Orleans Read online

  But Daniel ain’t behind me. I turn around and see he stopped and watching one of them Ursuline girls head toward the hospital tent. Maybe it be a shock, seeing a girl that young, looking so clean and innocent in all this mess, but it ain’t a reason to slow down. I got half a mind to leave him. Instead, I walk back and snap my fingers in his face.

  “Hey, man, what you doing?”

  Daniel look pale, like he seen a ghost. “Who is that?”

  I shrug. “One of the Ursuline nuns’ girls. Work at the hospital tent.” Sure enough, she be ducking inside. A nun in full habit come out, white dress and veil glowing it be so clean, even by lamplight. Daniel blink like a bird stunned by a snake.

  “I saw them,” he say. “At the Superdome.”

  “Course you did. That be what they do, other than try to run a school, heal the sick, and raise the dead. They nuns, man. Ain’t no different on your side, right?”

  Daniel look at me real slow, and for a minute I think he be another Lydia, wanting to go into that tent. But I ain’t letting him.

  “Look, man, ain’t nothing but the sick and dying in there. And the nuns. Nothing worth seeing, even for a tourist. Come on, it be getting dark.”

  Daniel hesitate. “They still try to save them? After everything?”

  “After what? You think we be animals, just leaving folks to die?” I snap. “Well, sometimes it be that way. But not always. You ain’t got a tribe to care for you, there be the nuns.”

  Daniel don’t be listening to me, though. “Maybe we should—” he start to say.

  “Do what you want. You on your own, then,” I tell him, and walk away.

  Hard to believe I been here just a couple days ago with Lydia, Harney, and the rest of them, and now they all captured or dead. Look like boys be fools on both sides of the Wall. They love the Market and they love looking for trouble. But I got more sense than that.

  Seems Daniel do, too. He come jogging after me just like Harney. Maybe he won’t die out here after all. If he learn to listen to me.

  19

  THE MARKET HAD SEEMED ENDLESS FROM THE inside, but after the hospital tent, it stopped abruptly. Daniel scanned the empty road beyond the Market. The pristine façades of the old French Quarter stared back. All thoughts of the nuns and their work, what data they could add to his own research, evaporated in the sudden silence.

  INQUIRY: Last known status of New Orleans French Quarter architecture.

  RESPONSE: Restoration to historical buildings of the French Quarter began after Hurricane Isaiah, utilizing reinforced composites designed to withstand a Category 4 storm.

  Daniel stared at the buildings, with their balconies of intricate ironwork, the low sidewalk of short wooden planks laid alongside the muddy road. From the look of it, the composites had worked.

  “Who lives here?” he asked Fen as she skirted the buildings, heading across the remains of St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square.

  “A-Positives. They be a strong tribe here on the water. We got no business with them. Like in Shangri-Lo, folks got to come through here to shop the Market, but once they out, they best keep moving.” She quickened her pace, thumbs hooked beneath her backpack straps. “Come on. We still got a ways to go.”

  They wove through the old French Quarter with its silent, watchful façades. “Where is everyone?” Daniel asked.

  “They there,” Fen said. Glancing around, Daniel thought he saw the gleam of eyes pulling back from an open doorway. The rain had stopped and the clouds were drifting apart, revealing patches of stars.

  Fen pointed with her chin as they came to a wide stream, thick with broken pieces of concrete and rebar. “We got to go that way.”

  Daniel nodded and followed her up the street. The Quarter gave way to empty, shattered storefronts and the corpses of office buildings. They passed under a portico of rusting iron grillwork and the echoing steps of Gallier Hall, with its commanding staircase and stone columns now littered with dust and debris. Flooding had turned the steps into a dock for rescue boats. Craning his neck, Daniel could just make out the high water line marked around the pillars in mold.

  Leaving the business district, they came to the edge of a broad lake. The empty hulk of an ancient skyscraper crumbled to Daniel’s right. He was struck by the silence and the darkness. It felt like he, Fen, and the baby were the last three people on earth. But then he remembered those eyes in the doorway. The city was watching.

  As they picked their way around the lake and onto a smaller road, he dialed up his night-vision goggles, wondering how Fen got along so well in the faint starlight. A quarter of a mile down the road, the remains of the interstate curved above them like the bones of an ancient whale. Fen sped up as they moved under the echoing expanse of the freeway. He followed close behind her, avoiding the black shadows of concrete pillars and rusted automobiles.

  On the other side of the freeway, they returned to the remains of St. Charles Avenue, now a grassy meridian between two shallow streams that had once been roads. On the concrete shores, faded storefronts mingled with vine-choked apartment buildings. Fen stuck to the grassy lane in the center of the avenue, well away from the decaying stores, rotting houses, and whatever they might hide. Neutral ground, she called it. Daniel had read about the concept in history books. In the early days of the Louisiana Purchase, when the French residents of the Quarter clashed with the Americans in Uptown, these grassy areas were neutral territory. He wondered if tribes honored that these days, or if it was merely a name.

  They moved into the Garden District, where the city had gone to seed, a cancerous jungle. Lush garden courtyards had burst like tumors, swallowing their outer buildings whole. Entire families had perished in some of those buildings, drowned in their attics or consumed by Fever in their beds. Their remains fed the madly flourishing bougainvillea and morning glory vines, even in early winter.

  The streets were quiet, waiting. Daniel shuddered. Orleans was a living city of the dead.

  • • •

  Half an hour later, Fen turned off the street toward a sagging building that looked like it had once been grand and white. Through his night-vision goggles, Daniel could see it clearly—an antebellum structure that had been flattened by Mother Nature’s gargantuan fist.

  “We can rest here,” Fen said.

  “Are you kidding? This place is falling down on itself,” he hissed at her.

  Fen cut him a look that made him take a step backward. “Fine. Then you choose.”

  Daniel looked around. There were so many ruins here, so few standing structures. He pointed toward a large two-story building that was somehow still standing at the intersection a quarter block away. Even the windows, geometric shapes in a modern stucco slab, were intact. “How about that place across the street?”

  “Oh, perfect,” she said, and he almost missed the sarcasm. “It look solid, don’t it? You’d think a solid building already be full up of the tribe that live here. But maybe it ain’t. And maybe that ain’t a spotter on the roof looking at your fool self and thinking he gonna send somebody over for our blood before we come for his.”

  Daniel blanched. There was movement on the roof. How had he missed that, when he was the one with enhanced night vision? And there was something else he had missed.

  “Wait,” he said, but Fen was already clambering through the tumbled brick wall of her chosen hideout. He followed as quickly as he could without tripping, and they disappeared into the dank, slanting building.

  “Was that a McDonald’s?” he whispered into the dark. His goggles whirred, adjusting to the deeper shadows inside the building. It was as bad as he had expected inside. A few yards into the foyer, the floor gave way to a crater that took up most of the first floor. An explosion of vines and weeds burst from the hole, like intestines spilling from a knife wound. If there had been walls before, now there were only fallen beams, some shored up by the collapsed ceiling. Fen stopped just inside the front door and tucked herself into a corner to feed the bab
y.

  “What are you doing?” Daniel asked.

  “What it look like? We cross that intersection and we be in AB territory—La Bête Sauvage’s ground. I ain’t going in there with a hungry baby that gonna cry and tell them where we be.” She gave him a hard look, laser sharp even in the gloom. “I feed her, she fall asleep, and we move fast enough, maybe we make it to the Professors okay.”

  Daniel shifted uneasily. “Can’t we just wait until morning?”

  Fen unwrapped the baby from her sling and cradled her in her lap while she mixed a bottle of formula. “You saw the spotter on the McDonald’s. You think they gonna let us stay here all night? If you tired, we rest a few minutes, but not much more.”

  Daniel paced, his nerves getting the better of him. He needed food and rest. He needed to get out of here. The floor creaked alarmingly under his boots, and he shuffled quickly to the corner opposite Fen. The ground felt firmer here, the edges of the building holding together better than the center. He dropped carefully into a squat. “A McDonald’s in Orleans. That’s crazy,” he said.

  Fen shook her head. “You ain’t left the planet, man. Course we got McDonald’s. Starbucks, too, in some places. But it ain’t like they open for business.”

  “Yeah.” Daniel pulled a tube of whitish paste from one of his pockets. If she was going to feed the baby, he might as well have something, too. The baby was snuggled in Fen’s arms now, and the girl looked as content as the child. Strange to seem so comfortable in such a dangerous place. But then again, the whole city was hostile. Daniel supposed you had to take your moments when they came.

  He rolled up his sleeve and shoved the tube into a port in the arm of his suit.

  “What it taste like?” Fen asked.

  “Sorry?” The nutrient tubes were a high-calorie paste in a sterile casing that fed directly into his bloodstream by osmosis. Not exactly the same as eating, but it was that or starve.

  “McDonald’s,” Fen said. “I know they made food, but what it like? I always been wanting to try a Big Mac.”

  Daniel smiled. “It’s not like . . .” Not like what? Other burgers? “Do you have cows down here?”

  “My tribe don’t, but I hear some tribes do.”

  “So you’ve never had beef?”

  “Just seafood and wild pig,” she said. “What beef taste like?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. Different from pork, but more like pork than fish. But a Big Mac is kind of its own thing. Sweet and hot, with two patties of ground meat, two slices of cheese, and this sauce that’s supposed to be special, but I think it’s just thousand island dressing.”

  The girl was staring at him with a little smile on her face. He blushed. “That made no sense, did it? You’ve never had cheese, have you? Or salad dressing.”

  She shook her head. “Sound like a rich place you come from. Maybe Baby Girl be having her first Big Mac for me one day.” Fen smiled down at the baby as she drained the last of the bottle.

  Daniel rifled through his coat pockets and found one last candy bar. Fen was watching him through half-closed eyes.

  “Here.” He tossed it to her.

  Fen reached for it, smiling, and tucked it away.

  “Snickers be good,” she said. “Used to be I got them all the time for my birthday, for Christmas, too.”

  “No beef, but you’ve had a Snickers?” Daniel asked, surprised.

  “I had a sponsor family in the States. Back when that used to be popular. They actually be adopting kids in the beginning, but by the time I been born, ain’t no one allowed out the Delta ’cause of the Fever. So they be sending me care packages and clothes and whatnot. And I be sending them pictures through the mission what started the program. Father John be the priest who ran it. He weren’t afraid of the Fever and he stayed to help.”

  She cleared her throat. “That be a long time ago. His church be right at the border where the gates used to be for volunteers and tourists, like you.” She chuckled when she said it, poking fun at him.

  “He be a good man, Father John, and he make sure I always get my candy, and my pictures be scanned and sent to my people. The Coopers, 15527 West Arlington, San Diego, California. I remember the e-mail address if I think about it, too.”

  Daniel plugged a second nutrient pack into his suit and resealed his pockets. “It must have been hard growing up like that,” he said. “Seeing what life was like on the other side.”

  Fen shrugged. “Ain’t it be like that everywhere? Either you got it or somebody else do.”

  Daniel tried to get comfortable, resting his back against the spongy wall. “I suppose.”

  “It be true,” Fen said. “You seen Orleans—how different can it be over the Wall?”

  Daniel blinked. So different, he didn’t know where to begin. “Well . . . for one thing, nobody’s hunted me for my blood.”

  Fen snorted. “Yeah, we got special circumstances here in the Delta.”

  “But they did round up people with the Fever and keep them in hospital camps,” Daniel explained. “Not so different, in a way. But there’s so much more that’s good. Schools and grocery stores and farms and amusement parks and movies.”

  “Amusement parks?”

  Daniel smiled. “It’s a place full of rides and crappy food that you go to for fun. You can ride roller coasters . . .” He trailed off, seeing her blank look. “It’s kind of like a train that goes up and down a track.”

  “Where it take you?” Fen asked.

  “Um . . . nowhere. It’s just for fun. It’s supposed to be scary and fun.”

  Fen shifted the baby in her arms and lay down on her side. “That be different from Orleans, then, for sure. We got scary, but it ain’t no fun.”

  She closed her eyes and fell silent. Daniel looked at her—that young face and those terrible burns on her arms. In the Outer States, those scars would be repaired with plastic surgery. Fen should be in high school, not toting a baby around this nightmare of a city. Daniel shivered and looked away from the strange girl. He felt far from sleep, and very far from home.

  20

  “DANIEL. DANIEL, WAKE UP.” I KEEP BABY GIRL close to me and creep over to tap him on the foot. We been here less than fifteen minutes, and now there be a light coming in through the broken window. Firelight.

  “Daniel!” He stir and suddenly sit upright. “Shhh . . .” I put a finger over my lips. He look around, nodding that he understand. I motion him to the front wall along where I been sleeping. “Come see.”

  Normally, I be giving him a hard time for being a tourist, but this be something special. Something I be real glad to see, too.

  He shuffle over on his butt, keeping low like me. There be an opening in the wall that used to be a window, but the glass be long gone, and now it be open to the street below.

  “Christ, what is that?” Daniel ask, and it sound funny through his filter, no expression, just words.

  “All Saints’ Day,” I tell him. “Hurricane season be over today, and we still here.”

  In the street, riding toward us on lean brown horses, come an All Saints’ krewe. They be decked out in all they finery—owl- and pheasant-feather headdresses, chains and bracelets made of shiny metal and glass mounded high on they wrists, and necks with strand after strand of old Mardi Gras beads, purple, green, and yellow, all sparkling and shining in the torchlight. The krewe be riding, holding they flambeaux high up to the sky. Like a thundercloud of fire, rolling toward us, they be singing and shouting at the clouds as they go by.

  “Who are they?” Daniel whisper. I bounce Baby Girl in my arms.

  “Anybody. Everybody. They wear masks over they eyes to keep from knowing. All Saints’ krewes and the Market be the only times tribes come together. Folks just show up in they costumes, ready to ride.”

  The krewe outside be a big one, almost twenty riders. They wheel around in a circle at the widest point of the road and thrust they torches toward the center of the ring, moving to a trot as the ring shi
ft shape and turn into a spiral ’stead of a sphere. Now they be like a hurricane, swirling and swirling, the smallest rider in the center at the eye.

  The sound grow louder. I hear them and I mouth the words. “Katrina, Isaiah, Lorenzo. Olga, Laura, Paloma.” Up and down, over and over, they be going faster and faster. “Jesus, Jesus, Hay-SEUS!” The Hurricane riders be stretching wider and wider in the street, and then they burst apart, horses and riders shooting off in every direction, splashing through the streams and trampling over the neutral ground.

  Some of they flambeaux go out, they be moving so fast. And they shout, hoot, holler, and I got to hold my tongue not to join them out loud. “Nous sommes ici! Nous sommes ici! Encore! Encore! Encore! Nous restons ici!”

  Daniel be looking at me like he never seen me before. I want to laugh, but we got to stay quiet. All Saints’ or no, it won’t do to let them know we here. Maybe the riders ain’t gonna bother us, but there be others that might.

  “It be a good sign,” I explain to Daniel as the torchlight fade and the riders gallop into the night. One rider play a trumpet. That old tune, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “Only time of year someone be fool enough to blow a horn like that. Ain’t nobody hunting a Saints’ Day krewe. Bad luck.” The riders be gone now, but you can hear they song farther up the road.

  “I don’t understand,” Daniel said.

  I sigh and curl myself back into my corner. Daniel sit beside to listen. I wish Cinnamon Jones be here to tell it right, but I do my best. “In the beginning, Orleans be like this special place, back when it been New Orleans. Everybody knew about it. We tell the story all the time. It been beautiful back then, and there weren’t no Wall, neither. It been part of Louisiana, and the whole Delta still been part of the United States. But then them hurricanes came, Rita and Katrina. And they break pieces off the land like eating cake. And they still rebuilding when Isaiah hit, and he ain’t the end. Laura and Paloma come along, and they be calling them the Two Sisters, ’cause they dance right on up the coast and drop skirts of rain on New Orleans like girls knocking over glass figurines with they spinning and twirling. And it almost over for the Delta. But the Government say they going to help us, they going to fix everything.” I look up, suddenly shy. I been talking like one of Daddy’s schoolbooks or Lydia, but I don’t sound as good as they do. Did. Most likely Daniel done heard it all before, but he still be listening, so I carry on.