“And how’s that?” she asked cautiously, giving away nothing.

“Because no matter what you tell me, I’m likely to believe it and likely to help you. These … zombis, or whatever Mrs. Laveau wants to call them. I’ve seen them myself, and I know what they’re capable of.”

“You’ve been down to the river?”

“No, and that’s the bad part. It’s a national secret at the moment, but those things, those zombis, they’re not just down by your river. They aren’t just in New Orleans. They’re in north Texas, and the turf west of that, too — all the way to the Utah territories and maybe farther west than that. Texas is getting positively lousy with them.”

A shiver went tickling down Josephine’s neck. “Are you … are you sure?”

“I’ve seen them myself, at the Provo pass. Seen them by the hundreds. And I almost didn’t escape to sit here now and tell you about it.”

“But how could they possibly be anywhere else? Lots of folks think they’re a voudou thing — spell-blind or ritual-maddened men, maybe even created by Marie Laveau herself! Lord knows half the city thinks she’s in charge of them.”

“Count me in the other half,” Korman said dryly, his mustache bobbing. “And you, too, I bet.”

Slowly, she bobbed her head in the affirmative. “Yes — me, too. Tonight she said we had to learn to manage them now, before they become unmanageable.” The thought made her head hurt. Then her exhausted brain caught up to something else he’d said a moment before. “I’m sorry, did you just now say you’d seen hundreds of them?”

“That’s right. Mexicans, and other assorted folks they’d picked up along the way. They’d been migrating, if you could call it that. Maybe wandering is more like it, but they roamed from a spot southwest of Oneida all the way up to the Rockies.”

“Dead men?”

“Women, too.”

“Dear God,” she breathed. “If only we knew what was making them — what was causing them, I mean.”

His mustache bounced upward at the corners. He was smiling. “Ah, that’s where me and you might have some useful things to tell each other. Nobody believes what I tell ’em, same as nobody believes you when you say that the dead are walking. That’s why you didn’t report what happened to those men, isn’t it? You thought McCoy — or whoever was in charge until he got here — would’ve thrown you in the clink, figuring you had something to do with their deaths.”

“Of course that’s why,” she lied. She’d kept the information to herself because if she’d shared it, she would’ve had to explain what she was doing following the men. And that’s what would’ve gotten her thrown in jail. “They were swarmed, Ranger Korman. Absolutely overwhelmed. Two Texians, armed to the teeth, and there were too many of the things for it to matter. What’s doing this? You have to tell me!”

“I’d be happy to tell you. Goddamn, I’ve been telling the world, but the world isn’t listening. Zombis happen one of a couple of ways, all of it going back to a very strange gas that’s being toted down from the Pacific Northwest.”

Stunned full of questions, Josephine had no idea what to ask first. She stammered, “Gas? A gas? From where?”

“Gas, you heard me. Like hydrogen, only not like hydrogen at all. This gas comes out of the ground, and it has something to do with volcanoes — that’s all I know.”

“They have volcanoes in the Northwest?” she asked, mystified. “I had no idea.”

“At least a couple of ’em. Best I can figure, from talking to a whole bunch of folks between here and there, this gas is mostly collected in a little podunk backwater of a place — some port city in the Washington Territory called Seattle.”

Seattle? Where Cly was living?

She sat there openmouthed, struggling for words and not finding them.

The Ranger continued. “This gas is sometimes called blight, and it’s not hard to figure out why. By the sound of things, it basically killed that little city. The locals had to wall it off and abandon it.”

“I … I didn’t know.”

“Hardly anybody does. No one wants to talk about it, not anymore. Thirteen years ago, the city’s former residents petitioned the Union to see if they’d accept Washington as a state. They thought if they were part of a country, and not just a distant territory, maybe they’d see some tax money or some military help. As far as I can tell, they gave up a few years later. With the war going on, the Federals weren’t looking to take on any new responsibility — least of all, responsibility thousands of miles away.”

“So … what happened to the people who lived in the city? The ones who abandoned it?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Either they moved back East, or maybe they stayed out there. Might’ve gone to Tacoma, or Portland. Might’ve gone up north to Canada.”

“All of this…,” she began, trying to arrange her thoughts into words. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but I will say that it sounds far-fetched.”

“Dead men walking around a riverbank sounds far-fetched, too.”

“I’ll be the first to admit it, and both of us know it’s true. But this gas … why would anyone store it, or transport it? And what would anyone do with it?”

His smile swelled. “You’re asking the right questions. The gas is processed through some method or other. Distilled, or something like that. Then it’s dried down to a yellow residue, which can be cooked up and smoked, or snorted, or even swallowed.”

“But why on earth would anyone—?”

“Miss Early, have you ever heard of a substance called sap?”

“Like … like tree sap?”

“No, ma’am, like yellow sap. That’s the most common term I’ve heard for it, though I’ve also seen it called cracker piss, sick sand, and a few other things. It’s a drug, something like opium but a whole lot stronger and a whole lot cheaper. Soldiers are taking to it left and right, looking to escape the war, as you do. As anyone does.”

“And it’s made from a poisonous gas?”

“Deadly poisonous. So deadly, it kills you without stopping you. I’d heard tell that this sap has been finding a place among sailors, and with the young Texians, too — the ones sent far from home, especially. The lonely men, or bored men. Men without the sense to know any better, or men who’ve lost so much already that they don’t care.”

“It starts with a gas.”

“Yes. The gas itself turns people into zombis faster, more directly. Breathing it will kill you deader than a stone before you know what’s happened. But the drug does it slow. It takes time — time to build up in a man’s body, time to work into his blood. And gradually: not all at once, but in time…”

“In time, the men who use the sap become zombis?”

“Men who’ve used too much of it, for too long.”

“But you said a group of Mexicans in Texas … they weren’t all using the sap, were they?”

He shook his head. “No, no. A dirigible from Seattle was carrying a big load of gas, and it crashed out in the desert — right on top of them. It’s a long story,” he added fast, as if he wished to cut off commentary. “But that’s what happened to them, and it could happen here, too. Out at the airyard, or at the pirate docks — anyplace where dirigibles come and go, moving the gas around. Any leak or failure of their equipment could unleash it.”

The shivers on Josephine’s neck went down to her knees, which were beginning to tremble against her will. “How much gas are we talking about, Ranger? How much will a dirigible hold? How many people could one load of gas—?”

He held up his hands, and thereby his hat, which dangled from his left one. “How much gas depends on how big the dirigible is, and what kind of equipment’s on board. The one that turned some seven hundred Mexicans and their kin was pretty big. One of the biggest, I’d say.”

“Seven hundred!” she exclaimed. “And out in the desert? Here in the city, we have that many people on a given block at the right time of day or night. More than that down at the market on a Saturday, to be sure! And the market isn’t terribly far from the—”