minute.
He shook his damp locks, pulled the collar of his overcoat tight about his neck and fumbled with a cigarette. Minutes later the troll drove the boat into a suffocating fog bank. The chill air ate into Felon’s bones. His fingers fumbled and his nose ran freely. He sucked a stream of acrid smoke into his nostrils hoping it would dry and warm the sinus cavity. The assassin allowed himself a scarf, and warm socks, but no gloves. Felon almost died once because of gloves. They kept his fingers warm but a gun has a definite shape, and required precision to fire. He could not feel a trigger properly through gloves, and fabric reacted differently to other materials. Damp leather could catch on a wool coat or cotton jacket. Human skin, damp or cold, could distinguish the outline of a gun a lot better than a layer of fabric.
The Sunken City loomed suddenly out of a rolling fog. Monoliths of salt-stained brick and stone appeared. The ocean ground slowly, noisily through cramped streets, pounding its outer neighborhoods with waves. The walls of the narrow canyons were enormous sheets of concrete and steel rising in the distance. The dead and abandoned buildings reared out of the water at disturbing angles, many ready to collapse. Those closest to the boat disappeared in the low cloud cover. The fog swirled and churned around the trawler, as they pitched over broken houses while hollow thunder boomed, sending adrenaline surging in his veins. A gust of wind and the fogbank parted-the boat slipped into the protection of a narrow city street that opened along a steep divide. Echoes of water and wind rumbled. The Sunken City’s voice had nothing good to say.
Wurn slowed the trawler to a crawl. The water around them was black. Felon knew that the outer rim of buildings was a formidable barrier to any approaching ships. Tons of twisted steel and shattered rubble made a reef of destruction that few could navigate. Wurn steered down the flooded street, toward the inner neighborhoods where Felon knew lights were kept burning with coal and gas. That was where the Demon’s lived.
There was a splash to his left. Swimmers! A number of them converged on Wurn’s trawler when it slowed to navigate the dark streets. They swam silently with the boat, occasionally tilting a gray eye at its occupants. Swimmers were preserved by the Change and the high concentrations of salt in the water. The Demons allowed them to populate the streets as a deterrent to visitors. Little was known about them. Since their bodies could not long withstand the rigors of life out of the water, they posed little threat. Nobody who swam with the Swimmers lived to tell the tale.
“Hey there’s Swimmers!” Wurn exclaimed redundantly with dismay in his features. “Stay out of the water!”
Swimmers were dead people-drowned, murdered or dumped. The Change preserved them with the extinction of most forms of bacteria. Small fish nibbled the swimming corpses, large fish took the odd bite, but those that remained intact toughened in the salt water, their skins taking on a gray, sharkskin look. The dead on land had to worry about dehydration; the dead in the sea had to worry about dissolving. If the skin was intact, a Swimmer could go on, growing more durable with each passing year. But, if the skin was broken, that was the beginning of the end. Little fish and the nibbling parasites got in. In time, the afflicted Swimmer would become more and more ragged, more bloated and distended. In late stages they resembled a tangle of floating bones and rotting meat.
The creatures traveled the sunken streets alone or in packs. Swimmers didn’t speak. They were cunning, but unlike the dead on land they behaved like animals-more apt to flee than fight. Felon didn’t care what they were, or what they thought, he only knew that they didn’t like bullets. In the dark water their long-limbed bodies resembled toads’.
Felon growled, touching his holster as he eyed the boatman. The trawler picked up speed.
The broad sunken avenues gaped to either side of them as they passed over drowned intersections. At places where traffic of ocean currents converged, small maelstroms were created, their impetus pulling at the boat. The powerful engine rumbled and sent them surging on. One hundred years of rain and pounding surf had worn away at the Sunken City’s skyline. Skyscrapers had tumbled and apartment blocks had collapsed into dangerous mazes of corroded steel and mountains of reinforced concrete. The structures at the eastern edge of the Sunken City took the worst of it; they were pounded by Old Atlantic and torn by its winds. What remained had formed a break wall-a complicated shallows that absorbed the energy of the waves, protected the buildings deeper in.
Millions had once lived in the now shattered buildings, driven its flooded streets, and worked in its crumbled factories and for a moment a nagging pre-Change recollection tugged at Felon’s thoughts. He imagined most were dead now and wondered how many of them still moved along its streets as Swimmers.
A horrible cry cut through the gathering gloom. It started guttural and gravely high above them, and wound upward in pitch and ferocity, until it became a screaming whip stroke of sound that undulated and fell on the delicate tissues of the brain like broken glass. Felon’s gun was out and pointed at the shadows above.
“Watcher!” he hissed.
“Watchers watch!” the troll whimpered, glancing into the shadows above them before gesturing with an over-sized hand. “There! Master Balg’s boat-on the Street of Walls!” He swung his arms along a broad corridor lined with enormous stone buildings.
The overcast left everything in gloom. Felon ripped his eyes away from the empty window frames above. He could see the shape of a large ship a half-mile away. Lights blazed out of its many windows and with it came haunting musical strains. The sounds echoed toward them, distorted by the distance.
“Light!” He paced to the wheelhouse.
Wurn reached under the boat’s dashboard and grabbed a spotlight. Felon snatched it away and played its harsh beam first along the regular surfaces of the buildings towering over them. Shadows swung about the black interiors of the dead monoliths. Nothing. Then Felon turned the spot, and sent its powerful light across the water. Balg’s ship was growing in size as they approached. Perhaps one hundred-fifty feet in length, it rose from the waterline thirty feet to its top deck.
Felon pierced the surface of the flooded street and stroked the corroded pavement forty feet below with the angled beam. It flashed over barnacle-encrusted vehicles, a corroded bench, a toppled light post then fell on the first of the Swimmers. A great, distended blob, with bloated legs and head, it bucked and thrashed away from the light like it was on fire. There was a mob of them, floating and paddling around in the dark. The moment the light passed near they dove and swam into the recesses of submerged doorways and sunken subway entrances. He shone the spotlight toward the yacht, and caught a few more gray eyes disappearing in a splash. He let the light slide up the anchor chain.
Felon glared at Wurn.
“Swimmers don’t take no Baron Balg. They takes Eyesores, and we watch. They take us but we watch!” Wurn ran his large palms over his thick thighs, and then rubbed them together. Felon slipped his gun away, watching the powerful muscles bunch beneath the creature’s yellow-gray skin. He slid the pistol in and out of the holster, left it unfastened, and turned to watch the yacht.
20 – The Mission
The magician waited while Dawn finished with her little woman’s moment. Years before she started dawdling while getting ready for breakfast. She claimed she spent those minutes in her cubbyhole applying finishing touches. A little dab of scavenged rouge perhaps, a final flourish for her thick dark hair-Mr. Jay could never tell what wonders she worked. Her forever girl’s condition had her brimming with youthful beauty at all times.
He curled cross-legged on the sill of the boarded-up window. The magician had returned some forty minutes before Dawn awoke. Mr. Jay loved and hated his time away from her. He enjoyed it because he had a very isolated life before he’d met her. Not lonely, just isolated and he had adapted to solitude. And now, he was uncomfortable with time alone, because it meant being away from Dawn. He’d known her all these years and still could not predict her actions. So he worried.
Mr. Jay blamed the fact that she’d never gone through puberty. She couldn’t recognize the dangers of the world. For her, a danger passed was passed and life took her onto the next thing. He checked that line of reasoning because it wasn’t true. She learned, and she was wiser than she let on. She played dumb from time to time. He knew that was because if she could take care of herself, she was afraid he’d leave.
Mr. Jay stretched himself out of his moody brooding and settled against the bricks. The exertions of the night had little effect upon him. He rarely needed more than a couple of hours sleep. It gave him great opportunity for
