The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,164

at last. He wondered how long he’d been unconscious. He couldn’t tell how much of his exhaustion and fever was due to illness and how much was the New Orleans heat and humidity. The dizziness and fatigue could have been caused by the struggle of wading through the flood. The familiar rush from sending a family to heaven was gone, replaced as always by a nagging feeling of incompletion. His mission wouldn’t be done until he’d redeemed his real family. Maybe the cause of his malaise was the knowledge that time was running out. He knew deep down that each of those families had been a test case, a trial run. But they weren’t his own sinful family. Martin had been saving others while his own beloved family continued sinking into depravity.

Fever had been the first symptom, but he hadn’t recognized it until the chills began. He’d been finishing up, dispatching the family near the intersection of Chartres and Jackson, when an icy shiver, breathtaking in its intensity, seized him and wouldn’t let him go. He pulled up his pants leg and saw why: the bandage on his injured leg was soaking wet. A nasty yellowish ooze from beneath the gauze made it look like some horrible mold was consuming him. The hot, swollen wound had an alarming purple tint. The filthy dressing had become one huge scab. He felt terribly dizzy and weak.

He vaguely remembered wading down the street in the middle of a crowd. Jackson Square? Yes, that was it, one of the few spots of higher ground. After that, something about a boat, a hospital, and the dreamlike sensation of being lifted through a window.

Martin had been sitting on the floor for hours, his back against the wall. At first, he’d accepted the chair offered by a young man accompanying a comatose woman, probably his mother. But dizziness soon overcame him, and he could hardly hold his head up. He’d slid to the floor and leaned against the wall with the old woman’s stretcher on one side and the metal IV stand holding drips for both of them on the other.

Martin looked up at the half-full bag. The staff had said the plasma was dosed with antibiotics and tetanus vaccine; the second unit of that solution was draining down the plastic tube and through the needle taped to his arm. He lifted his other hand and touched his forehead. The fever seemed to have subsided. He was still weak, but he felt a lot better. He needed rest. He needed to get some of his energy back. He reached down and gingerly probed the skin around the new dressing. His leg was still inflamed, but it seemed less swollen.

He looked around. The young man who’d given him the chair was weeping aloud, his head in his hands. It looked as if his mother had just died. The hand that dangled over the edge of the stretcher was little more than skin and bones. The medic told the boy they had to remove his mother’s body because they needed the stretcher. He removed the IV, left Martin the stand with the drip, and took one end of the stretcher. He and an orderly carried the body away. The young man followed, but Martin knew they wouldn’t let him into whatever temporary morgue they’d set up.

He’s a good son, Martin thought, and wondered if she’d been a good mother. That conjured up thoughts of his own mother and how he’d dispatched her to heaven. He murmured a brief prayer for her soul.

59

FORSAKEN BY THE SAINTS

Superdome, New Orleans

Nana awoke again, uncertain whether she’d slept for hours or merely minutes. She was too tired and dizzy to try to unzip the knapsack to take out her purse and search for the little gold watch Bobby had told her to keep hidden. Each time she woke up, she found herself bathed in sweat, a sign she was becoming dehydrated. There was little she could do; her blouse stuck to her back, and big drops of perspiration trickled down her chest and belly behind the plastic knapsack she clutched tightly. She cursed the pressing urge to pee that had tormented her for hours. She knew she wouldn’t be able to ignore it much longer.

She looked around. She was convinced there were more people now, even though that seemed impossible. She gulped the foul, contaminated air. It stank of the piss, sweat, and breath of thousands of refugees. She was distressed that she was