Read Online King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) by Joseph Nassise - Free Book Online
Authors: Joseph Nassise
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head, wondering if I’d heard correctly. Unknown illness? New Orleans?
Denise was having the same difficulty in making sense of it that I was. “Did he say New Orleans?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
I spun the dial, looking for another newscast, but eventually gave up without finding anything. It seemed we’d have to wait a little longer to figure out what was going on.
I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so why stress?
At least that’s what I told myself.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work that way. The closer we got to the city, the more anxious I became. It was like my body knew something that my head hadn’t managed to figure out yet and it was doing its best to communicate that information with the only tools it had at its disposal. The increased heart rate, the difficulty breathing, the inability to sit still for more than a few moments, all of which were evidence that my body was trying to tell my brain it was making a big mistake.
It didn’t matter what I did to try to calm myself: the anxiety wouldn’t go away.
By the time the city loomed ahead of us, I was a nervous wreck.
9
HUNT
We entered New Orleans from the east, driving south through St. Tammany Parish to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and then into the city proper across the Causeway. In the setting sunlight I couldn’t see, so I asked Dmitri to describe the Causeway to me as we drove across. It wasn’t every day that you found yourself atop the world’s longest continuous bridge over water.
Dmitri was his usual eloquent self. “It’s a long stretch of road over a big muddy lake.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one tired of the long drive. I settled for rolling down the window and letting the humid Louisiana air roll across my face, imagining I was poling my skiff through a cypress swamp while trees draped with Spanish moss soared high around me.
And they say I’m not a romantic.
The mental exercise had the added benefit of helping to calm the anxiety I had been feeling for the last hour. By the time we reached the other side of the lake and entered the city proper, I was back to my usual grumpy self.
Denise began to work her way through the part of New Orleans known as Metairie, not far from the infamous 17th Street Canal breach that played such a big role during the flooding after Katrina. Unlike the average individual, I hadn’t been able to watch the news reports as they’d come in during the storm and so I hadn’t seen the pictures of either the flooding or the aftermath. At the time, I hadn’t particularly cared; all of my attention had been focused on my search for my daughter, Elizabeth. But now that I was here in person, I was struck by the desire to experience it for myself. Call it academic interest, call it morbid curiosity; all I knew was that I needed to see it for myself, to get a sense of the lay of the land before we got involved in whatever it was that Denise’s patron deity had in store for us.
I tapped Dmitri on the shoulder from the backseat.
“Mind if I have a look?” I asked.
He must have been feeling apologetic for his surliness earlier, for I felt him shrug as he said, “Suit yourself.”
I’d borrowed Dmitri’s sight before and quickly made the connection. Borrowing the sight from a Mundane makes everything appeared washed out, like a colored shirt left too long in the sun, but borrowing the sight from one of the Gifted like Dmitri is the closest thing I’ve found to being able to see normally again.
It took me less than five minutes of looking around to realize something about New Orleans.
It was a city of ghosts.
And I don’t just mean the literal kind, although there were plenty of those to go around, too. No, what I mean is that New Orleans has a way of haunting itself, a way of showing its true face to those who are smart and clever enough to look for it and of hiding it away from those who are not, like a spirit that can be seen only by those
Denise was having the same difficulty in making sense of it that I was. “Did he say New Orleans?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
I spun the dial, looking for another newscast, but eventually gave up without finding anything. It seemed we’d have to wait a little longer to figure out what was going on.
I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so why stress?
At least that’s what I told myself.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work that way. The closer we got to the city, the more anxious I became. It was like my body knew something that my head hadn’t managed to figure out yet and it was doing its best to communicate that information with the only tools it had at its disposal. The increased heart rate, the difficulty breathing, the inability to sit still for more than a few moments, all of which were evidence that my body was trying to tell my brain it was making a big mistake.
It didn’t matter what I did to try to calm myself: the anxiety wouldn’t go away.
By the time the city loomed ahead of us, I was a nervous wreck.
9
HUNT
We entered New Orleans from the east, driving south through St. Tammany Parish to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and then into the city proper across the Causeway. In the setting sunlight I couldn’t see, so I asked Dmitri to describe the Causeway to me as we drove across. It wasn’t every day that you found yourself atop the world’s longest continuous bridge over water.
Dmitri was his usual eloquent self. “It’s a long stretch of road over a big muddy lake.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one tired of the long drive. I settled for rolling down the window and letting the humid Louisiana air roll across my face, imagining I was poling my skiff through a cypress swamp while trees draped with Spanish moss soared high around me.
And they say I’m not a romantic.
The mental exercise had the added benefit of helping to calm the anxiety I had been feeling for the last hour. By the time we reached the other side of the lake and entered the city proper, I was back to my usual grumpy self.
Denise began to work her way through the part of New Orleans known as Metairie, not far from the infamous 17th Street Canal breach that played such a big role during the flooding after Katrina. Unlike the average individual, I hadn’t been able to watch the news reports as they’d come in during the storm and so I hadn’t seen the pictures of either the flooding or the aftermath. At the time, I hadn’t particularly cared; all of my attention had been focused on my search for my daughter, Elizabeth. But now that I was here in person, I was struck by the desire to experience it for myself. Call it academic interest, call it morbid curiosity; all I knew was that I needed to see it for myself, to get a sense of the lay of the land before we got involved in whatever it was that Denise’s patron deity had in store for us.
I tapped Dmitri on the shoulder from the backseat.
“Mind if I have a look?” I asked.
He must have been feeling apologetic for his surliness earlier, for I felt him shrug as he said, “Suit yourself.”
I’d borrowed Dmitri’s sight before and quickly made the connection. Borrowing the sight from a Mundane makes everything appeared washed out, like a colored shirt left too long in the sun, but borrowing the sight from one of the Gifted like Dmitri is the closest thing I’ve found to being able to see normally again.
It took me less than five minutes of looking around to realize something about New Orleans.
It was a city of ghosts.
And I don’t just mean the literal kind, although there were plenty of those to go around, too. No, what I mean is that New Orleans has a way of haunting itself, a way of showing its true face to those who are smart and clever enough to look for it and of hiding it away from those who are not, like a spirit that can be seen only by those
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