My breath was running out. I tried to twist around, but I was stuck.
Don’t panic, I thought.
Too late.
Yellow blotches bloomed in my vision. The urge to breathe was too great. I gasped and water rushed into my mouth, down my throat, and burned in my lungs. The yellow blotches went red. And then there was the endless blackness of the water.
It was really a relief. I didn’t have to think about the people who’d died because of me, or little girls who’d been raped, or Ink, or John Fortune, Niobe, or Drake, or anything anymore.
“Is she all right?”
I opened my eyes. Crap. Zombies. Then I rolled onto my side and started coughing and puking up water.
Someone wrapped a blanket around me. “I thought you were fucking indestructible,” said Hoodoo Mama, holding my hair back.
“I’m like the Wicked Witch of the West. Water can kill me,” I croaked.
My throat was sore and my sinuses burned. I pushed myself onto my hands and knees. “How did I get out?”
“I don’t swim,” Hoodoo Mama said. “But the zombies don’t breathe. So I sent them in for you.”
My throat and lungs were on fire, but in an “Oxygen Is Our Friend!” way. I never thought stale, fetid, sewage-tinged, flooded-warehouse air could smell so good.
“Did we get everyone out?”
“Yeah, every one of them.” Hoodoo Mama smiled at me. That surprised me. “I’ve got Dave and Floyd setting up the cots in each office. C’mon, we’ve got one for you.”
I stood up, but I was still a little unsteady. “What about everyone else? Is the water still rising? Are we safe here?”
“Jesus Christ, the water has stopped rising. This place is a dump, but has good enough bones to make it through this. That’s why I chose it. Fuck all, stop worrying and come lie down.”
“I smell terrible.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me, Jesus, what did I do to deserve this fucker? I think we’ve got some wet wipes.”
“Bubbles.”
I woke with a start. I was never going to get a full night’s sleep again. “Yeah, I’m here. Anything wrong?”
“No,” Hoodoo Mama said softly. “I just wanted to talk.”
I rolled over to face her and pushed my hair back. “Okay, what’s up?”
She was sitting on the floor next to the cot, hugging her knees. “I guess, I, I just wanted to say that as fuckers go, you’re not too bad.”
“Mmm, high praise indeed.”
“Now why the fuck would you go and say something like that? I was being sincere.”
I pushed myself up onto my elbow. “I’m sorry. I’ve been dealing with some stuff lately. And my God, it smells like ass in here.”
“You know what ass smells like? I find that mighty difficult to believe.”
I stifled a laugh, but it really did smell awful.
“C’mon,” she said as she stood up, grabbed the blanket off my bed, and went to the door.
I got up and followed her. We went toward the back of the building where we’d come in. She opened a door and led me into a stairwell. We went up to the third floor.
I’d thought there would be offices, but it was just a big unfinished area. There were windows around the perimeter of the room. Some were broken and let in the air. It wasn’t a lot cooler than downstairs, but it didn’t stink as much.
Hoodoo Mama went to the window closest to us and opened it. We were in the eye of the storm, and things were oddly quiet. We both leaned out of the window, sucking in the fresh air.
“There’s a lot of bodies in that water,” she said softly. That was part of her power, no doubt, knowing where the dead bodies were. It was a terrible power, I realized. Always knowing death.
“So, you were saying that you’re going through shit,” she said suddenly. “You want to tell me about it?”
I was surprised. I’d come to the conclusion that Hoodoo Mama had three modes: kill fuckers, annoy fuckers, ignore fuckers. And what could I say about my life? Killing people who are trying to kill me isn’t as much fun as it’s cracked up to be?
I shrugged. “You’ll probably think it’s stupid, but I got a friend of mine in big trouble with SCARE. They’re this government agency that . . .”
“I know what SCARE is,” she said coldly. She turned away from the window, then shook out the blanket and laid it on the floor. “Anyone got a wild card know who SCARE is.”
We plunked down on the blanket together. I sat Indian style and toyed with a loose piece of weave.
“So, I get sent to do a mission to save this friend of mine. Only after all hell breaks loose do I find out that the guys who are asking me to do all this stuff have lied to me.” It still made me mad thinking about it. Thinking how they lied to me and almost got Drake and Niobe killed.
“Lied to you about what?”
I could feel my hands shaking again. I shoved them under my butt. “They told me that there was this wicked powerful ace I had to ‘contain.’ Turns out that the ace was a kid. He was only thirteen,” I said as I began to rock back and forth. “And so I accidentally betrayed my friend, Niobe, who was helping him escape these other assholes—who I now know want to kill him.”
Her face went cold. “These SCARE guys want to kill some kid because he’s powerful? Fuckers.”
I nodded grimly. “Yeah, they are. At least the Committee was trying to get him away from them.”
“So, the Committee protects kids?”
I nodded. “I’m still pissed as hell that they didn’t tell me everything about him, but they were trying to keep him safe.” I closed my eyes. “When we went to Egypt, I brought down these helicopters with soldiers in them.” My voice broke. I bit my lip and took a deep breath to steady myself. I continued. “They caught fire and when they fell I could smell them. Like burnt pork. And they screamed.” I opened my eyes and looked at Hoodoo Mama. “I can’t tell you how it sounded when they screamed.”
She shrugged. “From what I heard, sounded like those fuckers deserved it.”
I hugged my knees to my chest.
“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. If I had died, would I have deserved it?” I stared out the open window. The light was tinged a strange green color. And all those people I killed would never see any light again. “And there were other things. The Behatu rape camp. Jesus, you don’t want to know what that was like.”
“Did you kill the fuckers who did that?” “Yeah, that doesn’t bother me much. It was the women we found there that haunt me.”
“I know what that’s like,” Hoodoo Mama said. It was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. And when I looked at her face I knew what had happened to her. I swallowed hard and then I leaned forward and whispered, “Did someone rape you?”
For a moment, her hard expression collapsed. The naked pain there was terrible to see. She didn’t answer me, but she nodded.
“I’m so sorry.” Then I took her hand in mine.
“That’s how I got to be Hoodoo Mama,” she said after a few moments.
“My card turned then.” She wiped her nose on the back of her shirt sleeve.
“The fucker died screaming.”
“Good,” I said. I gave her hand a squeeze. Then she put her arms around me. So I put my arms around her.
We held each other for a while. I felt her stroke my hair. Then she slid a hand up my arm to my shoulder and started caressing my neck.
“I, uhm, Hoodoo Mama,” I said.
“Call me Joey. That’s my real name.” Her lips were hovering over mine, and then she kissed me. And, heaven help me, I kissed her back.
It started tender, and then it became hard. She ground her lips into mine and jabbed her tongue into my mouth. She shoved me backward. And I was startled by how strong she was. But it wasn’t as if she could hurt me.