Mississippi Roll

They fell in line behind the lawyer. As he led them across the main deck, Ray’s nostrils flared. The Schröder’s interior matched its exterior in terms of grime, rust, and general decrepitude. The deck needed a new paint job, not to mention a thorough washing. Usually, Ray thought – though his experience with boats of any kind was rather limited – you see crewmen bustling about on errands and chores, taking care of vital upkeep and minor repairs. But they saw no one, crew or passengers, as they made their way to a hatch leading down into the ship’s hold. It was so quiet that it was more than a little eerie. The Schröder might as well have been manned by a crew of ghosts.

Ray and the Angel exchanged glances. She can feel it, too, he thought. He glanced at Moon and saw her sniff the air. An expression of disgust washed over her lean-jawed face. Ray lacked the acute senses that Moon had, but he could smell the stench, too. Had smelled it since they’d reached the deck. It was getting worse, and it hit them like a slap on the face when Pretorius led them down the ladder into the ship’s hold.

The vessel’s only cargo was inside. People. They were everywhere in the gloom of the poorly lit, practically unvented hold. Men, women, and children looked at them wearily as they descended the ladder, hunger, hope, and fear in their eyes. Ray guessed that this trip had been as hellish as the demon-haunted last days of their home city of Talas. Most were gaunt. Many just lay on the dirty bedding that was their only protection against the harshness of the hold’s metal floor. Ray had been in better-smelling swamps. He didn’t want to even try to imagine the privations these people had undergone during their voyage.

Ray and the Angel kept stoic expressions on their faces, but Jones recoiled and audibly gagged.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘don’t you people bathe?’

‘In what?’ asked the woman approaching them. Her voice was bitter and bore an East European accent. Ray recognized her as Olena Davydenko, the daughter of a deceased Ukrainian mobster. She’d used her dead father’s fortune to finance this desperate quest for safety and freedom. Olena looked at them cooly. She was blond and pretty, Ray thought, in a brittle, high-fashion sort of way. She was accompanied by a young woman who was a bare inch or two over five feet. She had clear pale skin that had a golden sheen to it. And she was staring at the Angel, who seemed uncomfortably aware of her gaze. At least the Black Tongue was nowhere in sight. If IBT and the Angel came face-to-face again – Ray pushed the thought away and forced himself to concentrate on the here and now.

‘We have barely enough water to drink,’ Olena continued bitterly. ‘We have no food, no fuel, no medical supplies—’

‘Not my concern!’ Jones snapped. ‘You people should have been better prepared for your little cruise.’

Pretorius held up his hands. ‘This is all beside the point.’

‘The point being,’ Jones said implacably, ‘that of all the people who decided to take this trip, very few have the proper documentation or even family members already living in the United States willing to sponsor them. No one lacking a sponsor or the proper documents will be allowed off this ship.’

Dr Pretorius gestured to an angry Olena, who handed him an expensive-looking briefcase. Ray figured that while most of the onlooking refugees probably couldn’t follow the conversation in English, they had no problems understanding the gist of it. Pretorius extracted an impressively thick document from the briefcase and handed it to Jones.

She glanced at it. ‘What’s this?’

‘A brief requesting political asylum for all my clients,’ Pretorius said. ‘The government in Kazakhstan has collapsed. The warlords are fighting over the scraps of their country, but they all agree on one thing. They fear, wrongly and unjustly, that somehow the plague that struck Talas was brought on by the wild card virus and that the madness that destroyed the city was somehow spread by the jokers living there. Nonsense, of course, but that’s not stopping them from waging genocide against all wild carders. These people couldn’t stay in Talas and be killed. They can’t go back. They’re claiming asylum.’

‘You know that this must be adjudicated at higher levels of government—’

‘I ask for an expedited hearing. In the meantime, we need food, water, medical—’

‘I’m sure they do.’ Jones started back up the ladder, taking Pretorius’s brief with her.

The joker lawyer looked at Ray. ‘That was pleasant.’

‘Yeah,’ Ray said. He was starting to have a very bad feeling about this mission. It wasn’t as cut-and-dried as it had first seemed. He hadn’t signed up to bully helpless jokers, women and children among them.

The young woman standing with Olena looked at Angel and spoke in accented but clear English. ‘I am called Tulpar. I was in Talas, too. I saw you fighting monsters. They called you the Angel of the Alleyways, the Madonna of the Blade—’

The Angel looked down. ‘I lost it.’

A look of sympathy crossed the girl’s face. ‘I see that your pain is great. But you helped us once. The people, the children, are starving—’

The Angel turned her face, stood silent for a moment, then followed Jones up the ladder.

Moon whined and went after her, taking the ladder carefully. Ray looked at Pretorius, who was watching with pursed lips, and then at the Kazakh girl. ‘She’s been hurt deeper than you know by what happened in Talas.’

‘I could see it on her face,’ she said.

Ray nodded and hurried after them. Jones had crossed the deck and was going down to the waiting Port Police launch. The Angel, again holding Moon with the agent’s front paws over her shoulder, was following.

Ray, feeling helpless, watched her. It had been a very difficult time, with the Angel growing more withdrawn and despondent despite the counseling she’d had. Ray had thought that maybe getting her out into the field might start her back on the road to who she’d once been, but, if anything, it seemed she was getting worse. He didn’t know where to turn himself, or what to do, and that helplessness was churning deep inside and turning to an anger that he couldn’t focus on any one person or thing. It was just grinding at him.

He started down after the Angel as sudden shouting from the riverbank caught his attention. A group of the anti-refugee protesters from the Liberty Party had surged against the flimsy barrier separating them from the pro-refugee JADL contingent and were breaking through the thin blue line that was all that kept the two groups apart.

‘Crap,’ Ray said.

He glanced down. The Angel, too, had paused on her way down and was watching the drama unfold on the riverbank.

‘Hurry up,’ Ray called. ‘We’ve got to stop this before someone gets hurt!’

The Angel nodded and dropped the remaining dozen feet or so to the launch’s deck, landed lightly, and set Moon down. Ray swarmed down the ladder like a monkey in a major hurry and in a moment was at the Angel’s side.

‘Cast off,’ he shouted. ‘Head for the landing across the river!’

‘I give the orders here, Ray,’ Jones said coldly. ‘Just what are your intentions?’

‘My intentions,’ he said in a dangerously level voice, ‘are to keep people from getting hurt.’ He locked eyes with the officer in charge of the launch.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said crisply.

Jones sighed. ‘Very well. Though I don’t know what you can do.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ the Angel said.

The launch cast away from the Schröder and swept out in an arc, taking them to the northern bank, as everyone onboard watched what was happening on shore with concern.

The small JADL contingent was holding their ground as the anti-refugee protesters broke through the police barrier. Ray and the others on the launch could hear their angry shouts as they ran, screaming and waving their signs. The one in the lead was a heavyset man whose sign read Go Home GeneticWaist! The ones following him shoved aside the few cops who were bobbing helplessly in the mob’s wake like corks in an unleashed torrent.

‘Oh crap,’ Ray repeated.

And as the protesters approached the JADL demonstrators – slowly, because their signs weighed them down and most weren’t in the best shape and it was a very hot and humid day – the zombies began to appear.

They didn’t pop up out of thin air, but instead hauled themselves out of the river, climbing the steps at the landing toward which the launch was heading, like corpses rising from a watery grave. And make no mistake, they all were dead as shit. Not one was complete. Some were missing only fingers or an ear or an eye, others were less whole. Their sodden clothes oozed stinking seawater, which nicely complemented their body odors – a combination of rotting flesh and astringent embalming chemicals. The protesters outnumbered them ten to one, but Ray figured that the zombies were probably more intent on their purpose.

‘Goddammit!’ Ray swore aloud. He felt a sudden twinge of despair when the Angel didn’t respond to his blasphemy. She never did, anymore. ‘Goddammit!’ he repeated.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Jones said.

‘You’ve never seen a zombie attack before?’ the Angel asked, conversationally.

‘Swing it around parallel to the shore,’ Ray shouted as the launch neared the riverbank. He climbed out on the bow.

‘What is he doing now?’ Jones wondered.

‘He’s going to make someone pay,’ the Angel said softly, but she didn’t say for what.

Moon whined by her side.

‘Go ahead and help him, if you want.’ Moon put a paw on her knee, beseechingly. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the Angel said in a faraway voice. ‘They’re only zombies.’