The gold bar made a dull thud as Jason set his tin of beans on it.
He was sitting in the cargo hold of the Icarus. Around him, stacked in messy pyramids, sat twenty tons of stolen bullion. A fortune. The GDP of a small nation.
He dug a spoon into the cold beans.
"Twenty million dollars," Jason muttered, chewing the tasteless mush. "And I can't buy a hot cup of coffee."
O'Malley leaned against the bulkhead, cleaning his Thompson submachine gun. The big Irishman looked tired. His eyes kept drifting from the gold to the empty shelves of the pantry.
"The crew is getting restless, Boss," O'Malley said. "They're staring at the gold like it's a woman. But you can't eat a woman, and you can't eat soft metal."
"We're almost to Chicago," Jason said, scraping the bottom of the tin. "Hitler has grain. We trade the metal for the wheat."
"Hitler," O'Malley spat. "I don't like dealing with a man who calls himself 'The Organizer.' Sounds like a funeral director."
SCREEECH.
A horrible grinding noise vibrated through the hull. The deck plates shook so hard the spoon rattled in Jason's tin.
"Bridge to Captain!" Hughes's voice crackled over the intercom. He sounded hysterical. "The Number Four Thruster is vibrating out of alignment! We're burning dirty fuel, Jason! The kerosene is full of sediment!"
"Cut the mix!" Jason yelled, grabbing his headset. "Lean out the fuel ratio!"
"If I lean it out, we lose lift!" Hughes shrieked. "We are heavy! That gold is dragging us down!"
Jason stood up. He walked to the porthole.
Outside, the world was gone.
They were flying over Pennsylvania. In this broken timeline, the labor riots of 1919 had escalated into full-blown industrial sabotage. The coal mines of Centralia had been firebombed.
The fires had spread underground.
Below the airship, the earth was cracked and bleeding smoke. A wall of black soot rose ten thousand feet into the air. The "Black Lung Cloud."
"Visibility is zero," Jason said. "Fly by instrument."
"Instruments are clogged with soot!" Hughes yelled. "I'm flying by feel!"
PING.
A sharp, high-pitched noise echoed through the hull.
Then another. PING.
"What was that?" O'Malley asked, racking the bolt of his tommy gun. "Hail?"
"No," Jason said, pressing his face to the glass. "Sonar."
Three shapes burst out of the black smoke.
They were silver. Tri-motor airplanes. Angular, ugly, and fast.
The Ford logo was painted on the wings in stark blue.
"Ford Flotilla!" Jason screamed. "Evasive maneuvers!"
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
Muzzle flashes sparked from the noses of the planes. Heavy machine gun fire ripped through the outer envelope of the Icarus.
Helium hissed out. The ship listed violently to port.
Jason was thrown against the gold stack. Bars toppled, bruising his ribs.
"They're not hailing us!" Sarah's voice came over the comms. "They're trying to pop us like a balloon!"
"Return fire!" Jason ordered. "Railguns!"
"Targeting computer is dead!" O'Malley yelled, climbing toward the gunnery ladder. "The iPhone is gone! We have to aim manually!"
"You can't hit a plane moving at 100 knots with a manual crank!" Jason shouted.
The ship groaned. They were losing altitude. The burning coal vents below looked like the mouth of hell waiting to swallow them.
"We need to climb!" Jason yelled into the headset. "Get us above the smoke!"
"I can't!" Hughes screamed. "We're too heavy! I told you! The gold!"
"Dump the gold!" O'Malley shouted from the ladder. "Boss, dump the damn money!"
Jason looked at the stack. That gold was their future. It was the only leverage they had against the warlords. If he dumped it, they were just refugees.
"No!" Jason roared. "Keep the gold!"
"Then we die!" Hughes wailed.
Jason's mind raced. He looked at the ship's schematics in his memory. Mass. Lift. Ballast.
"The water!" Jason realized.
"What?"
"Dump the potable water reserves!" Jason ordered. "All of it! The tanks are amidships! That's ten tons of liquid!"
"If we dump the water, the reactor coolant loop has no backup!" Hughes argued. "If the core spikes, we melt!"
"If we hit the ground, we burn!" Jason countered. "Dump it! Now!"
Hughes slammed the emergency purge lever on the bridge.
Beneath the Icarus, four massive valves opened.
Ten thousand gallons of water cascaded out in a violent torrent.
The water hit the freezing air of the upper atmosphere. It didn't just fall; it turned into a dense, icy slush.
The lead Ford plane was diving for an attack run, directly below them.
WHAM.
The wall of slush slammed into the plane's windshield and propellers. The glass shattered. The engines choked on the sudden intake of ice.
The plane stalled. It spiraled down into the smoke, vanishing into the darkness below.
Freed of the weight, the Icarus shot upward like a cork released underwater.
They punched through the smoke layer.
Sunlight. Blinding, clean sunlight.
The two remaining Ford planes circled below, unable to match the airship's sudden ascent rate.
"We're clear," Sarah breathed. "They can't reach this altitude."
Jason slid down against the gold bars. He was sweating.
"We're alive," O'Malley said, climbing down the ladder. "But now we're thirsty. We have no water, Boss. Not a drop."
"We'll drink in Chicago," Jason rasped. "Get us to the lake."
Six hours later.
The sun was setting, casting long purple shadows across Lake Michigan.
The Icarus limped toward the western shore. The engines were sputtering, coughing on the dirty fuel.
"There it is," Sarah said from the bridge. "The Windy City."
Jason looked out the panoramic window.
It wasn't the Chicago of history.
The skyscrapers of the Loop were dark, hollow shells. Windows were broken. No lights.
But to the south, the sky was glowing orange.
The Union Stockyards.
A massive complex of factories, pens, and smokestacks. It was ablaze with electric light. Smoke poured from a hundred chimneys, thick and greasy.
"The river," Jason pointed. "Look at the river."
The Chicago River, famously reversed by engineers years ago, was flowing backwards. But the water wasn't blue or brown.
It was neon green.
Chemical runoff. Bio-waste. It glowed with phosphorescence.
"That's not water," O'Malley muttered. "That's poison."
"Captain," Hughes called out. "We are being hailed. Morse code from the ground."
"Read it," Jason said.
"Landing restricted," Hughes translated. "Airfield controlled by Ford. Divert to... The Pens."
"The cattle pens?" Jason asked.
"Coordinate 41," Hughes confirmed. "They're clearing a space in the mud."
"Set her down," Jason ordered. "Gently. If we break a strut, we're stuck here forever."
The airship descended. The smell hit them even before they landed.
It wasn't just manure. It was blood. Rendered fat. Coal. And ozone.
The Icarus touched down with a squelching thud. The landing gear sank two feet into the muck of the Stockyards.
Before the engines even stopped spinning, they were surrounded.
Floodlights snapped on, blinding them.
Jason grabbed a Thompson. O'Malley kicked the ramp open.
They walked out into the glare.
A hundred men stood in the mud.
They weren't soldiers. They didn't wear uniforms.
They wore heavy rubber aprons stained dark red. They wore welding goggles.
They held weapons, but not guns.
Meat cleavers. Boning knives. Pneumatic bolt guns used for slaughtering cattle. Oxy-acetylene torches hissing blue flames.
The Meatpackers Union.
"Welcome to the Jungle," O'Malley whispered, raising his gun.
A man stepped forward. He was huge, holding a massive sledgehammer. He pointed at Jason.
"No guns," the man rumbled. His voice was thick with a Polish accent. "The Organizer demands peace."
Jason handed his Thompson to O'Malley. He stepped into the light, holding his hands up.
"Take me to him," Jason said. "Take me to Hitler."
The man grinned. His teeth were metal.
"Follow the blood," the man said, pointing to a grate in the floor.
Jason stepped into the mud. He realized with a jolt that the ground wasn't just wet dirt. It was paved with bones. Thousands of cattle bones, pressed into the earth to make a road.
He walked forward. Toward the factory that ate the world.