The Heavens Rise

I’m not lying when I say I only remember scraps of what came afterwards. My father carrying me deep into the cypresses. The floor of the abandoned boathouse we took refuge in. The sound of my father stealing the tiny skiff. I remember helping him haul the monster into the back of the boat and then breaking down into something between sobs and screams when I realized what I was doing.

Actually, a couple months later, right before I was drifting off to sleep one night, I remembered what set me off. It was the sight of one of my mother’s hideously enlarged hazel eyes rolling up to meet mine in that scaled . . . thing’s face.

Dad told me later that the place where we hid out was a fishing camp that had belonged to a patient of his who had died of pneumonia during recovery; his widow had confided in my father that she couldn’t bring herself to clear the place out and sell it.

But for me, it’s all a jumble. I didn’t think I’d wake up and be told it was a dream. But part of me hoped the sparkling world I had seen with my altered vision as I had controlled my mother like a puppet would return to embrace me and carry me away. That the monster my mother had become, and the sounds of my father’s deranged sobs, were just the unfortunate side effects of having been returned to a solid, ordinary world I no longer belonged to.

My first clear and simple memory is of wandering through the swamp, summoning that blissful unzipped feeling and using it on the animals in my vicinity. There was no burst of having looked into someone’s soul, but I was able to place a few birds under my control for a dazzling five to ten minutes. And then their heads exploded and they tumbled to the ground, tiny masses of gore. They didn’t change shape or form, aside from this gruesome split-second death I triggered.

I can use my ability without creating monsters. And I can use it for an almost limitless amount of time on strangers in ordinary settings. God knows, I used it plenty to get us out of the city without being detected. But it’s not just a reaction to a sudden shock or trauma that will pervert the connection; it’s any swell of deep emotion within me. I’ve had a few close calls this past year, and they weren’t all the result of being frightened or distracted. In every one, the person I’d hooked bore some physical similarity to someone out of my past; a tense set to their brow that reminded me of Anthem, a full, generous mouth that reminded me of Ben, a perfume that reminded me of my mother. And when these qualities distracted me, when they stirred memories that began with a seed of nostalgia and then flowered into blossoms of grief and loss, that’s when things almost went full nightmare again. There’s only a few seconds in which I can break the connection before my instincts take over and I pull back against that horrible tug on my rib cage. But it’s a tiny window, and if I’m a second off . . .

That’s why total strangers are the most easily controlled. No emotional connection. Their bursts of soul that rush through me are brief, nothing like the overpowering sensations of my mother’s soul flooding through me. And that’s the terrible tragedy I live with every day. It was my love for her, my connection to her, my inability to detach from her as I manipulated her like a doll that caused her own nightmares to consume her physical form.

There’s still so much we don’t know about what I can do. The samples haven’t told us much. He calls it the Elysium parasite and it seems to have stuck with both of us; so much for the nickname I came up with—swamp sperm. And that’s just fine, I guess. My MRI didn’t tell us much either. There’s swelling in some areas where there shouldn’t be and his working theory is that they’re still in there. The parasite. His working theory is that they’ve altered fundamental, nonvisible light waves in me that make up my soul, thereby allowing me to suck on and take in the nonvisible light waves that make up the soul of someone else.

In his view, I am a parasite governed by human will and emotion. Why I can only control one person at a time, he’s not exactly sure. Whether or not the little buggers are still inside me—he’s not sure of that either. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe I pissed them away. But one thing’s for sure: they’re the cause of everything.

As for the other guy who was exposed?

Well, to be honest, after what I did to him at the Plimsoll Club, I don’t think he’ll be waking up anytime soon. I might have been able to force a confession from his lips but as my hatred for him swelled, I realized what was about to happen.

So it’s love and hate, isn’t it? It’s just kind of hitting me now as I write this.

My love . . . my hate . . . their nightmares.

Anyway, maybe if I’d let him transform into some kind of beast before everyone in that ballroom, his father would have been too afraid to run toward him and the poor man would be alive today. Meanwhile, I could have watched from the safety of the elevator lobby, concealed in the velvet cape and Mardi Gras mask I’d stolen from a costume shop so I could blend in with the waitstaff. Maybe if I’d let the process unfold, Marshall’s dad would be alive.

It’s ridiculous, I know. I couldn’t let it happen. But his father . . . I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.

But I didn’t want any of this, now, did I?

I lie awake nights remembering the view into his soul my gift afforded me. We were writhing together in the grass, a few yards from the pool at Elysium, and he was holding me by my neck while he drew a short knife with a sharply curved blade up the length of my sternum. And I wasn’t screaming or crying out for help or even gasping for breath. I was accepting this evisceration with serenity and calm. And I could feel his pride, his sense of triumph, at my silence.

Can you blame me for what I did to him?

Have you ever looked into the soul of someone who craves your evisceration? Can you see why I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to go for more than a confession? “I put a snake in their car” . . .

It’s been a year now. I’m sure they medevaced him out of New Orleans before Katrina. But with each passing day, his chances of waking up again diminish. I’ve read up on what happens to patients in a persistent vegetative state. I hope all of it happens to him.

Yes, I’ve thought about finishing the job on many occasions. My father was so horrified by what I’d done, he made us leave New Orleans before I could try. But how would I do it? I can’t use my ability on a person who isn’t technically conscious. (Trust me. I’ve tried, just to satisfy my curiosity on this front.) And I’m not going to make an innocent person do my dirty work.

And then there’s the whole not knowing. There’s what I heard him say at the table that night, about knowing the difference between a venomous snake and a nonvenomous one.

The water moccasin and the diamond-backed water snake are easily confused, you see. Both grow to lengths of six feet, both have smoke-colored scales and bodies as thick as a person’s wrist. Only the diamond-backed water snake isn’t venomous at all. Was it just a prank? And was he just a boy who didn’t know any better? (Am I just a girl???)

As for the peek I got into his soul? Maybe there are similar visions of violence inside the souls of men who have never lifted a hand to harm anyone in their lives. But he did harm us. And so . . . yes, there is a little regret. Just enough to keep me from driving a knife through his heart with my own two hands.

I like to believe that with each day, with each hour, death has pulled Marshall Ferriot a little closer to the gates of hell; some souls are just heavier than others.

But I wonder if as he lies there, some part of his brain is replaying that image of me, gutted like a catfish, over and over again. And when those thoughts become too much for me to bear, I tell myself that a father for a mother is a fair enough trade. For now.

26

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

OCTOBER 2013

Ben Broyard threw himself against the door so hard that the journal he’d just finished reading went spinning off the table and clattered to the floor beside him. There was no response from outside.

Then he was standing in mud, his shoulder still aching from the blow.

String lights sparkled in the low, shadowy branches overhead. The trailer was several yards behind him. Once again, time had been excised from his consciousness with a surgeon’s precision. And as he turned in place, he realized there were two trailers parked in the mud a few yards away, not just the one in which he’d been confined. The other was a bright silver Airstream that had the same stage-set newness and shine as the tiny prison in which he’d been forced to read a chronicle of monsters and magic.

He was standing amid a re-creation of Elysium as it appeared more than two decades ago, in that photo of her newly engaged parents Nikki had described in her journal. (It had to be a re-creation. The land on which the original Elysium had stood was now a wash of untamed swamp.) Everything seemed perfectly arranged except for the small tangles of shredded plastic lying close to the trailers. The closer Ben got, the more he could see that they were pieces of the original lounger Noah and Millie Delongpre had been reclining on as she’d extended her ring hand toward the camera. But just pieces. Something had torn both lounge chairs to pieces.

A snake’s scales. Claws. The eyes of a lost woman.

Just then, approaching footsteps squished in the mud and when he turned, Ben saw a stopped figure hobbling toward him with the support of a cane. There was some vitality underneath the man’s strained movements, and Ben sensed that his contorted walk was not the result of age, but of some recent and serious injury.

Once they were a few feet apart, the pale glow from the string lights above illuminated the man’s face. Ben felt his vision narrow and a weight on his chest that made him gasp.

The last time Ben had laid eyes on Noah Delongpre had been eight years ago; the man had been home early after doing his rounds at the hospital and rifling through mail in the kitchen as he pretended not to eavesdrop on the conversation Nikki and Ben were having in the other room; another whispered, frantic how-can-I-ever-forgive-Anthem session Ben felt overwhelmed by and powerless to bring to a satisfying close. Noah’s eyes had briefly met Ben’s through the doorway, and for the first time he’d seen real concern for Nikki in them. The sight of it had so startled him in that moment, he’d stammered through his next few sentences to his best friend.

Noah Delongpre had always struck Ben as a wildly self-centered man, and his only real joy in the world seemed to be his love for his wife, a love he saw his only daughter as a distraction from. Perhaps if Nikki had been less self-possessed, more in need of his constant guidance, he could have treated her like a patient. Or a case. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d done following the madness recorded in the journal he’d just read.

But now, here he was, looking as if he had aged two decades instead of one. Gone was his military-grade buzz cut; it had been replaced by a thick salt-and-pepper mane he’d tied into a ponytail and threaded through the back of his gnawed baseball cap. He had the same angular features, with small, deeply set eyes, dwarfed by his boat’s prow of a nose. But Ben couldn’t tell if the tightness in his expression was the result of controlled fury or a great, interior strain.

“If you’re going to waste our time with protests, do it now, by all means,” Noah Delongpre said. “But allow me to remind you that there was a time when the mere notion of there being a chemical inside of plants that essentially metabolized sunlight itself would have seemed like an insanity to most men. Maybe it still does . . .”

“You exposed yourself to it too?” Insane, Ben thought, even as he spoke. All of this is insane. But it felt as if some long-buried set of instincts inside him had taken over and was answering for him, some primitive yet essential ability to believe in the impossible. He didn’t dare call it faith. Not yet, anyway. To do so would imply that the hell of which he’d just read had something of the divine within it.

“So you believe what you read?” Noah asked.

“Whatever you can do, whatever she can do, you’ve done it to me twice. So I’m not sure I really have a choice.”

“You were hoping it was her, no doubt. When you opened the door.”

“No. I knew it wasn’t her.”

“How?”

“Because she would never treat me like this.”

“It’s been almost a decade, Ben. You have no idea what she’s capable of doing to you or anyone—” His anger caused him to straighten a bit, and just this small movement stoked the fires of whatever injury he was struggling against. “That’s the only reason I drove you again—”

“Drove me?”

“That’s the term we came up with for it. Her power. He’s got his own name for it too, I bet. Marshall Ferriot, that is. But I warn you, don’t become lost in the language of the thing. Terms, labels—they’ll do nothing to blunt its reality.” When he noticed the expression on Ben’s face, his eyebrows lifted and he recoiled, both hands balanced atop the head of his cane. “Oh my. You are upset with me, aren’t you?”

“If Marshall Ferriot is out there . . . if he can do what you can do, why did you bring me here?”

“You would rather I leave you unguarded?”

“Anthem is out there!”

“If it’s Marshall’s intention to hurt Anthem Landry, then Anthem is either already dead by his own hand or he’s been changed into something you will never want to lay eyes on!” This eruption sent Noah into a coughing fit, and when he lifted one fist to his mouth, Ben saw that that the space from his index finger to his thumb was a mass of red welts and fresh scar tissue.

“How would you know?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean, how—”

“If he’s . . . if he’s been changed. The thing you described . . . Miss Millie . . . You killed it right away. How can you know what it really was, or if it was—”

“If it was still her, you mean?”

Ben nodded.

“There were others,” Noah said. “Many others. And we made it a point to keep them alive for as long as we could just so we could answer that very question. And if you think I harbor one scrap of guilt for shooting that thing my wife turned into exactly when I did, then you are a worse listener than I thought.”

“Others . . .”

“You don’t think I’ve been here for eight years, do you? What? You think we just vanished into the swamp to live like rats? No, that part came later. First, we had to learn. First I had to play mad scientist, and she had to play test subject. You see, when I was in med school I did an exchange program in Thailand, so I knew the country fairly well. I also knew what we could get away with once we arrived. That’s where we conducted our experiments.”

“Experiments? On . . . people? You experimented on people?”

“On men who became sexually aroused by burning children with cigarettes and penetrating them with the legs of furniture. Trust me. We put them to a far, far better use. And no one will miss them. Least of all the children they traveled halfway across the world to abuse.”

“And what did your experiments prove?”

“Most of our initial conclusions we’re confirmed, just as she wrote them in her journal. The parasite resides in the brain and it allows the host to consume and metabolize frequencies of light which are not visible in this dimension of existence. On any equipment I could get my hands on anyway. But the pupils of both Nikki and her subjects dilated to twice their normal size during a drive, as we called it. Leading us to the conclusion that the eyes truly are the windows to the soul.”

“You consume . . . a person’s soul?”

“Close. You absorb part of it. It flows through you on a kind of conduit which we can’t see. The person completely loses all consciousness as a result. So forget what you’ve seen in the movies. This is not possession. You can’t see the world through their eyes. The mind-control aspect . . . well, it’s just a by-product, you see. A by-product of the fact that you can draw the person’s fundamental quantum material into your body by metabolizing part of it.”

“And the monsters?”

“Ah, see, that was the interesting part. Sometimes I would tell her what a subject was guilty of. This one, for instance, enjoys tying up young girls and applying abrasive chemicals to their bare flesh. Nikki would be able to drive that unsavory subject for as long as she wanted, and no monster. Unfortunately. But if, on the other hand, I spritzed the man with a little bit of Anthem Landry’s favorite cologne—Ralph Lauren Polo, is it? Well, then . . . showtime.”

“And what were they? The monsters?”

“They were from the mouth of hell is what they were. They were malformed hybrids of that person and one of their worst nightmares or some element of a past trauma. Just as it happened with Millie. Don’t worry. We did our due diligence. We confirmed what their worst nightmares were beforehand just to be sure we weren’t off the mark. The interviews were not my favorite part. She mostly handled those, well-spoken girl that she is. I can show you some photographs, if you’d like.”

“What I would like is to make sure Anthem Landry is okay so I can—”

“Anthem Fucking Landry,” Noah bellowed. “It all gets back to Anthem Landry. You’ve both tried so hard to save him—”

“What do you mean we both—”

“Oh, don’t you see it? Don’t you? She suffered a crisis of conscience in Bangkok, you see. She couldn’t go on with the experiments and she abandoned me. She left me there. But I knew exactly where she was going. Exactly. It’s the only reason I exposed myself, as you so eloquently put it. You see, I had taken samples from the pool before I capped the well. When she left me, I had no choice but to expose myself. But the problem? Well, the samples weren’t enough. It’s a funny creature, you see, our Elysium parasite. A drip and drab of it here and there has no real effect. In the wild, on its own, floating free through the swamp, it’s as inconsequential as a drop of water. But in concentration, it’s another thing entirely. If you capture it the way we did in that pool, if you get it to flock, then immerse someone in it, the change takes effect. So I came home as well to get—”

“As well?” Ben cried. “What do you mean as well?”

“Oh, come on, Ben. You’re smarter than this. You’ve always been smarter than this. A big brute you meet on the Internet walks into your apartment late at night, gets violent with you and suddenly just walks away.”

It took Ben a few minutes of gape-mouthed silence to remember what Noah was talking about. “I . . . I pulled a gun on the guy . . . I—”

“Is that why he smashed his head into your door frame three times in a row, the exact same number of times he smashed your head into the headboard?”

“How do you know all—”

“Or better yet, Anthem Landry, in an alleged blackout, smashes every bottle of liquor in his apartment and writes himself a note that says he’s done drinking forever. She was here for years, Ben, working on your lives from the shadows. But then she got scared. You see, she ignored my warnings all together, and she flat-out ignored what we had discovered in Bangkok. Which is that it isn’t contempt or anger that makes the monsters rise. It’s connection. It’s true love and true hate. Not the kind of petty, childish hate that gets bandied about on the Internet as some petty device against strangers. I’m taking about true hatred, the kind where you’re convinced the other person has been taking from you year after year after year and you’re powerless to stop them. That kind of hatred, Ben. The kind of hatred you feel for Marshall Ferriot.”

“How?” Ben said. “How could she . . . Did she not feel a connection to us? How could she have been using her power on us and not turned us into—”

“She wasn’t using it on you! She was using it on the people around you. The people who threatened you on the way home from the bar, the people who were standing in your way at work. She was your guardian angel, Ben. And it was going so well, she started to get careless. I had found her by then and I warned her. She went too far with Anthem that night. The bottles, the note. She knew I was right. So she went back to your apartment to remove all the surveillance software she’d installed on your computer so she could track your movements and whatever stories you were working on. That’s when your angry visitor showed up and she was forced to take action to keep you from becoming a hate crime. After that . . . Well, I haven’t seen her since.”

“That was six months ago. She has to know,” Ben whispered. “Just like you, she has to know after everything that’s happened today that Marshall’s awake. That he’s here. She has to know.”

“Maybe she does. I don’t know how far away she is. And you’re so desperate to leave. Do you really have the time to wait for her?”

“What does that— What do you mean?”

“I have more of it, Ben. I went to the source and I took as much as I could ever need.”

“It looks like you took too much,” Ben whispered.

Noah lifted his scarred hand from the top of the cane. “Nice try,” he muttered. “But this is from something else altogether.”

Noah’s smile was wobbly. “You always hid behind your sarcasm, Ben. Always. When you weren’t hiding behind Anthem and Nikki. You’re still hiding behind him, by the way. Standing here, at the threshold of one of the greatest miracles ever to be visited upon mankind, wondering how that vulgar, self-obsessed drunk will fare by the time the night is over.”

“I haven’t heard anything that sounds like a miracle,” Ben whispered.

“Then you haven’t been listening!” Noah roared.

“Why didn’t you stop him yourself?” Ben fired back. “Why go to all this trouble and waste all this time?”

“So time spent on you is wasted?”

“Stop fucking around with me!”

“There is no shield against what Marshall Ferriot has. There is no antidote. And if he gets you in his sights and he gets close enough, there’s no running. I am going to give you what you need to stop him, Ben. But first it was my responsibility to tell you our story so you would know the risks. So you would know how this works.”

“You’ve told me nothing,” Ben said. “I’ve got one journal entry from eight years ago, and nothing about what came afterwards except for your word. Which I don’t believe, by the way.”

“How could you deny what I can do after every—”

“I’m denying your story. You were the only person she had left in the world. She wouldn’t have left you in Bangkok unless she had a damn good reason.”

Noah lowered his eyes as if he were disappointed, and this time, Ben felt the darkness come like an insect darting through the air behind him before coming in for a landing on the back of his neck.

• • •

He came to on his knees, just outside a weak halo of light thrown by a Coleman lantern sitting on the floorboards a few feet away. There was pitch black all around him, but he could sense that he’d been moved—driven—inside some kind of barn or large storage shed. But it was the photographs spread out in a semicircle before him that captivated him.

At least twenty images in all, but they were of the same three monstrous creatures. One of them had to be the thing Millie Delongpre had been turned into. Just as Nikki had written in her journal, the contrast between the creature’s scaled face and the huge, staring, death-glazed human eyes stopped Ben’s breath in his throat, forced him back onto his haunches.

The others were worse.

All of them had been photographed in death; there was a giant hybrid of a man and what had to be a pit bull that had an almost serene expression, save for its gaping jaws, so huge and so stuffed with giant, almost cartoonish canine teeth, they looked poised to divide the entire creature’s head in half. The most human-looking creature of the three was an enormous woman—the combat rifle leaning against the concrete wall next to her gave her scale; Ben figured she was at least ten feet tall—with a giant ridge dividing her head and her twin flaps of greasy, knotted black curls. The flesh of her crossed legs was sealed together as if by hot wax. If she had been mobile, she would have been forced to drag herself around by her arms. Her dangling, teardrop-shaped breasts were striated by spiderwebs of dark blue veins and a lewd, serpentine tongue dangled from her leering clown’s grin of a mouth, so big that the entire thing could never have fit between her lips no matter how hard she had tried.

Ten feet tall . . . Mother of God.

And what was she? The nightmare version of some test subject’s mother or wife? What crosscurrents of the human mind had literally given flesh to such a horrid thing? Mind monsters, he thought. That’s what these things were. They were living nightmares, plucked from a person’s soul as the material of their soul was drawn from their flesh. No, they weren’t just plucked. That wasn’t the right word. Jostled. Let loose. Set free. A disturbance in the connection between Nikki and the subject that set these nightmares loose upon the world.

Mind monsters. The term came to him effortlessly. He even whispered it to himself. Then he remembered what Noah had said to him about trying to name and label everything. Clearly, the man had been speaking from his own experience because that was Ben’s exact urge. Name, label, categorize. Breathe.

Ben heard movement nearby, then the familiar metallic hum of electricity as several tracks of fluorescent light flickered to life in the rafters above. Noah was standing a few feet behind him at the entrance to what had once been a long boathouse. Walls had been built around the perimeter, and the rails where the boat slips had been rose up out of plywood coverings. On the wall behind Noah, Ben could make out a faded sign in brightly colored print, a series of warnings and notices to the parkgoers who had once lined up for swamp tours and boat rides from this now dark and dank space. The whole place had once been a zoo or an amusement park.

Noah’s stare seemed vacant, then Ben heard a swinging chain behind him, and he realized his captor was focused on something just over Ben’s shoulder.

Ben screamed when he saw it. Not a short, sharp cry, but a guttural scream triggered by a true belief that he was in immediate physical danger. But after a few minutes of stumbling backward, almost losing his balance a few times, and watching the creature swinging from chains above the floorboards, Ben realized that, even though it was twice his size, the creature swinging from chains strung from the ceiling was dead. A chain had been attached to each large, translucent wing, keeping them spread out behind the slender, malformed body at its center. The wings were patterned like those of a butterfly, but the colors themselves were the greens and browns of the deep swamp. And the body that appeared to be pinned to the very center of both wings was almost humanoid. Infantile, even. Bald, with foreshortened, dangling legs. Covered from head to tiny knotted toes in what looked to be charcoal-colored fur.

And Ben wondered if the reason he hadn’t lost his mind entirely was because there was always a part of him that believed the swamp could give birth to such vicious and massive creatures. And to behold one now, to smell the sour-milk stench it gave off, returned him to a state of childlike wonder. But childlike wonder is always accompanied by a child’s overpowering sense of helplessness, and so, for the first time in his life, he was fighting not to lose control of his bladder and his hands rested against the nape of his neck as if there was a strand of pearls there for him to clutch for dear life.

“You wanted the whole story,” Noah said. “Here’s the whole story.”

Ben heard Noah’s footsteps approaching from behind as he studied the dangling creature before him. And then he realized what was familiar about the creature’s blackened face; the deeply recessed brow, and the jutting lips, contorted into a cruel parody of a baby’s pout, even in death. They were cartoonish distortions of a face he’d seen just earlier that day—impossible to believe it had been the same day, but it had been—the email a woman named Allison Cross had sent him as he’d pulled away from his apartment building with Marissa and a tiny motorboat in tow.

Millie Delongpre. Yes. You see, she and my husband, they were together before she met Noah, and well, Jeffrey always carried a torch for her. He even talked to her in his sleep.

Her husband, missing. Her husband, one of the only other men to love Millie as much as Noah had. Her husband, here now before him, a shadow in the facial features of this terrible creature.

“Jeffrey Cross,” Ben said.

Noah went rigid beside him.

“Jeffrey Cross has been missing for weeks. His wife, she called me today and . . .” Ben pointed at the creature but he couldn’t find the right words. “This is . . . Is this . . . ?”

“It doesn’t sound like you need my help. You’re smarter now. When you were a kid, you were all emotion and temper and—”

“You were trying to reverse it,” Ben said. “Jeffrey’s wife told me he always carried a torch for Millie. He was there the night you proposed to her. So you re-created Elysium just as it had looked on that night. And you brought Jeffrey Cross here and . . . what?”

In response, Noah lifted his chin and stared directly at the creature.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “Is this what Nikki found out? That you were actually going to make a monster out of—”

“I was not trying to make a monster. I was trying to make her.”

“Millie. Your wife . . .”

“They’re memories. They look like nightmares. But they are memories. Living memories. They are fusions of human form and memory and I thought if the process could be refined, we could . . .” His breath left him and he licked his lips desperately, which seemed to bring no moisture to them at all. “Our test subjects were abducted and confined and interrogated; of course they gave birth to monsters. And Millie had suffered the worst trauma of her entire life that night, of course she gave birth to a monster. But what if, what if it could be done another way? What if what appeared to be the great and terrible limitation of Nikki’s power could be used to unleash true magic on the world, instead of living hell?”

“You were trying to bring back the dead.”

“I was trying to give life and form to a memory,” Noah said. He pointed to the photographs at their feet. “That woman, she’s the mother who molested one of our subjects when he was five years old. That dog, that’s the pit bull that attacked our other subject when he was fourteen, the one he could never get out of his head. And my wife . . . my wife ended up merged with the snake Marshall Ferriot put in our car. Memories, all of them. Every experiment, every last one. So I picked the man whose memories of my wife were as full of love and longing as mine, and I brought him to a place where she would rise to the surface of his consciousness. And then I reached into his soul. If that qualifies me as bringing back the dead, then so be it. Then that’s what I was trying to do.”

“And you failed,” Ben whispered.

Noah’s face wrinkled, and after a few seconds, what Ben thought was a sneer turned into the threat of a sob. He pulled his shirt up over his chest and the wounds Ben saw there were as fearsome-looking as the carcass swinging by chains a few feet away. He’d seen photos of great white shark attacks that looked similar, but the worst parts were the bands of blue and dark green on the perimeter of the giant bite mark that covered half of his chest, his entire side and the lower part of his back. They weren’t bruising; they were signs of infection which would explain the weakness and the shivering Noah was suffering from on top of everything else.

“There’s no way that thing could—”

“Oh, no. This, this lovely creature was my third attempt. The first was decidedly more reptilian in nature, as you can see from my wounds.”

“Your third attempt at . . . what? Millie?”

“No. I’d given up by then. I was trying to turn him back. But he didn’t make it.”

“You’re dying, aren’t you?”

Noah let his shirt slide back down over his injuries, and when he turned to face Ben, his eyes were glassy with barely contained tears. “I’m done. There’s a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re all dying. Every last one of us. Me? I’m actually ready to be dead. And that’s fitting, isn’t it? I’ve been legally dead for years.” Noah closed the distance between, and in the bright glare of the fluorescent lights, Ben could see for the first time how sallow the man’s features were. His lips were so dry they looked ready to slough from his face. “I don’t expect you not to judge me. Or not to hate me, even. But whatever choice you make, know this, little Ben Broyard. I am your prologue. And so is Nikki. She used to think we’d hand over everything to you once the time came, or if we were ever discovered or found out. All she wanted you to do was tell our story. But I’ve been watching you, Ben, and I can see now you have the power to continue it. And I’m going to let you. On one condition.”

Noah paused, and despite his stern and aggressive tone of voice, one of the tears he’d tried to contain slipped down his cheek. “You must do what she failed to do, what she lacked the courage to do. You must stop Marshall Ferriot.”

• • •

A choice, this last thought was still filtering through his consciousness when Ben opened his eyes and found himself staring down at cloudy, mustard-colored water. After a few seconds, like the pixels of an old Magic Eye, the tumbles of flesh-colored particles, many of them flocking together in pulsating clumps, seemed to resolve, and he realized he was standing on the service walkway above a large aquarium tank, another exhibit in the ruined zoo Noah Delongpre had taken as refuge.

There was a service walkway that made a U along the tank’s sides and back. Off to his left was a floor that sloped abruptly, probably the ceiling over the walkway tourists had once filed through to get a look through the tank’s glass.

Noah had driven Ben to the walkway’s far end, and was standing between him and the service door on the opposite side of the tank.

“Why give me the choice?” Ben called out to him.

“Because you won’t put it to good use if I force it on you.”

And then the door opened on the other side of the tank, and she was there. She was taller, her hair thicker and darker than it had ever been in her youth, no longer the honey shade it had been when he’d used to run a brush through it late at night as she dozed off in his lap. And her face was longer and more angular and there was a hardness to her slanted cat-eyes that hadn’t been there before. And when she saw him standing just steps from the tank and the surging, tumbling infestation laced through its cloudy water, her lips parted but no sound came out that he could hear. Indeed, what he heard instead was a shuffling sound, and when he looked to Noah, he saw that the man had taken out a small gun and placed the barrel against his right temple, while balancing his other hand on his cane.

“That’s the other thing, Ben,” Noah called out. “The other limitation. You can only drive one person at a time. So sometimes, you have to make choices. Hard choices.”

Nikki shook her head back and forth, but her expression was one of mild, mature disapproval.

“Enough,” she said quietly.

“Of what, dear?” Noah asked his daughter. Then, to Ben, he said, “She can’t decide, you see. Which one of us to stop, that is. And the risks of driving either one of us are already so great to begin with—”

“Enough, Dad. Please.”

Still pressing the gun to his own head, Noah looked into Ben’s eyes. What he was searching for in them, Ben couldn’t be exactly sure.

Was it some roiling evidence of Ben’s constant desire, there since the first day he could remember, to be a bigger and more physically powerful man than he would ever be? Was it some evidence of the lifelong terror he’d felt most of his life, always fearing some form of attack on his very being, fearing that his only real defense—his sharp tongue—would offer no protection against pipes and bottles and guns? Or was it Ben’s ceaseless desire to change the very flow of the world around him, to alter the course of rivers so that they flowed toward the sunlight of truth? Was it the memories of those ruined and shamed women, clinging to the rafters of their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward or cowering in their attics, terrified to let the floodwaters touch them again, even as Ben and Marissa had goaded them on—Come on, girl. Come to the boat. It’s okay. Were Ben’s lips moving as he remembered those awful scenes, as he thought to himself how the water beneath him now was as clouded and menacing and dark as the water that had blanketed his city that week?

What was her name? he thought. The one who was too afraid, the one who never swam for the boat. The one who stayed behind because she thought the water would go down soon and she could just walk out of her house as if the levees had never failed. The one who died of dehydration. If only I could have made her swim . . .

. . . I could make them swim.

He realized he’d said these words aloud only when he felt the breath of them move across his lips. Then Noah Delongpre smiled, and nodded slightly.

“And now it begins,” Noah said.

The gunshot knocked him backward, the blood spray painting the wall behind him a split second later, and then Nikki was screaming and racing down the walkway. And Ben felt as if he were floating up and out of his skin and bone. But there was no darkness, no sense of missing time, no sense of having his soul pulled from him by a force he could barely comprehend. All he saw was Noah Delongpre’s final, barely perceptible nod. Then the water rushed up to meet him as he dropped himself feet-first into the tank.

27

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

OCTOBER 2013

Ben could feel them.

There was nothing quick or predatory about their movements, nothing to suggest they were penetrating his flesh or following some primordial instinct to enter his bloodstream and make their way to his brain. First they drifted toward him, then they formed tendrils down his limbs, up his neck and over his face, and within a few minutes it felt as if a veritable blanket of them had embraced him from head to toe. But there were no pinprick stings, no tiny bites. On their own, they were too small for that, and it was the clumping of them—the flocking, as Noah had called it—that rendered them visible at all.

According to her journal, Nikki and Marshall had been in the water together only a few minutes, so that was all it took, right? Just a few minutes was all he needed. But Ben held himself below the surface, just as he used to do when he and Nikki were kids and they would compete to find out who could hold their breath the longest. It was fear that kept him from surfacing, but not fear over what he’d done. Too much of the world had been cracked open during the past few hours for him to be seized by such a childish and reflexive instinct. No, he was simply afraid that if he surfaced too quickly, the little bastards wouldn’t have enough time to work their magic.

But then he heard the sound of Nikki sobbing, as familiar to him as if they’d never been separated; the same raw, chesty sobs she’d let loose when choir practice was interrupted and she was told that her grandmother had died. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, feeling wet clumps of the little fuckers sliding down his cheeks and up his nostrils—not sliding, crawling—she was cradling her father’s corpse in her arms. It looked like she was preparing to flip Noah’s body into the tank. But that wasn’t it; she was just desperate to hold him, but she didn’t want to cradle his gunshot-blasted head on her lap, so she’d slid her arms underneath his lower back, despite the awkwardness of the pose.

Then she saw Ben, floating several feet away, with only his head above the surface. He braced himself for judgment of some kind, but instead, he saw a flash of recognition in her eyes that stalled her violent tears. She was scanning the rippling surface of the tank. The tendrils of Elysium parasite had formed a starburst pattern around his head.

“I knew you would do this.” Her voice was choked. “The minute you knew about it, I knew you would do something like this . . . I knew you would want to save the world with it. So I tried to keep it a secret and do my best to save you.” She was fighting tears again. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? After the life I’ve lived . . . I’m still so afraid for everyone else. And that’s the worst part. You can’t use it on the people you love, not even to make them save themselves. It’s just too dangerous. You can’t. You just can’t . . .”

Ben hoisted himself from the tank, did his best to ignore the sensation of a thousand microorganisms sliding down his slick flesh as he made his way to her. Without moving from where she sat, he yanked on her father’s body suddenly, until his head was resting on her lap. His face was unharmed and she avoided touching the back of his skull. Instead, she ran her fingers gently down the bridge of his nose, and Ben wondered if she was trying to draw solace from the fact that Noah’s death wouldn’t be marked by the same hideous transformation as the loss of her mother.

“He was dying,” Ben finally said, and he was amazed, a little disappointed, to find that his voice sounded exactly the same. “The thing he turned Jeffrey Cross into, it attacked him. His wounds were infected and he was . . . he was dying, Nikki.”

“If only it had been the fountain of youth,” she whispered.

Because there was nothing else he could think of to do, he sank down behind her and wrapped his arms around her chest, and in her ear he whispered, “I missed you. I missed you so much.” His words felt pathetic and inadequate. He closed his eyes to see if they would resonate, for him, at least. And they did, a little. Nikki shook with more sobs. He gently pulled her to her feet, then he took her hands in his. As her sobs continued, he placed his forehead against hers because he could think of nothing else to do but say her name over and over again.

He was trying for a speech, a strategy, a pitch. But all he kept seeing over and over again was Anthem’s apartment building blowing sky high like the redbrick house in Beau Chêne. All he could see was Marissa, possessed, drained of herself, dragging him into that boat propeller. And all his grand plans and clever words kept collapsing in on themselves. There was a great freedom in all of this somewhere, a clarity that would push the shadows from the path ahead.

“It’s Marshall, isn’t it?” Nikki finally whispered. “He woke up.”

“Yes . . .”

She nodded, but she was struggling for breath. Then she took his hand and they started to run.

• • •

Ben was astonished that Nikki owned a cell phone and a car. After what he’d just been through, he would have been less surprised to learn she’d spent the last eight years sleeping under bridges and darting between rooftops courtesy of dragonfly wings. But instead she’d been making cell phone calls on the shiny iPhone she passed to him as soon as he asked for it, and gliding along highways in the sleek black SUV that sat parked on the other side of the ruined chain-link fence enclosing most the property. The Keep Out signs along the fence now looked as mold-bruised and weathered as the once welcoming signs for the old zoo, and the SUV’s silver grille glinted in the bouncing beam from Nikki’s Maglite.

He’d managed to call Anthem’s cell twice by the time they reached Nikki’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. Straight to voice mail each time. He couldn’t tell if the twisting deep in his gut was just fear, or the first bloom of his immersion’s side effects.

Once he’d braced himself against the Jeep, he looked back on the warren of shadows they’d just escaped from. It was the first time he’d seen the place in its entirety, given that he’d been driven through it in a series of forced blackouts. The building they’d just fled was one of several dilapidated one-story exhibit halls that made a semicircle around a courtyard of cracked concrete. The dry fountain at its center sported a giant statue of an alligator dressed up in some sort of festive, plumed hat, its forelegs lengthened into arms that opened to welcome the dark.

“You’re going to get sick soon,” Nikki said. It was her explanation for shoving him into the backseat, and he didn’t fight her, just curled up onto the leather and screwed his eyes shut as the Jeep’s engine revved beneath him and gravel and twigs spat out from underneath the tires.

“How long?”

“We’re a half hour from New Orleans.”

“How long will I be sick, I meant.”

“Ben, I don’t know. It’s been eight years. I wasn’t in the habit of infecting people.”

“How bad?”

“Like the flu, I guess. I mean, you won’t be incapacitated but it’s not going be pretty and you’re gonna want a bathroom . . .” She fell suddenly and abruptly silent, and when he rolled over onto one side, he saw she was struggling to keep her eyes on the road, the sobs threatening to take control of her again. “I wouldn’t have stopped you, for Christ’s sake. I would have let you make a decision. He didn’t have do that. He didn’t have to—”

“He would have done it anyway. He was planning to do it from the moment he brought me there. Some people are dying, and some people are done. He was done. That’s what he said to me, Nick.”

“I could have stopped him.” In the faint green glow from the dashboard lights, he could see she was focused on the rutted road. “I could have stopped him from going after Jeffrey Cross. He had a list, Ben. Did he tell you about that part? We were in Bangkok—”

“He showed me the pictures.”

“I found a list in his lab. A list of people who’d loved my mother as much as he had. That’s why I left him. We’d been experimenting on psychopaths and he wanted us to come home and switch to his old friends.”

She was ramping up again, and he was afraid hysteria was about to replace her grief. Chills rippled through his body, and he felt a twisting in his stomach that was resonating down into his bowels. But he reached for her through the shadows anyway, over the gearshift, until his hand came to rest on her right thigh. When he spoke his tongue felt thick.

“Do you remember what you said to me that day on the fly?” Ben said. “We went there after school, just the two of us, and it was a beautiful day. I think it was January but it wasn’t too cold and the sky was clear and the river was so high we could practically put our feet in the water. And there was soccer practice going on behind us. Do you remember?”

She was silent, both hands planted on the steering wheel. The road went smooth beneath the tires suddenly and headlights flared over Nikki’s face. They were on open freeway now.

“You told me no matter who I turned out to be, you would always accept me. You would always love me. Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I remember,” she whispered. “And then I left you.”

“You left me with that day. That beautiful, perfect day. And you left me with your kindness and your respect. Those things didn’t leave me when you did. They never will. And I’m offering you the same things in return. Always. Always, Nick.”

She reached down and took his hand and hers, and brought them to her chest.

“But Nikki . . .”

“Yes?”

“We have to kill Marshall Ferriot.”

She brought his hand to her mouth, kissed his fingers gently, and for a few seconds, Ben thought this was the only response he was going to get out of her, then she said, “I know.”

28

NEW ORLEANS

It was like being atop a floating skyscraper. The borders between river and dry land were hard to discern because the lights of the container and chemical ships passing them on either side appeared briefly as dense as the lights on shore.

After two hours on the bridge, Marshall had managed to commit a map of his surroundings to memory. Exit doors on both sides led to wide exterior staircases that zigzagged several stories down to the main deck. A long bank of radar consoles, a map table and the wheel, which was currently being manned by a tiny Southeast Asian quartermaster, took up the center of the room. Every few minutes Anthem would call out a new direction—Port 10, Midships, Starboard 10—and the quartermaster would repeat it in a chirpy, heavily accented voice that suggested these nautical terms might be the only English words he knew.

Just behind the ship’s glowing, flickering nerve center, a pull curtain hid a messy navigation area that contained a battered gooseneck lamp and two computers that looked older than any of the three men currently on the bridge. Both computers were off, and a nicotine-stained dot-matrix printer was attached to each one. Right behind this cluttered area, the ship’s main interior staircase entered the bridge. Next to this entrance, the door to the small bathroom drifted and swayed with the giant ship’s almost imperceptible motions.

In front of the wheel, radar screens and empty pilot’s chair, there was enough walk-through space for Anthem Landry to stand and devour a plate of hamburger patties and sliced potatoes brought to him by the ship’s cook. His view of the river wasn’t perfect. Four giant cranes lined the ship’s hull, perpendicular to the bridge, and Marshall figured the long, swaying hooks and chains attached to each one were used to open the grain containers that filled the ship’s hull.

There was enough room at the long counter lining the windows for Marshall to sidle up to him, but he chose to stay back. No video cameras were visible; he didn’t even see any protrusion in the ceiling. But there was no telling where they might be hidden. Best to hang back and play as small a role as he could, just in case the whole thing ended up on film. “You okay?” Marshall said.

Anthem nodded. His eyes were saucer wide in the glow from the brightly lit cranes outside. But his mood seemed morose, distant. It was just the two of them on deck with the quartermaster now. The jovial Greek captain had disappeared after introducing himself when they first came aboard. The chief mate had poked his head in a few times, but it was clear they were all resting up before they took to the Gulf of Mexico on their own.

“You bored?” Anthem asked.

“Nah uh,” Marshall answered.

“Should be about another half hour before we reach the base of Canal Street. Then we’ll hand off to the next pilot at Chalmette. You sure you don’t want coffee or anything?”

“I’m good.”

“Thank you. For coming. I appreciate it.”

“It’s good. It’s all good.”

“It’s funny. When it’s light out, we’ve got pigeons all over the hull, eating at the grain. Dancing around like they’re all hopped up on crack.”

“What do you do? Chase ’em off with a broomstick?”

Without a smile, Anthem said, “You heard about Deepwater Horizon, right? I mean, you were probably still . . .”

“The big oil spill. Yeah. I read about it.”

“Friend of mine worked with the cleanup efforts out in the Gulf. He said they used these big booms to corral all the oil and then they’d light it up to burn it off. Most times they did it, they’d have birds and turtles and stuff caught in the oil. But they didn’t give a shit. They’d light ’em all up anyway. Sometimes I can’t get it out of my head, that’s all.”

“Can’t get what out of your head?”

“The thought of those birds trying to take to the sky, oil all over their wings, flames racing after them, taking ’em down just when they got airborne. Sometimes I close my eyes, and they’re all I see.”

“Never thought you’d turn out to be some animal rights guy, Landry.”

Anthem managed a weak smile, but his eyes were still locked on the hull below, like he was seeing the dancing, grain-drunk pigeons that typically flocked there when the sun was out.

“Sometimes I just wonder if there’s always gonna be a price for living here,” Anthem whispered. “That’s all.”

“There’s a price for living anywhere, isn’t there?”

“True. But it’s getting steeper here.”

Marshall said, “I’m gonna take a leak.”

“Don’t fall in.”

Once he was behind the pull curtain in the messy navigation area, Marshall removed the pistol he’d been carrying in the back of his jeans and tucked it in between one of the ancient computers and its accompanying printer. He made sure the barrel pointed toward the wall, and the handle was extending slightly out from the edge of the shelf, as poised and ready for action as a ripcord.

Everything had fallen into place and nothing else mattered. So what if Anthem’s soul burned more brightly than the others? Marshall knew he could get his hooks into the man—he’d already done it once that night—and now that all the pieces had fallen into place, that was all that mattered. Because if things kept going as well as they’d gone for the past few hours, he would only need to drive Anthem for a short time to bring about a perfect ending for a not-so-perfect hero.

“Hey, Ferriot? You seen my phone?”

29

Get down!” Nikki cried.

They were flying through Jefferson Parish on Interstate 10, passing the broad off-ramps to various shopping malls, cavernous hangarlike buildings where Ben had done last-minute Christmas shopping in another life. He’d been dialing numbers so frantically he’d missed the flare-up of police lights behind them. Now he lowered his head and watched as Nikki looked into the rearview mirror and let her foot off the gas.

“No, no, no!” Ben protested. “C’mon. You gotta—”

“Hush.”

The police car was gaining on them, lights flaring, siren wailing. They’d been doing ninety since hooking up with the interstate behind the airport. Ben had been curled into a ball for the first twenty minutes of the drive until he realized the nausea was actually more bearable when he was sitting up. By the time he got his bearings they’d been cutting through the sea of cypresses that cradled the 310 Freeway, leaving the towering Luling–Destrehan Bridge in their wake, and crossing behind the airport’s runways. Wherever Noah had taken him, it had been on the west bank of the river.

But now they were just a few minutes from the best off-ramp to get to Anthem’s apartment and Nikki was letting a cop car get within inches of their rear bumper. “Gotcha,” she whispered.

The cop car suddenly swerved to one side and slammed nose-first into the concrete divider. She hadn’t just let the car gain on them; she’d been letting the driver get within range.

“You have a test question, right? If you get him. You understand what I mean, don’t you? In case Marshall’s already—”

“Yeah. I’ve got one.”

“You need to throw up?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes. Nikki . . . how long until I can . . .”

“I don’t know, Ben. It was days with me, but I didn’t know what had really happened to me. It could be sooner. I don’t know.”

“Jesus!”

“Just open the door, I’ll slow down and—”

“No, no, no. It’s not that. He’s on call. I forgot. He’s probably on a ship right now.”

“He’s safer on a ship.”

“He wouldn’t go out on one without his phone. He needs it. He uses it to communicate with the relief pilot.”

The great hulk of the new pumping station they’d installed next to the broad, flood-prone dip in the interstate flew past the left-hand side of the Jeep, then they were passing under the train trestle, and two expansive aboveground cemeteries appeared on either side of the freeway. The city was within sight now, the South Carrollton off-ramp dead ahead.

“Do I get off?”

“I don’t . . .”

“Ben. Should I get off?”

“I don’t know. Just wait. Just hold on—”

A call to information put him through to Vessel Traffic Control, the small bunkerlike building where all the bar pilots monitored their own river traffic. Each station was manned by an off-duty pilot, and chances were high at least one of those pilots would be a member of the Landry family. A gruff male voice answered before Ben could rehearse his words. So he went with his first instinct.

“Are any of the Landry brothers working a shift tonight? I have to speak to them immediately. There’s been a family emergency.”

“And who’s this?”

“My name is Ben. I’m a close friend of their brother, Anthem. There’s been an accident.”

“There’s been an accident, you say?”

“Yes. I’m trying to get in touch with any of the Landry brothers. Merit or Greg or—”

“Hold on,” the guy said. The curtness of his response suggested that either Merit or Greg was working one of the computers in the other room, maybe within sight of the guy’s desk, and he wanted nothing more than to pass off this crazy dead-of-night caller to one of them as soon as he could.

“Ben?” It was Greg Landry. The last time they’d spoken had been at a family crawfish bowl a few weeks earlier, where the family was shot through by a wary optimism over Anthem’s newfound sobriety. Radio calls squawked in the background; Greg must have picked up in the central control room.

“What accident? Anthem’s on a ship.”

“Where’s the ship?”

“Uh, sheesh . . . I don’t know. I know it’s grain and it’s headed south for a handoff to a Crescent City pilot at Chalmette. One of its containers is cracked . . . What the hell’s going on, Ben?”

“Find out if he got on alone. If he didn’t, we have a very serious problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Find out, Greg. You said he’s headed south? Toward downtown?”

“Yeah. I can give you his exact position . . .”

“I need to know if he’s alone, Greg. He’s not answering his cell phone.”

“Now just hold on a second. Okay? Hold on! He’s got his radio with him.”

Nikki said, “Where am I headed?” Ben gestured dead ahead, toward the mushroom swell of the Superdome and the brightly lit skyscrapers of the Central Business District. The radio noises continued in the background. Greg Landry must have been sitting at his station when he answered the phone, and he didn’t even bother putting his hand over the receiver as he asked the guy next to him, “You talked to A-Team since he boarded?”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Ben cried. “Don’t radio the ship!”

“Well, how in the hell do you expect me to—”

“Listen to me, Greg. And I promise you, I am not fucking around here, okay? So you have to listen to me here—”

“I’m listening, for Christ’s sake!”

“If he didn’t get on the ship alone, then he’s in danger—”

But Greg was talking to the man next to him in the control room again, his tone urgent.

“Greg!”

“He’s not alone,” Greg said into the phone. “Guy next to me just talked to the pilot who handed off to him at Destrehan. He said some . . .” To the guy next to him, Greg said, “What frickin’ cousin?”

Greg’s simple question—What frickin’ cousin?—resounded over and over again in Ben’s head like cannon fire.

“You want to tell me what the hell’s going on here, Benny?”

“There’s been a threat against Anthem,” Ben said.

“A threat against— What kind of threat? Like terrorism?”

“Something like that.”

What frickin’ cousin? What frickin’ cousin? What frickin’—

“You think somebody got on with him?” Greg said, dropping his voice so as not to be overheard. “Benny. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“Mother of Christ. I’m calling the ship, for Christ’s sake!”

“No! Don’t do that! You’ll tip him off.”

“Then he’ll use the code word we’ve got for hijackings.”

“Just tell me where the ship is!”

“Ben, you’re not making any goddamn—”

“Tell me where he is!”

His scream frightened Nikki so badly she winced and brought one hand to her mouth. There was a stunned silence from the other end. But Ben didn’t care about any of it. He was trying to strategize in his head. Can’t go behind the floodwalls ’cause we might miss the ship and then we’ll get trapped. And how much range do we have anyway and what good can I do if I can’t see inside of the ship or the bridge or where they are? I’ve got to get high up and the whole city’s below sea level. Have to get downtown. One River Place. The Hilton. Or the bridge. That’s it, that’s it. The bridge. Have to get on the bridge. But what will we do then? Something. That’s all. That’s all anyone can ever do. Something, goddammit.

“They passed the Upper Nine about fifteen minutes ago,” Greg said, sounding stunned by Ben’s eruption. “That’s Audubon Park. They’ll hit the base of Canal Street in a few minutes.”

What frickin’ cousin? What frickin’ cousin? What frickin’—

“If you have a terrorist protocol, activate it. Activate it now.”

Greg inhaled sharply, but before he could respond, a familiar, static-spiked voice echoed through the room on the other end of the line, sending a spike of cold fear through the center of Ben’s gut.

“Heeeeeelllllooooo everyone? Is anyone theeeeeerrrrree?”

There was a rustle against the phone, probably because Greg was setting it down on a table. But Ben could still hear everything: the click of Greg answering the radio call from the man he thought was his brother, and then Greg’s voice saying, too softly, too controlled, “Hey, man. It’s your brotha. How’s everything going out there tonight?”

“My brother, huh?” came the coy, probing response.

He doesn’t know his name, doesn’t recognize the voice. He doesn’t know his name because it’s not him anymore.

“Yeah, man,” Greg answered, trying to play it cool even though his voice had the tension of a high wire. “How’s that Panamax treating yah, A- Team?”

“Oh, it’s just fine,” Anthem’s voice said, and then in the background, Ben heard something else. Crying. A man crying. Not just crying. A pathetic, terrifying and yet somehow universal sound: a man pleading for his life. “Listen up, brotha”—and this snide ridicule of Greg Landry’s Lakefront accent was all it took to confirm Ben’s most horrifying fear—“there’s something I want y’all to hear!”

The gunshots came so close together it was impossible to tell how many there were.

30

Gunfire swallowed the quartermaster’s cries for mercy.

Amazing how the body just drops like that, Marshall thought. He was crouched in the back corner of the deck. He had, only seconds before, closed the interior entrance to the main deck, and now he was studying his handiwork with a calming sense of satisfaction. No grasping at the chest, no arms opening to God above. Just sudden deadweight hitting the floor like a ton of bricks.

And now Anthem Landry towered over the crumpled form of his third and final victim, the gun in his right hand, the walkie-talkie in his left; the latter erupting with terrified demands for information from Vessel Traffic Control.

Marshall saved the quartermaster for last not because he was the smallest, but because he’d been alone at the wheel while the captain and chief mate had been huddled in discussion close to one of the exits. Four shots had taken down both men, then Anthem had crossed the deck in several long, effortless strides, aiming the gun at the terrified, screaming quartermaster as he threw the lock on both doors. All these tasks had been completed effortlessly by the blood-lashed, gun-wielding pilot, probably because a man whose arm wasn’t aching from the gun’s recoil was controlling his every move.

And now the call had been made, the final murder recorded for posterity’s sake. The interior entrance was locked, which meant anyone who tried to break in from the side staircases would be exposed to gunfire on the landings outside. It had all come together so beautifully; he allowed himself several moments to just savor it. Even the blood splatters throughout the bridge were just a faint, delicate glisten in the radar screen’s green glow.

Up ahead, the Crescent City Connection blazed high above the rippling black waters.

He couldn’t wait too long. The clock was winding down. The heart of the city that had stupidly declared Anthem Landry a hero would soon be exposed to the ship’s giant prow.

Anthem Landry raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth, pressed the button and began to speak. “Answer me a question, brotha, motha, and whoever else can hear me on this beautiful night. Don’t you have days when you’re just ready to be done with this place? With this whole fuckin’ city, I mean. Don’t any of you get tired of pretending this place wasn’t meant to fall into the fucking sea? Anyone? Anyone?”

• • •

Could they get there ahead of the ship? Were they ahead of it right now? There was no getting Greg’s attention back. He was too busy trying to break in on his brother’s full-scale mental breakdown. And he was failing. Anthem wasn’t interested in being interrupted. Marshall Ferriot wasn’t interested in being interrupted.

“ . . . You know how fucked up it feels to have everyone call you a hero, only to turn around and realize you’re the hero of a giant shit pile full of niggers and drunks? It’s like being handed a medal and realizing it’s covered in piss. A piss medal. Hey, maybe I just invented a new term. How about that?”

“What the fuck, man?” Greg Landry wailed into the phone. “What the fuck is happening?”

“It’s not him, Greg.”

“What do you mean it’s not—” Voices on the other end of the line interrupted him. They were gruff, authoritative, trying for a sympathetic tone and failing in their eagerness to get Greg Landry out of the control room. He was losing his shit.

“Who is this?” a new voice said.

“My name’s Ben Broyard. I called about a threat we received against Anthem Landry at our offices earlier tonight—” When the guy didn’t ask all the questions he should have been asking, like What office? and What does threat mean? Ben understood the level of terror that now gripped everyone at Vessel Traffic Control.

In the background, the venomous diatribe continued. “ . . . Fact is, we ignored our own history. No city ever should have been built here. This damn river! It’s just a giant toilet for the rest of the country. And we’re the sewer! And do you know what that means? Do you know what that means for every last one of us? We live in shit! That’s what!”

When the stranger spoke again, his attempt to enunciate every syllable only caused his voice to wobble even more. “I’ve known Anthem Landry most of my life. And that’s Anthem Landry’s voice we’re hearin’. So tell me, just who in the hell is this threat against?”

Shouts erupted in the control room and, after a few seconds of this melee, Ben heard a recurring phrase: He’s turning. He’s turning the thing. He’s turning.

“Where?” Ben shouted. “How’s he turning it around so quickly?”

“He’s not turning it around. And it’s empty.”

“Empty. Isn’t that good?”

“No. It means its got no weight. It’ll ride up over anything it hits and just keep on going. And they were just starting to drain the ballast so the bow’s still sticking up out of the water and . . . Aw, Jesus . . .” The man groaned. “Aw, no, no, no . . .”

“What?”

“He’s turning for the east bank. He’s headed for Spanish Plaza.”

Spanish Plaza. The spot where Marshall Ferriot’s death plunge had been broken by his own father. How fitting. How fitting, you monster. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? You’re not just taking out Anthem. You’re sending Nikki a message. And Ben had no choice but to relay it.

To Nikki, he said, “Spanish Plaza. The Hilton.”

Her eyes flashed, but then her icy calm returned, even as she drove like a kamikaze pilot.

“Have you evacuated the riverfront?” Ben asked.

“A tactical alert’s been sent out. NOPD’s been mobilized. But we’ve got the Hilton, One River Place . . . It’s the middle of the night. Those folks are asleep.”

“Then wake them up!”

The Jeep rocketed down the long expanse of the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center, and then Nikki pulled a hard right, tires screaming, before she could plow into the sidewall of Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. Cabs swerved out of their way as she careened into the large circular carport of the Hilton Hotel and Riverwalk Shopping Mall.

A woman in a bathrobe was staring into the Jeep’s headlights. Nikki slammed on the brakes, came within a foot of hitting her. The woman didn’t care. She took one look at Ben and kept running. She was too busy trying to get away from the Hilton’s entrance. And she wasn’t alone. Several bright lights were flashing above the hotel’s entrance doors, and more guests—most of them sleep-rumpled and in their nightclothes—were pouring out into the night while security guards directed them away from the entrance and the fire alarm let out a series of bloodcurdling, automated screams.

Several NOPD cruisers squealed into the turnaround behind him, but they didn’t give two shits about the speeding Jeep that had beaten them there by a heartbeat. The uniformed cops sprang into action, directing guests away from the building.

Ben struggled out of the car, grateful that adrenaline had caused his nausea to wane. But his head was spinning, and the crowd of evacuees from the hotel was threatening to throw him off balance. Nikki was calling out to him from the other side of the Jeep, but he ignored her, focusing instead on a dazed-looking man in a half-unbuttoned plaid shirt and loose-fitting jeans. Plaid Shirt was doing a half-stumble, half-trot away from the lobby doors, because he was scanning the crowd around him for someone important.

. . . and then he was a ten-year-old boy, standing at his mother’s bedside, reaching for her hand, and she was pale and gaunt and bald from chemo, but her fragile smile and her reach for her son’s hand was enough to comfort him . . .

He felt Nikki’s hand on his shoulder, but the world had gone silver, the crowd surging through the hotel’s circular driveway casting off ghostly impressions, and Plaid Shirt stood frozen, awaiting Ben’s commands.

“Let him go,” Nikki whispered into his ear. “Let him go, Ben!”

It wasn’t ego that had made him hesitate, but the same rich, delicious pleasure she’d described in her journal. It was like the peak of an orgasm, softened and sustained. And letting it go felt like yanking a half-chewed bite of ambrosia from his mouth.

The world returned to its normal, everyday colors in a seamless instant. And then it was just him, and his nausea, and the screaming fire alarm, and his best friend, back from the dead and glaring at him with a schoolteacher’s anger and intensity.

“I think I’m good to go,” Ben whispered.

She started pulling on his shoulder, then she ran for the opening in the concrete floodwall up ahead that served as the entrance to the Riverwalk Shopping Mall.

As soon as they entered the courtyard, they saw the ship. Its wheelhouse was tall enough to block out part of the glimmering Crescent City Connection bridge it had just left in its wake, and it was on a direct course for the riverbank, its approach silent but undeniable. The fire alarms from both the Hilton and One River Place, the condo high-rise just west of the hotel, sounded eerily distant now, like sci-fi sound effects from a neighbor’s television. The fountain behind him was off. And the plaza around him was just an expanse of empty concrete. No one to scream, no one to warn. Just wind-rattled tree branches and the deceptively gentle swish of the river water breaking across the approaching ship’s giant bow.

“We can’t drive him,” Nikki gasped, struggling for breath. “We’ll turn him into something so much worse than what he is now.”

“Then what the hell are going to do?”

Nikki started to spin in place, surveying their surroundings. He couldn’t tell if she was looking for something specific, or if it was panic that propelled her now. Then she went rigid. It couldn’t be the ferry landing that had stilled her. What could they possibly do with— Then he saw what was just beyond it and rising over the ferry landing’s elevated concrete walkway; the great parabolic sweep of green glass that enclosed the jungle exhibit at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas.

• • •

“Sorry, folks. I wish I could do this another way. But I guess y’all just don’t want to get the message. Hell, if Katrina didn’t deliver it, I’m not sure I can. But I’ll try. I have to try. So here’s what I say to all those folks who called me a—” But Anthem’s voice sounded weak, and a small seizure shook Marshall’s sternum in time with Anthem’s every stammer.

Something was wrong. His ribs wanted to burst from his chest, he was sure of it.

Their speed had been over fifteen knots right before they went into the turn. Now they were crossing the current, which was slowing them down, but not by much. And he’d been fine then, his fears about Anthem’s overpowering soul flash seemed to have been for naught.

Then suddenly, it was all gone. Marshall had fallen to his knees on the metal floor and the world had been returned to its bleak, everyday colors, and several feet away, Anthem Landry’s entire body was shuddering, so severely it was visible even in shadows. It looked as if his shoulders were about to jerk up and out of their sockets, and Marshall realized the chattering sound was the man’s teeth knocking together. And his hold on him was gone. And when Marshall went to hook him again, the shadow that had been Anthem Landry turned on him, and in the green glow of the radar screens, he saw that the shoulders poised to lift free from Anthem Landry’s body had blossomed into impossible, dual swells that surged upward from the man’s arching back. Anthem’s eyes were gone, caverns of blackness that seemed to be devouring his entire face. But there was a channel of suddenly molten flesh pouring down the bridge of the man’s nose, lengthening it. And his stooped pose wasn’t correcting itself. He was standing upright. In fact, the man’s silhouette was expanding, lengthening.

It’s his spine, Marshall realized. His fucking spine is getting longer. That’s why he’s not standing up.

And then there were two clattering sounds, sharp and subtle given the nightmare unfolding before him, and in the radar screen’s glow, Marshall saw what had made them; two giant, matching talons that had slapped to the floor of the bridge in unison. And that’s when Marshall could no longer deny what the twin surges of shadow emerging from Anthem Landry’s rapidly lengthening back actually were.

“Wings,” he muttered aloud, before the wave of shadow surged toward him across the deck, emitting a piercing, shrieking sound that emptied Marshall Ferriot’s bladder instantly. And then it felt as if he was being dragged across the metal floor by darkness itself.

• • •

The police officer had just finished shooting out four of the glass doors in the entrance to the Aquarium of the Americas when the ship’s great bow slammed into one corner of the ferry landing. The two-story skeletal steel structure gave way like kindling. And then, just as the pilot on the phone had predicted, the ship’s bow jerked upward, riding up and over the descending maelstrom of struts and support beams, driving them down into the maelstrom of muddy water. The ship kept going, the giant chains attached to its four loading cranes swaying.

Nikki drove the police officer to run in the opposite direction, toward Woldenberg Park, away from where Ben and Nikki now stood clutching each other just outside the now shattered entrance doors to the aquarium. The ground underneath their feet was trembling as the ship tore through yards of red bricks emblazoned with the names of the aquarium’s donors. Its approach across the water had appeared so lazy, it was almost impossible to believe that the deafening sounds of splintering wood and collapsing concrete were the results of its hull devouring the dock front.

Ben glanced over one shoulder, just as Nikki drove the cop to toss his gun over the railing into the river. Then, once he was a good sprint away from them, she released him and he literally spun in place, he was so disoriented.

Then he was knocked off his feet, and before he could think twice, he pulled Nikki down with him. The ship’s bow had slammed into the two-story wall of green glass that enclosed the Amazon Jungle exhibit, and the vast sweep of shattering glass was so loud and piercing, it was like a thousand children screaming at once.

Now that it had been stopped at a forty-five-degree angle with the bank, Ben scanned the length of the ship. The wheelhouse was still a good two hundred feet out into the river. A dark shape was trying to fight its way out through the broken windows, but it was caught on a long series of empty metal window frames. Then, with one powerful thrust, the dark shape hurled itself forward and the entire row of empty window frames popped free and somersaulted through open air down to the main deck.

A pair of wings pushed their way through the new, elongated opening, unfurling suddenly to a span of at least fifteen feet, as dark and solid as the hull of the ship itself. Then the creature dropped from the front of the wheelhouse, revealing two legs shaped like those of a giant human but covered in the same glittering, obsidian feathers that plated its enormous wings. On its way down the thing buoyed itself with several awkward wing-pumps, then it landed feet-first atop the grain hatches.

Ben glimpsed the creature’s foreshortened arms, crossed against the chest as if it wasn’t quite sure how to use them, enormous talons latticing each other. Five curving nails on each claw? Could it be possible? The same number as fingers on a human hand. Then the giant creature raced down the length of the ship, wings spread to keep the disproportionate body upright as it ran.

Nikki had seen it too, and she was getting to her feet, slowly, using both hands to brush her hair back from her forehead, as if she thought the creature might be a trick played by her bangs.

He was visited again by the same two words that had coursed through his brain when he’d seen those awful photos. Mind monster. And Nikki was shaking her head, her hands gripping the top of her skull now.

“Come on,” she said.

When he didn’t move right away, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to his feet, then she turned and kicked out the remaining glass in the bullet-pierced door, all the while holding his hand as if he were a child who might try to flee.

31

Marshall had been so sure the creature was going to drop him in the river, he started kicking the second he hit the water, determined to keep himself floating above the treacherous currents that flowed just beneath the surface. But now his feet brushed sand and when he broke the surface, he heard screaming emergency alarms all around him, along with the wet, thwacking sounds of debris slamming against concrete.

He was inside the aquarium. The damn thing had flown right into the soaring Amazon Jungle exhibit and dropped him into one of the open-air fish tanks. The glass wall had been cracked in a dozen places, and water was spewing out onto the debris-strewn walkway so fast the level inside the tank was dropping. Marshall threw his arms over the steel rim in an intact portion of the glass wall and managed to swing one leg over the side, then the other. When he dropped to the walkway, he sensed a great movement high above him. A shifting of something massive and not quite steady. It was up there, somewhere, perched atop the giant thatched tree house that hung high above the exhibit; a dark shadow, wings folded against its newly formed back.

Silent, watching.

There was a sharp, high-pitched crash from high above. Marshall thought it might be the creature, until he saw the thing’s shadow jerk in startled response. A quadrant of steel framing and shattered glass had pulled free of the shattered ceiling, sending daggers plunging into the jungle foliage a few feet away. He heard a soft pop nearby, another tank giving way. But the creature was still up there, the creature that had been Anthem Landry just moments before. It was still Anthem. It had been made from him. He’d watched it happen. What would happen if he—

Something seemed to explode in the air right in front of him, and his first thought was that the creature had descended on him, and he was preparing to hook the damn thing when there was an explosion of white-hot pain in the center of his skull, piercing and flowing. Feathers slapped his face and there was a blast of wild, rank stench. A bird. A real bird, normal size, and it had just taken a bite out of his face. There was another explosion in the air a few feet away; this one right behind him. Feathers slapped his neck. And another. He was still spinning. They were attacking silently, one after the other. Three were as many as he could count from the blasts of their wings. He focused on their blasts, tried to hook them, but he couldn’t. It was like scraping his hands against a steel door. Because they were already hooked.

Another one landed a searing, direct hit, tearing a chunk of flesh from his eyelid. He screamed despite himself, felt his knees slam to the concrete. They’re going for my eyes. She’s here. She’s here and she’s trying to blind me. Then he heard one of them slap to the concrete next to them, and then another. And a third, and the air around him felt still suddenly.

He was wiping the blood from his eyes, blinking furiously, telling himself they hadn’t pierced his eyeball, that he would be in agony if they had, and that when he was able to see again, he’d see them littering the walkway around him, their skulls exploded like all the animals who were subjected to a power like his own.

“Nikki Delongpre?” he growled.

But once he said her name aloud, realization hit. Three birds at once. There’d been three birds at once, and unless she was infinitely more powerful than him, there was no way she could have hooked more than one animal at a time. He’d tried countless times and failed. She wasn’t alone.

He was still wiping the blood from his eyes when he felt sudden movement around his legs, then in between them, the brush of cold, tensile skin. His vision cleared just enough for him to see the giant snake coiling itself around his knees. The exhibit’s star attraction, freed from its tank and coiling around his waist now. He managed to lift one arm above his head, but the other was pinned underneath the sudden constriction, and immediately his lung cried out in protest as he felt the squeeze. The son of a bitch was ten feet long uncoiled, so thick he probably wouldn’t have been able to fit both hands around its body.

And now its expressionless eye was level with his, its giant head sliding over his chest, and when he went to scream, there wasn’t enough breath left in his lungs to give voice to its terror. He had one free arm, but when he went to claw the thing’s eye out, the mouth opened and swallowed his hand. And the knowledge that it was human intention—her intention—driving the snake’s seemingly emotionless movements only added fury to his terror. He tried to say her name, but what came out was a slurred perversion of it that made him sound brain-damaged. And he prepared himself to die, on his knees, splinted by the snake’s unnatural constriction, his vision finally cleared of his own blood.

Then the snake’s head exploded, and its suddenly lifeless body lost its coil, sliding down him gradually. He pulled his hand free of the mass of gore that had once been its head and used it to push himself out of the snake’s ghostly coil. The last few movements needed to free himself made him look like a bride stepping out of a wedding gown she’d let puddle on the floor.

Another sharp crack from high above, but nothing animal about it. Another rain of glass from the shattered ceiling. Only there was a disturbance in the high mound of jungle foliage a few feet away in advance of the impact. A startled movement that was all too human. The fresh rain of glass was about to expose someone’s hiding place.

Ben Broyard somersaulted to the walkway in front of him, head slamming to the pavement just as the giant wet leaves that had concealed him were torn to pieces. His body went limp and Marshall was wondering if the little fucker had been knocked out cold when suddenly, for the first time, his own world was wiped away from him as if by a giant hand.

• • •

Someone was calling his name. His head was spinning and everything he heard sounded like it was coming to him through a thin tube. But he could hear his name, laced with another word he couldn’t make out. A woman’s voice. Screaming . . .

Nikki.

His eyes popped open. Marshall Ferriot stood over him, wide-eyed, blood streaming from the bites across his forehead and the bridge of his nose, his expression as vacant as Marissa’s had been earlier that day when she’d almost torn his head off. Nikki’s voice was blending with the squealing emergency alarms. They’d spread out the second they hit the jungle exhibit, both of them trying to get different vantage points on Marshall, as far away from him as possible.

But now he’d been exposed and . . . she’d hooked him! That’s why she was screaming. When he’d fallen right in front of Marshall, she had no choice but to hook the guy, and that was the other word she was screaming: Now Now Now Now Now.

Ben reached out for a giant shard of glass lying a few feet away. He ignored the fact that it had sliced into the flesh of his palm. He knew if he looked right into Marshall’s eyes, he would hesitate, so he closed the distance between them without looking at his face. When there were only inches between them, he slashed the jagged pieces of glass at Marshall’s throat. And it was as if it had moved through water.

Because Marshall Ferriot’s skin had become fluid and black. It looked as if he was bending backward at the waist, but his torso was actually lengthening, his legs fattening, and then his mouth opened so wide it appeared to consume his entire face, turning his head into a featureless, gelatinous black mass that looked like crawling lava after it has dived under the surface of the ocean. His neck was lengthening and taking on the patterning of a snake’s smoke-colored scales. His arms had opened as if he were about to take Ben in an embrace, then they sealed themselves to both sides of his narrowing trunk, sprouted into something that looked like a millipede’s legs. Then the matching rows of dripping fangs took shape inside the creature’s giant, crescent-shaped mouth, and it was now ten feet long, level with the floor, its blazing eyes focused on Ben.

Ben wasn’t sure what terrified him more, the thought of staying put or the thought of what the thing’s soul would look like if he tried to drive it a second time. So he turned and ran. And that’s when he felt an incredible gust of air behind him, heard a deafening, pained hiss and looked back in time to see the winged beast Anthem Landry had become seize the giant serpent in its great avian beak and lift it off the ground. Doglike, the winged monster swung its head back and forth, wings pumping madly, and the giant serpent’s entire body jerked and spasmed as it was hefted up into the air. Then they both dropped.

The serpent’s limp body smashed into the emptying remains of one of the open-air tanks. Now that it was pinned to the floor, the winged creature landed talons-first on the serpent’s back, and then tugged lightly on each talon to make sure it had pierced its scales. Then, wings pumping to give it balance, it pulled its talons in opposite directions and tore the son of a bitch in half.

One after the other, it yanked it talons free from the blood, gore and shredded scales. When it turned and looked back at Ben, he collapsed on the walkway, just inside the tunnel that lead to the rest of the aquarium. The creature stood up on its hind legs, its talons tucked against its feathered chest, and despite the inhuman shape of its blood-splattered beak, the eye that it focused on Ben was Anthem’s. And when the creature opened its beak and let out a piercing scream that sounded like a woman’s cry filtered through a torrential thunderstorm, Ben thought it might be parroting the terrified sobs he couldn’t fight any longer.

Having exhausted itself, the creature picked up the serpent’s severed head in its talons, then kicked itself into the air with its powerful legs, the pumping wings giving it flight. It took a few minutes for Ben to gather his courage and walk to the spot where the serpent’s shredded lower half lay strewn across the walkway. Once he was there, he looked up and saw Nikki standing on one of the thatched, elevated walkways that passed just below the tree house overhead. She was staring up through the shattered glass ceiling of the exhibit, probably at the spot where the creature had flown away. By the time he had joined her on the walkway, they could hear the footfalls of approaching police officers, too many at once to drive off, so he took her hand and they sped off down the walkway in the opposite direction.

32

MADISONVILLE

They crossed Lake Pontchartrain in silence, and by the time they reached the old push boat outside Madisonville, they had three hours until dawn. Nikki used her Maglite to guide the way toward the ship’s remains, which now seemed tiny to Ben in comparison to the leviathan that had almost run them down earlier that night. For a while, they stood at the edge of the empty parking lot as Nikki ran her flashlight beam over the push boat’s glassless windows, waiting for the eruption of some unnamable creature cowering inside, Ben scanned the night sky. But the boat was empty and so was the sky. The dock had mostly rotted away, so they were forced to wade through waist-high water to get to its back deck.

They searched the lower deck for any signs of talon marks, any stray obsidian feathers. But there was nothing, just a hollowed-out steel-walled cavern. The situation on the upper deck was the same. That left the wheelhouse. And when the beam of Nikki’s flashlight traveled across the pile of red Mardi Gras beads Anthem had piled there every year after the Krewe of Ares parade, she sank slowly to her knees and ran them through her fingers.

Ben turned his back on her, allowing her this private moment at the graveside of her adolescence, and surveyed the sweeping view of the lake. In the near distance the causeway twinkled, though not with its usual energy given the lateness of the hour. But the world around them was flat, silent and dark, devoid of monsters and seemingly drained of magic. And this sudden peace made him feel dizzy and light-headed. He had the sense that he was about to float away, as if all that truly tied him to the earth’s surface over the years was his belief in the inevitable orderliness and decay of the human body.

He was exhausted, and he smelled awful, so awful he was tempted to douse himself in more lake water. But that would only make it worse. Having taken her moment with Anthem’s makeshift altar, Nikki sank to the floor, knees to her chest.

“The way to keep from losing your mind is to see them as extensions of the person, rather than . . . you know, a separate thing. Something from another dimension. It sounds horrible, but it actually makes it easier. The eyes . . . They’re always there, in the eyes.”

Ben nodded, and for a while, neither of them spoke, just listened to the gentle howl of the wind moving through the ship’s hollow, rusted skeleton.

“I never told him,” Ben finally said.

“Never told him what?”

“That I thought Marshall caused the accident. That I knew you two had gone to Elysium together.”

“What does it matter, Ben?”

“If I’d given him some reason to . . . suspect, I don’t know. Some reason to hate him or fear him, even, maybe he wouldn’t have let him get so close . . .”

“Marshall didn’t need permission to use his power on anyone. That’s not how it works. You know that.”

“I know, but . . . he brought him on the ship.”

“He could have been driving him all night long.”

“Then he would have changed earlier. Look how quickly Marshall changed. No, they were . . . They were together, Nick. For a while before Marshall did anything. And if I had told Anthem what I . . .”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought he would kill him. Now that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.”

“No, of course not. Marshall would be dead and Anthem would be on trial and you would have no real idea of what you’d been spared, just that your best friend was going to go to jail for murder. And all because I was still out there, letting everyone believe I was dead. You’re not going to beat me at the blame game, Benny.”

Another silence fell, and then she whispered, “I never thought he’d wake up. You have to believe me. I never . . .” And then a tremor took control of her voice, and Ben sank down to the floor beside her and laced his arm around her leg and held it there until she seemed to have regained her composure.

“Of course you didn’t,” he whispered.

He gave in to the urge to rest his head against her shoulder, and when she relaxed under the weight, leaning back against the wall and spreading her legs out in front of her for support, he leaned in further and she curved an arm around his back.

“I’ve never turned one back,” she said. “You know that, right? I mean, not into anything that’s . . . livable.”

“But you’ve never loved any of them either.”

“That’s true . . .”

“Do you still love him?”

“What I feel for him, I’ve never felt for any other man.”

“Me too . . .”

“Did you guys ever . . . You know, after I left . . .”

“No. Oh my God.”

“I don’t know. I just thought, maybe . . .”

“You thought he’d get wasted and I’d get desperate.”

“Not exactly that. But something like it.”

“I would never.”

“All right, fine.” She ran her fingers through his hair gently. “Has there ever been anyone?”

“You mean besides the guy you drove out of my apartment that night?”

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

“No. No one who . . . mattered. As much as you or him.”

Her touch was soothing and hypnotic.

“Ben . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know how they are when they’re . . . loose. What if he doesn’t come?”

“Then we look for him.”

Or someone else finds him first, and the entire world changes. She must have heard the exhaustion in his voice, because she slowed the gentle movement of her fingers through his hair, and for a while, they said nothing. It was long enough for the weight of sleep to sand away the edges of his thoughts.

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“I really thought you’d get a little bit taller.”

He laughed into her chest, and then she tightened her arm around his back, and after another few minutes or so, he slipped away. But it was the kind of fitful sleep he typically had after too many drinks, where the brief snippets of dreams seemed raw and close to the surface of wakefulness; he dreamed that he was awake and they were talking to each other when they really weren’t, and then the images from the aquarium played rapid-fire across his mind, each one too quick to startle him awake. But the high-speed-download quality of it left him with the awareness that he wasn’t slumbering so much as processing, and underneath this realization was the vague fear of who he would be once the impossible events he’d witnessed that night became a part of his memory.

Then Nikki was shaking him awake, and there was a noise outside like a low, crackling fire. “Ben,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s here.”

• • •

He could barely walk upright, not without the support of his wings pumping the air behind him, and the effort seemed to be exhausting him as he shambled across the empty parking lot. He switched to all fours but his forearms were ill designed for the task. In order to take a step, he had to flatten his five-nailed talons entirely against the asphalt, then take them up high into the air with each step, like a cat pulling its paws out of something sticky, all the while making sure the long curved nails didn’t fold together on each retraction, preventing him from taking another step.

Ben realized what was so awful about the creature; there was no evolution to its form, no logical physical adaptations to environment that had been refined over millennia. He remembered the photograph of the giant, deformed woman, whose giant tongue had been too big to fit inside her mouth. This creature had the same lunatic quality to it; its giant, protruding beak didn’t close entirely and the huge, ovular eyes—too full of human-shaped iris and pupil to look anything like those of a bird—didn’t blink because there were no eyelids to go with them.

If they left him like this, if they didn’t do something, he would not survive for long. Ben was sure of it. And the more he studied its imbalanced form, the more he realized why the creature seemed exhausted. Its massive wingspan made it more suited for flight, but the weight of its heavy, humanoid body must have created incredible drag. There was no way this creature could survive in the wild, if it wasn’t killed by a human. What choice would it have if it went on like this? Fly itself to death?

As he and Nikki crouched against the railing outside the wheelhouse watching its approach, Ben was grasping to figure out what memory of Anthem’s could have given rise to this thing. Then he remembered a drunken late-night phone call, right after Deepwater Horizon blew. They’re burning birds, Benny. In the oil. They’re caught in it but they don’t get them out before they light the fires to burn it off, and they’re all just going up. Are you going to write about it, Benny? You got to write about it, Benny.

The creature jumped down into the water with a great splash and began walking down the side of the boat, away from the wheelhouse, toward the yawning opening in back. The push boat’s weight shifted beneath them as the creature crawled inside the lower deck, and that’s when Nikki turned to Ben and looped several strands of red Mardi Gras beads around his neck. Then did the same to herself.

“I’ll get as close as I can,” she whispered. “You stand by, and when I’m ready . . . you drive him. But not until . . . not until . . .”

“Not until what?”

She bent forward and whispered words into his ear. They were short and sweet and simple enough to remember, but he was still sure he’d forget them in the terror of the moment, so he started whispering them to himself over and over again.

“I don’t know how much of him is still in there, Ben. I don’t know if—”

“He came here, Nikki,” Ben whispered. “Remember that. He came here.”

Nikki turned from him and started slowly down the exterior staircase that lead to the lower deck. He followed a safe distance behind. When they reached the lower deck, they found the creature slumped against one corner of the shadowy steel cavern, its feathered chest heaving. From the way it had jammed its wings up into the corner of the ceiling, holding them there by leaning his upper back against the wall, Ben could see what a terrible compulsion they made for the thing; a giant, undeniable invitation to take to the air, even though the rest of the thing’s body wasn’t properly crafted for flight.

Ben stood his ground outside the door to the lower deck.

Nikki entered the shadows. The creature didn’t seem to notice her approach, then, when she was eight feet from it, she said, “You know, you’re not going make a lot of friends around here with that T-shirt you got on.”

The avian head jerked back on its neck. The beak opened and closed, but no sound came from it.

“True,” Nikki continued, taking several slow steps toward the thing. “You did meet the two of us today, so I guess that’s something. But maybe after school, we can run you by Perlis and get you some of those polo shirts with the crawfish on them. You know, help you fit in a little bit more. What do you say to that, huh, Anthem Landry?”

The creature leapt forward, talons slapping to the metal floor inches from Nikki’s feet. Ben gripped the door frame, prepared himself to take the creature under his command, but when its beak opened, the sound that came ripping out of it had the tinge of a man’s wail in it. Nikki had held her ground and lifted one palm.

“After all,” she continued, but her voice was trembling. “You are the most beautiful man I have ever laid eyes on, so you can’t blame me for coming up with an excuse to get close, now, can you?”

The creature lifted one talon off the floor, and slowly extended one sharp, curving nail. “Nikki . . .” Ben said quietly.

Nikki shook her head, but she was having trouble keeping her eyes open, and her chest was heaving as the creature’s one nail traveled slowly up the length of her torso. To Ben, it looked like he was searching for a target, and he prayed it wasn’t Nikki’s beating heart or her carotid artery.

“You know . . . Mardi Gras is coming up soon, and we like to watch the parades from Third and St. Charles. It’s not too far from my house. Maybe you could join us, Anthem Landry. Would you like that? Would you like to watch the Ares parade with us?”

The nail found its target, the plastic medallion attached to the beads hanging from Nikki’s neck. A soft, gentle whine escaped from the winged beast. And Nikki said, “Would you like that . . . my hero, my God, my angel?”

Having heard the signal, Ben opened, and just as the scene before him turned silvery and luminescent, the creature’s soul sent him stumbling backward. He felt his ass hit the steel staircase, and then all sense of up and down, all sense of a bordered, orderly world was lost as he was battered by the nightmare-gnarled images pouring through him. The writhing body of the serpent Marshall Ferriot had become, Nikki shrinking from view as the creature rose up through the jungle exhibit’s shattered ceiling. And then there was a soft, radiating glow, beating like a heartbeat within the chaos. And Ben recognized the twirling knots of flame blossoming throughout his consciousness. He could hear the music, he could smell the spilt beer. He could feel the memory of a long-ago Mardi Gras parade coursing through him, and that’s when he realized Anthem Landry was moving through him too.