This hurricane was supposed to be the worst in a generation, like nothing they’d seen, yet the mayor had done little to get folks like him and Marta out. They were late seventies. Too poor to afford a car. Too old to venture far on their own. They were black. They didn’t matter.
Their home was ramshackle, single story, built long ago in a crumbling ward that sat below sea level and lacked the comfort of close neighbors. On the radio, he’d heard that the 17th Street Canal levee was under assault by storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain. If the levee failed, the ward didn’t stand a chance. Their home didn’t stand a chance.
He sat next to Marta who lay under thick covers, eyes closed, breathing fitfully. He placed a wrinkled palm on the wrinkled forehead of his love, her sweaty skin the color of coffee and sooty with age, but still beautiful to him after fifty years of marriage.
Remy touched her as he listened to the radio’s thick crackles, to the broken bits of news, to the random chatter. Other wards had been flooded, he’d made out that much. The water had carried away cars and trucks, had swept houses from their foundations, and had caved in crypts and mortuaries freeing the bodies within.
That’s where things got strange.
He thought he’d heard reports that said disinterred bodies were coming back to life. Witnesses on the radio had sworn it was true. Supposedly, dead bodies had writhed and flailed as floodwaters swept them along and when they’d washed against higher ground, they’d clambered to their feet and walked. Walked. He shook his head. Here people were spinning foolish tales about the walking dead when Marta couldn’t walk at all.
“We’ll get through this, you ’n’ me,” Remy whispered, taking his wife’s hand. “Like we got through so much else.”
She moaned softly. Marta had been sick for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that he’d nearly forgotten what their life had been like before the disease. Ovarian cancer. It didn’t make sense to him since she was far past childbearing age—not that they’d had children—but her ovaries had become polluted just the same, and the cancer had spread to her stomach and then her spine.
“We’ll get through this, hon,” he repeated, but didn’t know how to make good on the promise if the levee broke. How could he when most of the city had run off? When the police and fire fighters had run off as well?
Lightning flashed, casting the room bright white, and then thunder growled as fiercely as the apocalypse.
Taking the radio, Remy shuffled down a dark hallway into a kitchen lit by candles. He fetched more matches from a cupboard, and then counted cans. They had enough food for a week, which would have been fine if the morphine he’d dripped so carefully onto Marta’s tongue with a baby’s eyedropper hadn’t run out that very morning. He couldn’t call the hospital for more, either, because the landline was dead and he’d never been able to afford a cell phone. Of course that was assuming the hospital staff hadn’t left town, which they probably had.
Without morphine, Marta had nowhere to hide from the pain; already it was becoming too much for her. One moment she’d be lying there peacefully, and the next she’d be mewling and balling her fists and crushing her eyes closed with such force that he’d feel her agony like it was his own.
Mewling… that was the only sound she could make now.
Remy looked into the living room at his trumpet, which hung on the wall in a glass case above the fireplace. He’d put it away over a year ago when Marta got so sick she couldn’t sing along with him any more.
At times he’d fooled himself into believing that folks had come to the Bourbon Street clubs they booked to hear his sharp-noted riffs, but deep down, he’d always known they’d come for her. Achingly hourglass in form-fitting blue, Marta would take the stage as quietly as an afterthought, press her full lips to the mic, and then float her voice sweetly, robustly, through a room’s smoky air in time with his trumpet’s plaintive moan. Jazz, blues, gospel, rock—she could sing them all. Transform them all. Her soulful, smooth-rasping lullabies never failed to transfix, to shake free what was hidden, to soothe like promises of hope the damaged spirits of those who listened. None more than his. None more.
No more.
Marta’s voice had been siphoned by the cancer. What he would do to give Marta her voice back. To stop her constant suffering.
The radio crackled. Remy placed it on the kitchen counter and fussed with the dial.
“…broken…” he heard the broadcaster say. “…17th Street Canal levee…mercy on our souls…”
Remy went cold with fear. So it had happened. He had to get Marta outside and up onto the roof, but how could he when he lacked the strength to move her fast enough to beat the coming floodwater?