Watermind (39 page)

CJ rubbed her collarbone where he'd knocked against her. It felt sore. She would have a bruise. Roman closed his eyes and rocked. When his silence continued, she, too, sat on the cold deck. Facing the water, she leaned against Roman's back, and she could feel his chest fill with air. After a while, they began to breathe in unison.

Along the underlit river, mist rose in slow burgeoning spirals. Dense clouds hid the moon and stars. Only floodlights and the spinning red strobe of an ambulance illuminated the Gypsy boat ramp. The boys were shaken and hurt, but they would recover.

CJ's tongue tingled. What an idiotic prank, tasting that river sample. She gathered saliva in her mouth and swallowed. From the rhythm of Roman's breath, she could tell he had nodded off.

“I'm pregnant,” she said aloud, knowing he wouldn't hear.

She stroked her belly. Could Roman be the father? DNA testing would tell her for sure. But DNA was not destiny. A person could change. She rested her forehead against the rail and peered down at the platinum films in the river. They were pixelating like diamonds.

A shape caught her notice. Something wiggled ten inches under the surface. She leaned farther out and met the bewildered gaze of a bass. Gray stripes dotted its silver flanks. It wallowed on its side, trapped between cold glassy layers. She could see it clearly in the colloid's glow. Its gills sucked furiously, and its open mouth churned. She didn't need a degree in ichthyology to understand that it was terrified.

Engine vibrations shook the hull, and very slowly the
Pilgrim
steered downstream toward the spillway, leaving
the trapped fish behind. Unsettled, she squinted ahead into the river's bright reflections. As the ship gathered speed, radiant green ripples winged out on either side of its blunt bow, and St. Elmo's Fire crackled along the hull. She felt the static charge build. The EM field made her skin prickle.

What if I can't stop you?

She peered at the flickering green water as if it could read her thoughts. A liquid mind, the first sentient life since humans. She envisioned its exotic neural net spreading through the oceans, raining on the land, entering the human water supply. . . .

How fast will you change everything? Faster than we did?

Around the speeding ship, emeralds blazed.

 

Saturday, March 19

7:09
PM

 

A hundred yards upstream of the Gypsy boat ramp, Rayette Batiste cajoled her Ford Escort into reverse. Traffic was thick on the levee road, and her backup lights offered little help in the darkness. Plus, it was cold. Her car heater fogged her windows, and she had to wipe them with a Kleenex to see out. With great caution, she eased backward onto the soft shoulder and turned her car around. The man beside her groaned.

He was fondling a small chain and mouthing a chant. Rayette felt sure he was praying. For what, she couldn't guess. She kept peeking at his hand as she drove watchfully along the crowded narrow road. He'd wrapped his bloody hand in his T-shirt.

It wasn't easy, going against traffic. Rayette's pale hair
fell in her eyes as she dodged through potholes and slid in the mud. Scores of cars were pouring downstream, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacle blaring through their TVs. Rayette guessed she must be the only driver to turn back. In the flare of headlights, she stole another peek at her strange passenger.

She knew his name. She'd seen him before, many times, but never like this. Without the bandana covering his head, he seemed younger. Mud caked the curly black hair on his chest and stained his jeans. He looked as if he'd been swimming in the Mississippi for days. But his face carried a virile dignity that Rayette had always admired. Her glance lingered on his mouth, then glided down his muscular bare chest to his hand, bound in the bloody T-shirt.

“ ‘A certain Samaritan,' ” she recited in her mind, “ ‘came where he was, and when she saw him, she had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine. And set him on her own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.' ”

She skidded around another oncoming ambulance, and mud splattered her windshield. Its blinking red lights scared her worse than its siren. Someone must be hurt really bad, she thought, and no wonder. The parade along the levee was a lawless bedlam. Pedestrians meandered through traffic waving open whiskey bottles. Gunshots popped like firecrackers. Someone rammed her rear bumper. It was worse than Mardi Gras. Again and again, she had questioned what she was doing in this caravan of sinners. She prayed and whimpered and tried to keep her car between the ditches.

Jeremiah Destiny was the one who sent her on this mad Saturday afternoon pilgrimage. He said, “Follow the Behemoth, and keep me apprised.” So, for the first time in her life, on Jeremiah's advice, Rayette had committed crimes. She'd pilfered an office BlackBerry and deserted her network servers, leaving Quimicron's LAN to the vagaries of
identity thieves, cyberterrorists, and spam. It was the Lord's work, Jeremiah said.

And then, out of the dusk, the wounded hitchhiker materialized beside her car. His bloody hand thumped her hood. His familiar face loomed at her window. Joy to the world, the Lord had sent a True Sign.

“Dangerous road, Miz Batiste. You don' need to be out here alone.” Those were the first words Max Pottevents spoke when he tumbled wearily into her passenger seat.

He told her how a fiery wave hit his boat and launched him out like a missile. He said he landed in soft mud on the riverbank, but Rayette knew it was the Hand of God that broke his fall. When he asked to borrow her cell phone, she showed him the stolen BlackBerry hidden in her glovebox. His first call was to his little daughter, Marie. Rayette smiled as his manly baritone morphed to baby talk.

Next, he called Rory Godchaux. He asked a question or two, but mostly he listened. Then, very mildly, he said, “Rory, I'm through. Tell them I ain' coming back.”

After that conversation, he sat rubbing his injured hand, occasionally wiping the window and peering out. “That mess downriver don' concern us, Miz Batiste. Leave it to the outsiders. They don' need us mixing in.”

“Yes oh yes.” She wept a little with blessed relief as she steered her Ford off the levee road. This was a message from the Redeemer, surely.

Max kept talking, mostly to himself. He'd had enough of Quimicron SA. He didn't need their money, their
mauvais largan
. He'd find another way to make a living. From now on, he just wanted to spend time with his daughter and play music.

But when Rayette stopped at the junction of Highway 48, he rested his hand on her gearshift. She wanted to turn North toward home, yet she waited for him to speak. After a while, he rolled the window down and leaned his head out. Rayette sensed her True Sign slipping away.

“There's a clinic in LaPlace I could take you,” she said, “for that hand.”

When he didn't answer, she said, “Your daughter's up in Baton Rouge, isn't she?”

When he opened the car door, Rayette reached across his lap and jerked it shut. “Listen here, Mr. Pottevents.”

She wanted to tell him he'd been SENT by Providence to rescue her from the Maelstrom. “Like you said, they don't need us mixing in.”

A tractor-trailer truck roared up Highway 48, and suddenly, Rayette heard the Lord speaking. His Voice came like the thunder of steel-belted tires on wet asphalt. “ ‘For ye have been called unto liberty; only use not your liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love, serve one another.' ”

Rayette knew that passage. Galatians 5:13. She shut her eyes, and horrible visions danced around her head like dragons. She feared what obligation the Lord's Word might lay upon her. She whimpered a little.

Max didn't notice. He sat listening to the night, massaging his injured hand and gazing South.

 

Saturday, March 19

10:34
PM

 

The sky was pitch-dark when the
Pilgrim
and
Chausseur
reached the Bonnet Carré Spillway. They anchored just downstream of the concrete weir and prepared for the colloid's approach. But the green slick dawdled upstream, leaching more cargoes. Almost within sight of the spillway weir, it covered the Mississippi like radiant silver foil, and in the last hour, it had riddled half a dozen more barge hulls.

Spectators lined both banks with flashlights and flare guns. Sightseeing aircraft spiraled overhead casting spotlights. FOX was running live coverage. Roman's mouth
tasted like sand. He felt disaster building. Why had he ever imagined he could keep this quiet?

On the
Pilgrim
's prow, a northerly breeze whipped a line against an aerial, setting up a steady
ping ping ping.
Gulls banked under the weir's sodium lights, dropping guano. The river smelled alive. Its swollen current spurted between the tight wooden weir pins with a noise like raining gravel.

Roman stood at the rail and counted the pins. He had organized materials for a temporary catch dam inside the spillway, and his workers were already rushing to erect it. Trucks, barges, and helicopters were converging with supplies. He'd maxxed out his last line of credit. And he had still not received permission to open the Bonnet Carré weir. He counted another bay of wooden pins. The number in each bay was always the same. No variance.

Seated at Roman's feet, CJ ignored the light rain that pooled around her on the cold steel deck. Roman's red windbreaker flapped around her shoulders. Soggy and goosefleshed, she hugged her knees and watched a cormorant diving for fish in the cone of sodium light. A sharp thin bird, the cormorant was all angles and points, evil-looking, she thought.

Roman had approved her plan—maybe he was desperate. In any case, he'd ordered the gear she needed. As soon as the equipment arrived, she would go into action. She intended to lure the colloid through the weir using Max's music. She would play it correctly this time, in the right order. She would collect a viable sample, then neutralize the rest before it did any more harm.
For you, Max
. She watched the cormorant dive.

Roman watched the sky glowing upriver. He could almost hear the colloid hum. He'd ordered Vaarveen to keep station at the slick's leading edge and take readings. Vaarveen's latest sample showed the colloid had transmuted to a radically new form.

Hovering somewhere between liquid and ice, it had
evolved into a “meta-material,” a substance so complex, it could create otherwise impossible material effects, like negative light refraction. Its computer chips, microbes, plant sugar, Freon, and sundry suspended particles had blended so thoroughly, they were no longer recognizable as separate components. And its volume of dissolved iron had increased by an ungodly factor.

Roman raked his long hair with his fingers and watched Reilly scowl at the sea birds. Reilly claimed the colloid used iron to move. She said its neural net steered the magnetic solution by rhythmically altering its EM field. Maybe that's how the
picaro
anchored against barges. How else could it resist the river's plunging force?

He studied Reilly's milk-white face. Behind those
Anglo
eyes clicked an astonishing intelligence. He counted the streaks of dirt on her bare knees. She was scary smart. But so was the colloid.

A horn boomed through the fluttering wind, and Roman turned to face the brightly lit Boston Whaler ripping across the black water toward them. On its superstructure glistened the red-and-white castle logo of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And on its bridge stood the one man Roman most wanted to meet. Joshua Lima, the New Orleans district engineer. They'd conferred by phone and e-mail, but Roman needed direct contact to make his argument stick. One word from Colonel Lima in the appropriate ears would open the Bonnet Carré Spillway.

Roman touched CJ's shoulder, and their eyes met. “At all cost, we have to stop it here.”

Water hissed through the wooden pins. She choked back a taste of cold metal, like a gun pressing the roof of her mouth. “Let's do it.”

 

Sunday, March 20

6:03
AM

 

The vernal equinox dawned clear and sharp over southern Louisiana. Light westerly breezes. Temperatures in the sixties. A good day to skip Mass and go sightseeing. That notion must have flowed like a cloud of memes through St. Charles Parish, because men, women, and children arrived in droves at the Bonnet Carré Spillway, with fishing tackle, picnics, and roving eyes.

From the top of the weir, Ranger Robert Dréclare commanded a panoramic view of his eight thousand acres. He could see the small blue stream winding toward the bright sparkle of Lake Pontchartrain on the far horizon, six miles away. He tipped the brim of his park ranger hat lower over his eyes and sauntered along the catwalk, surveying the lines of traffic on the access roads. Colonel Lima had ordered him to evacuate the spillway ASAP, and how was he supposed to do that? He had himself, his maintenance supervisor, and three borrowed sheriff's deputies to turn away a crowd of thousands. A crowd that clearly did not want to leave. Everyone wanted to see the Big Show. The Corps of Engineers was going to open the Bonnet Carré Spillway.

Half a mile down the spillway, Dréclare could see the crescent wall of sandbags they'd been building since the previous midnight. Three Corps helicopters were still busy hauling cargo nets full of sandbags from the New Orleans stockpile. The semicircular dam looked small from this distance, but still a miracle of speed and coordinated effort.

The ground crew hustled around with trucks and cranes, reinforcing the wall on one side with interlocking blue gates and on the other with big yellow water-filled bags. Dréclare patted a trickle of sweat from the back of
his neck. Mighty imposing edifice just to catch a refrigerant slick. He'd worked with engineers his whole career, and he'd never seen such structural overkill.