Orleans Read online

  I ignore her question. Mama saved my life, just to throw it away again. Now she got her sights on Baby Girl.

  I got to play this right if we gettin’ out of here okay. What I need be time to think. “Ain’t no miracle,” I tell her. I drop my arm, let the sling take the baby’s weight. I be reaching for my knife.

  “Fen, girl, what you doing? This a house of the Lord,” Mama say. I see her face go hard when she look at my burnt-up arms, and she cluck her tongue. I turn my arm out at the elbow, let her see how she ain’t never gonna get another pint from me again. The wounds done healed and kept me safe from other needles, but safe be a relative thing.

  Her face go sour, but then she laugh. “You was strong, girl. Strong like your Mama Gentille. I thought you was something special, ’til you let that man use you like that. Let him take away your power. Now look at you, underfed with some bastard whelp in your arms. Fen, Fen, Fen. You could have been mambo after me.” She shake her head and turn away.

  This be the woman behind the freesteader nursery? I know what she doing to them kids. I spit to get the bile outta my throat. It land on the bare wood planks with a smack. Mama Gentille recoil in disgust.

  “You lose your manners,” she drawl, and cut me a look that once upon a time I’da tried hard to dodge.

  “I ain’t never been your girl, Mama Gentille,” I tell her. “I just been your slave.”

  Mama Gentille smile and use her wide shoe to smear my spit on the floor. “Now, Fen, we talked about this. There ain’t no slaves in Orleans. Only them as know they place, and them what’s got to be told.” She say the last word with emphasis, and it take a lot to keep me standing right there, two feet from her, instead of trying to run.

  “Now.” She clap her hands. “Sit down. The second service be about to begin.” She return to the pulpit, and Brother William bring out a big chair woven from dried vines. She settle herself and start singing.

  One thing about Mama Gentille, she ain’t no Christian woman, but she something, all right. She talk to spirits the way them Ursulines pray to they crucified god, but Mama’s spirits, or loas, help her get her way like I ain’t never seen other gods do. Mama be a true priestess, a mambo.

  I look around and everyone be swaying in they seats, all except the smuggler. Slowly, slowly, the drums start to rise and Mama take off her turban, letting her hair swing down. Her hair be long and black like she got Indian blood in her, it so shiny and thick. Brother William take that button-up shirt off and I can see his ribs and the needle marks on his arms. He and Henrietta spread out and Mama Gentille start to say something, but my ears be full of the sound of my own heartbeat now. I know what she be doing even before Henrietta jerk to the center of the circle. Mama worship something between spirits and gods. She can bring them loas down from the air into a body. I seen it when I been with her. I ain’t never wanted to see it again.

  Henrietta come out to the center of they raggedy circle and sweep her arms down to the floor, then up to the sky. She be moaning when she do it, and it got a rhythm, the same rhythm coming from the drums, from the swaying, from Mama Gentille. I be scared now like I ain’t been in years.

  Mama take blood from children for selling and trading. She use folks up gentlelike, for years, ’til they run dry. Then she give them to her loas. Them loas climb up and ride a body the way some folks ride a horse or donkey. They climb inside and take over, use a body to walk the earth. Henrietta about to be ridden by a god.

  I can’t move. Incense be thick in the room now, and I be caught up in the trance like everybody else. It hard not to watch, like seeing a snake in front of you about to strike. Behind her pulpit, Mama Gentille smile, big and wide. She rise up and sway her hips left and right. She the mambo in this house and she be in charge of everything, and everyone.

  Mama Gentille run her ring-covered fingers down her plump brown arms, shaking her hips as she dance. It give me a shiver to see it. For all the folks she done bled, nobody ever done bled Mama. She say that why she such a powerful mambo now. When I burnt my own arms, she seen it as a sign of power. She think I been something special. A daughter, or an heir. But then she gave me to the gentleman, I guess to see what I would do. I didn’t fight him, though. He used me up and I ran away.

  I shake my head to clear it, and look around. I ain’t a little kid no more. I learned how to fight. Across the floor, Henrietta be stalking around, proud as a peacock. She strut past Mama Gentille, who reach beneath the altar and pull out a bowl of stew. She call to Henrietta’s loa, “Ibo Lele,” and hand him a bowl of stew. Henrietta smile wide, so wide her face almost split in two. I guess Ibo Lele be pleased.

  This a bad night for being here, with the spirits swinging low to earth this close to All Saints’ Day. I feel myself moving forward, drawn to the circle, drawn by the drugs in the food and the incense in the air. By the power. I try to fight it, but even Mama Gentille going under, pulled down by her own spell.

  Mama’s head jerk up, her eyes roll back in her head, and she boom in a voice like thunder. I try to run, but my eyes be closing. My legs feel heavy unless they moving to the beat, my body weighed down unless I be dancing. So easy to let go, to let the spirit ride me. When the loas come up over you, it take you out of yourself, out of Orleans for a little while, and it feel so good. I ain’t felt good in a long time. I want to lay this baby on the floor and let the spirit take me. That be all I gotta do. Just let Lydia’s baby go.

  11

  THE RAIN WAS COMING DOWN SOFT AND warm. The smell of heated pavement rose up, wet and mineral, from the broken road. Daniel kept his eyes on the ground. The humidity fogged his face mask and the rain dotted his vision with tiny magnifying droplets, giving him a sense of vertigo. Evening was falling fast. He adjusted his goggles for lower light, his breath heaving like a bellows in his ears. The Superdome was ahead of him, where Poydras Street was partially blocked by a wall of debris. According to the datalink, he needed to go west of the Dome, into Uptown. But the Superdome was an icon of old New Orleans—the defining silhouette of the city’s skyline, the sports stadium that had housed thousands of football games and concerts in its heyday. Now that he was here, he couldn’t help but take a look.

  A causeway of broken concrete had been laid out like a dam, a crossing for the earliest funeral parades. At LaSalle Street, the young river that was the far end of Poydras became a pond. He could see the dull grayish sheen of the water up ahead as he came down the road. And then he saw the memorials, like faces of the dead peering up out of the water—masques made for Mardi Gras of years past sunken beneath the surface as if pulled under by mermaids or undines.

  The Drowned Dead, names painted lovingly along the cheeks and brows on the masques, slowly deteriorated beneath the muck. It accounted for the milky quality of the water leaking from the pond into the river stream. Daniel had mistaken it for silt of some sort, minor pollution. But it was the face paint and the decorations of these memorial masques, washed away by the gentle lapping of the dammed pond.

  Thirty thousand people had huddled inside the Superdome after the first of the big storms. Katrina turned the Dome into a refugee camp. Lorenzo turned it into a morgue. Jesus turned it into a tomb.

  INQUIRY: Number of dead buried in the Dome?

  RESPONSE: The New Orleans Superdome can seat up to seventy-two thousand people. Number of dead unknown.

  The street was wide and exposed. Daniel was grateful that the sun had set, leaving a dim twilight through the fading rain. He had no desire to run into any of the locals. He reached the causeway, the peaked tumble of rocks and debris that blocked the flow of water and lead across Poydras to the ramps of the Dome. Daniel looked at the footing, the tiny slides where the rocks were unevenly stacked. Marking his path, he hauled himself up to the crest. The path was surprisingly even on top. For a moment, he could picture the long line of mourners two-stepping beside the shrouded bodies.

  Wide enough for a parade, he thought.

  The Dome loomed above him like a p
oached egg in a cup. The top was shattered, tapped by a giant spoon. He picked his way across the bridge to where the old wheelchair ramps led up to one of the double-wide entrances.

  “It weren’t no parade,” the smuggler had told him when Daniel first commented on it, six months ago in that small bayfront divers’ bar on the Chesapeake. “They started piling bodies to keep down the rot. The Dome had generators and air-conditioning back then, so they ran it high like a refrigerator and kept bringing them in.”

  “It wasn’t done second line, like New Orleans used to do?” Daniel had asked. He had seen footage of the funerals, tearful black-draped crowds on the way up the slope, cheerful dancing mourners on the way back. It was this second line of partiers, often strangers joining the dance, that gave the marches their name. They carried feathered umbrellas and were led by jazz bands. One news story had shown a photograph of a woman, mascara running with tears as they carried her husband and child into the Dome. The headline had read RESILIENT—THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN. The woman was quoted as saying Jesus had risen on the third day, and for New Orleans, the third day was coming.

  “Hell, no,” the smuggler had cursed. “That was a show for the reporters, something the mayor and the governor fixed up. By the end of it, there weren’t no coffins or nothing, just bodies, wrapped in a sheet if they had it, and when the bodies got too high, they sealed the doors and built a ramp around the building like this.” He waved his hand in the air in a zigzag motion.

  Daniel saw the ramp now, a pebbled sort of beige concrete that rose in a graceful series of slopes up the side of the Dome.

  “You see, they couldn’t use the door anymore,” the smuggler had explained. “Bodies. All the way to the top, bodies.”

  No one held burials here today. “They just dump ’em in the swamps now,” the smuggler had said. “Let the river take ’em.” Practical, Daniel thought. He thought of the funeral he held for his brother, Charlie. No parades or bright music there. Few flowers, fewer people. After burying so many Fever victims, funerals had become smaller. More affordable.

  What am I doing here? Daniel asked himself. But he knew the answer. Daniel was here to save the world. So no one else would have to lose their little brother to this disease. But such ambitions needed support, research, evidence. And then there was also morbid curiosity. Orleans was a necropolis, a city of the dead. He wanted to see it for what it was.

  He had gone no more than a quarter of the way around the Dome when it drifted toward him, above the hum of the wind, from somewhere inside the Dome. Singing. Girls’ voices, or maybe young boys. High and sweet, like a Christmas choir. Daniel froze. Was it possible that his encounter suit had already been compromised? That he’d contracted Delta Fever? That he was hallucinating and this venture into Orleans would be the death of him? Then he saw the lights up ahead, so small they might have been fireflies or a sprinkle of powder on a length of black velvet.

  The Dome was as wide as a city block, and while the sidewalks had once been broad to accommodate the crowds of concertgoers and sports fans, they were now broken and shadowed, treacherous to cross. Daniel dialed his goggles up and hugged the bulging side of the Dome.

  Just at the edge of the building’s curve were a pair of double doors. A flare of little lights, bright green dots, danced along his vision, and he adjusted his goggles again. The battered doors had been pulled apart, rust settled into the scratches. They were standing wide open, and a line of people was flowing inside. They couldn’t see him, he was sure. But the candles they held, tall white columns clutched in both hands before them, and their few torches flared in his night-vision goggles. He blinked, dazzled. Women. Wearing simple gowns of white cloth, veils of the same material draped over their hair like brides, like ghosts. And in their wake, a line of young girls carrying flowers.

  Daniel’s heart leapt in his chest. His mind staggered, wrestling with what he was seeing. In the heart of a dead, diseased city, here was a group of women and little girls. They bore no weapons, only flowers and candles. They were defenseless, vulnerable. And yet they survived.

  A second thought occurred to him. These women and girls had to be Delta Fever carriers, every last one of them. You could not live in Orleans without contracting some form of the disease. And here he was, with a weapon in his bag that could kill them all. Daniel began to sweat beneath the skin of his encounter suit. He’d thought the entire city was a tomb, but Orleans was clearly very much alive.

  INQUIRY: Are there nuns in Orleans?

  Daniel shook his head. The question sounded wild, even to him. But the datalink did not judge.

  RESPONSE: Historically, there were several orders of nuns within the city limits of New Orleans. Most famously, the Ursuline Sisters, overseers of the Ursuline Academy, the oldest Catholic school in the United States. When the Holy See pulled its resources out of the Gulf Coast, the Ursulines were the only sisterhood that remained. Their motto: Serviam, I will serve. Current status of the Ursulines is unknown.

  Daniel took a deep breath. Serviam. That is what he was doing here, too. But he couldn’t let himself be seen, even by a group of nuns who clearly had more bravery than the rest of the Roman Catholic Church combined. He looked at his chronometer. He had been in the heart of the city for almost four hours. Daniel steadied himself and leaned back against the rough, pebbled wall of the Superdome. He would wait for the nuns to leave.

  • • •

  As the evening moved toward midnight, he heard the nuns leaving the building. When the last candle disappeared into the night, he knew he should leave, too. But he couldn’t simply walk away. Where common sense left off, curiosity stepped in. As a scientist, it was the fuel that drove him.

  Daniel retraced the nuns’ path, back to the entrance of the Dome. The doors had been shut, but they hadn’t sealed closed, thanks to the crowbars that had originally pried them open. He turned up his night vision, peeled back the door with a loud scrape on the pavement, and entered.

  The night-vision goggles were not enough. Even they needed a light source to draw from, no matter how slight. Daniel pulled a glow stick from his pocket, adjusted his vision, and snapped it on, flooding the corridor with a sickly green light. He found an archway leading into the stadium down a flight of wide stairs, and his footsteps echoed hollowly. As he entered the stadium proper, he gasped.

  A cool smattering of starlight filtered in ever so faintly from the gash in the ceiling of the Dome, but what it illuminated was no lye pit, no holocaustic vision of piled corpses. He turned in a slow circle, noting every row, every seat in his range of vision. Occupied. By bones.

  Tens of thousands of seats, row upon row, and on each plastic chair, a carefully stacked set of bones, with the skull on top. A second skull rested before bones on the floor beneath every seat. Flowers had been placed at the base of each skeleton, a cross painted on the forehead of each skull, like a marking of ash at the start of Lent. The Ursuline Sisters had turned the Superdome into a catacomb.

  Daniel sat down heavily on the stairs and hung his head. He did not dare walk down the aisles for fear of disturbing the bones. The flowers were fading where he sat, but he imagined somewhere they were fresh. How long must it have taken? You could not replace a hundred forty thousand flowers in a single night.

  Below, in the green sweep of the field, more bones were piled. Daniel shivered inside his encounter suit. He felt like a grave robber in an ancient pyramid and wondered briefly if there were curses laid on this place, too. He laughed to himself. The sound echoed loudly around him, then faded as the enormous stadium swallowed the noise.

  He patted his coat pocket with the vials inside, his own Pandora’s box. How many more Orleanians could it kill? Daniel’s body ached as the enormity of his journey overcame him. It was too much. He turned and remounted the stairs, going back the way he had come.

  Where were the lye vats, he wondered, that had allowed the nuns to strip those drowned and fevered corpses into gleaming white piles of bone? He scraped t
he door shut and made his way across the broken pavement to Poydras Street. Despite his night vision, he lost his footing and splashed into the little pond where the masques for the dead lay submerged. Cursing silently, he hurried on, hoping he hadn’t been heard. The city rose and fell around him, scorched brick, shattered plaster, and gleaming shards of ancient broken glass.

  He hurried into the shadows of a nearby building, an ancient parking structure, its levels collapsing one on the other, a layer of algae and thick black mildew blooming across the face of it. Behind him, the street was empty. He scurried on, hauling his bag behind him, terror rising in him like he’d never felt before. For all the risks he took in the lab, handling virulent strains of Fever, Daniel had never been afraid. But this was not a laboratory, or even a civilized city. It was more alien than any place he’d ever been. He would return to the building with the tree in its center, take his jetskip, and go home.

  He fled.

  • • •

  Half an hour later, Daniel could see the ruined building that held his jetskip in the distance. He would sleep, just long enough to handle the trip back across the Wall. Then he would go. He took a deep breath to steady himself and picked his way out into the broken lane.

  “Run, run, run, fast as you can,” a voice said softly behind him.

  Daniel froze, and they were on him. Leper or no leper, they grabbed him, dragged him down. Not innocent young girls with flowers, not nuns in veils and white dresses. These were men. Large, scarred men, draped in coats over thick canvas overalls.

  Broken teeth gleamed in the moonlight, half hidden by rough beards and twisted leers. Chains wrapped around Daniel’s gloved wrists, snagging his datalink, pinching him even through the encounter suit. He yelled in fear, praying that the ragged leper disguise would do its work and save him. But it did not.