Free Gods of New Orleans by AJ Sikes Page A

an awning from the frame of the ship to the branches of a tree. Brand sees more canvas hanging from the airship frame.
    Brand realizes the tramps aren’t chasing him. The ones who left and these he sees now in their shelter. They aren’t made of mud. These tramps here in the airfield are real men. Flesh and blood, just like he feels himself to be flesh and blood. Still. Even after what he’s done to himself, he still feels alive.
    No. That’s wrong. What he feels most of all is cold.
    His naked feet are freezing, nearly numb but still able to send knives of ice up his lower legs. Brand shivers and wraps his arms around himself tighter, watching the tramps by the lakeshore. They’ve lit a fire and Brand is on his feet now, walking across the mud with careful steps, watching out for every puddle, every slick patch that might hide a deeper pit beneath it.
    He makes it close enough that the men notice him. He sees heads jerking his way, but the tramps’ faces are still indistinct. Three men surround the small fire in the close space of the canvas shelter. One stirs a pot now, hanging it over the fire using a pair of blacksmith’s tongs. The other two huddle together nearby, their dusky faces alight in the glow of the flames.
    Brand is close enough to see that both of them have their eyes closed. The third, at the fireside, has his eyes closed also. When the man turns his face to Brand to greet him, opening his eyes, Brand screams and stumbles backward.
    “Oh!” says the tramp with no eyes holding the pot with the tongs. “Do forgive me. It is long since the Three Blind Men have been approached by a fellow traveler beside the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.”
    “Who‌—‌who the hell are you?” Brand says, still on his ass in the mud. He stays there out of instinct. This isn’t the first time he’s found himself in such a position and happy to simply be alive to experience the sensation. At least this time it isn’t the Kaiser’s mortars that put him here.
    The tramp by the fire stirs his pot and grins. His eyes are closed again, and Brand wonders why he doesn’t just keep them that way since he’s got nothing to see with.
    “You got a name, pal?” Brand tries again.
    “A name,” the tramp says, setting the pot aside. He removes a mitten and wipes his thick fingers down both cheeks, like he’s preening for a photograph. He smooths the snarled salt-and-pepper whiskers on his dark face, but they pop back up again, jutting out like some kind of fungus on the bark of a tree. “Surely I do have a name,” he says, putting the mitten back on and taking up the tongs and pot again.
    Brand is about to ask the man for his name a second time when the tramp speaks, his graveled voice carrying a hint of humor across the cold morning air to Brand’s ears, like the man would laugh if only he could remember how.
    “My name is Barnaby Augustine Fellows, and it is a tragedy that I have spoken so much at length but have not yet introduced myself to you. If I may ask your name now, sir, so that acquaintance can be a word we use with honesty.”
    Brand sits up and moves across the ground to accept the shelter of the canvas. He puts his back to the tree and chuckles at the tramp’s talk, his fancy words and the airs he wears like medals on a dead man’s chest.
    “Name’s Brand. Mitchell Brand. No middle name in there because Mother Brand didn’t go in for that sort of thing.”
    “Well met, Mitchell Brand. And is it Mitchell, or do you accept Mitch as a substitute?”
    Brand thinks for a second. His only friend in Chicago City used to call him Mitch, but they’d been in the war together, flying observation missions over No Man’s Land in ‘17 and ‘18. His newsboys called him Mr. Brand, but that was kids talking to a man, nothing like this exchange between equals he’s faced with now.
    “Let’s try Brand,” he says. “And is it all right with you if I use Fellows? Only the whole thing’s a bit of a mouthful,