Dead on the Delta

by Stacey Jay

  Instead, I let him put an arm around my shoulders, and pull me close.

  “Is it her?” he whispers, voice pained.

  I nod. “I’m pretty sure. White nightgown with red bows, pink nail polish, and a temporary tattoo of a unicorn on her right arm.”

  “Shit.” He runs a hand up his forehead and back over his shaved head.

  There’s a shushing sound as the rough skin on his palms brushes the hint of stubble, the same sound my fingers made a few hours ago. It makes me want to get even closer, to wrap my arms around his neck and pull his scratchy head down for a kiss.

  But I don’t. I can’t. Now that the kit is in hand, real panic is beginning to set in. The world spins again, and my brain screams in protest. I take a breath and turn it off, promising it a nice, strong toddy when we’ve finished the dirty work. I pull away from Cane and turn back toward the thing in the field, to the thing I will poke and prod and eventually drag within the iron gate for the coroner to collect.

  I can’t think of Grace as Grace or I won’t be able to finish this. At least not while I’m sober.

  Two

  The Beauchamps are standing on the veranda of their massive, be-columned home as I bicycle by. Thanks to a fresh coat of paint each spring, Camellia Grove always looks bright and new, a virgin awaiting a bridegroom who never came back from the Civil War.

  A creepy virgin, with vacant eyes and clutching hands.

  I’ve never liked the house. Camellia Grove is one of the only plantation homes that wasn’t wrecked in the riots following the mutations and a true treasure of Louisiana heritage, but it’s also … haunting.

  Today, the lingering creepiness is worse than usual. I can’t help but imagine a new spirit drifting through the live oak trees lining the drive, mocking the sentries’ aura of safety and permanence. Nothing is safe; nothing is forever. So I don’t slow to watch the lacy moss that hangs from the trees sway in the breeze. I just pump my legs a little harder.

  Cane is still cataloguing the evidence, the coroner’s loading up the body, and Percy hasn’t mustered the courage to haul her ass back to the house and tell her employers what’s happened. I know she hasn’t. The Beauchamps are looking at me expectantly. Even from a hundred feet away I can see the tension in their faces. Barbara and her two adult children—James and Libby—shuffle to the porch railing, a trio of well-dressed zombies searching for something that will make them human again.

  Barbara adopted Grace late in life, when her own kids were nearly grown. I remember the headline—local Christian saint adopts baby with heart condition from New Orleans. They’d showed the baby’s picture, a beautiful one-year-old girl with white-blond hair. Heart condition or not, I wasn’t impressed.

  What about all the kids around here who need someone? Kids whose parents have been infected and are no longer fit to care for them? At the moment, there are over two hundred orphans at Sweet Haven, the halfway house where Marcy worked when I was sixteen. There are kids right here in Donaldsonville who need homes. But a lot of them are older, or fucked in the head, or black, or in some other way undesirable to a woman like Barbara.

  I know her kind. I was raised by someone just like her.

  But my hovering mama doesn’t speak to me anymore, not since the night I left our own well-appointed home in New Orleans. Accident or not, my sister, Caroline, was dead and I was alive. I was never going to be forgiven. It was better to leave. I’d thought distance, time, accomplishment … something might make it easier to go back. But it didn’t, and I eventually gave up on med school and my mother.

  It’s for the best, really. She wouldn’t approve of her daughter dating a black man and I don’t want to hide Cane the way I hid Hitch all those years ago. Hitch was poor, not “colored”—as my mother drawls when in the company of her fellow bigots—but, to her, that’s nearly as bad.

  Barbara reminds me way too much of Mama Lee, making me grit my teeth as I get closer to the house.

  The trio on the porch shuffle closer. Libby hunches and rubs at her arms, but Barbara is by far the most tragic figure. Her usually perfectly arranged blond hair is loose and wild, her face makeup-free despite the fact that it’s nearing two o’clock, and her clothes look like they’ve been slept in. She leans against her son, fingers tangled in his blue button-up shirt. James, at least, seems to be holding it together. He’s twenty-something, doing his residency at the heart hospital in Baton Rouge, and the head of the household. Mr. Beauchamp died before I moved to Donaldsonville, long enough ago that James is comfortable with the role of family pillar.

  Good for him. It can’t be easy. Barbara’s a handful.

  From the corner of my eye I see her waving at me, an impatient gesture that makes it clear she assumes I’ll scurry to do her bidding. Unfortunately for her, I don’t scurry. Ever. For anyone.

  I pretend I can’t hear her cry out for me to stop. There’s a reason I put in my earbuds and slipped on my official orange FCC vest before I left the crime scene. I want everyone to see that I am busy. And also can’t hear jack shit. I’m not going to be the one to tell Barbara her daughter is dead. I’m. Just. Not. Going. To. Do it.

  I pump harder, breathing easier when I reach the bend in the road and put the Beauchamp mansion and all the pain hovering around it behind me. I would have taken the long way around the swamp behind the house and avoided the scene entirely if I weren’t late for my real job. But I am late, and I have to snag samples, whip up a report, and get to the FCC field office in Baton Rouge before five o’clock or—rare, premed-qualified, immune field agent or not—I’ll have my ass handed to me on a platter, cut up hors d’oeuvres–style with a sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. My deadline for turning in my new samples passed days ago and Jin-Sang is already going to give me shit.

  Wretched Jin-Sang.

  I thought supervisors couldn’t get any worse than his sister, Min-Hee, with her OCD fixation with filling out forms in triplicate. By hand. With “black ink, not blue, damn you, Lee!” But after four weeks, I’m counting the days until her maternity leave is up. Unfortunately, the FCC gives immune operatives six months

  of paid leave. Something about hoping the immunity to fairy bite can be transmitted through breast milk and blah blah blah. They also give you a hefty bonus if your child is immune. Shady government spending if you ask me, but it’s a powerful incentive for some women to squeeze out a few puppies.

  Not me. No kids, no puppies, no kitties … well, no kids or puppies.

  Somewhere between the crime scene and the Beauchamp house, I’ve acquired a tail, a fat black and white cat with a limp. It has no collar or tags, but it looks cared for and seems to have taken a “shine” to me, as Marcy would say. Too bad I’m not in the market for a pet.

  I’m not good at keeping things alive. Not pets, not plants, probably not even intestinal bacteria. I forget to feed myself half the time until I start to get dizzy. Definitely not mommy material.

  I assumed the cat would get the hint when I tossed it out of the trailer behind my bike a half a mile back, but so far, not so good. It still rambles along behind me, yowling, cursing me for making it walk. It’s so damned loud I can hear it over my punk rock cover of “Islands in the Stream” by Fairies Will Die—surprisingly good stuff for a band out of Detroit, but then I’m a sucker for a good cover.

  “You’re asking for an alligator bite, cat.” I glance over my shoulder to see how it takes the news.

  It yowls again and plays up the limp, as if it knows I’m looking.

  “Go cry for someone who cares.” I turn back around and snag my drink—Coke bottle emptied halfway, with that medicinal rum I promised myself poured in to fill it back up to the top—and take a long, deep swig.

  The numbness is a soft blanket pulled across my soul, shutting out the horror of the afternoon. The alcohol makes the unbearable heat even hotter and I’m dizzy by the time I reach the edge of the swamp, but that’s okay. Better dizzy than sober.

  “Reeow.” The cat lets out a soun
d of triumph as I pull to a stop and climb off my bike, giving it the opportunity to leap into my trailer and snuggle up next to my blue cooler.

  “Get out.” I toss it to the ground, but it’s back in seconds, growling as it once again claims the coldest seat in the house, shooting me an affronted look that reminds me of … myself. Probably similar to the look I gave Cane when he said he wanted to call in sick and make love to me again. Gag. We don’t make love. We screw each other’s brains out … or so I thought.

  But when a man tells a sure-thing kind of girl he wants to make love, he means it. At least, I’m pretty sure he meant it. Sure enough to be scared.

  After Hitch, I opted out on love. I’m too independent, too distant, too obnoxious to be lovable. Even taking into account that I have a decent sense of humor, shoot a mean game of pool, am generous with blow jobs, and know how to spiff up in my Sunday best and play sweet with his mama at lunch once a week, there’s no way Cane could love me.

  But what if he does? What will I do?

  The FCC pays very well, but I live in a three-room shack without central air and ride a bicycle, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even muster the gumption to commit to a large purchase, let alone a relationship. Any kind of relationship.

  I reach for the cat. It narrows its eyes and presses closer to its new best friend. He—I can see now that he’s definitely a he—seems ready to make a romantic connection with my blue cooler. His bad leg hitches up over the edge, claws catching on the handle, as intertwined as Cane and I were a few hours ago.

  Damn. Just … blechk. I give up and grab my waders. The cat will either be gone before I get back or he won’t. I can’t waste any more time.

  I struggle into my dark-green boots and pull the rubber pants of the waders up around my waist, hooking my arms into the suspenders. The khaki straps cut into my skin as I bend to snag my kit, but I’m still glad I went with the light green tank top. It’s better to wear a T-shirt for field work, but it’s just so damned hot. Better blisters than any more sweat. Even with perspiration that doubles as a natural fairy deterrent, there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

  My sweat scares away the fairies. Something in the iron content keys them in to the fact that my blood will kill them. On a hot summer day, the Fey won’t come within two feet of me. I’m that … potent.

  “Just in case.” The cat narrows his eyes as I run the sweaty back of my hand over his fur. Fairy bites don’t affect animals the way they do humans, and the fairies probably won’t bother with something so furry when there are plenty of insects around, but no need to take chances. I don’t want the little bastard bleeding on my cooler.

  He growls as I reach around him, fetching my gloves and a few tubes that have fallen out of my kit. Jin-Sang would shit himself if he saw the disorganization. He’d probably try to get me fired, if he hasn’t already.

  “Later, cat.” I toss my iPod onto my seat—I can’t afford to drop another one in the water—and take one last swig of my drink, tipping it back until the lukewarm mix of sugary rum and Coke flowing down my throat makes my nose tingle.

  I can’t bring it with me, either. Not enough hands and fairies like red—being the color of blood, that isn’t surprising. They’d swarm around the bottle and get in the way. That can be useful when I need a live specimen, but I’m only after water, egg, and shit samples today, though I will take a body or two if I find any floaters.

  Ugh. I don’t want to think about dead things. Even fairies.

  My drink churns in my stomach as I wade into the shallows, sticking to the shady areas, gathering my samples, keeping an eye out for logs with eyes. I trudge farther and farther, deep into a part of the bayou where nothing human dares to walk anymore. Under a cluster of fungi sucking the life from a live oak, I find a few early eggs and scoop a sample into my blue test tube, ignoring the tiny, pissed-off faces of the fairies that flit close enough to smell that it isn’t a good idea to bite me and buzz angrily away. A few more vials of water and I’ll be done. All I need is poo.

  As I search the patches of dry land for a mound of fairy dung, my mind drifts into melancholy territory. I think about white nightgowns and pink fingernail polish and a time when Caroline and I both loved unicorns. We’d been best friends when we were babies, but by the night of the camping trip, she’d barely been speaking to me.

  She only agreed to go to piss off Dad. She thought if he and Mom came home from his conference in Mobile and found out we’d been smoking pot and drinking beer and being generally disreputable with two boys in a camper all weekend that he’d let her go to Smith for undergrad instead of making her stay in New Orleans. Dad and Mom were resigned to me being a failure, but they wanted better things for Caroline. She assumed that if her proximity to me put her at risk, they’d let her go.

  She might have been right. If she’d made it home, she might have gotten the green light to head north and become a future Yankee of America. If the newly mutated fairies hadn’t attacked our campsite, if she hadn’t been bitten and died in my arms, going from perfect daughter to dead body so fast she was gone before I could say goodbye.

  Bodies. Caroline’s body, and now that tiny body they’d lifted into the ambulance. What had happened to Grace? How did she die? Was it over quickly or did she suffer? Was the murderer someone she trusted, or a stranger who—

  “None of my business.” I don’t realize I’ve spoken aloud until someone answers

  “Damn straight, bitch. This ain’t none of your bidness.” The high-pitched voice is accompanied by a bony fist. I duck in time for the punch to connect with my head instead of my jaw and hear the woman behind me cry out. I have a hard head … or so my mama always told me.

  I drop everything and twist around, landing my own punch in the middle of the scrawny woman’s face before I’ve quite regained my footing. Bright red explodes from her nose—a crimson target in the center of skin as black as my cream-free morning coffee. The fairies are on her in seconds.

  I might have felt bad—even though she hit me and called me a bitch—if she weren’t already covered in bite marks. This chick has been out here awhile. Her fate’s already sealed. A camp is in her future. The bitten aren’t allowed to live among the average population. Back in the early days of the mutations, a few of the infected transmitted the disease to friends and family. Fey venom can’t survive in human saliva and doesn’t contaminate the blood—humans can’t spread it by biting each other or having sex or sharing needles—and there’s no airborne virus, so I have no idea how it spread. But the government said it did, and the soldiers in charge in the days of martial law came to take the infected away.

  Even now that we’re back to a more standard “rule by the people” method of government, that’s still the way of things. Bite victims who don’t die right off the bat are sent to a containment camp. Keesler Air Force base over in Gulfport, Mississippi, is the biggest in our area. I visited it when I was in training. Nice facility, especially considering most of the people living there are raving lunatics.

  But the immune officers keep the peace. Of course, they do have four hundred officers on active duty. The abundance of immune operatives at the camps is a big reason we’re so understaffed in the field. Sometimes, that’s just an irritation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of life and death.

  Like now, perhaps. If I had a partner, I wouldn’t be alone out here with no backup, getting my ass kicked by someone half my size.

  “Bitch!” Skanky chick swings at me again, her diamond chandelier earrings swinging wildly around her ears. The jewelry’s ridiculous paired with her stained T-shirt and sodden jeans, but there isn’t time for a fashion intervention even if I were that kind of girl.

  I duck, and back away. She comes after me, seemingly oblivious to the creatures grunting and screeching as they tear into her flesh. She fights her way through a tangle of tree roots, while the fairies suck and slurp and fall off of her in a drunken stupor, hitting the water with the plunk of pennies dropping into
a wishing well.

  Crap. She’s a Breeze head. I should have known.

  Her blood wouldn’t make the Fey drunk unless she’d been eating or snorting Fairy Wind. She isn’t just venom-crazy, she’s flying the wind, pumped up on a toxic high that will make her impossible to overpower. I’m only five eight and a hundred and forty pounds on a good week—when I’ve remembered to eat and not earned my morning vomit once or twice—and even six-two, two-hundred-and-ten-pound Cane would have had a hard time with this one. Unless he resorted to something more serious than fisticuffs.

  Cane bought me a gun last year, when he thought New Orleans gangs were setting up a secret drug-running operation in the bayou. But I refused to get my concealed-weapons permit. I’m too lazy to take the eight-hour “super-secret carrying-heat class” he teaches on weekends. And I’ve always assumed I couldn’t kill a person, even if that person was trying to kill me.

  I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong about that.

  “Ahhh!” Skanky screams as she lunges for me. I try to step back, but slam my head into something hard. The next thing I know, I’m under water with the woman’s hands around my neck.

  Swamp surges into my nose, but I have the sense to hold my breath after the initial invasion. I don’t try to swallow it or spit it out. I just drive my hands up, grabbing the woman’s wrists, digging my fingers into her tendons until her grip fails. As soon as her fingers spasm, I throw her off and surge to the surface, spitting out swamp and sucking in a deep breath.

  “Don’t do it!” I scream, loud enough that even a Breeze head with a death wish and ears full of water has to have heard me. But she doesn’t listen. She comes for me again, and I do what I have to do.

  She’s off-balance when I push her under. It isn’t hard to take her all the way to the bottom or stomp rubber-booted feet firmly into her back. She bucks and thrashes at first, but stops moving faster than I expect. Still, I don’t get off of her until I count to sixty. I don’t want to take a chance that she’s faking it.