Mississippi Rose | Book 1 | Into Darkness

by Lopez, Rob

  That evening, Darla celebrated in her cabin with a few gills of rum. Warming to the occasion, she leaned back on her new duvet and pillow, savoring the flavor. The pillow was a little flat, so she pulled it out to give the contents a little shake. That’s when she noticed the monogrammed initials on the corner.

  They were the same initials she’d seen on the corner of the duvet, but she’d assumed it was just high-class branding. There were more flaws on the pillow’s monogram, however, and she realized it was actually hand-embroidered.

  Somebody had taken the trouble to decorate their husband or son’s bedding.

  Darla put the glass of rum down. Suddenly it didn’t taste so good. The image of the charred body invaded her senses.

  You hustle, I hustle, I don’t see the difference.

  Being reminded of her past indiscretions, by Eric of all people, had irked her and she’d been quick to put it to the back of her mind. She liked to think there was a world of difference between her and Eric, but now she wasn’t so sure. There was a reason she always ended up with lowlifes and freaks, and it was probably because she was one too. She understood the rules they operated by because she used the same rulebook. Hell, she’d likely scribbled extra notes on the pages too.

  She tightened the cap on the rum bottle and listened to the water lapping against the hull. The duvet wasn’t any better than the one she had. She should have left it. When this was over, someone would return to that boat, finding the captain dead and catching the evidence that someone cared so little about him that they were willing to kick in his cabin door and look for something to take, even if they didn’t need it. It seemed so petty and unnecessary.

  Draining the rest of the glass quick, she blew the candle out. She lay curled up in the darkness for a while, then pulled the pillow out from under her head and threw it off the bunk.

  14

  Under a wide gray sky, on placid waters, the Mississippi Rose steamed, moving gently with the current. Darla had spent a couple of days towing more barges to the camp and was now headed downstream. A southerly wind was blowing and Darla could smell rain coming up from the Gulf. They passed the Pride of Orleans bringing up another load of passengers to swell the camp, and Eric was stood once more on the forecastle, tipping Darla a lazy salute as he went by.

  She tossed him back a very different kind of salute, which brought a few looks of surprise from some of the passengers observing.

  Docking at the nuclear reactor late in the day, she blew the steam whistle and stepped out of the pilothouse. Aguilar turned out to be there and she was the first to the jetty.

  “Thought you’d forgotten all about us,” said Aguilar.

  “You guys eaten yet?” asked Darla.

  “If you can call MREs eating. I’m going to be constipated for a month.”

  “I’ve got just the thing to clear your tubes. Call everyone down. We’ve got a treat for you.”

  “A treat? That’s unexpected. My mother would say that’s the product of a guilty mind. Have you been bad?”

  “I’m always good. You know that.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure. Call your guys down.”

  The work crews and engineers entered the saloon to find tables and table cloths, wine glasses and the smell of something delicious coming from the galley.

  “There’s a bathroom over there to wash your hands,” called Darla, “then sit yourselves down and prepare yourselves for some gumbo and rice, followed by blueberry pie.”

  It had taken a while to convince Jacques to use canned meat in the gumbo, but fortunately he still had okra, bell peppers, celery and onions, though they were no longer fresh and needed to be used. Getting him to make the pie also involved a few heated exchanges, but Darla finally got her way. With the addition of fresh baked bread and some bottles of wine, she was pleased to be able to give the crews some good home cooking. Jacques especially needed the work. For all his complaints, Darla knew he was happiest when he was working hard over a hot stove, concerned as always that his customers should have the best, and making damn sure they got it, whatever the limitations of the ingredients. And he preferred to work alone. The galley was his domain. When Zack entered to help out, he got shooed out again in short order. When Jacques was on a mission, you didn’t get in his way. Cooking was serious business, and he trusted nobody to do it right.

  The reactor crew were more than grateful to have a chance to sit down in civilized surroundings and be waited on, even if the waiters were older and more grizzled than the average waiting staff. They’d been sleeping rough, working rotating shifts, without the chance to change their clothes or shower. The film badge dosimeters they wore were nearly all black from the radiation they’d been exposed to, and a couple of the elder ones were hollow eyed and lethargic. It was unclear whether they were sick or just tired.

  Darla poured everyone some wine and sat down next to Aguilar.

  “When did you get out of New Orleans?” Darla asked her.

  “Two days ago,” said Aguilar, tearing off a piece of bread. “There was nothing we could do. The grid is beyond repair and there was no way we could get the pumps running. Ground water’s seeping beneath the levees and the water table’s rising. Another week or two and the city will be flooded.”

  Darla was shocked. “That bad? How come they can’t repair the grid? It’s just some lines down.”

  “It’s more than that. The transformers are destroyed. Every substation we visited was the same. Even if we managed to override the electronic safety systems at the power plants and plug them straight into repaired lines, we’ve got no way of stepping down the voltage. We can’t order new parts, got no machinery to repair what we’ve got and there’s hardly anybody working on it anyway. New Orleans is running out of food and people are either scavenging or bugging out. There’s no help coming in from outside.”

  That sounded horribly reminiscent of Katrina. “Maybe we need to get some messages out,” said Darla. “There’s got to be some places unaffected that can help. The governor had a plan, didn’t he? Has to be some federal help coming, and if not, I can take my boat along the coast to DC and damn well demand some. They’re not leaving us like this again.”

  “I don’t think it’s neglect this time,” said Aguilar. “I talked to a ham radio guy. He told me he had three transceivers protected by Faraday cages. Should have been enough to protect from an EMP. All three were damaged in the solar storm and he was only able to repair one of them. On clear nights, back in the day, he said he could pick up signals from across the Gulf and even as far as Colombia. Now there’s nothing. Just silence. It’s like the world just stopped.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Darla. “There’s no freaking way that everything could go down across the entire country. And what about Canada? The United Nations? It can’t have taken out the whole world! It just can’t.”

  “Carl thinks it can. Last transmission we got before the storm hit talked about a potential global impact.” Aguilar sighed. “I’m not sure we’re coming back from this.”

  ***

  Darla took her boat down to New Orleans for the night, a gloom descending on the river. The thought that the current situation might be permanent troubled her. It didn’t seem plausible. To Darla, it was simply a matter of fixing things. Sure, things in the near term would be bad, but with everyone working together they could straighten stuff out.

  Aguilar was an engineer, however, and to Darla that meant her words carried weight. If she said the grid couldn’t be fixed, she was probably right. That was way too pessimistic for Darla, though, as was the assertion that nobody would be coming to their assistance. There was no way Aguilar could truly know that, and Darla didn’t want to entertain the possibility.

  Docking at New Orleans port, she thought at first it was deserted. The police were gone, as were all the guardsmen who’d been sleeping in the warehouse. There was a crowd of people outside the locked gates, and a dozen or so guardsmen in a line within the c
ompound, clutching their rifles in readiness. In the front of the crowd were angry looking youths hurling insults. Darla couldn’t hear what they were yelling, but they looked ready to storm the gates. Stepping off her boat, she was accosted by a 2nd Lieutenant who’d dashed back from the line.

  “Are you going out again?” asked the officer, looking stressed.

  “No, we’re done for the night,” said Darla. “Where’s everybody else?”

  “The police are patrolling the city and the other squads have been sent to guard the hospital and food distribution centers.”

  “What about the FEMA lady?”

  “I have no idea,” sighed the 2nd Lieutenant. “The people are getting angry and demanding evacuation. We had trouble getting them out of the port after the last boat left, but they saw your boat coming down the river so they’re back. Is there any chance you can take a bunch of them?”

  “We’ve already begun blowing down the boiler,” explained Darla.

  “If you could just take the front rows,” said the officer, “that might lower the tension.”

  Considering the front rows were the loudest, not to mention the most violent looking, Darla could well imagine it might defuse the mob, but she didn’t particularly want folks like that on her boat. The officer was basically asking if he could hand off his problem onto her.

  She also thought that, once those gates were opened, there was no way they were going to stop coming, and her boat could only take so many.

  “I’m not sailing until the morning,” said Darla. “Tell them that. All they have to do is wait and they’ll get a ride. Might be able to fit two journeys in tomorrow.”

  “They’re not going to wait that long.”

  “They’ll have to. I’ve been working all day and I was told to be here for the morning embarkation. Well, I’m here.”

  The officer removed his helmet to massage his brow, his dirty hair sticking up.

  “You’ve got to move your boat, then,” he said. “As long as you stay here, they think they can get aboard. You need to move it out of sight.”

  Darla considered this. “Okay,” she said finally. “You guys be okay here on your own? You want to come with us?”

  “Hell, no. If they see us going aboard, there’ll be a stampede. Just go. We’ll be fine once you’re gone.”

  Darla nodded and returned to her boat, entering the boiler room.

  “We got enough steam to get under way again?” she shouted.

  Manny was bleeding off the boiler pressure and he closed the valve to stop the noisy escape.

  “What?” he said.

  “We’ve got to get moving again. Is there enough pressure to get under way?”

  Manny looked at the dials. “If we move slow. I thought we were docking for the night?”

  “Yeah, but not here,” said Darla. “They don’t want us.”

  She passed Jacques in the galley. He was washing the wine glasses and polishing them, holding them up to the light to check for blemishes.

  “Get ready to cast off,” she told him.

  “I thought we were staying?” he said.

  “Yeah, but no,” she said irritably. “Just untie us.”

  Darla made her way to the pilothouse and waited for Zack and Jacques to pull the mooring ropes back aboard, then ordered Slow Ahead. The Mississippi Rose eased away, the wheels turning with aching slowness. Over by the gate, the crowd went crazy, but the guardsmen held their position. Darla watched them until a burnt warehouse blocked the view, then she steered into the channel.

  Against the current they made barely any headway, but she crossed over toward the opposite shore and called out for Jacques to drop the anchor.

  If she stayed out in the river, nobody could say they were tempted to board her.

  In the shadow of an abandoned freighter, the Mississippi Rose pulled the anchor rope taut as the wheels were stopped. Darla climbed onto the roof of the pilothouse, listening for the possible commotion of the crowd rushing the guardsmen, but all she heard was the lapping of the water against the hull.

  Darkness fell and Darla lit a candle in the saloon. Through the open door of the bathroom, Manny stripped down to the waist and splashed water from the sink onto himself, washing off the sweat and soot from his sagging rolls. The boat produced its own clean water from a steam condenser, so he could afford to be lavish. Zack waited in line, staring broodingly at a reflection of himself in the saloon windows. Jacques prepared an evening meal of fried rice and sweet corn. When it was ready they all sat at the table and ate quietly. From the city came the occasional crack of a distant gunshot.

  “Who thinks this isn’t going to end?” asked Darla suddenly.

  The others each raised their left hand while continuing to eat.

  “You guys don’t know nothing,” snapped Darla.

  The staccato rattle of automatic gunfire sounded in the distance, followed by silence, as if all other weapons had been shamed into a ceasefire.

  “That’s a double negative,” said Zack quietly.

  “What is?” said Darla, thinking he might be referring to the gunfire.

  “Not knowing nothing. It means we know something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like … a bunch of stuff. But not nothing.”

  “That don’t mean nothing.”

  “So it means something.”

  “Quit playing with my words! What are you, some kind of college professor or something?”

  “No,” said Zack slowly, taking the accusation seriously. “I never taught.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” scoffed Darla.

  Zack fixed her with a dark gaze. “What makes you think I couldn’t teach?”

  “Kind of obvious, isn’t it? Look at you.”

  Zack paused to think about that. “Are you always so judgmental?”

  “Well, duh!” exclaimed Darla. “What do you think?”

  “I think you revel in it, sometimes.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re not a good judge of character.”

  Manny and Jacques looked on with interest as Darla puffed herself up.

  “Hey!” she said. “Are you forgetting whose boat you’re saying that on?”

  “It’s your boat,” said Zack reasonably, “but that’s my observation. It’s a simple comment.”

  “You’re lucky I’m not drunk,” Darla declared. “I’d have punched you in the mouth for that.”

  “I imagine you think you would,” he said. “But you’re not that kind of person really.”

  “Oh yeah? Jacques, fetch me a bottle.”

  Jacques didn’t move.

  Rebuffed, Darla said to Zack, “Mister, you can get off my boat right now.”

  “We’re anchored in the river,” said Zack. “I can’t swim.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you opened your mouth. When did you get so talkative anyway? You’ve been hanging around for days, mumbling into your beard. I preferred it like that.”

  “I know,” said Zack, gazing off at his reflection in the windows. “I’ve been silent too long.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” said Manny sympathetically.

  “But there is,” said Zack. “I turned inward and got too insular.” He looked at Darla. “In your particular vernacular,” he told her, “I had my head up my ass.”

  Darla gave him a wary look. She could feel something coming, like he was about to unmask himself.

  “I wasn’t completely honest with you,” he said. “I wasn’t completely honest with myself. Except, that’s not completely accurate. I was pretty mixed up.”

  “So you had been in prison,” ventured Darla.

  “No,” replied Zack, “except when I went in to interview clients.”

  “Clients?”

  “I was a lawyer. Joined a practice in Chicago after finishing law school. Worked there for five years before they had to let me go.”

  “Let you go?”

  “Well, they fi
red me. I couldn’t do the job anymore. It was a downward spiral after that. I lost my house, ended up on the streets. Took to drinking when I could, in order to forget.” He gazed off into the distance again. “Met some amazing people. Watched some die from drug overdoses or hypothermia. Got robbed and run out of town a few times. Wasted a lot of years.”

  “And then you met Eric?”

  Zack looked at her. “No. I told you, I don’t know anyone called Eric.”

  “Bullshit, mister. Nothing about your story makes sense. I mean, a lawyer? Really? Care to tell us how you managed to get fired from a job like that, because I’m having a hard time believing it.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. I have a hard time believing it myself sometimes. It’s like a different life. After my wife and daughter died, I kind of collapsed. I had it all and then it was gone. I couldn’t function. The firm put me on a sabbatical, but when it looked like I wouldn’t make it back — and to be honest I didn’t want to go back — they terminated my contract. By then I was already a mess. Losing my family just killed something inside.”

  There was an awful silence around the table and Darla’s mouth clamped shut.

  There was a loud crack as one of the windows shattered. Everyone stared dumbly at the broken pane for a moment before realizing that someone had just taken a shot at them. With the sudden scraping of chairs on the wooden boards, everybody dived to the floor. Darla took a second to comprehend what had just happened. The candle was still burning, illuminating the saloon for anyone outside to see. Licking her fingers, she reached up and snuffed out the flame.

  “Manny, get your rifle,” she said.

  With a grunt, Manny crawled through the pitch black, promptly hitting his head against the bar. Cursing, he adjusted his trajectory, fumbling for the doorway.

  Darla’s eyes adjusted a little to the darkness. There were a couple of shouts outside from the direction of the port, but no further gunfire. Considering she hadn’t actually heard the shot, she wondered if someone had simply thrown a stone at the window. But they were too far from the shore for that, unless it was someone already on the water. Darla listened hard for the sounds of somebody trying to board the boat, but all she heard was Manny bumping around in his cabin, looking for the rifle.