George Martin - Mississippi Roll

The launches following them stopped dead, the police cars racing up the road skidded to a halt. The three SCARE agents watched the show unfold. It was like watching a surrealistic version of an old Keystone Kops movie with sound effects.

The refugees, vastly outnumbering their pursuers, were fleeing in all directions. Some few, of course, were caught.

Gunfire erupted from one police boat as someone started shooting at those who were swimming for it. Suddenly a vast, dark form erupted out of the river. It slammed into the launch, half lifting it out of the water. The launch rocked uncontrollably, and to Ray’s astonishment he realized that the attacker was a giant alligator. It was the largest gator that Ray had ever seen, fifteen feet long if it was an inch. The gator managed to hook a leg over the edge of the boat and clambered aboard like an avenging demon. It swept the boat clean of cops using its tail and then bellowed, its cry roaring eerily into the night. Using its snout as a battering ram, it sank the boat, then slipped under the water.

‘That’s not something you see every day,’ Ray remarked.

A barge rowed by zombies cut through the water, picking up a handful of refugees. Ray could see the Handsmith and his son among them before it disappeared into the darkness.

A golden creature, the winged Tulpar, appeared on the shore and charged the lead car in the police caravan that was chasing refugees who were fleeing into the warren of warehouses and industrial plants, smashing in its hood with her razor-sharp hooves. She leaped up onto the car’s roof, crumpling it, and managed to cripple half a dozen more before vanishing into the night.

The show was interrupted when Evangelique Jones appeared in one of the launches, looking up at them on the Schröder ’s deck and shouting.

‘What’s going on here?’ she cried. ‘Why aren’t you helping to round up these illegal aliens?’

‘Not my assignment,’ Ray called down.

‘I’ll have your badge for this!’ Jones screamed at him.

‘All right,’ Ray said. He took it out and scaled it down at her. As usual, his aim was impeccable. It hit her in her ample bosom and fell down at her feet. She stared at him, her jaw dropping.

Ray looked at the Angel. She laughed aloud for the first time in way too long. Ray smiled at her. Her aim wasn’t as good. Hers plunked down into the river somewhere near the launch’s bow. Ray looked at Max.

‘You might want to hang on to yours.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young agent said stoically.

‘It was nice working with you,’ Ray said.

‘Nice working with you, sir,’ Max replied.

Arm in arm, Ray and the Angel walked down one of the gangplanks leading to the riverbank. He felt relieved. Almost light-headed. For the first time in years it seemed as if nothing, not a single part of his body, hurt.

‘What now?’ the Angel asked.

Ray pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and saying it felt very good.

They’d walked a couple of miles down the riverbank back toward New Orleans, when Ray suddenly stopped.

‘Crap,’ he said. ‘I forgot all about the Witness and his men tied up in the Schröder ’s hold.’

The Angel looked at him. ‘Would you think less of me if I told you that I hadn’t?’

Ray shrugged. ‘Oh well. Maybe someone will find them.’

Laughing, they resumed their stroll, heading toward the rising sun.

Wilbur Leathers felt steam hissing in the boilers and surging through the lines as Travis Cottle, the current chief engineer – a coffee- and cigarette-addicted middle-aged man with graying and thinning brown hair – checked and tweaked the boilers, lines, and engines for the Natchez ’s impending departure from New Orleans. Cottle was rather obsessive, in Wilbur’s opinion, always consulting the pressure gauges within the system – which dropped briefly whenever Wilbur borrowed steam from the lines, random failures of the system that seemed to infuriate Cottle as he could find no explanation for the pressure drops. If Wilbur wanted to, he could plunge his hands into one of the lines and draw the steam into him right now, allowing it to fill his body, and sending Cottle off on yet another paroxysm of double-checking all the lines and recalibrating the gauges.

Wilbur told himself he’d do that later. Maybe he’d even allow himself to become steamily visible, and if a passenger or two glimpsed him in the dark, it would only add to the popularity of the Natchez – though he’d make damn certain it wasn’t that obnoxious Dead Report crew; he didn’t intend to give them the pleasure.

Still, he could almost hear the shriek of alarm and wonder that would result. ‘Oh my God! Look! That’s Steam Wilbur! We’re actually seeing him! He’s real!’ But later. Later. Maybe. He’d left Cottle to his work, finding something on the main deck that interested him far more.

He could hear the Jokertown Boys doing their late show up in the Bayou Lounge – all of the passengers seemed to be there; the main deck was largely deserted and the main gangway had been withdrawn. The Quarter lights threw their futile beams into an overcast and occasionally dripping night sky. The promenades on the deck were empty, the passengers nearly all choosing to stay inside against the threatening weather.

There was some commotion going on downriver from where they were berthed. Wilbur could see a constellation of blue and red flashing lights crowding the shore a few miles downriver, and spotlights tore at the low clouds nearby, though whatever action they were illuminating was just beyond the downriver bend. He wondered what was happening, and if it had to do with that joker freighter.

JoHanna Potts, the head clerk, waited near the head of the gangway along with a quartet of deckhands. Jack, an older Cajun man whose skin looked as crinkled and dark as alligator hide, walked anxiously along the Natchez ’s landing at the river’s edge; Jack had been hired as one of the bartenders for this cruise. Jack and JoHanna put Wilbur in mind of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife: JoHanna was a wide and heavy African-American woman whose wrists and neck glittered with strands of gaudy costume jewelry; Jack, conversely, was rail-thin, normally dressed in dark pants and the white jacket he wore as bartender. But he wasn’t dressed that way now; in fact, his clothes seemed to be in tatters and soaked besides, and Wilbur couldn’t imagine what the old Cajun was doing out there.

As Wilbur pondered the scene, a small barge emerged from the darkness of the river. Wilbur stared at the craft in shock: it was being rowed by what appeared to be several … zombies. At least that’s what the rotting, peeling, and discolored flesh of their bodies, the jerky movements as they paddled the barge, and the horrific smell that the breeze off the river would indicate. Jack was hurrying over to the barge and helping perhaps twenty people inside out onto the landing. When they were all on the shore, the zombie crew – if that’s truly what they were – pushed away again, vanishing quickly into the night and heading back downriver.

‘Go on,’ he heard JoHanna say to the deckhands, who swung the gangway over to the dock once more. Wilbur went to the rail of the main deck; he could see Jack herding the people from the barge toward the Natchez . JoHanna waved to them, and the clot of people moved quickly up the gangway and onto the boat. The first of them came up the gangway and approached JoHanna; in the deck lights, Wilbur saw the man more clearly: a face neither young nor old, lined and weathered. His clothing was ragged, soiled, and tattered; most strange was the fact that his hands were covered by burlap, the rough cloth tied around them at his wrists. It didn’t look to Wilbur as if there were actual hands under those improvised mittens, nor did the man extend his hand to JoHanna. ‘I’m Jyrgal,’ he said, his voice heavily accented, his words halting. ‘Some call me the Handsmith. We are very grateful to you for your help.’ Sounds Russian, Wilbur thought, then he saw the others with him.