“You’ll catch your death all over again,” Wells heard, as Jane came up behind him, squashing a hat onto his head and wrapping a woolen scarf around his neck. It was all oddly like a harvest bonfire, though the festive note was entirely replaced by one of alarm.
And then, like a worm wriggling up out of the earth, Wells saw something emerge from the shattered remnants of the rear gun turret. An arm was flung out, and then another, followed by a head scorched as black as ink, except for the whites of the eyes, wide with fear.
The bugle boy cried, “Look there!”
“One of ’em’s still alive!” Mrs. Willoughby shouted.
The gunner slithered on his belly away from the wreck, smoke and even a touch of fire still smoldering from his leather pants. His fingers were digging in the sod to pull himself along, a few inches at a time. His legs looked broken. Goggles hung down from his neck.
How on earth could he have survived the fire, and the crash? Wells wondered.
Slattery stepped over his own line, and strode to where the man was now panting on a tiny patch of grass and weed. Wells assumed—though why?—that he was about to pull him farther away from the flames.
“Bitte,” the gunner said, too injured even to lift his head. “Bitte.”
But Slattery didn’t say anything. He simply straddled him, one foot on either side, raised his pitchfork with both hands, then plunged it into the gunner’s shoulders, pinning him to the ground like a butterfly to a mat. Still leaning down hard on the handle, and putting his full weight on it, he muttered, “Baby-killer.”
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, the downed zeppelin was not only the talk of the town, but of the whole country. The late edition of the London papers made space for it on their front pages. At the tobacconist’s shop, Wells picked up a sheaf of the newspapers, along with his usual haul of whatever magazines, pamphlets, and tabloids caught his eye. One on the rack was new—the Freewoman, which billed itself as a monthly journal aimed at the free-thinking (read “suffragette”) women of England. He added a copy of that to his pile on the counter—he always liked to keep up with current opinion of every stripe—and as Mr. Spool toted them all up, Wells asked, “Has your business been up today, what with all the national attention?”
“Oh, yes,” Spool said, making change from the fiver Wells had handed him. “Lots of folks stopping for directions to the site.”
“That doesn’t do you much good,” Wells said. “Directions.” His own parents had owned a small and unsuccessful shop, and he remained sensitive to the plight of shopkeepers.
“Oh, I manage to sell them a packet of Woodbines or a good cigar before they go.” With a stringy finger stained yellow from nicotine, Spool pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Not that they get to see much. The army’s pretty well got the whole field roped off.”
Wells had seen some signs of it before coming into town; two or three military cars and a pair of lorries, with a half dozen soldiers in each, had bucketed past him as he’d walked along the road.
By the time he was heading back home, it was dark out, but on the far field he could see that lights had been set up and he could hear some commotion. Jane would worry that he was late for dinner, but he couldn’t resist, and detoured toward the meadow. He was still a few hundred yards off when a sentry stepped into his path.
“Sorry, sir, but this is as far as you can go.”
“Saw it all last night.”
“Must have been quite a show.”
Was that what it had been? Hard to think of it that way at all, especially as the one moment that had come back to him all night—and all that day as he’d attempted to work on his new manuscript—had been the livery driver finishing off the German gunner.
“Were there any survivors?” Wells asked.
“From the zepp? Not very likely. Why?”
“I thought I might have seen someone fall, or jump, before the crash.”
This appeared to give the soldier pause. The question was above his pay grade. “Can you wait here? I’ll have to get my CO.” He started to turn away, then said, “Oh, and may I ask your name, sir?”
“Wells. H. G.”
The soldier nodded quickly, starting to turn again, when the name struck him. “The author?”
“I like to think so.”
The soldier loped off toward the wreckage in the distance, but not without one backward glance at the famous writer. Wells was used to it, but still enjoyed the recognition. God knows he’d spent enough time at his desk to have earned it.
When a Lieutenant Talbot arrived, looking just as young and callow as the sentry, he began by burbling about Wells’s books and how much he had enjoyed them as a boy, before getting to the matter at hand. “We’ve found the remains of perhaps a dozen men inside and around the wreckage,” he said, “but the fire was so intense it’s hard to know for sure if we’ve found them all. You say you think you saw someone escape before the crash?”
“Off behind that copse of trees, to the south, there.”
The lieutenant looked that way and said, yes, they’d searched there. “And at least a quarter mile in every direction,” he added.
“Were any parachutes found?”
“None. And judging from the trajectory and speed of the descent, there wouldn’t have been time to deploy one properly.”
Maybe he’d been mistaken, Wells thought. Either way, it was out of his hands now. “Would it be possible,” he said, “for me to get a look at what’s left of the zeppelin before you haul it all away?”
The lieutenant wrestled with it. “Orders are very strict about that; no civilians are to be—”
“For my writing,” Wells said, playing his ace. “The Evening Standard has requested anything I can give them.” Not strictly true in this instance, but if it helped . . .
The lieutenant folded like a house of cards; how could he refuse such a request from the most famous writer in the world? Nodding at the sentry, as if to warn him to keep mum about this breach, he escorted Wells the few hundred yards between where they’d been conferring and the sodden pile of bent metal and scorched fabric, all thoroughly drenched by the fire brigade, and now bathed in the harsh glare of arc lights powered by two rumbling field generators. While soldiers kept up a wide perimeter around the site, a few experts were still picking over the remains, looking for all the world like men exploring the innards of a beached and eviscerated whale. The rounded struts rose up like broken ribs above their heads; the propellers resembled wounded tail fins. The twin Daimler engines, the beating heart of the beast, had already been removed and were lashed to platforms tied to the back of the lorries.
A dozen canvas body bags were discreetly being loaded into a pair of hearses.
Wells was standing on the very spot where the gunner had been dispatched with the pitchfork. He could still see the divots torn in the soil by its prongs, and perhaps the lieutenant had noticed them, too.
“We found a crewman here,” he said, “who’d managed to crawl away. He’d made it this far, but he was pretty well burnt and had a number of wounds, and no one has been able to tell us if he was able to say anything.”