44
“WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?” DANIEL ASK. We be winding our way through the woods, the Super Saver behind us. The trees be bigger the deeper into the woods we get. Soon we be coming out the other side.
“The Charity Gate,” I say. “You ready to go?”
“We’re ready.”
He say we and it hit me that Enola don’t belong to me no more. She ain’t looking up at me with her mama’s big brown eyes; she looking at him. It make me fold my arms against my empty chest. I want to hold her again, but then I might not let her go. It gonna be all right, I tell myself. Daniel know what to do. He got the Coopers’ address in San Diego. He got they e-mail address, too, so they can know he coming. Baby Girl be all right, as long as we get them out of Orleans.
We hear the Wall before we see it. The trees be so close together here, there ain’t no leaves on they trunks except for at the top. Ain’t nothing to muffle sounds, so we extra quiet, in case there still be ABs around. That be the only reason I hear it: a burst of radio, like a louder version of Daniel’s voice filter.
“Hold up,” I hiss, putting my hand up for him to stop. Radio static. Only folks I know who got radios be Mr. Go, Father John, the Ursulines, and the Professors. None of them be here now. Daniel crouch next to me and I signal for him to stay put. He nod, and I inch my way out to the edge of the trees ’til I can see it. The Wall.
Surprise me every time, how short it be. Maybe twenty, thirty feet high. Look like you could climb it with rope or something. But it almost as wide as it be high, and between the soldiers and the razor wire, you’d be stopped before you made it across. That be why Mr. Go so clever. The Wall ain’t as kept up as it could be, this close to the gate, and a crack in the mortar be enough to get a body through.
No more than a couple yards downslope from us be the moat, where they dug a channel for the bayou to go along the Wall. To my right, across the muddy channel, be the Old Charity Gate. The army checkpoint still there, a big concrete bunker squat in the middle of the Wall, like a frog sitting on a log. It look like it always do, covered in vines and crumbling around the edges. There still be searchlights mounted on the roof on both sides of the gate, and a drawbridge, too, where there used to be a road out of the city. The old highway been blown to bits long ago to make way for the moat. I used to come here with my parents when I been little, just to look at it all. I liked to see the people, the soldiers in they black jumpsuits and camouflage hats, they guns strapped across they chests, new ones every month ’cause they don’t be lasting out here for long. The outpost been empty for a long time, with just a sniffer drone to keep watch. At least, it supposed to be.
I guess we been wrong about that.
Soldiers. Two of ’em I can see, and that burst of radio mean there be more somewhere I can’t lay eyes on. Cigarette smoke drift toward me. There be more of them, all right. The two on the Wall ain’t smoking.
Then the searchlights come ’round, bright as stars against the gloomy afternoon. I scuttle back into the trees.
“Fen?” Daniel ask when he see me coming back.
I shake my head. “Change of plan.”
I lead him deeper into the trees so we can talk without being heard. “Mr. Go say there be a way through just south of the gate.”
Daniel pull out his map. He point at a spot on the drawing of the Wall, marked on the paper with an X. He take a deep breath. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s what I be telling you that you got to listen to, Daniel. The gate being watched. Not just drones, neither.”
Daniel don’t say nothing, and I know it ’cause he scared. But I need him not to be. I need him to do this for me, for Enola. I squat down next to him.
“Listen to me. You take Enola back downstream outta sight of the gate and wade across. The moat ain’t too deep. If it was, they’d risk losing stuff that fall in by accident. I seen it happen.”
Daniel shake his head. “They’ll see us. I heard their radios, too, Fen. This place must be crawling with soldiers. Jesus, this is stupid.” He run a hand over his hat, like he be smoothing his hair if he not been in the suit. He be worrying like an old woman. I want to slap this boy. I close my eyes.
“Course it be dangerous, but it be necessary. Look at the Wall. You see what Mr. Go be talking about?” I point through the trees. Maybe thirty yards downstream from the gate with its old drawbridge welded shut in the raised position, the Wall ain’t reinforced with steel sheeting like the gate. Whatever been there done rusted away and it be just concrete now. Vines be growing, eating at the Wall like acid. Where the vines be thickest, Mr. Go found a hole.
Daniel nod and look at me. “Fen? Don’t make me do this. I’ll stay. We can find a cure together. I promise.”
I look at him; I look at Baby Girl. She be sleeping in her sling. I fight the urge to wake her, have her look at me one last time. I didn’t know I had any heart left to break ’til she come along. But there ain’t no use in crying on it now.
“Say you stay here, you and Enola. And them vials you dropped in Rooftops break open. We all be dead then. Say they don’t break, and we stay the same. You been in a blood farm once. You think it can’t happen again?”
Daniel hang his head and nod, like he be convincing himself. He know I’m right. We both do.
“It ain’t what I want, Daniel. But it got to be. Now, give me your coat.”
“What?”
“Give me your coat. But don’t wake the baby.”
Daniel hesitate a second, but he do it without asking why. That a first. I smile at him, but I don’t feel it. I glance at his encounter suit, seeing it fully for the first time. Thick as gator skin, with fluids that be pulsing and pumping inside. It nasty and uncomfortable-looking, but it going to save two lives. I bundle Daniel’s jacket up ’til it just about Enola’s size. Then I tuck it into my arms.
“Wait for my signal. The moat ain’t wide. Just start moving. When you hear me, run.”
“What are you going to do?” he ask, looking at the bundle.
I sigh. This boy never learn, but I forgive him this last time. “They won’t shoot a woman carrying a baby. Now, listen for me, and hustle.”
Slowly, Daniel rise to his feet. “Keep her above the water,” I tell him, and I squeeze his arm through the bulk of his suit. “It been nice knowing you, tourist. Take care of your souvenir.” I nod at Enola and head north, toward the gate.
Away from my tribe.
45
FEN WAS GONE. DANIEL LOOKED AT THE ridiculously small child in his arms and swallowed hard. He moved through the trees downstream, and into the tall standing cattails on the edge of the moat. Wait for her signal.
The moat wasn’t that impressive here, not like the wide swampland he pressed through on his jetskip. It was like a canal, a concrete culvert maybe fifteen feet across. A token blockade, really, this close to the Wall. The water was too murky to see the bottom, but Fen and Mr. Go had both said it wasn’t deep. Nothing to worry about. He edged closer to the water, as close as he dared, allowing the reeds on the bank to conceal him from the soldiers upstream. A soft rain was starting to fall, further darkening the cloudy sky. The tiny raindrops were almost beautiful, flashing brightly in beams from the searchlight on the Wall as they swung across the treetops and shoreline. Daniel ducked down flat as the lights washed over his head in a lazy arc.
He adjusted his grip on Enola. Wait for the signal, he thought, but what would it be?
Daniel flinched when it came. A splashing sounded from farther upstream and the searchlights passed him over, converging on one spot. Daniel risked a look upriver.
Fen was in the water, lit up like the midday sun. One arm tucked under the bundle of his coat, the other waving in the air. She was shouting, drawing the attention of every soldier at the post. She hollered the way she had at the blood farm, like a madwoman. Insane.
Daniel’s heart leapt into his throat. His stomach dropped. As fast as he could, he lowered himself into the water
, trying not to splash. It was chest-deep, deeper than where Fen was wading waist-high in the muddy water. Daniel scooped Enola up, away from his body, over his head, and willed himself across the moat.
His splashing was drowned out by the frantic squawks of the soldiers’ radios along the wall. “Stop where you are! Stop where you are! Hands in the air! You are in a restricted military zone!”
He broke into a cold sweat beneath his suit and felt the industrious suck of the equipment as it pulled the sweat back in to be recycled for later. His hands, his face felt like they were on fire. He pushed on. The soldiers were not shouting at him.
At last, Daniel pulled himself along the shoreline to where the vines grew up and over the Wall.
There. The vines gave way in the center. There was a crevice, maybe three feet to the other side, where he could see gray daylight again. Taking a deep breath, Daniel pushed an arm through the vines. He could feel it, the crack in the wall, like a tunnel hidden from view. Behind him, Fen stood silhouetted against the searchlights, rain spattering the water around her. Her arms were raised, her face turned up, the bundle held high in the air. She rotated in a slow circle as the rain washed the mud from her skin.
For an instant, she looked at him. The moment hung in the air, Fen’s mouth curving into a smile, seeing Daniel and the baby almost there. Almost there. She turned away.
A shot rang out. The bundle fell from her hands.
Daniel jumped, pushing himself desperately through the vines. Don’t stop, don’t stop. He had made a promise to protect this child. To take her to a better life. And that’s what he was going to do.
The vines fell back into place as he pressed into the crack, all but crushing Enola to him as he passed beyond the dead city and the madness of the Delta. He was sucked into darkness smelling of green and loam, the sharp bite of asphalt and stone and, somewhere up ahead, a cool breeze.
They had made it.
Daniel stumbled through the last stretch of narrow tunnel to emerge, exhausted and blinking, into the light. Ahead of him was a wasteland, thirty feet of barren ground, empty now but for unoccupied military vehicles. All attention had been drawn to the girl at the gate.
Daniel closed his eyes for a moment, blinking back hot tears, still seeing that last glimpse of Fen swirling through the water, spinning like the wheel that turns the world. He braced himself, then ran for cover across the heart-pounding expanse, into the trees that would hide his passage back into Mississippi and the Outer States of America. In his arms, Fen’s baby girl was awake and wriggling against him, waving her small fists at the weeping sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is written alone. It might feel like it is, especially in those last rounds of rewrites when you can barely remember why you started writing the thing in the first place. But then, when it’s done and you look back at all of the work, you remember that you did not do it alone. I have a lot of people to thank for Orleans. First and foremost, my mother, for having the foresight to be born in New Orleans and taking me home to visit my grandparents often. My mother was a Katrina survivor, and it is because of her, and the things we both endured in those days after the storm, that this book exists at all.
I’d like to thank my editors on the book: Tim Travaglini, for being excited enough to give me my first shot at writing speculative fiction (always my goal as a writer, so thanks, Tim!); and to Shauna Fay, for bringing the book into the home stretch. Garrett Hicks, my manager, who believed in the story from the beginning. Many thanks also to a host of writer friends who listened to me moan, complain, and shout in ecstasy: Claire Dederer (who saw the deadline in my eyes); Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, who gave the book a tarot reading with interesting results; Amy, Vito, Ruby, Denise, and all the folks at Hedgebrook writers’ retreat on beautiful Whidbey Island, for housing and feeding me while I gave birth to the first draft. To Jason Ho, for listening to me without having laid eyes on a single page of writing, and still giving me good notes. To Gentleman Jim Silke, who, when it comes to storytelling, has the eyes of a hawk. To my husband, Kelvin, for reading the story over and over, and assuming I would simply get it done one day.
On the research front I must thank Dr. Noah Federer, child hematologist, for an interesting discussion about viruses over lunch, and Dr. Rebecca Mandel, for introducing me to him. Becky, you’re always good for a talk about diseases! To Alice Litt, my oldest friend, who happens to be a biology teacher, for telling me how to destroy a virus; and her research scientist sister, Sarah Connolly, for educating me on the concept of retargeting viruses to attack an infection. And to think, we saw Teen Wolf together. My, how you’ve grown!
Lastly, I’d like to thank the Coast Guard for listening when no one else would, and helping evacuate my mother from New Orleans five days after the storm, three days after the levee broke, and the day before her insulin ran out. New Orleans has my heart in many ways. May She live on forever.
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