Cly took a deep breath. It was hard to do so inside the mask, where every intake was hauled through the filters that kept the air from killing him. He said, “I think this wraps up all the official talk, and there’s no reason we can’t be on our way. Everybody inside, and buckle up. I’m right behind you.”
“Behind us?” Houjin asked from the foot of the steps.
“You heard me.”
Andan Cly leaned down to Briar and said, “Hey, do me a favor.”
Behind the lenses, her eyebrows knitted. “What?”
“Take a deep breath.”
“What?”
“Just do it. For me.”
“All right?…” Her chest inflated and she held the air, as requested.
The captain did likewise, and snapped one hand out to her mask, and one hand to his own. Faster than lightning, he lifted the filters on both contraptions and leaned in for a swift, sudden kiss. Seconds later, because there was no time to dare more—not on the surface, where the air was made of poison—he popped both masks back into place and exhaled as hard as he could.
While everyone stared and no one spoke, Briar did likewise, adjusting the fit over her face.
“Now what’d you go and do that for?” she stammered.
“For good luck,” he beamed. “Besides, everybody knows by now, anyway.” He wiggled his mask to tighten the fit and added, “Good-bye for now, Briar Wilkes. I’ll be back in a few weeks, you just watch me.”
Five
Agatha Knotts turned another card over.
The Hanged Man was revealed, suspended by his foot over a grill. The weathered edges of the paper were fuzzy from humidity; a crack in the old stock split across the gallows. The whole pack was worn like this, from years of use by skillful fingers—decades of patterns, possibilities, and promises spread across a bright silk scarf beneath a parasol.
Josephine sighed. “I was hoping for something a little more auspicious.”
Agatha shrugged and said, “It’s not the worst you could’ve pulled. Think of it as balance, your world suspended between two tugging forces.”
“It is helplessness.”
“It is not.”
“Give me the last one,” Josephine urged. She was careful not to glance over her shoulder, or to peer from left to right. The Square in front of the Saint Louis cathedral was not so crowded now. Curfew would descend within minutes. The fortune-tellers with their stands, their small tables draped in bright colors, their battered and mystical tools … they were folding up shop and preparing to leave before the Texians made them go.
The statue in front of the church cast a horse-shaped shadow that stretched the beast into a monstrous mockery of four legs and a rider drawn spiderlike between the angled lines of the church’s pointed spires. Josephine did not look at that, either, because she already knew the hour was late.
The fortune-teller said, “Temperance.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake.”
“Again, you are thinking too narrowly, my friend.” Agatha tapped the card with one long fingernail. “The lady does not stand for restraint—no more than you do. Consider how metal is forged. This is another card for balance, for the subtle power that comes after a trial.”
“You’re making this up.”
With a flick of her wrist and a very fast sweep, Agatha scooped the cards into her palm. “You’re the one who asked me to read. If you don’t believe, I don’t mind. But there’s no need to be rude.” She shuffled the stiff rectangles idly, jostling them in her hands, slipping cards in and out of the stack and massaging them back into the whole. She lowered her voice and was careful to keep her eyes on the orange silk before her. “It won’t be long now.”
“I know. Give me another spread. A short one.”
“Another row for you to mock?” The colored woman in the pretty shawl lifted an eyebrow, mocking back. It was friendlier than it appeared. Agatha and Josephine had known each other since childhood, and their differences ran deep without coming between them.
Josephine dropped her voice as well, making a show of reaching into her bag for another warm coin to set upon the box that served as a table. “Another excuse to linger. I want to see how they clear the Square. I want to see if the new man comes and sweeps it himself.”
“Three cards, then.” She spread the pack in an arc and said. “Choose wisely, and concentrate on your question, so the cards can respond.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” she mumbled. Even so, a query buzzed through her mind in a flash. Will Cly come—or will I have to find someone else? She shook her head, doing her best to empty it of the superstition. Then she randomly tapped three selections. “Those.”
“Very well,” Agatha said with a patient, practiced nod. As she removed the cards and retrieved the rest of the deck, she asked under her breath, without meeting her companion’s eyes, “Hazel said you spoke with Madame Laveau?”
“Yes. Four nights ago. She saved me.” She said it matter-of-factly. Regardless of her opinions on tarot or the stars, or God or the devil, or any other unseen thing alleged to walk the city … she believed in the elderly vodou queen.
Agatha remarked, “She has not spoken much about the Dead Who Walk. Some people think she made them herself. They say she’s building an army of the damned to throw the Texians out of New Orleans.”
“They can say whatever they want. I do not believe she made the zombis.”
“Zombi? Is that what she calls them?”
Josephine nodded down at the cards, maintaining the fortune-seeking charade in case they were being watched. It was safest to assume, in the occupied city. They were always being watched. “Do you know the word?”
“I do.” For a moment she paused, as if she censored herself. “It should not surprise me. It is an old word, an African word brought to the islands, and then to the delta.”
“Is it like your cards? One meaning on the surface, and another below?”
“It implies that the dead have brought their state upon themselves, and that they are restless because of their own sins.”
Josephine murmured, “Aren’t we all?”
“It is a good word. Or an appropriate word, I should say.” She turned her attention to the cards once more. Revealing the first, she said, “Here we find Justice. He suggests satisfaction and success, brought about by leadership and cooperation. Whatever question you asked the cards, this is an auspicious answer.”
Josephine said, “I asked them nothing.”
Agatha did not argue. She flipped the second card. “The ten of wands. You must beware of your own responsibilities, and keep your own house. Someone may try to deceive you, or play you for a fool.”
“Meaningless. That’s every day of my life.”
“So skeptical, for someone who so badly wants guidance.”
“Is that what you think I want?”
“Well”—Agatha reached for the third card—“you want something. Look, it is the six of swords.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Change, and swiftly coming. It is a card that urges concentration and focus, lest your goal be lost. And I suppose that’s meaningless, too.”
“You know me so well.”
The fortune-teller’s hand hovered over the spread. Impulsively, she pulled another card.
“What are you doing?”
“Asking a question.”
“I thought it was foolish to read one’s own cards.” Josephine repeated something Agatha had told her once before.
“Not a question for myself,” she said, turning it over. “A question for you. Ah. The Magician.”
“Now that’s somebody I could use, right about now.”
Agatha shook her head. “In this case, I think he stands for you.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because as you said, I know you so well.” She smiled and leaned forward, pretending to explain some arcane bit of divination, but only leaning in so that even the closest observer might no
t overhear. “You believe Madame Laveau? You do not think she made the zombis, or controls them?”
“She says they Walk through no magic of hers. But she controlled them a bit. I saw her do it.”
“Hm.”
“I do not think she was lying, and I do not think her control is absolute. Nor,” she added quickly, “do I think any magic is involved.”
“How did she control them?”
Josephine hesitated. “I should say instead that she stopped them. She stunned them, with a very loud noise, and something about it … the timbre of it, or the tone. Something made them all stand still. But I don’t know if I could repeat her success, and I would not dare to try.”
“It’s wise of you, to defer to her judgment.”
“I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in cards, or curses. But I believe that Madame Marie has power, and I have no interest in offending her. Besides, she saved me.”
“You believe that?”
“I know that,” she confirmed. “I was trapped between the dead and the alligators, and she intervened.”
“Then she wants something from you,” Agatha said coolly.
“Whatever it is, she can have it.”
The fortune-teller retrieved her cards again, and resumed her slow shuffling. “If I were you, I’d be careful what I promised to the little queen. I would not offend her myself, but beware of what you offer unbidden.”
“Does that advice come from your cards?”
“No, it comes from my heart—one old friend to another: Be careful of her motives, and the favors she asks of you. I believe she means well for the city, but also that she leans quite hard on the ends justifying the means. At any rate, look: you’ve used up all your tarot time, which will come as a relief, I’m sure.”
Josephine heard the rolling-crawlers before she saw them. She’d know them anywhere; she listened to them for the last three nights patrolling beneath the Garden Court windows every hour on the hour as the curfew that seized the city was forced into effect. Ostensibly, this new measure was meant to address the disappearance of Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff four days previously, and just this once, Josephine didn’t doubt the Texians and their sincerity. They wanted to know what had happened to their officers, and they didn’t understand anything about the Dead Who Walk, the “zombis” whose population had risen so much over the last year.
It was hard to blame them, except that they’d failed so thoroughly to listen. Anyone could’ve told them.
The people who worked the docks, who managed the piers, who loaded and unloaded cargo both virtuous and clandestine. The men who drove the ferries over the river, who worked the engines on the little flat boats that carried people across the bayous and into the islands in the bays; the women who separated shells from seafood in the old canneries, who mended the nets down by the shore under the heat of the sun reflected off the river, and off the ocean.
They could’ve asked the rich children who were warned by bedtime stories about the zombis, or the poor children who were threatened with zombi punishment when they misbehaved. They might have asked the old folks who knew to shutter their homes against the dead as if against a storm; or they could have inquired after the young folks, who were fast enough to run and knew all the ways of escape from the in-between world down by the water.
Anyone in the city could’ve said, “Yes, the men-shaped things Walk the shores and roam the abandoned spots where no one else dares to go. They moan and cough, and chase and bite. They kill, and you’d best be leaving them alone.”
But the Texians had largely kept to their barracks and bases, and they did not ask about the occasional soldier or sailor who went missing … and later, perhaps, was seen again in a terribly transformed state. Desertions were not so very rare, after all.
Over the years, the occupation had become a stable and sedentary thing. The men on top of the command chain ignored the citizens’ complaints, just as they ignored Marie Laveau and her church, and her graveyard pastimes.
Anything out of sight can be ignored, when knowing the whole story is too much trouble.
But Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff were gone, or worse than that—and if anyone but Josephine knew precisely what had become of them, no one was saying. If any bodies had been found, no one had honored them with a public burial. If anyone Walked, no one was speaking of it. Instead, the Texians went to ground like frightened animals, enforcing old rules and instituting new ones to keep people indoors at night.
And so the rolling-crawlers came puttering on their diesel engines, around the corners and through the alleys toward the Square in front of the Saint Louis cathedral. The last of the determined fortune-tellers and corner preachers and salesmen offering boiled crawdads or knuckles of sugarcane, everyone who’d insisted on staying until the final moment … they all admitted defeat, and grumbling, they put away their stalls, their makeshift stands, and their wares.
The rolling-crawlers were called such because they patrolled on hard-rubber wheels that bounded independently of one another on floating axles, allowing the carriage-sized craft to climb forward over curbs and navigate the narrow streets of the old Gulf city.
They were both better and worse than horse-drawn affairs. Better because they left no manure. Worse because they were louder, and the diesel stink of their exhalations polluted the damp, heavy air—which locked on to the best and worst of odors, keeping all smells close to the earth.
The fortune-teller said, “There’s the new fellow. He came tonight, after all.”
“I heard he only just arrived yesterday,” Josephine replied, scanning the scene.
“Two days ago,” Agatha corrected. “I’ll say this for the Texians: They replace their own fast.”
“I hope they don’t replace Cardiff anytime soon.” Josephine rose to her feet and stretched, then began to help her friend break down the little station from which she earned most of her living. “I won’t be too brokenhearted if there’s no one to focus on a certain lake project anymore.”
“It wouldn’t break my heart either, but I won’t hold my breath. I hear Travis McCoy is more trouble than two Cardiffs and a mule. He’ll be patrolling for your prize”—she used her preferred euphemism—“sooner rather than later.”
Josephine asked, “Where is he? Do you know what he looks like?” She held a hand up over her eyes, shielding them from the last of the sun’s setting glare as it bounced off the windows on the far side of the Square.
“Over there.” Agatha tossed her head, indicating a large rolling-crawler, painted Texas dun. “Yellow-haired maniac atop the biggest brownie. That’s him.”
“How do you know, if he only got here the other night?”
“He’s the only one I don’t recognize. The rest of these lads”—she waved in the general direction of all four corners—“I’ve seen before. Not closing down for curfew, but around the Quarter. Besides, he’s the only man being driven around, like the machine is his private cabriolet.”
He was young for a man sent to marshal a city, probably the madam’s own age—if not younger—and he was lean inside a uniform that fit him well, and was buttoned up to the top despite the early evening warmth. He had the ramrod posture of a lifelong military peg, and the lantern jaw of someone who ought to be twice his size, though the fluffy reddish-blonde beard made his exact lines hard to determine.
Given what could be seen of his face, Colonel Travis McCoy possessed the kind of bone structure that’s considered “strong” on a man, and would be “unfortunate” on a woman.
While Josephine and Agatha closed up shop and sneaked glances at the rumbling machines as they puttered around the Square, the colonel lifted an amplifier to his mouth. He said something, but the words weren’t loud enough and no one heard him. He fiddled with the electric coils and turned a dial, then tried it again.
This time his voice bellowed out—boosted by a handheld device shaped like a witch’s hat.
“Ladies and gentleme
n, I can see that most of you are in the process of wrapping up your daily business, and I thank you for your promptness.” His accent leaned toward the higher-class end of the Texian spectrum. He sounded like he’d had an education someplace else, but exactly where, Josephine couldn’t pinpoint. “I do apologize for the inconvenience, and would like to remind you that this is for your own safety.”
“Like hell it is,” she grumbled.
“Hush now,” Agatha urged. “At least he’s being polite.”
“I don’t care if he hands out five-dollar bills while he brushes my hair and calls me sweetheart, he’s closing down the Square for no good reason.”
“I’m trying to look on the bright side.”
“There’s a bright side?”
Agatha folded up her scarves, wrapped her cards, and gathered all the small things that were part of her trade. She then placed them inside the overturned box-table and picked it up. “There might be. Think about it this way: New Orleans has a zombi problem. It’s also occupied by the most heavily armed military in the world, and now that military is on alert. It’s a long way to go for a glimmer of light, but if nothing else good ever comes of Texas squatting here, I’d be glad if they can clear the dead out of the in-between, down by the river.”
Josephine held out her hands, offering to help carry something. Agatha jutted her elbow out, pointing crookedly at the parasol, so her friend picked it up and closed it, then held it under her arm. “You give them too much credit. For all we know, they’re the ones who brought the dead. We didn’t have any zombis before they moved in, now, did we?”
“You’ve got me there. Hey, mind your mouth.”
Josephine boosted an eyebrow, but didn’t ask questions. A moment later, she heard the pounding footsteps of someone jogging up behind her. She pivoted on her heel and saw a man in his twenties sporting a brown uniform, homing in on her like a man with a purpose.
She bristled and gritted her teeth, but Agatha put on the sort of smile worn by a woman who earns her living dealing in pleasantries with unpleasant people. The fortune-teller exaggerated her accent when she called out, “Bonsoir, boy—and there’s no need to rush us. We’ll be on our way, you just give us half a minute.”
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