Free Afterlands by Steven Heighton

indignant look. He has a snub nose in a broad pink face, curly blond whiskers, a head of wiry curls. A lower front tooth is missing, adding to the impression of a cranky, bearded boy.
    She thinks we are still on a Gott damned ship, Anthing goes on, as if Tukulito’s slip of the tongue, with its reminder of where they are not, makes her somehow blamable for where they are. She thinks comes out as She sinks .
    Spiel weiter , says Kruger. Just let her alone.
    Never disturb a working cook, Herron adds lightly, yet with hunger edging his voice. What’s trump again?
    Pik! says Anthing. The spades. You know this.
    Jackson pauses, cleaver upraised over the stubborn biscuit. On this here chunk of ice, he says, with all this other ice around, I reckon we’re safer than on any ship. Like can’t hurt like, not so easily.
    The bread, please, Mr Jackson.
    Not to say we’re all like here, are we, lads? says Herron.
    Jackson brings the cleaver slamming down. The biscuit shatters with a fearsome crack. Everyone looks over, startle-eyed, except for Punnie, who goes on stitching with grave concentration, and Anthing, who could well be deaf, all sense-energies funnelled through those great, globular eyes that go on searching his cards. A boy’s impatience, but also a boy’s intense competitive focus.
    After a moment Kruger lays the jack of spades on the snow.
    Hah, lads! cries Herron, snapping down two more cards with a grin. You’re considerably euchred!
    Herron, raised in Liverpool, a recent emigrant, is the only crew member who is liked by everyone, even by those who dislike each other, and so like an axletree he has helped to hold together the spokes of this varied wheel, so far. Though still in his twenties he’s as florid and portly as a middle-aged squire. Though never drunk or profane—he’s a Quaker and teetotaller—he always seems to be in a state of mild, comradely intoxication. He’s one of those who give kind words and compliments not out of strategy, but simply for the pleasure of spreading contentment. One of life’s natural harmonizers. His good cheer compels belief, seeming to defy fate to do its worst; as if fate, thinks Kruger, ever needs an invitation.
    Kruger has read somewhere that “character is fate” but to him, now, fate is simply People in Power—Budington, who seems to have deserted them, and Tyson, who has tried to make them quit the floe’s relative safety for what seemed, to Kruger and the other men, certain death in an open boat stripped of supplies. What chance would they have stood in a gale, or if the milling ice had crumpled the boat? Well, brave men love to roll the dice.
    But at least when fate takes human form, it’s resistible.
    On their sixth morning adrift, a piece of good luck from bad. Kruger, Herron, Jackson, and Jamka, reasoning that several hunters will be more effective than one, discreetly follow Ebierbing to the banks of the small floe in a glacial twilight. Knowing stealth to be vital they conceal themselves in back of a small hummock thirty paces behind Ebierbing, who is prone on the floe-edge beside his kayak. Jamka’s presence makes Kruger uneasy. His service in Bismarck’s recent war with the French has left him damaged. Kruger is baffled as to how he got past the immigration agents in Battery Park, then hired on for this expedition. He is shaggy and gaunt, as if cast away for years already. Sometimes he looks cross-eyed and his gapped teeth are stumpy and brown. He fidgets, startles at the slightest noise.
    Ebierbing lifts onto his elbows and aims his rifle at a vague form on an ice pan some way off in the dimness. The crewmen also take aim and slowly, in near silence, thumb back their hammers. Let Joe shoot first, Kruger whispers, nodding toward Ebierbing while trying to catch Herron’s eye—because Kruger is wary of him, too, his exuberance. There is no endearing trait in anyone that’s not also a liability sometimes. Ebierbing holds his aim, motionless for minutes,