Orleans (12 page)

Wide enough for a parade,
he thought.

The Dome loomed above him like a poached 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 the 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.

12

MY KNEES BEND AND I BE ALMOST TO THE
ground when Baby Girl start to scream. It sound like the Devil himself be screaming. A spike of fear shoot through me like lightning through a dry tree. This be Lydia’s baby. She ain’t mine to give away.

I stand up and pull Baby Girl closer to me, bouncing her as I come awake, her screams clearing my head. She ain’t gonna die here. Ain’t gonna be one of Mama’s babies, sold for blood and sex and magic, any more than I am. So close to the circle now we almost in it, I can see they all be gone, carried away on whatever Mama’s religion done to them. Even Mama be gone, rattling in her throat like to beat a storm down, smiling up at the sky.

When I duck under her arms, nobody try to stop me. Then we in the kitchen of the church, not more than a little room with a chimney hole over the cookstove, open to the night sky. And a door in the back. I open it real slow.

A rope bridge lead from the tree house to a nearby tree and switch back three times to the ground. That be how Mama Gentille made it up here. I tug at the bridge, tied to hooks in the doorway. Easy up, easy down. They can cut it loose if need be, and tie it up again. I go back to the kitchen and find a knife, still smeared with sweet potato and bits of pheasant meat. I don’t bother to wipe it off, just stick it through my belt behind my back, where Baby Girl can’t reach it. Then I tie her on tight and grip both sides of the bridge as I make my way to the ground.

Nobody waiting for us here. If there a guard, he at the rope ladder ’neath the tree. It be true dark now, and I know we be hard to see. If we keep quiet, maybe we get past them. The swaying of the bridge sound natural, like a cradle in the breeze. Then I be off the bridge with dirt under my feet instead of air. It feel good to be on solid ground again, even if the night be cold enough to bite after the warmth of the church.

We lucky to be alive, I know. I don’t take it for granted. I walk a ways from the church, ’til I know no one will hear me, and then I run.

• • • 

It be past midnight when I stop to find another hidey-hole, a foxhole like the one I avoided earlier in favor of the church. I won’t make that mistake again. Mr. Go’s place be better, but I’m like to fall down tired if I keep going.

Baby Girl stop crying, my running done took her breath away. But she still ain’t been fed. Now that I stop running, she catching her breath, maybe to start up hollering again. Quick as I can, I mix another bottle to keep her happy, and it work. She drink and I burp her. She close her eyes. I draw my legs in under the side of the fallen tree, drag some leaves and moss in around us. That’ll make a good diaper for her in the morning. But not now. I be too tired.

I watch her for a while, and then my eyes close, too.