Storming: A Dieselpunk Adventure Read Free Page A

“Never starved yet, have we?”
    Rick clanked his plate onto the ground. “It’s been a narrow margin.” He rose from his crouch and brushed past Hitch. “If we don’t finish choreographing this sensational new act before the colonel arrives, we’re routed even if Earl is able to repair that wreck of yours again.”
    Hitch watched him go.
    “It’s all right.” Lilla retrieved Rick’s plate and offered it to Hitch. They couldn’t afford to let the food go to waste right now. “Rick’s upset because he says we don’t have enough money to get married yet.”
    To that, Hitch could only grunt. Lilla, bless her loyal heart, hadn’t been gifted with the most capacious of upstairs accommodations. Still, he hadn’t known how truly cramped they were until she’d fallen for Rick.
    Rick flew the other Jenny and did parachute drops. He’d been with Hitch for almost a year, which was almost a year too long for anybody to have to deal with an ego that outsized.
    The whole thing had worked—barely, but it had worked—until a competition last month in Oklahoma when Rick had announced, in front of half a dozen other pilots, that he’d been the first man to do a successful handkerchief pickup. That, of course, was downright hogwash. The trick—of flying low over a pole and using a hook attached to the bottom wing to snag a handkerchief off the top—had been around a whole lot longer than Rick Holmes.
    Without thinking, Hitch had snorted a laugh and called the lie for the malarkey it was. Rick had gotten about as red in the face as it was possible to get without exploding every single one of his blood vessels. He’d stomped off without another word—but Hitch had been hearing about it ever since. Rick wasn’t about to leave without getting paid, and Hitch couldn’t fire him until he had the money, but that day was coming and they both knew it.
    For now though, he still needed Rick. Good pilots were hard to find these days, much less jumpers skilled enough to pull off this high-altitude stunt they were planning for the competition.
    Behind him, footsteps crunched through the grass. “Well, how’d she fly? Like a dream?”
    Hitch turned around. “You’re not going to believe what happened up there.”
    Beneath the upturned brim of his baseball cap, Earl Harper grinned. “Won’t I though? How about that speed? Didn’t I tell you? We more than doubled the horsepower. You should be getting ninety miles an hour, maybe a climb rate of five hundred feet per minute.” He smacked his hands together. “And with that reinforced frame I gave her, you know she’ll take a whole lot of beating. Hot dog, boy. They’re going to have a hard time trouncing us this week.”
    “About that...”
    The shadow of a day’s worth of black whiskers froze around Earl’s grin. “About what?” He glanced at Lilla.
    She turned to sit primly, knees bent, eyes studiously on the fire.
    Earl looked back at Hitch. “You busted it? Tell me you haven’t already busted that beautiful, brand-new Hispano-Suiza?”
    This was where it got tricky. Hitch paid for the planes. Hitch flew the planes. But once Earl got under the hood of anything with oil running through its veins, he thought it belonged to him.
    Hitch held out both hands. “Okay, look, I didn’t bust it. But there was this woman—”
    “Lilla?”
    “No, not Lilla...”
    Earl lowered his chin. He looked like a bulldog, thick all over and more than a little rumpled. “That’s what this is all about? I told you to wait until morning to take it out, but, no, it had to be tonight.” He turned around and talked to the darkness, both arms raised. “He wants to fly back to his hometown after nine years, he says. He wants to take the new engine out at night, he says. It’s all perfectly innocent, he says.” He turned back and prodded Hitch in the chest. “I thought you were done with the dames in this town!”
    Lilla turned her head. “You have a girl?”
    “She’s not my