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Floaters 1
1The swells were drunk.There were three of them. Young toffs, their fine suits looking worse for wear after a night of East End carousing. Still joking and pulling at a shared bottle as the wherry made its way upriver. Midnight was long past and dawn too far off for Jenkins’ taste. Father Thames was in a foul mood. Night was thickest on the Surrey side, the glassworks and wharves invisible behind the greasy banks of fog. On the City side, the electric lights of the Temple Pier and Victoria Embankment glowed through the murk like will-o’-the-wisps. Despite the dark and the fog, old Clarence Jenkins, who had been dipping his oars in these muddy waters since before the Great Stink, knew every dock and water stair on both sides of the river and could find his way blindfolded. He loved the dear old cantankerous river in all its lights and liked to think of it as his, but lately the relationship had soured. He wanted to attribute his failing affection for the river to age. He was g
Floaters 2
2The knives and beltswere out. Will Tagget brandished a big chopper as he circled Bill Drummond. It was all prearranged. Will and his Lambeth Walk Lads had agreed to meet up with the Drury Lane Gang on the Lambeth side of Westminster Bridge where, as per custom, insults that never failed to provoke were exchanged and the gangs would give each other what for. The row wasn’t so much about territory—a bridge and a river divided them after all—as about bragging rights.Bill Drummond of the Drury Lane Monkeys kept his only slightly smaller blade steady. Body crouched, elbow bent, his beady eyes watched for an opening. Drummond was a good bladesman, Will gave him that. But Will’s grim grin proclaimed he was better.Across the water, the half-hour boomed from Westminster. The clock tower and House of Commons were lost in fog. All that marked the far shore were the lamps of the Victoria Embankment. Even here, on the Albert Embankment behind St. Thomas, the fog was so thick you coul
Floaters 3
3London is a cityof rivers. Besides the Thames, there exist its many tributary creeks and rivers, most of them culverted and pressed into service as sewers for the great metropolis. The River Fleet flows under Holbein and Fleet Street and emerges as a drainage outlet in the embankment wall beneath Blackfriars Bridge. The Rivers Tyburn and Westbourne and the Effra in Southwark suffered similar fates as the population bourgeoned and the offal pouring into the Thames became insufferable. But a few open waterways emptying into the Thames remain—the Regents Canal, the Limehouse Cut and, farther east, the River Lea. On the day following the attack on the Lambeth Lads and the Drury Lane Gang and the death of Detective-Inspector Lock, the fog lifted and the afternoon warmed enough for a few families to venture to Victoria Park to picnic and to row on the boating lake.One family consisting of a young father and mother, a baby boy in a pram and a little girl in a blue dress and white
Floaters 4
4Across the Thames inWestminster, the clock tower chimed the quarters. Big Ben followed tolling the hour. Nine o’clock. The river lapped against the water stair. It was less foggy tonight, but the humid air was fraught with chill. They stood on the Vauxhall Stairs adjacent to Lack’s Dock between the looming brick hulks of the Royal Flour Mills and a Gin and Vinegar distillery. The tide was in, the landing below the stair submerged. Descending beside the moss-covered wall, the slippery stone steps disappeared into the water, like an invitation to a drowning.A crescent moon broke through the overcast and, for a minute, the river, the opposite embankment, the misty arc of the Vauxhall Bridge glowed like a luminous monochromatic painting. Then the moon retreated, plunging the river back into darkness.“Now what?” Foley asked. He’d insisted on accompanying Will on his quest to capture a floater. Though Will would never admit it, he was glad of the company. It’d be nice to have
Floaters 5
5Fire and plague. Certainly no strangers to London Town. But now fire consumes the docklands on both sides of the river, and the plague, newly risen from the Thames, threatens to put the Great Leviathan down once and for all. Fleeing citizens, their wagons and carts piled high with their worldly possessions, clog the thoroughfares, jam the bridges. No one takes to the river. The cry is away—away to the country, away to the north and west, away from the river and canals from which legions pour ravening for blood. Packed to bursting, citizens clinging to the roofs of the cars, trains depart the London stations—the Great Northern, The Great Western, the London and Northwestern, The Great Central—carrying their passengers to safety. They do not return. As the army of the dead advances, those who fall beneath their bite rise and swell their ranks, consumed by an unspeakable hunger. In the City of London, the Lord Mayor has blocks of houses pulled down and torched in an effort to slow th
Floaters 6
6While Quincy and hiscrew offloaded their cargo of blood, Kate and more than a dozen girls from rival gangs worked their way up the canal opening locks. The idea was to open all the locks from St. Pancras to Limehouse. If both were successful and they met up somewhere along the system, they could abandon the canal while the increased flood flushed the floaters down to the basin where Will and the others would, with the help of whatever gods there be, destroy them. So far, they’d been lucky. The Commercial Road Lock at the mouth of the canal where it poured into the basin was open, as were the Solomon Lane Lock and Johnson’s Locke above. They met slight resistance at Solomon Lane, shoving two floaters into the lock until the lower gates were open. The surge of falling water swept the creatures downstream.Seldom more than seven feet wide, the towpath wound along one side of the dark waterway. A long wall of leaning board fences separated the cindered yards of tenements on the
Floaters 7
7They were passing underthe grim visage of the Tower of London when the floaters boarded. With Dirk supervising and the rest of the men working at the barge’s stern, no one realized they’d been boarded till Dirk turned to see who was shouting. Jeb and a few others stood at the tug’s stern-rail waving and yelling, but he didn’t need their help to see what they were pointing at. Three floaters had somehow hauled themselves onto the barge and were making their way aft.So, the fuckers can climb!He filed the information away along with other useful tidbits like beware coppers wearing vulcanized rubber soles and rainy nights are best for breaking into warehouses.“Head’s up, men!” he shouted. But a quick glance told him they’d seen their company. In a matter of seconds, they’d dropped their buckets, wiped bloody hands on their trousers, grabbed their weapons—knives, axe handles, a pickaxe and a couple of iron pry bars—and gathered for battle. Smacking the shillelagh against hi
Floaters 8
8Soon as the prowof the barge grazed the bulkhead, Patsy and Dewey leapt out and ran in swinging their poles like Little John crossing staves with Robin Hood. Dewey landed a terrific blow to one floater’s head, literally caving in the creature’s skull with a sickening crunch and hurling the thing into the water. Patsy wasn’t so lucky. He, too, swung, but his target, seemingly unhampered by its sopping jacket and trousers, was quick and caught the pole inches from its head, wrenched it out of Patsy’s hands and flung it over his shoulder. The thing was on Patsy in an instant. Taller than the Dove Rower, it bent over him as it bore him to his knees. Brown teeth snapped at him as he fended it off. The river reek of it burned his nose. Then it was lifted off him as Dewey’s staff caught it in the throat and flung it backwards. For a moment he thought he was going into the drink as his assailant clung to him, taking him with it, but a second blow from Dewey’s pole knocked it to the st
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