“You never knew him?” Eleanor asked. She was scissoring a jeweled pendant in her fingers, the light catching on the facets of the large emerald that was its centerpiece: a gift from her parents when they’d announced their engagement.
“He died in New Orleans in 1896, twenty years before I’d be born—believe it or not, after being struck by a hit-and-run bicyclist. My dad was only three at the time.” Wilbur lifted a hand at the slow beginning of his wife’s smile. “Uh-uh. You’re not allowed to laugh at that,” he said. “It was a tragedy.”
“Being killed by a hit-and-run bicycle?”
“Grandpa Thomas was eighty. Not exactly a spring chicken.”
“Thought you said he was a tough and stubborn old bird. Though if he still managed to get his poor second wife pregnant in his seventies…” She laughed, and Wilbur had to laugh along with her.
“He saw a lot in his time,” he told her. “The Civil War, for instance.”
Eleanor nodded at that, sipping at her highball. One of the waiters passed the table, refilling their water glasses, his skin starkly dark against the white sleeves of his jacket. Wilbur saw her gaze follow the man. “I’ve been reading up on steamboats on my own, since we’re going to be living on one,” Eleanor said, her attention moving from the waiter back to Wilbur. “I learned that some of them used to smuggle slaves from the South. Brought them here to Cincinnati sometimes, in fact…” She stopped, looking embarrassed, taking another, longer sip from the glass. “Sorry,” she said. “I know how your grandfather…”
Wilbur shrugged. “My grandfather was a man of his time and place,” he said. “Yes, he was a Confederate and unapologetic about his views. Heck, Eleanor, the sixth Natchez took Jefferson Davis to his home after he’d been elected president of the Confederate States of America; Granddad used his boat to transport Confederate troops to Memphis; and—according to what I’ve been told by family—he deliberately torched that Natchez in 1863 to keep her from being seized by Union forces. He never smuggled any slaves to freedom; in fact, from what I’ve been told, he despised the captains who did and considered them traitors. After the war, he refused to fly the Stars and Stripes flag on any of his boats—he finally, finally let the eighth Natchez raise the American flag in 1885, as she passed Vicksburg. Sometimes…” Wilbur managed a wan smile and lifted his own drink. “Sometimes I think I’m glad I never had the chance to know him. After what I saw in the war, after what we heard was done in Germany to the Jews, and the horrors the Japs inflicted on the Chinese … well, Grandpa Thomas’s political beliefs feel like a bloody stain on my family’s legacy.” He grunted a short, deprecating laugh. “Families—they all have skeletons they’d prefer to keep buried.”
“You’re not your grandfather, Wilbur,” she told him. “As you said, he was a man of his time. Any sins he might have committed aren’t yours to bear.” She put her hand over his on the tablecloth, her wide blue eyes searching his own. “You aren’t him, Wilbur,” she said with a slow emphasis. “You’re a far better and wiser man. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone who wasn’t also a good and compassionate person. Which is what you are.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “Now let’s go upstairs to our room,” she said. “And no more talking about your grandpa Thomas.”
He remembered how they’d made love that night, and how they’d moved aboard the Natchez two days later, which would be their home for the next three years, until that day when everything changed.…
Now Wilbur was looking at twenty or so ragged, tired, and frightened refugees packed into a cabin just as those smuggled slaves might have been a century and a half earlier, and the sight tore at him. Here, it seemed, was a chance for the Natchez to atone, at least a little, for Thomas. Here was a chance for Wilbur to do something his grandfather had refused to do.
What Eleanor, with her empathy for anyone in trouble, would have insisted he do. She’d called Wilbur “good and compassionate.” He was afraid she’d overstated his qualities, but …
For Eleanor’s sake, he would help Captain Montaigne, JoHanna, and Jack to bring these people to freedom. He would do what he could to make sure that happened.
Wilbur went to the nearest wall, where the steam lines ran to the ’scape pipes. He could feel the warmth of the steam like a welcome embrace, and he closed his eyes, pushing his hands through the wall and into the pipe, absorbing the heat that flowed there and letting it fill him. As he took in the steam, he also allowed his form to slowly materialize in wispy clouds. With only a single light on in the otherwise dark room, he was easily visible—in the mirror installed on the far wall, he could see his semitransparent, cloud-like form: a middle-aged man in an old-fashioned captain’s uniform and cap—Wilbur as he’d once been.
A young woman with a froth of lacy gills around her neck was the first of the refugees to notice him. She gasped and pointed, and a babble of voices erupted around him. The beaver-like joker glared at him threateningly. Wilbur lifted a finger to his lips, shaking his head, and they quieted, all of them moving back from the apparition. He motioned to Jyrgal to come closer; the joker did so with obvious reluctance. “I will also help you,” Wilbur said slowly with an exaggerated emphasis, though he knew that none of the living could hear him. He’d hoped that the joker could manage to read his lips, but Jyrgal shook his head.
“I do not understand you,” he said. Fear trembled in his voice, and a mittened hand touched his ear. “I can’t hear the words…”
Wilbur glanced around the room for paper and a pen or pencil. Seeing none, he sighed and glided, cloud-like, over to the mirror. They moved aside as he approached, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. Standing in front of the mirror, he raised his hand; using his index finger as a pencil, he wrote on the mirror in steamy, blurred, and dripping letters:
YOU MUST DO AS THEY SAY. YOU MUST STAY HIDDEN.
He looked at Jyrgal. The man was staring at the writing, but Wilbur couldn’t tell if he could read English or not. There was a box of tissues on a small table under the mirror; in his steam form, Wilbur was capable of handling and moving small objects. He plucked a tissue from the box and used it to wipe away the letters, then placed the now-sopping tissue back on the table. He wrote again.
I WILL ALSO HELP YOU.
Jyrgal still stared, as did the others. “Do you understand?” Wilbur asked. “Tell me.”
No one answered, at least not in English. There was only the chaos of voices speaking their own language, and Jyrgal’s expression didn’t lend any confidence that he understood the writing.
Wilbur held out his hand to the mirror again; this time it didn’t steam up as quickly, and he could see from the increasing transparency of his reflection that his steam-created body had cooled somewhat—he could never stay long in full steam form. Glancing around at the refugees around him, he chose one who looked young and in relatively good health: a rather excessively hairy young man with four arms. He slid quickly into the joker’s body before the young man had time to move.
Carefully … After killing Carpenter by doing what he was doing now, Wilbur hadn’t tried to take possession of a body for a long time, but over the decades, driven by curiosity and wanting to find a way off the Natchez, he had—though he’d found that even in possession of another person’s body, the ship still wouldn’t permit him to leave. But he knew now to allow his body to cool significantly first before entering a person, and not to stay too long.
In the moment Wilbur slid into the body of the joker from Kazakhstan, he was the joker. He knew the man’s name: Tazhibai. He could feel Tazhibai’s confusion and fear, and images of the man’s memory flooded him. Wilbur ignored the glimpses of Tazhibai’s life—he didn’t have the luxury of time to examine them, not if he wanted Tazhibai to live.
Instead, he quickly wrenched away control of Tazhibai’s body from the joker. He pointed to Jyrgal with all four arms (a decidedly strange sensation, Wilbur thought), and spoke in English. “Don’t be afraid. My name is Wilbu
r, and I’m also here to help you,” he said. “Do as JoHanna and the captain tell you, and I will also watch over all of you. Tell them, Jyrgal. Oh, and this young man isn’t going to be feeling very good for the next few hours. Tell him I’m terribly sorry, but this was the easiest way for you to understand me.”
With that, Wilbur slid away from the joker again. The young man’s clothing was drenched, and he was suddenly and rather explosively ill from the effects of the hot steam and the water his body had taken in. “Really, really sorry,” Wilbur said again, though he knew none of them could hear him now. They were all staring at him, uncertain. “Okay, then.… I’ll check in on you later.”
With that, he turned—all of them moving back quickly except for the four-armed joker, who crouched, moaning, on the floor as a young woman with incredibly long arms but only short stubs for legs put an arm around him in comfort and stared at Wilbur with decided malice. Wilbur slid across the room to the outside wall and through.
He left behind a man-shaped, dripping wet spot on the wall.
As he left the refugees’ cabin, Wilbur felt the boat lurch as the stern wheel suddenly engaged, followed by three short blasts from the steam whistle. The calliope wheezed and began playing “Southern Nights” as the Natchez nosed out from the dock, the paddles lashing the brown water into foam as it pushed the boat against the Mississippi’s relentless southward current. Passengers crowded the rails down on the boiler deck, shouting loudly and holding plastic drink cups, waving to those on the shore.
They were under way.
Cool enough now that even if he wished it he was no longer easily visible, Wilbur went up the nearest starboard stairs to the hurricane deck. He could see Gimcrack, the keyboard player for the Jokertown Boys, standing at the calliope keyboard, decked out in a white dress shirt with puffy sleeves held down by sleeve garters, over which he wore a fancifully embroidered vest. The calliope’s pipes vented slightly off-key bursts of white steam in response to his fingers on the keys.
Evidently Captain Montaigne had opened the stairways on the port side of the boat to the passengers, who were normally not permitted on the hurricane deck. Some of them were watching Gimcrack play or gazing out over New Orleans, glittering and alight in the night with the river a dark, winding trail in its midst. Some of the passengers appeared to be jokers themselves: a few steps away, Wilbur saw one older man with a pair of gigantic, curling ram’s horns sprouting from his temples, holding hands with an extremely tall and extremely attractive older woman. Jokers or aces? Wilbur wondered.
The truth was that Wilbur had wondered that about himself. Every ghost he ever heard about in stories had been a cold presence; he was a hot one. And he’d seen how the wild card virus could change someone drastically: after all, he’d been there in New York to see it start.
He would never forget …
It was September 15, 1946.…
Wilbur had served during the war as an ensign, then later a lieutenant (junior grade) aboard the USS Natchez, from 1943 until her return to Charleston for decommissioning in June of 1945. He found it amusing that he’d been assigned to a ship bearing the same name as his family’s boat, even if the USS Natchez was a patrol frigate in the Atlantic on anti-submarine duty, and resembled a steamboat not at all. Wilbur even saw action aboard the ship as they escorted convoys, most notably when the Natchez sunk a German U-boat they spotted not far off Cape Henry, Virginia. For a time, Wilbur even considered making the navy a career, but then he met Eleanor at a nightclub in Charleston two weeks after leaving the USS Natchez. Everything about her entranced him: her dancing blue eyes, her easy smile, her laughter, the smell of her goldsilk hair, her husky, low voice that reminded him of Lauren Bacall.… He fell in love with her quickly and completely, and decided that serving long tours of duty at sea as he made his way up the ranks no longer seemed quite so appealing a prospect.
Wilbur was released from service a year later. He spent the next few months traveling around the Midwest and up and down the East Coast (with frequent returns to Charleston to be with Eleanor), trying to raise money from family, friends, and bankers to pursue his dream of building a new steamboat, a ninth Natchez like his grandfather’s famous vessels. Wilbur was convinced that with the war over and the nation trying to recover, people would yearn for a return to a simpler time, and steaming along the Mississippi in a sparkling new boat with a famous name transported from a golden era would be a compelling prospect.
That was his dream, and Eleanor gladly shared the dream with him.
He’d come out of the Chrysler Building’s impressive Art Deco lobby after a meeting at the Chase National Bank, the papers for a loan in his suit pocket. He walked three or four blocks up Lexington Avenue toward his room at the Hotel Lexington when he heard air raid sirens and realized everyone around him was staring up at the sky. He craned his neck, following their gazes.
From the tower-flanked Manhattan street, he watched with dozens of others to see a collection of blimps moving high over the city. As the sirens continued to blare, anti-aircraft fire boomed as fighter aircrafts buzzed like circling wasps below the growing dark clouds. Echoes of the bursting flak pounded along the street like a barrage of distant bass drums. “What’s going on?” he asked a uniformed cop, standing with one foot outside his parked patrol car.
“There’s someone up there with a damn A-bomb,” the cop grunted with a Brooklyn Irish accent. “I’d tell you to get the hell out of here and take shelter, mister, but if it’s really an A-bomb…” The cop shrugged, still staring up at the sky, the flak, and the red-painted jet rising above it. “Hey, Jetboy’s up there … that’s his plane heading for the blimps.”
They both watched Jetboy’s plane crash into the gondola of the dirigible, then shielded their eyes from the explosion that followed a few moments later as fragments of the famous ace’s red airplane fell toward the city like a bloody rain.
They could see a parachute open below the gondola, and he cheered with the cop and the crowds around them, all of them thinking that it was Jetboy under that white canopy. Then, perhaps a minute later, there was a second, far larger explosion, one that sent shadows racing over Manhattan even in the daylight. “Goddamn,” the cop said as the glare of the explosion faded, leaving purple afterimages chasing themselves across Wilbur’s vision while more wreckage fell from the sky into the city. He saw a portion of the gondola hit the side of the Chrysler Building and rebound, tumbling down toward the crowds on Lexington Avenue. The cop grabbed his radio receiver. “Dispatch!” Wilbur heard him say. “Emergency!”
Then everything went terribly strange, wrong, and surreal.
Wilbur saw the cop’s hand clench around the receiver as if he were trying to crush it, and at the same time, the man screamed, high and shrill. Wilbur could see his face: skin drawing tight against the skull, the tendons and muscles all standing out stark and tight, his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging from his mouth. The scream strangled, gagging noises emerged as the cop’s entire body twisted impossibly, his torso turning 180 degrees while his lower body remained still. Wilbur heard a sickening, distinct snap like a dry twig being broken: the man’s spine. Another snap, then another and another and another; the cop was on the ground now, the ends of broken bones erupting bloodily from his skin and clothing, his whole body writhing as if something alive had burrowed under his skin and were shrinking and drawing tight all of his muscles, tendons, and tissues.
The cop’s skull cracked open with a sound like a gunshot, and brain matter splattered over Wilbur’s pants and shoes. Wilbur’s mouth was open in a soundless howl of horror, but now he realized that there were screams and wails rising all around him, and his gaze left the ruin of the cop’s body to view the street.
It was a sight that even Hieronymus Bosch could not have imagined in his visions of hell. It was a sight that Wilbur later wished he could erase from his memory forever.
Cars were colliding madly all along Lexington; Wilbur saw a black Packard Clipper, its h
orn blaring and the driver slumped over the wheel, climb the curb and plow into a crowd of pedestrians before shattering a plate glass window. But that was hardly the worst of it. All around him, people were changing and dying in myriad awful ways: a woman’s body melting into a human-sized gray slug oozing a trail of slime as it slithered down the sidewalk; a man screaming as purple fire engulfed his body; a young woman with a featureless face—no eyes, no nose, no mouth—clutching at her throat before collapsing; a man whose face and naked body had transformed into that of a classic red-skinned devil, laughing madly as his barbed tail slashed repeatedly across his scarlet abdomen, his laughter dying as his gray guts spilled out and the blade of the tail sliced across his throat, nearly removing his head.
Everywhere Wilbur looked, there were yet more horrors to see, more people altered into grotesque parodies of what they’d once been, more people screaming in agony and dying. He did the only thing he could think of doing.
He ran.
He didn’t know then, but would learn later, that the cause of the disaster was what would be named the wild card virus. An alien virus unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The world would be forever changed as a result.
But Wilbur was one of the lucky ones. The virus hadn’t affected him—at least, that was what he believed. Tens of thousands would die that day and over the next few weeks while New York City, the nation, and the entire world panicked but Wilbur managed to return to Eleanor unscathed through a landscape that was far more altered and awful than anything he’d experienced in years of war.
The moment he finally held Eleanor in his arms again—the wonderful scent of her shampoo and her perfume filling his nostrils; her body warm against his as they clutched each other; both of them weeping tears birthed in mingled joy and fear—that, at least, was a memory he would always treasure. I will never forgot that feeling. Never …