Free Gods of New Orleans by AJ Sikes

Hardy’s hand that hovered over his lapels.
    “It’s the book , Little Dove. White folk who be walkin’ and travelin’ around New Orleans like to be havin’ an idea of where ‘tis safe to go. The book tell you dat. You read up and you tell your Mama and your clipped Pappy here. They know what’s bein’ good for ‘em, they listen to you.”
    Hardy finished with a finger aimed at the kid’s chest and a glare at Aiden’s folks. Then he turned on a heel and stalked into the station house, leaving Emma and the others alone with Bacchus and his toughs.
    “Lest we move any farther down this path,” Bacchus said. “I hope all you doves remember what happened here this morning. And now I bid you good day. And welcome to New Orleans.”
    The heavyset man draped in fur and glittering gold took a short step back. He smiled before he slipped between shadows and early morning mists, leaving nothing in his wake but a fluttering curtain of air above the weathered boards of the mooring deck.
    The Conroy dame gasped and snapped her eyes to look back at her husband, who kept his face bunched up to hold in his tears. The kid shuffled his feet and made like he wanted to help but just didn’t know what to do. He reached for the little green book that Hardy had tossed on the deck.
    “We should . . . we should probably get out of here,” Emma said.
    The kid looked at her like he would reply, but his mother got there first.
    “Yes. You should. You should both go.”
    Emma wanted to tell her it wasn’t like that. That she meant they should all leave together. But the lady’s face said nothing doing. If those eyes of hers were gun barrels, Emma knew she’d be a fool to stare the woman down for another second.
    Putting an arm around Eddie’s waist, she helped him down the deck, leaving the Conroy family behind. She gave a glance back, just to be sure. The parents sat together in a heap, the father holding his hand against his chest and both of them sobbing like it was all they had left to do. The kid kneeled down by them, but he was watching Emma and Eddie leave. He lifted a limp hand to wave, like a bird with a broken wing trying its damnedest to fly from danger.

Chapter 9
     
     
     
    Brand hears the gunshot. He can even see the man who falls and knows who it is. Otis, the other Negro they’d rescued from Wynes’ little lynching party back in Chicago City.
    But Brand can’t get up there, up those stairs and onto the deck where the Vigilance hangs heavy and dark. He can feel the ship watching him, but he also feels it pushing him back, like it somehow knows he’s trouble.
    “Gave you enough trouble already, hey?” he says, and decides to find someplace to hunker down and hide. At least he’s above ground now, on the street and not in it.
    Brand squats on his bare feet, puts his back against one of the posts of the mooring deck. Lake Pontchartrain kisses the shore a few hundred feet away. The sound of water lapping at mud comes to Brand’s ears along with other sounds of a lakeside coming to life in the early morning. Coughing and wheezing startles him, and he jerks upright on his tired, naked feet. He sees tramps rising from around the airfield.
    They come out of ruined cars and trucks, and the beat-up hulks of old airships. Brand ignores the tramps for a second, his eyes riveted to the wrecked airships, large and small, their frames like skeletons that have long since spilled their guts and sloughed off their skin.
    A group of tramps shuffles away into the morning, then another. Stragglers come out like cattle to the farmer’s call, lowing in a chorus of hacking coughs, spitting, and groaning as they stretch their legs and reach withered limbs to the sky. Spines, joints, and jaws crack and pop as the tramps stretch, and then they’re on their way, all of them. All but one group.
    The layabouts stay huddled under a piece of old canvas in the remains of an airship closer to the lakeshore. They’ve hung the canvas like