Chapter 13
Duel of the old gods
Rebecca Cunningham arrived at Higher for Hire the next morning frowning at the large stack of delivery crates left untouched on the docks. The day was the seventh since anyone had seen Kit, and not one delivery had been made since.
She was met at the door by a courier, who approached her with a clipboard and an envelope. "Higher for Hire?" he asked.
"That's us," replied Rebecca.
He handed her the envelope and gestured for her to sign on the clipboard. "Telegram for you, ma'am."
She thanked him and put the envelope in her coat pocket as she fished for her keys to unlock the door.
Inside the office, she found Baloo slouched back and snoring in his favorite chair. She let him be and went to put on a pot of coffee in the kitchen, leaving her coat on the counter. Afterward, she found the telephone directory and began to look up companies that rented cargo planes, thinking she would have Wildcat start on the deliveries. She had not the heart to force Baloo away from searching for Kit.
Her mind wandered as she sifted through the telephone numbers, and soon was doing nothing at her desk but staring at the front door. She half expect Kit to walk inside any minute, to see a weary grin telling a danger-riddled tale of where he had been and how he cunningly found his way home at last. That was a wish she had been holding fast to for several days now.
The truth was, however, that at seven days, hope was wearing thin, though no one dared yet to speak of the worst. Molly moped instead of played. The carefree smile usually plastered on Wildcat's countenance was absent. Her heart ached for Baloo. If it had been her daughter missing, she would have been a nervous wreck.
She made her telephone calls quietly to afford Baloo a little more rest. Then she remembered the telegram, and went to the kitchen to retrieve it.
'Alpacito City,' she thought, looking at the return address first. 'Who do I know there?'
She sipped from her coffee mug and began reading the note. Her eyes suddenly widened and her coffee spilled over.
"Baloo!" she hollered, bursting back into the office. "Baloo! They found Kit!"
Baloo snorted and jolted awake. "What?"
"Kit's okay! They found him!"
Baloo was off his chair in a flash. "Who? Where?"
"Tyler Borden, of all people!" said Rebecca. "They found him in..." Rebecca paused, quite suddenly, befallen by a confused frown as she finished reading the entire message, which contained phrases such as: 'Lied. Betrayed. Gone piraterottentothecore.'
By the last words, letters squished together, it was evident the sending party wished to pile in more descriptive phrases about the boy than the message would fit.
She handed Baloo the telegram, which he read quickly. "I don't know what he means by this."
Baloo tucked the telegram into his shirt pocket. "Only one way to find out, right?"
He pushed his hat snugly over his head and wasted no time getting out the door. Rebecca went after him. "Wait! I'm coming with you!"
Just as dawn peered over the Atronador Heights, the Iron Vulture had crossed over the shoreline of Alpacatan, well south of the big city, flying low behind the mountain ridges in an attempt to avoid being spotted by the scattered towns and villages.
On the bridge, Don Karnage kept an eye on Mount Seren with a telescope, though it was difficult to keep a careful watch as they were at a great distance. A veil of smoke was still rising forth, and he sent Mad Dog to do a fly over to see if there was any sign of the dragon. Kit was beside him, watching the smoke with his nose to the glass.
Static cracked over the radio, and Mad Dog's voice was coming through in pieces.
"Hey," said Jock, "He's callin' us!" He ran to the table and turned up the radio.
"Ask him what he sees," said Karnage.
"Capt'n wants ta know what ya see," relayed Jock on the microphone.
Mad Dog made a reply, though only broken words came though; the rest was drowned in static: "All ― -in ― -ground!"
"At least it sounded like he was talkin'; instead of screamin' for his life," said Kit. "That might be a good sign, huh?"
Karnage shook his head, and resumed looking through his telescope. "If he saw wretched reptile, I would at least know where it was at, and I could tear it into a pair of very big shoes!"
When Mad Dog returned, Kit and Karnage went to the hangar to hear what he had to say. While waiting for him to land, though, Kit's attention was snagged by a weapon rack full of muskets and grappling hook guns...
The whole ship was abuzz with excited chatter about the heist ahead, not only about the gold, but more so about what they might encounter. Word of a deadly dragon guarding the all the treasure spread overnight, and though they could only picture what that meant in their mines, they greeted the problem with rowdy shouts and cracked knuckles galore... they were hoping for a fight.
"Well?" Karnage asked Mad Dog, as he stepped out of his plane.
"It's a big hole in the ground," shrugged Mad Dog.
Karnage glared at him angrily, prompting him to be a bit more articulate if he wanted all of his body parts left as they were.
"No, r-really," stammered Mad Dog, backing away from the captain. "That's all it was! There was nothin' in there, just some smoke and hot lava!"
"Lava?" Karnage asked.
"Yeah, way deep down there, but you can see it, it's burnin' red," said Mad Dog.
"Hmm...," said Karnage, and he scratched his cheek and thought. "Then either it has escaped already, or it will be waiting for us."
"We ain't scared of no lizard!" a pirate shouted. The rest of the crew replied with a loud and hearty "Yaarr!"
"We're gonna string it up by its tail!" another pirate shouted.
"Yaarr!"
*BANG!*
That last round of cheers was abruptly stopped by a loud gunshot, and the pirates in the hangar yelped and ducked. And poor Dumptruck... he never knew what hit him before his hat was blasted from his head. That purple feather attached to his hatband was blown in half, and he watch haplessly as it fluttered to the floor.
They turned and saw Kit knocked on his rear, with a smoldering musket in his hands. He replied to their angry looks with a nervous grin. "Uh... sorry. It, uh, fell off the wall! I just picked it up to put it back!" He hung it back on the rack and walked away from it quickly, clearing his throat. "Ahem. Carry on."
Karnage ran his hand down his face and sighed heavily. "My protégé," he muttered.
Dumptruck picked up his hat, pouting. "Der, I hate when he does that."
A buzzer rang throughout the ship, a message from the bridge that their destination was fast at hand. The pirate crew scrambled to their positions.
"Try not to mess this up, you bungling bucket-heads!" yelled Karnage, which was as much of a rousing pep talk as the crew was going to get. He looked at Kit and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "You stick with me, boy. Go!"
From the top of the canyon that hid Rhamastan's gates, Jesse Richter had set up a small camp for himself, awaiting reinforcements from Shere Khan. When he first heard the engine noises from a distance, he thought it was the zeppelin fleet arriving early... the echoes made it difficult to tell from which direction the dirigibles were approaching.
He pulled out a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon. The engines were getting louder, closer... and closer... he never thought zeppelins would have made such a racket. He scanned back and forth, not seeing anything. "I hear you guys," he said, "but where in the blue h ― aaugh!" He yelped as the shadow of the Iron Vulture suddenly cast over him.
He took cover in the foliage, cursing repeatedly. His movements were limped and pained, for the stab wound in his thigh ached fiercely. The pirate airship slowed to a hover before the canyon, and several long rope ladders were dropped from the beak-shaped prow, bomb bay doors, and hatches on the broadside. Dozens of blade and musket wielding pirates began to descend to the ground and race into the long, jagged crevice. Cranes lowered some of the explosives.
Richter slid to the edge of the cliff on his stomach, and watched them with his binoculars. He found Karnage, he was leading the pack, swinging his cutlass and shouting orders. Gibber and Karnage Junior, as Richter thought of the kid, were right beside him.
Then he surveyed the Iron Vulture and calculated a rough plan. With the ladders down, he could board the ship and cause a lot of trouble, even crash it. Khan's zeppelins and their fabric hulls would stand no chance against the Iron Vulture's cannons. They would never even get close to it.
He spied the captain again, and with the pain in his leg he found himself so fuming that he could not think straight. With a grunted exhale he forced himself to focus on this impending mess and how he was going to deal with it. On the bright side, he figured, he was not going to have to go far to keep his promise to Karnage. He decided not to take any more chances letting him go; Karnage got too lucky too often. He grabbed his repel gear from the camp and set it up.
In a frenzy of greed, the pirates climbed over the rubble left at the gate of the ancient stronghold and stormed through the first hall, each drunk with the imagery of what great treasures they would claim in the mountain. They stopped to leer at the glowing stones fixed in the walls like they were large diamonds for the taking, though their captain commanded them to move on and worry about those later.
Karnage led the way further down the hall, and started coughing. The air was suddenly hot and smokey, and stung his eyes. He and Kit were the first to clear the hall, the rest of the crew shortly behind them, but when they came to the first great cavern that housed the garden bright as day ― as they had remembered it, anyway ― they all came to a dismal halt.
Everything was blackened and veiled in a dark haze. The giant trees, some still smoldering a feint red glow, were nought but charred skeletons, the once vibrantly glowing plants were shredded and roasted into ash. In the middle of it all was the golden statue, toppled to the ground, her features melted into vague shapes.
The cavern walls were shattered, the glowing stones imbedded in them gone. The path that led out of the area was laden with rubble the size of boulders, the cliffs had been sundered apart to make a much broader passage.
Kit looked around in circles, breathing into the arm of his sweater. His toes brushed against an old iron battle helm. He bent to pick it up and dropped it; it was still hot to the touch.
Last in line came the pirates' special trap, the cage rigged with raw meat and enough dynamite to blow them all to high heaven, presently being shouldered by Dumptruck and Hal, who could not so much contemplate their scorched surroundings rather than grumble under the strain of the contraption's weight.
Kit stepped behind Karnage, waiting for him to say something, as the rest were; for his part, Kit was not without a bit of hope that Karnage would order a retreat. Among his priorities, leaving with empty pockets was low on the list, but not quite as low as being barbequed. At length he tugged on the captain's coat sleeve.
Karnage jerked his arm away, not even looking at him, and while the wolf tried to be covert about it, Kit could see the lump he swallowed.
"Did... it do all this," asked Ratchet, speaking aloud for many like minded thoughts at the moment.
Karnage raised his sword and gestured toward Dumptruck and Hal. "Bring its tasty snack to the front," he ordered. "At the first sight of the beast, drop it, and then I would only suggest you run like the chickens! On your toenails, all of you, and step like you are not a bunch of elephants dancing in a china shop!"
One by one, muskets were raised in shaky but ready fashion, and there was no longer laughter among the crew at the thought of an impending fight, but sullen murmurs and spooked hisses where one wondered if the devil himself was about to leap from the shadows and claim their soul.
Hacksaw, with his mad grin, was an exception. He just didn't give a hoot about what happened as long as he could blow something up. "Let's find it an' make it go boom already!" he cried, jotting to the front of the group, his hands full of dynamite sticks and matches.
"It is only an animal," growled the captain, but though the crew did not assume as much, he was mostly convincing himself. He marched forward, and the rest followed in short order, trampling the scattered remains of the old Felocians into the ashes. "One animal, and more gold than we can carry out of here! Move it!"
Mutters of agreement rose, with determined growls that no creature was going to stop them.
Loose rocks from above poured on their heads. It took some time for them to negotiate the path ahead over the rubble, though between the broken cliffs they saw waiting for them at the end a golden glow, heavenly by comparison, and they assumed a greater haste away from the ashes.
They arrived en masse at the main court, the ziggurat temple set before them and the great golden walls all around. This they took in with a large degree of awe, now seeing what grand potential was about to sate their greedy fantasies, and that was just for the construction material.
Hunched in the shadows, Richter was stalking them from behind; he had no luck to stealthily pick any of them off, they were all too close together and had to many guns to risk being seen.
To the left of the temple was the carcass of the slain white dragon, lying bloodied in the garden of giant-leafed plants.
"That don't look so bad," a pirate remarked. Hacksaw kicked his foot across the ground and sulked, seeing that someone had already blown its head off.
The pirates began to scatter somewhat, not as organized groups but as individuals staring absently at the walls, wondering what could be behind all those doors. Karnage did the same, but he was not looking for signs of treasure. His left ear perked and zeroed in toward the great cavern mouth where they had last seen the giant black beast emerge; its depth was shielded in smoke.
Richter slipped into one of the doorways along the outer wall, and found a ladder where he accessed a balcony not far from directly above Karnages head. He held his machete in his fingers as if balancing it, and gauged his odds at being able to sink it into the wolf's skull from there.
"You hear it?" Kit asked the captain.
"I thought so..." said Karnage. He leaned over closer, eyeing the cavern suspiciously. "You?"
"I can't tell," shrugged Kit, breathing slowly to listen. "Maybe it's nothing."
"It must be nothing, then," concluded Karnage, and he straightened up as if the matter was closed.
Kit nodded, pleased that Karnage was taking his opinion to heart, but then again, that seemed a little too easy. He assumed he would regret asking, but: "Wait, why?"
"Please, boy, you could pick up radio signals with those enormous ears!"
Kit rolled his eyes. That was more like it, he thought. "It's a good thing you didn't give me a gun," he grumbled.
Don Karnage raised his sword and pointed it to the temple, where the doors inside were still wide open. "Onward, men! We start our pillaging performance in there!" To Dumptruck and Hal, he ordered them to set their 'dragon trap' halfway between the cavern and the passage from where they just came; this was a task that took a bit of time as it was no short walk across the vast court.
His loud commands echoed and bounced a couple times over their heads. The pirates cut loose with another 'Yarr!' and fell in together in a large group and trod down the path to the temple.
Meanwhile, Richter had his knife wound back over his head. He cocked his head like he was aiming down the barrel of a hunting rifle, with Karnage's crown in the crosshairs. Then he thought he would aim just a little lower... the back would be a nice target, easier to hit and it make him suffer a little longer. Watching the wolf so contently lead his thugs, too confident for proper caution, made this deadly surprise that much more rewarding.
And so, before he could let Karnage get much further, Richter lunged forward from the balcony and let fly his machete with as much might as he could throw...
From the cave, a powerful roar blasted from the depths, and caught the pirates as though they were standing in the tracks of a speeding train. In a sudden jolt, Karnage stumbled over Kit, who in turn got knocked head over heels on the ground.
Kit blinked dazedly, with Karnage cursing on top of him; the pirates were hollering frantically, and he could have sworn he saw a big knife bounce off the ground in front of them.
"Boy," huffed Karnage, "why don't you watch where I am ― !" He suddenly paused, and his nose wrinkled. He tipped a glance at his right shoulder... there was a cut and it was bleeding. "Yee-owch!"
"Dammit!" shouted Richter, though at the top of his lungs it did not really matter; the pirates were going berserk looking for cover.
Karnage clasped his shoulder as he stood up, searching the area above him as to what hurt him. "Something bit me!"
"Something's gonna bite you!" cried Kit, and he yanked on Karnage's hand to get him moving. The beast's breath brushed against their faces like a gust of arid wind. "It's coming this way!"
"Set the trap!" ordered Karnage, and he and Kit scrambled to get inside the nearest doorway along the golden outer wall. "Now, now, now!"
Dumptruck and Hal stumbled and dropped the trap, halfway to where they intended to put it, and there they turned back and ran for it. Like a superhero, however, Hacksaw came running to save the day, drug the cage himself the rest of the way, and took a long, pleasant sniff at the contraption. Gunpowder and raw meat... it must have been what pirate heaven smelled like. He ran back to the others with a skip in his step, frothing at the mouth to see something explode already.
The pirates waited, most of them taking cover behind the large chunks of rubble on the path from where they had entered the court. Smoke billowing from the cave told that something was stirring inside it, but they could not see it. The roaring was terrible, like the creature breathed thunder itself, and it belted out a long, piercing howl that made them cover their ears. Then, suddenly, nothing... the roaring receded, and all became still and quiet.
Too quiet. A moment passed. No one dared to move. Every musket was aimed at the cave, waiting... but nothing was there anymore.
Eventually Karnage tiptoed back into the court, Kit following, and soon the rest of the crew did the same. They scratched their heads and muttered curiously, for when they truly listened now, they heard not much but their own footsteps. What was in the cave had disappeared.
"It ran away," said Ratchet.
"Aww, nuts!" pouted Hacksaw.
"This isn't right," said Kit, and he backed in toward the rubble, as if to grant himself a head start should running commence. "The captain and I saw it, it's not gonna run from us!"
"An animal big enough to make all that noise ain't just gonna shut up," argued Ratchet. "If it's still there, what's it waitin' for?"
"How would I know," snapped Kit. "What kind of giant lizard do I look like to... to..." Kit choked on his own words; chin fell open, and he cocked his head toward the smoking cavern. Two words came to mind: thoughtful killer. "It's waiting for us to go out there... so it can kill all of us at once."
From up above, laying low and hidden on the same balcony, Richter smirked. He was wondering who was going to be the first among them to figure that out, and leave it to the twelve-year-old to beat the rest of them to it. He was content to wait there and let the dragon do the work for him, just as long as he got to see it.
"Shoot it," snarled Karnage. The crew, staring in transfixed bewilderment, seemed to ignore him. Much more prominently, he whipped his cutlass out and pointed it at the cave. "All of you, now!" he barked. "Fire!"
At that, the pirates raised their guns and blasted a salvo of bullets across the courtyard. A silent moment of reprise followed again, but the reply came swiftly enough. The cave lit up brightly.
A huge wave of flame burst forth, rolling as a mighty bolder over Karnage's trap, which exploded into messy pieces. The pirates yelped and dove out of its fiery path before they were engulfed.
When they looked back up, the horned beast was snaking through the mouth of the cavern, crawling as a tiger stalks its prey, flame dripping from is maw, which gave particular flare to its jagged fangs. Many an uncouth word was shouted at the sight of it, and more muskets fired.
The beast raised its head and sprawled its talons in front of itself; the ground cracked underneath. Like a vast cloak of darkness its wings draped over its back. While bullets bounced off its chest like pebbles, it swayed its head to and fro at the pirates, in a manner that it was aiming the horns jutting from under its jaw at them, as if selecting who to impale.
"Bullocks, run for it!" someone shouted, and most of them had already began to, dropping their weapons and gear to hasten their speed.
The black dragon reared and jumped high, its wings swung forth and its talons swiped down on the top of the center zigurat, tearing it apart in mid-air, then it crashed down where the pirates were grouped, slamming its crown into the golden wall, with such force that those fleeing were knocked down from the sudden quake. Among them, Richter quickly found himself on ground, knocked off his hiding spot, underneath the beast's throat.
But then the dragon recoiled, and stumbled as if dazed. It was enough time for the pirates to get themselves a head start, Richter was right with them, making furiously fast tracks for daylight.
In a moment, the dragon collected itself, and lunged to give chase to them... but then it ground to a halt, sniffed the air, and turned back to the wall...
Kit was leading the pack as far as the running went, for he was able to jump and scale the obstacles easier than the others. He turned back for a moment, looking for Karnage, who he thought was right behind him. He saw a lot of hard and scared faces huffing past him, but none belonging to the red wolf. At length Hal came plodding by, the folds on his belly bouncing and he breathed as if to deplete the world of its oxygen supply, but still running for all he was worth, and it looked like he was the last of the group.
"Hey! Where's the captain!" cried Kit.
"If he's as smart as he thinks," panted Hal, "already outside!"
Hal had to have been right, Kit thought. He must have missed him.
But Don Karnage was indeed still inside the stronghold; he had hid in one of the rooms in the wall, and there he knelt in the dark, gasping under a window. With his ear pressed to the wall, he could tell his crew had run, but the dragon ― clawing and growling ― was still there.
It was sniffing, and getting closer, until it was just right before him. He covered his mouth in hope it would not hear him breathe, and pushed his back against the wall. Somehow closing his eyes seemed like it would help.
And perhaps it was working... the beast moved its head away. Karnage opened an eye, wondering what it was doing, though he was hard pressed to stick his head out to see.
The dragon snorted and drew another deep breath; with a flap of its wings, a heavy gust brought a dust storm through the court and the rooms surrounding it so that Karnage was suddenly choking. He wondered if the beast had heard him cough...
A blazing inferno blasted over his head, heavy through the window like water jetting from a fissure in a great dam. Karnage screamed and dove to the floor. The room around him was set brightly aflame. As soon as the onslaught of fire ended, and the beast took another breath, he bolted in that brief reprise through another door and up a stairway.
"Why me!" he cried. So much for staying undetected. "Thirty of the world's ugliest ducks for it to chase, and always the overly handsome one gets ― yiiiieee!"
Another blast of flame washed against his heels. The beast howled and swiped its talons across the doors and windows it saw its prey running past, ripping the glistening walls asunder.
From one connector to the other, Karnage sprinted through the rooms around the court, almost blindly, running up stairs, jumping down onto platforms, crashing into furniture and ancient knick knacks that were only dark shapes between him and the next exit. Through each pass of a window the beast was following, though he could never see its face so much as the fire spewing from its jaws.
He slid to a stop under another window, heaving. By his guess, he probably run a half-circle around the court, and now he was an area left under construction, where no lustrous gold covered the bare-rock framework being sculpted from the cavern. Smoke was everywhere, and he could hardly breathe much less run any further.
Another barrage of flame roared over his head, but he sat still. His hands were trembling as he covered his face. When the fire stopped, he was left with only the thought that he could not elude this beast, that there was no escape... and one of his boots was slightly higher than the other. He blinked and squinted, and drew his feet closer for a better look. Sure enough... he must have been walking around looking lopsided all day. He wondered why no one had told him... he also wondered why the hell he was thinking about this when he was about to be roasted alive. He adjusted his boots anyway.
On the other side, however, the beast had suddenly gone quiet, as if it had given up.
In a ray of hope, Karnage raised his head up for peek, and was met by the beast's eye before his face... no pupils, just a shiny jet orb with blotches of red; it was like seeing his reflection in a blood-splattered mirror. Karnage was terror-stricken, frozen in its gaze. If the eye was a window to the soul, then a soul the beast was wanting for; its gaze was empty and cold.
The dragon whisked its head away, reared back, then thrust forward with its fanged maw aimed straight for the captain's head. To Karnage it was all happening so slowly, the pounding beats of his heart ticking at a snail's pace. In another beat, he might have been able to count its teeth... but when that beat came, he realized how very much he wanted to live, and he leaped sideways.
It crashed through the stone structure with such wrathful force that it did not stop at one wall... apparently not to its intention, it burrowed its neck deep into the cavern, where the ancient builders had hollowed out spaces for further construction.
Karnage rolled on his back; it felt like he had been knocked down by an explosion. When he looked back, through all the smoke and dust left in the dragon's wake, he could not believe his luck. The beast's massive neck was stretched before him as it tried to jerk itself free. Perhaps the pirate gods were smiling upon him to slay the wretched creature, but in any case, he was starving to hurt it.
He drew his sword, charged and slashed at it, but its flesh was as giant scales of molten iron. With a furious cry, Karnage lunged his sword into it with all his might, and the blade sunk half-way. It was hard to tell if it even stung the beast. He spat on it and chose this as an opportune time to flee across the courtyard. He abandoned his sword and climbed down a set of ladders and balconies to the ground, only to be found trapped by the beast's swinging tail and talons, all swinging wildly and tearing apart everything they touched.
The dragon erupted with an ear-splitting howl that blew as a hurricane through the unseen labyrinth of passages of the old stronghold. In one last mighty pull, it freed itself and carved out pieces of the cavern wall with it, and in a furious rage it roared and shot a pillar of fire straight up, high enough to reach the firestone-laden dome.
The firestone exploded, hundreds to thousands of crystals at once, their dying light creating a huge fissure in the dome; the cracks grew and the last stones popped like fireworks across the breadth of the ceiling, until the dome itself crashed down on top of the beast in massive broken chunks...
Outside, while the pirates were still reeling, Kit meandered through the crowd, looking for the captain; the crew was still yet terrified and clamoring about what had happened; much of the talk was about getting back on the Iron Vulture where they would be safe. Gibber launched a flare was launched from a gun to signal the airship that they were on their way back.
Then the ground shook, and chaotic echoes were coming from the entrance of the stronghold. It sounded like heavy buildings were tumbling down. The pirates started as if something was going to punch its hand through the earth and drag them down a burning abyss. They fled the length of the canyon to where the Iron Vulture hovered, and its ladders weren't lowering fast enough for anyone.
"Captain!" hollered Kit. Anywhere he looked, and he had looked everywhere around, Karnage was not there. "Where are you?" He turned toward the cave, a dreadful frown crumpling his face. "Please don't be in there..."
There was no point in asking any of the others to go back, they were much too afraid for their own heads. Not that he could blame them for not taking odds against a giant fire-breathing nightmare, but to realize there was not one of them who could have cared less if anyone else had survived... he was getting sick of them already.
The clamor around him faded from his eyes and ears as he watched the cave. Any moment, he thought, Karnage was going to saunter out of there unscathed, brush himself off, a smug grin telling of a tale of how he laughed in death's face.
But he wasn't there.
Noisey rotor chops above them, the Iron Vulture dipped low, and the pirates began climbing its ladders, the bigger ones first, if only because they were able to shove the rest away.
Kit glanced up at the airship; considering what kind of bedlam was happening under his feet, the climb to safety was tempting. So much less tempting was to get stuck on the ship with the thugs presently brawling each other to get their feet off the ground first. To turn his back on either the ship or the cave... he inwardly remarked that he must have been crazy for it to have been such an easy choice.
He moved away from them all, and crouched toward the cave as a runner gets ready for a race. He could think of nothing that could help the captain, nor think of any sane assurance that if he ran back in there, he would ever make it out. Moreso, however, his gut told him 'nothing' was the one thing he could not do.
But then, at last, black patches on singed fur on his face, Karnage staggered into the daylight and fell exhaustedly to his knees, hardly ever as thankful to see the sky.
"Ha! I knew it!" cried Kit. "Hey! Are you okay?"
Karnage replied in turn with a nod, though he was wobbly enough that just about anything could have knocked him off kilter, and it happened to be his nose. He toppled face forward in the gravely dirt.
Kit grabbed him by the shoulder to help him up. "What happened?"
"It's gone," replied Karnage. "Everything!"
"The treasure?"
"Kapooey," sneered Karnage, shaking his head grimly. "Where do you think you were going?"
"What about the dragon?" asked Kit. "How'd you get away from it?"
At that, Karnage ducked down on all fours, scanning the ground like he was trying to trace the murmurs in the earth, which were growing softer and distant. "The volcano, which way was it?"
Kit pointed toward the south. "Over there." He suddenly realized with a sunken heart why the captain had made such an inquiry. "We can't stop it... can we."
"We are pirates," huffed Karnage, a fiery gleam in his eye. "Who says we can't!" He jumped up, twisted Kit around by his shoulders and giving him a shove toward the Iron Vulture. "Get on the ship!"
Don Karnage was not the last to exit the cave. Richter bid his time in the shadows, unnoticed in all the panic. Karnage stumbling past him took him by surprise, he did not see him until already outside, too far to chase him down with his bad leg. He watched Karnage yell what remained of his crew to make way for him at the nearest dangling ladder, making sure the boy got on first before he went up.
Richter grumbled over another missed opportunity, and seethingly began to limp out to swipe Karnage before he was able to climb away for good, damn all the risks of one of his lackeys plugging him with a bullet.
There was but one pirate left under Karnage, the stunted canine Sadie, and he still had his musket with him, though he never got a split second to as much aim it; he was too interested in the airship than paying attention to the looming blur hastily lurching from the corner of his eye. When he finally took hold of the rope ladder himself, he was abruptly yanked down, and after that only saw big knuckles cracking into his face.
Richter stared at his clenched fist with a great deal of admiration, particularly at the little splatters of blood and slobber on his knuckles. "Gah, that felt good!" he snorted.
Karnage was already halfway to the airship. He wondered what the particularly heavy tugging was below him, what was suddenly causing the ladder to sway as if an anchor had been tied to it... he could not remember Sadie being much more than scrawny. He looked down between his feet; Richter had grabbed hold and followed him, pulling himself up hand-over-hand using only his arms.
"Again?!" cried Karnage. After that he kept his head up and climbed all the faster. "Why me! Always me!" Soon the ladder began to sway heavily, with Richter as the pendulum. Karnage kept climbing.
Once Karnage got to the top, Kit was there to offer him a hand aboard the ship, which Karnage blindy refused. Instead he hurriedly crawled on the deck and swung his cutlass free from his side, and began hacking the ropes with it.
Not that randomly odd behavior was uncommon among present company, but Kit raised an eyebrow at him anyway. "What'd the ladder to do you?"
"He is down there!" said Karnage, with another slash of his sword one side of the ladder was severed.
"Sadie?" asked Kit.
Karnage leaned over the edge of the deck, grasping his sword downward with both hands just in case Richter had already made it too high up. To his shock, however, the ladder was unoccupied. He leaned lower and took a more careful look at the ground... no Richter... and for him to pull a disappearing act would have been quite a feat.
Kit bent over for a peek at whatever was being searched for. "What?"
Karnage straightened up, scratching his head. He could not have just imagined it... could he? What he could not have imagined, however, was quite clear in the south. The mighty volcano was in an uproar.
"To the volcano!" ordered Karnage loudly. "Blast it! Everything we have, now!"
Most of the pirates were still collecting themselves, standing dazed on their feet. Ratchet spoke, "But boss, the city! They'll see the ship! They'll send their patrols after us!"
He received in quick reply a deathly ferocious glare and the tip of the Karnage's cutlass pressed between his eyes. "Any other concerned?" growed the captain.
Ratchet backpedaled shakily. "I'll g-go see if they need any help on the bridge!"
And so the Iron Vulture adjusted its course, and pushed full steam ahead straight for the black plumes flowing from Mount Seren.
The Sea Duck soared high and fast on the route to Alpacito, darting through thick, scattered clouds. Throughout the trip, Baloo could not keep his foot from tapping on the floorboard, as if coaxing his plane to go even faster, though the throttle was as far as it would go.
As their destination rolled in from the horizon, they saw little dots scattered in the sky ahead.
"Are those balloons?" asked Rebecca.
Baloo leaned forward and squinted to see. "Look like big ol' cargo zeps to me. Whole mess of 'em, too. Huh."
The zeppelins moved slowly, and the Sea Duck soon overtook them, flying in the midst of their numbers, which as Rebecca attempted to count there were at least twenty of them. Most of them were carrying a rather bulky payload on their bellies, each chained to a lift on cables. She caught the insignia on one of their tails, 'SK'.
"They're from Shere Khan," she said. "I wonder what they're up to?"
"Who knows," said Baloo. "Heh, if they're goin' where we're goin', they're gonna have a heck of a time findin' a parkin' spot!"
Rebecca took a more careful look at what they were hauling. "Tanks!"
Baloo blinked. "Yer welcome, but for what?"
"No, they've got tanks strapped underneath them," she said. "Where could they be going?"
Baloo brought the plane down low to prepare for a landing, and Rebecca stood up, pointing out the windshield. "Baloo, look at that now," she said. Two heavy gunships sat outside the city's harbor; massive, ironclad vessels that overwhelmed the bay. Their powerful cannons were all poised toward the jungle.
"Now those belong to Shere Khan, too" remarked Baloo.
"I don't like the looks of this," said Rebecca. "What does Khan think he's going to do with all those weapons?"
"Ol' Khan can dance the merengue on a salsa bar for all I care," said Baloo. "We ain't exactly gonna stick around to sight-see once we get Kit!"
They moored the Sea Duck at the city docks and hurried on foot to the museum. Tired and out of breath, Baloo stopped just short of the entrance and turned toward Rebecca. "Uh, the gal in here, when she sees me, she might try to... uh..." He faltered for the words, but then shrugged; the heck with it, he thought. "Well, you'll see."
But there was no one to meet them at the reception desk. They only saw a few visitors milling around the museums aisles. They walked further inside and heard voices carrying over from the back, not yelling, but obviously riled, and one sounded like Tyler. They heard part of the conversation as they approached:
"What's the use," said Bagheera. "Even if we didn't have a monster to contend with, we're not going to get another ounce of gold out of there before Khan has his fleet ready."
"The discovery is still ours," said Tyler. "That has to count for... well, something."
"Yes, probably a nice round figure," said Bagheera. "Like zero."
"We found it," insisted Tyler. "Even if all else should go to the dogs... well, it still means something in itself."
They found a room with the door ajar; Baloo knocked and pushed it open. There, Tyler, Bagheera, and Myra sat slouching around a table with a telephone and empty coffee pot on the middle; they all had heavy eyes that looked like they had not had much sleep lately. Tyler and Myra sat opposite each other, Myra's hands loosely on top of Tyler's, and Tyler's hands loosely over a small, golden dragon figurine. Tyler regarded it like he was staring at a very wishful dream, and Myra beheld him sympathetically.
Their camping equipment was scattered across the floor. Maria the receptionist was there, too, sitting next to a radio, listening to local news chatter. She was not somber like the others, and she was particularly not somber when she spotted Baloo.
"Popi!" she cried, wiggling in her seat excitedly. "You come back to see me again!"
Baloo grinned, a bit nervously, and tipped his hat at Myra, though he was not nearly the mood to greetings, introductions, or small talk. "Look, folks, we got a telegram sayin' that you found..."
He was interrupted by Bagheera slamming his fist on the table. "You didn't tell them in the message?" he asked Tyler.
"Of course, but there was only so much room for detail," said the fox. "I got in the choice words you wanted to add... well, some of them, anyway."
Myra sighed at their bickering. "I'm sorry, Baloo, but he's not here," she said. "He... left."
"Left?" asked Baloo. "Left where?"
"We found them in the mountains," explained Bagheera, huffily. "We found him stranded in the jungle, he was with that confound pirate Karnage. We captured Karnage and cared for that brat so that he was safe and sound, and he repaid us by willingly and very intently setting Karnage free while we slept and and robbed us blind!"
"You just stop the clock a minute, pal," scowled Baloo, taken aback. "That ain't Kit yer talkin' about!"
"There has to be some mistake," said Rebecca, squeezing into the room from behind Baloo. "Baloo's right, that doesn't sound like Kit at all."
Tyler explained it further to them, elaborating on how they had Karnage securely captured, how they held small fortune in valuable trinkets, how Bagheera was awoken at the business end of a knife, and how Kit was responsible for their loss.
"I'm terribly sorry, Baloo," said Tyler, "but it's the truth. I sent the telegram because I felt you should know, you seemed like the closest thing to family. But your lad double-crossed us. We would have seen him back to you, he knew that. It seems to me he made his choice."
Bagheera slumped forward and nestled his chin in his arms, fuming more so every time he thought of what happened. His claws absently scratched slow lines on the table. "I'd like to give that little hellion a thrashing he won't soon forget," he muttered.
"You watch it, buster" warned Baloo. "He ain't a bad kid!"
"Well he's not exactly a good one, by my count," replied Bagheera. "Bad doesn't begin to describe him. Liar, thief, backstabber, well then, we're getting warmer ― oof!" With a stern look, Myra kicked him under the table to let him know he was not helping matters.
"But there must be more to the story, some explanation," said Rebecca. "Kit would want nothing to do with the pirates, and he's no thief..."
"You mean anymore?" sneered Bagheera.
Baloo's eyes narrowed at him. "What's that s'posed to mean?"
"Come now, Baloo," said Tyler, "it must not be that hard to consider... if he was a pirate before you knew him, well, how well do you truly know him?"
Rebecca looked at Baloo worriedly, she thought he might take that question like a sucker punch to the jaw... but he was still and defiant. "Enough to know that he ain't a bad kid," he said.
Maria clicked her tongue sympathetically, but turned her ear to the radio, where something was being said about the volcano, which since having shown signs of eruption the day before, had warranted much interest among the city news.
Bagheera was about to unleash another rant, but Tyler nudged his shoulder to stop him. The fox frowned at Baloo, sadness and empathy in his eyes. "I remember when you got into that fight at your friend's club... Louie's, was it... you didn't see that boy's face when you fell... neither did anyone else in this room."
The furrowed grimace across Baloo's face softened.
"Maybe there is more to the story," said Tyler. "I don't see it, honestly, but... bloody, you could be right. I hope you are. I don't know where he is now, but I think it's a safe bet wherever he is, he's with the pirates."
"That just brings us back to square one," sighed Rebecca. "The pirates haven't been seen all week."
"Piratas!" cried Maria, pointing at the radio. "They see their flying ship!" She rushed to the nearby window and gazed into the sky, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of something exciting (or, someone). The tip of her tail was twirling. "Oooh... Don Karrrnage is here," she purred. Myra looked at her like she was insane.
Tyler got out of his seat, his head tilted at her. "The Iron Vulture? Here?"
"Where?" asked Baloo anxiously. "What did they say?"
"By the volcán!" replied Maria. "The volcano!"
"Mount Seren," said Tyler, with a snap of his fingers. He grabbed a backpack from the floor and began searching it for a map. "It's due southeast of here, on the other side of the jungle. One moment, I'll show you!"
"No need, we'll find it," said Baloo, already heading out the door. "C'mon, Beckers, let's go find us a big metal buzzard!" He turned to Tyler once last time before leaving in a hurry. "Thanks!"
"Good luck," nodded Tyler.
"They're going to rush headlong into that pirate ship," sighed Bagheera.
Tyler opened the map across the table and sat down again. "Yes, they are."
"And for what, so they can hear it from the whelp's own mouth that he wants nothing to do with them... before they're shot and skewered?"
"You don't know that."
"Am I to understand, then," said Bagheera, "after what he did to us, you believe he has a shred of decency in him?"
"It's a complicated world, chap," Tyler shrugged. "I don't know what to believe."
Mad Dog stomped down the port side of the Iron Vulture's lowest deck, closing up the last of the hatches and pulling up the ladders. He hated the work, the length of the ladders did not make them easier or faster to pull back up. Dumptruck was assigned the other half of the ship.
Mad Dog was halfway through with the task, in a dark corridor blinded by the sharp pillars of light let in by the open hatches. He reached out and closed one more hatch, and saw a large, broad shouldered figure limping toward him in wide strides.
"Dumptruck! What gives? How come you ain't helpin'!"
Like wielding a sledgehammer, 'Dumptruck' swung his arm back and lunged it forward with a tight fist into Mad Dog's crown.
Richter spat over the pirate's unconscious body.
When he was following Karnage on the ladder, the wolf turning around on him with a weapon was predictable; Richter had swung from ladder to ladder under the length of the ship, and climbed aboard without anyone being the wiser. Mad Dog was the first of many, he thought, as many as it would take to get to Karnage. That was business now; any body count thereafter would be recreational.
He had two grenades left on his belt. He took one, pulled the pin, and dropped it beside Mad Dog, and gave it a tap with his boot to tuck it under the pirate's head. Then he walked away, waiting for the right moment, then raised his hand and began counting down on his fingers: Five, four, three, two, one...
A blast rocked the airship's iron bones. Richter blinked... it was not his grenade. To his chagrin, that one was a dud. Another blast. It was cannon fire.
The Sea Duck had plunged into a bank of low-lying clouds over the jungle. Rebecca held a pair of binoculars readily, but they were no good for looking into an opaque whiteout. Baloo kept the plane's throttle at full; he leaned forward anxiously, and had not much to say since leaving the museum, though he often had his bottom lip clenched in his teeth.
As they broke out of the clouds, the Iron Vulture was suddenly looming before them, indeed; it had its two giant front cannons extended and was launching a brutal wave of artillery on the fuming Mount Seren.
"Whoa!" exclaimed Baloo. "Looks like they're busy!"
"Very busy," said Rebecca. "What do we do now?"
"We get in there an' find Kit," said Baloo.
"Oh, is that all!"
The Sea Duck was approaching the Iron Vulture from its flank. Baloo's hands were tight around the yoke, and his eyes darted several places and back again: at the cannons, at what they were shooting (which was apparently nothing), and where, if anywhere, he was going to be able to land his plane. The front of the ship was out of the question. He considered the flight deck on the top, and pulled the Sea Duck upward.
"Hold on, Becky! We're goin' in!"
Rebecca's fingers dug into the arms of her chair. She could feel the shock of the Iron Vulture's blasting cannons in her bones. Searching out the window to her right, she was dumbfounded as to what the pirates were raising such a ruckus over. Watching where the shells hit the volcano, she took the binoculars and zoomed in... in a beat, she dropped the binoculars on the floor.
Her voice was quivering. "Um... Baloo?"
"Yeah?"
"I don't know what they're shooting at, but..." She paused, tilting her head questioningly, as if she very much could not believe her own eyes.
"Becky? What's the matter?"
"I think they need to keep shooting!"
Baloo leaned over to look through the passenger window. The slopes of the volcano were being shattered, but then something moved from inside the volano, a dark shape, very large, sweeping across the broad caldera. In a burst, the great black dragon jumped forth from the smoke.
Kit stood on the lower jaw of the Iron Vulture's open prow, looking on with wide eyes and covering his ears. Karnage was beside him, gritting his teeth against the wind. "Keep it up!" he hollered. "Blast it! Blast it!"
The dragon shrieked as the exploding shells tore into its armor-like flesh. It recoiled down the volcano's slope, digging in with its talons and shielding itself with its wings, which were rent by the airship's relentless attack.
"It's workin'!" cried Kit. "We're beating it! We're...!"
"Out of ammo!" shouted Will from a hangar catwalk. He was running to the bridge, shouting orders: "Front guns are reloading! Turn the ship around! Get the broadsides shootin' before it's too late!"
Kit and Karnage started when the airship's cannons suddenly went silent. "I hate when that happens," Karnage muttered.
The dragon was stunned, but recovered at speed. It climbed to the top of the volcano, roared in thunderous bloodlust, and cast its massive wings into the air. With the sun on its back, its shadow blotted the jungle in nightfall.
Now in the open, those watching saw it as it truly was in its hellish entirety from head to tail and the full breadth of its wingspan, lengths to which not even the Iron Vulture measured. It appeared pitch as a living shadow, its form smoldering hot and featureless from a distance save for the sun piercing the tears in its wings and the silhouette of its fangs in the red glow of its fiery gullet.
It leapt from the mount in a dark bolt, the vast jungle canopy bent under the flap of its wings, and it soared swiftly toward the Iron Vulture, but quite erratically as it turned out, like it had once known and forgotten the art of flight. It plunged into the jungle, swiping a great clearing of uprooted trees in its wake. The trees standing in front of it, and every creature happlessly living among them, were consumed in a wrathful inferno.
The Iron Vulture began to turn away, and the beast did not like that one bit. It cast a long stream of fire at the airship, blasting the bottom of its hull.
"Baloo, no!" warned Rebecca, as the Sea Duck swung ever closer to the airship. "Don't! We can't get near that thing!"
"Kit's on that ship," Baloo said, in such an insisting manner that it closed any debate on the spot. "I'd buckle up if I were you!"
The dragon's wings caught the wind once more, and it leapt into the air, this time with more success, and grasped for the Iron Vulture. In mid-air, it collided with the ship from underneath, and took hold! With its front limbs and talons shredding and twisting shards of metal from the ship's purple sides, and it bit down ferociously into the prow.
The Iron Vulture swung wildly and sunk toward the ground. The dragon was wrestling it out of the sky.
From the Sea Duck, Rebecca yelped and Baloo nearly jumped out of his seat. "No! Kit!" he yelled. He watched the ship get pulled down, trancelike, caught in a dreadful fear. But then the Iron Vulture suddenly fell less quickly, and just as it was low enough where the dragon's tail touched the ground, the airship's rotors were spinning so fast that smoke churned from them, and it hovered until the dragon finally slipped away and fell to the earth on its back. The Iron Vulture, however, in its utmost test of engine strength, shot straight skyward like a rocket.
The dragon, with no hesitation, took off after it, flying in wide, swift circles as it ascended.
"Jiminy," exhaled Baloo; he wiped beads of sweat from his brow, then slammed his fist into the dash. "What is that thing?!" He brought the Sea Duck up, keeping an eye on the Iron Vulture, which was just about leveling out, but the dragon was there too, and it was swinging around for another attack. "What if I can't save 'im," he mumbled.
"I know you want to get him out of there," said Rebecca, "but we can't...!" She paused. Baloo looked lost and panicked, like he was about to have a breakdown. She sat back in her seat and sighed, considering that she volunteered for this trip. "We can't leave him there, you've been right all along. We never knew how we were going to get him back, once we found the pirates."
"Some way, somehow," said Baloo.
Rebecca nodded. "Exactly. So, just... sic 'em!"
"Since when do you have dragon-proof planes? It'll barbeque anything that gets near it!" Kit tailed Karnage up the decks toward the bridge, trying to be a voice of reason while the captain hollered to for his pilots to get the attack planes in the air. There was no easy task bringing anything to order at this point; the entire ship was disheveled, alarm sirens were blaring throughout, half the crew was taking pot shots at the dragon with the broadside cannons, and there was yet the occasional pirate running and screaming at random.
They were halfway across a catwalk over the hangar when the Iron Vulture was slammed with a violent collision and reeled steeply to the side. All those standing on their feet were thrown to the floor, and Kit and Karnage had to grab onto the railing to keep from falling over it.
In a single angry growl, Karnage cursed luck, fate, gravity, the dragon, and the entire world for bringing him into this mess. "We have to get it away from the ship!"
"I'd rather take my chances!" said Kit. "If you go out there, you're not comin' back!"
"You want to be in charge?"
"Yeah!"
Karnage blinked. "Well... tough!"
A strange yelp cried from behind them; it was Hacksaw, tumbling onto the catwalk from an adjacent corridor, and when he finally rolled to a halt, his eyes were spinning and he had a broken ax handle in his hand.
And there was Richter, staggering from behind him. He yanked with his teeth and spat out the pin from his last grenade. His face was scratched and bruised, and a trickle of blood dropped from his chin. Hacksaw was just one of several he brawled with.
Kit's jaw came unhinged. "Where did he come from?"
Karnage froze and hesitated like he had been caught in a sniper's crosshairs. The grizzly was holding the ticking grenade purposely, waiting for just the right time, so that when he threw it there would be no delay in the explosion. "Watch it, boy, get ― jump!"
Richter wound up as a baseball pitcher throws a speedball and launched the grenade at aim for the captain's chest. Karnage leapt low under the catwalk railing, pulling Kit by the arm with him, and they dropped two stories to the hangar floor under the ear-popping bang!
Karnage landed on his backside at the side of a CT-37, groaning. At this rate he longed to be back in the jungle riding that llama, when his tail had no feeling...
"How about a little warning next time?" griped Kit, from the bottom of the plane's cockpit.
"I said jump!" snapped Karnage.
"Yeah, jump! Not 'let me break your shoulder for you'!"
"Will you shut up and...!" Above them, the catwalk was creaking. There was a hole in it where the grenade went off, and the walk was held together by twisted metallic threads, about to collapse with Richter trapped in the middle, and where best it would fall but right on top of them. "Get out of there, hurry!"
Kit began to slide on his stomach out the side of the side of the cockpit. "I'm tryin', I ― augh! Yeow!" His cry was sharp and most definitely from pain. He dropped to the floor, clutching his right foot.
"What now?" asked Karnage impatiently.
"My foot!" cried Kit. "Gosh darn it, I ― ow! It hurts!"
"Bad timing," huffed the captain. Bolts from the catwalk were popping, and it was ripping apart. He grabbed Kit by both harms and helped him hop away. "Badder than the baddest timing ever of all time!"
Just then the Iron Vulture suffered another massive hit, this time the dragon ― it's roar rattling the hull ― slammed into it from underneath, and a great dent rose from the hangar floor. The catwalk severed in two, swung apart and crashed with Richter going along for the ride. It missed Kit and Karnage, but the same fortune was not bestowed the pirates' planes nearby. Notably, as Karnage was quick to notice, with much dismay, his own tri-wing attack plane had its nose and wings clipped in the wreckage. And the wreckage... it was moving. It was Richter.
"Not my plane!" groaned Karnage. He drew his cutlass and waited with his wolvish fangs bared. Kit leaned on him on one foot, looking for help to call, but for all the pirates on the ship, none were in the area.
"We can't deal with him too," said Kit. "What now?"
But Karnage was bristling and determined. He put his hand on Kit's shoulder and spoke solemnly, "No more running."
Just as Richter emerged from the heap of metal around Karnage's plane, the Iron Vulture was struck once more, violently, this time somewhere from the aft, for the back of the ship was heaved upward, and, let alone the crew, every object not bolted down on every deck went flinging and crashing. In the hangar, planes, machinery, and spilled crates came sliding toward the nose of the ship like an overwhelmed dam, the flood of which overtook Kit and Karnage as they tumbled across the floor.
When the airship finally leveled again, and the screeching of metal grinding on metal eased, Kit raised his head up and cracked it on the belly of a CT-37. Between its pontoons, he saw no sign of Karnage and Richter... at least not for long. He crawled from the plane, slowly, cringing at throbbing pain in his toe, and Richter was there just several steps away. Somewhere in the disheveled clutter, the grizzly had found a large and long broken pipe. He eyed Kit with a cruel smirk, and wielded the pipe like a baseball bat as he got to his feet.
"It's never the healthy zebra that get eaten by the lion," Richter said. He crept toward Kit with a dark and immense glow of satisfaction. "Damn things keep getting away one way or the other, and there's so many in the heard that the lion has to worry about gettin' stampeded. So the lion keeps trying, picks the same one out of the heard each time, and every swipe and bite, hurts it more, until finally the zebra won't be able to run away anymore."
"I'm... I'm not runnin' from you. No one is," replied Kit, though with Richter standing over him with such bloodthirsty intentions, his defiance was betrayed by a fearful glistening welling in his eyes.
"Did I mention that it's usually the baby zebras, too?" Richter lifted the pipe over his head, ready to smash it into the boy's bones, but he paused, and tilted his head just enough to have an ear listening behind him. Suddenly he swung the pipe and his entire body around in a half-circle, when Don Karnage ducked just in time to miss having his skull crushed.
Karnage lunged back up with his cutlass leading the charge, and thrust it at the grizzly's chest. Richter got the pipe back in front of him barely fast enough to deflect Karnage's blade; Karnage ducked under his arms until he was out of pipe-swinging range, and stopped to lock eyes with his foe.
"This ain't a bullfight, you little roach," snorted Richter.
"Oh no?" retorted Karnage. "You know your foul-looking face does remind me of a bull, but not the side with the horns!"
Richter laughed raunchily. "Hell, I'm glad I didn't kill you before now. It wouldn't have been such a pleasure!"
Crouched with his feet ready to fly in any direction, Karnage was eager for Richter to rush at him with another heavy swing of that pipe, where he could sidestep him and land his cutlass where it counted... though perhaps his eagerness was a bit too transparent. Richter dropped the pipe and slowly rubbed his hands together as he stared the pirate down.
"I killed a varan the other day by ripping its jaw apart," he said. "You're a lower lifeform than a lizard, but I wouldn't mind extending the same kind of courtesy."
"If I were you, I would not consider myself so qualified to be the smart-guy," said Karnage, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
"Well, I suppose you're gonna tell me why not," said Richter.
"You turned your back on the boy."
At that, Richter started, and quickly turned around... and saw nothing... but the distraction it was all Karnage wanted. He charged braced to plunge his cutlass into anything he ran into.
Richter pivoted back around with a brutal swat to Karnage's shoulder, and the captain was knocked far across the floor, sliding close to the Iron Vulture's nose. He lost his cutlass, which slid even closer to the edge.
"Hey, don't fall off!" hollered Richter, and he chuckled at himself. "Too quick! I want this to hurt!"
Kit was crawling, hopping, sliding ― whatever he could do ― over and around all the clutter in the hangar, on a mission to find help before it was too late for the captain. But when he looked over his shoulder, and saw Karnage dazed and not very far from a deadly fall, he feared it was too late already.
Outside the prow, the daylight was eclipsed with a gust and roar of a thunderstorm as the black dragon soared just in front of the ship. In a beat it was gone just as quickly as it appeared, but not before it flicked the ship with an upward snap of its wing. Kit lost his balance in the sudden jolt, just as he lunged toward the bottom of a stairwell leading up the decks to the bridge. He fell on top of a hard object with enough pointy ends to not feel so good on the ribs. With a grumbled curse he was about to swat it away, and suddenly regarded it contemplatively, darkly, and not with a little desperation.
It was a musket re-engineered as grappling hook gun. And, from deeds in his yesteryear known only to pirates and their plundered victims, he had experience using it, including for more than it was intended.
He swung it over his shoulder and hobbled away from the stairwell...
Following the last pass of the dragon, Richter frowned, realizing he had to be quick and and then find a parachute, lest he wait until the Iron Vulture was ripped in half. He limped hurriedly toward Karnage as the pirate was getting up; if he could have mustered the speed, he would have given him a running kick to punt him into the open sky and oblivion... but then, getting in a few extra fist pummels was not such a bad alternative.
Breathing heavily with his face against the floor, Karnage glared at Richter's incoming boots and spat. A feral anger burned in his heart, kindled in seething growls, and it burned hotter than any sense of fear for life. He waited for Richter to get close, right up until the grizzly reached for him...
Karnage sprang to his feet and stunned Richter with a fierce blitz of knuckles, claws, and teeth. In no time he was on top of Richter's shoulders, wailing away relentlessly on the back of his head.
The big bear staggered and yelped and his arms flailing as he tried to smack the pirate loose. Then he finally got his hand on a wrinkle on Karnage's coat, and whipped him to the floor. Karnage jumped up like he had landed on a spring, but this time was grabbed by the neck and pinned down by a pinching grip. Richter piled the bulk of his weight onto the pirate's throat, frothy drool on the corner of his lip, taking vengeful pleasure in the pirate's red eyes and agonized wheezing.
"I'm gonna throw you off your own godforsaken ship," he growled. Starting on his good leg, Richter stood up, hoisting Karnage over his head in a one-handed choke hold. He admired the sight greatly, thinking it was the next best thing to seeing the pirate's head in a noose. "But first, I just want to know one thing," he said. While Karnage kicked futilely, Richter brought him closer so he could speak close to the pirate's ear. "Does this hurt?"
Karnage wrangled his fingertips slightly in Richter's grip, just enough to utter a few words. "You turned your back on the boy," he croaked. He closed his eyes, as if flinching.
A chill went up Richter's spine, perhaps by some uncanny instinct or premenision he sensed that Karnage was not bluffing. He turned around, Karnage still firmly in his clutches, and there was Kit, fallen on his side, eyeing him coldly down the barrel of the grappling gun. Negotiations were through before Richter even opened his mouth to bargain. Kit yanked the trigger, the hook shot forth with bullet-like velocity, slammed into Richter square in the chest and ricocheted away. Like a great and ancient sequoia cut down in the forest, the grizzly tottered backwards slowly and fell stiffly. His shoulders went over the edge of the prow, and in an instant the rest of him slid off as well, though with a last bit of his wits he caught onto the ledge with one hand.
Karnage writhed on the floor, holding his neck, gasping precious air back into his lungs. When he saw Richter's hand clamped onto the ledge, he crawled for his cutlass nearby, and back to Richter to relieve him of his fingers.
"Wait, don't!" rasped Richter. Karnage peered over the ledge, with his blade pointed at the grizzly's head. He saw fear in Richter's eyes, panicked and pleading for mercy. It took him aback, and he allowed Richter to get a second hand on the ledge. "You... y-you win..."
Karnage was quick to snap out of it. He brought the hilt of his sword over his head and was about to run Richter through, the ire of all the pain and trouble this foe had forced upon him flashing boldly before his eyes. His arms were practically frozen, though, hardened like cement, and he felt Kit staring at him like a hotlamp against his back. He gripped his cutlass tighter... this was between him and Richter, who he had already made the mistake of sparing before.
"You don't have to do this," piped Richter weakly. "I give up!"
"Shut up," snarled Karnage. The fact that he was even still there to tell him to 'shut up' was driving him mad; this was taking way too long. Every piratical fiber in his body was screaming with clear directive to end Richter's existence before hesitation cost him dearly. But then, Richter was barely breathing, and could not muster the strength to pull himself up. Would it have been so heartless and cold-blooded to slay him when he was so vulnerable? And what was wrong with heartless, he questioned. Heartless had made him feared, had made him criminally wealthy, and had established his command.
It also lost him the one person in the world who thought something good of him.
Karnage grumbled resignedly, lowered his blade to his side, and at length moved away from the edge. If he wasn't going to let Richter have it, he certainly wasn't going to help him up. He grinned, victoriously, and expected some nod of approval from the boy, but Kit was pointing frantically for him to turn around.
Richter had lunged up in a last-ditch effort and with a swipe of his arm swept Karnage's feet away, and grabbed hold of Karnage's leg to pull him over. He received, in quick turn, the heel of the pirate's boot kicked into his nose; there was a snap of broken cartilage and Richter was gone.
On board the Sea Duck, Baloo was distantly circling around the front of the Iron Vulture, glancing for any landing opportunity out his side window, when he saw a large figure plummeting from the airship. "Holy guacamole," he started, "somebody's fallin'!"
Not three syllables into Baloo's exclamation did the dragon come swooping down under the Iron Vulture and caught the falling body in its maw; with a shake of its head, spat it back out in several burning pieces.
"What? What was it?" asked Rebecca.
Baloo gulped, speechless. If not for his gray fur, he would have been pale as a hospital sheet. "Oh... nothin'... nothin' at all..." His voice was shaky, and suddenly he shouted, "Whoa, watch out!"
They yelped as the the Sea Duck went into a rolling tumble, caught in a swift storm of smoke and darkness as the dragon's soared above them.
"It can't slow down," Baloo remarked, as he figured out which way was up. An idea was brightening his countenance. "It's like a plane that's too heavy... if it can't keep the wind on its wings fast enough, it can't fly!" He turned his plane straight for the Iron Vulture. "That's why it's makin' long passes, it can't cut corners this high! If we can get in there while it's flyin' away... yeah, it's crazy enough to work!"
Rebecca smiled through her teeth. "Crazy. Yay."
Don Karnage had not a moment's respite over the fate of one enemy; the deadliest yet, in his plain view, was turning sharply to make another charge at the Iron Vulture. Against the bright horizon it appeared as a dark tear in the very sky, and it seemed but an instant before it was approaching again. He scampered from the ship's prow fast enough that his boots barely caught traction on the metal floor.
"Nice shot," panted Karnage. Kit threw the grappling gun away, with much disdain for it, and Karnage helped him to stand on his one good foot. "Though late as always, of course."
"Yeah, real nice," Kit said grimly. "I made him fall."
"You did?" Karnage sputtered a weak guffaw. "Stop flattering yourself!"
Will, Dumptruck and Mad Dog saw them as he was running through the hangar, calling for the captain. "What the heck are you guys doin' out there?" Will cried. "Trollin' dragon bait?"
"Here it comes!" screamed Mad Dog.
They could hear the wind whipping under its wings as it descended upon the Iron Vulture, this time not as a charging bull but as a perching hawk; it landed on top of the airship on all fours, talons piercing and clamping concrete and metal, with its wings wrapped around and under the hull. The ship's rotors chipped at its feet, which apart from annoying it seemed to pique its curiosity. While the airship was struggling not to sink toward the jungle faster than it was, the dragon glanced around, as if trying to figure out what type of creature it was fighting.
Any conclusions it drew were unlikely satisfying, as it was quick to howl furiously and unleash a river of flame over the flight deck. When that yielded no painful response from its giant rival, the beast in two sweeping strikes obliterated the ship's rising rudder and smashed apart four rotors before fanning its wings and leaping into the air. The Iron Vulture was sent spinning and tilting erratically behind it.
Meanwhile the Sea Duck stayed on straight aim for the pirate ship. Rebecca looked at the spinning Iron Vulture through her fingers as she covered her face. "You were saying it couldn't slow down?"
"Hey, they never taught dragons in ground school!" said Baloo. The airship had become somewhat stable again, the Sea Duck was poised to make a very ungraceful landing into the Vulture's gaping mouth. "If there's one good thing, it's that I've at least done this once before!"
"And you tore the plane in half doing it!"
"Yeah, well... practice makes perfect," he muttered nervously. He lowered the plane's landing gear with a pull of a lever.
The Iron Vulture's hangar was now flooded with clamoring pirates looking for parachutes and planes that had not yet been wrecked too far to fly.
"We gotta abandon ship!" pleaded Ratchet to the captain. "We ain't got a choice! One more hit like that and we're through!"
"I will not lose the Iron Vulture!" fumed Karnage. "We can draw it away and blast it with the big guns!"
"Boss, we can't play cat and mouse with that thing!" said Will. "It's... it's!" The furious and defiant glint in the captain's eyes told him exactly how much he was considering his options. Will sighed. "For cryin' out loud, then, at least make sure to take Dumptruck with you. Maybe if it eats him it'll leave the rest of us alone!"
"Get the guns loaded!" ordered Karnage. "Go! And get a path cleared for these piece-of-junk planes!"
"You gotta listen to these guys for once!" said Kit. Stepping in front of Karnage didn't keep him from being brushed aside as the captain went for the nearest flyable CT-37.
"Go bandage your foot," was all Karnage would reply.
"It's just a ship," said Kit, limping and hopping hastily to keep up with his steps. "I'm sure you can steal another just like it!" He yanked on Karnage's coat, but it was so futile that he might as well had been invisible. "Cap-tain, you better not!" If there was nothing else to grab his attention, he ditched tugging on his coat and went for his tail instead.
"Yeow!" yelped Karnage. He turned and slapped Kit's hands away. "Stop that!"
"What do you think you're gonna do if it chases you, huh?" asked Kit angrily. "What's worth it? Only an idiot would be caught flying out there!"
"Look out, incoming!" a pirate yelled, and the crew braced themselves for another thrashing from the dragon, though instead the Sea Duck burst inside, slamming its belly harshly on the floor. From there its braking landing wheels squealed and burned marks in their tracks, and the seaplane knocked its own path clear through the clutter of the hangar, until it skid to a halt over the bombay doors.
Karnage groaned lengthily. "Well, you were right for once, boy."
Kit's eyes were wide in disbelief. "No way... Baloo? Baloo!" A big smile swept across his face, and then vanished as he glanced at Karnage. "Uh-oh..."
"The big uh-oh," said Karnage. To the crew, which was about to circle the intruding plane, he yelled, "Guns and planes, I gave you orders! I will deal with this fool Baloo."
"Ha! We're in!" cheered Baloo. "In one piece, too!"
Rebecca sunk in her seat before any bullets started flying through the windshield. "Do you think anyone noticed?" she asked dryly.
"Hey, there's Kit!" said Baloo. "He sees me! Keep the engines warm, I'm gonna get him!"
As Baloo jumped out of the plane, Rebecca held her tongue to offer any words of caution or concern. At this juncture, 'be careful' seemed like it would have done a fat load of good. She had a sinking feeling, though she realized it was not her stomach... it was the plane. The airship's bombay doors, weakened from the dragon's strikes, were creaking open.
"Lil' Britches!" bellowed Baloo. "I'm here, kiddo!" He saw Kit limping, and seeing he was hurt made a beeline for him with open arms, not so much noticing who the boy was holding onto to keep his balance. He was met quite suddenly by the sharp end of Don Karnage's cutlass.
"Well well, look who came all this way to waste his pathetic time!" said Karnage. He kept one hand on Kit's shoulder, drawing him to his side and out of Baloo's reach. "I will give you one chance to drag your bozo of a bear-napper self far, far away! One chance before you begin to bleed."
Sword or no sword, Baloo's fists were clenched fiercely. They glared at each other with menacing wagers of just who exactly was going to get hurt. "Let 'im go, Karny! I ain't leavin' without Kit!"
"He is exactly where he belongs!" growled Karnage.
"He's my navigator!"
"He was my boy before he was your navigator!"
"Gu-uys," said Kit, "this really is a bad time!"
The Iron Vulture was slammed again by another vicious blow, and with a loud electric buzz, every light inside went dark, some of them exploding. Baloo fell on his backside, and Karnage to his knee, though even through the rocking quake he was adamant not to lose his position between Baloo and the boy.
The captain had a grimace of absolute dread as he regarded the airship's fate; its engines sputtered and wheezed, and its nose dipped toward the treetops; were it a living beast it was gasping its last breaths and about to utter a death rattle. There was smoke creeping across the ceiling from fires unseen, and the phrase 'abandon ship' was being hollered left and right. He could see outside the prow how high the ship was yet flying, and once the engines gave out altogether... he realized not everyone was bound to survive.
Abruptly, with loath reluctance, he pushed Kit in front of Baloo. "Here! Get him out of here before ― just go!" he snapped.
"Hey, wait a minute!" cried Kit, but Karnage was already darting to the nearest attack plane.
Baloo snatched Kit in his arms and ran for the Sea Duck. "C'mon, better not wait for a second invitation!" he said.
Kit looked back at Karnage, watching him jump into a CT-37 and fire up its engine; he could not help but wonder if that would be the last he ever saw of him.
"What the ― my plane!" shouted Baloo. The bombay doors were cracked almost halfway, and the seaplane was sinking fast from the ship. "Hold on, kiddo, gotta double-time it!"
"Baloo! Kit!" Rebecca held the cockpit door open, shouting for them to hurry. Just as Baloo lunged to get one hand on the plane's door, the bombay doors collapsed, and he, Kit, and the Sea Duck plummeted toward the jungle.
The Sea Duck fell immediately into a flat spin, Baloo did all he could just to hang on, but Kit had slipped from him. Baloo yelped and tried to swipe him out of the air; he could not reach before Kit was tumbling away, his crying out for help more piercing than the wind roaring in their ears.
With Rebecca's help, dizzied as she was, Baloo pulled himself into the cockpit and into the pilot's seat. "Where's Kit?" she asked.
"Workin' on it!" said Baloo. The world outside the windshield was whisking by in a blurry circle. In a panicked frenzy, he flipped a number of switches and wrangled the flight yoke for control. "C'mon, baby, pull it together! Pull it together right now!"
As if by his command, the Sea Duck turned a steady course. Baloo spied Kit falling, already much lower than the plane. He steered into a fast dive and rolled down his side window, with his eyes solely locked on the boy. He had mere seconds.
By foot and yard, the Sea Duck was closing in with Kit, who saw Baloo's arm stretching out the window. Kit reached his hands out to catch Baloo's, for what good it might do him given all the aerial somersaults he was caught up in.
"Please get him," muttered Rebecca quietly. Her eyes were closed. "Please, please please..."
Finally Baloo was close enough to read Kit's lips as he called out for him. The rolling jungle canopy was coming up fast. He got ready to grab the boy's arm, when a CT-37 cut under the Sea Duck's nose and snatched Kit out of the sky!
Baloo and Rebecca yelped, but they had no time to immediately piece together what happened. Baloo pulled the flight yoke back with all his strength, sinking them into their seats; the Sea Duck dipped into the jungle and sprang up into the sky, clipping a rooster's tail of leaves from the treetops in its path.
Don Karnage wanted to throw an obscene gesture at Baloo, though presently he could do little more than cough and try to un-hunch himself with Kit landing to hard into his lap. He had seen Kit falling and raced Baloo to save him.
"Oowww..." groaned Kit. He winced at the pain in his toe, and it was no small effort between him and Karnage to share the cramped cockpit seat, which left Kit smooshed against the side. "Thanks... that was all a little better than hitting the ground."
"It was no barrel of monkeys for me, either," croaked Karnage. "If I left it to Mister What's-his-slow-poking-face to catch you in time, splat!"
Kit searched upward, seeing the Iron Vulture wounded but seemingly left at peace. Other pirates in their planes darted around the ship. "Where's the dragon?"
Karange wouldn't have admitted that he did not know ― how do you lose something that big, after all ― though he looked around with the same question.
"It didn't just disappear," said Kit. But come to think of it, what did he know about presumably immortal beings? There was nothing of the sort ever mentioned in a flight manual. "Uh... did it?"
Karnage's plane was just then enveloped in a shadow. Kit glanced at the Iron Vulture again, and how hopeful it would have been to have seen the aura of the sun behind it, but no such luck. The sun was at their back. He didn't want to look, it seemed better judgement not to; ignorance was bliss and what you didn't know couldn't hurt you... and whoever said those things were obviously never swallowed whole by a giant, fire-filled maw. So, he looked. He went back to wishing he had not.
"I hope you've learned some awesome tricks for this plane," he said. "It's picked out a favorite!"
"Well of course it has," seethed Karnage. "If it was not chasing me, I would not know what to do!"
A stream of flame shot for the plane, and blew under its belly; Karnage felt the heat under his boots, and as the fire consumed the air, the plane had nothing to fly through. With its tail smoking, it took a sudden nose-dive toward the broad and glowing red crater of Mount Seren.
"Whoa!" yelled Kit. "Volcano! Volcano!"
"I see it, I see it!" Karnage had a strangulating grip with both his hands on the flight stick; the controls felt like they were stuck, if not melted, and the stick was barely budging; he could not pull the plane up. "Who is doing the flying around here?"
"But you're flying right into it!"
"You would prefer to step out?" said Karnage. He grunted as he pulled on the flight stick, so much that he had pulled himself out of his seat. They were falling like a stone into the pit of the volcano. "Boy... help!"
Kit hurriedly squeezed between the stick and the dash and pushed the stick from the other side. The plane's tail made a cracking noise as the flaps snapped loose, and then began a hard upward turn just as it crossed inside the volcano, which was deeper than they had imagined; it seemed like an entire skyscraper could fit inside before reaching at last a lake of boiling red lava.
As they approached the other side, pulling near vertical, Karnage was coaxing the plane with muttered threats for it to muster enough power to get them up and over the edge of the crater. Kit knew, though he kept his mouth shut for the sake of hope otherwise, there was a known conflict between steep upward climbs and CT-37's... they did not go well. And, hope was not prevailing. The plane sputtered, and just before it was actually about to rise above the edge, the propeller died.
Karnage's fist angrily slammed into the console, smashing the speedometer in pieces. The plane hung in midair for but brief moment before sliding into the depths of the volcano, and falling back they just missed the dragon's lunging, snapping jaws.
"For cryin' out loud, we almost made it!" said Kit. "Try going in circles and pull up easy! We can do it!"
"Stop back-seat flying," spat Karnage. It was not as if he had much of a choice, anyway. The volcano was well wide enough for him to keep turning... though that idea was quickly disputed when the dragon landed and perched on the caldera's edge, snarling at them.
Coming around, Karnage spied in the shadows a great cave, no doubt where the dragon had emerged from. A stream of lava oozed from its mouth and revealed a glowing path inside itself, and rather than wait for the dragon to rain hell on them, flying full speed through unknown depths of a hot, volcanic cavern hardly seemed so bad.
"That's underground!" cried Kit. "Are you crazy?"
Presently Karnage was not even phased by the word. "Right now, yes!"
Kit sighed and sank in the seat. "Just thought I'd ask..."
The lava lit the cavern a golden red, and revealed at their sides a maze of smoke billows and mighty pillars of stalagmites and looming stalactites.
Seconds after crossing into the cave, there was a resounding thud heard behind them, even over the noise of the plane's engine. The dragon was following them, and while it had not the room to fly, it galloped behind, its legs easily clearing the lava stream under the breadth of its body. Its talons shattered chunks out of the ground with each stride.
Karnage was scandalized when he realized the beast was still giving him its undivided attention, just as the smaller white dragon had done. "What?! Why me? It chases me over and over ― I would expect it from the women, but those cankerous creatures ― why, why, why!"
Now that Karnage had mentioned it, it had dawned on Kit. He remembered how the dragon had sniffed him out when they first encountered it. "The egg! That goop that was all over you, it's tracking you like a bloodhound!"
Karnage suddenly forgot what was chasing him and threateningly narrowed his eyes at Kit. "Are you telling me I stink?"
"You don't have anything more important to worry about?"
The captain grumbled and jinked the plane to the left... he also couldn't resist putting his sleeve to his nose and taking a whiff, just to check for himself.
"Now what are you doin'?" asked Kit, seeing as they were now headed for a cluster of stalagmites the size of sequoias.
"Getting away from it, what else," replied Karnage.
"Oh, well, what a dumb question!" Kit gripped onto the outer edge of the cockpit. The path ahead did not look like a smooth ride.
Karnage fired a barrage of bullets into the spikes to see if he could cut a narrow path through them just big enough for the plane; they crumbled on the outside but did not fall... so much for that idea. There were rows of them, jutting from the top and bottom of the cavern like a forest of giant fangs, and in a blink the plane was in the midst of it.
On the edge of his seat, Karnage was giving emphasis to the notion that a pilot could fly by the seat of his pants. He rolled and weaved the plane left and right in short order, around, under, over and between the stone spikes. Kit dared to keep his eyes open, never sure when the next jink was going to be their last.
There were sharp clashing noises such as stone behind struck and shattered; what obstacles Karnage had to maneuver around the dragon merely plowed through, though after so many it was slowed enough that the plane gained a distance from it.
Kit glanced back, surprised. "It worked!"
"It did?" blinked Karnage. "I mean ― of course it did!"
"But we're running out of cave!" warned Kit; they suddenly approached a solid rock wall.
"Ooh," fumed Karnage, "they always put these things in the most preposterous places!" It was there then that Karnage turned the plane tightly around the cavern, where he found that same stream of lava again, and darted straight away over it.
The dragon was then at their two o'clock position, zeroed in and gaining on them, madly bulldozing through the stone spikes and pillars. By the alarmed expression swept across Karnage's face, this was not a turn of events he was hoping for. Still, he eyed the mouth of the cave daringly and gunned for it full throttle.
"Head down, boy!" he ordered, and he leaned in close to the plane's tiny windshield to cover his face.
"W-we're flying closer to it!"
"Duck!" yelled Karnage. The dragon lunged and spouted a jet of flame as the plane passed by it, but in doing so it hit its head against a particularly large overhanging stalactite, just enough to keep the fire inches off the plane's tail.
Kit felt the top of his head to make sure it was not on fire. "Yipe!"
"I told you, duck!" smirked Karnage, but more so gloating over the dragon's miss.
Kit gave him a nasty glare. "What duck?"
Though the dragon never relented its chase, Kit and Karnage flew out of the cavern far enough from the beast's flame-throwing range to have a viable chance at climbing out of the volcano. Karnage raised the plane's nose steadily, aiming for the caldera's edge on the far side.
They did not get far before the dragon snaked its head and neck from the cavern. It threatened them with a scream of thunder, and stretched its claw over the cavern's mouth in an attempt to climb the crater's wall, taking pained and resentful care not to fall into the lake of lava below.
"Go, go!" cheered Kit. "It's scared of falling! We're gonna make it!"
They fell under another great shadow, and for once it was not the dragon but the Iron Vulture, with its broken bombay doors aligned over their heads, and before they knew it, bombs were falling past the plane.
"What ― !" Karnage shouted at his ship as if someone was going to hear him. "No! Wait until we are outside! You bumbling bunch of dumbells!"
"Where do you come up with these names?" cringed Kit.
"Poetry," snapped Karnage. "Now shut up!"
The dragon slowly stepped along the side of the caldera with its front claws digging into it until it was halfway out, enough to wrangle its wings free to stretch, which veiled a part of the crater like an outstretched cloak. One of the bombs managed to strike and exploded over its back; it caused the beast to wail, but when the fireball dissipated it had done little else to harm or move it. It did force the beast to retract its wings, lest it suffer larger rends than it already had.
Big fiery explosions erupted from the lava as missed bombs slammed into the bottom of the volcano. Through it all, the lava was placid and unphased saved for the burning splatter.
"I don't think volcanoes oughta be fed like that," said Kit. They could feel the sound of explosions below tickle the plane. Karnage was silent, intently watching ahead. Sweat flew from his brow in the wind. The engines were slowing in the climb and they were but a hundred yards from crossing out of the caldera. At the rate the plane was slowing, instincts told him that if he did not turn back, they were going to crash before getting high enough to exit; his hand over the flight stick was twitchy as he frantically deliberated what to do.
The dragon had its neck curved upward and watched them with a deadly snarl. It saw that they were about to leave its sight, and crouched its forelimbs to make a mighty jump. It leapt jaws-first at the plane, when a well-aimed (or likely very lucky) bomb struck the beast over its horned crown; in a deafening screech, its massive form twisted in mid-air, and it aimlessly collided into the side of the crater, where one of its wings swept wildly upward and swatted the plane up, over and free from the volcano in a long, errant arc.
The beast slid down the caldera, swiping about erratically to catch onto anything, and it had managed to finally sink its talons deep enough into the caldera to slow itself, when the very tip of its tail swooped down and brushed the molten red pool. It was then that a great rumbling seeped through the lava, and it began to seeth, sputter and rise from the bottom.
Kit and Karnage screamed a collective 'Yiiiiieeee!' as their plane was happlessly flung over the slopes of the volcano and across the waters of Lake Titicoocoo. Karnage wrestled with the fight stick to gain some semblance of control, and the stick ended up snapping off from the floor. He and Kit stopped screaming to blink in stunned surprise at the broken shaft in his hands, before Karnage resignedly tossed it over his shoulder.
"Hold on, boy!" he yelled. The plane was quickly over the shoreline of the lake and darting for the thick treetops.
"To what?"
"To me!"
Karnage pulled Kit's head against his chest and hunched over him, and they shut their eyes tight. The plane was rolling wildly and plunged on its side into the jungle, violently plowing a hole through a thicket of leaves, branches and vines; its wings were sheared off, the propeller broke away, and the fuselage was crumpled in like an aluminum can.
Then, at last, it came to a sudden halt.
When the crashing noises and jolts finally came to an end, Kit opened one eye. "You dead?" he asked.
Karnage took a deep breath and straightened his back. "Not yet ― whoa!" They fell out of the cockpit head-first to the foot of the trees; what was left of the plane was caught upside down in a tangle of vines.
"What about now," groaned Kit, sprawled on the ground.
"No, no... there is still too much pain to be dead," replied Karnage.
Kit staggered to his feet, staying light on the foot that hurt, which was now nicely swollen around his toes. "You got that right."
There was much noise from the distance, explosions and roaring. "We can't stop it," said Kit miserably. "I don't know what's worse, being stuck in the middle of the jungle again, or knowing that dragon's loose to kill everything in sight. If it finds us down here, what are we supposed to do?"
Karnage perked an ear toward the clamor, and noticed that for all of what sounded terrible, it sounded far away. "It did not follow us," he thought aloud... then it struck him that the only thing present to divide the dragon's attention was the Iron Vulture. He suddenly bolted away. "My ship!"
Kit hobbled after him. "Hey! Wait for me!" He met the wolf at a nearby clearing where they could see Mount Seren from across the lake. There were waves breaking on the shore of the usually glassy water, and the ground trembled. The Iron Vulture had just unloaded the last bomb into the volcano, and the dragon's shrieks were agonized and piercing. The volcano erupted into a great blast of smoke, knocking the Iron Vulture from the sky, and the falling airship disappeared behind the mountain ridge. There were no parachutes seen.
Karnage fell to his knees. "No! Not my ship!" he lamented.
"Wow," gasped Kit. The Iron Vulture was never believed to be indestructible, though it most often seemed that way; even the times when it was under such heavy attack that it could not see its crew to their plundering fancies, it always shrugged off enough bullets and shells to carry the crew safely away. Cape Suzette's cannons would ravage its hull one day and see it looming in the horizon upon the next.
Karnage was devastated. He watched the mountains as if inwardly pleading for the ship to somehow rise again. "Gone," he muttered.
"I'm sorry," said Kit. He did know know what further condolences to offer, and he felt indifferent to the crew's fate. With the volcano erupting more fiercely by the second, there was not much room for contemplation. He was just glad he was not on the ship.
Black smoke bled vastly into the sky, and huge flames flickered over the top of the volcano. There the dragon rose, its claws gripping the mouth of the crater... and they were burning. Its head came next, roaring, flailing and immolated in a fire that was not its own. Its wings shot forth, only as skeleton and sinew, flinging globs of molten lava into the air.
Then an entire geyser of lava sprang as if spewed by all the wrath of hell itself, consuming the dragon in a thousand burning hands slithering over its flesh. It threw its head back, and from its gaping maw there was sudden silence. When it fell, the geyser subsided with it... the earth shook as if it were to rip itself apart, the trees rattled and animals fled terrified in a storm of falling leaves, and the imposing range of the Atronador Heights quivered, avalanches rolled from the snowy mountain slopes, and many peaks crumbled, collapsing onto themselves in shattered rocky knolls.
From the mountains a wave of dust flooded the jungle, blanketing the treetops as a foul gray mist. As it dissipated, the earthquake eased, and came to a halt altogether as the sun became less dim through all the haze.
Kit and Karnage were clamped onto each others arms, scared to move but their darting eyes, watching for a chasm to crack beneath their feet. Wild waves from the lake had them drenched, and before them Mount Seren had disappeared, with nothing left but a great heap of smoldering rubble.
At length, Kit uttered a thought that they were both wondering: "D-did we do that?"
They sat on the shore for a long moment, awestruck at the transformed landscape. Karnage began to admire it like an artist proud of his latest sculpture. He put his forefingers and thumbs together in a square shape and looked through them at the former volcano, imagining the scene as through the lens of a camera. "I want to see the dragon part again!"
Kit rolled his eyes, but then thought about it and shrugged in agreement. "That was the best part."
One of the CT-37's still circling the sky swung low enough near the lake that the pirate inside could be seen signaling them with a wave. Whatever he was telling them, it might as well have been a taunting goodbye, because none of the planes made an attempt to touch down. "So, now what?" asked Kit. "Those knuckleheads are gonna fly off and leave us here."
For that, Karnage had no reply. His expression turned grim. The pirate planes were flying away... no ship, no crew. It had become very quiet and still; the jungle animals were still too frightened to make a peep, and naught was heard but the rustle of the wind in the trees... and then, from their backs, a bunch of mechanical clicking noises.
By the way Karnage was watching the distance so stoically, Kit wasn't sure if he had even heard anything, so he turned to look, and started. The noises were rifles being racked, and there were a dozen Alpacatan soldiers with their guns pointed at them. "We have... company," he said quietly.
"Mm-hm," replied Karnage, seemingly unbothered. His eyes were narrowed at something above the lake.
"They have guns," said Kit.
"That would be less than something new," replied Karnage.
One of the soldiers called out, "Pirata Karnage! Surrender!"
With nowhere to run or hide, Kit regarded Karnage curiously. There was no hint of alarm on his face, but a bold glint growing in his eyes. His thumb caressed the hilt of his cutlass.
"We're in trouble," Kit whispered, in a tone that begged the captain not to do anything rash.
"It is me they want," said Karnage, thinking out loud. "You could just be one more helpless hostage, what would they know."
"No dice," Kit was quick to say. "I won't ditch you like that."
Karnage pointed to what he had been watching over the lake, where the Sea Duck was swinging down in the water toward their location. He raised an eyebrow at Kit, questioning if his answer would still stand.
Kit sighed, staring at the sand between his knees. "I don't want to hurt Baloo... but... I don't wanna leave you."
A soldier shouted at them again, "Your hands! Show them!"
With is back kept to the soldiers, Karnage rose to one knee, and winked at Kit as he offered the boy his hand. "Then we do what needs to be done, yes?"
"Does that mean surrendering?" asked Kit.
"Never!" Karnage whisked Kit from the ground and in a heartbeat faced the soldier's with the blade of sword under the boy's chin. "Away with the guns," he warned the soldiers, "or the scenery is going to get very messy!"
"Wha'... what are you doing?!"
"Act scared!" hissed Karnage.
"Act? I'm not bulletproof!"
The soldiers recoiled, though their weapons were still raised. They regarded the whispers shared between the two before them with confusion and suspicion. A familiar face stepped from the foliage and joined the soldiers, Rupo. He had no weapons, but a map rolled in his hand and a hiking backpack slung on his shoulders. Though he was surprised to suddenly meet the two right there, he shook his head incredulously at Karnage's threat. "Are we to believe you have a hostage?"
"Not my most sensational catch, perhaps," shrugged Karnage.
"He jests," Rupo said to the soldiers. "He will not hurt the child."
Karnage pulled Kit's head back by the hair and pressed his blade against his neck. "Try me," he growled .
"Ow! Don't try him!" piped Kit. He glared at Karnage and added, "He has no idea what he's doing!"
"What do you think will come of this?" asked Rupo. "If you cut him, you will be shot! How long do you plan we will all stand here like this?"
"Oh, just long enough," answered Karnage.
Then Rupo spoke quietly to the soldiers, and one by one they lowered their guns. After that, he stepped closer to Karnage. "When Seren began to stir, and the ground trembled with Sargon's groans, I rode to the city, at the behest of my elders, to warn them."
"You knew that thing was there?" scowled Karnage, inadvertently jolting Kit's head.
"Watch it," grumbled Kit. He twisted Karnage's pinky, and the wolf stifled a yelp, so perhaps he got the message.
"I did not!" said Rupo. "Nor did the elders, exactly. I spoke of Seren and Sargon as spirits, and that is all our beliefs had known them to be, the old gods. But did I not warn you of an evil you would not understand, an evil we did not understand! The elders believed strongly that evil was attempting to break free into the world, and now we know! We saw him chase your dirigible in the sky... we saw Mount Seren collapse upon him. We saw the mountains..."
Rupo paused and swallowed, viewing the forever changed horizon of the mountain ridge he knew so well. "I gave an earnest warning to the officials, though they only laughed at me as superstitious. This morning as I rode back to my village, I was met by these men, who had been told by a scouting patrol that your ship was hovering near the Rainbow Canyon. I told them of you, and of your business here, and I agreed to guide them to the canyon. And then shortly, we saw the battle ensue in the sky. I fear you found Rhamastan's gates in the canyon, did you not?
Rupo did not wait for a reply. "It was you who lured him. It was your ship over the jungle when he sprung free... it was your ship that he combatted. You trespassed Rhamastan and delved where the living no longer belong, and that which may yet live there can never be disturbed. If there are more of Sargon's kind deep in the earth, they must keep there.
"It may be that Seren kept her promise, and having finally defeated Sargon brought the mountains down over the Ancient Caves, that no fool might trespass there again. But we must know, and quickly. Tell me what you know of the gate; if it still stands, we must seal it."
"Seal it?" said Karnage, sneering at him incredulously. "And you are one estupid gato if you think these other estupid gatos would not try to plunder everything inside!"
"I am aware that may be likely," said Rupo, "but my kin does not have the resources to do it ourselves. Our choices are limited."
Sea Duck splashed into the lake and arrived behind Karnage, coming to a hasty halt over the silty shore. Rebecca and Baloo jumped out, landing knee-deep in the water. "Karny, wait! Don't hurt 'im!"
"About time," muttered Karnage. He turned and swiped his sword in Baloo's direction, keeping a firm grip on Kit. "Back, you! All of you! Back, back, back!"
"Look, he ain't done nothin' to you," said Baloo... but then he thought about that statement a bit more. "Er, lately... I hope. Just what do ya want, anyway?"
With a nod of his head, Karnage directed Baloo and Rebecca away from the Sea Duck, and slowly back stepped with Kit toward the plane. "If you do not mind, I will be making another dashing getaway, leaving you all to make an acquaintanceship with each other in this lovely, luscious, stinking-like-llama-spit jungle!"
Just then, like an invisible general had yelled to his troops 'Ready, aim...,' the soldiers raised their rifles with clear intent to commence firing... a lot.
"Eep," piped Karnage. He pulled Kit to the ground, and the soldiers fired at will over their heads... over the Sea Duck... and they shot again and again. When it was obvious that he was not their target, Karnage reared his head up, and heard an explosive blast behind him reply to the soldiers gunfire. It was a blast he knew... those cannons...
There was the Iron Vulture, dented, scarred, and smoking, flying low over the lake, engines chugging, bobbing up and down as an injured animal limps. Its front cannons were extended, and a reckless shot parted the water before it in massive splash that rose as high as the ship itself. When the splash fell back to the lake, there was a line of pirates visible on the edge of the prow, firing musket rounds at the soldiers. There they also dropped a rope ladder, which dragged along as they approached the shore.
The soldiers at once ran out of bullets, their rifles merely clicking empty. Another blast from the Iron Vulture's cannons ripped over them aimlessly, shattering trees... the soldiers cried for their lives and scattered into the jungle, Rupo among them. Once the ladder was near enough, Karnage jumped on. The Iron Vulture swayed upward and began the ascent to the open sky when Karnage realized he was the only one doing the climbing.
Kit was staring the Iron Vulture like the mere presence of the airship had him stunned, and that was not far from the truth, surprised as he was to see the selfish knaves rally to save their captain. Baloo was yelling his name; he and Rebecca had taken cover behind a giant kapok tree. Kit looked back at them; Baloo was reaching out his arms toward him.
"No, look up!" shouted Karnage. "You will get over them!" He slid down several rungs until he was near ground level again, but he had run out of ladder. He reached his arm as far as it would stretch toward the boy. "Come on, boy! Hurry!"
Kit's hand went up; for the things he felt now, once again, for the captain ― he didn't want it to end. His eyes stung with tears as Baloo kept crying out for him. His hand went down, and he staggered a step away from the ladder. The captain could only read his lips as the boy looked up at him, 'I'm sorry.'
Rifle shots began to blast from afar at the airship again as some of the soldiers hastily reloaded their guns. Lest he take one of those bullets himself, Karnage scaled up the ladder quickly.
Soon Baloo and Rebecca approached Kit's side. "Kit, are you okay?" asked Rebecca.
Kit nodded, watching the last trace of smoke from the Iron Vulture fade behind the trees. A multitude of second guesses stormed his mind, if he had been on that ship as it rocked away from the jungle, what would have become in the days, weeks and even years, seeing himself as Karnage had, free as the wind, defiantly pursuing the wealth and adventure of a whole world under a big sky, and in fact he could see it quite clearly. The things he wanted, or thought he wanted, were now a sudden and confusing blur. For the present, though, he had saved himself and Baloo a great deal of heartache, and in that much he felt that he had done the right thing; and there was some consolation that Karnage still had his ship and crew, and he would be okay, granted another day to do all the scoundrel things to which a pirate was entitled. He just could not shake the feeling that he wanted to be part of it.
"Aw, come 'ere, you," said Baloo, and he picked Kit up and held him in a gentle embrace. In a heavy and relieved sigh, he finally purged the fearful doubts that the present moment would not come. With his finger he brushed Kit's hair passed the bloodied scab over his brow, and he could only wonder if over any given moment in the past week how close those doubts came to being true. "Dangit, kid, I don't know where to begin."
"I'm sorry, Baloo," said Kit, burying his face into the big bear's shoulder. "None of this should have happened."
"Shh, yer safe now," said Baloo. "But you an' me gotta have a talk about you up an' takin' off like ― " Baloo paused when Kit squeezed his arms around his neck tighter, and he thought he might have heard a sniffle. Softly, he chuckled in Kit's ear, "Heh-hey, it's okay, buddy. We're goin' home."
Rebecca spied between the trees a man there she did not know, a cougar in glasses, curiously watching them all. He nodded as if he was gaining some sort of understanding, and he curtly waved goodbye before disappearing behind the trees. Rebecca waved back, awkward and perplexing as it was, it just seemed like the proper thing to do. She turned to Kit, patted and rubbed his back; he was still and silent, and seemed to have melted in Baloo's arms. "I think he's a bit overwhelmed that it's all finally over," she said.
"Yeah, an' he ain't the only one," said Baloo.
'Over,' thought Kit. It seemed consoling that they believed so.
The next afternoon, the scientist who a year prior engineered the sub-electron amplifier for Khan Industries was summoned to Shere Khan's office.
The news from Alpacatan was not spreading fast, as even those who were there to witness the strange events were not certain what had happened. Nothing was likely to make a major newspaper headline or breaking news over the global radio waves, but what passed through telegraph and telephone was news of a city reeling from a massive earthquake, mountains said to have shifted before people's very eyes, and strange rumors of two flying vessels locked in battle over the jungle. However, Shere Khan had been relayed a more detailed account through witnesses onboard his zeppelin fleet, who watched through telescopes and binoculars.
The scientist, a short, floppy-eared rabbit with big round spectacles and a white coat, stood before Khan's desk with a presentation easel, which had a stack of big charts that he was eager to discuss, the first being an aerial photograph of the Atronador Basin.
"Now, the jungle sits in a giant crater," he said. "It's possible the incenderous quartz was part of a fallen meteor from a prehistoric era, and is entirely unique to that location..."
The scientist prattled on, for he had made hasty but repeated practice of the words he would speak shortly beforehand. Shere Khan had the back of his chair turned toward him, still as frozen ice. Even sitting before a curtainless window in broad daylight, the sun seemed to shrink away before its rays reached Khan's face. Somehow the scientist could picture Khan's impatient frown, warning him to stop wasting time, though Khan would usually have just cut in and told him to get to the point. Some matter was weighing heavy on his mind. The scientist wondered if he was even being listened to at all.
The scientist turned the easel to a new page, this one showing a downward sloping curve against a complicated graph, full of penciled-in notes and equations. He noted Khan's odd silence with more than a little anxiety. "Regarding the substance's energy lifespan..."
"How did we lose the excavation site," Khan suddenly demanded.
The scientist gulped. Though he was back in familiar territory with Khan's impatience, now it was a matter of speaking the exact right words fast enough before Khan lost his temper. "Well, s-sir, the tests, our t-tests, concluded that the incenderous quartz was volatile when exposed to certain conditions or force, such as exposure t-to fire..."
Khan's chair stirred just a little; he was leaning forward as if about to stand up.
His employee spoke faster than before: "Whatever incited the volcano's eruption, it must have been severe. If some of the mountains actually collapsed, that suggests that there was a vast system of caverns underneath that imploded. The best theory is that the surge of lava suddenly flooding parts of these caverns caused the incenderous quartz to ignite, and thus a chain reaction throughout the entire system!"
The scientist caught his breath and recoiled behind his easel. At length, Khan leaned back in his chair with an air of calmness, be it fraudulent or not.
"And what likelihood exists that more samples of the stone can still be found at the site?" asked Khan.
"It... may be astronomical, at best, sir," replied the scientist. "If it was as densely embedded as Richter reported in yesterday's transmission, it would mean finding an area where it was much more sparse. Of course, if I could manage to speak with Mr. Richter when he returns, the answers he'll provide about ― "
Khan's hand rose from the arm of his chair, signaling the scientist to cease speaking. "That will be all, thank you."
Back at Higher for Hire, the day for Kit Cloudkicker had consisted mostly of a doctor's visit and a talking to from Baloo and Rebecca. He lay on his bed, his head and foot bandaged. It was perhaps splendid timing to be nursing a sprained toe, given that it seemed, per the lectures he just got about how dangerous and irresponsible it was for him to take off on a whim as he did, he was as grounded as a wrecked airplane.
There were worse spots to be; for now, there were no chirping crickets or croaking frogs, no forked tongues or bear-eating plants, no sudden falls or giant beasts at his heels. For now there were comic books and a pillow propped against his back.
He had quite a story to tell, and he explained most if it freely, how Karnage helped him, and how he helped Karnage, even to help him escape from capture. Blowing up a gas station, robbing a store, well... some things didn't need to be mentioned. He told of marvelous treasures and beholding fantastic ancient sights, and he affirmed the accusations made by Bagheera and Tyler, stating his reasons flatly and without remorse. In such matters, narrow as the scope was kept, he had spoken more of the past week with Don Karnage than he had ever mentioned of the year he spent under the pirate's wing. For once, though, as he admitted these things, he did not worry about Baloo understanding his motives. He didn't care what they thought.
Baloo walked into the room with two heaping bowls of ice cream. "I think I know just the thing to help yer foot feel better," he said with a wink.
Darned if he wasn't right, thought Kit. If it didn't help the swelling, it at least plastered a grin on his face. "Yeah, good thinkin'! Thought I was supposed to be in trouble, though."
"Yeah, but I missed ya too much," said Baloo. He sat at the side of Kit's bed and handed him one of the bowls, and noticed Kit was still wearing that red scarf around his neck; as they were flying back home he had not bothered to ask where he got it from, though he did think it was a shame that he lost his ballcap. "Yer neck cold, or are ya gonna go rob a bank on one wheel?" Playfully, he pulled the scarf over Kit's nose. "What're they gonna call ya, the hop-along bandit?"
"No," Kit giggled. "I'm just tryin' it out, to see how I like it."
"If it floats yer boat," shrugged Baloo. They clunked their ice cream bowls together in a 'cheers' sort of fashion and dug in with their spoons. "Wildcat's tryin' to straighten out yer board, by the way. You'll be back on it before ya know it."
Their bedroom window suddenly shook when explosions rocked the city's bay. The Cape Suzette cannons were once again unfettered against their old nemesis.
"What, already?" asked Baloo. "H'oh boy, that guy just don't know when to quit, does he?"
Kit shook his head, leaning forward to see if he could catch a peak of the airship out the window. "I guess it's not too big of a surprise, is it?"
"Heck, part of me would be disappointed if he did," laughed Baloo. "Who else is gonna follow me into one of my pelican dives and end up underwater? But after a week like this, I bet you'd be happy as pie never to see that old pirate ship again."
The thunderous shooting slowed and at last came to a still. Kit gazed out the window, at the burning sunset peering as just a golden strip between the cliffs. Even as the Iron Vulture drifted away unseen to those in the city, it had brought a message to every doorstep, though none heard it as it was truly meant save for one, for his ears heard amidst the cannon blasts a familiar taunting laughter, echoes of a spirit unyielding and unconquerable, vowing to all of Cape Suzette, if not the world, that there would always be the pirates, forever, nothing would keep them down, as long as a pirate could still dream, and as long as anyone could still dream of being a pirate.
Kit fluffed his pillow, reclined way back, and helped himself to a big spoonful of ice cream. He smiled, he couldn't help it. "I think we'll be seeing plenty of it."
~ fin.
