The Delta Devils (Conclusion To Brackish Mass)

The Brackish Mass waited for me on the Delta like a beast dressed in Sunday’s best. Miles away from the San Fran bay.

Lanterns hung low over the rickety docks, their flickering light cutting through fog thick and sour. The air reeked of sweat, cheap gin, and something fouler—fish guts tangled in mud, old blood long buried but never gone.

Faces drifted past, hidden behind cracked masks painted with shark teeth and crooked grins. Hooks swung from leather belts, catching firelight—a tool for catch or punishment, I couldn’t say which.

Children with wild eyes weaved through the crowd, their laughter sharp and jagged like broken glass. Men leaned into crooked deals, whispers coiling around smoke like it was listening.

I stood there, badge tucked away, Colt cold at my side, knowing this night was just getting started.

Beyond the flickering lanterns and masked faces, the river’s edge was lined with dilapidated vessels—hulks half-swallowed by the Delta’s slow, suffocating mud. Rusted river boats and barges, long forsaken, creaked with the weight of forgotten years. Their timbers groaned like ancient bones beneath a swollen sky, each one a graveyard in its own right.

No tombstones here. Just warped decks slick with algae and decay, windows shattered like empty eye sockets, and hulls cracked open to the hungry water below. They weren’t just abandoned—they were buried, their secrets sunk beneath layers of silt and shadow.

My eyes locked on long enough to feel the weight of those watery graves pressing up through the night, a reminder that some debts don’t stay buried.

This is where ghosts become aquatic, where history drowns but does not die. They weren’t born of the open sea—

No salt in their veins, no storm-scars on their backs.

The brack-folk and bankwalkers came from elsewhere. They claimed neither the salt or the sierras.

Bayous burned out by crosses. Backwaters run dry with hate.

You can still find their camps near the Delta. Shacks full of rusted lures and candle stubs melted to bone.

They don’t talk much. Not about what they’ve seen.

Rituals are like the spawning of the salmon they always came back—drawn by a pull older than anything a lobotomy could cure. To these drowned waters they returned, chasing death and rebirth beneath the swollen Delta skies.

Bodies wrapped tight in canvas, hidden beneath rotting planks—tokens of pacts made in blood and silence.

The dead kept company with the river’s slow pulse, dragged deeper each season, like souls caught in a tide that refused to let go.

I killed the lights and ghosted aboard one of the empty vessels, the rotten wood groaning beneath me like the slow decay of something long dead. I stayed still, letting the slap of water against the hull swallow my footprints, my presence—trying to disappear in a place that didn’t want to forget.

Could this have been an echo of my father’s night raids in the trenches? The darkness is thick with waiting. The silence that wasn’t empty—the styx watching, with patience. Different rivers, same godless hunger.

Out here, the past isn’t downstream, . It’s a circle, folding back on itself like a snake eating its own tail. The ghosts don’t just follow you—they become a part of you.

And in the end, the river always takes what it’s owed.

The hulls were draped in the detritus of desperation—stolen goods tangled in algae-covered nets, rotted crates stacked like forgotten prayers. A flare gun winked at me it would do no good here.

Every inch whispered of a thousand betrayals, a thousand sins piled high and left to drown in slow decay.

The nets sagged under the weight of salt and time, like memories we try to clutch but can’t. They stretched like spiderwebs, waiting to trap whatever foolish thing drifted too close.

Candle wax dripped in thick rivulets, pooling around jagged shells and blackened bones. The scent mixed with river rot, prayers burned halfway to ash.

And beneath it all—the sirens, water-maidens. Not the sweet songs from children’s tales, but dark calls whispered beneath the water’s surface. Something ancient, hollow, dragging at the edges of your mind when the night falls too quiet.

Out here, the river’s a mirror, but it doesn’t show your face. It shows what you’ll become when the world forgets your name.

And the hulls? They’re the bones left behind—adorned with all the things we thought would save us but only dragged us deeper.

I heard it outside the jubilee—low and curling through the dark like a my own mermaids call, only quieter. Not a song. Not even a sound, really. Just a pull.

The kind of thing that settles in your ribs before it ever touches your ears.

And once you hear it, you start walking toward the water, whether you mean to or not.

I spied the emergence of the ritualist. His eyes had gone milky, saturation.—Too many harvests, blended with a life anchored to the tides. His vision wasn’t lost. It had diffused into the sediment.

No words passed his lips. The Delta did not require sound. Only witnessing.

On the opposite bank, at the mouth of a forgotten cut, a man was dragged forward. He did not resist. Resistance here is like swimming against memory.

He was bound in rusted chains. His flesh leaked death. But not the rot of the dead. This was confessional emission—the smell of guilt made physical, sweat that has absorbed interrogation rooms, river baptisms, and backroom church exorcisms. It burned worse than the brine. It clung to the current.

This was no prison.

There was no trial for premeditation in the first degree.

It was a presentation. An interface. A message passed through a body.

This was how the Delta speaks: through offerings that pulse.

The Delta has no morals. Only flows, erosion, return.

He was never going to leave. He was already sediment.

I am not a doctor. What I know of the alienist discipline came from state lectures in 1929—half-cracked skull charts, chalkboard terms like “moral insanity” and “degenerative affect.”

We were told to look for signs: flatness of tone, misdirected eye contact, signs of “demonic possession” if the preacher types had their say. Some spoke of shell shock the way you’d speak of mildew—dangerous, but treatable. Mostly, it was text books from sanitariums. observers that didn’t get scat and fluids thrown at them.

The healer stepped soft toward the condemned, like a man fulfilling scripture—Old Testament kind, where the rod’s never spared.

“You have made sacraments that were not yours to offer. The land steps and their law men have put their boots and grime all over our waters now. What were you seeking?”

He implored.

The way that old man—the interpreter of the drowned rites, no less—spoke about people like they were nothing but parts of some twisted liturgy churned the acid in my gut.

Regardless They both ought to be strapped down and given shock therapy instead of the electric chair. That thought put me at odds with the others—men who’d rather be blasting down highwaymen from the Depression than wrestling with ghosts and rites no one wanted to name.

But I couldn’t shake it.

There was a method in the madness about the way he talked—calm, certain—that reflected a murky channel older than law.

The keeper of memory cut into the killer’s arms with steady hands—careful to avoid the deep veins, veins that pulsed in time with the slow workings of the Delta itself.

He’d bleed like a pugilist after a long fight. But this blood wasn’t meant for death.

It was for display.

Without a word, he motioned the man toward the depths of the water bank, where the water darkened and the current swallowed sound.

The slackwater slaughterer moved like a man who knew the way. He waded deeper into whatever waiting the river kept.

The blood touched the water. The surface trembled. The Delta received it the way an altar takes the first pour—silent, steady, certain.

Every ripple felt sanctioned.

Through the orange haze of the fires, the black ripples of the outlet shimmered and bled—a slow, living thing crawling across the surface of something old and broken.

He walked back from the water slow, deliberate—unbound now, the chains left behind like shed skin. The drums still pulsed low behind the treeline. Smoke moved through the jubilee air like incense. It didn’t feel festive anymore. The air had thickened, heavy with judgment, every movement drawn tight around something about to break.

The elder—the interpreter of what came before—met him at the edge of the clearing.

He unlocked the wrist links himself, his hands steady.

Then he raised the killer’s arm high for all to see. Not in condemnation. In recognition.

Like the prodigal returned not for forgiveness, but to complete something unfinished.

The two locked eyes.

And in that silence, there was reverence—on both sides.

No rage. No apology.

Only understanding.

Then the killer struck him. One sharp blow, clean and precise.

The old man staggered, did not cry out.

And the killer helped him into the Delta—not thrown, not discarded—given.

The water received him without struggle.

It wasn’t murder.

It was an offering. The fins broke the surface once—quiet, deliberate—followed by the suggestion of teeth beneath. Devils of the delta, older than trees, viciousness without malice.. It didn’t churn the water.

It crowned it.

And the people did not cheer. The bones of the world had been stirred and no one wanted to speak above the noise they couldn’t hear .An old ritual played out in front of eyes too modern to understand it.

I should’ve moved. But I just stood there, watching that old man disappear under the black water, the killer calm as a preacher at baptism. That’s when I smelled it—oil. Black gold from Bakersfield

It came from the derelict engines moored along the inlet—sunken tugboats, rusted pleasure craft, and the wreck of a river casino that hadn’t lit up since the crash.

The kind of wreckage people stop noticing because it’s been part of the shoreline longer than they’ve been alive.

The tide must’ve shifted just enough to stir it loose.

Heavy, sludgy, sitting under the surface like a second skin.

I pulled the flare gun out and fired—not at anyone, not even toward the crowd. Just into the water.

Where the sheen was thickest. The flare hissed, then bloomed red across the surface.

It lit the Delta like a warning bell—not loud, but bright enough to paint every stunned face in fire.

A second later, the oil caught. Slow burn. A warning, not a judgment.

I told myself it was to raise the alarm. Maybe even to draw the old man back, give him something to grab onto if he was still conscious.

But the truth sat heavier than that. I did it because I’d been quiet before—too many times. Back when I was undercover. When I let men vanish under worse circumstances for less cause.

Back then, silence was the job. But here, surrounded by rites I didn’t understand, watching the river take a man who wasn’t resisting— Silence felt like complicity.

I didn’t want to carry it again.

The flare had barely finished burning when I moved. Boots hit the mud hard, sidearm drawn before I was even off the ramp. My breath caught sour and smoke. Somewhere behind me, a woman screamed. The rest just watched.

This was no place for heroes.

Just couldn’t stand still anymore.

The crowd parted like a school of baitfish.

Two men didn’t. Fishermen by the look of them. Faces wind-burned, shoulders built from years of hauling lines instead of clocking hours. But their hands didn’t go to nets. They drew long knives—blades now glinted in firelight, wet with condensation like they’d been waiting for this.

They didn’t yell. Didn’t posture.

Just stepped in my path, blades out, quiet as the river.

A warning.

Clear as any word. I didn’t wait for the first swing. The first shot caught one in the thigh—a clean hit, enough to drop him. He didn’t cry out. Just dropped like a sack and stared at me like I’d confirmed something for him.

The second took steel through the collarbone. He fell slower. The crowd recoiled, not in panic—but like they were shifting to let something else pass through. Like I’d just cracked the shell on a ritual they didn’t expect me to interfere with.

I kept moving. Toward the water. Toward where the old man had gone under.

Toward the one they called back from the deep. I didn’t know if I was saving anyone. Didn’t know if I’d just declared war. But I knew this: If I stood still one more time, I’d never sleep again. I moved past the wounded without looking down.

They didn’t chase. They didn’t beg. One held his knife like a dying oath, the other just bled into the mud like he’d done it before.

The crowd closed again behind me. No screams. No gunfire.

Just the soft pressure of people rearranging around violence—like they’d expected it, and now they were making room for what came next.

The killer was still near the shoreline, bare-chested, blood drying on his forearms like paint left too long in the sun. He didn’t flinch. Just watched me approach, eyes unreadable.

I slowed. Gun low, but still in hand.

“You don’t need to do this,” I said, half to him, half to the air.

He turned, calm as ever, like he’d been waiting for me—not surprised, not angry. But disappointed.

“They were giving him back,” he said. Voice low, almost gentle. “You turned it into a rescue.”

Behind him, the water stirred again.

Fins and black eyes

Slow, deliberate.

The delta devils hadn’t left.

They were still circling, like sentinels. Or judges.

“You can’t stop what’s already fed,” he said. “You can only choose not to see it.”

I scanned the water. Just the same dark fins sliding along the current, waiting.

The crowd didn’t rush. Didn’t scatter. But I could feel them changing.

The hush of awe thinning into the kind of tension that comes before a verdict.

I wasn’t a lawman to them anymore. I was an interruption.

I took another step, boots finding waterline.

“I didn’t come here to let another man vanish under the current,” I said.

He tilted his head, a quiet gesture of mourning or pity—I couldn’t tell which.

“The river doesn’t take what it doesn’t recognize.”

And then, behind him, the water broke.

A tail.

A mouth.

One of the bulls breached—just enough to remind me they were watching too. Close. Close enough.

I held my breath. One step further, and I wasn’t saving anyone.

I was offering myself up. And then it hit me. He had it wrong.

All that blood on the riverboat, the chain-walk, the theatrical return—none of it had settled the air. The water still stirred. The crowd hadn’t breathed. The sharks still circled like the offering hadn’t landed.

Because it hadn’t. The perfect offering wasn’t on the deck. It hadn’t screamed or begged or walked into the Delta.

It had spoken.

The soothsayer.

The interpreter.

The one who knew the pattern, who remembered what the rest had forgotten.

And the killer had struck him like an executioner, not a vessel. Thrown him like trash, not tribute. The water wasn’t calm because it had been fed. It was calm because it was waiting to be corrected.

I looked at the killer again, and for the first time, he looked unsure.

Not shaken. But there was something in his posture—shoulders slightly lowered, like a man who’d rehearsed a role and suddenly realized he’d been handed the wrong script.

“You weren’t the chosen,” I said, quietly. “You were the knife.”

His eyes flicked to the water, then to the crowd. And for a moment, I swear—just a flicker—there was fear in him.

I fired twice. No warnings this time.

Center mass—best I could manage with a half-blind aim and the flames throwing shadows like ghosts across the reeds.

The first hit dropped him to a knee. The second spun him, but didn’t keep him down. Adrenaline did the rest.He didn’t cry out.

He just turned and waded in. Behind him, the water bubbled. The fins drew closer. They weren't circling they were Converging.

The crowd began to murmur—not panic, not prayer. More like the start of recognition. The debt was wrong and unpaid. I was standing between the mistake and the reckoning.

Someone shouted in a dialect I didn’t catch. Another threw mud—wet, heavy, sticking to my badge like a curse. A boy no older than twelve held a broken bottle like he’d been handed a blade by his father.

I counted the rounds I had left and knew they weren’t enough. Not for this many bodies, or with kids in the barrel-sights.

The air was thick with belief. And belief makes men act when fear never could.

I backed toward the dock, gun low, but not out. I wasn’t going to die there—but I wasn’t going to shoot through children to get out either.

The spawning was complete.

A frenzy of blood, bay water and blood gold. A hush moving through the crowd like smoke. No one spoke. Words weren’t needed here. The pattern had arrived at its next mark.

The killer—if that’s still what he was—lifted the old man in his arms. He carried the old man with care, as if bearing a relic or completing a rite.

He didn’t look back. He walked into the reeds, slow and certain, the skulls whispered to him.

In another timeline, another flood season he’d walked them before. The faces might change. The names fade, the clothes rot, the weapons switch hands—but the roles stay the same.

The one who carries. The one who’s given. The one who watches and leaves with nothing but memory.

I wasn’t stopping a ritual. I was watching it reset. The Delta doesn’t forgive. It remembers.