Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1)(21)
“Well, he won’t care if we scavenge,” Pima muttered.
“You going to scavenge him?” Nailer asked.
“He’s got pockets.”
Nailer shook his head. “I’m not touching him.”
“Don’t be a licebiter.” Pima took a breath and crept close to the dead man. Flies exploded in a cloud, buzzing in the warmth of the room. Pima tugged at the man’s pants and ran her fingers through his pockets. She was acting tough, but Nailer could tell she was unnerved. They’d both heard stories of fresh scavenge. Bodies came with the territory, but it was still scary to look into a man’s dead eyes and think that he’d been walking the decks only a little while earlier, before the storm took it all away and gave it to a couple kids on the shoreline.
Nailer scanned the rest of the cabin. It was big. A cracked photo on the floor showed the man wearing a white jacket with stripes on his sleeves. Nailer picked up the picture and studied it. “I think this was his ship.”
“Yeah?”
Nailer scanned the walls. There was an old-style spyglass secured with brackets. Pieces of paper with all sorts of writing on it, seals and official-looking stamps. And then this picture of the man with the braid on his shoulder and him standing in front of a clipper ship, smiling. Nailer couldn’t tell if it was the same ship as the wreck or not, but it was obvious the man was full of pride. Nailer glanced over at the bloated torn-open corpse and blew out his breath, thoughtful.
As if sensing his thoughts, Pima looked up from her work. “It’s all luck, Nailer. Just luck and the Fates. It’s all we got.” She flashed scavenged coins at him meaningfully. It was enough money to feed them for a week. Copper coins and a damp wad of Chinese red paper cash. “Today we’re the lucky ones.”
“Yeah.” Nailer nodded. “And tomorrow maybe we’re not.”
The captain hadn’t been lucky. And now Nailer and Pima were flush because of it. Weird to think about that. The captain lay bloated, his face puffed and purpled, the sun baking and ruining his flesh. Flies buzzed easily around his face: his lips and eyes, the blood on his head, the tear in his stomach. Whole clouds settled back on him as soon as Pima stepped away.
Nailer studied the cabin again, thoughtful. Brass on the walls, all kinds of scavenge. It was a swank boat, for sure. The captain’s cabin was rich, and even though the ship was as large as a cargo ship, it didn’t look like a working vessel. Everything seemed too nice, all silk and carpeted corridors and brass and copper and little glass lanterns. He and Pima kept going through cabins. They found carved furniture, sitting rooms, lounges, a bar with shattered liquor bottles, staterooms, art on the walls mangled and torn, oil paintings tossed about and punctured.
Down below, in the engineering rooms, where mechanical systems controlled the ship, they found more bodies.
“Half-men,” Pima whispered.
A trio of them, bloated and drowned. Their bestial faces looked weirdly hungry with their long tongues hanging out of their sharp-toothed mouths. Yellow dog eyes stared dead at Pima and Nailer, gleaming dully in the tropical sunbeams that penetrated the torn room.
“These people must have been damn swank if they could afford all these half-men.”
“That one looks like you,” Nailer commented. “You sure you haven’t been selling eggs?”
Pima snorted laughter and jabbed an elbow into his ribs, but even she didn’t suggest scavenging them. There was something just too creepy about the genetically designed creatures to consider getting close to them.
Nailer and Pima split up and continued to explore the ship. Pima found another dead half-man in the upper decks, strapped to the wheel and drowned. So much death, Nailer thought. The people must have been complete idiots to get caught in a city killer. He shoved open another door and whistled, low and surprised.
A table, tilted on its side, crammed against the wall, dark black wood as deep as night. Shattered glass everywhere, goblets thrown about…
“Pima! Check this out!”
She came running. The room was loaded with silver: silver candlesticks, silver tableware, silver platters, silver bowls… a huge Lucky Strike, all for the taking.
“That’s a lot of scavenge,” Pima gasped.
“That’s enough to pay off all our work debts. With that much cash you could set up scavenge on your own. Even buy Bapi’s light crew slot.”
“Come on!” Pima said. “Let’s clear it out before anyone else shows up. We’re rich, Lucky Boy!” She grabbed him and kissed him right, left, and full on the lips, laughing at his surprised expression. “Ohhh, Lucky Boy! We’re rich! We’re gonna be bigger than Lucky Strike!”
Infected by her spirit Nailer started to laugh, too. They gathered the silver to them, mounding it around, piling it high. They picked through shattered china, broken goblets, and the half-moons of delicate-stemmed glassware, unearthing more and more wealth.
Pima went to find something to hold it all. She returned with hemp sacking that they would have called scavenge just a few minutes ago, could have sold off for a couple copper lengths, and would have called it a good day—and now it was just something to hold the real treasure: all that silver. Serving trays and forks and knives went into the sack. Forks so small that they disappeared in Nailer’s hand, spoons so big and deep they could have been used as ladles at Chen’s grub shack where he served a hundred head at a time.