by Arden, Alys
I tried again, this time with more force, but the result wasn’t any different. “Stay back,” I said, and swung the blunt tool into the first hinge. The second swing smashed the next hinge, and then I jerked the door away from the frame. A black cloud whooshed out. Jory screamed louder than Betsy as we all dropped to the floor, covering our faces. Thousands of flies swarmed us, buzzing in our ears. I swatted at them with one hand, covering my nose and mouth with the other hand, and gagging as the true smell of death billowed out.
I didn’t want to move forward, but I didn’t dare look back; Betsy was already puking, and then someone else was too. Puking had a domino effect like that.
I crept closer to the door, holding the bandana over my face, my stomach muscles jerking uncontrollably. I peered into the dark room, which was no bigger than a walk-in closet. The walls were bright red, and a mirror hung at the rear, reflecting the light from the bedroom onto an altar below it. Mold had sprouted like mutant ferns, blanketing the scene: candles, twenty or thirty were on the table, some big, some small, all with hardened drips of wax frozen in time down the sides. Strands of beads hung on statues of the Virgin Mary next to conch shells and plastic flowers, all covered in gray, green, and black. Spots on spots on spots of mold covered the crucifixes and black-and-white photos that hung on the walls.
“What the . . . ,” my voice trailed.
“A prayer room,” Jory said from behind me, swatting away flies.
In the mirror’s reflection, I saw the body on the floor. I tried not to imagine him kneeling at the altar, the water slowly rising around him. I tried not to think about what was going through his head when he gave up on trying to evacuate. Was he old? Injured? Maybe he just wanted to die praying rather than out there on his own? Maybe he’d already found peace.
The reflection moved. I gagged violently and kicked the door shut.
“Maggots,” I said.
“The Corpse Whisperer strikes again!” Jory yelled.
“It’s not funny,” I choked.
“No, it’s not funny. It’s freakin’ weird, dude. You find more dead bodies than Jessica Jones.”
Behind us, AJ’s two-way bleeped. “We got another floater,” he said.
Someone on the other side would alert D-MORT, the FEMA-sponsored Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, which happened to be one of my pop’s projects. They’d arrange the pickup. No one knew for sure—well, someone knew for sure—but it’s been said that over eight thousand bodies had been processed in the facility. Of course, no one had bothered to define “processed.” As far as I could tell it meant “checked in.” Only a fraction of those had been identified. There was a website where people could report missing persons and answer a survey that begged for details: scars, tattoos, piercings, surgical histories. I even heard they were using facial recognition from Facebook photos. But for floaters with this level of decomposition, the only chance was dental records. Hopefully, being found inside a home would expedite his identification.
“Lord have mercy, Isaac,” Betsy said. “Lord have mercy.”
“You have some kind of predilection for the dead, kid?” AJ asked, pocketing the handheld radio. “What is that? Nine? Ten?”
“A baker’s dozen,” Jory answered.
He was right: I’d found thirteen bodies—with this crew. If you tallied all of the corpses from my first-responder days, the number was seventy-six. Seventy-six corpses. But they didn’t need to know that. Holding the record for corpses recovered wasn’t exactly something to brag about.
“You got some shit luck, kid,” said AJ.
“Yeah . . .”
What was I supposed to tell them? That a breeze always seemed to enter the room and lead me to the dead body? Oh, I just have this special relationship with the air—you know, because I’m a witch.
What happened next always felt the weirdest: I shut the door, and we went back to work. The shock factor for everyone had worn away along with the hope that it would be the last one.
Three Wu-Tang records later, I let the crowbar drop to the ground. “Is there running water here?”
“I think so,” Jory answered.
I ran upstairs to the master bathroom as we continued to yell back and forth.
“Don’t drink it! Boil-water advisory!”
“I’m not an idiot!” Actually I was—I should have left an hour ago. Gone back home and showered. Now you’re going to be late. And disgusting, and covered in drywall dust and mold flakes. I turned on the tub faucet. The pipes shook and sputtered until water gurgled out.
“Come on, come on,” I mumbled, pulling off my shirt.
The water ran a color that wasn’t brown but wasn’t quite clear either.
“Good enough.”
I splashed the water up my arms, carefully turning my face away, and then pulled a bar of soap from my bag and stuck my head under the faucet to rinse out my hair.
I emerged wearing a fresh set of clothes. Black clothes.
“Ya going to a funeral, boy?” AJ asked.
“I gotta leave early. See ya tomorrow.”
“We’re gonna pray for that floater’s soul,” Betsy said. “Me and Brett. Don’t you worry about him, Isaac.”
“Thanks, Bets!” I yelled, hopping down the porch. The sad truth was, I’d already stopped thinking about the dead body, because I was worried about someone else now. Adele.
I threw down my board but then turned back and ran up to the front door. I pulled a can of spray paint out of my knapsack, shook it quickly, and popped the cap. When the paint hissed out, I slashed out the 0 and painted a 1.
RIP, Mr. Seventy-Six.
CHAPTER 3
Death by Mold
Breathe.
I smoothed my skirt. The metallic fabric was silky against my fingers. Even in the dark space, it gleamed, reflecting the light from the racks of melting candles. I sucked in a big breath. It didn’t help. The mold-tinged air felt dank and cumbersome, too heavy for my lungs to push in and out.
Breathe, Adele.
Muted rays of sun shone through the stained-glass windows high above us, cutting through the dark room on a sharp diagonal. Even through my sunglasses, I could see all the dust and particles of God knows what else floating in the trail of light.
Father McKinley’s voice droned on in the background.
Like the rest of the Ninth Ward, the church lacked electricity and was far from operational, but it was the closest one to St. Vincent’s that wasn’t a total hazard. I think we were still breaking a dozen different laws by occupying it, but who was going to stop us? The government hadn’t officially condemned it, so that left it a free-for-all.
I imagined what the holy space had looked like with ten-plus feet of muddy river water flooded inside: The long wooden pews and the ceramic heads of religious icons bobbing between candle racks and collection boxes. Hymnbooks floating higher and higher to the heavens. A whole new meaning to the term “holy water.”
A memory of Lisette Monvoisin throwing a saintly statue at Nicco whipped through my mind.
I was grateful for my sunglasses as I blinked it away, as if my eyelids were burying the memory back into my subconscious.
Everyone shifted as more latecomers squeezed into the already-crowded pews, until we were elbow to elbow. The bout of claustrophobia came back. Most of the vast church had been emptied—maybe by looters, maybe by the archdiocese—so I shouldn’t have felt so trapped, but we were all crowded to one side. Tape blocked off the other half, where broken pews and dismantled confessional booths waited to be hauled off. The pile of trash glittered with the brightly colored glass that had shattered from the now-boarded frescos.
Jesus, how long is the priest going to talk? Was it absolutely necessary for this Mass to be inside given the circumstances?
Breathe.
I sat up straight and rolled my neck, flinching at the small pop.
On the next breath, I imagined thousands of microscopic mold spores flying into my nose, down m
y esophagus, and planting themselves inside my lungs. The seedlings germinated into cruciferous-like plants, and the bulbous vegetation grew into my throat until every bit of air was blocked from coming or going, choking my imaginary self to death.
I adjusted the collar of my black blouse, which was tied into a limp bow at my throat.
Just breathe, Adele. Stop thinking about mold.
Or death.
Death by mold.
I focused on the rack of candles next to the priest, trying to distract myself from having an anxious fit. I slowly squinted and released my eyelids, watching the flames change size. Warmth radiated from within my belly, and it took a full minute of playing with the fire to realize it wasn’t just an optical illusion. The flames were actually growing taller.
A wave of panic came next, and one of the flames doubled in size. Shit.
With a quick glance that begged my father not to follow, I squeezed past him and slowly pushed through the rest of the people in the front pew. I tried to be light on my feet so as not to distract from the service, but my shoes on the marble floor made it altogether impossible. Heads turned as I hurried down the side aisle, and then a slice of light pierced the congregation as I opened the door just enough to slip outside.
Freedom.
For a moment I leaned against the heavy door, but then it wasn’t enough; I needed more distance.
I bobbed down the marble steps, my feet pinching inside the pointy-toed shoes, and the gold lamé flouncing above my knees. Two thin layers of crinoline beneath the silky fabric gave the high-waisted skirt a slight flare. I didn’t stop until my heels clicked the bricks of the residential Bywater street.
Almost four months after the Storm had touched ground, the neighborhood still looked exactly as it had the day my father and I drove in after the evacuation. The postapocalyptic-zombie vibe crept up with a vengeance.
A gentle scraping sound to my left pulled my attention—I whirled around. It was just an empty Coke can knocking down the street in the breeze. A mangy black cat emerged from underneath the wrecked porch of a house whose tennis-ball-colored paint job still managed to beam through the layer of grime left by the Storm. The cat lazily stretched its back. I wondered who’d lived in the house and where they were now.
The waterline was over my head, swallowing most of the one-story. Were they home when the levees broke? Did the water rush in all at once like a giant wave tunneling down the street? Or did it slowly rise, giving them the false hope that it might stop before it touched their toes . . . before it swept around their shins and soaked their clothes and chilled their bones? Before they climbed to the highest, driest spot in the house? Were they thinking that if they climbed high enough God would rescue them? Because, really, who drowns in an attic?
My eyes fixated on the numerals inside the orange spray-painted X.
0-1-0-0
The numbers sprayed in the bottom quadrant sank my heart.
Who drowns in an attic?
This person did, that’s who.
The 0 meant there’d been no survivors found by the rescue crew, and the 1 meant a corpse had been. I wondered if they ever got a funeral, or just a label on a body-bag tag at the new city morgue. “D-MORT,” as Isaac called it.
My hand moved to a tendril of hair, deftly twisting it between my fingers, and the Coke can skittered across the broken road, landing next to my shoe as if it had been well trained. It rattled in place. I kicked it hard and sent it skidding down the street.
“Chill out,” I said, re-smoothing my skirt. The sun gleamed off the shiny gold fabric like brass.
Brass.
Notes squeezed out of a saxophone from a nearby street. The scales got louder and closer—someone warming up on their way here. The ground trembled underneath my feet. Tuba tremors.
A large, jolly-looking man rounded the corner with the enormous instrument wrapped around his body. His cheeks puffed up like a blowfish, and he gave me a sympathy nod as he walked past, the sun bouncing hard off the banged-up horn, which looked like it had recently been shined.
I squinted behind the dark, round lenses, which now felt like a part of my armor, shielding people from seeing my eyes and knowing my thoughts.
If people knew what I was thinking . . . what I had done.
Well, at least they’d stop looking at me with those poor little girl eyes.
I sighed and looked around, suddenly very aware that I was standing by myself in a crowd of people filtering out from the church.
Chatter came from every direction. Laughter. Whispers. Hoots and hollers. More instruments warmed up. A trumpet. A bass drum pounding. Cymbals clanking.
The more instruments that joined the warm-up, the louder the crowd became over them, like birds squawking and chirping. My pulse began to climb. Chirp. Chirp. More brass. More chirping. More metal. More vibrations.
Too much metal.
The vibrations traveled through my body, rippling through my bloodstream. I broke a sweat.
“This is so weird,” a voice whispered close to my ear.
I twitched, but he didn’t recoil from the rejection. Isaac.
His hand went to the small of my back, and I took a deep breath. I knew the gesture was supposed to be comforting, but it wasn’t—not today.
And people kept doing it. The small of my back, my shoulder, my arms. If it wasn’t Isaac, it was Sébastien or my dad or Ren. Even Detective Matthews had kissed my cheek. But I couldn’t expect anything less. This was the South after all.
“The skirt came out amazing, by the way.”
He was trying to distract me. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
He ignored my attitude and slid his hand around my hip. My entire body tensed. I didn’t mean for it to, but the fact that he was being so nice annoyed me. He’d been babying me since early yesterday . . .
I’d spent most of the day distracting myself by making the gold skirt. Instead of going to the café like he normally did after work, Isaac came over and sat on the floor against the wall in my bedroom, one leg outstretched and the other bent at the knee to rest his sketch pad. It took me most of the morning to draft the pattern pieces. Our eyes met only once—when he was switching knees and I was pulling out the fabric. I wasn’t able to force another smile after that point. It was the gold fabric . . . I’d bought it in France.
When I’d spotted it through the small shop window in Paris, I’d nearly leaned off Émile-slash-Emilio’s Vespa. His arm caught me as he came to a sudden stop.
“Don’t do that, please. Your mother will kill me if anything happens to you,” he’d said in French, his touch lingering, making me wonder if he was really the one who cared.
“Unlikely,” I’d said, and smiled, running into the store.
On the ride back to my dormitory, I hugged the tissue-wrapped pillow of gold fabric so I didn’t accidentally hug him. I am such an idiot.
The memory now made me shudder.
Of course, I couldn’t think about Émile without thinking about Brigitte, and after that I was hardly able to look at Isaac, knowing I’d lied to him about what happened in the attic on Halloween.
About my mother being trapped inside.
About my mother being a vampire.
An omission of truth counts as a lie, right?
The guilt had gnawed my nerves ever since, especially as we’d promised each other no more secrets on that very evening. Before we’d gone out that night, I never got the chance to tell him or Désirée that Adeline had killed Giovanna Medici. So, naturally, when Isaac pushed an extra female vampire into the attic with Martine, he assumed she was Nicco’s sister Giovanna.
And I hadn’t corrected him. Yet.
“Breathe,” he whispered, his forehead knocking the side of my head and his fingers pressing into my hip.
The music stopped. Mouths disengaged from conversation.
Short squeaks danced out of a solo clarinet, floating out over the crowd. The opening notes of the mournful hymn jabbed into my heart. I lo
oked down at my chest, half expecting to see blood gushing out.
Isaac squeezed me tighter.
This is really it.
From behind us at the back of the crowd, a trombone blew. The long notes slid deeper and deeper until they felt like they were inside my stomach. I knew without looking that Alphonse Jones was playing that horn. A few measures later he was weaving through people, past us, with the satin sash of grand marshal across his chest. Back from Los Angeles for the occasion, or to meet with their insurance agent, or FEMA. I wished Brooke had come with him. I’d only spoken to her once since Halloween night—when she spilled the beans about being cast on the next season of American Idol, and how she’d be going dark while they were shooting, per her NDA.
I changed my mind about wishing she was here. How would I explain all this to her?
“I think that’s my cue,” Isaac said softly, in a way that sought my approval.
When I nodded, he kissed my cheek—the gesture broke through my numbness. Face burning, I darted a quick glance left and right to see if anyone had witnessed the PG-PDA.
No eyes were on me.
As Isaac walked away, he paused to stretch his arms. He must have been out flying last night. The hem of his black T-shirt lifted as he deepened the stretch, exposing his hip bone. I looked away, trying not to blush. After all his hours of manual labor, his black T-shirt and black jeans were now too tight, like most of the clothes he’d brought from New York. His work hours seemed to increase by the day. Isaac just couldn’t not help people.
He looked strange in the dark clothing. That kind of ensemble was more reserved for Nicco. My gaze dropped to the ground.
More feet joined Isaac’s tan work boots. My father’s. Sébastien’s.
“Pretty girls don’t frown.” The words came from lips that were now kissing my cheek. “Hold on to my parasol, s’il vous plaît?” Blanche pressed it into my hands and kept moving past me.
“Good thing I’m not a pretty girl,” I mumbled.
He turned back around. “You betta be ready to dance!”
I forced a smile, only to feel like a grimacing clown, but then the back of his outfit made a genuine smile spread across my face. On the tails of his black tuxedo jacket were swirling appliqués of silver and iridescent sequins. They matched his purple satin shirt and signature glitter-swept lids.
