CHAPTER THREE
Chaz:
It was late, but an unrelenting crowd of bohemians, gutter punks and tourists still jostled their way through the Quarter, all of them carrying black-market imitations of Jamaican rum punch and Dixie Crimson Voodoo Ale. Musicians gathered on street corners, playing jazz improvisations to passersby, waiting for the steady waterfall of tips that jingled into open trumpet cases. Antiques shops and art galleries lured tourists toward brightly lit windows, and a pair of prostitutes strolled arm in arm, gossiping in French. The Newbie and I had walked from one blues club to another, watched the moon snake its way across the sky. My feet hurt and my head throbbed from my last glass of whiskey. A sure sign it was finally time to end the evening.
But now Miss Margarita was in the mood for adventure. As if her run-in with that genetic monster never even happened.
a€?I want to see the Cities of the Dead,a€? she said.
a€?The Cities of the Dead are gone,a€? I answered in my best monotone. Nobody needed cemeteries anymore. The empty carcasses left over after resurrection were just piled into incinerators and toasted.
She shook her head. Waist-long platinum waves shimmered.
Why did they always look like Hollywood movie stars, when they should be sucking up worms and dirt? I sighed.
a€?Ia€?m not stupid, you know. I used to be an attorney. I just, hey, yeah, didna€?t want to be one this time.a€?
I wished I had another drink. Even a migraine would be better than this.
a€?I know they kept one graveyarda€”yeah, they did. For tourists. Saw it on the news, babe. You know, before.a€?
a€?Before you went in the joint.a€?
She nodded. She didna€?t want to talk about the joint. None of them ever did. I felt bad immediately. I should have let her bring it up first. Tears formed in the corners of black-mascara-rimmed eyes. Maybe she was remembering a husband and a kid that she left behind. Maybe there was a best friend, rotting away in a nursing facility somewhere, waiting for a phone call that would never come. Maybe there was a lifetime of memories crowding to the surface, all struggling to be part of the 50 percent that got to survive.
a€?Fine,a€? I said, although it really wasna€?t. I shot a pulse beam into the night sky and signaled a taxi. a€?Wea€?ll go see the last City of the Dead.a€?
Her eyes darkened when the cab pulled down from a nearby rooftop, gliding through the misty evening fog to stop beside us. I thought she would be happy. Thought she would smile at leasta€”I mean, I did exactly what she wanted. But she just climbed inside the taxi and turned away from me, then stared out the window, hands rolled in tight little balls on her lap.
The cemetery appeared a few moments later, a gothic land of stone and skeleton, hard edges softened by moonlight and transformed into something mythic. We stepped from the taxi, both of us hesitating. The wrought-iron gates screeched when I pulled them open. I wanted to laugh, but for some reason I couldna€?t. This was a place where bones marked the transition from life to whatever lay on the other side.
No matter what the Stringers say, this was still a sacred place.
I watched as Angelique moved silently through moon-beams, shadowy fog clinging to her feet. It followed her like a living, breathing creature as she walked from one tomb to the next, poised beside her as she read rusted bronze placards. Names of the dead dripped from her lips. Christophe. Marguerite. Francois. She shook her head, moved on. I realized that she was crying. Something was wrong; some of her circuits werena€?t firing right. Tears slipped down pubescent-perfect cheeks. Movie-star lips quivered.
Suddenly I couldna€?t focus my eyes anymore. I staggered and grabbed on to a towering stone angel, almost lost my balance. Whiskey jitters were finally catching up with me.
a€?You shouldna€?t drink that black-market crap,a€? she said. Her speech patterns were changing. I detected a faint Scottish brogue, a late twentieth-century accent. I had to watch out. She could collapse if the memories came back too rapidly. a€?I worked on all the synthetic alcohol patents. Whiskeya€?s probably the worst.a€?
I nodded. We finally had something in common. Standing in the middle of a cemetery beneath a silvery moon, we both agreed that contraband liquor was bad news. A whispering breeze passed between us, stirred the mists into curving rococo eddies. Just then I turned away and leaned against my angel friend again. Vertigo forced me to wobbly knees.
a€?Drink tequila next time,a€? she said.
I held up my hand to silence her. Even a Babysitter deserves a moment of peace. Especially when hea€?s curled over with jitters. The world seemed to be all mist and shadow, everything in soft focus, like I was looking through a camera fitted with the wrong lens. I wiped my face on my shirt-sleeve, then caught my breath and stood up.
a€?Angelique?a€? Dead leaves rustled and tumbled through a narrow courtyard.
She was gone.
a€?Hey, yeah! Angelique. Where are you?a€? Stone met stone, shadows changed from gray to purple to black.
Babysitting 101: Never turn your back on a Newbie. Especially on Day One.
There were no sounds except my own footsteps as I stumbled through uncharted darkness; my own heartbeat, as it chugged along like a train on rickety tracks. I began to jog between temple-tombs, moved through what looked like a black-and-white vampire-movie set. I imagined Dracula, arms open wide, imagined Angelique welcomed into a land of the undead. A hundred dangers lurked in the shadows: thieves, murderers, kidnappers, hiding in the neat and narrow spaces between the tombs, waiting for tourists, hoping someone would pass by, someone unarmed and innocent.
Someone like my Newbie. Memories rose to the surface, stories of half-baked Newbies, caught and sold into slavery. They were so easy to program during the first week. I was running faster now. Thought I saw someone, watching me from a dark corridor between the tombs.
a€?Angeliquea€”where are you?a€?
That was when I rounded a corner and found her, kneeling in front of the burial tomb of a legendary voodoo queen. She stared at the stone slab as if it belonged to her; she was running her fingers through a fresh pile of Mardi Gras beads left by pilgrims seeking favors from the dead, a puzzled expression on her face. She must have heard me, but for the longest time she didna€?t move. She just continued to stare down at the tokens, mumbling to herself. Finally she turned and looked at me.
a€?Did you see him?a€? she asked.
a€?Who?a€? I glanced behind us.
a€?Hea€?s running away, hea€?s free now.a€? She tried to stand up, a ghostly smile on her lips, a long-dead memory. But then she blinked, her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed, disappearing beneath the mist.
I picked her up, checked her pulse, sheltered her in my arms for a moment while my head cleared. a€?Shea€?s fine,a€? I said to myself, as if I needed some sort of reassurance. I struggled to forget about all the things that could go wrong, about the hidden clauses in the Fresh Start contract that protected me from scenarios just like this. I was tired of being the one that always came out on top of every bad situation. a€?Youa€?re going to be okay. Hang in there, kid,a€? I mumbled as I carried Angelique toward the street. a€?Wea€?ll get you straightened out. Some jumps are just rougher than others.a€?
But deep down inside I knew that wasna€?t true. There was something wrong here: too much information was trying to get through. Almost as if whoever did her jump didna€?t know what the hell they were doing. Fortunately the cab was waiting exactly where I left it. I signaled the driver.
Then I used two Master Keys, preprogrammed commands hardwired into every Newbie at start-up, and I whispered into Angeliquea€?s ear. a€?Wake up. Focus.a€?
She instantly opened her eyes, stood up and climbed into the cab, one hand holding mine for support.
We drove away.
I was too tired to care about another Newbie whose life just got mangled and torn in Fresh Start machinery. Too tired to realize that there might be more going on here than just a rugged jump.
It was the first mistake I would make on this case. But that didna€?t really matter. Because I was about to make plenty more.