Текст книги "Ganymede"

Автор книги: Cherie Priest

Соавторы: Cherie Priest
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Hazel actually smiled, and Josephine’s mouth tightened involuntarily into something similar. “She got here on her own, she’ll get home on her own – I have no doubt of it. I’m sorry, but she didn’t tell me much and I’m not sure why you’re here.”

He came forward, seeming uncertain of how to proceed politely. Settling for a small bow in her general direction, and then one to Hazel, he told them both, “I’m Horatio Korman, a Ranger of the Republic. Are you Miss Josephine Early?”

“Yes, that’s me. Mrs. Laveau said that you and I should have a talk.”

“That was her recommendation, yes.” He glanced back at the door, as if not quite believing she’d really gone. “I get the feeling people tend to follow her recommendations.”

“Perhaps we could step into my office, upstairs. Hazel, I hate to ask you for yet another favor, but do you mind watching the parlor a little longer?”

“Not at all, ma’am,” she said, but her eyes were wide with curiosity, and a silent demand that she should be told all about it later. “I’ve been here this long, a little longer won’t matter. Besides, it’s been slow tonight, what with the curfew and all.”

Horatio Korman said, “Yeah, I’m real sorry about that. I mean, I didn’t do it. But. You know what I mean. I wish it weren’t the case.”

Upstairs she guided him to the wood seat with the shoulder-height back and padded arms that faced her desk, which she then sat behind. The show of authority might not have been called for, but it was as Laveau had said about power in the eyes of the beholder. She wanted the Texian to behold that he was on her business, her property, in her city.

The Ranger was not particularly ill at ease, not as far as Josephine could see. He was composed and confident, bordering on arrogant even just sitting there, but he’d shown a small sign of respect to both Josephine and Hazel on her premises, which was not something every Southern man did. She’d give him that much credit, but if he wanted more, he’d have to earn it.

She opened the conversation by saying, “You aren’t stationed here in New Orleans, are you? Rangers aren’t military, are they?” She wasn’t absolutely clear on the distinctions between the designations.

“No, we’re not part of the military, and no, I’m not stationed here. Not precisely.” He rested his hat on the chair arm and crossed one leg over the other, his ankle upon his knee. “I was sent here to look into a situation y’all been having, down by the river. Sent as punishment,” he mused, nearly to himself.

Josephine’s tone was icy. “I beg your pardon?”

Realizing her displeasure, he clarified. “The Republic wants me out of its hair, so to speak. My superiors wanted to get me out of Austin for a while, and I suppose someone figured the river was far enough away that I couldn’t bother them too much.”

“Are you a difficult man, Ranger Korman?”

He didn’t exactly answer. “Boy, if they think I’mdifficult…” His voice trailed off, then returned. “There’s worse trouble than me weighing against Texas. Maybe not yet, but soon. And bad.”

Josephine went straight to the meat of it. “Zombis. That’s what Madame Laveau calls them.”

“The walking dead men? Same thing?”

“Same thing.” She nodded. “And it surprises me to have a Ranger under my roof, wanting to talk about it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Up until Betters and Cardiff went missing, you couldn’t convince Texas anything was wrong down by the river. Not for love or money, and believe me, I tried both.”

“Pardon me for putting it this way, but nobody wouldbelieve you. I know, because I’ve been trying to warn them for months – and I’m one of their own. Nobody wants to hear it.”

Josephine looked him up and down, reaffirming her initial impression that this was a dyed-in-the-wool, run-of-the-mill, straight-out-of-the-mold upstanding Republican, at least by all appearances. Why would he meet resistance from his own men?

Horatio Korman eyed her back, likewise weighing something as he assessed her. Coming to a decision, he said bluntly, “Mrs. Laveau said you were there the night Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff were killed. She said you saw what happened. I’m not accusing you of anything, Miss Early, but right now we’ve got Texians down on the riverbanks hunting something they don’t understand – trying to defend this cityfrom it—” He tapped his finger on the armrest to emphasize the point. “And they’re having the shit scared out of them. I was directed here on the basis of other people’s reports, soldiers and merchants who’ve worked down there, people with friends who’ve gone missing. My boss sent me to New Orleans to get me out of their way, yes – but they might’ve done us all a favor.”

“And how’s that?” she asked cautiously, giving away nothing.

“Because no matter what you tell me, I’m likely to believe it and likely to help you. These … zombis,or whatever Mrs. Laveau wants to call them. I’ve seen them myself, and I know what they’re capable of.”

“You’ve been down to the river?”

“No, and that’s the bad part. It’s a national secret at the moment, but those things, those zombis, they’re notjust down by your river. They aren’t just in New Orleans. They’re in north Texas, and the turf west of that, too – all the way to the Utah territories and maybe farther west than that. Texas is getting positively lousy with them.”

A shiver went tickling down Josephine’s neck. “Are you … are you sure?”

“I’ve seen them myself, at the Provo pass. Seen them by the hundreds. And I almost didn’t escape to sit here now and tell you about it.”

“But how could they possibly be anywhere else? Lots of folks think they’re a voudou thing – spell-blind or ritual-maddened men, maybe even created by Marie Laveau herself! Lord knows half the city thinks she’s in charge of them.”

“Count me in the other half,” Korman said dryly, his mustache bobbing. “And you, too, I bet.”

Slowly, she bobbed her head in the affirmative. “Yes – me, too. Tonight she said we had to learn to manage them now, before they become unmanageable.” The thought made her head hurt. Then her exhausted brain caught up to something else he’d said a moment before. “I’m sorry, did you just now say you’d seen hundredsof them?”

“That’s right. Mexicans, and other assorted folks they’d picked up along the way. They’d been migrating, if you could call it that. Maybe wandering is more like it, but they roamed from a spot southwest of Oneida all the way up to the Rockies.”

“Dead men?”

“Women, too.”

“Dear God,” she breathed. “If only we knew what was making them – what was causing them, I mean.”

His mustache bounced upward at the corners. He was smiling. “Ah, that’s where me and you might have some useful things to tell each other. Nobody believes what I tell ’em, same as nobody believes you when you say that the dead are walking. That’s why you didn’t report what happened to those men, isn’t it? You thought McCoy – or whoever was in charge until he got here – would’ve thrown you in the clink, figuring you had something to do with their deaths.”

“Of course that’s why,” she lied. She’d kept the information to herself because if she’d shared it, she would’ve had to explain what she was doing following the men. And that’swhat would’ve gotten her thrown in jail. “They were swarmed, Ranger Korman. Absolutely overwhelmed. Two Texians, armed to the teeth, and there were too many of the things for it to matter. What’s doing this? You have to tell me!”

“I’d be happy to tell you. Goddamn, I’ve been telling the world, but the world isn’t listening. Zombis happen one of a couple of ways, all of it going back to a very strange gas that’s being toted down from the Pacific Northwest.”

Stunned full of questions, Josephine had no idea what to ask first. She stammered, “Gas? A gas? From where?”

“Gas, you heard me. Like hydrogen, only not like hydrogen at all. This gas comes out of the ground, and it has something to do with volcanoes – that’s all I know.”

“They have volcanoes in the Northwest?” she asked, mystified. “I had no idea.”

“At least a couple of ’em. Best I can figure, from talking to a whole bunch of folks between here and there, this gas is mostly collected in a little podunk backwater of a place – some port city in the Washington Territory called Seattle.”

Seattle? Where Cly was living?

She sat there openmouthed, struggling for words and not finding them.

The Ranger continued. “This gas is sometimes called blight,and it’s not hard to figure out why. By the sound of things, it basically killed that little city. The locals had to wall it off and abandon it.”

“I … I didn’t know.”

“Hardly anybody does. No one wants to talk about it, not anymore. Thirteen years ago, the city’s former residents petitioned the Union to see if they’d accept Washington as a state. They thought if they were part of a country, and not just a distant territory, maybe they’d see some tax money or some military help. As far as I can tell, they gave up a few years later. With the war going on, the Federals weren’t looking to take on any new responsibility – least of all, responsibility thousands of miles away.”

“So … what happened to the people who lived in the city? The ones who abandoned it?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Either they moved back East, or maybe they stayed out there. Might’ve gone to Tacoma, or Portland. Might’ve gone up north to Canada.”

“All of this…,” she began, trying to arrange her thoughts into words. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I will say that it sounds far-fetched.”

“Dead men walking around a riverbank sounds far-fetched, too.”

“I’ll be the first to admit it, and both of us know it’s true. But this gas … why would anyone store it, or transport it? And what would anyone do with it?”

His smile swelled. “You’re asking the right questions. The gas is processed through some method or other. Distilled, or something like that. Then it’s dried down to a yellow residue, which can be cooked up and smoked, or snorted, or even swallowed.”

“But why on earth would anyone—?”

“Miss Early, have you ever heard of a substance called sap?”

“Like … like tree sap?”

“No, ma’am, like yellow sap.That’s the most common term I’ve heard for it, though I’ve also seen it called cracker piss, sick sand,and a few other things. It’s a drug, something like opium but a whole lot stronger and a whole lot cheaper. Soldiers are taking to it left and right, looking to escape the war, as you do. As anyone does.”

“And it’s made from a poisonous gas?”

“Deadly poisonous. So deadly, it kills you without stopping you. I’d heard tell that this sap has been finding a place among sailors, and with the young Texians, too – the ones sent far from home, especially. The lonely men, or bored men. Men without the sense to know any better, or men who’ve lost so much already that they don’t care.”

“It starts with a gas.”

“Yes. The gas itself turns people into zombis faster, more directly. Breathing it will kill you deader than a stone before you know what’s happened. But the drug does it slow. It takes time – time to build up in a man’s body, time to work into his blood. And gradually: not all at once, but in time…”

“In time, the men who use the sap become zombis?”

“Men who’ve used too much of it, for too long.”

“But you said a group of Mexicans in Texas … they weren’t all using the sap, were they?”

He shook his head. “No, no. A dirigible from Seattle was carrying a big load of gas, and it crashed out in the desert – right on top of them. It’s a long story,” he added fast, as if he wished to cut off commentary. “But that’s what happened to them, and it could happen here, too. Out at the airyard, or at the pirate docks – anyplace where dirigibles come and go, moving the gas around. Any leak or failure of their equipment could unleash it.”

The shivers on Josephine’s neck went down to her knees, which were beginning to tremble against her will. “How much gas are we talking about, Ranger? How much will a dirigible hold? How many people could one load of gas—?”

He held up his hands, and thereby his hat, which dangled from his left one. “How much gas depends on how big the dirigible is, and what kind of equipment’s on board. The one that turned some seven hundred Mexicans and their kin was pretty big. One of the biggest, I’d say.”

“Seven hundred!” she exclaimed. “And out in the desert? Here in the city, we have that many people on a given block at the right time of day or night. More than that down at the market on a Saturday, to be sure! And the market isn’t terribly far from the—”

“Ma’am, let’s not panic yet. I don’t know all the factors that make up a tragedy with this sap; I’m still learning, myself. All I’m suggesting is that maybe it’s one reason you’re getting such a population of the things here, collecting at the riverbank. It’s possible someone wrecked a craft and it’s leaking, or it happened once before. Or maybe with all the servicemen, and sailors, and pirates, and airmen … maybe you’ve got a whole lot of men here who are looking to escape their problems. Now I’m asking you, Miss Early, can you tell me anything at all that might help me out, given what I’ve just told you? I’m aware that I’m in a house of … that I’m in a ladies’ boarding house, and it sees a great number of visitors from the kinds of men I’m talking about. So I’m asking you, and praying to God that you’ll cooperate with me even though I’m sure you’ve got no great love for the Republic … do you know of your clients abusing any substance that might fit this bill?”

She took a deep breath and said quietly, “Yes, I do know. They don’t call it sap here – they call it devil dust—but that’s what you’re looking for, Ranger Korman. You’re looking for the men who make and sell devil dust.”

He snapped the fingers of his free hand and said, “I knew it! And I don’t suppose you could point me toward anyone involved in the manufacture or distribution of this devil dust, could you? Obviously I’d never mention it was you who sent me.”

“I can’t,” she admitted. “None of my ladies are allowed to touch it, or anything like it. This isn’t that kind of place, and these aren’t those kinds of women, no matter what you might think.”

“I never said—”

“I know what you did and didn’t say. But I can’t help you find it, unless…” She rose from her seat, pushing it aside. “I know someone who might have an idea.”

“A customer or two?”

“He’s more like a resident, these days,” she muttered. “A Texian. I wouldn’t accuse him of using the dust, but if anyone could point you toward it, it’d be Mr. Calais. Let me see if he’s indisposed.”

Horatio Korman rose from his seat and waited for her to lead the way again. “He lives here?”

“He might as well. Wait here. I’ll knock, and bring him up.”

Down on the second floor, she stood outside Delphine’s room and rapped in her most businesslike fashion. Momentarily it was opened by the girl in question, mostly dressed.

Behind her, Fenn Calais was seated in a pair of pants and nothing else. He looked up from a chessboard. “Miss Early?”

“Mr. Calais, you’re up. Excellent. And I’m glad I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Only the whipping this girl is giving me.” He scooted off the bed, which he was using as a seat, with the board on an end table. “You never do give room and board to the dumb ones, do you, Miss Early?”

“Not if I can help it. Could I possibly have a word with you? In my office? Momentarily?”

“Should I dress?”

“It’s up to you. There’s a Ranger present, if that makes a difference.”

He nodded solemnly. “It does.” Rather than reaching for his shoes or shirt, he grabbed his hat, jammed it onto his head, and said, “Let’s go.”

Eleven

Captain Cly and his crew members had spent as long as possible getting further acquainted with the intricacies, quirks, and foibles of the strange machine. By the onset of nightfall, they knew it well enough to usher it around even in the dark – not speedily, not perfectly, but effectively.

Could they shuttle it around the lake? Absolutely.

Would they be able to navigate the river in it? Debatable. But no longer negotiable.

Word had come from the Valiant,by taps and spies and eventually Norman Somers, that the ship wouldn’t wait much longer. Texas was homing in, hovering and sweeping, gathering enough forces to chase the airship carrier farther out into the Gulf. It wouldn’t be safe for the Union to hang around any closer, any longer.

They had forty-eight hours to bring Ganymedeout to the Gulf to dock with Valiant. After that, the window would close and the opportunity would be lost … perhaps indefinitely.

As the sun set on that afternoon, the shadows all stretched out until they lost their shape, and the lake was dropped into the golden-edged dimness of twilight.

And then, these tense, frightened, brilliant men set their plan irrevocably into motion.

It was a precision operation, planned to the very smallest detail and – as Cly learned from Chester Fishwick – it had been dry-rehearsed at quiet, sneaky length. Not with the actual Ganymedein tow, of course. That would be too risky. They’d get only one shot at moving the enormous contraption from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River, and it had to count.

Eleven men worked as a unit, setting up an enormous cagelike contraption – a custom-made crane bracing a winch with the power to do what a thousand men would be hard-pressed to accomplish.

Lights flared to life throughout the bayou, dimmed by shades and covered with blue or red glass. They burned in lanterns, on poles, marking the pier’s edges as the hoist began to crank. The craft began to rise.

On the lake’s banks, just at the spot where it could be described as land instead of muddy water, a set of braced reinforcements had been sunk into the soggy earth to shore it up against the Ganymede’s unseemly weight. Backed up to these reinforcements, the two rolling-crawlers were hitched to the largest wheeled platform Cly had ever seen. The pilfered Texian machines were set up like a pair of draft horses, ready to pull.

Houjin whispered the captain’s own concerns. “Will those machines be able to tow it? And will they fit through the road leading out of the bayou?”

Before Cly could tell him that he didn’t know, Anderson Worth replied, “Those things can pull it, no problem. But they can’t cut through the bayou, not the same way you folks came inside it. There’s a secondary road – one we’ve been building up for the last few months. We’ve cut it as wide as we can, given it all the beams, braces, and support possible, and we’ve covered it up with the nettings, like the ones we use in the camp.”

“An entire road?” Houjin gaped.

Worth patted him on the shoulder. “Not a very long one. Less than a mile of it, even. It only has to reach from the swamp to the streets outside Metairie. From Metairie, we’ll have to haul tail to make it to New Sarpy without anyone seeing us.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Troost asked, watching as the winch worked hard against the dead, dangling bulk of the Ganymede’s hull. It was halfway out of the water, and still rising – and the pier was sagging where one leg of the enormous hoist contraption was braced. One of the other legs was pushing a clump of railroad ties deeper into the mud with every clicking rotation.

Mr. Worth smiled without any mirth. “We’ve got lots of friends between here and New Sarpy, and we’ll have to rely on them to look the other way while we’re working. There’s a warehouse on Clement Street where we’ve made room to dry-dock Ganymedeover the next day. And then, tomorrow night, we throw her into the river and you boys will take her out to sea.”

“Easy as that,” Troost observed, but whether or not he was being funny, it was hard to say.

Cly said, “Simple as that, anyway. I think we’ll be all right. She handles like a big, drunk salmon – but she doeshandle, and that’s something. With your boats topside, guiding us with the poles … it should be fine. We’ll be counting on you, though,” he said, bobbing his head at Wallace Mumler and Honeyfolk Rathburn, who had done most of the poling so far. “I don’t like moving blind. You’ll have to keep us out of trouble.”

“And we will,” vowed Mumler, who’d come to stand beside them as the big ship rose.

There were only so many positions where a man could observe and still stay out of the way. The winching contraption was a marvel of pulleys, foldable spiderlike legs, and a diesel engine determinedly chugging against the series of cranks that hauled Ganymedenot merely to the surface, but up out of the water entirely.

The craft was watertight, and there was no longer any immediate risk of drowning within it – not so far as Cly could tell during his earlier inspections. If there were structural problems left undiscovered, well, they’d have to deal with that when the moment came. Two escape hatches were built into the thing, after all. He tried not to worry about the fact that Houjin could not swim.

After a full twenty minutes of too-loud jangle from the slowly spinning winch, Ganymederose fully from the swamp. It emerged covered in mud, roots, plants, and primordial slime, dripping like something newly born, yet somehow ancient. Its hull shimmered in the red lights, giving the whole craft an unearthly appearance, as if it’d landed from some other planet – or been fired out of a volcano, and now hung suspended, dripping with cooling lava.

From the structurally buttressed bank, Rucker Little used the whole of his body to draw down a lever. The timbre of the ratcheting changed as a new set of gears engaged, and with a slowness that was painful to watch, Ganymedeswung in a semicircle toward the wheeled flatbeds that awaited her.

The crane groaned and the gears strained, their teeth clacking in agonized chomps; the legs of the makeshift device quivered and sank into the still-unstable turf, shuddering with every bite. But the structure held, and when Rucker leaned on another lever, the craft dropped, an inch or two at a time. It settled with a creak and a bong,with the scrape of a dozen seams and a hundred rivets grinding against the waiting pair of mated flatbeds.

The wheels compressed and the crawlers sank on their axles, but nothing broke.

Not a single cheer went up. There’d been too much noise already.

One by one, the lights were snuffed until only the bare minimum remained. Norman Somers removed the dimming lens from his own light, mounted on the front of the rambling vehicle he drove that night. It was smaller than the machine he’d used to bring Cly and his crew into the bayou, but still so large, it could hold Norman in the driver’s seat and Ruthie Doniker beside him.

It was their job to lead the way out.

The rolling-crawlers revved to life, and plumes of billowing diesel smoke choked the low, dark places between the bayou canopy and the soupy ground. Wallace Mumler drove one, with Captain Cly and Fang inside it. Honeyfolk Rathburn drove the other, with Kirby Troost and Houjin as passengers. The machines were joined together by a pair of bars on floating hinges. These bars kept the vehicles from separating and causing the flatbeds to split, which would drop Ganymedeinto the middle of the swamp, or the middle of the road. The coordination made driving difficult, a constant fight for navigational control, but like everything else about the operation, this had been practiced. Wallace and Honeyfolk knew what they were doing.

Cly clenched his jaw. It was excruciating, all this tedious caution, but he knew as well as anyone how necessary it all was. The bayou boys had a million and one things to worry about, and this kind of care was the only surefire way to remove as many of those variables as possible. It was wise. It was important. And it was driving Cly insane, because it gave him time to think of all the horrible things that could go wrong.

They could hit a bump and open a crack in Ganymede’s hull. A fuel line could be jostled out of place. The exhaust system could be unsettled, dumping bad air and fumes into the cabin when it came time to navigate the river, poisoning everyone where they stood.

How many men had died in these things, again? Had Josephine and Deaderick even told him the truth? Would they have lied, if they thought it would get them to their goal? Cly decided that in the name of fairness, he couldn’t speculate on Deaderick’s capacity for falsehood, but once upon a time he’d known Josephine very, very well, and he wouldn’t put constructive fibbing past her for one short second.

And this time he wasn’t just risking his own neck.

He looked over at Fang, sitting impassively in the central seat, since he was the smallest of the three men. Fang caught Cly’s stare from the corner of his eye, gave it back, and then winked, but made no signs to say anything else that might have been reassuring – or discouraging, for that matter.

Cly thought of Kirby Troost, who had made enough trouble of his own for a dozen lifetimes. For Troost, this was nothing more than another adventure, one more job to augment a bizarre résumé, and he was entering it freely. But did he truly understand the stakes? Would it matter if he did?

And what of Houjin, insatiable curiosity and all, game for anything? What if something happened to him? It was a risk every airman ran, at some point. Everyone knew that the sky was not always a hospitable place, and that not every pirate or pilot came to ground of his own volition. Huey was still just a boy.

Cly was seized with uncertainty. What would he say to Houjin’s uncle if the worst should occur? For that matter, should the worst occur to the lot of them, who would tell anyone?

Back in Seattle, Yaozu would wait and wonder with increasingly sour impatience, watching the tower and Fort Decatur for a shipment that would never come. And Briar Wilkes, who’d lost so much already. Would she wait weeks? Months? How long would she hold out hope before assuming the worst?

He swallowed, or he tried. His mouth was dry. His nerves were frazzled, not that he would’ve admitted it. He’d been in tight scrapes before, hadn’t he? Plenty of them.

None of them had ever involved spying, though. None of them had ever come with two governments – the Republic and the Confederacy – willing to shoot any and all comers. He found himself longing for the companionable violence of pirates, which only led him to think of Barataria Bay, and whatever was left of it … and his mood darkened further.

In front of the rolling-crawlers, Norman Somers and Ruthie Doniker left their light on bravely, no doubt nervously, knowing that they’d draw the most immediate attention if any attention were to be drawn.

The moment when the double-wide load turned out of the bayou and onto the main street was one accomplished with white knuckles, gritted teeth, and the grinding of wheels, accompanied by the surge and struggle of the diesel engines that powered the whole operation.

And now they were out in the open. No cover, no canopy.

It was late, but not so late that they were alone on the road. The way was not crowded, and it was trafficked mostly by men in riding crafts like the one Norman Somers drove at the head of the weird caravan. Norman waved at a few of them, even called out greetings, which were called back.

The other drivers gazed curiously, or made a pointed effort to look away – as if by seeing nothing they could know nothing, and be forced to recall nothing later on. People averted their eyes and shuttered their lanterns, holding away what light they could in order to let the strange procession pass as if unseen.

Onward they rolled, every yard a dreadful grind.

New Sarpy was not a large place. Not quite a town, not quite a stop. It was more like a cluster of warehouses, shrimp docks, liveries, cargo bays, and old piers half-turned to mush by the soaking churn of the river. But the largest of these was a depot built a decade earlier for a street rail stop that never came. Boarded and disused, and within mere feet of the water’s ever-eroding edge, it was the perfect place to leave something large and not quite invisible.

As the procession drew to a stop outside, Wallace Mumler and Rucker Little leaped out of their vehicles and ran to the giant doubled doors at the building’s north wall. Surely it had been meant to receive the cars themselves, shipped upriver, or maybe it had only been made that way for other incoming cargo of unknown size but conspicuous bulk. In seconds, the door – which looked firmly barricaded – was pressed open on hinges so silent, they must’ve been recently oiled and cleverly fixed to only appear so abandoned and impenetrable.

As the men went back to their seats, Ruthie Doniker leaped down out of the vehicle and ran inside. She reappeared almost instantly, bearing a torch so brightly lit that it made the old depot seem fully illuminated. She waved it and retreated, guiding the joined craft forward – around the sharp corner that had them on the verge of overhanging the banks, but never quite slipping over the side. Backwards she walked, and the drivers followed her at a snail’s pace, creeping and creaking toward her, scraping the flatbed edges against the wide plank frames that held the massive doors. The whole structure shuddered but stood firm, and in a round of harrowing heartbeats, the Ganymedewas finally inside.