Orleans (21 page)

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 good 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.

The last drawer held newspaper clippings, medical journals, and the research that had gone into writing the articles. This was all first-year textbook reading for any biology student. Nothing helpful, nothing new. The rest of the filing cabinets were filled with the same sort of archival documentation.

At last, Daniel gave up. This room didn’t hold any secrets. Except for one.

Feeling a bit like a voyeur, Daniel pulled the Jerome de la Guerre file from its drawer and began to read.

• • • 

Jerome de la Guerre had been one of those idealistic graduate students, a doctoral candidate in social anthropology. Fen’s mother, Sylvie, had studied botany. They both signed on for field duty. Their type O blood had made them more resistant to the Fever than some of the other Institute workers, and they had volunteered to work in the city, outside the protective walls of the Institute’s old school building. They mimicked the lives of freesteaders at a time when freesteading was not as dangerous as it was today. There were still aide workers in the city then, church-run missions. Jerome and Sylvie had run a pipeline of information between a mission run by a Catholic priest, Father John Dunham, the Institute, and the Ursuline school. Together, the three organizations brought food, water, medical supplies, and structure to the struggling community of Orleans. Almost thirty-five years after the Wall had gone up, it seemed like a silver age, an age of hope. Somewhere along the way, Jerome and Sylvie fell in love, married, and had one daughter. Fen.

But something had happened. Fen’s parents had left the Institute. A falling-out with the management, the file said. A change in the Institute’s mission, a parting of the ways. If the Institute had been the de la Guerres’ tribe, then at some point they, along with a five-year-old Fen, had made a break with Dr. James and his organization.

And they were not the only ones to leave. A senior researcher and a few other field operatives were said to have “gone native” as well.

Daniel closed the file and returned it to the cabinet drawer. This was politics and strife, not science. He was here for data, he reminded himself, not gossip. He had a world to save.

25

I LEAN MY BACK AGAINST THE DOOR AND STAY
hidden in the alcove behind that old crape myrtle, trying to think.
Fen, girl, you a fool.
So what if Daniel done pulled us through the dark? So what if he help us get out of that blood farm? He been using us. Like the swamp rats the Professors used to experiment on. Best thing I can do for Orleans be lock Daniel up inside. Him and his damned virus.

I be breathing heavy, feeling like a trapped animal. But I got away, I tell myself. We got away. Baby Girl make a noise in my arms and I look down at her little face. Her mama’s eyes stare back at me.

“What you be looking at me like that for?”

She yawn, but this time she don’t go to sleep. She just stare and I stare back. I can’t help it. This baby got eyes like a sinkhole; they be pulling me in, and I let them.

“Can you believe that, Baby Girl? Fool trying to cure Delta Fever.”

Ain’t like a million other folks haven’t tried. Before the Wall, Daddy say everybody with a test tube and a kitchen sink be trying to cook up a cure. A medicine like that make you rich for life. You could own the Delta.

But a cure mean other things, too. If Delta Fever be gone and all the sick folks over here be cured, there’d be no more blood hunting, no blue tarp room in the Ursulines’ hospital. No Wall.

I be assessing my situation again, looking at my assets. I got Baby Girl. And I got a chance.

“You wouldn’t have to leave me,” I say softly. I think of Daniel again, dragging me after him through the night, torches on our heels. He a do-gooder. Maybe they all like that over the Wall. Daniel create a poison, but he ain’t using it. He coulda opened that canister back at the blood farm, killed us all and gotten out. Hell, he could be using it now and we be dead where we stand. But he ain’t. Daniel ain’t a killer.

And now Baby Girl finally be talking to me with them eyes of hers. She be telling me what to do next. “Baby Girl, you don’t know the world like I do. This gonna be more trouble than it worth.”

She just look at me and yawn again like she bored. Like I ain’t got any other excuses. Which I don’t. I curse under my breath and look out through the branches of the myrtle tree. Baby Girl ain’t never seen a crape myrtle in bloom, and she never will if she got to go to Father John and over the Wall.

“You want to see something pretty?” I ask her. “Maybe one day you see flowers on this tree.” She hiccup at me and I shake my head. Me, talking to this baby like it make some kind of sense. I don’t make her any promises, ’cause I know this one gonna be real hard to keep, but I’ma try.

It take a little doing, but I get that door pried back open and I shuffle back up them stairs. Back to where I used to be someone with parents, good people who tried to make a difference.

Doors be open up and down the hallway. I find Daniel sitting in the middle of the hall, like a dog that don’t know what to do without a master.

“You came back,” he say.

I shrug. “You saved me and Baby Girl last night. I owe you for that.” In my arms, Baby Girl gurgle and coo. I point to the open doors with my chin. “You find what you looking for?”

“There’s nothing here.” Daniel stand up, slow and stiff in his suit. “There’s nothing here on the Fever at all,” he say incredulously. “I don’t understand. There should be research, records, data. Something.”

I shake my head. “I told you it be useless. Come on, now.”

“Where are we going?”

I look at the baby in my arms one last time, make sure I’m doing the right thing. “To the only person who might help you. The oldest man in the Delta, Mr. Go.”

Daniel turn suddenly and look through the observation window into the infirmary. “My God,” he say.

My feet don’t want to move, but I make them, and I walk to see what he seeing. The screen over the first bed be lit up in big green letters:
WHO’S THERE?

“Come on, Daniel,” I whisper. But he don’t move, and suddenly all the screens come alive with bright green lights. They blink at us like owls in a tree:
WHO? WHO? WHO?

26

FEN? FEN DE LA GUERRE?

“Shit.” I shake my head. “Yes, Dr. Warren,” I say for the first time in eleven years.

FEN. ARE YOUR PARENTS HERE?

“You know they dead the minute they left you. We made it five years.” Nobody survive as a freesteader for long.

I watch the screen. But it ain’t like him to say sorry or nothing like that. On to the next thing, then. “Where Priscilla at?” I ask.

“Who’s Priscilla?” Daniel whisper.

“His granddaughter. She twice my age but the closest thing to a kid the Professors ever had. When they got sick, she took over, caring for them and running the project. I thought she the one you been looking for.”

Through the glass, Dr. Warren’s screen lights up.
SHE LEFT US. IN THE NAME OF THE WORK.

“Left you?” I think of the way the door been left cracked open. She ain’t planning on coming back here. Dr. Warren really be dead. He just don’t know it.

“Is she coming back?” Daniel ask. I hear the hope in his voice, like he might still find what he looking for here.

I shake my head. “Man, you don’t even know if she alive. Walk away, Daniel.”