Ganymede (35 page)

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, everything’s fine. I was hoping I could speak to Captain Cly.”

Kirby Troost’s teeth worked around the fraying match. “Well, then. I guess you’d better come inside.” He opened the door to admit her, then shut it fast behind her.

Inside, the warehouse was not as large as she’d remembered it, from the one time she’d been there a few months previously. Then again, last time she saw it, the place hadn’t been stuffed with two large flatbeds and the
Ganymede
—which had been covered with an assortment of tarps roped down over the sides and concealing most of its details.

The interior was shadowed. Most of the light came from a row of small windows up near the ceiling. The rest came from two strands of electric lanterns, hanging from the ropes somebody had strung from two sets of rafters, fizzing and popping.

“You covered it up,” she observed.

“
They
did.” Kirby cocked his head toward a back door, leading to an alley near the river. Then he said, “I mean, your bayou fellas did it. I didn’t much see the point, myself. Anybody who looks in here will get a gander at that thing, wonder what the hell it is, and take a look underneath the wrappings, regardless.”

She peered up at the loosely swaddled craft, wondering where they’d found so many big scraps of tarp. “Still, I suppose it feels safer this way, rather than leaving it exposed.”

“It’s not exposed. It’s got a whole building over it.”

“At any rate, Mr. Troost, could you tell me where the captain has run off to? I don’t see him.” For that matter, she didn’t see anyone. Troost was the only warm body present. That didn’t precisely worry her, but she wasn’t particularly comfortable with his presence, either. Something about the little man bothered her. He reminded her of someone or something unpleasant, or perhaps it was only the impertinent way he spoke and moved. He was entirely too comfortable everywhere. No one should feel so immediately at home at the drop of a hat.

“Could I tell you where he’s at for certain? No. I could make a guess or two, or you could wait until he gets back. I believe he’s gone down the road to that little bar, the one three or four blocks east. We’ve been coming and going in shifts, and hanging around the one hotel New Sarpy sees fit to maintain. It wouldn’t do anybody any good to see a bunch of men coming and going from this warehouse. I don’t care if your brother says everyone in town is a friend of ours.”

“Almost everyone,” she murmured.

“Yeah.
Almost
. Almost means room for error, and I don’t like it. So we’re taking turns, just hanging around. One or two of us at a time. But Cly isn’t much of a drinker, and he’s keeping an eye on Houjin, so I predict he’ll get bored and swing this way within the hour.”

Josephine said, “Hm,” surveying the scenery with a critical eye. Then she asked, “Are you from Seattle?”

“Seattle?” he repeated, neither confirming nor denying anything.

“You heard me. Seattle. What can you tell me about it?”

He shrugged and leaned against
Ganymede
’s shrouded bulk, pulling a tobacco pouch out of his vest pocket. As he delivered a pinch into a white square of rolling paper, he told her, “Not sure what you’re looking to hear. It’s an old port town, up in the Washington Territory. Not much to it anymore.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“What
have
you heard?”

She crossed her arms. “There’s gas in Seattle, isn’t there? Turns men into the walking dead, isn’t that right?”

He didn’t bother to deny it. “Something like that.” He scrunched the paper into a cigarette and pulled the match out of his mouth. Lifting a corner of the cloth that covered
Ganymede,
he struck the match on the craft’s rough-edged side. It sparked to life, and he used it to light the cigarette.

“How does anyone live there, if it’s full of this poisonous gas?”

“So
this
is what you want with Cly.”

“He’s been living there in Seattle, hasn’t he?”

Troost’s eyes did not exactly narrow, since they had never been open all the way, but now Josephine felt as if she were being squinted at. “No. He’s got a flat in Tacoma, about thirty miles to the south.”

“But he comes and goes from Seattle a lot, doesn’t he?”

“You’ll have to ask him. I haven’t been with his crew terribly long.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

They stared each other down, him smoking carelessly and her braced for a fight that he wasn’t prepared to give her.

Kirby Troost repeated, “I’m not lying. I don’t know how much time he spends in Seattle, but I know he visits regularly. There’s a woman there, and he’s sweet on her. I think he’d like to settle down, if she’ll have him.”

“Inside a poisoned, abandoned city?”

“People still live there, underground. It’s … complicated. They’ve got this wall around it, and a crazy system of air tubes and vents, and filters, and whatnot.”

“And this woman of his, she lives there?” she asked without really meaning to. She didn’t care. She wasn’t even curious. She wasn’t sure why she’d pressed the issue.

“Her, and her son. She’s a widow.”

“Is she—” Josephine wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask. “—good for him?” she finished weakly.

“I don’t know, I’ve barely met her. He sure likes her a lot, and that’s what’s important, as far as I’m concerned. He’s got this plan to set up an airyard dock inside the city wall. The people who live there are willing to pay him to maintain it.”

“Why?” she asked. It was a why that applied to any number of questions she couldn’t yet formulate more specifically.

“It’s hard for them to keep contact with the outside world. It’s practically a secret, them living there. They like to be left alone; to their own devices, if you know what I mean. They don’t bother nobody, and they don’t want anybody bothering them. But sometimes they need supplies. They need to send letters or messages. Things like that.”

“And if Cly does this, if he starts a business there—he’ll live there, too, and marry this woman?”

“Yeah, I’d say he’ll marry her if she’ll have him.” Then he turned the conversation just a notch to the right, in exactly the direction Josephine didn’t want him to go. “You and him—the captain, I mean. There’s history there, ain’t that right?”

“He told you?”

“He mentioned it. Didn’t say much, except that it was years ago, and it didn’t work out.”

She only just noticed that he almost never blinked. “That’s about right.”

Kirby Troost, still mostly unblinking, said, “I can see it.”

“See what? Andan and me?”

The shadow of a smile tugged at the corner of his lip. “Yeah. I can see it. Not exactly two of a kind, but I suppose—given what I’ve heard—he’s got a certain type he prefers.”

“And you think I fit that type?”

“Smart and tough. You’re taller, though. Taller than Miss Wilkes.”

“I thought you said she was a widow.”

“I did, but it’s complicated.”

“So complicated, you call her
miss
?”

“Complicated enough. We mostly call her
ma’am
. She’s a yitty-bitty thing. A little smaller than me, even. But I don’t know too many men who’d argue with her, push come to shove. That’s what I mean, about him having a type. Not many men argue with you, either.”

The back door squeaked open, and before Josephine even noticed him reaching for it, Kirby Troost was holding a six-shooter primed and ready. Upon seeing Cly and Houjin, he lowered it and tucked it back into his belt.

“Cap’n,” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Josephine,” he greeted her with a nod. “Something I can do for you?”

“A word in private, if you please.”

The oriental boy’s face constricted into a sneaky grin, as if he looked forward to embarrassing the captain with this moment later on—but it would wait. He opened his mouth to say something, but Cly didn’t give him time.

“Huey, you and Kirby stay close.”

Kirby Troost said, “Great.”

To which the captain said, “You can teach him to play cards if you want. Just keep each other out of trouble, will you? Josie, how about we go out back and walk along the river.”

“That sounds fine,” she told him stiffly, and she followed him as he went back out the way he’d come in, holding the door for her and—like his engineer—shutting it firmly and quickly as soon as they were through it.

Down along the river, there was a path built on old railroad ties and bleached-bone boards pounded into the mud. They walked slowly along this, going nowhere in particular, unwilling to look at each other.

After a minute or two of unhurried shuffling, he finally asked, “What do you want, Josie? Or what do you need? Why’d you come all the way back out here from the Quarter?” His words were tense, like he was afraid to hear the answer.

“It’s about the zombis, Andan.”

That caught him off guard. Whatever he’d been expecting or fearing, this wasn’t it. “The what now?”

“Zombis. That’s what we call them here, though you must have a different word for them in Seattle.”

“In Seattle?”

“The walking dead, Andan.”

“Yeah.” He scratched at the back of his neck, feeling the sweat already gathering there, from the warm wet air by the river and from the company, as well. “We’ve got some of those. We call them
rotters
. I don’t think there’s any real word for them. They aren’t like animals, or bugs—we don’t have scientists falling all over themselves to catalog ’em.”

“Madame Laveau calls them zombis, and she’s the only woman on earth who seems able to control them at all.”

“Laveau? The Queen? Hot damn, is she still alive?”

“Yes, dear,” Josephine said without thinking; the phrase simply fell out of her mouth. “She’s still alive, and she’s brought me a Texas Ranger who thinks he knows what’s making them. She wants me to work with him.” She sighed.

“What’s the Queen got to do with the dead things? You said she controls them? Maybe they aren’t the same problem we’ve got. Ours don’t answer to anybody,” he replied, but he didn’t sound certain. Suddenly he added, “Come to think of it, I’ve seen them answer to a machine. My buddy Jerry, he has this gun he calls Daisy—and it shoots a big gong of sound. It stuns them into holding still, but only for a few minutes.”

Josephine remembered watching Marie Laveau clang her cane against the lamppost. That was the same thing in its way, wasn’t it? A
big gong of sound
? She did not believe in coincidences, so she filed this information away. “I need you to tell me about them, Andan. Tell me everything you know.”

He did.

It came out haltingly, as he fumbled around the conversation—trying to spare her the things she already knew, and pass along only what was helpful. Much of what he told her was truly revolutionary, particularly one important point confirming what the Ranger had told her: One way or another, the zombis, or rotters, or whatever they were … they originated in the walled-up, poisoned city.

Seattle was the source. Seattle was the problem.

“No,” he corrected her when she said as much aloud. “People like
me,
we’re the problem. We moved the gas out, so the chemists could turn it into sap. We spread the poison around because we’ve been paid well to do so, but that shouldn’t have mattered. We shouldn’t have done it.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. All of us, everywhere, everything we do … it hurts someone, someplace. I’m convinced of it.”

“That’s a god-awful philosophy, Josie.”

“It’s not a philosophy; it’s an observation.”

But privately she could only agree. She also understood that his desire to settle down and do something else had as much to do with someone named Briar up in the Washington Territories as it did with his own guilt.

She briefly considered bringing up this Briar person, then felt silly for the impulse. It didn’t matter. When this was over, and
Ganymede
was in the appropriate hands, she and Cly would go their separate ways on the same grand scale as before, and that would be the end of it.

Sentimentality would do neither of them any good. She fought it hard, and turned it off, and walked beside him without thinking about how much she’d once enjoyed doing so.

She did not think about how much it’d warmed her, and been an odd source of pride, to roam with the giant pirate whom no one ever stopped or bothered, or assaulted or robbed, or even questioned—no matter how softly he spoke or how friendly his words. She did not recall how she’d appreciated his strength, even seeing it used against others when he’d fight for money in the ring, and she refused to consider for even a moment how she’d lengthened the bed they’d so often shared in order to make him more comfortable.

She worked hard to keep from considering the way things could have been, and might have been, but were not. Things had gone another way, and this other way had been best for them both. Or so she was forced to assume, not knowing what might have happened if she’d bundled up and headed north, and west … or if he’d taken off his coat and parked his dirigible in the delta.