LITMIR.BIZ

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Myron had throttled back the Diesels and diverted some power to pumping out the water gushing in through the breach. Instead Ricky and Jak were kicking the burning planks chopped free overboard.

      There wasn’t enough power to spare for the above decks pumps too. Myron clearly reckoned that if the boat sank, it would take care of the fire, anyway. So his priority was keeping her afloat. His prime enemy as he saw it was water, and Ryan couldn’t disagree.

      Avery laughed. He was pointing out to Ryan where to cut with the ax, plus helping out with one of his own.

      “Not triple likely, kid. They probably forgot all about us. The only stuff we had worth stealing’s burned to the waterline. Least as far as they know.”

      “The only reason either bunch really had for shooting at us,” Arliss pointed out, “was that they’re both plain mean. They’ve been rival king-ass fucks lording over this stretch of river for generations, each with only the other to give them any kind of check. And it went to their heads.”

      “So are they meaner than the countryside hereabouts?” Ricky asked.

      “Unless the stickies or the swampers got themselves some cannon,” J.B. replied, “I’d reckon yeah.”

      “Too slagging right,” Jake said. He was handling the portside hose, where Krysty and Mildred worked the pump, while J.B. and Doc operated the starboard one that fed Arliss’s.

      Ryan wasn’t pleased about Krysty working as hard as she was so soon after her concussion. But since the concussion wasn’t literally life-or-death, but putting out the fire might be, he knew better than to try to order her to sit this one out.

      “But we gotta beach her soon,” Lewis said. “Then everything changes.”

      It was the longest speech Ryan had heard the lanky man make. His tone carried a sense of doom. And if Ryan had any doubt the Queen was doomed—at least so long as she stayed in open water—Arliss chilled it at once.

      “She’s riding lower in the water as every minute passes.”

      “At least we mostly got the fire beat down,” Avery stated.

      “What happens if we go down?” Ricky asked.

      “Nile crocodiles,” Jake said with doleful satisfaction.

      Ricky emitted a yelp of terror. Everybody laughed. He blushed.

      Suzan came back aft. “Captain’s compliments, Ryan, and she asks that you present yourself on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”

      Obviously under the inspiration of their captain, Ryan had noticed the crew was partial to the use of old-timey-sounding nautical talk on formal occasions. “She requests your advice picking a spot to ground the vessel.”

      “Right,” he said. Just because he knew the game didn’t mean he had to play. Their employers didn’t seem to expect it of him or his people, anyway.

      “We got the fire controlled,” Arliss said. “Jake, Avery and I can take it from here. You all can go.”

      “You heard the lady,” he said, passing the hose down to Krysty and clambering from the roof of the mostly gutted cabin. “Let’s shift on out of here.”

      Jak looked at him with eagerness written on his face. “Go up top, watch?”

      He nodded. Jak scrambled up to the roof.

      “Man doesn’t talk much,” he told the Queen crew members.

      “Noticed,” Jake said.

      * * *

      “WAIT,” MILDRED MUTTERED. “How did I wind up carrying the lower end of this freaking coffin when the dude on the other end is like eight feet tall?”

      Santee was not, in fact, eight feet tall, although he was six-six, minimum, or she was the Pope, Mildred thought, and he was indisputably on the end higher up the staircase. Or “ladder,” as the boat people insisted on calling it. That struck the much shorter Mildred as markedly unfair.

      Of course what they were carrying could only serve as a coffin for a child or a very short adult. It was no more than five feet long and felt as if it were packed with lead ingots. Or maybe she felt burdened because it was sweltering hot there in the cargo hold, and she had to breathe through a wet handkerchief tied around her face to filter out the smoke. And then there was the stench of rotting blood from poor Edna and Maggie, although their bodies had been taken ashore.

      “What’s in it, anyway?” she demanded as she struggled up the stairs with her unbalanced burden. “Shouldn’t we only be carrying, like, food and other vital supplies off the boat?”

      The big man smiled down at her. “Treasure,” he said cheerfully. Nothing seemed to get to Santee.

      She managed to make it up the rest of the way and onto the deck, where the two of them handed the long wooden box over the rail to a quartet of workers standing in shin-deep shallows. Then she propped her butt on the rail to catch her breath. Santee said nothing, only drank deeply from a canteen and handed it to her.

      He didn’t seem offended when she wiped the mouth with her hands. Even on short acquaintance, the Mississippi Queen’s crew had learned that she had her eccentricities. Fortunately, they were inclined to take folk at their own value, and not sweat that kind of thing unless it slopped over into their own personal lives. They weren’t outlaws, these people who made their livings on the river—certainly not by the standards of the day—but they were pretty clearly outcasts, who had trouble fitting into the more settled societies ashore.

      Which is probably why we and they get along like bosom buddies, she thought.

      Her companions and the crew worked without particular urgency to unload the boat of whatever was deemed necessary, and prepare a camp on the riverbank, which was as flat as a board and barely higher than the water. The sun wasn’t going to set for some time yet, and it wasn’t as if they could hide their presence.

      Ryan and the captain had chosen a decent spot to ground the boat. It was a mostly clear area of dry, firm soil. The radiation in the immediate vicinity wouldn’t chill them too quickly, according to Ryan’s coat-lapel rad counter. As for the amount of heavy metals—brutally toxic—they might be taking in, there was no way to tell, which didn’t make Mildred any too happy. But what mattered was immediate survival. In the absence of that none of the other stuff would matter anyway.

      The one slightly alarming aspect was the presence of a dilapidated railroad bridge barely a quarter mile upstream. The rusty steel structure had fallen into the creek from roughly one-third of the way out from this bank almost to the far side. Likely there was still a rail line, long overgrown by weeds, leading to and from it. The problematic part was, this region was alleged to be crawling with stickies, and that derelict bridge would provide an ace nest for a major stickie colony.

      Still, she thought, we take what we can get. As usual.

      Ryan was hacking back the long grass and scrub surrounding their landing point with his panga. Jake was helping out with a scythe that they seemed to be carrying to trade at some point. He mowed the stuff down far faster than Ryan, and likely could have done as well by himself. But Ryan clearly felt the need to do something, especially after the enforced helplessness when they were trying to run from a bunch of boats shooting cannon at them.

      At least Ryan and Mildred had prevailed on Krysty to take it easy, once they got ashore. She had insisted on carrying her own backpack off the vessel—fortunately all their gear had survived the fires and general smashing. Then she went off to the side and sat down on her jacket, spread out on the dirt. She was acting normally, aside from her not being in the thick of all this activity.

      Mildred smirked. Sometimes she got her companions to stop acting as if they were superhuman, and to take some regard for their health. If you didn’t take care of yourself some, your performance degraded. There was no way around that. And especially given the way they all lived, that was a fast ride

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