Orleans (5 page)

Lydia groan and fall to the ground. I do my best to hook my arms around her and drag her to the brush. It slow going, and seem like we gonna be caught, but they ain’t coming for us, and I wonder if this hunt be for the O-Negatives. It don’t matter to me as long as the Devil ain’t come for the two of us today.

• • • 

“It gonna be all right,” I say to Lydia. I been pulling her along, wrapped in the sheet I thought I’d be using for the baby. But there ain’t gonna be no baby if we ain’t safe. “It gonna be all right,” I say again. Lydia nod, her forehead beaded with sweat, and I worry again about them dogs. O-Neg hunt or not, they’d be after us. Because now there be blood on the sheet coming from between Lydia’s legs. We still not safe enough. I slide her through the woods ’til we get to a protected place. Protected as can be in these thin trees, with a little pond of water and enough moonlight to see by.

I lay her out on the cleanest part of the sheet, and she look so weak lying there. She don’t even be moaning and crying anymore, just calm, like she asleep. “Fen.” She try to sit up, eyes wide. “Are we there yet?” she ask.

“We here. We at the hospital. We gonna have your baby now,” I tell her. She smile at me. Ain’t been a real hospital in the Delta since before I been born. They all been turned into crypts or tribe houses, and the Ursulines’ tent be more like a morgue than a place where babies be born. Not everybody live in the open like us OPs. We a big enough tribe to care for ourselves, watch our own backs.

Used to be, anyway.

“I’m going to push now,” Lydia say suddenly, and she grip my hand like she gonna break it. She take in a sharp breath and push down.

“Okay, okay, breathe easy,” I tell her, and wish I had a blanket or something to pillow her head with. Instead, I make sure there be no rocks under her head or back. She lie there with no complaint and the contractions hit again. When they come a third time, I let go of her hand and go down to see where the baby be at. Lydia bleeding real bad, and I can’t help but listen for dogs. It too soon for all that blood. All that OP blood.

She reach for me again and I take her hand. I won’t need both hands ’til the baby start to show. I count with her and sing when I remember a song, and tell her them stories she used to be telling me when I been little and scared.

“Once upon a time, there was a magical place called New Orleans . . . There you go. Breathe, two, three, wait. Push. There was magic in the water, magic in the trees, and magic in the people. Two, three, there, I see a head!”

I forget the story ’cause the baby’s head seem so big. It look like a melon pushing out, or a full moon, pale blue in the moonlight and bald. I let go of Lydia’s hand.

“Keep talking,” Lydia whisper. “Please.”

“Um . . . but most magical of all was a woman named Jeanne Marie. Jeanne Marie was—”

“Clever as a clock and pretty as a sunset,” Lydia say. She be smiling, and I smile, too. That always been my favorite part, describing Jeanne Marie.

“She was smart as a whip and pretty as a new moon,” I say. Lydia chuckle, then groan and push again. I hear a gushing sound and the baby come free in my hands, like a storm surge, but the water be mixed with blood and Lydia’s life be tied to the other end, gushing out.

“Wait, Lydia, wait,” I beg, and wipe the baby’s mouth clean, and suck its little nose clear. I hold it up to her so she can see it, but Lydia be looking at me.

“The City takes, Fen,” she say. “I can’t stay here. It’s too much. Too much to change.” She look around at the swamp and the ring of trees that hold out the rest of Orleans. “You’re a fighter. You’ll survive. Promise me you will look after my baby. Give him a better life than this. Teach him to be strong.”

“But—”

“Promise me.
Promise.
” She grip my arm so hard, I almost drop the baby, all slick and wet with Lydia’s blood.

I cry out with pain. “I promise.” She let go, and I hold out the baby and say, “But Lydia, she a girl. A baby girl.”

Lydia look and her eyes light up like the midday sun. “A girl. I was so sure it was a boy.”

And then she dead. Like that. Eyes dull and staring. The baby, cold in the October night, start to cry like she know she at her mama’s funeral. I stare at Lydia and feel like that baby crying for her mama. Only I had something this baby never will. I had Lydia.

I wrap Baby Girl up in the edge of the sheet and cut a section of cloth and the umbilical cord with my cleanest knife. I swaddle her the best I can in her mama’s shroud and take off my shirt to make a sling to carry her. My skin be covered in goose bumps, but I been naked in these woods before. Only a matter of time before what happen once happen again.

I close Lydia’s eyes, roll her up in the sheet, and sit down beside her, waiting for the sun to rise.

5

THE SMELL OF GASOLINE FILLED THE AIR,
sharp and noxious over the deeper stink of diesel fuel. Daniel unplugged the rental truck from the fueling station’s bank of electric chargers. Across from the kiosk of dark green outlets, eighteen-wheelers and cargo trucks idled, waiting to refuel at the fossil tanks. A few old jalopies waited behind the trucks, families crammed in ancient cars, moving east, west, wherever they had heard things were better. Freeways throughout the country were filled with cars like these, broken down on the side of the road, families huddled under blankets, waiting for help that was slow to come. What was so wrong with their homes that they traveled north so many years after the hurricanes had blown away?

Overhead, black clouds threatened more than the current sprinkling of rain. Daniel hurried, dropping the cord to reel itself back into the charger stand. He clambered back into the cab of his pickup just as the rain began in earnest. He turned on his headlights and checked the tarp over the truck bed through his rear window. Everything was secure. Turning back around, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He looked young, like a teenager, instead of his twenty-four years. He looked like his little brother, Charlie. He ran a hand through his dark hair, wiping back the dampness on his forehead that he knew was more than just rain.

“Pull it together, Danny.” He tore his eyes from the mirror. Daniel tried to remember the boy his brother Charlie had been before the Delta Fever set in. The happy kid with a snaggletooth and a love of banana-flavored candy, comic books, and, surprisingly, movies about horses. Danny and Charlie. A nine-year age difference, yet somehow they’d still always been a team. Daniel had been off at school when the Fever swept through Charlie’s class. They never traced the route of the disease. But it didn’t matter how it had arrived, just that it was there.

Daniel had returned home to find his little brother in quarantine, sealed in a white room at a hospital, where he scratched at the floor with bloodied fingers, his scarecrow-thin shoulders shaking, unable to stand. Daniel had asked if he could bring him anything, candy, comics. Charlie had barely been able to speak, but he’d asked for one thing: dirt. He was so hungry and it was the only thing that sounded good anymore.

Daniel knew Charlie hadn’t been hungry for dirt, but for the minerals it could provide, minerals being stripped from his own blood by the Fever. Anemia had ravaged him and iron was only a temporary solution. Daniel had given blood, there had been transfusions, but it would never be enough.

Charlie had died before his eleventh birthday. And Daniel immediately went to work on a cure. How many other Charlies had died since? The Fever seemed unstoppable, but so was he.

He changed his thesis to target Delta Fever specifically. After graduating with multiple degrees, he went to work for the military. They had the best laboratories and access to viral cultures of Delta Fever. Daniel started adapting methods used for cancer therapies at the turn of the century. Retargeted viruses, they were called. A way of invading a disease and altering it so that it attacked itself, or alerted the body to fight back before it could take hold.

It was careful work, retargeting a virus, but he had done it. Daniel had bioengineered a new virus with one purpose—to attack Delta Fever in the bloodstream. It was a subtle invasion that attached a new protein to the infected cells. Like pulling a fire alarm, this new protein signaled the body to attack the infection with everything it had.

At least, that had been the plan.

What actually happened was something much more dangerous. Daniel’s cure for Delta Fever had created an even deadlier strain of the disease. Charlie had taken over a week to die. Daniel’s virus would have killed him in less than twenty-four hours. It was worse than a laboratory mistake. It was a weapon, a time bomb that only killed Delta Fever carriers, which now included every inhabitant of the Delta Coast.

The United States economy was suffering. If the Delta could be recovered, stripped of Delta Fever and harvested for its natural resources—timber, oil, shipping lanes, and more . . . If the military knew about Daniel’s virus, they might very well use it. Genocide in the name of money. And it would be his fault.

His first instinct had been to destroy it, to run his samples through a steam autoclave, a machine designed to cook viruses and bacteria until they were dead. Or he could have drowned the whole batch in bleach. But he hadn’t done it. Daniel had looked at those six tiny vials, each no bigger than his little finger, and seen years of effort, money, time, and determination. And something else: a key. One that could unlock the doorway to a cure. As dangerous as this step was, it was also necessary. Now Daniel was on his way to break through the quarantine, into Orleans.

A line of military trucks barred the entrance onto the freeway, an olive drab caravan of canvas-covered stake beds and flatbeds bearing heavy equipment. Daniel joined a long line of waiting vehicles. Work at the Wall was never done, he had heard. The military employed more and more civilians each year to keep back the swamp, shore up the barricades.

The final truck passed, and at last the line of civilian cars crawled forward, merging onto the four-lane highway. Daniel’s truck came up to speed and the dashboard chimed as it slipped into autodrive. Daniel pulled his foot off the gas and relaxed. He had a long drive ahead of him in one direction. South.

• • • 

PEARLINGTON, MISSISSIPPI
. The interstate sign loomed overhead, clearly visible in Daniel’s headlights now that the rain had stopped. According to the map, this was the last stop for gas and food before the Wall. The best place, a sign on the side of the road said, to turn around. Once upon a time, the country had gone on for almost another hundred miles, but now the Southernmost tip of the United States of America was here in Pearlington. Orleans was forty miles away by the old interstate. It was hidden by the Wall, which acted as both dike and quarantine for this tiny town. Pearlington had been all but erased from the map from storm damage until the Wall was built, forming a break against storm surge and high winds. Then the people rebuilt and stayed, for reasons Daniel could not fathom.

To Daniel’s right lay the Louisiana Delta Region Military Base, the entire state claimed by eminent domain for use by the military. It had been a staging area for rescue and relief operations until twenty years ago. Now, its main purpose was to protect the Wall. Daniel eyed the long, high fence that marked the state line. In the distance, the lights of watchtowers flashed intermittently across the night sky. Then the road turned away. Daniel followed the new freeway left as it dwindled into a two-lane road that stopped in the heart of Pearlington.

The scent of mildew rose up as he drove on. There were houses, a few with porch lights on. Dogs raced along fences as he passed. The street was well lit, and there were clear signs pointing to a cluster of motels along one side of the road.

Then the road stopped. Just stopped. And the smell of mildew grew stronger. Big concrete blockades had been dragged across the street, shored up with sandbags and detritus. Past that, the town continued on, but it was a ghostly reflection of Pearlington. Houses, like the ones he had passed, stood or staggered here, leaning, sagging on their foundations, faded to browns and greens as algae grew up the sides and black mildew devoured the rooftops. A fence had been built here, as well, and it marked the line of demarcation. A half mile south, Daniel knew, was the Wall.

He stared into the darkness at the dead side of town and wondered how people could live so close to their own ghosts. Then he backed up, drove to the nicest-looking of the three motels, and checked in.

“Tourist? Or you got family at the base?” the woman behind the desk asked when he signed the register with a fake name. “We offer a discount to military families visiting loved ones.”

Daniel smiled sheepishly. “No. I’m here for the hunting,” he said. “I hear there’s boar in these wood like we don’t get back home in Virginia.”

The woman snorted. “Got that right. My Herb caught a big old sow out by the fence there some ways east of here. Ate like kings for a week, the whole town did. Course, he’s dead now.” She nodded toward a photograph on the wall behind her, of a solidly built man in hunting gear.