Orleans

by Sherri L. Smith

Genres: YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

A gritty futuristic tale from author of Flygirl

First came the storms.

Then came the Fever.

And the Wall.

After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct … but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.

Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood becomes tainted. Fen meets Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has snuck into the Delta illegally. Brought together by chance, kept together by danger, Fen and Daniel navigate the wasteland of Orleans. In the end, they are each other’s last hope for survival.

Sherri L. Smith delivers an expertly crafted story about a fierce heroine whose powerful voice and firm determination will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Release date: March 7, 2013

Publisher: Speak

Print pages: 352

Sample

ALL ALONE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL.

I GOT TO FIGURE OUT WHAT COME NEXT.

Only so many places to run to when you ain’t got a tribe. Maybe I find another group of OPs somewhere, but Lydia’s tribe been one of the biggest and strongest. If they ain’t safe, nobody be. It ain’t easy finding a tribe, neither. Everyone take babies glad enough. If you live with folks your whole life, you ain’t so likely to turn against them. But if they take in someone older, even if they only seven or eight, they ain’t got an idea what kind of egg they got—chicken or snake. So even if you ain’t turning against them, they might turn against you, just to be sure.

Lydia say she want Baby Girl to have a better life. Can’t see how a tribe gonna give her that. Ain’t no such thing as a better life in Orleans. Not really. Only chance this baby got be in the Outer States. So I gotta get her there.

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SEPTEMBER 14, 2004

EDMUND BROUSSARD MOUNTED THE STEPS TO the levee above the old Café Du Monde off of Jackson Square. The sky was pale and colorless above him, the grass a vibrant green at his feet as he faced the wide expanse of the rolling Mississippi River. Behind him, a handful of revelers on the ironwork balconies of the French Quarter could be heard drinking their Hurricanes and ignoring the voluntary evacuation order that had sent so many tourists home. The café was still serving their hot beignets and chicory coffee. A few persistent people strolled the green lawns of the square outside St. Louis Cathedral.

Edmund opened the black case he carried in his left hand and pulled out his trumpet. The yellow brass reflected the city back on itself in the flat afternoon light. He put the horn to his lips and defiantly blew “When the Saints Go Marching In” into the unnaturally still air. He was not leaving New Orleans, no matter what the weathermen said. He was not leaving his home. New Orleans would stand against any storm that came her way. The TV crews loved it, the image of a lone man facing nature, refusing to bend.

• • • 

Hurricane Ivan turned east, barely brushing the city with rain as it ran its devastating course along the coast of Alabama. It returned to the mouth of the Mississippi and faltered there. New Orleans was spared. Laissez les bons temps rouler. The fabled city that care forgot danced on.

The next time, they were not so lucky.

August 29, 2005
HURRICANE KATRINA
Saffir-Simpson Category 3 at landfall
Casualties: 971; Survivors: 30,000

 

September 14, 2014
HURRICANE ISAIAH
Saffir-Simpson Category 4 at landfall

Casualties: 532; Survivors: 27,800

 

August 25, 2015
HURRICANE LORENZO
Saffir-Simpson Category 3 at landfall
Casualties: 1,432; Survivors: 22,345

 

June 30, 2016
HURRICANE OLGA
Saffir-Simpson Category 5 at landfall

Casualties: 2,022; Survivors: 20,323

 

July 27, 2017
HURRICANE LAURA
Saffir-Simpson Category 4 at landfall

Casualties: 1,371; Survivors: 18,952

 

July 29, 2017
HURRICANE PALOMA
Saffir-Simpson Category 5 at landfall

Casualties: estimated 3,500;
Survivors: estimated 15,452

 

October 20, 2019
HURRICANE JESUS
Category 6 at landfall,
based on new Saffir-Simpson Scale

Casualties: estimated 8,000;
Survivors: estimated below 10,000

 

AFTER THE STORM DEATHS CAME OTHER CASUALTIES: deaths by debris, cuts, tetanus, or loss of blood; suicide; heart attacks caused by stress of loss, or stress of rebuilding, or just as often from the lack of medicines used to treat common ailments. The list of no-longer-treatable diseases grew: diabetes, asthma, cancer. Domestic violence rose, along with murder.

Then came the Fever.

And the Quarantine.

Excerpt from the
DECLARATION OF QUARANTINE
issued by FEMA and the Center for Disease Control,
September 20, 2020:

------------------------------

For the safety of the population at large, we deem it advisable to seal off all storm-affected areas of the Gulf Coast region. No citizens or personnel will be allowed to cross the border without blood testing for Delta Fever. This is an epidemic of proportions we have not witnessed since the Spanish Influenza of 1918. The Quarantine will be reevaluated as the disease runs its course and we make progress toward treatment and a cure. Until then, all borders will be sealed.

Excerpt from the
DECLARATION OF SEPARATION,
courtesy of the Smithsonian Collection,
March 11, 2025:

------------------------------

Therefore it is with great regret and pain for our fellow citizens that the United States Senate has agreed to withdraw our governance of the affected states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The shape of our great nation has been altered irrevocably by Nature, and now Man must follow suit in order to protect the inalienable rights of the majority, those being the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the foremost of those being Life.

Signed this day, the Eleventh of March,
Two Thousand Twenty-Five, in the presence of witnesses,

The President of the United States of America
The Senate of the United States of America
The House of Representatives of the United States of America
The Governor of the former State of Alabama
The Governor of the former State of Florida
The Governor of the former State of Georgia
The Governor of the former State of Louisiana
The Governor of the former State of Texas

OCTOBER 30, 2056

THERE BE SEAGULLS CATCHING THE BREEZE overhead. I sneeze and wipe my nose on the back of my bare brown arm.

“That’s the batch of it, Miss de la Guerre. The two books, the formula, and the bottle, genuine glass.” The smuggler McCallan point his boot at the things spread out on my blanket over the broken ground.

We be near the Market, where the old levee used to be, across from St. Louis Cathedral. What once been a green hill now be a beach dune made of debris—everything from washing machines to refrigerators and old cars been hauled and dumped here trying to shore up the levee. But the land gave way when the river rose, and the junk be left behind. Daddy used to say you could give a history of the place just by looking at those layers of trash.

Beneath us, on the river side of the hill, be a dusty gray beach of pulverized concrete, ground thin by storms. “The fabled cement beaches of Orleans,” McCallan call them. “Finer than the black volcanic sand of Hawaii, or the pink sugar sand of the old Caribbean.” I don’t know about that. Nothing left of Hawaii or the Caribbean since the water rose and the storms grew heated. It’d take a deep-sea diver just to find them. But Orleans still be here.

I snort at the blanket and give McCallan a hard look. “And the blood, old man? I done give you a good, solid downpay on it. What about that?”

McCallan’s eyes crinkle like he be laughing at me. He should know better. Grinning like a fool only make me angry. “Sorry, sugar, they were out of both positive and negative at the banks. There’s a blood supply shortage out there.” He wave his gloved hand behind him, toward the wall and the Outer States. “I ain’t risking my neck and smuggling to the Delta when I’m about to retire, now am I?”

I fold my arms. “We had a deal. I need that blood.”

McCallan shake his head. “We could use more with your fire back home,” he say. “I’ll be missing you, Miss de la Guerre, that’s for sure.”

I’ll be missing him, too, though I won’t say it. McCallan an old guy, almost forty, but he smart. He been smuggling for more than ten years. He know who to bribe, where to breach the Wall, how to get over while the guard be changing, how to avoid the sniffer drones. I ain’t the only one he doing trade with, neither. His regulars know his goods be clean and fresh. He don’t sell dirty blood or fake medicine. Even after the government closed the Delta, he kept working—trading with the tribes. Delta Fever be harder to kill than a swamp fox. It be always changing, the way those little buggers switch back on they own trails. But if it stay confined to a blood type, if folks keep to theyselves by type of blood, then it slow down somehow. And that why folks like McCallan be necessary. Tribes ain’t able to mix together long enough for real trade.

“I did my best, Miss Fen,” he say and spread his fingers with a shrug.

I spit in the gravel and hold out my hand. “I want a refund.”

McCallan sigh. “D’you want the stuff I got or no? I’ve come a long way and I’m not so sure anybody else is keen enough to buy these damn books off me. Baby Naming and The Developing Years. What are you up to, Fen? You’re not knocked up now, are you?” he ask, eyeing my belly.

Shoot, skinny as I be, I sure as hell ain’t pregnant. Lydia say I’d pass for a boy, if not for the braids she do for me, all wrapped in a topknot on my head to keep out of the way.

“Man, will you stop staring and just make good?” I say.

McCallan blush inside his encounter suit, one of the old kind with thick, mucus-looking skin that turn orangey-yellow when the heat rise in his cheeks. I’d be like to suffocate in something so thick, hot as I already be in my cutoff shorts and tank top. My hiking boots be bugging me they so sweaty, but he be wearing that whole suit like a murky second skin.

“Here, doll, take the books and the formula, the bottle.” He bend down to the blanket and roll it up for me. “And here’s your goods back.” He hand me back the little bag of gold I gave as down payment. Took a week to scrounge it all up from the teeth of the dead inside the Dome, while I been pretending to pray with the Ursulines.

“I didn’t even melt it down yet, in case you weren’t pleased. Use it in the Market. Or better yet, find the O-Negs. They’ll charge high, but there’s blood to be bought and sold right here.”

I shove the books into my pack and string the sack of gold around my neck to drop down my shirt. “We don’t do that,” I remind him.

My tribe be O-Positive, or OP. And our chieftain, Lydia, don’t take kindly to the blood trade. O types don’t be needing transfusions like ABs do. The Fever be in us, but it ain’t eating O blood up from the inside like it do other types. So O types got to be extra careful of hunters and the farms where they be taking they kidnapped victims to drain them alive. O blood be the universal donor. If we give a drop, they be taking all of it. Lydia say that ain’t right. Only ones worse off than us be O-Negs.

O-Negs don’t got the Rh, or Rhesus factor, that O-Positives do. Daddy use to say O positive be like coffee and O neg be like water. You can add water to coffee and it still be coffee, but you add coffee to water and it ain’t water no more. Everybody drink water, so O-Negs be used by everyone. Like the rhyme the nuns taught us about the Rules of Blood:

Types AB, B, and A

Need to stay away

From O and from each other,

Plus from minus, sister from brother.

O positive can feed

All positives in need,

But O neg is the one

For all tribes beneath the sun.

I feel McCallan’s eyes on my arms as I pack up. He be looking at the shiny scars there along the insides of my arms, wrists to elbows and then some. Burn marks so thick, ain’t nobody ever gonna get a needle in the easy way. Not everybody got scars like me. But then again, not everybody willing to die. Somebody want to take my blood, they got to go through the veins in my neck or thigh. They can only bleed me once and I be dead. But that better than being a blood slave.

McCallan shrug. “Best I could do,” he say.

If I hadn’t burnt myself up like that, I could give my own blood to Lydia. If she bleed too much while birthing and need it, I’d do it without being asked. But I can’t or I be dead and she get no help from me after that.

So I nod. “Fair enough.” Some choices, once you make them, they stay made. And I had my reasons.

“You know, there used to be music here all the time,” McCallan say. He looking out across the city like he see someone he used to know and like. “Jazz and blues, zydeco. The kind of songs that made your heart sing.”

It be my turn to shrug. “Not anymore,” I tell him. Music be a surefire way to bring the hunters down on you, or any other kind of trouble you don’t want.

With a final nod, I hitch up my shorts, raggedy edges tickling at the tops of my thighs, and walk away. My old army pack be slung across my shoulders, and my work boots scatter little rocks as I pick my way down the trash heap, past the ruins of Café Du Monde, toward the bright blue tarps of the marketplace.

• • • 

The Market be bubbling with people today. It hot for October, and folks be all about, trading and swapping this for that. There be food vendors selling fruits and vegetables, fish, and sometimes wild pig, or stewing it up in big pots over wood fires. I can smell the cooking and hear the clamor, but most of it be hidden by the roof tarps, bright blue in the afternoon sun. The Market be right at the edge of the Mississippi, with her back up against the Old French Quarter. The streets behind us belong to the A-Positives now, but the Market been here in one way or another since before Orleans been Orleans, and it be for everyone.

From the early days before the Wall, they been rotating security, this tribe one day, that tribe the next, keeping it fair and safe. Back when the Fever started, that the only way Os, As, Bs, and ABs could shop without catching they death from Fever. Shop on the day your tribe be guarding—if not your own tribe, then another of your type—and you be okay. Us O types, we can shop any day. Fever don’t run through us quite so bad as it do the rest of them.

It be an AB day, and I see Harney and his boys messing with them AB girls like they got a chance. Harney be an OP like me, but that where the comparison end. He fifteen and brawny everywhere except the head. Them girls got tattoos, which mean they tribe with La Bête Sauvage. Only thing dumber than making trouble around one of La Bête’s girls be making one pregnant. ABs and Os make A or B babies. That just giving La Bête more children for his tribe, and that ain’t a good idea for us Os.

“Harney,” I call him off. He come over reluctantly, long legs and arms shining with sweat in the sun. He only a year younger than me, but he listen when I call. That be the benefit of my experience. “Where Lydia at?” I ask.

He shrug and look around like he nervous or something. “You know. Where she ever at on Market Day?”

I swear under my breath. Lydia can’t be messing with folks like that. “Get ready to go,” I tell him. “I be right back.”

I walk past the nods of ABs guarding the entrance to the market. These fools got tattoos, too, so you know they all La Bête’s people. Most folks ain’t dumb enough to risk blood poisoning or tetanus by sticking theyselves with a needle. But La Bête’s tribe be big, strong, and crazy. At least today they here to keep the peace.

The market be big, a whole rabbits’ warren of stalls, but I know where to go. Last one on the first row. Ain’t nobody selling nothing nearby, not food, not clothing, not even rope to tie your tent to the trees. Nobody want to set up shop next to the nuns and they hospital tent. You could sell shovels, though, so the folks inside can dig they own graves.

The hospital be made of sheets of wood and rusted metal, like everything else in the Market, but it got a different roof. Instead of blue plastic tarping, it made of clean white canvas. Don’t know where the nuns be getting the stuff, but it let in the light so they can see.

The Ursuline Sisters been taking care of folks in Orleans since before the Civil War. Even before the city been part of the old United States, they been running that old girls’ school out of the same building they shut theyselves up in today. They spend turns nursing them that’s too far gone to be cared for by they own tribes, folks that be nothing but a burden with nowhere to go but in the ground.

I don’t like this place. It smell like death. I stand outside a minute to take my last few good breaths, then I head inside to find the pregnant woman among the dying.

• • • 

Inside the tent, row after row of straw pallets covered in bodies line the floor, some living, some not. Nuns and novices be drifting about like ghosts in them white shift dresses they wear. The nuns cover they heads with pieces of cloth, but the girls go bareheaded, young as can be. I’d worry about young ones like that out in the Market, out in the city, but they ain’t my tribe, so I don’t.

A man moan on the pallet next to me. Fool look like he been gored by a wild boar. Just a freesteader by the look of him, no tribe to help him with the hunt. Lady next to him look like she dying from tetanus, the way her jaw be all rigid and she missing a leg. She be wasting away, can’t even open her mouth to eat. One of the nuns look up at me from the lady’s side. I mouth Lydia, and she point me to the back of the tent.

My eyes follow her finger. Lord have mercy. The last row of the hospital, the one closest to the concrete hill beside the Market. That where the Fever victims go, the ones nobody can help. A black curtain hide it from view. I brace myself and make my way to the back.

“Shh,” Lydia hush me when I push the curtain aside. She be sitting in that little room with the walls covered in blue tarps because they easy to throw out: Just roll up the bodies and carry them out back before lining the room again.

Not so many people dying of Fever these days, what with the Rules of Blood telling tribes to keep apart and stay healthy. The Fever ain’t what it used to be. But sometimes there be an outlander, a smuggler from over the Wall, or a freesteader without a tribe, and he get sick and it be as bad as it been fifty years ago when they built the Wall in the first place.

Fever make you weak at first, tired and confused. That be the disease eating up your red blood cells. Then it make it so you can’t sleep and you start seeing things. Crazy things. And skin that be black or brown or white all turn the same color—chalky yellow. That be your blood failing and your liver giving up. Bruises come up on the skin then, like something inside you trying to beat its way out. Then come cramps that knot a body up from the inside out, and the weird shifting walk of somebody whose joints ain’t working right no more. Your lips crack, your mind go, and you start seeing more things that ain’t there, knowing they be coming to get you. At the worst, when pain ain’t doubling them over, folks with Fever be screaming nonsense and scrabbling with they hands, shoveling they mouths full of dirt. My daddy once told me they be looking for iron to replenish they blood. That be why some ABs drink blood when they ain’t satisfied with just injecting it. Either way it goes in, it can cause more trouble, make you even crazier. And when you all used up and ain’t got no more fight in you, you be like this boy in this dark little room.

Lydia be sitting next to this freesteader AB boy, reading a book. She crouch back on her heels even though her belly be eight months big and she should be sitting down for real. She want to show him pictures in the old mildewed thing she reading.

Lydia beautiful, even here in the low light of this death room. She in her own simple dress, made from homespun cotton, hair piled high in black braids on her head. She look like a queen. I be a scarecrow next to her.

She run a long-fingered hand across the boy’s forehead, leaving a trail in his sweat. His skin must’ve been as brown as hers once, but it yellow now and graying from his own bad blood. His eyes be glazed over and his arms and legs don’t bend the right way. He shudder like a puddle in a storm. She lean in to him and whisper the last line of the book. “‘And it was still hot.’”

The boy smile an ugly smile, lips peeling back from his face in a grimace. He nod and I see him try to say the words back to her. Lydia press a finger to his cracked lips. “Rest, Ezekiel. Rest.” The boy nod again and close his eyes. His chest be moving up and down. He ain’t dead yet, but he will be soon.

“Fen, what is it?” she ask me, rising slow, one hand on her back, the other on her round belly.

“Time to go,” I say. No use telling her she a fool for being here when she carrying a new life and her time be so close.

She don’t argue. “Powwow’s tonight,” she say, and I nod. Lydia got peace talks on the table with the O-Negs tonight. Plenty enough to worry over with that. No need to add a dying boy at the Market. She push back the black curtain and wave one of the nuns over. The woman glide up and kneel by the boy.

“The City takes,” the nun say, bowing her head.

“And God receives,” Lydia reply. The nun will stay. Someone to hold the boy’s hand when he do finally cross over. Lydia always make sure of things like that. Shepherd, that’s what she be. It no wonder I follow her out of the hospital tent and back into the light of day.

• • • 

“Leaving!” I sing out when Lydia and me reach the gates of the Market. We nod at the guards flanking the entrance, and I signal Harney and his boys. We walk past the row houses with they rusted bits of ironwork. We past the preserved streets now, and it ain’t all picturesque like them old photographs at the library. The pavement be broken here, and I be glad I got me some new boots. That old smuggler be good for something, even if not for what I really need.

“You sure we ain’t got to go to the library?” I ask Lydia. There be a jerry-rigged computer there, run on a foot pedal and who know what else. Electricity be rare in Orleans, so most folks do without. But somebody keep that computer running, and Lydia use it sometimes to send messages over the Wall. She use the old e-mail system left behind back when the Wall first went up. When I been real little, I got to send e-mails, too, at Father John’s mission. But that a long time ago, when it looked like the Wall weren’t gonna be there always, and folks on the other side still cared enough to sponsor kids in Orleans. Now there just be the one machine, and only chieftains use it, contacting smugglers and looking to set up trades. Maybe one day, the old computer be gone, too. Then Orleans be on its own for true.

“With the powwow and the baby, all my concerns are here, Fen,” she tell me. “Orleans has got everything we need.”

A skitter of stones behind me say the boys be running to catch up. Good. They got to learn. Ain’t never a time to be fooling around at the Market. You in, you out. Just ’cause there be guards there don’t mean a problem can’t follow you home. Harney come jogging up all out of breath, but Erik and Matthias, they too young to know they should be tired from messing around in the sun all day. They skip ahead of us like a couple fool puppies. I grunt. See if I don’t talk to them about that later. We OPs. We got to act dignified, for Lydia’s sake.

“Let them be boys for a little while,” Lydia say to me, laughing. “Once a week is all they ever get; don’t let us be the ones that take it away.”

“All right,” I tell her. She the chieftain, so we do as she say. But if we don’t break them of that foolishness, someone else will. And they’ll keep on breaking them, too.

Even with they jumping and clowning, Harney and the boys keep pace with Lydia and me ’til we out of the Quarter, then out past the old cemeteries, St. Louis Number 1 and Number 2, and into the woods, where we separate like always. This time, I stay with Lydia. That baby got less than a month before it leave her belly. And I won’t let her out my sight ’til it do.

THE SKY BE GROWING DARK BY THE TIME WE get back. Around us, camp be swarming like a beehive with folks making last-minute preparations for the powwow. They funnel the smoke from the cook fires so you can’t smell it so easy beyond the encampment, but up close my mouth be watering. They be fixing a feast for the O-Negs to show how good we OPs be living, how they could be living, too. My people risked they lives catching the wild boar they roasting, but it sure be worth a bite or two of that meat.

We pass by our storyteller, Cinnamon Jones, practicing his poems and songs on the edge of camp. He wave at me and smile wide at Lydia, then go back to walking his way through a pantomime.

Our camp be arranged in a circle, with cook fires in the center and houses on the outside. We ain’t living in buildings like them ABs by the Market; we camouflaged. First glance, you see nothing but a bunch of fallen trees. Look closer and you see there be a few small huts and bigger hogans, cozy as fallen logs covered in vines. We use tent poles or young trees bent into arcs and hoops for frames, and cover them with green saw palmettos that ain’t sharp enough yet to cut you with they serrated leaves. The hogans be like low tunnels, tall enough to stand in the middle, with sleeping mats on the sides. On cold nights, most everybody sleep in the hogans. On a night like tonight, when it still a bit warm, most folks stay in simple tents and lean-tos instead, and the hogans only shelter them that needs protecting, like pregnant women and the injured. Hogans take time to build and, being OP, we ain’t always able to stay in one place that long. With the blood hunters other tribes be sending out, a body got to keep on the move fairly regular or risk being trapped in they own home.

“Eh la bas!” my friend Caroline calls to me from across the way. She and her husband, Theo, got a big house, long as a shrimp boat and then some, to house all they kids. She mother to five of her own and two of Theo’s. Little Selene be sleeping in her mama’s arms. She ain’t got the O positive blood, so she’ll be moving on to her new tribe when she a bit older. But for now, Caroline rock her youngest and smile at me. Lydia stop to play with the baby and I wait. We at camp now and I ain’t got to be on guard duty, but I ain’t gonna relax ’til the powwow be done.

“Big night tonight,” Lydia tell Caroline, passing Selene back to her mama. “Maybe we’ll have time to play with both our little ones when there’s a lasting peace.”

Caroline smile and say she hope so, and I walk Lydia all the way to her hogan, checking to see it be clear before I leave her safe inside.

My hut be right next to Lydia’s like it been at every camp since I joined her four years ago. Used to be we shared a hogan. Well, Lydia got tired of me sleeping in the dirt outside her door and made me come inside. I been like a dog then in more ways than one. I been wild, for sure. It took a kind hand and lots of patience to bring me back again. Now I got my own place, not so big or well-made as some, but quick to put up, easy to leave behind. I don’t use tent poles like others do—can’t rely on always finding a full set of aluminum that ain’t rusted through, and I ain’t gonna be risking my life to save them if we got to move real quick.

The ground between our huts be starting to wear clear of grass, like the floors inside the houses. It slap loud beneath my boots. We been getting too comfortable here. Soon it gonna be time to move on.

I duck into my hut, drop my pack, and look around to check it ain’t been messed with while I been gone. I scan my low bed on the right, made of sacks stuffed with cotton and straw, next to a crate I found at the edge of the swamp one day and turned into a cubby for my books. The books be all wrapped in plastic to keep them dry whe