Orleans (15 page)

The way she said the words sounded formal, like a ritual.

INQUIRY:
What is significance of blood type in the Delta?

RESPONSE:
Blood type is identity in the Delta. It indicates tribe and potential value of blood, if type is rare or useful. It can imply a tribal challenge, or an act of trust. Type AB is the rarest, but O is a universal donor, and therefore of increased value.

“Fen . . .” Daniel sat up and cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said. Trust might come slowly, but they both needed it if they were going to get out of here alive.

“Mister—Daniel. You say that thing on your wrist analyze stuff. Do it read blood types?”

Blood types, chemical compounds, air quality. The datalink was a very sophisticated computer, even if it was self-contained. “I suppose so,” he said.

“Trade, then. You type Baby Girl, and I get you outta here, safe and sound.”

“But we already—” he started to protest. How could he trust her if she kept changing their agreement?

“Keep your shirt, and your water. It don’t matter to me as much as this.”

He hesitated. “Bring her here.”

Fen tucked the baby back in her sling and slid over to him. “Do it hurt?”

“No,” he said, pulling up his coat sleeve to reveal the full datalink. Raising his arm, he showed her the scanning plate, a rectangle on the bottom like smooth green glass. “Look. It reads things from here without breaking the skin.”

Daniel motioned to Fen and she held the baby’s hand up. Gently, he pressed it to the scanning plate and his arm lit up like fireflies weaving in the dark as the datalink screened the baby’s blood. Then it clicked softly and he let go of the baby’s hand. The datalink whispered the information into his head.

“She’s O positive. Like her mother,” he said with a smile, wondering if the news was a relief. He couldn’t tell by the look on Fen’s face.

Suddenly, the door handle twisted, the lock clicking open with a heavy grinding noise. Daniel cowered and Fen flinched, setting the baby to crying again.

“Daniel,” Fen hissed. “Get down.” She motioned for him to lie down and feign sleep.

Between slitted eyelids, Daniel watched Fen reach into the hay pile behind her, pulling out the moss she had removed from the baby’s diaper. And then he understood her plan. Newborns didn’t process food into feces, but a black thick substance called meconium. Quickly, Fen smeared it into the corners of her eyes, mixing it with spit until she had streaks down her face.

Daniel recoiled, but lay still. Trust, he reminded himself. It wasn’t like he had any other options.

The door swung open and a man in a dirty white lab coat appeared, needles in his hand.

Daniel saw the man glance in his direction, then turned to Fen, who sat with her head tucked down, face hidden from view.

“Come on, girl. We need to type your baby,” he said, and reached for her. Fen rose, head down.

“Get me outta here, mister,” she pleaded. “That man a leper. He making me sick.”

She stepped closer. Daniel braced himself. Maybe he could rush the door, take the man off balance.

Then Fen screamed, “He killing me!”

She thrust her face into the lab man’s, black ooze leaking from her eyes, and he screamed, falling out of the door. Daniel didn’t hesitate. He leapt to his feet, moaning the way his brother had, ravaged by Delta Fever. They both groaned and stumbled out into the main room, but the man in the lab coat was nowhere to be seen. There was one other attendant, but he had no weapons. One look at Fen’s face and Daniel’s rags, and the man cursed and ran. The old smuggler had been right about the leper rags after all.

Daniel raced after Fen out of building 17. To the left lay the road into the camp toward the cook fires, all cold now in the morning light. A dog started to bark, and Daniel wondered how long it would be before the hunters woke up and caught them again. The lab men were halfway across the yard, calling for help, calling them infected. Daniel followed Fen’s lead, staggering and moaning until they were close to the back fence, more a log pile than a real structure. They clambered over the logs, Daniel clumsily, Fen surprisingly agile even with the baby slung across her chest. Then they were out of the farm and in the woods. They ran.

16

WE LUCKY. THEY DON’T BE COMING AFTER US
right away, and there be a stream right behind the farm. I splash into the water and run across it, then back again. “Follow me,” I call. Daniel not so limber, but he do the same.

When our scent be on both sides of the stream, I run back into the middle where it deep enough to almost hit my waist, and I run best I can with water pulling at me. We go upstream, far away from the farm, and I don’t be hearing no dogs because, as much as a new baby might be worth, they think we infected. In they mind, we a waste of fuel if they got to burn all three of us.

When we gone far enough I think we out of danger, I crouch by that stream to wash my face and scrub and scrub ’til I can stand to stop. Baby Girl be thinking it a game ’cause she waving her arms in the air and punching her fists and I think she be happy, maybe. If a body that young even know what happy be like.

Daniel sit on a log beside me and check his suit for tears.

“You alive, Daniel. I done my part.”

He maybe grinning or scowling, the suit make it hard to see. But he nod a bunch of times and try to catch his breath. I look up at the sky. The sooner I be done with this fool, the sooner I can get Baby Girl to Father John. He the only one who can get her out of Orleans alive. Which be more than this boy can hope for. City always been easier to get into than out of for smugglers. But that be his problem, not mine.

“You still want the Professors? I can take you to your stash instead and you can get outta here.”

He take a deep breath, like he making a big decision. “The Professors,” he say, and his filtered voice sound even flatter out in the open with no walls to bounce off.

“Okay then.” I wipe my hands on my pants and tighten Baby Girl’s sling.

• • • 

There be only a few ways to cross the Mississippi from here. One be that barge the hunters use. Too soon for me to get on that thing again, plus it likely they be waiting for us there if they waiting anywhere. The other way be a mud skiff. Sometimes there be crabbers and shrimpers in the river, but mostly they on the lake or the Gulf. What you see more of be them Chinamen and they junks, plying the river and mudflats for clams and oysters.

The shellfish beds be real big ever since Hurricane Jesus, like the mud been mixed up just right. First few years after the big ones, the water been poisoned. All them bottom- feeders been toxic. The military been dropping food supplies back then. Still, lots of folks got sick or starved. But the shellfish done they job eventually, cleaning up the river. Daddy told me there ain’t been oysters this big since the white man first came to this country. Father John call it a gift from God. Mr. Go say it be Nature taking care of herself. I don’t know ’bout that, but I know we can get a Chinaman to take us across the river for a fee. We just gotta find something worth trading.

“What part of the States you from?” I ask Daniel. If Baby Girl going over the Wall soon, it can’t hurt to know what it be like.

“East coast,” Daniel say. He still breathing kind of hard, and I wonder if it ’cause of the suit. “Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina. I’ve moved around.”

I repeat the names in my head. “Sound exotic.”

Daniel laugh. “Not like Orleans.”

I shrug. “You got a nice place in East Coast?”

Daniel nod. “A two-bedroom apartment. It’s okay. It’s got parking.”

I don’t know what parking be, but it sound all right. “And schools? You got good schools, and enough to eat?”

Daniel rush to keep up with me. “Not everyone does, but yes. I mean, if you can afford it, there’s plenty.”

Every place you go got a price. I look down at Baby Girl and wish I still had that gold McCallan left me. Then Baby Girl be leaving with something to pay her way. “Don’t sound so different from here,” I say.

Daniel finally catch up, and look me in the eye. “Believe me, it is.”

• • • 

It be coming on afternoon when the trees give way to grass and marsh along the river. Soon we be at Shangri-Lo.

Nothing more than a row of shanties where the river men live. When the Fever hit, all the Asians in Orleans moved over here. The Fever ain’t take to Asians the way it did the rest of us, so they like a tribe that way. They not like the rest of Orleans. They be mixing, for sure: Koreans and Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese and Filipino. But nothing else. Folks in Orleans all be mutts except for the Asians.

“Why are we stopping?” Daniel almost run into me at the edge of the reeds. I point to the stick in the dirt with a red mark painted on it.

“Oyster beds,” I say. “We almost there, but we need to work a plan.”

“I thought you had a plan,” he say.

It be enough to make me want to smack him, but Lydia always say there be more flies caught with honey. “I got us here, didn’t I? Up to you to get us the rest of the way. The Chinamen got boats that go to the Market across the river, but they ain’t taking us for free. You got any coin on you, or something for trade?”

Daniel look down at his coat. “I’ve got some cash,” he say, and start to reach into a pocket. I shake my head.

“Man, Outer States paper no good down here. It just wash away. What else you got?”

“What’s considered valuable?”

“Metal, fabric. Useful things. Glass? We don’t get a lot of glass anymore.”

Daniel shake his head.

Damn, this boy be useless. I think about my assets. I know a boatsman, used to study with the Ursulines, too, long time ago. We see each other time to time in the Market. His mama got a noodle stand there. Friendship don’t count for much in Orleans, but maybe.

One good thing about these folks—they used to trading, so they ain’t that territorial. Seafood and boats be bringing all kinds of folks to they door, and we ain’t no exception.

“Follow me.” I wave Daniel along, and we head across the mudflats into Shangri-Lo.

17

DANIEL’S HEART CAUGHT IN HIS THROAT. THE
shantytown spread out along the shoreline before him, huts of flotsam and lean-tos. Families lived here. Children. Life of a sort he hadn’t expected to find. Thriving life. And to think he had the means to end it all in his pocket. He pulled his coat closer around him and self-consciously followed Fen into town.

“Ni hao, konichiwa.”
Fen waved as she and Daniel entered the first row of shacks. A toothless old woman waved her away like a fly as they walked past her into the main thoroughfare.
Town
was too big a word for this place. It was more like a collection of shacks, some made with concrete walls and roofs, others just sheets of plywood. Sticky mud sucked at Daniel’s boots as he picked his way after Fen. Small dirty dogs paced them through the row of sheds.

“How do they live like this, right on the water?” Daniel asked, ducking under a line of drying laundry. Fen shrugged, her back looking too thin beneath the fraying fabric of her sack shirt and the weight of the baby slung across her chest.

“How do anybody live?” she replied. “Concrete be good shelter in a storm, and it last if there be a flood. The rest of the wood be cheap. It blow away in the wind without breaking anything else, and float back when it over, so they put it back together again.”

Daniel shook his head and stepped over an open gutter, wrinkling his nose at the filth that flowed through it.

“Is that a sewer?”

Fen laughed. “Naw, that be nasty. That the gutting canal. Where they throw all the oyster shells and fish guts. They wash back out to sea when the tide come in. It keep the place clean.”

The sheds grew larger as they walked along the shore, deeper into Shangri-Lo. In some of the bigger huts, lanterns could be seen burning. Fen strode along confidently, forcing Daniel to jog to keep up.

“What’s that up there?” he asked, pointing to a triangular wooden hut on stilts in the distance. “A watchtower?”