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“I already know about the gas, and those Mexicans in Utah. ”
“Sure. But have you heard about the zombis in New Orleans?”
Seventeen
Josephine held her breath and aimed.
She exhaled slowly as the zombi moseyed behind a stack of crates outside the warehouse down at the river’s edge. This was the same warehouse she’d visited once before, following the two Texian officers—and then, of course, she’d been saved from potential disaster by Marie Laveau, may she rest in peace. But Marie could not save her now. Marie was beyond saving anyone anymore, and it was almost as if the zombis knew it.
Josephine would not have said it out loud, but it was hard not to notice, and not to wonder at how the riverbanks were more dangerous now than before the Queen had passed on despite Texas’s efforts to the contrary. Patrols ran every night, in three shifts. Texian soldiers and Texian guns picked off the dead men by the score, leaving everyone to wonder just how many of the things, precisely, had been running around all this time.
Every morning there were more bodies, more corpse-corpses. Some of the zombies were recognized, named, and taken away. Most were not. Most of them were burned down to charred black scraps, and if anything was left, it was buried. Or else, the nasty remnants were dumped into the ocean—where everything eventually rusts, or warps, or is eaten away by carrion-seekers small and large.
They must be managed now, before they become unmanageable.
These days, or at least these curfewed nights, Josephine had started lighting candles and praying to no one in particular that it wasn’t already too late.
Then she’d pick up Little Russia and don unfancy clothes, adding a dark brown cloak. She’d meet her escort downstairs at the door, and he’d flash his badge again and again to see them both past the anxious watchmen who kept the Quarter under lock and key between dusk and dawn.
Together, they would go down to the river, to the warehouses, to the edges of the territory trawled by the organized boys in brown—with their rolling-crawlers and air support, their well-drilled sharpshooters and lookouts. They worked the fringes as a team, without the tactical advantage of numbers … but between them, they did their part to keep the things contained.
And to study them, and discuss their theories, their suspicions.
Tonight, like every night, the warehouse was dark.
Its huge double doors—built to accommodate ship-repairing cranes and equipment—had rotted and fallen off, and now lay flat and fragmented across the pier, leaving the interior exposed to the elements.
And to the zombis.
A pair of them wandered back and forth, wheezing as they shambled, seemingly in search of nothing at all—and, finding nothing, they merely changed their path and searched for nothing once more, in another direction. Josephine could see them from her vantage point atop an old shipping container, upon which she had lain down flat on her belly … all the better to alternately watch the riverbank and its forlorn, collapsing buildings through a spyglass, and over the edge of Little Russia’s barrel. Three other zombis were milling about, lurching and sagging, coughing and hunting.
She shuddered. She shook her head, braced her elbows, and closed one eye.
“Be patient,” whispered her companion.
She scrunched her eyes shut and resisted the urge to hit him. “I know,” she said instead, through gritted teeth. “And I am. ”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to get your dander up. I’m just trying to tell you that if you give this one on the left a minute or two, I think it’ll circle back around. You might be able to hit ’em both with one bullet. ”
He was right, and she almost hated him for it—except that the implication of his suggestion was that he believed she was capable of making the kind of shot that could knock down two zombis at once. And that was no small measure of flattery, coming from a Texian.
She relaxed, very slightly. She returned her attention to the scene before her, illuminated mostly by moonlight flickering off the river, and by two skinny gas lamps that were too far away to do anything but stretch the shadows.
Josephine said, “I’ll take those two, and you pick off the ones hanging out on the right. If you don’t clip that big one soon, he’s going to topple clean over. That’ll mean a point scored for an alligator, and not for you. ”
“I didn’t realize we were keeping score. ”
“Everybody keeps score, Ranger Korman. Right now, I’m ahead by two. But if you can strike all three of the dead men on your right side, then you’ll only be down by one. I daresay you’ll catch up again, once we move down the block. ”
He made a harrumph noise that wiggled his mustache, and he used his free hand to adjust his hat—lifting the brim up out of the way so he’d have a clearer line of sight. “I think maybe you’ve miscounted. ”
“I think maybe you don’t like the idea of being beat by a woman. ”
“I didn’t say that. ”
“Keep your voice down, Ranger, or neither of us will do any better tonight. Look, here they come around again, like toys on a track. Not a brain left in their heads, I swear to high heaven. ” She took another breath, held it in, and exhaled slowly.
Then, as the zombis staggered into position—that critical point when two were both in the same line of sight—she clenched her jaw and pulled the trigger. Little Russia bucked in her hands, hurtling a bullet between two stacks of industrial crates, straight into the ear of one ambling zombi and out the other … and farther still, to lodge in the forehead of a second dead man right behind it. A big red circle splatted thereupon, and in perfect synchronicity, the two dead men toppled down to the planks. They dropped with a hollow, melodic thunk.
