The Drowned Cities (31 page)

Much like the shotgun Mahlia had inspected, the walls of the city were decorated with the images of previous owners, emphasizing how quickly the tides of war shifted in the Drowned Cities.

AOG colors were slathered over other warlord faces, blotting them out. Other army flags were blacked out or painted over, but some images still peeked out. Mahlia could even make out a few peacekeeper slogans from when the cease-fire had been in effect.
IMMUNIZE FOR LIFE. BEAT YOUR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES.

Mahlia saw soldiers on a boardwalk, waving them over.
They were just boys, some of them as young as Mouse, all of them armed with assault rifles and shotguns. Bony bodies and knotted muscles and scars that ripped across their bare backs and ribs and chests. All sorts of races and mixes, black and brown and pale freckled pink, and all of them as hard-eyed as their warlord. All of them full of the same hungry swagger as the UPF soldiers who had taken Mouse.

“Who’re you, girl?” one of them asked.

Mahlia didn’t answer. The boatman answered for her.

“She’s with me.”

He pulled out papers and handed them over to the soldiers. They looked at her, looked at the papers. Mahlia wondered if they could even read.

The boatman said, “I have an arrangement with Captain Eamons.” He lifted a sack, offering it to them. “He will be expecting this.”

The boys looked at the sack, looked at the papers. Looked at Mahlia.

Their eyes were bloodshot. Red rippers or crystal slide. All the troops were hopped up on the stuff to give them a combat edge, but it made them crazy and wild, and suddenly she had a bad feeling about the plan.

These soldier boys, they just wanted to kill another castoff. It didn’t matter if she had the protection of this trading man or not. Didn’t matter if there was some agreement.

A castoff had no chance going into the Drowned Cities. She didn’t belong here. The warlords had demonstrated that when she and her mother fled the first time. People
who had collaborated with China’s peacekeeping mission were public enemy number one. The warlords and their soldier boys had long memories for traitors.

One of the boys was looking her over. He only had one eye, which kind of reminded her of Tool, but this boy’s eye was brown and bloodshot and angry and crazy in a way that Tool, even when he seemed ready to kill, never was.

“You castoff?”

She tried to speak, but fear overtook her. Shook her head.

“Sure you are.” He looked at the boatman. “What you want a castoff for, old man?”

The boatman hesitated. “She’s helpful.”

“Yeah? How ’bout I buy her?”

Mahlia’s guts tightened. What a fool she’d been.

“She’s not for sale.”

The boy laughed. “You think you decide what’s for sale, old man?”

The boatman shook his head. Even though he looked calm, Mahlia could see sweat dripping from his temples, running down his neck. “Your captain and I have an agreement.”

“I don’t see him around.”

Mahlia thought she felt a thump through the base of the boat. Tool, either drowning, or readying himself to emerge and slaughter.

Stay down
, she prayed.
Stay down.

All the soldier boys were looking at her, hungry and
predatory. Their little aluminum amulets of protection glinted on their bare chests. Some of them had a green cross painted on them; others had their general’s face painted there, the same one that slathered the walls, with his black skin like her mother’s and his hollow cheeks and his wild, intense eyes.

The amulets were different, though. General Sachs was still smiling, but whoever had painted him had made him look almost crazy. Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was because he wanted to look that crazy and dangerous, or because the painter just couldn’t paint worth a damn, but when she looked up at the boys, she knew she wasn’t going to ask. It didn’t matter if she thought the general they worshipped looked silly or not.

No one with a gun looked silly, in the end.

The boy looked at the boatman, then looked at Mahlia, weighing his cruelty. His troops all watched, interested. Ready for anything. Happy for everyone to end up dead.

Don’t shame him
, Mahlia thought.
Give him a way out. Give him some way to not lose face with his boys.

The boatman seemed to be reading her mind. “Your captain is expecting us.” He opened a sack and withdrew a dirty stack of Red Chinese paper money, with pictures of some woman on the front and a tall angular tower on the back.
BEIJING BANKING CORPORATION
written in Chinese and English.

Red hundreds.

“Once he pays us,” the boatman said, “there will be more on the way out.”

The soldier boys didn’t change their expressions. But the lead boy took the cash and waved them deeper into the Drowned Cities.

G
LENN
S
TERN’S FACE
stared at Ghost from the side of a building.

The man was three stories tall, and ten stories up, and he was eye to eye with Ghost, because Ghost was sitting on top of a barracks building by a bonfire with all his warboys, and Ghost was the man of the hour.

They’d gone into an old building and found a whole bunch of old paintings and furniture, broken them up, and started a bonfire on top of the building, choosing one where they could see out across the Drowned Cities and enjoy the view.

It had been a hell of a time hauling the stuff up, but now it was all burning, and the fire was crackling and hissing,
and all kinds of strange colored paints were bubbling on the canvas and going up in smoke.

Sergeant Ocho hadn’t wanted to go up so high, but seeing as they were behind the war lines, and seeing as Stork and Van and TamTam and everyone else were begging, he said it was okay.

Stork said the sergeant didn’t like getting pinned up in the towers; he’d been caught with an old squad and ended up doing an emergency jump into a canal from four stories up. Broke his leg doing it, but in the end, he’d come out okay.

Still didn’t like to get pinned, though.

So now they were up high, looking out over the city, with Glenn Stern staring at them, and they owned the place.

Far in the distance, other fires burned, beacons. Some of them UPF; others, farther away, the campfires of the enemy. Sometimes, some asshole would launch a mortar and they’d watch it arc across, but there seemed to be some kind of agreement between the troops of the different factions that you didn’t mess with each other when you did a rooftop camp at night. Skirmishing was a day job. When you cycled back for R & R, they left you alone, and you did the same. Mostly.

Tracer fire launched across a darkened street along with the chatter of a .50-caliber. Ghost was surprised to realize that he didn’t need Mahlia to tell him what the guns were. He knew them all.

Van grabbed another big painting and dropped it on the fire. It hissed as the fumes from its paints went up.

The flames cooked through the picture. Some lady, sort of lying on a wheat field, looking across the hills to a house, all the colors kind of washed-out and grayed. The colors were boring, not like the kinds of paint they decorated their guns with. Those colors really stood out.

Ghost was looking at his own gun. It had color after color on it. Bright. A green cross on a red background, a sign that the Army of God had been the last owner.

Ocho squatted beside Ghost, nodded at the gun. “You should paint it,” he said. “Make it your own.”

“With what?”

“Romey’s got some colors; he does the pictures of the Colonel sometimes.”

“Like that one?” Ghost jerked his head at the huge image across the canal.

Ocho grinned. “Not quite. But he can get some supply. You can put your mark on it. Put a Fates Eye on it, or something. Get yourself some protection. Make it yours, right? All that AOG crap’s got to go, though. No cross-kisser stuff. Fates Eye, or else UPF blue and white, you want to get all patriotic.”

“How’d they even get him up there?” Ghost wondered.

Slim looked over at the image. “Patriotic fury, right? They scaled that sucker.”

“Ropes,” Ocho said. “They dropped ropes over the side,
and lowered themselves off the top. Worked for weeks on it. For Colonel Stern’s birthday. Bunch of Alpha Company put the civvies on it.”

“I still say they climbed.”

“You weren’t there,” Ocho said. “It was before you even got your half-bars.”

“Why you want to run down a good legend? Where’s your patriotic fire?”

“I’m all for patriotic fire,” Ocho said. “Especially if it’s a bonfire.” He tossed a cracked chair leg into the blaze, sending up sparks.

Ghost stared across the gap between the buildings. The people who had painted Glenn Stern had done a good job. The man looked like some kind of god. Hard and angular and his green eyes that did the same thing that Ocho’s did. Sort of green with gold flecks.

A god, or at least a patron saint. They all toasted the Colonel with their bottles, and then they all toasted Ghost, the hero of the day.

Reggie had bought three bottles of Triple Cross off the boys over in Charlie Company. They had a still that they worked, smuggling food downriver off their territory grant, and then distilling it. No one knew what went into the brew. For all they knew, Charlie Company was distilling fingernails and dogs, but they said it was all real grain. Things like ShenMi HiYield Rice, TopGro Wheat, whatever they could burn out of the fields and get away with
before Army of God or Freedom Militia figured out that they’d gone raiding.

Ghost’s squad boys kept giving him shots, getting him drunker. He stared up at the image of Glenn Stern.

“You should hear him speak,” Ocho said. “He’s got fire in him. Make you believe you can walk through a wall of bullets for the cause.”

“You got the same eyes,” Ghost said.

Ocho glanced at the painting. “Nah. I don’t. You look into the Colonel’s eyes and you see it in a second. We got the same color, but our eyes ain’t nothing the same.” He shrugged. “Saved me, though.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I wasn’t Drowned Cities, originally. Not like most of these dumbass war maggots.”

A couple of the other soldiers hooted at the insult, but Ocho waved them silent, smiling. “My family were fishers. We all got blown in on a hurricane, couldn’t paddle out. UPF scooped us up.”

He shrugged. “Most of us—” He broke off. “Anyway, they thought my eyes looked like the Colonel’s, so they recruited me.” He held out his hand, waist high. “I was a maggot about this big. They liked me. Like a mascot, right? Little bit of Glenn Stern, to keep them lucky when the bullets started flying.”

“Those soldiers still around?”

“Nah. They’re dead, mostly. But the LT, he was the one that saved my ass. He likes it when he’s got a sign. There
are days when all I can do is wake up and thank the Fates that I got the same colored eyes as the Colonel. If I didn’t—” He broke off, his expression turning dark.

Ghost hurried to change the subject. “How come he calls himself Colonel?”

“You think he should call himself something else?” Stork asked, an edge in his voice.

“Army of God has a general. General Sachs,” Ghost pointed out. “How come they got a general?”

“General Sachs.” Stork made a face of derision. “Hell. That man ain’t even a soldier. Never even went to war college. He’s just some crazy dude who talks fine and got a bunch of sorry-ass warboys to believe they’ll go to Heaven if they kill everyone who doesn’t bow down to him. He calls himself Supreme Eagle, too.”

Ocho broke in. “The Colonel says you can’t just give yourself a rank. That ain’t military.” He nodded across at the huge painting. “He says he won’t take a higher rank, because it’s not his place to take a rank. That ain’t patriotic. He’s fighting for the Drowned Cities, not for some kind of rank. He loves this place, for real. He’s not just here to scrape some scavenge out and run away like these other dogs.

“Someday, when we get rid of Army of God and Freedom Militia and Taylor’s Wolves and all the rest, he’s going to build it all back. Make it great again. Maybe then, he’ll be like in the Accelerated Age. A president or something, right?”

“President,” Stork laughed. “Don’t they got one of those in China? Peacekeepers were always going on about stuff like that.”

The conversation broke off abruptly as Lieutenant Sayle came up onto the roof. Everyone jumped to their feet.

“Soldiers!” The lieutenant smiled. “I’ve got good news. We’ve got a new hero in the platoon. Got to treat our boy Ghost right.” He waved to Ocho.

“Burn him in. Give him his verticals, and treat him good. We have twenty-four R-and-R before we go back out and teach the cross-kissers another lesson.”

“Burn me in?” Ghost asked.

Ocho and Stork had already grabbed Ghost’s arms.

“C’mon, Ghost. Be a man. Get your three.” Ghost started shaking at the thought of the iron again, but TamTam handed him a bottle of booze.

“Drink up, warboy. You don’t got to do this one clean.”