Orleans

by Sherri L. Smith

  When I go say good-bye to Dr. Warren, I duck down real low so I don’t have to look him in the face. Overhead, his screen blinks at me, green and black. When I wave, it blinks again.

  GOOD-BYE, FEN. GOOD-BYE.

  • • •

  “Stay close to me, Fen,” Mommy says.

  “I always do, Mommy,” I tell her, and she smiles. I am her good little girl. We leave the Institute and walk across the stream to the neutral ground.

  Yesterday was my last day with Sister Mary Margaret and the other kids at the Ursuline convent. I made sure to pretend I’d see them again, but I won’t. Daddy says we’re going to visit Father John at the Catholic mission, but he’s telling a story he must want everybody to believe. Because last night, I heard him talking to Mr. Go and Mommy. They said the Institute is a bad place and Dr. Warren is a bad man. They don’t want to play with him anymore. Like I don’t want to play with Priscilla. Just because she is older doesn’t mean she’s a grown-up, but she makes me do what she wants and I don’t like it. Priscilla thinks she is special because Dr. Warren is her granddaddy and she was the first baby at the Institute. But I came second, and I was the last, and that makes me just as special, Mommy says.

  Daddy is waiting for us in a jeep. It is Father John’s jeep, the one he runs supplies with. We never get to ride in the jeep unless we are carrying Important Supplies from the Institute, or Mommy is bringing back samples of plants that are big. Jeeps run on Gas, and Gas is harder to find than a five-leaf clover, Mommy says. It comes from the Government in big yellow canisters, but Father John hasn’t gotten any in a long, long time.

  “Mommy, did the Government give Father John more Gas?” I ask.

  Mommy shakes her head. “No, Fen. The Government isn’t helping us out like that anymore.”

  “Why not?” I ask. Everyone is supposed to help everyone. That’s what Sister Mary Margaret says. It’s called the Golden Rule. It’s not the same as Dr. Warren’s Rules of Blood. Those are different. Those say everyone has to stay apart from everyone else. I’m lucky my mommy and daddy have the same blood as me, or else we would have to stay apart, too.

  We get into the jeep and Daddy drives us the long way to Father John’s mission. “Is Mr. Go coming?” I ask. Mommy gives me a look and I hold my tongue. I’m not supposed to know Mr. Go’s leaving the Institute, too. That’s a big secret. Mr. Go is like Priscilla. He lives on a Closed floor at the Institute and he hardly ever leaves. When he does go out, he wears an outside suit.

  “Simeon’s not coming with us today,” Daddy says with a look at Mommy. I hold my tongue again. I remember last night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Mommy said Mr. Go is Not Right, either. She said, “We have to live in Orleans, not in Spite-of-it.” I don’t know where Spite-of-it is, but I don’t want to live there. It must be where Mr. Go will live.

  We drive and drive across the city, and some folks wave at us, and some hide. Mommy keeps her gun hidden, but I know it’s there. Sometimes people get really hungry or really sick, she says, and they will try to take things from us. So Mommy carries a gun while Daddy drives, and he’s such a good driver that she doesn’t have to use it.

  Soon we are at the mission and Father John sweeps me into a big hug. “Welcome back, Little Fen,” he says. Father John smells like incense, like the nuns burn in the chapel at school. He is a big man, tall like a tree. Father John is my friend. Even though he is not a type O blood, I think he is part of our tribe.

  Mommy and Daddy help Father John unload the jeep. There is medicine in white boxes with red crosses on the side and there are tools to help repair the computers in the mission. They run on electricity, which is hard to find. Mommy says you can make electricity with gasoline or wind or water, but you need the right machines to catch it. With these tools, Father John can keep his machines going even when the gasoline is gone.

  I go inside and sit in the computer room and write a letter to Uncle Garrett and Aunt Cee. The Coopers are my family on the other side of the Wall. They asked to be friends with a little girl and send her letters and things, and they got to have me. I tell them good-bye. I don’t know when I’ll write again, but I don’t say that because it’s a secret.

  “Fenny?” Daddy says to me when he’s done helping carry supplies. “Do you remember what we talked about yesterday?”

  I hang my head. Daddy got mad at me because I was talking like the other kids at the nun’s school and the mission. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I say. “I was talking tribe. I won’t do it again. But when I talk like you and Mommy, everyone makes fun of me. They say I’m a Professor, but I’m not. Professors are old people like Dr. Warren, and I’m just a little girl.”

  Daddy crouches down in front of me and takes me by the shoulders. “No, Fen, I’m glad you can talk tribe.”

  I think he’s fooling with me. “You are?”

  “Yes, honey. It’s like that chameleon Mommy showed you.”

  I nod. “The lizard that looks like the leaf?”

  “That’s right, baby girl,” Mommy says. “We’re leaving now, Fen, and you’ve got to be like the lizard on the leaf.”

  “So no one can find me—and I’ll be safe from owls and hawks?”

  Daddy smiles, but Mommy is crying. “Yes, sweetie, so you’ll be safe.”

  “I’ll be invisible.”

  “That’s right,” Mommy says.

  “Even to Father John and Mr. Go?” I ask. Mommy and Daddy look at each other.

  “No, baby girl, they can see you. They’re lizards, too.”

  “But not Priscilla?” I ask. I don’t want to play lizards with Priscilla.

  “Not Priscilla,” Mommy says. “And not Dr. Warren or anybody at the Institute. And no tribes, either, unless they’re Os or OPs, okay? Got it?”

  That’s a lot of people to be invisible to, but I nod because I will try.

  “Got it,” I say. And I talk tribe to show them I mean it. “They be Professors. But we be tribe.”

  Mommy take my hand then, and Daddy take the other, and we wave good-bye to Father John and we walk into the woods to our new house, a little wooden house in a clearing.

  It be just like a fairy story, only it scary, too, because we don’t go back to the Institute when the sun go down, like we always used to do. We alone here, Mommy, Daddy, and me, and I know we ain’t tribe at all.

  We freesteaders. And freestead mean dead, the school kids say. But tribe, tribe is life.

  23

  “FEN?” DANIEL BE STANDING RIGHT UP BEHIND me, like I’ma give him a piggyback ride up them steps.

  “Hold on, now,” I say, and pretend to be adjusting the baby’s sling around my shoulders instead of putting off seeing them ghosts. Baby Girl looking at me like she got something wise to tell me, but then she yawn and close her eyes. “All right,” I say, and we climb.

  The third floor of Sacre Coeur be like the first two—marble floors and a long hallway lined with classrooms, only these classes been over for fifty years or more, and since then the rooms been turned into housing. I stop at the third door on the right and look through the little window at the top of the door. It look like a storeroom now—cots and empty bookcases, boxes all shoved against the far wall, blocking the windows. My heart skip a beat in my chest and I take a quick breath. I be glad it ain’t still the way it been when we left. Don’t know if I could handle that.

  “What’s in there?” Daniel ask. I swear he be breathing down my neck, and I’m like to slap him, he bugging me so bad.

  “You know, if I need to pull my knife suddenly, you’d be standing in the way.”

  He back up real quick then, hands up in front of his face. “Pull your knife for what?”

  I snort. “You scare too easy. Back off. Three feet between you and me. Something come up, a body need some room to move.” I point my arm out at him and draw a circle around me. “This, plus a blade. Leave room for it or you get cut. Got it?”

  He back up a little more and nod. “Got it. But what’s in that room?
”

  “Nothing now.” I shrug and keep going down the hallway. “But I been born there.”

  I feel Daniel gape at the back of my head, but I keep my memories to myself. I ain’t here to make friends and share my story. The sooner he see the Professors be a dead end, the sooner I be rid of him and get this baby over the Wall.

  We descend to the second floor again, on the opposite side of the plastic doorway we been on before, and I stop in front of the infirmary. There be a window in the wall looking directly into the infirmary, not the lab room the air lock lead to. I don’t like looking through that glass any more than I did when I been little, but I seen a lot of mess between here and there, so maybe this ain’t as bad as all that.

  On the other side of the window, the infirmary be dark, except for the life-support systems lighting up the room in little halos of light, like flies swarming over each bed.

  Some of the beds be empty. The rest be holding corpses.

  Daniel gasp at the sight.

  I turn Baby Girl away. She don’t need to know about things like this, not if she gonna have a life over the Wall where things be normal and folks ain’t trying to extend they lives beyond the natural span just so they can play king of the mountain. Like this room full of dried-out husks that used to be living, thinking people. Fools. I bounce Baby Girl against my skin and she feel so soft and warm and alive, it make me feel something close to glad.

  “There you go,” I tell Daniel. “They be the Professors.”

  Daniel stand quiet for a real long time, and I don’t know if he accessing his datalink or just thinking. “Are they dead?” he ask at last.

  “Not all of them. But they should be. Lot of these folks been old by Orleans standards when they got here. Dr. Warren over there”—I point with my chin to the first bed on the left—“got to be almost eighty, but I don’t think age counts when it earned with pumps and force-feeding.”

  In the reflection we cast on the glass, I see Daniel blink back tears. He put a hand to the window. “Warren Abernathy James?” He press his head against the glass. “This was supposed to be . . . Oh my God, oh my God.”

  I don’t say nothing, just let it sink in, let the sight convince him where my words can’t.

  “Fen . . . What am I supposed to do? How am I . . . ?”

  “How you supposed to what, Daniel? What you come here for?”

  He don’t move back from the glass, but he turn his head to look at me. “I came to cure Delta Fever.”

  I laugh. “You and everybody else, I’m sure.”

  “Right. But what if I told you I’ve almost done it?” He reach into that big old coat of his and pull out a long black cylinder, lit up with green lights like the equipment on the other side of the glass.

  Every muscle in my body go tight. Baby Girl wake up and start to cry. I shush her, but my eyes don’t leave that cylinder.

  “I call it the DF virus. My attempt at a vaccine for the Fever.”

  “Attempt?” I say.

  “I was trying to kill the disease, but it kills the host, too. Carriers. Like you.”

  To think I thought I owed this fool my life and he been risking it the whole time. I swing Baby Girl’s sling behind me and jump back from Daniel fast as a cat, my knife already in my hand.

  “Fen—” he start to say, but I ain’t listening. I take a swipe at him, and lucky for Daniel, he paid attention and be out of reach of my blade. But I ain’t trying to kill him. I’ma let the city do that. I spit at him and back away to the stairwell. Swinging Baby Girl back in front of me, I get a good hold on her and run. There be a crack of light coming through the door we entered from. I squeeze back through the doorway and slam it shut behind me.

  24

  She pulled a knife on me , DANIEL THOUGHT. She thinks I betrayed her. But he had done the right thing. Leaving the virus in the lab would have been the same as giving up on a cure. Or worse, giving the military a weapon. At least that’s what he told himself.

  Daniel stood up, careful not to look back through the observation window that reminded him so much of Charlie’s final days in quarantine. Careful not to think of what he would do now, without Fen.

  The building was an eerie place, silent as a tomb. There had to be answers here somewhere. At the very least, there would be supplies, and a better map to help him find a way back over the Wall. There had to be.

  Across the hall from the infirmary was a security room. A wall of monitors loomed above a workstation that looked like pictures he’d seen of the old mission control rooms at NASA. The Institute of Post-Separation Studies hadn’t been well-funded. The loss of the Delta had hit the US economy hard. So the Institute had run on a patchwork of high-tech gear and dated equipment believed capable of withstanding the challenging environment in Orleans. A sensitive tool like Daniel’s datalink wouldn’t have lasted the first decade in the humidity here. So it made a sort of sense, even if the result was less than state-of-the-art.

  The monitors were all cold and dark now, but labels beneath listed names of locations across the city—the Superdome, the Market. At some point, they must’ve had eyes everywhere. But there was nothing here for Daniel now. He moved back into the corridor and began peering through windows.

  At last, he came to a room of filing cabinets. Daniel leaned against the door and listened. He dialed up his night-vision goggles. There was dust on the floorboards near the door that hadn’t been disturbed in years. Relieved, he opened the door and went inside.

  Green and beige filing cabinets lined the walls, four drawers high each. He opened the top drawer of the nearest cabinet. At least they had been clever. Instead of manila folders and paper files, the records within were recorded on thin sheets of plastic, organizing tabs running along the tops. Printed thermally, the words became a permanent part of the sheet. Even in a flood, these files would survive.

  The windows on the outer wall were blocked by bookcases, and a thin gray light seeped in through the narrow cracks between them. He pulled out the first group of files and lowered himself to the ground, back up against the side of the cabinet. This way he could watch the door in case Fen came back.

  “What have I gotten myself into?” Daniel muttered as his suit whirred to life, siphoning away the sudden sweat on his palms. Fen would come back, he told himself. She would realize she’d made a mistake, that he was the best hope for Orleans, and she’d come save him.

  But it wasn’t likely. Technically, she’d lived up to her part of the bargain. She had gotten him out of the blood farm and to the Institute, just as he’d asked. So he couldn’t blame her for leaving, even if the Professors were in comas and he was still as lost as he had been the moment he arrived. He laughed, and it sounded high-pitched, nearly hysterical. He forced himself to stop, took a deep breath, and focused on the files in front of him.

  First things first: He should find what he came for. And then, who knew? With a cure in hand, maybe he could bargain his way out of the Delta. What tribe would harm the man who could save them? Maybe the Institute still had working radios or other communications equipment. He could signal the States for help, call in the cavalry. With the DF virus turned into a cure, there would be no danger of genocide if he contacted the military. He would be a hero.

  All he had to do was focus on the files.

  They were personnel records, files for Warren Abernathy James and his crew of sociologists, biologists, botanists, and medical doctors, both psychological and physical. It read like a list of Nobel Prize winners, people who had consigned themselves to the quarantined city at the height of their careers, a dream team determined to find a cure. Then came the falling stars, once-renowned researchers whose willingness to join the one-way trip to Orleans was a Hail-Mary pass, a last, heroic attempt to make a name for themselves. Daniel recognized some of the names as former professors at his own university. They had thought the Institute would last a few years, a long sabbatical, and they would return, tenured and celebrated, the world once again united in g
ood health. People still talked about those missing professors with reverence and the occasional head shake of disbelief.

  There was nothing new to discover here. No research, just résumés and observational notes. At the back of the folder, he found the thinner résumés of graduate students who had treated a tenure at the Institute as the equivalent of a semester at sea. When he’d first heard of these students and their Peace Corps–like commitment to the people of the Delta, he had thought them ludicrous. It was one thing for a fifty-year-old scientist to make the move to Orleans, but what twenty-something student would willingly condemn themselves to life in a disease-ridden, dying city at the beginning of their own life? Even protected by the walls of the Institute, it had sounded idealistically shortsighted. But now he was here for the same reasons and not half the support or equipment that the Institute had begun with. Who was the fool now?

  He stood up and shuffled the files together, ready to return them to the drawer, when a label caught his attention: DE LA GUERRE. Fen said she was born here. This file belonged to a Jerome de la Guerre. Fen’s father? Daniel hesitated, fingering the top of the page. It didn’t matter. He could read Fen’s entire life history here, but it wouldn’t help him cure the Fever or find his way back home. Shaking his head, Daniel returned the files to the drawer and moved to the next cabinet.

  Inventories of food and equipment came next. The equipment lists were less useful than he had hoped. Much of the lab equipment was woefully unsophisticated and out of date. Only now were labs able to attempt the sort of viral engineering that had half a hope of beating the disease. And that required equipment that Orleans did not have.

  So this was simply a data-gathering mission. Daniel would have to find his way home again to complete the work, no matter what.