SLOP, SLOPPP… Water, and a whole lot of it, lapping over the Ponchartrain seawall.
Over Algiers, the Carnival mask warehouses shook and swayed under the incessant
roar of Katrina’s windy breath. Corrugated tin curled, ripped up and section by section, blew back and off into the heavy backdraft. The big live oaks shook in the Garden District, swayed, and creaked madly, before limbs snapped on to the overheads and CRACK! SN-ZIZZLE!!, went the power lines.
From his spacious serpentine porch on St Charles in the District, Theodoric Purslane felt a nauseous shaking sensation. “H’mmm. Cain’t be a Quake,” he muttered, then suddenly-irrationally– Purslane found himself flailing and batting back immense winged Formosansfrom his face. “Dang!! Shoo, ye bastids!! G-git back, y’Heah?” Fumbling in the breast pocket of his wrinkled linen overshirt, Theo cursed under his own grumbling exhalations. He pulled out a stubby Admiral Belgrano black stogie, and fought to light the blasted thing.
“Aii!G–D–horizontal teardrops of Bacchus!! Damn, Vi–!!”
Purslane attempted to summon his wife,but over the general high tenor of the offshore gale,
She likely couldn’t hear a word he was saying. And in that same moment, both the lights and Purslane’s cigar went clean out.
Now, at Charity Hospital, muddy, sludgy, dangerous slop more sewage than river water swirledever higher ‘round the darkening Deco hulk of the facility. Shrill screams of terrified patients, no more than inmates at this point, rose faintly above the meteorological noises that filled the air.
Loomis Reader had tried to ask two interns and a nurse how the Hail to find a proper exit. His gurney had actually floated him to a stairwell, and a gnarly old guy named Mojo Man had flicked
His Bic and grunted, poining in the dank dimness, “Up. Up, whiteboy, don’t you HEAR those Voices!!”
Yes, Mojo Man, I think I hear them- Loomis, half thought, half whispered to his new ‘saviour.’
“Don’t you understand? Dey’s the ones awready DEAD!! GONE!!”
“Gone, sir? Well, best we be goin’ ANOTHER WAY, then!” Loomis groped for a rusted handrail, blindly hauling himself upward, to the next level with Mojo, and the few other Charity-ites who dared follow.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
