Mississippi Roll_A Wild Cards Novel Read online

  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 sea water, which nicely complimented 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 tinge 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.”

  By now the protesters were all quite aware of the creatures shambling toward them. The mob’s first reaction was to stumble to an uncertain halt, stand, and stare. Ray wanted to scream aloud to Hoodoo Mama—only she could be orchestrating this—but that would sound silly. “Josephine” was too formal, and “Joey”—he’d never called her that. The anger continued to build in him—the months and months of watching the Angel grow ever more inward, ever more detached, ever more untouchable and desolate—and he found his voice in a wordless cry of his own rage and despair.

  He leaped as the launch swung around as he’d directed, setting a new unofficial world record for the standing long jump, and hit halfway up the stairway going up the riverbank. He stuck his landing and was moving a moment after his feet touched ground.

  Moon followed him. She leaped from the bow, her fur flowing in the air as she dove into the water and came up swimming, reaching the foot of the staircase as Ray clambered up to the top.

  By now, the shambling newcomers had inserted themselves between the two groups of demonstrators, a half score undead facing the larger contingent of the living. The charging protesters had stumbled to an indecisive halt. As the reeking zombies continued their slow approach, the demonstrators turned en masse and, bumbling and battering against one another, retreated. Many added to the chaos by screaming incoherently. Some threw away their signs, some used them to bludgeon a way to safety.

  Many suddenly also realized that Ray was coming toward them with the speed of a runaway train and a look on his face that was not entirely rational. Moon followed behind him, barking ferociously. He heard Moon, but his heart sank when he realized that the Angel had remained on the launch, looking on. It all just made him even more angry.

  Some protestors fled; some froze in fear, creating a major traffic jam as those behind them either blundered to a halt or tried to fight through the paralyzed clumps of humanity.

  Ray hit the scrum of uncertain protesters like the running back he’d been in college. It all came back to him, like a riding a bicycle that’d been parked for forty years. He smiled crazily as he headed for an imaginary goal line, jinking and darting through the defenders, none laying a hand on him, his eyes on the prize ahead.

  The biggest of the zombies, a huge man who’d once been black but was now a washed-out, grayish color, was in the lead. He had a nasty bullet hole in his forehead, but that didn’t seem to be bothering him any as he reached for the unlucky protester at the rear of the pack. She’d fallen down and the zombie was looming over her, opening wide jaws, which showed gaps where, Ray guessed, gold teeth had once gleamed.

  A last moment of cognition, of recognition of danger, must have flickered through the dim recesses of the zombie’s brain, for a whisper of what looked to Ray like surprise passed over his face, and then Ray leaped over his intended victim and hit him at full speed, shoulder first, arms wrapped around him.

  The zombie came apart.

  Fuck, Ray thought, I’m wearing a new suit.

  He clutched the top half of the zombie’s body, various organs dangling from it like really ugly candy hanging from a shattered piñata. The zombie’s bottom half, from the ass down, hit the asphalt walkway and skidded. Ray’s forward momentum shot them into another zombie and the two and half of them hit the ground in a tangle of limbs.

  Ray had rarely—no, never—been so disgusted in his life. He was covered by water-soaked zombie goo, his new suit was ruined, and he was still, in general, pissed off. The zombie on the bottom of the dog-pile tried to bite him, and Ray put his fist through its face, smashing it like a two-week-old Halloween pumpkin. Then he was on his feet, stamping, until the zombie’s chest was a flattened mass of fetid flesh and shattered bones.

  If the remaining zombies in Ray’s vicinity had any humanity left about them, or even some low degree of animal cunning, they would’ve fled. But no. They were zombies. They converged on their new, nearest target.

  Ray realized that all the protesters had gotten to safety—out of the corner of his eye he saw the cops helping some of them and Moon was harassing and gnawing off bits of other zombies—but he wasn’t done yet. He had to hit something to work the anger out of his system, and zombies made good targets.

  He grabbed the right wrist of the nearest and flipped it to the ground. He put his foot—his shoes, too, were finished, Ray realized—in its armpit and twisted. The arm came off like a well-roasted chicken wing and Ray was just in time to duck and whirl and smack another attacking zombie right in the face with his unconventional yet effective flail.

  The zombie’s head sailed off its rather scrawny neck and it twirled in a little uncertain dance and immediately fell over the edge of the riverbank, bounced a few times, and was swallowed by the waiting river. Ray whirled about, but the other zombies had stopped in their tracks.

  “Come on, you sons of bitches,” Ray shouted, though two of the zombies were clearly women. He didn’t really care.

  But they, or more properly, Hoodoo Mama, had had enough. She wasn’t exactly frugal with her undead soldiers, but neither did she waste them for no reason. Those left standing all turned in unison and marched toward the riverbank.

  “Come on!” Ray shouted in frustration. “Come on!”

  But no one heeded his challenge.

  “Shit!” Ray yelled. Still enraged, he hurled the zombie arm at the last zombie before it could jump off the bank, hitting it in the back and knocking it into the river below. Ray took a deep breath. “Shit,” he repeated, more quietly this time.

  He stalked back to the clump of protesters. Moon trotted next to him, her beautiful coat soaked in zombie goo, sneezing and hacking up bits from her narrow-jawed mouth.

  “Thanks,” Ray said.

  She wagged her tail.

  The launch had landed during the fight and Jones had disembarked, followed by Ray and the Port Police crew.

  Jones planted herself in front of him. “Agent Ray—” she began, but stopped when Ray raised his right hand and she saw the look in his eyes.

  He was covered in gore, soaked in embalming chemicals and bodily fluids, smeared with rotting flesh and squashed organs.

  “I’m going back to the motel now,” he said. He was surprised to hear the calmness in his voice. “I have to take a shower.” He looked at his wife. The look in her eyes—was it sorrow? Loss? Nothing at all?—bit deeper than any wound he’d ever received in his forty years in government service.

  The Angel and Moon followed him as he walked away.

  “Who told you where I live?” Joey Hebert asked sullenly as Ray stood before the door of her shotgun shack. Th
e white picket fence around the front yard was more gray than white and had more gaps in it than a meth head’s dental work. The front porch sagged and the entire building listed uncertainly like a drunken sailor. “It was Bubbles, wasn’t it?”

  Ray suppressed a sigh. He’d decided to take this one on alone, leaving the Angel and Moon at the Motel 6 where they were staying. He feared that Hoodoo Mama might remind her even more of Talas. Months of therapy had done little to help the Angel. Sitting around D.C. hadn’t helped either. He’d hoped that what he thought would be a relatively innocuous assignment might start to shake her out of her depression, but the Angel wasn’t responding at all to being in the field. The shields she’d erected around herself after Talas were still impenetrable. And now Ray had to worry about the twists the mission was taking. Well, one thing at a time.

  “Let me in, Joey.” He decided on the informal approach. “We have to talk.”

  Hoodoo Mama glared at him. She was a scrawny, young black woman with an expression that was mostly always angry. Ray knew the feeling.

  “We have to talk,” he repeated flatly.

  After a moment she said, “I guess I can’t make you shut your mouth.” She opened the screen door and stepped aside.

  The front room was a mess. Ray’s sense of neatness was offended. The room was poorly lit by a single forty-watt bulb in a floor lamp that stood next to a dirty, beat-up sofa. The coffee table in front of it was littered with old Chinese food and pizza boxes, the worn carpet was splotched with dried mud and less identifiable stains. The room smelled of dust and decay and death. “Jesus,” Ray said, “would it hurt to have one of your zombies run a broom through this place occasionally?”

  Joey shrugged defensively. “I just got back into town—right before I heard about the ship of refugees being held up in the harbor. They’re mostly wild carders, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ray said patiently. “And you’re not helping—”

  “Someone’s got to help them, Mr. High-and-Mighty Government Man,” Joey said, bitterly. “Someone’s got to keep them safe from those creepy-ass Liberty Party motherfuckers.”

  “That’s my job,” Ray said.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  Ray’s crooked features suddenly froze in a clenched-tooth grin. “You ever heard of me shirking my duty?”

  “What is your duty, Mr. High-and-Mighty Government Man?” Joey replied.

  “Trust me,” he said, and repeated after her unamused bark of laughter, “trust me. If you want, keep an eye on the situation—I know you have a legion of dead pigeons and rats you use as spies. Have an entire division of zombies on hand just in case things go wrong. But for Christ’s sake, keep them out of sight. You’re not helping by having the walking dead show up at every little provocation.”

  Joey eyed him, Ray thought, with more speculation than distrust. “You got a plan to save those poor people?”

  “I’m working on one,” Ray said. It almost surprised him to realize that he was. But in her own unsubtle way, he realized that Joey was right.

  She nodded. “All right. If you said you had one I wouldn’t believe you, because no one can save them. They’re fucked. But I’ll be damned if I’m just going to let them quietly sail off to their doom.”

  “I’ll take your word on that.” Ray turned to leave, stopped, and looked back. “And Bubbles said to call her. Your cell phone isn’t working and she’s worried about you.”

  “Damn it!” Hoodoo Mama said as Ray let the screen door bang shut after him.

  He went down the sagging wooden stairs carefully, fully aware that there could be an army of small dead things with sharp pointy teeth under them that Joey could send after him. But he felt that they had found at least a tiny bit of common ground, and zombies were one less thing he had to worry about, for now. There were plenty of others.

  Like the man sitting in the locked black Escalade he’d left parked up the street from Joey’s shack. There were no working streetlights in Hoodoo Mama’s neighborhood, so Ray could barely discern the silhouette in the front passenger seat. He thought that it was a man, a small man, perhaps a boy. He seemed utterly unconcerned as Ray approached the vehicle, so Ray simply opened the driver’s side door and bent down to look in.

  From close up Ray could see that he was indeed a small, slight white man, probably in his early seventies. He had a pleasant face that had been roughly treated by the passage of time. What hair that wasn’t covered by his porkpie hat was white and cut short. Ray suddenly recognized him. “You’re the JADL guy from the boat. Robicheaux, right?”

  He smiled. His teeth were even and white. “Right, Mr. Ray.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “No, but I want to help you.” He had a Cajun accent.

  Why not? Ray thought. A small old dude was just who he needed on his side. “How?”

  “Information, Mr. Ray. I know what’s going on among the refugees—and it’s not good.”

  Ray sighed as he pulled into the deserted street. “What’s happening?”

  “They’re scared, Mr. Ray. Tired and hungry. They were hoping for sanctuary and have been turned away—”

  “Pretorius say they have a shot—”

  “No. Asylum will be granted to a token few—the Handsmith and his son, the ace Tulpar, maybe two dozen passengers in all. Aces and nats, every one.”

  “And the jokers?”

  “Van Rennsaeler made a deal with the British PM—they’re sending them to Rathlin Island.”

  Ray frowned. “That rock off the coast of Northern Ireland?”

  “It was once a joker colony. Pretty much abandoned these days.”

  “So they’re sending them to some gulag—out of sight and out of mind.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I can hear the but you left unsaid.”

  The old man smiled wryly. “Very perceptive, Mr. Ray. There are several buts. The Handsmith has refused the deal, as has Tulpar. There’s talk of mutiny aboard the ship—of taking it over and trying for Brazil, Africa, maybe.”

  Ray snorted. “Yeah, Jesus, great idea.”

  “There’s more. A few of the refugees belong to a joker terrorist gang—the Twisted Fists. Others are starting to listen to them.”

  “To do what?” Ray asked. “Go up against the U.S. Coast Guard?”

  “They are desperate.”

  “It would be a bloodbath.”

  “Which is something your job is to prevent.”

  Ray pulled the Escalade over to the side of the street and slammed it into park.

  “How’d this come down to me?” he asked. “I don’t speak for the government. I work for the government.”

  The old man looked at him, his lined face composed. “If not you, who then?”

  “Shit,” Ray said.

  “But for the fortunate turn of the card, you and I could be one of those jokers.” If he was a joker, Ray thought, it didn’t show. An ace, maybe? Ray had never heard of him, but that meant little. Your card could turn when you were seven or seventy, or maybe he had some crappy little power that attracted no attention in the wild card world. “If as a nation we turn our back on a handful of brothers and sisters whose only crime was to be born in a savage land, how long will it be before other ships are sent to Rathlin, packed with those of our own nation who some people still despise? What then, Mr. Ray?”

  “Shit,” Ray said again.

  “But,” the old man said thoughtfully, “all is not entirely lost. The JADL has been in contact with a man who calls himself Witness. For a million dollars he’s offered to provide haven for the refugees in Cuba. That island isn’t exactly, uh, strict when it comes to immigration, and, uh, other laws. It could easily absorb a few hundred refugees, or act as a transit point once they acquire proper identification.”

  But Ray’s mind had turned back a decade. “This guy calls himself Witness,” he asked, “what’s he look like?”

  The Angel was still awake when Ray returned to t
heir hotel room. She slept very little, ate very little, and never smiled. She was sitting on the bed, watching some Mexican talk show. Ray knew that she didn’t speak Spanish. It was all noise to her, like the rest of the world washing through her head but failing to distract her from the horrors she’d faced in Talas.

  “I’m back,” he said, eliciting only a flicker of interest. “You’ll never guess who I ran into.”

  Her eyes slid over to him, which was encouraging.

  “The JADL guy we met on the ship,” he said, undressing down to his underwear and carefully hanging up his suit in the hotel room’s closet. The room was small, but neat, one of the lesser chains as SCARE didn’t have the budget to put its agents up at the really nice places with gyms and saunas and free breakfasts. But Ray didn’t much care as long as it was clean.

  The night was hot and humid, but the Angel had cranked up the air conditioner until it was bordering on wintry in the room. Ray got into the bed next to her.

  “The small man? He seemed nice,” the Angel said. There was a faraway look in her eyes.

  “Yeah.” Ray looked at her thoughtfully. “But he’s in the fight, in his own way.”

  “What do you mean?” the Angel asked.

  Ray kept the smile off his face. At least he’d engaged her, aroused her curiosity. That was something.

  “He’s working with the JADL, trying to help the refugees.” Ray relayed the information that’d been given to him, but when he was partway through the Angel turned her attention back to the television screen. “Only thing is, along with the nutjobs trying to keep the refugees off American soil, apparently there’s another problem festering behind the scenes. The Twisted Fists may get involved.” That evoked no interest. “And a group headed by some guy who calls himself Witness.”

  This captured the Angel’s attention. She turned her gaze back upon Ray. “The Witness?” she asked.

  Ray nodded. “He fits the description.”