot, and half a dozen passengers and crew. Not too many. ”
“All right. Let’s get them down, and out. ”
Someone else added, “And out of here. Bugle and tap says the line’s shifting. Everybody’s got to move—we might even be in for a retreat to Fort Chattanooga. ”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’m serious enough. That’s what the corporal told me, anyway. ”
“When?”