Floaters

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

3London is a city of 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

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

7They were passing under the 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

9Bill Drummond and the little Bow Commoner Alby Budge came up the walk to the swing bridge where Will and Police Constable Foley were anxiously watching for Fish and Bogart’s arrival and arguing what to do if the tug didn’t make it or arrived after high water or if the living dead would even enter the lock. Both remembered how the severed hand, in trying to escape, adapted to its environment. Did the floaters have some sort of primitive survival instinct that would keep them from entering the basin? Foley suggested they might march their troops back toward town and help the authorities destroy them. But only halfheartedly. They might be of some small service, but the floaters would still infest the waterways. And there was still the chance Quincy Bird’s crew and Kate and the girls would succeed in flushing the canal’s floaters down to the basin. Thinking of Kate brought a lump to his throat. She could handle herself, and she had some tough company with her, but still . .