Any port in a storm.
He scurried past the clamoring hands and scooted, still hauling that dead-weight foot, beneath the overhang and to the ladder. Scaling it required him to set the cane aside, and he wouldn’t do that, so he stuck it in his mouth where it stretched his cheeks and jaw until they ached with the strain. But it was that or leave it, or leave the lantern—which he held by the hot, uncomfortable means of shoving his wrist through the carrying loop. When it swung back and forth with his motion, it burned the cuff of his shirt and seared warmly against his chest.
So he climbed, good foot up with a grunt of effort, bad foot up with a grunt of pain, both grunts issued around the cane in his mouth. When he reached the top he jogged his neck to shift the cane so it’d fit through the square opening in the corrugated roof. He slipped, his heavy foot dragging him to a stop with an ear-splitting scrape.
He’d have to step softly.
From this vantage point, holding up the quivering black lantern he could see all of it, and he understood everything and nothing simultaneously. He watched the mostly men and sometimes women of Reluctance stagger and wail, shambling hideously from corners and corridors, from alleys and basements, from broken-windowed stores and stables and saloons and the one whorehouse. They did not pour but they dripped and congealed down the uncobbled streets torn rough and rocky by horse’s hooves and the wheels of coaches and carts.
It couldn’t have been more than a hundred ragged bodies slinking forward, gagging on their own fluids and chasing toward the light he held over his head, over the town of Reluctance.
Walter stuffed a hand in his vest pockets and felt at the bottom of the bag he still wore over his chest. Bullets, yes. But not enough bullets for this. Not even if he was the best shot in Texas, and he wasn’t. He was a competent shot from New York City, orphaned and Irish, a few thousand miles from home, without even a sibling to mourn him if the drooling, simpering, snap-jawed dead were to catch him and tear him to pieces.
Bullets were not going to save him.
All the same, he liked having them.
The lantern drew the dead; he watched their gazes, watching it. Moths. Filthy, deadly moths. He could see it in their eyes, in the places where their souls ought to be. Most of the men he’d ever shot at were fellows like himself—boys mostly, lads born so late they didn’t know for certain what the fighting was about; just men, with faces full of fear and grit.
Nothing of that, not one shred of humanity showed on any of the faces below.
He could see it, and he was prepared to address it. But not until he had to.
Beneath him, the Sweet Marie was filling. Down below the twisted residents of Reluctance were dragging themselves up and onto the platform, swarming like ants and shrieking for Walter—who went to the ladder and kicked it down against the generators, where it clattered and rested, and likely wouldn’t be climbed.
He sat on the edge of the corrugated roof and turned the lantern light down. It wouldn’t fool them. It wouldn’t make them wander away. They smelled him, and they wanted him, and they’d stay until they got him. Or until he left.
He was leaving, all right. Soon.
Inside the satchel he rummaged, and he pulled out his tobacco and papers. He rolled himself a cigarette, lit it off the low-burning lamp, and he sat. And he watched below as the cranium-shaped crest of the Sweet Marie slowly inflated; and the corpses of Reluctance gathered themselves on the landing pad beside it, ignoring it.
Finally the swelling dome was full enough that Walter figured, “I can make it. Maybe not all the way to Santa Fe, but close enough.” He rose to his feet, the flesh and blood one and the one that pivoted painfully on a pin.
The lantern swung out from his fingertips, still lit but barely.
Below the lantern, beside the ship and around it, the men and women shambled.
But fire could consume anything, pretty much. It’d consume the hydrogen like it was starved for it. It’d gobble and suck and then the whole world would go up like hell, wouldn’t it? All that gas, burning like the breath of God.
Well then. He’d have to move fast.
Retracting his arm as far as it’d go, and then adjusting for trajectory, he held the lantern and released it—tossing it in a great bright arc that cut across the star-speckled sky. It crashed to the far corner of the landing pad, blossoming into brilliance and heat, singeing his face. He blinked hard against the unexpected warmth, having never guessed how closely he would feel it.
The creatures below screamed and ran, clothing aflame. The air sizzled with the stench of burning hair and fire-puckered flesh. But some of them hovered near the Sweet Marie, lingering where the fire had stayed clear, still howling.
Only a few of them.