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diff --git a/unseen/Book 4/Sil and Dean/intro to sil.txt b/unseen/Book 4/Sil and Dean/intro to sil.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eab4ad3 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/Book 4/Sil and Dean/intro to sil.txt @@ -0,0 +1,525 @@ +Sil goes up the side canal, part of the flooded river, Scratch is back on the main river with Arbella, hidden in the overgrowth, the mast folded down. Sil stays in the tree during the day, watching. In the rain he sees the modmen (maechanically enhanced) killing the slaves. he doesn't do anything. he just watches. + +Or he wrestles with what to do for some time and finally decided to free them, going down at night and using his blow gun to kill one soldier and then shooting the second. He then blasts the sonic fence and talks to the men before letting them off. + + +Then he finally makes it to the house and meets the woman and the little girl. He leads them back across the prison territory, to the boat. The woman dies, from snakebite or perhaps something human? Sil and Scrtach and the dog and the litle girl head south for new orleans. They slip through the blockade and head out to sea. + +The passage at sea starts with the bird falling on the deck, the hummingbird that didn't make it. Then they make land in Nicaragua where they meet up with Dean who is letting Claire stay there. Claire has come down by land through mexico, after spending time with the nuns she leaves again going through the jungle until she emerges at Ameritown on the eastern coast of what used to be nicaragua. + +The Arbellville exists because Dean and Sil fled the the country when the US fell. The steal the boat (or maybe not, how does scratch come into the picture? How do Dean and Sil know each other?). Ameritown exists because Sil believed that the best place to hide and run a smuggling operation from would be the mosqiuto coast since that's what had been happening there for hundreds of years anyway. The start out with just a few shacks and then, because they are so successful at getting in and out of places a community begins to form, like minded people, not ruthlessly violent, simly people who want to be left alone. There is only one law, do not harm. When there is harm, the person doing the harming is tried under a very simple code: did you harm? If so they are expelled. Though the turth was, in all the time it had taken for the town to grow to a sizeable habitation of some seven or eight hundred souls, no one had ever been expelled. + +**** + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +The air was heavy, a wet wool sweater suffocating the day. Beech leaves hung overhead, jagged, silent gar's teeth ready to snap at the sky. Sil rounded a bend in the channel and came to a long row of oak trees. Limbs swept out from the trunks in great arcs that bowed under their own weight until they seemed to droop over the dark water. The leaves were thick like hands, the moonlight obscured in a black tunnel of gnarled oak fingers. Sil poled the skiff slowly along, planting the long bamboo pole at the bow and pulling the boat past it. Then he turned smartly on his heal, pushing now, and walked back toward the stern as the boat glided along beneath him. His bare feet threaded their way between the planked ribs of the hull, the thick skin too calloused for splinters to penetrate. When he reached the stern he turned around and walked back to the bow, planting the pole again and repeating the endless journey from bow to stern. The boat moved quietly up the canal, under the oaks and the massive basket-spider cobwebs that hung like Chinese lanterns over the cool flood waters. He was headed inland, away from the wide river, the relative safety of Arbella, Scratch and Galen, all hidden away in a camouflage of bushes and branches, tucked in a quiet eddie on the west side of the river. Sil felt like Sisyphus, endlessly pacing the length of the boat, wondering what compelled him to walk forward yet again. Nothing. This was what he had said he would do. So he did it. + +He emerged from under the canopy of trees, back out into the moonlight where, rather than relief, he suddenly felt exposed. He pulled over the side and sat down in the boat. He fumbled in his pack for the night vision goggles and strapped them on to study the banks of the channel. There were a pair of deer, eating quietly in the bushes a hundred yards ahead of him, but that was all he could see. The channel continued to narrow. At this rate, thought SIl, I'll be walking before dawn. + +After several more hours the channel was narrow enough that he could push off the marshy banks. Cattail blooms dried like Panama cigars on brittle stalks bobbed in the ripples of his wake. The air carried the faint smell of late summer honeysuckle and jasmine, a slight sweetness that mingled with the foul water of the channel water to create something not far off from rotting human flesh. + +The eastern sky was already a barely perceptible shade of purple when he spotted the overgrowth. It looked exactly the way the man had described it. A fouled mass of skin-tearing briars. Silverthorn, Bougainvillea, laurel bushes and razor grass planted to discourage anyone from straying too far up this side channel. Sil shifted the pole to his other hand and wiped the sweat on the dirty leg of his jeans. He gave one last push and quickly lay down in the hull. The continued forward, the tangles and sharp blades drifted by overhead. It was pure black beneath the bushes, but as his eye adjusted he saw cobwebs and abandoned birds' nests, snarls of twigs brought up the channel when the river flooded its bank. He grabbed the sturdier branches and pulled the boat further in. Dead limbs scraped against the hull of the boat, screaching off into the the night. Sil winced and let the boat slow to a stop. He listened, half-expecting to hear the a startled aligator to come over the side, half-hoping it would, half-hoping it would all just end here, quickly, if not quietly. But there was no sound save the chirp and warble of insects, crickets chirped, cicada wings hummed in the stillness, as if nothing were wrong. He pulled on another branched, pushed off a larger limb with his left foot. After what he guessed was a half mile the jumble of bushes began to thin out, the starry sky became visible between the branches and then the boat slipped free of them and he lay back, starring up at the big dipper. Sil rolled over slowly, swatted at cobwebs and wiped off the dead leaves that had fallen on him. He scooted forward, to the bow of the boat and looked around. Dawn arrived. the faint purple glow turned a more distinctive red-orange. The water around him became milky yellow. A warbler began to sing somewhere in the tangle of branches behind him. He tried the goggles again, but even the long shadows seem to hold nothing. He didn't have time to wait. He reached up, grabbed a sizable branch and pushed the boat forward. It slipped along in silence until it hit the first bit of broken wood that still clung to the half-sunken dock. The bow slid up onto the lower, submerged portion of the dock. Sil pulled himself over the edge of the hull and flopped onto the wood like a beached fish. He began to make his way forward, dragging himself along with his forearms toward the tree line on the shore. He cursed the splintered boards as they dug into his arms, but eventually he reached the first bushes and dragged himself to a seated position. He twisted his arms around to extract several rather large splinters from each. He wished someone would just take a shot at him so he could turn around and run. But no one did. He put on the goggles and turned around to scan the area inland from the dock. + +In front of him was half a mile of marshy bog, reeds and grass and mud, partly flooded from the rains that had fallen all throughout the previous week. The grasses were brown and overgrown. There was little in the way of cover until the far side of the bog where a line of good size trees marked the bottom of the first hill that would lead out of the river basin and eventually into the mountains. He could see a shelf of limestone halfway up the side of the hill. A few tulip populars and small oaks grew in its dark gray fissures, but the top of the rock was clear and offered a commanding view of the bog, the stream and probably, Sil guessed, most of the river valley behind him. If you were going to watch the area, that would be the place to do it. Nothing moved. Sil knew he would never make it across the marsh before the sun was well up in the sky, but the potential cover of the trees was more alluring than spending the day near the water, the boat and other obvious signs that he existed. He went back to the dugout and laced up his boots. He threw the backpack over his shoulder, grabbed the shotgun and headed off toward the forest line. + +His feet sank deep into the marsh mud with every step and required a sizable effect to extract them, that a sucking, sloshing noise every time he moved. The pack lurched from side to side with every awkward step, throwing him off balance. More than once he simply fell over sideways into the grass and mud. Each time, after he righted himself, he carefully cleared the barrel of the shotgun with a rag from his back pocket and wiped down the goggles that still hung about his neck and bashed into his chin every time he stumbled. His lip bled and he could feel the leaches burning on his legs. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +It was daylight by the time he made it to the base of the hill. He stripped off the pack and went back down to the edge of the bog to wash the mud from his legs. The dirty water just made him dirtier, but he could see the leaches well enough to get them off. He couldn't risk a fire and he didn't have any matches so he simply ripped them off, small chunks of his flesh coming with them. He walked back to his pack and pulled out his medical kit. He splashed a bit of alcohol on the wounds and put tape over the larger ones. With any luck he'd be back to Arbella long before any serious infection started to fester. He packed up his gear again and kept moving up the hill. He climbed to the top of the limestone outcrop and looked back at where he'd come from. The stream was merely a line of green trees amongst the brown landscape as it traced its way back toward the Mississippi. Sil sat down and drank from his canteen. Behind him the forest thickened and hill grew steeper, climbing skyward through a thick undergrowth of ferns and dried honeysuckle vines, leaves sheathed in dust. He climbed on, over mossy, rotting logs and dense leaves the cruched with every step. A log spun beneath his foot and Sil jumped back to stop it before it rolled down the hill. It rested unsteadily against his shin and then he gingerly stepped over it into a dark, worm carved underbelly of the log. The exposed ground was covered in toadstools and lined with ant tunnels, maggot burrows and centipedes all working their way out of the dense primordial sludge of rotting leaves. He stared at the layers of leaves slick with lichens and molds, years upon years of leaves matted to the forest floor like the thick pages of a water logged book. Sil kicked at the leaves with his foot and exposed a small forest of liverworts and fungus sprouting from the dark soil somewhere below. Satisfied the log wasn't going to crash down the hillside he continued up the hill. He fell into the slow rhythm of defeat, each step up his foot slid halfway back down. He moved like a somnambulist now, ascending slowly into the dark depths of the forest that would shelter him from the waking world. + +Thunder was already rumbling in the distance when he staggered to the top of the ridge. He drained the canteen and walked the crest in seach of a suitable tree. He found a massive beech, the tall straight trunk leading up thirty feet before the first horizontal branches reached out into the forest canopy. He pulled the boot spikes out of his pack and snaked a rope around the trunk. Throwing both the pack and the shotgun over his shoulder he began to climb. It was slow going, kicking the spikes in the bark and then carefully testing it with his weight before pulling himself up, shifting the rope that snaked around the trunk and looped through the hoops in his harness securing him, somewhat. Then he repeating the process, kicking with the other foot, testing his weight and climbing higher. His mouth was dry and sweat soaked his back by the time he rested on the first limb. He studied the canopy around him. About twenty feet above him was an eight inch thick limb that jutted out and then curved to its left to avoid a thin pine tree, making, Sil thought, a good enough spot to string a hammock. It took him another ten minutes to reach it and then he tied himself off to the tree, secured his pack with another length of rope and pulled out his second and last canteen. + +He was busy guzzling water when he heard the unmistakable sound of mechanical servos and hydraulic pistons. He hurriedly screwed the canteen up, checked his harness to make sure it was secure and pulled the shotgun around on its strap so that it lay across his lap. He brought the binoculars to his eyes. The soldiers were moving slowly, Sil could hear them at least five minutes before he saw them, five men, exosketelon legs propelling them with almost zero effort on their part. Sil knew the legs, while they were moving slowly at the moment, could run up to thirty miles an hour, some people claimed much faster, though it hardly mattered since even the low end of spectrum could easily run down the average human being. The soldiers below him were moving slowly only because the terrain made it nearly impossible to do otherwise. The soldier in front was sweeping the terrain with something that looked like an old police radar gun. His face was hidden in the shadow of a baseball cap, but his uniform was unbuttoned and his shirt soaked with sweat. The heat and humidity didn't care what sort of legs you had. The soldiers were carrying automatic rifles with pistols strapped to strapped to their chests. Around the lead man's waist was a belt of concussion grenades. He had stopped as he crested the ridge, the others fell in around him looking at the screen on the back of the radar gun. The man swept the gun down the hillside and, after some words Sil was too far away to hear, two of the soldiers stepped out of their exolegs. One of the soldiers lit a cigarette, the other turned and pissed into a dogwood beside the trail. The rest passed a water jug between them. Sil kept the binoculars trained on the radar gun, but he couldn't make out what it was, only that it had a screen on the back and gave some kind of read out. Eventually the smoking man flicked away the butt of his cigarette and the two climbed back in their exolegs. The lead soldier set off down the hill, toward the bog and the others followed. Sil watched them go. He scanned out, down the hill to the edge of the bog. He decided to wait and see if they crossed it. When the sound of the mechanical legs had faded to almost nothing, he untied himself and set up his hammock to wait out the afternoon. + +It began to rain. Sil pulled his poncho out and draped it over hammock. It was stifling, but better than spending the afternoon in a pool of dirty water, or worse exceeding the weight limits of the hammock and ending up on the ground with a broken neck. He set the empty canteen at the edge of the hammock and pushed the tarp up to form a crease that slowly filled the canteen back up. Periodically he used the binoculars to scan the marsh in search of the patrol, but no one appeared. Perhaps the exolegs didn't work in mud, but then why bring then down here, to the river basin where mud was inevitable. Perhaps they were just waiting out the storm. Sil laid the binoculars down on his chest. Without noticing that he had done so, Sil fell asleep for the first time in nearly thirty-six hours. + +He started awake to a world of darkness and the crashing of thunder reflexively clutching at the shotgun cradled across his stomach. It was there, cool and comforting in his hands, the barrel still safely covered and dry. He lifted the edge of the poncho and looked out. It had stopped raining, though the water still dripped from the leaves of tree around him and over him. He was surprised to see the flicker of firelight through the trees. He couldn't see the fire itself, it was too far away, just the amber pulsing. Otherwise the night was black, clouds still obscuring the stars and sliver of the moon that should have been coming up over the the northern ridges of the Osarks, which he knew were between him and his destination. And now he knew there might well be soldiers between him and Arbella. Soldiers that could run twice as fast and fight five times as well as he could. He put on the goggles and looked in the direction of the fire, but all he could see was a green blossom of light, as if the forest had exploded and was being enveloped in a green mist. It reminded him of comics, the Green Lantern or Iron Fist. He took off the goggles and let his eyes adjust back to the darkness. He climbed out of the hammock and sat down on the tree limb, letting the cool water drip in the back of his neck. The night smelled of rain and the dead leaves below him, a warm fecund reminder that that decay always wins in the end, no matter who's army you're in. Sil began to fumble through the hammock, storing his gear back in the pack. He pulled the poncho over his head, shouldered the pack and clipped onto the line. He dropped slowly, trying to avoid the whine of rope and carabiner. He felt the familiar relief wash over him when he hit the ground. + +He sat down, leaning against the tree and debated what to do. He considered backtracking, heading down to the outcropping to look at the camp, but he had over twenty miles to cover by dawn if he was going to stay on schedule. The smart thing to do he knew was to stick with the plan, cover the distance, do the job and leave. The war was over. Still, it had been a long time since he had had an opportunity to strike back against the Protectorate in any tangible sort of way. The hill was nearly fifty miles from the border of the prison territory and held primarily by the Protectorate. To hit them here, deep in their own territory. People would hear about it. The president would hear about it. Or maybe not. From what Sil had both heard and seen on his way up river with Scratch, the Protectorate was not particularly concerned with old St. Louis or the borderlands around the prison states. There was no need really, the biggest danger in here was not revolution or even AI, it was breeding lions, outbreaks of Cholera and Dengue, to say nothing of the people inside the prison states. Even smugglers didn't come here. There were no sizable cities left inhabited, no economies to speak of, it was a I2 dead zone, no net, no nothing. There was simply no one left. The sane thing to do was what Sil and Scratch always did, slip into the port cities like New Orleans, drop your goods, collect your money and slip out again. It has been working for over four years now. But this was not a normal smuggling run. They had come in empty and would going out full. They were, as Scratch had pointed out countless times over the two weeks it had taken them to slip this far upstream, doing it assbackwards. And now there were soldiers here. That was assbackwards too. Disconcerting, but it gave him something to think about as he made his way inland, even further from the river, the water, escape. + +West of Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and the Ohio meet, a small tributary, too small to navigate with a boat like Arbella, but large enough for canoe, cuts through a rolling valley spread out between the easternmost ridges of the Ozarks that hold in the valley like a snake nestling between fingers. Once this valley was farm country, but the meandering river and the sudden influx of polar melt had flooded the land from the east, upending the overgrown peach orchards and burying the beans and corn with silt and sand swept down from the higher valleys. The farmers were already gone by then, lured by St. Louis and then later by the army, by both armies. Even before the protectorate turned its back on its own breadbasket and acquiesced to demands of food importers this small valley had turned feral. At the upper end of the valley was Lake Wappapello, once the source of water and finally the destroyer of the valley when the dam could no longer contain the swelling waters behind it. It had burst and drained, leaving behind rich, gar-nourished soil that quickly became the boggy marshes Sil waded through. + +After the lake the Osarks began. a series of folds and contours that look looked as if someone had crumpled up paper and spread it flat again. The mountains were not high, but the terrain was some of the worst in the area, dense chokes of undergrowth. Kudzu and peavines laced through every available space and blocked anyone and anything heading west, higher into the mountains. The mountains themselves dictated on harsh terms where the roads could go. Sil has been heading northwest, following a winding old state road, overgrown enough to offer shelter and hiding, but still passable. Ahead of him was Graves Mountain, at the base of which was a cabin. One of the many stops on the underground that traversed through the Protectorate like an illicit scent wafting out the windows of an otherwise hermetically sealed shimmering glass building. + +Sil walked through a night bathed in in the false green light of his googles. The humidity fogged the glass in from of his eyes and soften the world even more. The clouds had begun the clear, the faint light of the moon smeared its way through the humid air. He turned off the infrared beam. The forest around him was suffused with mist and wisps of fog that rose off the wet ground in swirling clouds. The green mist parted as his feet stirred their way through. He stopped in the relative cool of a timber stand that marked the end of a long forested descent. He could smell the sour breath scent of milkweed and rotting vegetation drifting in from the field in from of him, but something else on the edge of it, water. He pushed on across the field and found the stream. With his canteens full, he stripped off his clothes and lay down in the chilly water, scrubbing shakily at his body. Perched naked on a rock, he surveyed the colorless night without goggles. Clouds drifted in front of the moon and then part around it as if burnt off in some lunar heat. When he was relatively dry he dressed again and continued walking toward the next stretch of forest. + +Sil had developed the ability to feel dawn coming. There is moment in the utter darkness of the early morning where something changes, the world twitches suddenly, as if starting awake from the dream of night. A fleeting movement where the world suddenly sees itself blinks and then falls back, recedes into the dreamworld of existence, prepared now to do it all again. Sil had become aware of the that blinking awareness, like a a rolling wave that passed through him in an instant and continued on to the horzens and beyond. He began to look for a suitable tree. + + + * * * * + + +Up near the house he could see the fence line, overgrown with a creeping vine that nearly swallowed it back into the landscape. It started on the north side, moving though the side yard where some of it joined the fence, while other vines bore straight to the north wall and climbed up to the roof. The house was only yet about two-thirds consumed in vine, the fallen porch still hung on, its sagging curve lending the house a vaguely human quality, as if it were slowly forming a rather sinister smile. A quarter mile to his left was what remained of an old barn, its roof timbers having long since caved in to become little more than a breeding ground for bats and swallows, a few of which Sil could see darting through the air, their indigo throats flashing like sequins in the evening sun. + +Just east of the house he could see where the road, a generous word for the twin tire tracks cutting through the muddy red earth, emerged from a thicket that sheltered the front entrance to the property. There was no sign of life, although from his vantage point he couldn't see far into the shadows of the forest where, he well knew, just about anything could be lurking. But he saw no obvious signs of soldiers, or anything else. There was just the throbbing heat and stillness. He put the binoculars down and rolled over on his back, trying to be perfectly still. He closed his eyes and listened for anything out of the ordinary, but he heard only cicadas and crickets along with a lone bullfrog warming up for the coming night. There was a stream back behind hi, he had followed it for the last two miles this morning. Downstream he could make out the sound of a Kingfisher, its sharp cry reflecting and echoing off the water. Finally, satisfied he had not been followed and willing to admit that anyone lying in wait was simply more patient than he was and therefore had earned the right, he stood up waited for the sniper bullets to tear him apart. + +He left the river trail and begin to cross the open field. The ground was soft from rain and his boots sunk into the red earth and dried stalks of blow over grasses. Just in front of the house was the stretch of fence he had been warned about. Sil stopped and wiped the sweat from his brow, studying the two sides of fence that lined the walk up to porch. The rails of warm gray wood had been reinforced, or their message reinforced with lengths of barbed wire, but it wasn't the barbed wire that bothered him, it was the large water moccasins tied by the tail to the top line of barbed wire. some stretched out on the wooden rails, others were coiled threateningly on the posts. + +Sil considered his options. He could jump the fence into the open grassy patches that were, according to his sources, laced with Claymore mines. Or he could simply thread his way through the snakes. Nothing to it. Just take a slow oscillating path around each snake, alternating sides of the fence to stay out of striking range. He began to ease his way past the first snake, sliding gingerly along, his back pressed against the opposite rail to the point that he felt his shirt catching on splinters. The first two snakes ignored him as he passed and then slowly backed away from him, but the third reared its head at his approach. Sil froze. He watched the dark eyes fix on him as the snake's tongue tasted the air. Backing up would mean possibly agitating the two he'd already passed. Sil guessed the snake was at least five feet long and even crawling, it would likely reach him without too much trouble. Sil decided to do what he did best. Nothing. + +He stood still for several minutes, hoping the snake would lose interest. He listened to his own breath and felt beads of sweat begin to run down down his forehead. After a few minutes the sweat overwhelmed what was left of his left eyebrow and begin to trickle into his eyes, pulling a salty blur over the world. Starry spikes slowly rose up, as if growing out of everything in his vision. He blinked rapidly, but the effect lingered. He closed his left eye, but the right one began to water at the lopsided view. He took a deep breath and tried to relax. You have been shot at he told himself, seen men disemboweled for sport and lived off grilled rats and fear, this is nothing. But the slow breathing did nothing to help the sense of vertigo that began to creep over him. He could feel his heart beat in his stomach and was sure that if he looked down he would be able to see the skin vibrating like the thin head of stretched over the copper cauldron of a timpani drum. Dizziness descended as he stared at the coiled snake, weighing his options. Before long he found that his feet had become free agents, refusing to obey the commands he was pretty sure he was sending them. Sil wondered if perhaps the snake had already bitten him and venom was simply taking its course, eating away at his insides and infecting his brain, but he felt sure he would not have overlooked being bitten. The snake remained exactly where it was, coiled tense and whipping the air with its forked black tongue. Sil begin to see spots at the edges of his vision, as if he had been bent over for some time and straightened up to quickly... the world was dissolving bit by bit as his brain started to discard data it seemed to no longer needed. At the same time he noticed that his body seemed somehow larger than he was accustomed to, something beyond the frame and shape he had known for more than thirty-five years. He felt swollen, like a balloon. The snake opened its mouth to reveal pink and white gums, already dripping tiny rivulets of venom, little starry drops, like geometric crystals breaking off the thin, white, icicle fangs. The fangs, the snake, the green veined leaves of the vine, the rusty red of the barbed wire, everything seemed brighter, larger and somehow more real than anything Sil could recall seeing. And then it began to recede, black crept in, spots connecting at the edges of his vision, spilled ink pooling on a cartoonist's table slowly dissolving the scene at hand as that part of the mind that keeps us from what we cannot bear beat a retreat into nothingness. + +Sil came to on the ground. He turned his head and saw the snake now fully extended, bouncing back against the fence with a violence that almost made Sil feel sorry for it. He lay in the grass for a while, staring up at the clouds, trying to feel for any pain that might indicate he had been bitten. + +Eventually he wormed forward on his belly until he was sure he was out of reach of the snakes. He stood and dusted himself off. He walked slowly up the trail to the house, stepping over a short wooden fence into the overgrown garden, its knee-high thistles lying in wait. Sil stepped gingerly around the obvious thorns and made it to porch where he stopped to work out which boards would support his weight, and which would send him crashing down through into the darkness he could see through the broken steps. He had just about figured it out when he felt something hard and round press against the back of his head. + +Easy. + +On your knees, slowly. + +Sil was relieved to hear a woman's voice. He knelt. + +Hands on the back of your head. + +He did as she said, though when she stepped formard to he carefully balled his fists and straightened his thumbs. If she noticed she didn't care, she slipped on the zip ties and pulled them tight. He brought his hands down in front of him and sighed. + +Up, walk. + +He took a few hesitating steps forward testing the boards as he went. + +Open the door. + +He turned the handle and pushed the door forward. He half stumbled forward as she pushed him from behind with her foot. He staggered into the room only to be greeted by a man with another gun leveled at his head. + +They put him through the Q and A and then offer him a drink. They talk about the soldiers. + + + + + + + + + + +The door was already swinging open by the time he got there. The woman smiled, her white teeth shining against the murky darkness of the room as he slid inside and waited for his eyes to adjust. He slowly took in the peeling green wallpaper and tattered chairs against the blacked-out window. An oil lantern burned on the mantel. The woman took a bottle off the mantel and poured a dark brown liquid into two glasses. She extended one to Sil without looking him. He smiled and took it. He stood by the window, studying the layers of pasted newspaper scraps that served to blot out the world. There were headlines about the bombs in Los Angeles, snippets of virilant editorials protesting martial law, overlayed articles recounting the slow disintegration of the union, frightening accounts of the first super hurricane to make landfall. It was someone's person catalogue of disaster that struck Sil as some how farsical despite having lived through most of it. He sipped the whiskey and bend over to read the least faded scraps down by the windowsill. The only faintly yellowed paper couldn't have been more than three years old, which meant that whoever had lived here hadn't left until shortly before the resistance began using it. The headline and blurb were a smear of newspaper ink thanks to drip, but Sil could still make out one headline recounting the driving of the golden spike for the fence and speculating that eventually the fence would no longer be necessary thanks to "prosperity and a bright future throughout the world." Sil grunted and turned around. + +He handed the glass back to the woman and flopped down in a chair, a small cloud of mildew and mold rising it off it as he did. He shifted awkwardly trying the find a spot where the springs did not poke up into his legs. + +The snakes are active these days. + +She smiled sipping softly at her own glass of whiskey. They get that way when it's hot. You just need to talk to them. + +He stared at her impenetrable eyes, wondering how she had ended up here. Someday he planned to ask, though he doubted she would tell him. Over the years Sil had come to find her rther attractive though he would have been the first to admit that she was not beuatiful in any traditional sense, whatever the hell that meant. Nevertheless, she had, though not so much lately figured prominantly in his dreams. She was not fat, though her exact figure was difficult to determine given the flowing shirts she typically wore, which together with what Sil estimated to be some forty necklaces dangling over her not to be ignored chest, gave her a certain gypsy air that appealed to something in Sil that he'd never fully brought to surface. No, not fat, but certainly plump, big-boned Dean would have said, with skin so white it bordered on tranluscent. Sil was sure that if the house had had lights he would have been able to see the blue ribbons of her veins threading their way through her body... Early on Sil had been suffered through a series of nightmares in which she in fact turned out to be completely see-through much like the human anatomy models sitting in the corner of the lab at the university where he had lived in a previous life. Yet there was nothing frail or fragile about her, in spite of her nearly transparent skin. And she had the most fantastic head of scorched red hair Sil had ever laid eyes on, a wide tangle of hair that would have better suited a horse's main or some other more industrial purpose than adorning the head of this woman who had steadfastly refused for two years now to even tell Sil her name, which, he reflected, probably had a good deal to do with why he sometimes felt haunted by her. + +He fished out a cigarette and ignored her frown as he lit it. You have any idea what they would do to you if they caught you? + +No worse than what they would do to you... + +So why are you always worried about me smoking? + +It's not the smoking, though I think it's a deplorable addiction, it's the smoke that lingers... a patrol passes by tomorrow say, they see an abandoned shack, they stop in, they find nothing they move on... they stop in they smell smoke they decide maybe to keep an eye on it for a while... + +Humf. Never thought of that. Sil moved to put out the cigarette, but she waved her hand. + +You might as well smoke it now, the damage is already done... + +Sil sunk lower in his chair and continued to smoke. Well, if it makes you feel any better I don't think I'll be doing this much longer. + +She frowned. That doesn't make me feel better at all. You're the best mule I work with. + +Sil smiled. Really? + +Well, you're the only one who's lasted this long... + +Jesus. Don't say that. You'll jinx me. + +You're superstitious? She threw her head back laughing. You are the same Sil Hawkard I've read about in I2 right? + +Just because I used to be... look, I mean... He considered the question for a moment. Isn't it obvious that there are patterns in the world, patterns other than those which are currently understood by us...? It's not that I'm superstitious it's that I'm not so arrogant as to believe that the roots of superstition are without merit... + +She said nothing, finished her drink. Well then, she bent her head and used both hands to free one of the necklaces from the tangle of their breathren... here, she held it out to Sil, take this. + +Sil took the beaded silver chain from her hand and studied the center piece, a skelton key. What's it open? + +I have no idea, she smiled. But it has always brought me good luck. + +Then you should keep it. + +She waved her hand. What I do doesn't require luck anymore. + +No? + +I have faith. + +Sil didn't say anything but he was thinking that faith wasn't much good in the face of machine guns. He spun the chain around his finger until it and key were a ball in his palm. He twisted in the chair as his hand worked the necklace into his pocket. Well then...? + +She motioned down the hall. They're in there. + +Sil stood, wiped the chair funk from the back of his pants, and followed her through the living room, stepping gingerly over the rotting floorboards to the back of the house, behind the kitchen, into what had once been a canning room or perhaps a screened porch. Now it was reduced to bare two by fours and tarpaper walls several layers thick. A young girl, maybe seven years old, though Sil couldn't be sure in the faint light, sat on a woman's lap. The girl's eyes were moist and swollen. Sil could tell she had either been crying or was about to cry. The woman stood as he approached, setting the girl on the floor and extending her hand. Sil couldn't help noticing the scars on her arm as he took her hand. He looked up embarrassed, but her eyes only made it worse. He smiled awkwardly. No names he blurted out hurriedly before she could speak. + +She hesitated. Nice to meet you. + +Sil nodded. You understand how this works? + +Yes. + +You understand it's hot, claustrophobic and probably the worst two to three hours of your life? + +She bit her lip and looked down. + +Okay. He fumbled with his hands, suddenly unsure of what to do with himself and smarting under the realization that this would probably be nothing compared to what the woman had already been through. + +Let's get it over with then. + +The woman took the girl by the hand and led her out of the room. The girl never took her eyes off Sil, turning her head to watch him as they walked to the front door into the waning afternoon heat. He turn to say goodbye to the woman inside, but the door quickly closed behind him and he heard the bolt snap shut. + +The three moved back down along the fence, trying as best as possible to stay beyond the reach of the snakes, none of which seemed to pay them any mind this time. When they reached the boat, Sil jumped down and pulled up the middle two planks revealing a dank and slightly waterlogged hull with just enough room for two people to lie prone. The woman stepped down and helped the girl climb into the boat. They both lay down in the hideous hold and Sil laid the boards back down over them, trying to avoid the terrified eyes of the little girl. Once the boards were in place he laid down the tattered tarp and climbed out to retrieve baskets of mayhaws. He made three trips, filling the hull with mayhaws until only a few shreds of tarp were visible. He jumped into the water and leaned his head down to the hull. + +How are you doing? + +He could hear the girl sniffling. Let's get it over with the woman said. + +Sil climbed back in the boat, shoved off the dock and lay down as they slid back under the brambles and spiderwebs. + +His pants were already as dry as they would get by the time they made it out of side canal and into the Mississippi current. Sil moved to the back of the boat and sat down on the crossboard, laying the skiff pole down and taking up the motor handle. He pulled the engine crank several times before it caught. By the time the prop was spinning they were already nearing the fence. + +He watched the sun sink into the hardwood canopy of the forest behind them. Up ahead the two remaining highrises of Baton Rogue were gleaming orange, mirroring the sunset which moved behind the boat as they rounded a bend in the river. + +Just past the city the river made another sharp turn to the east, there was a sand spit in the middle, now hosting two large and well-armed gun turrets. Sil brought the boat into the shore. A Guardsman in fatigues was watching him, smoking a cigarette. + +Hallo Sil. + +Sgt Thomas. + +The Sgt fished out a cigarette and offered it to Sil. They smoked and said nothing. After Sgt Thomas flicked his cigarette off into the river, Sil leaned down and pulled out a bag of mail. Here's some letters from your wife. Some for Clifford as well. + +He nodded, opened the bag and inspected its contents. It looks like everything is order here. + +Good. Sil turned to go and but Thomas put his hand on his shoulder, got plans for the weekend? + +No. + +He smiled. Well I bet its going to be good time to do some fishing. + +Hows that? Sil turned to look in his eyes. In the two-and-a-half years he had been paying Thomas to smuggle people out of the Protectorate, Thomas had never once said anything more than hallo and everything looks in order when he checked to make sure the money was in the mail bag. Sil felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. + +I hear they're biting is all, Thomas said with no expression in his eyes. + +Big ones? Sil tried to follow the metaphor, but wasn't sure. + +I just think it'd be good time to take that boat of yours out for some fishing, maybe coastal fishing. Like up Biloxi way. + +Oh. Sil felt like someone had just kicked him in the solar plexus. With steel toed boots. I'll keep that in mind. + +The Sgt turned and waved to the tower. + +Sil walked slowly back to the boat, his mind racing. He watched as the lights on the sonic fence went from red to green and then he pushed off the shore and let the current pull them through. He clenched his teeth despite the green light. He still had occasional nightmares about the fence videos he had seen in I2. On the other side he wasted no time firing up the motor again and opening up the throttle, executing a series of turns as the river narrowed and wound south. + +He was busy thinking about what Sgt Thomas had said when out of the blue he realized that the scars on the woman's arm might have been her attempt to remove the implants, not, as he'd initially suspected, some sort of torture or worse. For some reason this gave him a momntary feeling of calm, as if perhaps the world wasn't as utterly sideways as he sometimes felt. That thought was quickly shot down though as Sil began to think about implants. He was old enough to remember when implants refered soley to stripper padding their breasts. But then came medical histories, because of course, what better than an embedded medical history the hospital could read even if you were out cold and bleeding. The fact was it had saved countless lives... then it was money, because who wanted to carry cash anymore? No one had even hinted at ID cards or at the geolocating tools Sil had been working on when the bomb went off. Sil had been on vacation, gambling in the riverboat casinos of New Orleans when Los Angeles was reduced to ash and molten glass. He had been staying in the Quarter in a dingy flat he'd secured through a contact in I2. Travel was restricted, no planes flew for weeks. Sil made do in New Orleans, spending most of his time online, watching. + +The view from Sil's rented window went from bad to worse as the first refugees began streaming in. In the beginning to was just families from Texas and New Mexico anxious to get out of the way of the fallout. Unable to cross the borders many came as far south as the could to New Orleans. As time went on the street turned to refugee camps. Sil began to notice more vomit in the gutters, bodies began to tun up in allyes, purple spots on the skin, red radiation burns like rashes that slowly turned even the slender arms of children to grotesque misshappen tangles of keloids, black and blue skin bent and twisted in wrinkles and lumps. Those still living became incoherent, raving dementedly in streets spitting a fine mist of blood from the mouths where the raditiona ate away at their gums, reducing them to babbling fountains of blood until they to wandered back into the allyes and waited in agony as the skin began to slough off their bodies... By the time the Protectorate had formed most of the refugees had died and Typhoid began to run rampant through the city even before Ingrid made landfall. + +The appearance of several Blackbright patrol boats told Sil he was getting closer to city. The river had widened, and Sil turned toward the center to greet the patrol wakes head on, slowing to minimize the bounce. Two heavily armed men on the front of the first boat waved to him. Sil took advantage of the noise to lean over the side of the boat and yell, almost there as loud as he dared. There was no response from below. + +The sun was long gone. The reddish golden glow of twilight hung on the horizen giving him some light to navigate by, but for the most part Sil relied on years of experience to find his way down the river in darkness, picking out familiar lights on the shoreline to guide his way. He and Scratch had been running the river at night for three years now. The cargo had changed somewhere along way, no longer was it Deseil and boat parts, but, as Scratch said when he first approached Sil about running people out of the Protectorate, smuggling is smuggling. + +Sil brought the boat around the last major bend of the Mississippi and finally could see the slightly more significant glow of the city in the distance. He killed the motor and let the boat drift for a while in silence. A thin layer of fog was swirling up off the river, not enough to hide the boat completely, but enough to stop any prying eyes on the bank from getting a clear view of who or what it was doing. Sil pulled out the oars and latched down the oarlocks moving to the middle of the boat to begin rowing. The river was moving almost 3 knots and with oars Sil could double that, not the fastest craft on the water but running the engine into the city invited the kind of attention no one in New Orleans wanted. + + + + +He found himself in the least American place in America at time when A, which most people eagerly embraced -- no more lost wallets -- then medical historiesleast until he remembered that implants were an acceptable way to keep track of people. From what Sil could tell most the western world had simply accepted implants and he and handful of others like him, existing in the boundary areas of the west and elsewhere, were the only ones that thought the idea creapy or even morally wrong. Indeed it was difficult for even Sil to decide what was worse, implants or never knowing when the next bomb would go off. Put in those terms, and it always was put in those terms, implants didn't sound so bad. Which didn't, he mused, provide any insight into why scores of people would dig the implants out with whatever rusty tools they could find, risk all manner and death and debasement to lie flat in a leaking, clastophibic hellhole and slip out of the relative safety of states like the protectorate and opt, in the end, for a life that, as Sil well knew, had been reduced to near basic survival struggles. A gambling man would definitely stick with the Protectorate. It's long term survival was much more likely than any of the outlying settlments and states that had turned their back on it. New Orleans itself might outlast the Protectorate, but most of its inhabitants would not. Luckily Sil was not a gambling man, or rather, he was not a very good gambling man prefering the long odds of the underdog to any sort of logical outcome based on prudent analysis. Still, Sil wasn't sure he wouldn't stay in the Protectorate, or El Norte or anywhere else seemingly safe if he'd had a chance, but he hadn't. Owing to a fluke of geography, accidents and bad dreams Sil was where he'd always been, on the outside looking in, helping others leave without ever really understanding why they wanted to... + + + + +In new orleans now there were only smugglers and dealers. You were either a smuggler, a distributor or an outsider. Of the later it was mainly foreign journalists and mercenaries come to the war zone just as they had gone to a thousand other war zones over the last century, ostinsibly to document, though as Sil learneed from hangina round with them, most of them were seriously off kilter and had some insatiable need to put themselves in harms way, not for the glory, the one that were in it for the glory never hung around, no the real crazies were the ones that simply liked being in the middle of chaos and destruction, needed somehow the added pressure of life under the constant threat of death. As long as they paid him Sil didn't care. Scratch on the otherhand did care, tremendously. He refused to associate with or otherwise entertain so much a word with anyone claiming to be journalist. Mercenaries he regarded with suspiciion, but on some level seemed to accept the way dogs eventually come to accept fleas. + + + +Eventually he came to the large concrete boat ramp where he put in and tied up the boat. It was a ten minute walk through the woods to where his truck and boat trailer were hidden under a camouflage canopy. + +By the time he was back the light was almost gone. He loaded the boat as fast as he could and headed down the highway. He pulled into the warehouse in what was left of downtown Belle Terre, quickly jumping out of the truck to close the warehouse door behind him, though he was pretty sure that the supposed lookout somewhere in the back of his long-closed hat store was the only person still living in Belle Terre. And Sil had developed serious doubts over the last year as to whether the lookout was in fact still living. + +Once the door was closed and Sil completed his sweep of the warehouse, he hopped up on the boat and quickly gathered up the tarp of mayhaws by the corners, pooling the berries in the center and then, folding it over into a sort of spout. He then poured them out into the barrels he had stacked alongside the boat. He was pretty sure his habit of saving the mayhaws had him on more than one list-of-people-to-kill compiled by those escaping the Protectorate, but ridiculous decoy or no, it was always easier to lie when you weren't actually lying, so Sil actually did haul and even sell mayhaw.. + +He could tell something was wrong even before the deck boards came up. Everyone, even the most paranoid and disciplined escapees were always clamoring to get out. He heard nothing as he worked the crowbar under the boards, wondering what could be wrong. As soon as the first board came up all hell broke lose. The little girl bolted upright with an ear piercing scream that so shocked Sil he tripped and fell backwards, narrowly missing a fatal collision with the steel engine handle. He scrambled up as fast as he could and leaped amidships clamping his hand over her mouth before she could refill her lungs. He scooped her up in his arms and lifted her out of the boat. The minute her bare feet touched the floor she started screaming again, this time biting his hand first to get it out of the way. He tried to grab her but she wrestled away from him and ran to the far end of the warehouse. He started to chase her but her screaming had stopped so, for the moment, he let her go. His hand was bleeding and slick as he climbed back up and stood on the gunwale looking down at the woman's pale, unmoving arm. + +Jesus Christ. Sil tore up the other board and held his hand against the woman's neck. Good. A pulse. but her skin was cool and too pale, with a slightly greenish cast to it. And then he saw it. Twin sets of tiny puncture wounds along her arm. He stepped over to the other side the boat kneeled down, peering at the hand that was still hidden in the shadows of the hold. He gingerly lifted up her arm and say, clutched between her forefinger and thumb, a small moccasin, its head crushed, blood and brains smeared over the woman's knuckles. + +Shit. Shit Shit Shit. + +He scooped up the woman and lifted her out of the hull propping her limp frame against the gunwale. He felt her pulse again. Faint, but still there. He grabbed her arm and counted. Seven bites. It was a small snake, but seven bites. Shit. + +He leaped out of the boat and went to find the little girl, who was slumped against the far wall of the warehouse. Your mother has been bitten by a snake. The girl just stared blankly at him with huge, uncomprehending eyes. I need to get help. I'm going to have to go out. You must not leave this room, do you understand? She still didn't respond. Sil contemplated tying her up but decided there was no time. He was pretty sure she was in shock and he was pretty sure people in shock didn't go running off by themselves. It sounded good in his head anyway. He ran into what had once been the office of the warehouse and tore through the desk, throwing the contents on the floor, looking of any sort of medicine. He tipped over a metal cupboard in the corner but found nothing save some yellowed receipts and rusted pilers. It wasn't until he remembered the bottle of pills in the glovebox of the truck that he had anything like a plan. + + + * * * + + +The street was quiet, just beginning to wake. New orleans was something that happened at night, not during the day. The sun was already well past the horizon, the city bathed in a twilight glow. A few doors down a man was pitching buckets of water onto the concrete, washing away the mud from last night's rain. Across the street was the bank, its pale facade glowing in the dusk, pock-marks still visible, splatters of red brick poking through the white paint, where the bullets had ricocheted. Dean stood a few feet down from the doorway to The Library, nodding to regulars as they straggled out the darkness and pushed their way through the heavy wooden door. He was thinking about the guard that was not there. The guard that stood outside the bank every day, rifle slung over his shoulder, eyes hidden by the cheap formality of a tattered hat. But today the guard had never showed up. Dean came outside three different times to check, but he had never arrived. Perhaps he was sick, Dean thought. Typhoid was still a problem, dysentery could be had if one risked drinking the water. It could have been something as simple as an illness he reasoned. But down in his bones Dean knew the guard wasn't sick. He had abandoned his post, an idea that gave Dean a chill in spite of the warm night around him. + +The guard was always there, his mouth was twisted into a static, emotionless expression. His thin lips always floated, a ruddy spot of skin between and shadow of his hat and the dark blue collar of his uniform. He would nod, but never smile, at the people walking by on the street. Smiles, Dean had noticed over time, were reserved for the scant few people that actually ventured inside the bank. Given that New Orleans got by a variety of local scripts, and a complex bartering system, most kept what little hard money they had hidden in the back of water-rotted cupboards or stashed under a loose plank in the floor. There were some though, the bosses, the ad-hoc military leaders, that still used the bank and its lone connection to I2 to store their money elsewhere. During the day Dean had plenty of time to watch the guard from his room upstairs in The Library. And he never ceased to marvel at the guard's willingness to stand in broad daylight on a street ruled alternately by machine gun-wielding mercenaries, anarchists with bombs, religious revivalists with Molotov cocktails and the homicidal ex-police force, whomever happened to come down the street that day really... Dean had, after spending so many hours watching the guard, come to conclusion that it was not the job, Dean had no doubt that a mere pistol waved excitedly send the guard scurrying, but the need to hang on to those shards of normalcy that a job like guarding a bank offered. It was a symbiotic relationship, the bank wanted it to look like everything was normal and the man got the illusion that he had a job, a purpose. As if the banality of just standing somewhere, under someone else's orders was the one thing the man could cling to, the one thing that still offered a reminder of the existence they had all once known, gone now in the tension of wars and bombs and winds that tried every day to wipe the city right off the map. + +And then the guard was gone. + +Sil liked to say that New Orleans in the daylight was a testament to Pavlovian conditioning, its residents functioned as though there had been no, however brief, civil war, no uprising, no nuclear events out west, no sonic fence just twenty miles north, nothing at all to disrupt their daily business of repairing shoes, selling vegetables, serving food, taking orders and carrying them out. All despite the lack of viable currency, a whole set of new, far more brutal, bosses and, what would seem most discouraging of all, no chance of anything more. No one here was going to find a lover, no one was going out on Friday, no was going anywhere, save where they had to. Sil likened it to an experiment with monkeys he had once read about in I2, where five monkeys were placed in a cage with a bunch of bananas at one end and whenever a monkey went to fetch a banana all the others were hit with a fire hose, which eventually led them to beat the crap out of any monkey that went near the bananas. As time wore on the observing gradually removed one monkey and added a new one who was quickly brought in line with the prevailing logic of the cage -- don't touch the fucking bananas -- until finally all the original monkeys were gone and the new monkeys, despite never having been hosed themselves, continued to carry on with the tradition of beating the crap out of anyone who dared to go near the bananas. + +Dean never said anything to upset Sil's argument, but he wasn't so sure that fire hoses and monkeys could explain what had happened to New Orleans. He spent far more time on the streets than Sil and he had come to find New Orleans far more frightening than anything so simple as people too scared to reach for bananas. Dean had come to believe that New Orleans was evolving, its people changing into something beyond what they had once been, beyond human even. It happened so slowly he didn't notice it at first, but as time went on it was more like the lake of humanity that had once been New Orleans was slowly evaporating away and there was no longer any connection, no river to refill the lake. They were cut off from the world. And instead of that connection to the rest of humanity, there began to creep ing something else, something altogether inhuman, something so indifferent that it frightened even Dean, who had managed to survive the initial battle mind well in tact. But in the years since Dean had watched the something creep up on the city, watched its remaining inhabitants change from reasonable people into something not just unreasonable, but beyond reason. Whatever they were becoming, most seemed, fortunately, not yet aware of it, but it was there nonetheless. What scared him most of all was that he could feel it in himself as well, something that ate at him from the inside. Dean could see it in the eyes of others, the difficulty he had focusing on anything, the way people failed to register to each other anymore, the way people walked the streets as if unaware of where they were, unaware that they were not alone. It didn't come all at once, it was not like the shell-shocked madness he had witnessed during the war. It was much slower, much stronger, much more insidious. Even through the bombs and blockade most held on to the tethers to their former lives, the things they had once done. It was why they showed up to guard banks, to walk down the shattered docks and climb on boats, to make restaurants out of ruins and propane stoves, to turn abandoned buildings into homes and bombed out libraries into whorehouses, not because there was a need to earn money, there was no money to earn, but because they had to create something, to do something, to define where things began and ended and to give something of themselves, to themselves. But now... now there was only randomness, a chaotic series of events disjointed and without a guiding pattern, rhyme or reason, just bodies moving through the emptiness of undefined space. After routine broke down, time went with it and in its place came eternity and chaos, and in that vast emptiness the nothingness became personal. Once the chaos had you, it began to change you. Dean watched it every night at work. The afflicted never asked the girls to dance, merely sat in the corners, ignoring the gossip and speculation about the war because for them it was no longer about when the next bomb go off, or even how many would die, but about where, where was your bomb, where was the one with your name on it, the one that you knew was stalking you? Once the emptiness set in there was nothing but you, and the only relief was death. Dean watched it eat people up and spit them out, mere shells walking though the city, until one day they didn't show up to guard the bank, didn't bother to come in for a drink, seeking instead the darkest parts of the city, the lower wards, where the lights had never been restored, where the night was the day and day was unknown... down at the mouth of the river, where all sledge accumulated, waiting for the flood that would washed it out to sea... + +Sil ignored it, ducked his head down and worked. Rebuilding Arbella, scavenging, running the refugees who still thought that freedom was was something you could find in a place. Dean tried to do the same, kept himself busy, but he could feel it creeping in on him, the emptiness. He wondered if Sil did too. Dean never spoke of it to anyone, except the Senator. + +Dean flicked his cigarette in the gutter where countless previous butts already lay, most flicked out the broken window in his room upstairs, and pushed open the heavy wooden doors. Inside it was dark, the room lit only by oil lamps on tables and candles along the bar. Dean had a generator, but rarely used it since Sil insisted on saving all available diesel for Arbella's engines. He could hear the faint moans and occasional more piercing shriek from upstairs where the girls kept their rooms. Downstairs The Library was one large cavernous room, a balcony walkway circled the center of the room halfway up to the double story ceilings. Most of the books were upstairs, falling off the shelves, many of which Dean had used to divide open space into rooms, but the main reading area of the original library, which now served as a bar, still held plenty of bookshelves, the books free to whomever wanted them, though few besides Sil had taken Dean up on that offer. Most of the bottom-shelved books downstairs had been damaged in the various hurricanes that swept through, bringing knee-high water into every ground floor of New Orleans. As a result a musty, slightly moldy smell permeated the library, though most had long sense adjusted. Remarking on the musty smell was a sure way to announce you were new to The Library. Just in front of the main stacks downstairs were a series of massive wooden tables, left over from the days when this had been the reading room. Now it was where Dean's customers sat sipping various home-brewed concoctions of whiskey and beer which Dean dreamed up in the basement, tapping into Scratch's background as a chef to create recipes like juniper beer, mead or barley wine which proved, if not totally satisfying, at least drinkable to the majority of New Orleans remaining inhabitants. Those with money or things Dean needed were welcome to the whiskey Sil smuggled out the Protectorate. + +The former library's checkout counter served as the bar, a handful of stools scavenged from a bombed out hotel made up the bar, though most seemed to prefer the tables, especially the two closest the door where the ceiling was single story and the low light made it difficult to see exactly what was happening from the upstairs vantage point where the girls and their clients lingered to see what was happening below. + +Dean pressed the door shut behind him and surveyed the room. A quiet night, half a dozen men drinking morosely at the tables, no one was sitting a the bar. The lantern light wavered whenever the door opened, painting a wash of shadows across the honey-stained oak walls in patterns that would have made Plato proud. Dean saw only a few of the girls, trying their best to convince the men that a trip upstairs was well worth the money. Most of the girls were still upstairs, sleeping off last night. Or in somewhere in back cooking up something in the makeshift kitchen that had somehow become permanent. Hardly a kitchen, the room had once been the librarian's office, and in fact the man still came in from time to time. Dean allowed him to drink in the back room because he too needed something to remind him of what had once been, to feel that it might possibly be once again. Sil had rigged up an old kerosene stove he had found on Arbella in the man's former office. Sil vented it with piping scavenged from the docks so that Dean and girls could cook without asphyxiating themselves in the close quarters. Scratch's wooden icebox, insulated with straw, an idea he stumbled on one drunken night, when he passed out in the alternative history section and woke up in the pile of books on how to live off the grid, kept things cold. Most of the food came from Dean who traded for it, an open tab at the bar for an open tab at the meat market being the principle form of currency in New Orleans. Dean made his way back to the kitchen searching for Sil but found only Margarite and another girl grilling possum over the stove. Declining their offer of fresh meat, Dean walked back out and began pouring a few drinks, wondering why Sil was late and if it had anything to do with the disappearing guard. + +It wasn't long before the Senator arrived. He was a bit early and carried a large army surplus duffel bag, which looked horribly out if place slung over the shoulder of his, as always, impeccably cut suit. Dean hated the Senator's suits because they made his own clothes look like the cheap and ill-fitting rags they were which gave Dean the same feeling he had had as a schoolboy sent to see the principal, a feeling Dean had disliked ever since he was a schoolboy sent to see the principal. The Senator set the bag behind the bar without a word and sat down, the only one willing to sit on stool and face Dean. It was the Senator's hallmark, a lack of fear or intimidation so complete that it was as if he were simply unaware of what fear was. Dean poured him a some whiskey Sil and the Senator offered him a smoke. The gesture made Dean think of the night he had first met the Senator, some three years previous. The Library was still little more than a washed out building that no one had bothered to blow up yet. Dean and Sil and few acquaintances would gather in the evenings to drink and swap stories, for New Orleans was already a town where gossip and rumors were the only news to be had. Eventually Dean would start selling the drinks and girls would begin coming around, finding that, even if there was no currency, intimacy, or at the least the illusion of it, was still tangibly necessary for survival. But the night the Senator stumbled out of the darkness Dean was merely tired, tired of the rumors and gossip, tired of thinking that at any day now someone would emerge to save them all from their fate. He was out back, smoking under the awning Sil had scavenged from a run up to Shreveport. The bombs had stopped, the gangs not yet full formed, Dean was trying to sort out what would happen. The men in the room behind him were busy toasting the rise of the South, a new autonomous government and a new life for all. Even Dean admitted it seemed tantalizingly close and yet he could not bring himself to believe in it. It was the beginning of the nebulous feeling of dread that would slowly begin to take him over in the coming years. The Senator was walking by, a shadow in the shadows, but he stopped and greeted Dean by name. He asked for a smoke. Dean said nothing, but offered him the pack and then a lighter. Dean did not want any more friends and tried to convey as much with silence, but the Senator persisted, asking after survivors, a girl whose name Dean did not know. He said as much and Senator seemed to give up for a while. They stood in silence listening to the splattering rain echo down the cobblestone alley. And then the Senator asked if Dean had a drink. They went inside, sat at the table and Dean brought over a bottle. By the end of the night he had laid out his entire life, hesitating here and there but almost always giving in on the logic that confessions to a stranger were safer than those to friends whom you knew you would see again tomorrow. And the Senator was willing to listen, something most of the shell-shocked remnants of the battle were quite simply unable to do. But what stuck out most to Dean in his blurry memories of that night was a particular moment when Dean suggested that things were going to get worse, much worse, and he allowed himself to use a word that he had until then been afraid of -- escape. The Senator had grimaced ever so slightly, like a deep ache had come over his bones. His eyes squinted, as if trying to hold something in. He looked unpleasant, not unlike a crouched hawk, jealously guarding his prey. It was something Dean had never seen since, but in that instant Dean knew that if he was going to get out of New Orleans, he was going to need the Senator. Ordinarily the Senator went to great lengths to keep up appearances, it was in fact the genesis of his name, he always seemed timeless, ageless, and totally unaffected by anything happening around him, but in that one instant Dean saw something else entirely, something frightening, but also very purposeful, and he realized that, unlike anyone else Dean had met since the battle, the Senator was in New Orleans because he wanted to be, or more likely, had some reason to be, and more importantly, wasn't the least bit worried about what was to come. + +For his part, though he couldn't remember it exactly, Dean managed to make some sort of an impression as well. From that night on the Senator became a frequent visitor in The Library and Dean came to appreciate the power of the name. Which wasn't to say the Senator was loved. In fact he was almost universally hated, but more importantly, he was feared. Dean liked that he could make otherwise fearless men turn silent and study the ice in their glasses intently by merely mentioning the Senator's name. He liked that Senator's frequent presence had brought an end to the robberies on the street, and that no one ever dared touch the girls without asking first. But most of all he liked that no ever questioned his squatting rights. The Library was his, it was one of the very few indisputable facts of the city. + +If you believed the more vocal patrons of The Library the Senator was a scary man, a remorseless monster who had once killed a man for not taking his hat off indoors, threw his mistresses in the river when he was done with them, killed children for sport, drank blood on the full moon and so on. Two in particular had decided that it was either him or them and so Dean threw them out, picking their pockets on the way to the door. He also spent the first few nights assuring the girls that the mistress rumor was nothing more. And in an effort to distill the rumors surrounding him, Dean took to wearing a hat whenever he was behind the bar while Senator was there, which inadvertently added to his own stature.... + +Tonight the Senator sipped slowly, blowing smoke rings in the stagnant air. + +The guard is gone. Dean mumbled as he wiped the bar down for the tenth time. + +The senator glanced toward the door. Make you nervous? + +A little. + +Eventually they'll all end up gone... + +Dean nodded. I know. Just don't like to notice it. + +Ignorance is just ignorance. + +Dean switched the subject. What's in the bag? + +The Senator smiled. Something for Sil. + +The... + +As a matter of fact, yes. + +Wow. Dean walked over and picked up the bag. It's not very heavy. + +No. It's not very big either. + +Dean peaked in the bag and saw a packet of white paper, he moved it aside, glancing at the Senator questioningly. + +He chuckled. Instructions. + +Really? + +It comes straight from a Naval yard in New York. Sil was right, the Protectorate has quite a few of these. Big ones too. they're replacing their nuclear subs with these, well, much bigger versions of it. + +Dean tucked the plastic wrapped instruction back on top of the tangle of wired and circuit boards. So now Sil has everything he needs... + +I guess so. The Senator pushed his empty glass forward and Dean refilled it. + +You going to leave? + +Dean sighed. Been planning to... He started to wipe down the counter again. But what are they, he gestured upstairs with the rag in his hand, what are they going to do? + +The Senator smiled. That's the bit the preachers never mention.. If all you know are sinners, why would you want to go to heaven? That's why the only angle is to convert you and let you convert everyone you know. + +Dean laughed. Well, I don't know that it ranks up there with salvation of the soul, but i have, despite my best judgment, managed to become somewhat attached to our particular version of hell... + +Where are they going to go? + +Don't really know. South I guess. Sil claims there's an Ameritown somewhere down in El Norte, Old Nicaragua I think. He was there once, before... + +And then what? + +I dunno... stop worrying about when the next bomb is going to come? + +The Senator swirled his drink. Sounds boring. He smiled and threw the whiskey back down his throat. + + + * * * + +Sil stood in the middle of the office surveying the ruins. The file cabinet had cut his hand when it tipped it over and blood was running down his fingers. He flit the old oil lantern stumbled back out to the truck. He dug through the glove box in search of a bandage, but found only a dirty rag which he twisted around his hand to staunch the bleeding. With other hand he pulled out an old bottle of lorazapram and broke one of the pills in half. Sil could hear the faint sounds of sobbing. He brought the lantern over the boat and balanced it gingerly on the gunwale. The girl was curled up on top of the woman whose skin had turned an eery yellowish color. + +What's your name. The girl stopped sobbing for a minute, wiped her hand across her face and stared Dean in the eye. + +No names. + +Dean smiled. Okay. You're right, that was the rule. But no the rules have changed and you're going to have to come with me. My name is Sil. He climbed up on the boat next to her. What's your name? + +Dahlia. + +Dahlia? Like the flower? + +She nodded. + +That's a pretty name. Sil reached down and put his finger to the woman's neck. He moved it around several times but couldn't find a pulse. If she was still alive she wouldn't be much longer. + +Okay Dahlia, here's the thing... we need to get out of here, it isn't safe here. Do you understand that? + +She's so cold. I have to stay with her, keep her warm. + +Dahlia... Sil sighed. Dahlia. She's dead. + +The girls face seemed to crumble, like a high rise crashing to the ground, her forehead scrunched down and her eyes narrowed. Her cheeks trembled slightly and her chin quivered. Sil reached over and lifted her off the woman's body. Her thing arms felt hot on his neck. He set her down on the floor and climbed out of the boat. He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a small white pill. + +I need you to swallow this Dahlia. + +She stared at him with red, tear-stained eyes. Why? + +He put his hand on her head and pulled her against his shoulder. Because you need to sleep. + +She pulled back from him, wiped her face and nodded. She took the pill and put it in her mouth. Sil led her into the bathroom and turned on the sink. She waited until he came out and then went in and took a gulp of water and swallowed the pill. + +While she was inside Sil went back over the truck and started kicking the hitch loose. Eventually the cleat moved and Sil reached down, bracing himself and trying to ignore the pain in his hand, to lifted the hitch off the ball and let it down to the floor. + +Dahlia came out of the bathroom and could not see Sil in the darkness. She began to cry and when Sil called out she came running to his side and latched herself onto his legs. Sil stood there, unsure of what to do, looking down at her curly blond head pressed against his side. Finally he knelt down beside her and put his arms around her. She threw her arms around his neck and he picked her up. He carried her over to the truck, open the door and gently set her down in the passengers seat. + +He walked around the other side and climbed in, firing up the engine. While it idled he blew out the lantern and raised the door of the warehouse, glancing out at the street, but there was nothing to see save the darkness. He climbed in the drivers side, backed the truck out of the warehouse door and drove out of town without looking back. After a few miles Dahlia fell fast asleep on the seat next to Sil. They road in silence the rest of the way into the city, the only pair of headlights winding their way through the crumbled overpasses and makeshift ramps that still stood from their hasty construction during the exodus. + +Scratch was already asleep, curled up on his bed in the supply room, when Sil pulled in to his own warehouse. Sil carried Dahlia onto Arbella and set her down in the main cabin on the bed, covering her tiny form with a blanket. Percival sniffed inquiringly at her, but did not actually get up to investigate, taking it on faith that if Sil was carrying someone they must be acceptable. Sil pulled two cans of dog food out of his bag and emptied them into Percival's bowl. After assuring himself that Dalhia was in all likelihood going to be out for some time, he wrote a note for Scratch explaining the situation and laid it quietly next to his sleeping frame. + +Outside it was still warm, and curiously quiet. Sil walked quickly along the river, picking his way through the crumbling concrete practically be memory. When he reached TK street he cut east, but there was no one on the streets. As much as he disliked encounters on the street at night, he found the silence and emptiness even more distrubing and was glad when he finally made it to The Library. Dean looked up as soon as the door creaked and Sil could see his face vidibly relax when he realized that Sil had finally returned. He waved him over and Sil sat down next the the Senator. + +Give me the pricey stuff. + +What happened? + +Long story. I'll tell you later. Sil down the whiskye and motioned for more. + +The Senator was clearly well skunked and sat regarding Sil rather sulkily as he quaffed down another belt of Whiskey. + +I'll have some of the Juniper beer if you don't mind... + +Dean poured a glass and cocked his head at the Senator. The man has what you've been looking for. + +for the first time all day Sil smiled. He got up and moved down to seats, chaking hand with the Senator in the process. + +Dean tell you? + +Yes. + +It's right there. Sil walked behind the bar and opened the bag, holding a candle down inside to look at the contents. It was not at all what he had expected. There were simply a series of wires and cables and something Sil was pretty sure was some sort of servo, but a bit different than most wiring setups he had seen. Not that he had seen many, but after nearly three years of taking apart Arbella and puutting her back together Suil's mechanical prowess was nothing to scoff at. Still, the contents of the bag certainly didn't look like an engine to his eye. + +Not long after Sil found Arbella the Protectorate decided to keep a permanent naval presence just offshore of New Orleans. It wasn't exactly a blockade, official ships could get through, but nor was it something you could simply sail right through without a care. A few had tried. The lucky ones came swimming back. Thus far the Navy had proved unbribable, even for the Senator who had been trying on Sil's behalf, well Dean's really, but nothing had come of it. So for the past two years Sil had been chasing rumors of something he referred to as a pulse engine. Sil didn't pretend to understand the finer points of it, he left that to Scratch, but the principle seemed sound: move a boat without the noise of engine or the eye-catching, sore thumb of a sail. After weeding through some very confusing scholarly papers and a lot of theoretical arguments about water striders and magnets, Sil came to conclusion that it must exist, too much money had gone into protypes over the last ten years for it not to exist. The problem was, right around the time the Protectorate came into existence the paper trail went cold. Everything became classified. According to what Sil could get his hands on the engine worked on a quite simple principle -- to move forward, insects pull themselves inward, contracting and expanding, using the surface tension of water to pull themselves along. Apply a low-energy electromagnetic pulse to that same surface tension, and you get the same sort of movement. After making inquiries among his contacts in the Protectorate and coming up with a whole lot of blank stairs, Sil had had a bit too much to drink and spilled the whole story to the Senator who then seemed to take on the challenge. Perhaps it was because he genuinely wanted to help Sil and Dean, but Sil suspected that it was more to prove a point -- that the Senator really could get anything he wanted. + +And now here it was, a pile of wires at the bottom of the bag. Clearly the Senator could get anything he wanted. + +You know what to do with it? + +Sil glanced up at the Senator but hestitated for second. No, he said slowly, but I have someone who does. Thank you... + +Don't thank me, it's not a gift. + +Sil looked slightly crestfallen. What do we own you then? + +A favor. + +Name it. + +I will. The Senator smiled. Just not right now. + +Well, Sil leaned in and Dean followed suit. I think something's up, and I think, if we can get this thing working, tomorrow night is as good a time as any, so if you want us to repay the favor, now would be the time... + +Oh, don't worry Sil. The Senator winked at Sil. I'm sure we'll meet again at some point. + +Sil didn't say anything. He sat back down at the bar and drank his beer in silence, trying to decided if the senator was making a threat. Sil considered the thought the perhaps the Senator was going to sell them out, tip off the navy about blockade runners, or perhaps he was planning to follow them somehow, or maybe even stow away... what the hell did he mean meet again? Not if Sil could help it, at least not here in New Orleans. + +Eventually the Senator said goonight and stumbled out the door. Sil pulled Dean in the back kitchen and told him Sgt. Thomas' advice. + +Dean lit a cigarette and sat down on crate. You want to go tomorrow then? + +No. Well, I mean I'd like a few more days to pych myself up for this, but what if we don't have them? What if this is out opportunity, before it gets even worse? + +Dean scratched his chin thoughtfully. He was thinking about leaving the Library behind. Much as he wanted out of the chaos, he knew he was going to miss the Library. though they had never discussed it overtly, he considered it a forgone conclusion that the Senator would take over. Maybe not running it, since that was far to mundane for the man, but at least finding someone to look after it, keep it running, make sure the girls were safe... + +It's like Scratch said Sil, it's your boat. you're the captain. You make the call. + +Sil sat down on the floor, snatching the cigarette out Dean's mouth as he did. He took a drag, blew out the smoke and decided that tomorrow night was as good a night as any. + +Okay then. Dean reached for the cigarette and Sil gave it back. What do we need to do? + +Sil considered the question and suddenly wished he hadn't drank two glasses of whiskey in such a hurry. The alcohol brought a deep exhaustion over the his body and his brain felt thick and content. Totally unwilling to organize or plan anything. + +I think I need to sleep it was not a good day. + +Yeah, what happened? + +sil sighed. very long story. Remind me when we're out at sea... Sil stood up, shook Dean's hand and headed home. + +Back in the warehouse Sil climbed aboard Arbella and sat down next to Percival for a last smoke. The dog eyed him lazily, as if wondering whether Sil was going to make him give up some of the stern cushion he currently occupied. Sil petted his head and appaarently satified that the bed was hid, Percevil turned away and rested his head on the scansion rail. + +Sil dozed for a while sitting on the floor, leaning back against the bulkhead. It was still dark when he woke up, stiff and with an insomniac's certainty that there would be no more sleep to come. He brewed a cup of coffee, pouring the boiling water directly over the grains, watching them swirl in the dim overhead cabin light. Dahlia was still asleep right where he had left her, her arm having moved up so that her closed fist was next to her mouth, as if the subconscious portions of her brain had been fighting amongst the urges to suckle or not suckle the temptingly close thumb, which Sil noted was, at least at the moment, unsuckled. He watched the thin sheet rise and fall rhythmically with her breathing, thankful at least the Dean's sedate-and-deal-with-later plan had not anyway, resulted in death. Sil swirled a spoon through his strengthening coffee trying to create a downdrafting whirlpool to suck the grainy sludge to the bottom. He took a careful sip and stared at Dahlia, noticing now that her ears seemed rather too large for her head, or perhaps it was just the way they alone jutted out from and grimy mass of tangled curls that otherwise covered her forehead, neck and cheek such that the girl seemed all ear, mouth and fist. Curious he thought as he tiptoed out of the galley and made his way onto the deck, walking slowly so as not to stir up the grounds at the bottom of his cup. + +He saw Scratch also still sleeping in the storage area, blissfully unaware of the the small copper cylinder surrounded with an awkward collection of wires, that Sil had set as his feet. Sil hoped Scratch would know what to do with it. Sil knew some of which would need to be attached to Arbella's batteries and still others which would need to be wired directly into the hull, but which were which and where they needed to go was beyond him. + +Sil went below again and pulled out the checklist he had been working on for two years. He ran through it in his head, mentally crossing out the items they could get by without. It ended up a short list, just the food, currently serving as the foundation of Scratch's bed, the engine and several barrels of diesel already waiting by the door. Sil sat down at the galley table and glanced around the corner at Dahlia. She was still sound asleep. Sil tried to remember when he last slept that soundly. Years, possibly even a decade. Probably some time before he started working the lab he decided. In any case long before he had found himself here, marooned somewhere distinctly outside the future history he had imagined for himself as a sleeping child. + +Sil came to New Orleans for the sea. Never mind that his idle dream of running a marine salvage company had never really progressed beyond stealing a skiff in the middle of the siege. The bombs went off in Los Angeles before Sil ever had a chance to find a boat and after that it was hard enough to find work, let alone a boat. When the refugees arrived, and the burn wards began to fill Sil got by giving blood in exchange for food. But then the city began to overwhelmed, radiation victims lived on the street, dying huddled in the dark alleys as sheets of skin sloughed off them. A state of emergency was declared, martial law came shortly after it. But nothing prepared then for president Nadar's I2 address which announced that the United States would contract to a more manageable size, congruent with the global realities of our age, as Nadar had put it. No one knew what to make of that phrase. Nadar did not elaborate at first. Sil was out on a tug with Scratch, helping move a dredging barge upriver when they heard the news on the radio. The western states, with the exception of California, which decided, along with Oregon and Washington to form the nation of Jefferson, quickly organized into the new La Rep�blica del Norte, joining forces with Mexico. The press conference was a disaster, right-wing unionists fired into the crowd, someone bludgeoned the Arizona representative to death with a stolen camera. The I2 feeds cut off after that. Nadar welcomed El Norte, called it positive step. Scratch said nothing, flicked a cigarette in the river and continued pushing the tug upstream. Sometime later the Midwest, from Oklahoma north and much of the Mississippi River valley, as well as Vermont and Maine, joined up with Canada. Sil found it amusing that New Hampshire stubbornly declared itself an sovereign nation and managed to remain such for the better part of year before it ran out of money and threw its lot in with Canada. Nadar wasted no time setting up a new government and outlining what amounted to a new constitution for the remaining eastern seaboard, a new nation he called the Protectorate of Reformed American States. Sil heard whispers around the docks, drunken rants in bars, but then serious people began to raise serious questions, none of which were addressed. And the Governor got on I2 and said some inflammatory things, even used the word secede, in what even Sil thought was a rousing speech. Georgia and Alabama were the next to join. Mississippi, caught between Louisiana and the others secessionists tried to remain neutral, but the Alabama national guard put an end to that. And then the tanks came rolling down I10 and the navy appeared off the coast. + +Even when the guns turned toward New Orleans no one standing there with Sil on the docks, watching the horizon as the sun sank to the west, even then no one thought the ships would really fire. There was was a flash from the blockade, Sil thought it might have been lightning behind the blockade, but then he saw Scratch running down the dock, impressively fast for man his age. The sky blinked again and then Sil heard a screaming whistle streak across the sky overhead, he spun around and watched as it hit the Place St. Charles, the building flexed and shimmered in the sunset, the windows seemed to wrinkle and waver and then the entire top of the building erupted into an orange blossom of flame. The second shell hit the Crescent City Residences and by then the crowds scattered looking for shelter. A medium sized shell hit a dock not more than a hundred yards from Sil, the shockwave knocking him clear off the dock and into the water. When he managed to get his head back up above the water all he could hear was screaming. He tried to pull himself up a pylon and was able to get his head up just in time to see a piece of shrapnel tear a body neatly in two, showering the sidewalk with blood and the strange orange color of intestines that he would see several more times before the night was over. He simply let go and fell back into the river. He swam downstream toward the lower docks, looking for a way to get up when he noticed the skiff tied to the concrete pylons that held up the riverwalk. He floated for a few minutes by the boat, making sure no one was watching him and then he simply pulled himself over, started the motor and headed upstream into the falling darkness and out of the raining shells. + +Unlike Sil, Dean had never doubted that war would come. He started stockpiling weapons and ammunition before most people had even wrapped their heads around the nuclear incident out west. He had moved into the basement of The Library and fortified himself with a Kalashnikov and enough ammo to fend off a decent sized army. When the blockade arrived and finally opened fire one of the first shells hit The Library and tore through the upper floors leaving the impression of carnage severe enough the Dean never dared venture up to investigate it. Even later when he acquired the actual building he hired outsiders to clean up and repair the upper floors, unable to bring himself to see the end his friends and former lovers had met. Midway through the first night Dean decided to abandon his well-fortified basement in favor of a more mobile existence, which was how Sil had found him, darting down the street, backpack full of food and a rifle slung low on his waist. He offered Dean a ride out to Lake Pontchartrain, away from the city. The two had spent the few days living like rats in the swamp, finding food in abandoned houses, taking shelter under the trees when it rained and keeping a close eye on their water supply. + +On the second day the wind changed direction and the battleships stopped firing and began to move. Sil and Dean watched from the beach where they were looking for food in abandoned fishing boats. It wasn't until they noticed the clouds bearing down from the southeast that they understood. Ingrid hit the shore full force six hours later, by which time Sil and Dean had retreated back the partial refuge of Dean's fortified basement. They saw few people on the streets, most had long since started walking north. The few they did see quickly disappeared at the sight of Dean's gun. As night fell they sat in the basement listening to the Blackbright boats on the river, headed out to sea to try a counterattack in the midst of the storm. The Protectorate Navy suddenly had to fight off both the hired guns of Blackbright and hurricane Ingrid. + +Ingrid howled for over thirty-six hours. Sil and Dean sat into the library basement, sloshing through the surprisingly cold, shin-deep water, eating canned tuna pilfered from a store a few blocks away and smoking in the darkness. They could hear windows breaking above them, great plates of glass collapsing inward, branches crashed into the sides of the buildings, bricks came loose from porticos and overhangs, wrought iron rails tore off and the water logged balconies beneath them gave way and tumbled the streets. The sky flickered through the grated windows of the basement. Sil shivered and sat cross legged on a broken chair, trying to dry his feet. He told Dean about his salvage dream, even mentioned his work in the lab back in Boston, a story that even as he told it seemed less real than many books he had read. Dean listened, but offered few stories in return, mentioning only that he lived at the Library, that he refused to go upstairs. Their conversations were halting and eery even to them, disembodied voices talking through the darkness with only occasional glimpses of each other through flickers of lightning or orange glow of a cigarette. Toward morning on the second day the storm began to die down, other sounds crept in, Sil and Dean had long since stopped talking, merely listened to the the quiet snap of burning tobacco, the soft sigh of an exhale... The next day Sil went upstairs and collected water from the roof. There were not as many bodies upstairs as Dean had led him to believe. Sil guessed that most of the girls had left before the shelling started, after all, no one had been frequenting strip clubs for some time even before the siege. He did see one girl, a roof beam had crushed her entire skull as she lay in bed, it was enough to make him vomit half-digested tuna all over the last flight of stairs before stumbling out into the wind and rain. He never mentioned it to Dean. After the winds died down Dean and Sil ventured out again, raiding supplies from shattered stores and running into a few other survivors, trading stories and trying to piece together what had happened. Sil went down to the docks and was surprised to find the skiff right where he had sunk it. With Dean's help he got it back up out of the water and bailed out. They cruised the riverfront looking for somewhere to hide it. Sil spotted it first, the half collapsed warehouse that was to become his home for the next four years. The building had slid entirely off its foundations and hung over the concrete, out into the water. As a result there was room to drive straight into the building from the river. Sil did and surveyed to wreckage inside. + +Dean stayed in the basement of The Library, eventually using a bilge pump Sil found in a smashed to bits tug boat to pump the water out and create something that approached livable. + +That afternoon Sil decided that in the midst of insanity it was best to do something sane and so he started a salvage company. + +He used some charcoal he found in the back of the warehouse to write Sil's Salvage on the back of the skiff and he headed out straightaway to start looking for salvageable things. As he moved farther away from it, using the river to get to the canals that led to Lake Ponchetrain, he finally saw the extent of the damage. Half the city still burned, whether from the shelling or the hurricane he wasn't sure. Smoke smeared the southern sky, wind from the tail end of Ingrid pulling the ash down the coast toward Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile. Offshore, half hidden by the curve of the earth, a battleship still circled in a holding pattern, awaiting orders. + +He moved slowly through the canal, toward the lake, using a bamboo pole he found in the street to maneuver the tiny skiff past storm blown debris and flooded waters. He passed chokes of seagrass washed in from the barrier islands, thick oil slicks that clung to the wood hulled boat leaving behind a lingering smell of tar and gasoline. He moved through raw sewage, human excrement dyed chemical green, floating tangles of shit and clumped toilet paper that looked like limes and made him chuckle even as the smell made him choke. As he neared the lake the stench shifted, beached fish littered the banks of the channel, their white bellies swelling in the sun, clumps of crabs scurry around them, picking at the flesh. A dead egret hung from a V of limbs in an uprooted oak tree, its neck snapped, head dangling lifelessly down toward the water. At one point Sil had to lie flat on his back as the boat slid under the smashed fibers of what had once been a palm tree, uprooted and brought inland by the same twenty foot surf that had forced the the Protectorate Navy to abandon its shelling and move out to safer waters. + +Once he made it through the flooded, debris-choked channel into Pontchartrain proper he started the longtail motor and skimmed the edge of the lake, trying not to leave much wake, headed for the north shore where the debris piles would likely have come to rest. He skipped several promising looking mounds of seagrass and palm fronds, making a mental note of them and nearby landmarks, should no other scavengers find them first. He spent half an hour working his way along the reedy banks, shutting off the engine and poling carefully over the flooded concrete walls, over roads and up into the river fed marshes and wetlands just beyond the lake. He moved through the reeds, watching the cattails bounce in the wind, looking for anything metal, anything glass, anything human. But not too human. Every few minutes he glanced back at the lake to make sure none of the other scavenger crews, which had grown significantly in both strength and number since the blockade went in place six months ago, were bearing down on him. Behind him, across the lake and its fragile, now narrow, flooded strip of sand lay the hulking metal carcasses of two frigates and the one monstrous battleship. Though he couldn't actually see them, the heavy black smoke from the exploded, half-molten hulls still bloomed occasionally from the beach. The bigger scavenge operations were likely down there, out on the ocean even, looking for a huge haul -- gun shells, armaments, electrical gear, anything that might turn a profit back in New Orleans. Or what was left of it. + +After several hours of fruitless searching that yielded only a few oil drums and one mess of rebar and concrete that proved too heavy to move, Sil moved into a shadowy mangrove that he had been slowly drifting toward all morning. The bobbing oil drums clanged against the stern of the boat as he slowed the boat. The clanging seemed as loud as a gunshot in the still air of the swamp and Sil winced. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and revealed the unmistakably human color of red. His first thought was blood, he had seen so much of it in the past four days he was beginning to think that it was the only red thing left in the world. But blood did not protrude out of the water. Blood did not have a stern, nor a bow, nor did it leave masts in a tanged mess of rigging wrapped perilously around mangrove limbs. Sil leaned forward on the pole to rest and contemplated what was clearly a ship. She was half sunk, the bow pinned under the roots of a cypress tree, pushed at least two feet below the waterline. He glanced back out at the lake, but the only other scavenger boats were occupied with the debris piles on the south shore that Sil had skipped. He tied the skiff to a tree and sat down to think. He scanned the area, looking for survivors, or bodies at least. Finally, after considering quite a few outlandish scenarios in which he sailed straight out into the ocean and disappeared forever into the sunset, he decided to just take what he could carry and leave the hull where it was. He untied the skiff and moved closer, ducking under the mast and moving along the starboard side of the boat, inspecting the hull, which he noted was aluminum or some similar metal, trying to determine the stability of its resting place. Satisfied that even if she did break free and sink the minute he stepped aboard, he wasn't in any huge danger of drowning, he tied the skiff up and gingerly hauled himself onto the stern deck. He stayed seated, scooting forward on his butt until he reached the midships cockpit and galley entrance. Dark muddy water half filled what he could see of the galley. He stepped down, feeling with his foot for the companionway stairs until he felt something solid. He tested it, easing his weight down until he was standing. He ducked his head down and waited for his eyes to adjust. As they did he saw the glimmering light of another pair of eyes regarding him. Sil's legs shot back up before he even realized he was moving, sending him pitching back across the cockpit, slamming into the metal wheel and debris, watching as the crocodile lunged forward, toward him. Sil scrambled up on the side of the hull, cursing. He rolled off the boat, fell into his skiff where he bounded to his feet, grabbing the rifle, sweeping it across the entrance to the galley. Nothing emerged, but he could hear the animal sloshing in the waters below. + +Sil waited until his heart rate went down, forcing himself to breathe through the nose and counting slowly with each exhale. And then he climbed back up on the hull and slowly down again into the murky darkness, this time proceeding himself with the rifle. But there was nothing, the water rippled as he sat down on the step but the gator was nowhere to be found and Sil figured it was probably just as scared as he had been and retreated somewhere up into the V-berth or perhaps the bathroom since Sil wasn't entirely sure about the design on this boat. Nor was he in a hurry to find out. He climbed out and retrieved his torch from the skiff, he was just turning around to climb back on the half sunk boat when the largest, fattest gator he'd ever seen heaved itself up on the deck and regarded him for a minute, Sil kept the gun trained on the animal and contemplated shooting it for food, but decided that, despite the siege still presumably continuing, he hadn't yet reach the point where he would stoop to eating alligator. Instead he picked up a branch and heaved it at the gator which then scurried -- alarmingly fast -- off the boat and into the swampy water where Sil watched the snaking ripples that marked its path until he was satisfied it wasn't going to return any time soon. Then he went below and began to take an inventory of potentially useful and valuable items. + +He worked by sense of touch mainly, grabbing at boxes that bobbed around him, once nearly leaping back out the boat when he grabbed what was unmistakably a hand. He heaved it up out of the gallery and climbed out to look at a well gnawed arm, bones protruding where they should have attached to a body. Explains the gator, Sil muttered and went back below. Later he found a more in tact body, a man probably fifty years old, his legs bitten down to stumps. Sil vomited twice getting what was left of the body out of the boat. He found a water soaked wallet still in the back pocket, but there was no ID, just a little useless currency, some discount grocery cards and a captain's license issued to one Humphrey Bogart. Sil regarded the bloated head for moment. He couldn't help smiling. Humphrey Bogart. + +He buried what was left of Mr Bogart in clump of reeds, though he had no doubt the crocodile would be back to finish him off at some point. He loaded down the skiff with a much as he could find and headed back to the city. + +Two days later he was back in the grove. Arbella was still exactly where he had left her. Scratch gave a low whistle. + +Sil, this isn't a boat. + +What? + +This is a ship. Scratch wiped his face with both hands as if checking to make sure the skin was still there. He sat down on the bow of the skiff, legs dangling in the water as he packed his pipe. + +Sil sat in the back trying to listen for something intelligible in Scratch's hmms and ahs and other mutterings that drifted back with the potent smoke of the pot and tobacco mixture Scratch was so fond of. + +Eventually he came up with a plan and over the next month he and Sil worked day and night pulling Arbella out of the grove, patching her hull and eventually, on a moonless, overcast night, towed her back to the warehouse in New Orleans. + + + * * * + +Dean lay in bed with margarite her thin leg curled over his thigh, her feet entwined with his. + +Scene with Dean and Margarite + +Dean was the last to arrive, He saw Scratch tying down the mast, Sil was laying the black tarps over the hull and tying them down with rope. He caught the look of slight disgust that registered on Sil's face when he saw that Dean was not alone. Dean thought for a moment that he saw a small child's head poking out of the forward hatch, but he dismissed the idea immediately. + +Give me a hand with this stuff he called Sil. Sil laid down the ropes and came over to help unload the car. |