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Chapter Sixteen

What do you say when you're suddenly confronted with an ocean where half a million people lived?

And it wasn't just a living population swallowed up and gone but some four centuries of history, culture, and tradition.

The music was hushed now. It didn't matter that Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong were already gone and their recordings would live on. And hopefully the still-living greats had evacuated in time—those that weren't out on the road and already on tour. But there were too many that were old or blind or practically lame, now. Too many too stubborn—or too poor—to leave for just another storm. And what about Preservation Hall? Tipitina's? The Funky Butt at Congo Square, Donna's, the Rock'N'Bowl, the Palm Court, Fritzel's, and Snug Harbor? Hell, forget individual venues, New Orleans was The Source. Say what you will about the jazz scene in Chicago or Kansas City but that all came later and never had the cultural kaleidoscope of diversity or fresh-off-the-boat inventiveness or aged-in-the-wooden-barrel-house history sounds of New Orleans music.

Go to a hundred towns and cities in Louisiana and you'll find a hundred Mardi Gras celebrations, each unique and wonderful in its own right. But each only a pale reflection of the original party to end all parties.

And the food . . . 

It wasn't like you wouldn't ever eat jambalaya or gumbo or po'boys again. But only the Café du Monde made beignets and café au lait that people came from all over the world to taste. Nobody had a stand-up oyster bar like Felix's. You couldn't get better muffalettas anywhere than at Central Grocery. There was the chicken Clemençeau at Feelings, the Bananas Foster at Brennan's, the crawfish pie at Michaul's on St. Charles, the bread puddings at the Bon Ton, the quenelles of goat crème fraîche at Lilette, and fried green tomatoes, grillades, and grits at Café Atchafalaya. Arnaud's shrimp remoulade would never be duplicated. Oh, and the pompano en papillote, Eggs Sardou, andouille, maque choux, tasso, and courtbouillon of redfish! The pralines, king cakes, sweet potato pie, calas, and pain perdu!

I shook myself, the memories of cafés and restaurants, bars and music halls, buildings and landmarks fading. Yes, those places were gone and I mourned them because I knew them.

But a half million people that I didn't know had just become a lesser statistic to me. And that was just the city's population. One and a half million in the greater New Orleans area and, with water stretching in every direction to the horizon, who knew how far inland the sea had struck?

Or how many coastal cities had suffered similar fates between Pensacola and Galveston?

We were afloat on an alien sea and I just couldn't wrap my mind around the scope of the catastrophe.

Never mind.

I couldn't do anything for them now.

I was beginning to see the emotional advantages to becoming a monster.

My mind would be less cluttered with unhelpful emotion when I needed my wits about me. To revisit Joe Stalin, my family was the tragedy; everyone and everything else were just statistics. . . . 

For now I would concentrate on the task at hand. I would . . . 

I slid down the ladder to the lower deck and promptly began throwing up over the side. Mostly dry heaving as I hadn't put anything solid in my stomach for days.

There had to have been time, I told myself as small dollops of stomach bile plinked into the gray-green waves. Time for most of the people to have gotten out, gotten to higher ground . . . 

But high enough ground?

And how far away?

This was flooding beyond the anticipated disaster of a failed levee system. The sea had been out there, hungrily nibbling its way through the tidal lands and barrier islands that had provided a natural barrier for millennia. Unfortunately, ninety percent of that protection had disappeared in the last fifty years thanks to pipeline channels for oil development and wetland mismanagement. The weight of an increasing population along an unstable coastline added subsidence at the rate of three feet a century to the mix: the whole Gulf Coast from Mississippi to Texas was sinking at an unprecedented rate. And every hurricane, every storm surge returned a portion of the sea to its rightful place in defiance of man's best efforts at architecture and pump technology.

"The future of New Orleans tourism is glass-bottom boats," the more enlightened used to boast only half jestingly.

But even the worst-case scenarios put the anticipated flood stage at no more than eighteen feet.

This . . . I gazed in stupefaction out over the vast expanse of water broken only by the snaggle-toothed underbite of high-rise buildings—this was far worse! The water had to be more than three times as deep as anything dreamed by the Cassandras of modern misfortunes. This flood was no mere meeting of the Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain, the city of New Orleans caught between their overrun banks. The Gulf of Mexico had redrawn its boundary lines, bringing the coastline a lot closer to Baton Rouge.

And, peering at the invisible horizon, there was no way to know whether Baton Rouge had been subsumed, as well.

How could any storm—even a supernatural one—flood hundreds of miles of land, as far as the eye could see?

As if in answer to my question, the surface of the water began to pattern in miniature ripples, like a coarsely woven fabric, flattening out the grosser waves and wind patterns. Bubbles, ranging from delicate strands of pearl-sized hisses to Volkswagen-sized blasts of trapped air broke the surface, turning the ocean around us into a boiling cauldron. The New Moon pitched and turned and the sound of rumbling grew from a subharmonic vibration to a full-throated growl: earthquake!

Or, more correctly, a seaquake!

As I looked up in horror, the Greek-cross-shaped World Trade Center building canted to the left—presumably toward the submerged channel of the Mississippi River—and sank another eight stories beneath the waters.

New Orleans was gone. Gone deep. The dozen or so remaining buildings still showing above the waves were nothing more than tombstones marking her watery grave. Their glass windows shattered, dark, and empty. Devoid of light, motion, life. Based on the number of stories still showing I figured the French Quarter had to be under ninety feet of water easy, even though it traditionally stood on higher ground.

The Orpheum, I thought. What if Lupé and the others had stayed? Tried to ride out the storm like Mooncloud said? Even if the sealed entrance under the theater was airtight, was the rest of the underground complex once the sea rolled in? If that last temblor was an aftershock, wouldn't one of the previous seaquakes have cracked their subterranean bunker like an egg? And, even if they were still alive, courtesy of an enormous amount of luck and a large enough air pocket, how was I going to get to them without drowning them in the process?

I slammed my fist against the railing as Zotz called out from above: "Lady in the water! Two points off the starboard beam!"

I didn't know two points off the starboard beam from "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" but Zotz could point from the upper deck and that was all I needed to know. I kicked off my shoes as I rounded the New Moon to the other side, stepped up on the rail, and launched myself outward, punching off so powerfully that I angled down a good thirty feet through the water before I could stop my descent.

My eyes re-lensed and filtered the available light giving me an astonishing glimpse at the remains of the city down below.

I was suspended above a section of the riverfront and, as I turned, I could see the Spanish Plaza off to my right. To my left was Woldenberg Riverfront Park, its sculpture gardens befouled with clots of overturned automobiles and seaweedlike clumps of drowned bodies half emergent from windows and snagged on the stainless steel hoops and pillars of the Ocean Song monument. More disturbing were the bloated faces pressed to the glass ceiling of the Amazon Rainforest, now flooded like the rest of the Aquarium of the Americas, a giant fishbowl turned upside down with human and animal floaters providing food for the fish who had found their way inward.

A streetcar was on its side, blocking Canal Street adjacent to the ferry landing. An inconvenience to none, now. But, as I began my stroke and kick to return to the surface, movement caught my eye. I glanced back. Then looked again.

My head broke the surface and I had to reorient everything: direction, light, sound, target. Liban. As I swam toward her I tried to reconcile what I thought I had seen.

A crew of Deep Ones, laboring with ropes and jacks, to move the trolley as if it were needed elsewhere.

 

Rescuing this elven sea goddess was a little more complicated than I expected.

First of all, she was unconscious so I had to swim for the both of us—though thankfully she was buoyant and not all dead weight. At least until I tried to lift her toward Setanta's waiting hands. Eventually I gave up on that bit of impossible gymnastics and looped a rope under her arms so that the big Celt could haul her up like the catch of the day. It was an appropriate metaphor as Liban had "lost" her legs. The lower half of her orange wetsuit had transformed from neoprene to shimmering, coppery scales, fusing together to form a tapering but unified fishtail, overlaid with a mottled grid work of semicircles and arced patterns reminiscent of a lionfish. From the hips up she was just as hu—er—elvish—as she was before.

But, obviously, there was something to those mermaid stories beyond an overabundance of rum and too much time at sea.

Setanta placed her in my bed and checked her eyes and pulse while I changed into dry clothes.

"I can find no injuries," he said, combing through her dark, wet tresses to examine her scalp. "She seems to be but unconscious. As like the product of exhaustion."

"Yeah," I said, toweling off and grabbing another shirt out of the closet, "opening dimensional gateways always leaves me feeling a bit peaked. . . ." I saw the look on his face as he looked back up at me. "Kidding. Just kidding . . ." Anything to keep from thinking too much, too soon.

The lights in the cabin went out.

"Now what?"

There was enough daylight filtering in through the portholes to find my way to the dresser and extract a flashlight from the top drawer. Turning it on, I tossed it to the big Celt. "Stay here and keep an eye on her. I'll go see what the problem is."

I crashed about the lower level as I hopped into a pair of dry chinos and carried my deck shoes up the ladder to the helm and Zotz.

"Yeah," he said as I sat to put on my shoes, "I turned off the generator."

I stared at him. "Shit. We're running out of gas."

He nodded. "Just about. And no marinas in sight. I can stretch it if we don't use any unnecessary power."

"Can you power the GPS long enough to maneuver us over the Orpheum?"

The Mesoamerican bat-demon stared at me. "Do you have a plan?" Clearly the same obstacles were going through his mind that I had grappled with twenty minutes earlier.

"I'd say everything is a work in progress, right now," I said, willing my left eye to stop twitching.

"If we don't conserve fuel and we don't find more of it, we won't be afloat that much longer," he said pointedly. "We're wallowing in heavier swells and taking on water more quickly than back on the sheltered Ouachita. If I don't run the pumps every twenty minutes or so we'll be on the bottom inside of an hour. To run the pumps, I have to have fuel. Once that's gone, so are we."

I stared out over the water and noticed the light was lessening. Checked the position of the sun and, almost as an afterthought, checked my watch: 4:53 pm. Sundown was a while away but, barring a miracle, we'd be in the dark all too soon.

Where was the Coast Guard? In the aftermath of a disaster of this magnitude they should have had a fleet here by now; a flotilla at the very least. Zotz had issued a general mayday while I was in the water but the radio—on battery backup while the generator was off-line—remained ominously silent. It was as if a great tsunami had come along and washed everything and everyone away and we were the only living beings for a thousand miles.

Above the waterline, anyway.

Feeling helpless and impotent, I went back down to my cabin, cursing Hindu and Japanese and Outer Space so-called higher beings who seemed very big on the idea of delegating but more than a little hazy on the concepts of motivation, training, and providing proper materials and equipment.

Liban was awake but looking deathly pale when I entered. Setanta glanced at me and left without a word.

I sat on the edge of the bed. "How are you feeling?"

"Faded," she whispered. "Setanta said we arrived?"

I nodded, seeing the questions in her eyes. "We're in New Orleans. Maybe a hundred feet above the former Riverwalk. The city's under water. The storm got here first."

She reached out and squeezed my hand. It was more of a twitch than the actual application of pressure. "I am sorry. Opening a path through the waters is a difficult thing. I have never done it so far from the sea and where so much land crossed back and forth between. It distorted the pathway. The last time I did such a thing, seagoing craft were much different. Sailing vessels are much different than ships employing modern engines and technology: it felt as if I were drawing two vessels in my wake. And then I think I may have passed through a portion of the storm, itself. It was unexpected . . . powerful. I was thrown the wrong way on the final approach. We may have lost days instead of hours. I do not know. Everything became confused before I passed out."

"You brought us through safely," I said, squeezing her hand gently in return. "That's all that counts," I added, trying to be gracious. It wasn't easy. Somewhere in the back of my brain a part of me was screaming. It had started when I first realized that New Orleans wasn't merely drenched but fully dead and drowned. Meanwhile, another part of me was running around in circles and babbling, trying to figure out what to do next, what to do about Lupé and the others. Holding someone's hand and mouthing platitudes while the rest of the world was coming undone was not high on my to-do list at the moment.

"Rest now," I said. "Get your strength back. Is there anything I can get for you?"

She gave me a long look. "Perhaps later . . ." she said with a weak smile.

"Yeah," I said, getting back up and backing toward the door. That would be about the time I would be wanting a late night snack.

I went down the corridor and into the galley. The spare blood packs were in the fridge, not the freezer. I tore open two of them with my teeth and wolfed the contents. Crammed the rest in the freezer figuring they'd keep a little better there even with the power off.

Then I pulled the Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver and the sawed-off Mossberg out from under the sink. Checked and loaded each. Pulled harness and holster from the side cabinet. If the Coast Guard came calling I could pitch the shotgun over the side. If the Deep Ones came calling I'd be more adaptive to the situation. I went to the scuba lockers and began preparing spear guns.

 

The first boat appeared a quarter of an hour later. The second was right behind it.

They came out from behind the Plaza Tower and approached us in a long, lazy arc as if to look us over before coming in close.

Of course, that gave us the opportunity to do the same. Our field glasses to their field glasses. One quick look and I ducked down hoping that I had gotten the better look, first.

After a quick conference, positioning us so their line of sight was spoiled, Camazotz reconfigured his appearance to a tall Asian-looking guy. Setanta—well, we figured he was the least likely to be recognized. And I slipped down the back stairway to raid the restocked scuba locker and seal the Smith & Wesson in a waterproof baggie. Then I grabbed a face mask and fins, lowered the dive ladder, and eased off the stern and into the water as the two boats split their approaches to bracket us.

Fortunately they didn't try to bookend us on both sides. The first cut its engines across the New Moon's bow while the other pulled along our port side. I was able to use the houseboat for cover but I lost a flipper trying to put the mask on in the water. Then nearly lost the gun while strapping the diver's sheath knife to my calf. This was ridiculous. I ducked down and swam beneath the New Moon's keel and considered which of the two speedboats offered the most advantages to a stealth approach.

Never mind pain, serious injury, or death: if I pulled this off, Zotz would never believe my National Guard credentials again. . . . 

The visiting craft had the long sleek look of cigarette boats, the kind favored by rich playboys or coastal smugglers. One might assume the former based on the assortment of bikinied beauties on display, lying out on the exaggerated forward decks just ahead of the raked windscreens. They were strategically placed to draw the eye away from the clutch of bristly-faced toughs crowding the narrow cockpit and packing heat under their nylon windbreakers. I didn't need to see Johnny Depp's face to know that piracy was still alive and well on the high seas.

I had, however, seen three familiar faces on board the first go-fast boat. Faces that meant bargaining for some extra fuel was going to be a very dicey proposition.

So I continued my underwater swim, passing under their keel as they glided to stop some thirty feet off of the New Moon's port side.

I eased my head up on the far side of the new vessel as a familiar voice called: "Ahoy the boat!" No one on board would be looking away from the New Moon as that was their intended target and I was further hidden by the overhang of the V-shaped hull.

"Ahoy, yourself," I heard Zotz call back. And as they engaged in a totally bullshit conversation about who each other was, where they had come from, and where they were headed, I worked my way aft where the big engines and down-swept design would give me easier boarding access.

"I don't think I've ever seen a houseboat like yours out on the open ocean," the would-be pirate leader was saying. "The New Moon. Is it yours?"

"Naw." Make-over Asian Zotz chuckled crudely. "I borrowed it off some guy who said he had better things to do." That had their attention. I was able to pull myself up on the stern in time with the swell so that no one noticed any change in the boat's balance. Preternatural reflexes and now enhanced by nanite technology: sometimes I can do something right. The bimbos as well as the goons on the other boat were totally absorbed in watching the houseboat for any kind of a response.

"Yeah?" said pirate leader guy chuckling even more nastily than Zotz. "And what would that be?"

I peeled the waterproof bag open as Zotz shrugged. "He said something about having to deal with a bunch of pissant werewolves."

Pirate leader guy stopped chuckling and if I thought the pirate wannabes on both boats were attentive before, they were twice as attentive, now. "What did you say?" the leader growled menacingly.

Zotz leaned upon the upper deck's railing where the Mossberg and several spear guns were cached. I knew Setanta would be waiting in the salon, fingering Michael's great sword and waiting for the opportunity to repel some boarders.

"I said the guy who owns this boat said something about having to go deal with a bunch of pissant werewolves," Zotz repeated with a smile. "He said he'd warned some dude to stay the hell away from him and his people and this dude was just too stupid to pay attention."

"He said that, did he?" Pirate leader's lips peeled back in a manner that might have suggested a grin. But didn't.

"Sure did," Zotz nodded. "Said this dude needed some sense beat into him. Said it was probably a waste of time and this dude should just be shot down like a dog but . . ." Zotz shrugged.

"Really!" Hackles were rising all over the boat. Even the eye candy wearing the dental floss were starting to look a little feral. "Too bad I missed him. I'd really like to have a conversation with this fellow."

Compared to my silent arrival on board, the cocking of the Smith & Wesson's hammer was like a thunderclap. Everyone turned but turned carefully as there was no mistaking the sound.

"Hello, Gordon," I said. "Miss me? Because, from the looks of things, you decided you just couldn't stay away."

Everyone took a step back.

The funny thing was none of them were particularly worried about the monster handgun I was waving at them. Maybe if I told them the on-board ammo was silver frag-loads with sterling birdshot packed in a colloidal suspension medium I'd get a little more respect. Maybe. But for now, it was enough that the Bloodwalker was in the midst and all it took was a single scratch for me to go through them like a scythe through ripe wheat.

"What's the matter, Gordo?" I taunted, seeing the sick look on his once smug features. "Figured you were safe as long as I was on my boat and you were on yours? What was the plan? Sink the New Moon or set her ablaze or blow her out of the water—anything to destroy me from a safe distance with the added insurance of an ocean-sized moat between us?"

"Cséjthe . . ." the would-be pirate chief stammered, ". . . we didn't know you would be here."

I nodded. "Sure you did. You knew my boat was in the area from our distress calls and you ran a visual check on your approach. You had the intel, even if you've never actually seen the New Moon, yourself. You hailed us under false pretenses with a false ID. You've got scantily clad girls draped across your bow as bait and distraction—at least one of which is being held against her will. Cut her loose now." I turned to the fourth were. "And you brought Fenris along."

"Bloodwalker," he growled.

"Trucebreaker," I growled right back at him. I turned back to Gordon. "Who has seen my boat. Been on it, even. Enjoyed my hospitality. Then set me up to kill me. Was all set to kill his buddy Volpea, too. Fenny, how about cutting Volpea loose?"

"I don't—" the big wolf man began.

"No!" I yelled, turning back to him. "No stalling. No pretending to be stupid—you're stupid enough!" I waved the gun again. It probably bears pointing out at this stage that gun waving is a precise art. It's really more of a waggle. A short, controlled movement designed to get your adversaries' attention while still making sure that you both know the end of the barrel doesn't stray much from their heads or their hearts. Random waving about—in which your gun barrel wanders far afield—is the quickest way to make the points that 1) you are an idiot and 2) you are about to become a dead idiot.

Still, it wasn't so much the gun that was keeping my adversaries at bay as the knowledge that the first were to jump me would end up with me inside his head and using his flesh as a suicide weapon against the rest. Even more effective a threat than a machine gun much less a five-shot revolver.

"I am going to explain myself once and only once and then things are going to get really bloody because I am oh-so-easily pissed right now," I continued. "You tried to kill me and I would be thrilled—just tickled pick—to have the slightest excuse to blow a silver-ringed, fist-sized hole in your traitorous guts. If I repeat myself it will be to the next pissant were in line after I've blown away anyone I even begin to think might annoy me. Are we clear?"

He held up his hands. "She's cuffed. I'm going to reach into my pocket for the key."

I gestured with the gun. "Please remember that I'm hoping you'll do something stupid."

He didn't. Do something stupid, that is. At least until he had finished unlocking the camouflaged steel cuffs that had held Volpea a prisoner on the forward deck, stretched out in all of her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition glory. She stretched, rubbing her wrists and working out some shoulder kinks. Then punched him, knocking him overboard.

She looked at a life preserver and a length of rope then at me. "Sorry. Do you want him back?"

I shook my head. "You just saved me the trouble. Can he swim?"

"Yes."

"Pity." I turned to the others. "Now. I have a few questions. Same rules apply. Where is Marie Laveau?"

"I don't know."

I pointed the Smith & Wesson at his head, bracing my right wrist with my left hand. "I hope the next person on this boat is more forthcoming when I repeat the question."

"I really don't know!" he shouted, throwing up his hands. "Things have fallen apart these past three days. The old witch has a new demesne, now! The rest who survived have to fight for scraps!" He half threw a fist toward the deeper waters of the Gulf. "Word is, she's out there, somewhere! All I know is I haven't seen her since the storm hit. We're on our own here."

"So," I considered, easing the pressure off of the trigger. "You're not hunting me on her account any longer."

"Doesn't change your value as a bargaining chip," Volpea elaborated. "Gordon and company can either stay here and grow fins or try to bargain their way into some other demesne where they're likely to be killed or allowed on as the lowest of the low."

I nodded. "Killing the Bloodwalker, badass vampire nemesis, would give them the status and street cred to make their own deals."

"Can't blame a guy for trying," he said.

"Can't I?" My finger was back on the trigger. "If you don't know where Marie Laveau is, maybe you can tell me where my people are."

A hideous expression crossed the werewolf leader's face. "That's easy," he sneered. "Dead. Drowned. Sealed under the Orpheum Theatre in a watery tomb!"

I knew it, of course. But having Gordon confirm it with such evident relish just hit me all the harder at that moment. I wanted to kill him for it.

And I wanted them to kill me and let it all be over.

"That's not true!" Volpea said, stepping over the windscreen and down into the pilot's area. "They got out!"

"Shut up, bitch!" Gordon snarled. He turned back to me. "Don't you think she won't lie to you and tell you what you want to hear? They're dead, I tell you. All of them. And they died like rats in a storm drain! And you!" he shouted, turning back to the statuesque woman, "Mind your place!"

Volpea froze in place. Then turned slowly toward him. "Mind my place? Mind my place!" Faster than the strike of a cobra, her arm lashed out and her fingernails raked his face. "Why, Gordon," she cooed, all of the animosity suddenly gone from her voice, "you're bleeding! And so close to the Bloodwalker, too!"

That's when the radio crackled to life.

"Hello? Hello? I thought I heard a voice a while ago . . ."

Gordo touched his torn cheek and when he saw the blood on his fingers, his eyes grew wide and he glanced from the radio to me with a profound look of terror.

" . . . was that you, Zotzalahal Chamalcan? This is Sammathea D'Arbonne on board the Spindrift."

"I read you, Mama Samm," Zotz radioed back. "Are you all right? Are the others with you?"

"They were," she answered, sounding strangely distorted. Either she was very far away or something was wrong with her radio. "They've been taken. I was able to hide until they were gone but now everyone else—I can't stay on the radio, they may come back at any moment. Is Mister Chris with you? Can you put him on?"

"He's here. Sort of. But he's a little busy right now," Zotz answered. "I think he's about to beat the crap out of a bunch of werewolves and kill their leader."

Mama Samm's response was lost in noise of the former pirate chief vaulting over the railing and hitting the water. I looked around the boat at the others and said: "Well? What are you waiting for? He's your leader—go follow him." I had to wave the gun one last time even though it wasn't the gun they were most afraid of.

"No," I elaborated, "in the water."

I walked forward and picked up the microphone as eleven more splashes drowned out the GPS coordinates that Mama Samm was relaying to my demon helmsman.

"You sit tight," I told her, pushing the mic button, "we'll be there as soon as humanly possible."

"Inhumanly," Zotz kibitzed.

"Yeah. Listen," I told him, "we've got two fast, seaworthy, and presumably well-fueled boats here. Let's off-load what we think we'll need from the New Moon and turn in the rest to the insurance company next month. I want all of us to be on our way to those coordinates in ten minutes, tops."

"Aye-aye."

I dropped the mic in its cradle and turned around to look at Volpea. She was dressed much the same as when she had tried to seduce me on the top deck of my houseboat a few days before. Just wearing a little less, now, without the shirt.

"You're still on the boat," I said.

"Gordon is no longer my Alpha," she said.

"Well, it's sort of my boat, now."

"Well, I sort of figured that."

"Volpea . . ."

"The way I see it," she said, folding her arms in such a way as to strain the fabric of her bikini top, "is you're about to deliver one of three speeches."

"One of three?" I muttered.

"Yes. Either you're about to tell me that people who join your demesne share incredible risks and that I would be safer going my own way—"

"Well—"

"—or that you could never trust me because I suckered you and used you like a sap—"

"There is that . . ."

"—or that you don't like lesbians."

"It's speech number one," Zotz said, popping up over the back of the boat with the tow-rope from the other empty craft curled around one fist.

"Really," she said.

"Yeah. It can't be number two because he gets suckered and used by women all of the time. No signs of stopping, yet."

"And number three?" she asked.

"There's nothing wrong with lesbians. Some of the best websites—"

"Zotz!" I interrupted. "How did you get over here so fast?"

He gave me a wounded look as he tied the second boat to the stern of the first. "It's only twenty yards out and another twenty yards over. If I seem to be moving fast it's because I'm working and you're still standing still."

 

I took the wheel of the Bat Out of Hell, the first speedboat we'd inherited from Laveau's former werewolf minions. Zotz was driving the second with the words Screaming Mimi painted on the hull in a garish, windblown-font style. Liban didn't look happy but I doubted it had anything to do with marine-style detailing. I still needed debriefing from Volpea and it seemed wise to split out the complement between the two boats. In her weakened state, it seemed more sensible to put Setanta at her side.

Even though this was the most logical organization of our travel time and resources, I knew from experience that I would be punished for it after we arrived. Of course, if Lupé and Deirdre were waiting for me when I arrived with Volpea and Liban, it just meant I would be punished all the more. Incrementally and exponentially.

I've been told that it's every man's fantasy to be surrounded by beautiful women.

I can tell you that it is a fantasy.

And, unless you are very careful, it could be a final fantasy.

The GPS coordinates were well out into the Gulf of Mexico so, even at two-thirds open throttle we had a bit of time to talk. And the sun was already riding low in the sky.

According to Volpea, the storm had been fast, vicious and caught even the early evacuees unprepared. The storm surge had topped the levees and the seawalls, the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain had spilled over their banks, flooding everything below sea level and the pumping stations had all shorted out, one by one as the dark waters closed over them, too. Factories, refineries, and chemical plants polluted the flood waters with additional waste hazards and power plants ignited floating oil and gas slicks even as transmission towers toppled and power was cut across greater regions. Dead wildlife and living carpets of fire ants floated among the initial survivors. Then the alligators and the cottonmouths came, riding the crest of each new tide.

The greater threat came from the predators that were already among them. Looters and rapists and criminals of opportunity began to realize that food and water and camping gear and boats were precious commodities. There were stories of heroism as will happen among human beings during a crisis but New Orleans did not willingly surrender its title of the nation's murder capital during the storm, either.

Once the waters had come and driven the quick and the healthy to higher ground, the storm blew itself out. It was eerie, Volpea said. A one-day hurricane. But what a hurricane! The entire Ninth Ward gone. Flattened or picked up and flung away before being inundated in black silt and gray water. Automobiles tossed down the street or catapulted into buildings. Streetcars lifted off their tracks.

And people hurled like screaming missiles through storefronts, office windows, and less yielding surfaces or else out into the rain-pelted darkness, disappearing forever.

Even as the skies began to clear on the second day, the quakes began. Dams across the state, and what was left of the levees and dykes and sea walls, fell apart. Vast, watery sinkholes appeared. Then chunks of real estate disappeared, dropping anywhere from a few feet to dozens. A cascade effect ensued as water rushed in to fill the void and more quakes followed. Tsunamis formed out in the Gulf of Mexico and hurtled in like battering rams and turbo-charged bulldozers, tearing up fragile structures and anything that wasn't fastened down, and pushing the debris, living and dead, either miles inland or into larger, immovable objects before sucking them back out to sea.

Within hours a vast shelf of geological strata along the coast gave a deafening groan and shuddered. The subsidence of the land was less noticeable than the rising of the ocean as it slithered inland, climbing over the high ground and falling upon every refugee who wasn't in a boat or a reinforced building more than twenty-five stories tall.

Most of those buildings were deathtraps and charnel houses. The windows were mostly shattered from the pressure of the wind, the water, or the barrage of missiles the storm had thrown at them the first day. In some places the glass had blown outward from internal pressure as water rushed up a structure's core displacing trapped air faster than it could vent through the sealed environmental systems. No light, no power, no protection from the elements. Each new quake or aftershock brought more water up the elevator shafts and stairwells, claiming another floor, sometimes tipping the building a bit more, or toppling one completely. Some survivors fought for meager supplies and space as additional refugees arrived. Gordon and some of the other weres were keeping two of the buildings as their own private game reserve for when their own food ran out.

I wished I had known this bit of information before I had so blithely allowed them to attempt the marathon swim back to their "meat locker." Once again my natural impulses toward mercy and détente had proved the wrong call when dealing with the monsters.

No broadcast facilities within several hundred miles seemed to have survived. What meager reports had filtered through had come by way of boat radios farther away or inland, ham operators outside the destructive radius of the storm, or via a handful of working satellite radio receivers. Government response was rumored to be slow—the rest of the country seemed to think it was in as much shock as the people who were experiencing it firsthand. There were stories of refugee camps set up along the shores of the new flood plain by the Red Cross and FEMA but those were across the wide water and beyond the reach of survivors not already located near the fringe of the disaster.

There were more stories—tales of massive outbreaks of flesh-eating bacteria, dysentery, warnings about malaria. Reports of looting, civil unrest, piracy, and overnight disappearances. Tabloid-style stories of strange nocturnal sightings, "humanoids from the deep," and rumors of Coast Guard vessels gone missing.

Then radio reception turned bad. Batteries were running low, to be sure, but there was a quality to the reception that suggested some kind of interference.

Then silence.

As Gordon had said just before he opted to walk the plank, we were pretty much on our own down here and likely would be for a long, long time.

 

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Framed