The Midnight Country

Chapter 4

I’m not sure how much time passed, maybe five minutes, maybe twenty. All I know is that the sky had begun to lighten and that it was Eddy who spoke first, saying, “Hydrogen. They feed on hydrogen. We’re safe.”

I must have looked at him, because I remember clearly how pale he looked, how ill.

“Jupiter 6?” I said, although I already knew the answer.

“Why not?” He laughed a little to himself. “Cosmos. Carl Sagan. Hunters and floaters.”

“Someone needs to toggle the propane,” said Karen, absently, it seemed, as though she were a million miles away.

I looked at her to see a woman clearly in shock. “I’ll do it. Okay? You—just relax.” I looked at the apparatus for controlling the balloon. “The red lever?”

She nodded and sniffed, like a helpless little girl, and I climbed to my feet. Eddy grabbed my ankle.

“Wait. The cloud. Are we still in it?”

I scanned our surroundings. “Yes.”

“Okay, toggle it and get back down. Quickly!”

I toggled it and got back down.

Quickly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The cloud ... it’s ... I think it’s a form of camouflage. You know, like how octopuses squirt ink—but in this case it’s to confuse their prey, not predators. Right? Okay. So that means as long as that cloud’s there, we got trouble.”

“But you said they—”

“Feed on hydrogen, that’s right,” he said. “But they don’t know we’re running on hot air—not yet.”

“Which means—”

“Which means they’re checking us out, right now.”

I looked at the pink and purple clouds. “But wouldn’t they have a way to, I don’t know, sense when hydrogen is present?”

“I’m sure they do. Look, all I know is they just hit the jackpot with Kerber’s gas balloon, and it looked a lot like ours, all right?”

“Right,” I mumbled, seeing the truth of it. “And that’s not our only problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a giant meal called the Excelsior which could be hovering over the Super Bowl right now. Jesus. How many people does a stadium like that hold? 90,000? A hundred?”

No one said anything.

I climbed up and peeked over the basket’s edge.

Sure enough, through a hole in the marmalade clouds, the stadium had come into view, shining like a north star and already crowded with balloons—including the Excelsior. I looked at the bullhorn in the corner of the basket, the one Sean had said he used to communicate with people on the ground. At least there was a way to warn the crowd—if and when we got there.

“The burner—it needs to be triggered again,” said Karen, distantly. “And our altitude ... what is it?”

I looked at Eddy. The truth of it was, I was sort of hoping he’d take this one. But he only shook his head.

“Right,” I sighed at last. “Okay. Is that the altimeter?” I gestured at the readout next to the burner valve.

Karen nodded.

“Okay—hold my beer.”

And I counted to three.

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* * * *

What happened next happened very fast—so fast that I was unable to process the enormity of it until Eddy was long gone and so was most the floor, leaving us to dangle precariously as our feet sought the shattered plywood’s edges and we hung onto the cold, chromed burner supports for life. For Karen had stood with me as I reached for the red propane valve (to check the altimeter herself, presumably) and thus been spared falling into nothing when one of the creature’s knife-like tails penetrated the flooring—harpooning Eddy through his abdomen before jerking him clean through the plywood and dragging him screaming into the void.

But something else happened in that instant too, something which remains the single most terrifying aspect of the ordeal. For as we clung to the burner supports and tried to keep our feet on what was left of the floor, the head of one of the creatures darted from the fog—it was easily the size of a refrigerator laid on end—and just stopped: the tip of its nose all but touching my own and its huge eyes which were full of spirals regarding me with something like curiosity. Then it exhaled, blowing the hat off my head, and arced away into the mists, and as it went I felt a great rushing of wings as though a dozen others had suddenly abandoned their fascination with us and followed.

And then it was just us, Karen and I, gripping the burner supports and trying to keep our feet on what little remained to support them. And I knew that she knew we were safe now—at least from our Jovian hunters—but that we had a responsibility, too. For it was clear to both of us, I think, that the monsters had not merely lost interest but been lured away—by the promise of enough hydrogen to fill them all to bursting. By the promise of Ronald Trimp’s leviathan blimp, which now loomed large in the slowly clearing mists.

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