The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(74)

Tracer fire launched across a darkened street along with the chatter of a .50-caliber. Ghost was surprised to realize that he didn’t need Mahlia to tell him what the guns were. He knew them all.

Van grabbed another big painting and dropped it on the fire. It hissed as the fumes from its paints went up.

The flames cooked through the picture. Some lady, sort of lying on a wheat field, looking across the hills to a house, all the colors kind of washed-out and grayed. The colors were boring, not like the kinds of paint they decorated their guns with. Those colors really stood out.

Ghost was looking at his own gun. It had color after color on it. Bright. A green cross on a red background, a sign that the Army of God had been the last owner.

Ocho squatted beside Ghost, nodded at the gun. “You should paint it,” he said. “Make it your own.”

“With what?”

“Romey’s got some colors; he does the pictures of the Colonel sometimes.”

“Like that one?” Ghost jerked his head at the huge image across the canal.

Ocho grinned. “Not quite. But he can get some supply. You can put your mark on it. Put a Fates Eye on it, or something. Get yourself some protection. Make it yours, right? All that AOG crap’s got to go, though. No cross-kisser stuff. Fates Eye, or else UPF blue and white, you want to get all patriotic.”

“How’d they even get him up there?” Ghost wondered.

Slim looked over at the image. “Patriotic fury, right? They scaled that sucker.”

“Ropes,” Ocho said. “They dropped ropes over the side, and lowered themselves off the top. Worked for weeks on it. For Colonel Stern’s birthday. Bunch of Alpha Company put the civvies on it.”

“I still say they climbed.”

“You weren’t there,” Ocho said. “It was before you even got your half-bars.”

“Why you want to run down a good legend? Where’s your patriotic fire?”

“I’m all for patriotic fire,” Ocho said. “Especially if it’s a bonfire.” He tossed a cracked chair leg into the blaze, sending up sparks.

Ghost stared across the gap between the buildings. The people who had painted Glenn Stern had done a good job. The man looked like some kind of god. Hard and angular and his green eyes that did the same thing that Ocho’s did. Sort of green with gold flecks.

A god, or at least a patron saint. They all toasted the Colonel with their bottles, and then they all toasted Ghost, the hero of the day.

Reggie had bought three bottles of Triple Cross off the boys over in Charlie Company. They had a still that they worked, smuggling food downriver off their territory grant, and then distilling it. No one knew what went into the brew. For all they knew, Charlie Company was distilling fingernails and dogs, but they said it was all real grain. Things like ShenMi HiYield Rice, TopGro Wheat, whatever they could burn out of the fields and get away with before Army of God or Freedom Militia figured out that they’d gone raiding.

Ghost’s squad boys kept giving him shots, getting him drunker. He stared up at the image of Glenn Stern.

“You should hear him speak,” Ocho said. “He’s got fire in him. Make you believe you can walk through a wall of bullets for the cause.”

“You got the same eyes,” Ghost said.

Ocho glanced at the painting. “Nah. I don’t. You look into the Colonel’s eyes and you see it in a second. We got the same color, but our eyes ain’t nothing the same.” He shrugged. “Saved me, though.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I wasn’t Drowned Cities, originally. Not like most of these dumbass war maggots.”

A couple of the other soldiers hooted at the insult, but Ocho waved them silent, smiling. “My family were fishers. We all got blown in on a hurricane, couldn’t paddle out. UPF scooped us up.”

He shrugged. “Most of us—” He broke off. “Anyway, they thought my eyes looked like the Colonel’s, so they recruited me.” He held out his hand, waist high. “I was a maggot about this big. They liked me. Like a mascot, right? Little bit of Glenn Stern, to keep them lucky when the bullets started flying.”

“Those soldiers still around?”

“Nah. They’re dead, mostly. But the LT, he was the one that saved my ass. He likes it when he’s got a sign. There are days when all I can do is wake up and thank the Fates that I got the same colored eyes as the Colonel. If I didn’t—” He broke off, his expression turning dark.

Ghost hurried to change the subject. “How come he calls himself Colonel?”

“You think he should call himself something else?” Stork asked, an edge in his voice.

“Army of God has a general. General Sachs,” Ghost pointed out. “How come they got a general?”

“General Sachs.” Stork made a face of derision. “Hell. That man ain’t even a soldier. Never even went to war college. He’s just some crazy dude who talks fine and got a bunch of sorry-ass warboys to believe they’ll go to Heaven if they kill everyone who doesn’t bow down to him. He calls himself Supreme Eagle, too.”

Ocho broke in. “The Colonel says you can’t just give yourself a rank. That ain’t military.” He nodded across at the huge painting. “He says he won’t take a higher rank, because it’s not his place to take a rank. That ain’t patriotic. He’s fighting for the Drowned Cities, not for some kind of rank. He loves this place, for real. He’s not just here to scrape some scavenge out and run away like these other dogs.