“You can be good at whatever you put your mind to doing,” Kristin said. “But it’s fine. I understood. I didn’t mind the work. It paid okay, and the tips were under the table. People were nice. I wish I’d been able to spend more time with you girls though. I do regret that.”
“Don’t regret it, Mom,” said Katie. “I didn’t bring it up to drudge up regrets. You shouldn’t feel guilty. You were—are—a great mom.”
A gust of wind swirled through the trees, rustling the leaves and rippling the water near them. The water was three feet away now. Bob wondered if he was the only one watching it. His neck ached. He stretched it to one side and rubbed his shoulder with his thumb. He took in a deep breath and then exhaled, suppressing the urge to vomit.
“I hate to break up the trip down memory lane,” he said. “But the water is getting closer.”
Kristin tugged on him, pulling him back toward the peak of the roof. The girls scooted back. They were essentially at the apex now. From that vantage point, even in the dark, they could see the water surrounding them. It was endless, save the tops of houses, trees, and power lines, which hung low over their heads now.
“The rain stopped,” said Kiki. “The water should be going down.”
“Depends on where it’s—” Bob’s muscles tightened and he grabbed his arm. He bit the inside of his cheek and tasted the warm, coppery flow of blood filling his mouth.
His wife screamed. His daughters cried out. He couldn’t be sure who said what. He couldn’t focus on anything but the pain, a tightness in his chest unlike anything he’d ever felt. It wasn’t pain so much as a heaviness. Someone was sitting on his chest. The pain, which was acute, was in his shoulder and neck. His jaw throbbed.
He was cold. Shivering now. He was sure he was sweating, even though he couldn’t distinguish it from the floodwater and rain on his face and under his arms. His groin pulsed with every unusual-feeling heartbeat.
“I think…” he squeezed out through clenched teeth, “I’m having…a heart attack.”
He exhaled again. Each breath was thicker than the one before, more concentrated, more precious. He sucked in the humid air despite the weight on his chest, despite the overwhelming nausea that washed over him like a series of waves, one after the other.
They should have evacuated. The mayor was right. The Evacuspots might have worked. They could have gotten out. They could be high and dry without water at their feet. He could be asleep right now instead of dying. In his mind he cursed the mayor. He cursed the Evacuspots. He cursed the modernist, fourteen-foot sculptures that denoted the gathering points. He cursed butter and cholesterol. He cursed the years of smoking menthols. He cursed himself.
He saw his women trying to communicate with him. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, what they were telling him to do, what they wanted from him. How could they want anything from him? He was having a heart attack. How could they ask him to do anything? They couldn’t be making demands, could they? He couldn’t move, couldn’t clench his fist. He couldn’t breathe now. He blinked his eyes. Or they blinked for him. Everything was working, or not working, on its own. He wasn’t in control. He couldn’t feel or do anything other than focus on the pain and the nausea and the dull ache.
But there were hands on the back of his head now. Cold hands on his neck and on his forehead. Even though he was cold, the hands were cold. How many hands were there?
His mind raced. His breathing was quicker now, more shallow.
His eyes blinked again. Slower this time. And again, even slower. It wasn’t a blink. He was having trouble keeping them open. He couldn’t focus. He couldn’t see more than blurry faces looking down on him, blocking the milky black sky above.
Then he couldn’t see anything at all.
***
Keri told Louis to turn right onto the next street-turned-borderless-canal. He spun the helm, guiding the jon boat in a looping turn that puttered ninety degrees.
Frank was in the bow of the boat, keeping watch for potentially damaging debris. He was dragging one hand in the water beside the starboard side of the boat next to the bow. But since he didn’t know exactly where their destination was, and he was as bad at street names as Louis, he wasn’t doing much else.
Keri was his navigator. She knew the way. At least she thought she did.
The city was unfamiliar to her now, like an alien planet whose surface was water and whose long-ago civilizations had drowned in it. There were only the remnant reminders of buildings and lives long ago sunk. The darkness and heavy, moist air added to the grim illusion of being on a foreign moon far from the warmth of a centering star.
This wasn’t an alien planet though. It wasn’t some foreign moon. It was her hometown, and somewhere in the far end of the city, her parents and sisters were alive and needed help. They had to be alive. There was no other possibility.
They’d traveled for miles now, edging closer to the outskirts of the central city where her sisters’ rental home was cemented to the shifty earth. The tops of houses, or their second stories, passed by, and Keri ducked under branches and sagging power or phone lines, challenging herself at every intersection.
Was this the turn? Was it right? Was it left? She couldn’t be sure. She told herself she was sure. She wasn’t.
The rain hadn’t returned, which was good. It made it easier to see in the dark, and somewhat more tolerable to troll the nasty water in search of her family. She did notice the water wasn’t receding though. Whenever they were close enough to a house, especially one painted white or yellow, she searched the siding, or brick, or wood, for the hint of a waterline that would tell her the water had reached its crest and was receding. She hadn’t seen one yet. Not even a hint.
Although she wasn’t a flood control expert or a meteorologist, she knew enough about the way floodwater worked to know it either rose or it sank. It didn’t sit stagnant. Not for long, not when the rain stopped.
Then all of her doubt about their path evaporated. She knew where she was at last.
“Turn again,” she said, looking past Dub and pointing at the approaching intersection. “I think that’s the one.”
There was a pole but no street sign. It was familiar enough though, the large aged magnolia on the corner that rose above the white two-story house and protected it with its outstretched branches.
“This is it,” she said. “I’m sure.”
Her pulse accelerated in her chest. Her breath felt thin as she drew it through her nose. She took Dub’s hand and squeezed. This was the street. Four houses in, on the left.
“Go slow,” she said to Louis, as if it were her charter. “Real slow. It’s hard to see.”
The air was warming up again. It was dense with the odor of swamp and rot. Keri didn’t smell any of it. Or if she did, she didn’t notice. She was too focused on the houses to the skiff’s port side. They’d past the first house and the second.
“Do you hear that?” asked Frank. He was staring up to the sky and off to the distance somewhere. Something he’d heard had him straining to focus on it.
“What?” Keri asked, almost standing in the boat, then thinking better of it. “What do you hear?”
“Cut the motor,” Dub suggested, “please.”
Louis shut off the power, and the boat drifted forward. The only sounds at first were the distinct chirp and croak of insects and reptiles that had been their soundtrack the length of the trip. There was the distant rumble of thunder that felt a thousand miles away. And then she heard it, a woman’s voice calling for help. Keri looked to the left, two houses down, but she didn’t see anything or anyone. The cry was from farther away.
“I think it’s down and on the right,” said Dub.
Barker agreed. So did Gem.
Keri resisted the urge to dive into the water and speed to her mother. But why would they be on the right side of the street? Why so far down? Was it her mother? Or was it someone else?
She scanned the house tops and the
trees. She was second-guessing herself now. How was she wrong? How did she screw up and fail her family?
“That can’t be,” she said. “They should be here. On the left. At that house. At that—”
She saw the house, fourth on the left. It wasn’t her sisters’ rental. It was a different style. It was a two-story with a rounded cupola at the top.
Keri slumped, her head felt heavy. Her arms weighed too much and her shoulders ached. She wanted to puke.
But the cry kept coming. The woman ahead and to the right needed help. Her call, louder as they drifted closer in a slow but steady current that pulled them in the right direction, was desperate. Keri could hear it in the woman’s voice. There was pain, fear, urgency. She was calling for help, though not for herself.
“My husband!” the woman cried. “He’s sick. We need help. Help!” The voice echoed, carrying across the water. It was distant but not so much so. It was on this street.
“We should help them,” Gem said to Keri. “We should help and then go find your family. We have to be close, right?”
Keri nodded blankly. She’d heard Gem but wasn’t really listening. She was trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong.
“I’m cranking the motor,” said Louis. “We know about where they are, this woman and her husband. If he’s sick, we’ve got to get on it.”
Louis set the choke and cranked the motor back to life. Oily smoke drifted across the open body of the skiff. He throttled the boat forward.
They were moving at a good clip now, outracing the current and angling toward the right side of the street. Frank was the lookout. He stood, bent kneed, at the bow. He scoured the rooftops, the elbows of large trees, with squinting eyes that must have cut through the dark. They must have, because he spotted the woman. He saw her husband and two other women on the pitch of a roof four houses from the end of the street on the right.
Keri saw them too and her eyes widened. She leaned over Dub, trying to affirm what she’d second-guessed. This was the right street. It was her mother and father. Her sisters were there too. They’d come there from the opposite end of the street. She’d been turned around.
Her excitement was immediately tempered as they drew close enough to see her father. He was unconscious or worse. He wasn’t moving. His head was in her mother’s lap. Her feet were in the water. Her sisters flanked her, both of them pale and soaked through. Despite the dark, Keri could tell they’d been crying, might still be crying.
This time she couldn’t resist. She stood up in the boat, Dub balancing her by holding her hips. The skiff wobbled and she took Gem’s hand with one of hers to steady herself. She set her feet wide and then leapt from the boat, pulling herself free from those trying to hold her.
She landed on her knees and chest on the roof, banging her chin on the rough tile underneath the water. She shook off the sting and crawled the short distance to her parents. She didn’t speak. Instead, she threw her arms around her mother, her sisters, and then quickly guided them toward the boat.
By now, Dub and Barker had followed her. They were behind her when she turned to help her sisters. Together they picked up her father, using the buoyancy of the water to move him into the boat at its center. Everyone else made room, shifting to the bow and the stern of the small skiff.
It was crowded and unstable, but as soon as they had her father in the skiff, cold and limp and barely breathing, Frank pushed them free and Louis pushed the throttle all the way forward.
They glided across the water quickly from one street to the next. Keri was focused on her father while the others talked about where to go, how to find a hospital or shelter, what route might be best if they could determine one. Keri’s sisters were doing most of the talking since this was their neighborhood.
Keri’s mother held her husband’s head in her lap as she had on the pitch of the roof. She stroked it repeatedly, running her fingers through his hair. She whimpered but kept her cool, considering.
Dub was at his feet, keeping his knees bent so that he was in a position somewhere between lying down and sitting up. Barker and Gem had moved to the bow of the boat, next to Frank, to give the Monks room.
The skiff was crowded, heavy, and sitting low in the water now. The motor strained when Louis increased the power. He kept riding the throttle, speeding up and slowing down.
They were searching for a needle in a haystack. They had no way of knowing where a shelter might be, let alone one with the kind of medical attention her father needed. Keri was aiming for the closest hospital, or something like it. But in a city with an average elevation of a foot below sea level, dipping as low as seven feet below, there weren’t going to be a bunch of options. Monkey Hill was among the higher elevations in the city, and there was a spot called “The Mountain” in City Park.
They were in a part of the city called Touro, north of the Mississippi River and part of the city’s garden district. More precisely, they were in the Mississippi now. Her eyes scoured the edges of the street, searching for some sign of anything, anywhere that might help them.
“What’s that?” asked Gem. “Up ahead. Are those lights?”
Keri saw them too. A warm, hazy yellow glow hovered above the water some distance ahead. Somebody had power. Louis headed for the light. Like moths they fluttered there, the motor working beyond its capacity to propel them through the water and toward the destination.
As they neared the glow, Keri made out the shape of the building from which the yellow light came. It was a dark, angular shape against the sky. From it, the sound of diesel generators rumbled and burped.
Louis slowed the skiff and steered it toward the building, which Keri recognized. It was the Touro Infirmary. They were on Prytania Street. The old brick building, its burgundy awning teetering above water level, beckoned like an oasis.
She knew it because it was a famous place. It was the first operational hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was the birthplace of Truman Capote. And it was, most importantly of all, open right now.
There were three other skiffs docked at the awning, tied off to one of the support poles. The second-floor windows at the building’s facade glowed with light, one of them shattered. Inside, leaning against the open frame, was a man dressed in blue hospital scrubs. He was waving at them to move the boat closer to the window, yelling something they couldn’t understand.
Louis maneuvered the skiff to the window.
“We’re open,” the man said, “but only for medical emergencies. You got an emergency?”
“My father’s having a heart attack or stroke,” said Keri. “He’s unconscious.”
The man waved them to the window and then disappeared inside. He was back with a second person by the time they floated alongside the opening.
The man, tall with dark skin and eyes, was smiling. The man next to him was shorter and heavier. He wasn’t smiling. He was all business.
“I’m Drew,” said the tall man. “This is Kyle. We’re going to help your dad. Get as close to the window as you can.”
Dub reached out and grabbed hold of the windowsill, and the men inside the hospital window managed to get Bob through the opening and onto a gurney. Kyle immediately started wheeling him away, hopefully for treatment.
Drew stayed at the window. Sweat beaded on his forehead and in the shallow folds under his eyes. He was still smiling. It was the kind of smile a flight attendant offers when passengers board. It was polite, friendly, but it was mechanical.
“Who’s family?” he asked, his eyes dancing across the eight remaining people on the boat. “I can take family.”
Keri spoke up. “I’m his daughter. These are my sisters and my mom.”
“What about the rest of you?” Drew asked.
“Not family,” said Dub.
“He’s my boyfriend,” said Keri in a way that she hoped might leave an opening for Drew to let him stay too. “He’s like family.”
Drew eyed Barker and Gem. “And the two of you?
Cousins?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “Distant relatives who somehow found each other on one of those genealogy sites?” Before Barker could reply, Drew answered for him with a wink. “Distant cousins it is. Those sites are amazing, right?”
“We’re not related at all,” said Louis. “Me and Frank here gotta get going anyhow. More people to save and whatnot.”
Drew nodded and waved to the others. “C’mon, climb on in.”
Once they were all inside, and Dub had thanked Louis and Frank for their generosity, the boat shoved off. It disappeared into the dark, not even its motor audible over the echoing rumble of roof-mounted hospital generators.
The hospital hallway was stark. Keri smelled Betadine and bleach as the group followed Drew along the wide corridor. It was lined with gurneys and people in various states of consciousness.
“We had to evacuate the first floor,” said Drew, as if giving a guided tour. “But we’re okay. We’ve been taking in stragglers as they come, not turning anyone away. It’s exhausting but good. It makes me feel like we’re doing something in such a helpless situation.”
“Are you the only hospital open?” asked Keri.
“I don’t know. They tasked me with finding a way to get people into the building if I could. Breaking that window was the only option. We’ve got another one open on Foucher Street, the other side of the building. I think there’s more activity over there.”
“Where are you taking us?” asked Kristin, Keri’s mother. “Where is my husband?”
“We’ve got a temporary ER here on the second floor,” said Drew. “He’s there. We’ll take you to a waiting area we’ve set up. You can wait there. It’s crowded, though; you might need to cop a squat on the floor.”
“That’s fine,” said Kristin. “As long as Bob’s okay.”
Keri noticed her mother’s face for the first time in the light. She appeared much older than she had before the flood. She walked with a stoop, her shoulders hunched forward. Her cheeks hung like jowls at her jawline but the skin stretched at the bone. Her skin was pale, sallow, and lacked the color of life. Heavy bags rounded her eyes, her hair was matted against the side of her head, and it was drying in an uncontrolled frizz.
The Alt Apocalypse {Book 3): Torrent Page 19