The Map of Moments (29 page)

“Ray?” Max called, startled by how loud his voice sounded. No one seemed to hear him.

“Now they've gone too far,” Ray whispered. “And I'm getting too old to hold them off.”

Something seemed to strike the house, rattling windows in frames and splitting wood. The people looked around in a panic, but Ray ignored the noise, picking up the raw, red organ and dipping it slowly into the bubbling bowl before him. He started a chant that troubled Max's hearing. It was made of words he did not know or understand, and sounds he could not make, and the others in the room quickly picked up on it, repeating the words slightly after Ray to form a group echo.

As Ray dipped the organ into the boiling bowl, Max felt something hot pressing against his right buttock. He snatched the folded map from his back pocket, certain that it was on fire, ready to open it up and stamp out flames. But when he did open it, there seemed to be nothing amiss. This Sixth Moment was still here, boxed and written against the Lower Ninth Ward.

Is Ray trying to flood the ward?
he thought. He couldn't think what else the writing could mean.

Under Cover of Betsy

The End of a Ward

He knew that many people had died in this hurricane, drowned in their attics as they had been forty years later during and after Katrina. Was Ray really a killer? A mass murderer?

And if he was, what did that make Max?

Ray's chanting increased in tone and urgency, and the thing he held down in the bowl started to foam and froth. Pinkish bubbles overflowed, creeping up his arms and spilling across the wooden table. The other people in the room continued their chanted echo.
They were Tordu,
Max thought.
Ray brought them over.

The Tordu, he knew, were bad. Maybe even evil. But that did not necessarily make Ray the good in all of this. Maybe—

He dropped the map. It had burned his fingers. Glancing around the room, aware that he was still unseen, Max opened the map on the floor. To the southeast of the city, where the swamps and lakes were marked with sparse symbols and vague shading, a faint glow had appeared.

“One ward in many,” Ray said, “one of the farthest out. And Seddicus will welcome its fall.”

Not the Lower Ninth Ward!
Max thought. This was another ward entirely. He did not know what, or why, or what it was meant to do, but—

In superstition, a ward was a manner of protection. A method of warding something off, holding it back.

Keeping it out.

Max shivered. He knew only the name, Seddicus. And he knew that it was meant to be a demon.
It's said he only fed on bad folk,
the waitress had said. It was as if there was a lake of buried knowledge within him, an awareness of that unknown thing's true nature, and that lake was now being plumbed. He felt more terrified than he ever had of anything in his life before. A shadow closed over his mind, not
quite touching him but smothering much of what he thought of as natural awareness. He tried to look beyond this moment, but he was locked here by fear. He could only watch Ray's hands covered with the bloodied foam of someone's dead organ, hear the chant, taste the wet, salty air as Hurricane Betsy prepared its assault on this great city, and as he looked back down at the map he saw a stain appear in the distant, primal swamps.

“It's working!” Ray said. And then he looked across his assembled audience's heads and directly at Max.

Max froze.
Ray,
he tried to say. But the man was not quite seeing him, not truly aware. There was a distance in his gaze as he said, “This is one of the city's most powerful Moments.”

Then someone pulled a gun and shot Ray in the chest.

Others fell on the shooter, beating and kicking and slashing with knives, and outside, the storm's violence grew to match.

Ray gasped, blood staining the front of his clothing, as several people squatted around him. One of them held his hands and kept them pressed down in the boiling bowl, but Ray's jaw dropped, his eyes went wide, and he let out a piercing cry.

“All gone wrong,” the old man gasped.

The shooter was dead, a bloodstained mess of meat and clothing in the corner of the room. Everyone stood now, all except for Ray and the man holding his hands. In their eyes, Max saw fear and hopelessness.

“Is the ward broken?” a woman asked.

“Wrong …wrong!” Ray whispered.

“Is it broken?”

“Mireault knew…” he gasped. “He knew about
all
of this, and now …he'll punish us …”

Max looked down at the map. The singed, darkened paper in the marshes grew light again, resolving the lines and shadings of that wild place. And another area, much closer to where he viewed this pivotal part of New Orleans’ history, was starting to glow, and char.

From outside, through the violence of the storm, came the first of several massive booms. The house shook, the people gasped.

As one, they turned to look at Ray.

“I was so close,” he said.

“What do we do?” someone asked. Another thudding explosion from the distance, and this one continued to shudder through the ground, as something monstrous approached.

“Run,” Ray said. “The water's coming.”

Max looked back down at the map. Spanning the Industrial Canal, the scorched spot writhed.

Was that Ray protecting the city, or destroying it?

As Max descended the stairs, the house was already fading away. In the last blink before this Moment disappeared, he thought he heard the roar of water in the distance, and the sound of buildings falling. Then he was standing on the concrete slab of the house, moonlight bathing him and silence surrounding him.

I don't know how many more of these I can take.

He looked at the map, watching the Sixth Moment fade away forever. He scanned for the Seventh Moment, but it did not appear. Even with the map flat on the concrete and held down by lumps of rubble, Max could not discern where the next Moment might be. He searched the city district by district, then out beyond the city, paying particular attention to the swamps and lakes to the southeast.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “So is that it?” The night gave him no reply, and he sat down and wiped sweat from his face. Staring out at the road, he could see the place where he'd watched that abandoned car pushed along by the wind, nudging another car and waiting for the storm to carry it farther.

Ray was mixed up with the Tordu. No, not with them,
against
them.

As ever, the Moment had left him with a thousand more questions, so many that his mind felt full of them.

“So is it time to find Matrisse?” he muttered.

“Not yet,” a voice said. Harsh, nasal, and filled with violence.

Fat Man.

Max went to turn, but something struck him in the face. He fell sideways onto the concrete slab, putting one hand out just fast enough to prevent his head striking too hard. He spit blood across the map.

How did you find me?
he wanted to ask, but he would not give Fat Man the satisfaction.

More shadows closed in, four of them stepping up onto
the slab. One of them carried a machine pistol. Another flapped a bag in the air, which snapped in the wind like a gunshot.

“Coco requests an audience with you,” Fat Man said, kneeling beside Max and clenching one meaty hand around his throat. He squeezed. “You, and your magic fucking map.”

Fat Man pulled him upright again, and Max scanned the map. Brought out by a spray of his blood, a Seventh Moment began to manifest, nestled in the ruined streets of Gentilly.

Before Max could read what it said, the bag was pulled down over his head, a rope was tightened around his throat, and he was kicked in the head again and again.

T
he full moon silvered the buildings as Fat Man drove northeast, up through Gentilly and onto Chef Menteur Boulevard. Max sat in the backseat, disoriented from the beating and getting his revenge the only way he could—by bleeding all over the Cadillac's leather upholstery. That would teach them. Bloodstains would never come out. Fuckers.

He knew his thoughts were too sluggish, that he'd lost a lot of blood in the past few hours. But the basic situation was not lost on him. They had taken the hood off once the car picked up speed. Fat Man and his Tordu buddies didn't care if Max saw where he was going, which illustrated a fact
that Max did not want to face: they did not expect him to be alive to tell anyone where they had taken him.

So he sat in the backseat, discouraged from trying to pop open the door and dive from the moving car by the presence of a gun pressed against his right side, aggravating his already bruised ribs. Hitting the pavement at fifty miles per hour did not appeal to him, either. On the other hand, since the alternative seemed to be dying, he tried to clear his mind enough to come up with a third option.

Chef Menteur Boulevard—also known as Chef Menteur Highway, aka Route 90—meandered northeast out along an isthmus that separated Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. Technically, the whole area was part of the city of New Orleans, but civilization grew sparse out here and then disappeared entirely. There were a few suburban neighborhoods out this way, Max knew, dropped down in the middle of nowhere like they'd fallen from God's pockets by accident. But for the most part, off the highway there wasn't much more than forest and wetlands. Did this count as bayou country? He didn't know. But he knew there must be a million places out here to dump a body, or feed one piece by piece to 'gators.

There were three people in the car with him. Fat Man drove. The guy with the gun sat in the back with Max. In the passenger seat was a white woman with full lips and jet black hair pulled into a ponytail. She was anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, dressed in blue jeans and a green ribbed tank top. Tall and thin, she sat upright and remained grimly silent. Max thought it might be because she was uncomfortable with what they were doing, that she
might turn out to be an ally in keeping him alive. But when she glanced back at him with the dull, lightless eyes of a predator, he gave up on that fantasy.

As in the past, the Tordu apparently did not discriminate based on hue or sex. They had only one requirement that Max had discerned—their members must be without mercy, as single-minded as the alligators that prowled the bayou.

“How you feelin’ back there, dead man?” Fat Man asked, grinning into the rearview mirror.

Max sat right behind him, and when he hadn't been searching the sprawl of thick, green, mosquito heaven that unfurled on both sides of the road, he'd been staring at the sweaty rolls of fat at the back of the guy's neck. Now he stared there again, not wanting to meet the man's gaze in the mirror.

Over the past couple of days he had become more and more afraid that his search, and his life, might end this way, driving out into the middle of nowhere to eat a bullet. He'd always been a bit of a coward, avoiding pain whenever possible. If he'd ever imagined a scenario such as this, he would have pictured himself pleading, panicking, even praying. A lot of guys might try to think like tough action heroes and keep their jaws square and their repartee sharp, holding on to their dignity, but Max would have predicted only whimpering on his own part.

What he could never have prophesied was the particular stoicism with which he now confronted his fate. Certainly he felt fear; it shook him, within and without. And the thought of death, perhaps with torture beforehand, terrified
him. Yet it all felt so inevitable that he could not muster a prayer or a plea.

“I'm talking to you,” Fat Man said.

The barrel of the pistol jabbed his ribs and Max hissed air in through his teeth. He turned to glare at the Tordu son of a bitch beside him in the backseat. The guy had fine features, a long nose, and wavy, shoulder-length hair. His eyes were green and his skin a coffee hue that might have been Spanish Creole or ordinary Latino. He had expensive taste in clothes, and was now picking invisible lint off of his linen pants. The guy had an elegance about him and an arrogance, like he was some kind of foreign nobleman.

The thought made Max smile.

“What's funny to you?” the man asked, poking the barrel of the gun into Max's ribs again.

Max only shook his head and looked back at Fat Man's neck rolls. But the intensity of the glare in the rear view mirror was too powerful, and Max found himself staring back at last.

“Gerard,” Fat Man said, “if he don't answer me, shoot him in the leg.”

The guy beside Max nodded. “You have a preference of legs, Lamar?”

Max blinked, taking a moment to realize that Lamar was Fat Man's name. The silent woman continued to stare straight ahead during this exchange.

“Nah. Either one's fine.” Lamar looked at Max in the rearview mirror again. “So, where were we, dead man? Yeah, how are you feelin’?”

“Like I just got my head kicked in,” Max said.

But it was a lie. Fear filled him up to overflowing, but it wasn't alone. Something else was inside him as well, and he knew what he felt didn't only have to do with disorientation or loss of blood from the beating. Ironically, on a trip that would end with his death, he felt remarkably alive. His skin tingled, and the night air sparkled, suffused with a golden aura that should have gone with the setting sun. The Tordu in the car with him were voids in that aura, as if on a certain level of perception they did not even exist.