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“No. It’s like… like they’re imitating us.”
With their hands joined, the dead raised their arms, drawing the lightning to them. It crackled around their flickering, rotting bodies. They opened their mouths, jaws unhinging. An unholy shriek shot across the levee.
“Ahhhh!” Memphis shouted. He dropped Bill’s hand to cover his ears.
It was a chaos of sound inside his head, like the world ending. Barks. Growls. Screams. A radio scrolling through stations so quickly it became cacophony. A fist of noise punching through him. Memphis was brought to his knees. Beside him, Bill staggered, his face contorted in pain. The refugees on this part of the levee were affected, too. Voices swirled through the din:
You did this.
Hunted us down. Annihilated.
We feel you. You are in us now.
We have your power.
The air wobbled and warped. The high-pitched sound pricked a hole in the wall of sandbags protecting the levee. Water gurgled in the cracks, pushing to be let in. If the sandbags gave way, the swollen Mississippi would wash over the levee. National Guardsmen were running into the camp. “Here now! Stop that! Stop that screaming!”
The sound stopped. Memphis wiped drool from his mouth. Gasped for breath. The dead were gone. He saw them slipping back into the water, facing the city. One of the Guardsmen shot his rifle into the air. There was chaos in the camp, too, as they confronted the refugees who pushed back. More Guardsmen were coming.
“Memphis, we got to go now,” Nate said. “My boys.”
It seemed to Memphis that his heart might burst as they raced down to where Remy’s boat was tied to a stump. Quickly, Remy untied the boat and pushed off into the overflowing Mississippi. They watched as the tent city of the levee grew smaller in the distance.
“You think da ghosts out here?” Remy asked, face grim as his eyes darted left and right, watching.
“Yes,” Memphis said. He didn’t know what these new, powerful ghosts were capable of, and he hoped they’d be in time to save Moses, Toby, and Henry.
Remy steered the boat through the flooded town, toward the silent edges. Shadows deepened the spaces between the abandoned, half-drowned houses. Any one of those houses could be hiding the dead.
“No birds,” Bill said ominously.
Memphis could feel the stillness pressing in.
“This would go a whole lot faster if we could use the motor,” Remy said.
“Don’t want to call too much attention to ourselves,” Memphis said. “Trust me.”
“I think you better tell me the truth now, Memphis,” Nate said. “My boys are out there.”
“He’s coming,” Memphis said, and he took no pleasure in being right. “The King of Crows is sending his dead.”
An iridescent figure appeared at a dark upstairs window. Even from that distance, Memphis could feel the ghoul’s dead eyes trained on them. In the boat, they were completely exposed. The ghoul’s lips peeled back to show its teeth. It beat its hands against the window, thwack.
“Just keep going,” Bill said. “Don’t look back.”
“Allons,” Remy said and paddled faster.
Just like in Memphis’s dream, the dead were rising up, this time out of the water, and crawling onto the roofs and porches of Greenville. There were two more on a sleeping porch, gnawing on the carcass of some animal that had been left behind when the flood hit. Did these dead have powers? Would they open their mouths and drown the boat? Nate’s eyes were wide, wild. Memphis knew what he was thinking: My boys. I’ve got to get to my boys before they do.
When Memphis was running numbers for Papa Charles, he’d met a man who’d been a soldier in the Great War, part of Harlem’s 369th Regiment. He talked about what he’d seen over there: Men being blown apart by machine guns. Dying of mustard gas. Climbing into trenches and stabbing each other to death with bayonets until all humanity was extinguished.
“What it was, we were fighting a war with no rules,” the man had said, staring at his cards and placing his bet. “It was as if all the rules had gone right out the window.”
Memphis and his friends were fighting a war with no rules, too.
“There’s two,” Bill said.
“I see ’em,” Memphis said.
