Chase The Rabbit: Gretch Bayonne Action Adventure Series Book #1 (5 page)

              Then common sense took hold and I remembered that was where our official trip was to begin. There would be thousands of spectators watching, and someone might see my upper torso perched on top of the greatest airship ever built. So I went back down. I didn’t want to. It was just like this whole assignment…I didn’t want to do it but I had to.

              The second I got to the bottom of the ladder, Klaus turned the corner. Had I stayed on top ten-seconds longer, he would have known what I’d done.

              “Okay, Mr. Bay, you can come down now,” he said. “Follow me.”

              We went down a ladder and into a very narrow hallway that sloped down dramatically. I suddenly realized, we were walking on the steel skeleton of the bottom of the ship. There were no handrails, so it was difficult to walk normally. Then it leveled out. We passed several doorways to our right until we finally stopped at one and went inside.  There were two men sitting on bunks in the tiny room. 

              “These are riggers Abelard and Didi,” Klaus said. I shook their hands as Klaus introduced me. 

              “Mr. Bay will be bunking on level A tonight,” he told the men. They smiled and nodded their heads. 

              “We are honored to have you aboard, sir,” one of them said in broken English. I’d already forgotten which one was which.

              “Perhaps we will come up and visit later and play cards and drink rum,” the other said, smiling. 

              “Okay,” I responded, reluctantly. “But I only play poker. For money. I have to warn you, I’m pretty damned good.” 

              The men laughed as Klaus and I exited and continued down the thin, long hallway that seemed to go on forever. 

The giant balloon-type objects were to our right and curved up over our heads, making the walkway an L-shape. 

              “How many of these balloons are there?” I asked. 

              “They are cells, Mr. Bay,” Klaus answered, “and there are seventeen total.” 

              By now I was feeling claustrophobic and wished I was back outside on the beast’s top. 

              “Where are we going?” I asked. It seemed we’d been walking for ten minutes or more. 

              “Just to the end,” he said. “I told you I would give you a tour, and that is what I am doing.”

              I drudged on thinking I’d made a big mistake by signing on for this trip. It was a free passage to Hollywood, but sometimes free has a price. And, sometimes a beautiful thing like the Great Graf, is really frightening and ugly inside.

              “Below us are the engines that make the hydrogen that fills the cells,” Klaus explained.

              I was barely listening to Captain Clipboard’s commentary on the Tour of Big Mistakes. I started thinking about Patricia, and my mind slipped off into vivid recollections of how beautiful and amazing she was. 

              “And, what propels her are five Maybach engines,” he continued. “Four hundred and ten kilowatts, oh excuse me, that is 550 horsepower to you Americans!” 

              “Yeah, fascinating,” I lied.

              We finally got to the end where there were a few more tiny rooms. Klaus introduced me, again, to a few riggers who also smiled broadly and said nothing memorable.  Then we climbed yet another ladder and were at the very end of the corridor or spine of the ship. Except now we were at the absolute tail end of the Graf. I had started in way closer to the front, where the passenger cabin is. That meant we now had to walk the mid-corridor the entire length of the ship to get back to where we started, some 700 feet. 

              It wasn’t just the distance that disturbed me, but the environment. It was like walking through the stomach of a giant whale. But this one was man made, constructed of rubber and steel. Like a movie, it wasn’t alive, yet seemed to be.

              We could have been in the bottom of the ocean for all I could tell. There was no way of knowing we were soaring through the sky at 65 mph with the most famous people on Earth, while the entire world watched. For me, it was a personal nightmare that wasn’t going to end anytime soon. 

Chapter Four

B
y the time we reached the front of the Graf, I was ready to throw myself off the damned thing. The ladder that led up to her glorious top tempted me, but I didn’t want to die just yet. I thought about it though.   

              Having taken the tour, I realized the midlevel of the ship where I would be sleeping was actually the largest.  The rooms below where the riggers slept were like closets.  I just didn’t want to be there by myself.

              “This is the best place for you to be,” Klaus said. “I will come back up and check on you tonight.”

              Suddenly, a strange rumbling noise came from above.  We looked up, and on one of the overhead girders was a monkey pushing a ball. Then to our right there was another one, a monkey pushing what looked like a bowling ball.  The ball seemed to fit perfectly inside the triangle shaped girders. We looked at each other dumbfounded. Klaus shook his head. 

              “That acrobat, Alvon,” he said. “His monkeys must have escaped their cage!”

              I couldn’t imagine the belly of the beast being anymore surreal until I saw monkeys rolling bowling balls through her hollow bones.

              “I have to find him,” Klaus said. “You wait here!”

              “Oh no!” I shouted. “I am not waiting anywhere, I’m going with you!”

We ran down the long corridor until we came to the ladder leading down to the end of the passenger cabin and nearly fell down the ladder of the cargo area. The cage was open and empty. No monkeys and no Alvon.

                We were out of breath and speechless so we sat down to collect ourselves on one of the many boxes filled with mail and postcards. But instead of the boxes being hard, like a chair, they fell over with us on top of them, as if they were filled with nothing but air. 

              “I thought these were mail boxes,” I said. “What the hell is in them then?”

              We stood and ripped one of them open. It was filled with hundreds of camera flashbulbs.   

              “Are these supposed to be here?” I asked. 

              “Maybe,” Klaus said. “I don’t know. This is a Hollywood charter. Maybe they are going to use them to take pictures.” 

              Just then we heard a high pitched whistle in the distance. The sound got closer and closer. Strange rumbling noises closed in on us. It was the oddest sound I had ever heard, like we were under attack.

              Suddenly, monkeys flew out of nowhere and scurried into the cage. Then down the ladder came Alvon, smiling and shaking his head.

              “I am sorry. They are no harm,” he explained. 

              The monkeys kept coming quickly, shooting into the cage as Alvon walked towards it.

              He began counting, “Three, four…they are highly trained and usually very well behaved, as you can see, six…” he said. “They are not used to being cooped up in a cage…seven! All present and accounted for!”

              “What the hell?” I screamed. “How could you let this happen?”

              “I went to get their food, and I guess I left the cage door open, and well, my apologies,” Alvon said. “I can assure you it will not happen again.” 

              Klaus seemed to be relieved that the monkeys were secured again and wouldn’t have to explain to the captain what had happened. I was relieved too, that it was just monkeys and not an army of monsters hell bent on killing us.

              “Very well, then,” Klaus said. “Just see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

              “Of course, sir,” Alvon said. “And Mr. Bay,” he continued, “I am a fan of your work. I write some myself, and I would like to show you something if you have the time.”

              I was never really comfortable with people saying they were fans of my writing. I figured he was just buttering me up for something. Unless you are going to pay me to write, I don’t really care. I just nodded and said, “Okay.”

              I was thinking
This is crazy and I am not about to sleep up here with monkeys and a man who wants to show me his writings.
So on our long walk back yet again to the front of the ship, I had a little talk with Captain Clipboard.

              “Klaus,” I said.  “I understand Bela Lugosi is among the guests on board.”

              “Yes,” he said, “I believe he is.”

“Well, I’m friends with him,” I explained. “And I would like you to get a message to him that I am here.”

              “I could probably do that,” he said.

              “And I won’t mention that you had monkeys running around loose rolling bowling balls,” I added.

              “I would appreciate that,” he said.

                We made our way back to the front of the ship and as promised, Klaus fashioned a “sling” as he called it, for me to sleep in that night. It consisted of a hammock and a lot of rope. Then he brought me dinner, Chicken Dijonnaise with asparagus and clams. I drank half a fifth of whiskey with dinner. Other than the bottle, I was alone, feeling like a prisoner under the most bizarre circumstances. No one came to visit me.

              The damned phone hanging from the ladder kept ringing. It was driving me crazy, so against my better judgment, I finally picked up the receiver. 

              “Bay here,” I said.

              “Is this the Graf?” a voice asked.

              “No,” I answered. “This is Bay. The Graf can’t talk right now, she is busy flying a bunch of monkeys to some ridiculous game. Who the hell is this?”

              “This is Emil Wilde, KMOX radio in St. Louis, Missouri,” he answered, “and you are live on the air! Can I speak to one of the stars, please?”

              “They’re not here,” I said. “How did you get this number?”

              “It was scheduled,” he answered. “We were supposed to be patched through to the control room via short-wave radio. Is this not the control room of the famous Graf?”

              “Nope,” I said. “You reached the belly of the beast.”

              “Can you get me to the control room?” he asked.

              “Sure,” I said. “Just go down this ladder and make a left.”

              “I apologize, dear listeners, there seems to have been a mistake,” he said.

              “Yeah,” I added, “and I am the guy who made it by getting onboard this crazy damned balloon ride to begin with.”

              Click. He hung up.

              I eventually drifted off to sleep, thinking of this beautiful woman who had sent me on this wild rabbit chase. The strange sounds of engines below bellowing off and on woke me up throughout the night. Between half-waking and sleeping, I had dreams of my dinner with Patricia. There were half a dozen dream scenarios or more.  In one, I found her husband then killed him so that I could have her for myself. In another, I was being chased by monkeys who could talk.

              “We know what you have done!” they chanted. “Shame on you, Bay!”

              It was a horrifying night. Then the monkeys’ voices turned into that of a man. “Bay, wake up!” Klaus said, “I have brought you breakfast.”

              I had a headache as deep as the Hudson is long. I fell out of the hammock like a pigeon in a thunderstorm. 

              “Oh for the love of God!” I shouted, squirming on the cold steel floor in a fetal position. “I need a shower!”

Klaus helped me up and led me downstairs through that horrible tiny tunnel to a shower room. The water was good and hot. It was just what I needed to bring me back to reality. But my situation was the same. I was still stuck in the digestive system of the largest mechanical airship in the world. And she was eating me alive.   

              I dressed and made my way down to the cargo area. At least that had some semblance of a real room. The monkeys were there, but fortunately, they were in their cage. Alvon was feeding them from box loads of fruit.  The Chinese man was standing in the same spot where I had seen him the night before. But even that didn’t creep me out as much as being alone in the middle of the Graf.