Blackwater Promises: Fever
ā ļøContent Warning: gore, pregnancy-related anxiety, trauma, flooding, life-threatening situations, graphic survival distress.
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The walk from the I-10 overpass to the Convention Center was only a mile and a half. On a normal Tuesday, it was a quick drive down Poydras Street.
Annie walked barefoot on the boiling asphalt. Her feet were cut, blistered, and caked in toxic, gray mud. With every step, a sharp, shooting pain traveled up her shins, settling deep into her lower back. She walked with one hand pressed hard against the side of a parked, abandoned city bus to steady herself, and the other wrapped tightly underneath her belly.
Ruby was heavy. The baby felt like a bowling ball resting directly on Annie's pelvic bone.
Just to the doors, Annie chanted in her head, her cracked lips moving without sound. Just get to the AC. Get to the Red Cross. Get a cup of water.
She was part of a shuffling, silent parade of the displaced. Surrounding her were the ghosts of the city. A teenage boy pushing his grandmother in a shopping cart. A woman wearing nothing but a soaked slip, holding a screaming, red-faced infant. Men with hollow eyes carrying black trash bags filled with all that was left of their lives.
No one spoke. The heat had stolen their voices. It was ninety-six degrees, and the humidity made the air feel like breathing through a hot, wet wool blanket.
Annie stumbled. Her toe caught the edge of a shattered storm drain.
She pitched forward, a cry tearing from her dry throat.
A strong hand grabbed her by the shoulder of her torn yellow dress, jerking her upright before her belly could hit the pavement.
"I got you, sista" a deep voice grunted.
It was a man in his fifties, wearing a mechanicās shirt with the name Leon stitched over the pocket. He was carrying a heavy, waterlogged suitcase, but he didn't let her go until she was steady.
"Thank you," Annie wheezed, the words scraping her throat like sandpaper.
"We almost there," Leon said, pointing down the boulevard with his chin. "Look."
Through the shimmering waves of heat radiating off the pavement, she saw it. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. It was a massive, sprawling complex of concrete, steel, and glass, stretching for blocks along the riverfront.
For a single, fleeting second, Annie felt a sob of relief rise in her chest.
We made it. Smoke, I made it.
But as they drew closer, the mirage shattered.
There were no white FEMA tents. There were no Salvation Army trucks. There were no rows of green military cots or medics in crisp uniforms passing out bottled water.
There was only the crowd.
It looked like the entire population of New Orleans had been swept up by a broom and pushed against the glass doors of the building. There were ten thousand people massed on the sidewalks, spilling out into the streets, huddled under the slight overhangs of the roof to escape the brutal sun.
"Lord have mercy," Leon whispered next to her, stopping dead in his tracks.
The smell hit them a block away. It was a physical wall. It smelled of thousands of unwashed bodies, sour sweat, and the sharp, ammonia stench of urine baking on concrete. There were no porta-potties. People were relieving themselves against the walls, in the gutters, between parked cars.
Annie's stomach lurched. She dry-heaved, bringing up nothing but a string of bitter, yellow bile that burned her mouth.
She forced herself to keep walking. She merged into the sea of humanity, pushing her way toward the main entrance.
"Excuse me," she rasped, nudging past a group of teenagers sitting on the curb. "Excuse me. Red Cross?"
A woman leaning against a concrete pillar laughed. It was a harsh, dry, cracking sound.
"Ain't no Red Cross here, baby," the woman said, waving a piece of junk mail in front of her face to create a breeze. "Ain't no nobody here but us."
"But the buses," Annie pleaded, her chest tightening with panic. "The police said the buses was here."
"The police lied to get you off the bridge," an older man snapped from the ground. "They locked the doors. The inside is full. No lights. No air conditioning. Just dark."
Annie stared at the massive glass doors of Hall H. They were propped open with a trash can, but looking inside was like looking into the mouth of a cave. It was pitch black. The heat radiating out of the building was somehow worse than the heat outside.
A sharp, paralyzing cramp ripped across Annieās lower abdomen.
She gasped, her knees buckling. She grabbed the metal handle of the glass door to keep from collapsing.
It wasn't a kick. It was a contraction.
Her body, severely dehydrated, traumatized, and exhausted, was beginning to misfire.
"No," Annie whimpered, terror flooding her system like ice water. "No, Ruby. Not now. It's too early. We ain't safe yet."
She looked around wildly. Ten thousand faces, angry, exhausted, and abandoned. There was no water. There was no help. She had crawled out of the flood only to be dumped into a desert.
She slid down the glass door, her back leaving a smear of dirt and dried blood, until she hit the concrete sidewalk. She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around the tight, cramping ball of her stomach, and closed her eyes as the city of New Orleans slowly went mad around her.
Annie gripped the fabric of her torn yellow dress, her knuckles white.
Tighten. The muscle of her uterus seized. It didn't just hurt; it turned her belly into a hard, rigid stone. The pain radiated around her lower back, a dull, grinding ache that stole the air from her lungs.
She bit down on her lip to keep from screaming. The sound of weeping and arguing echoed endlessly in the dark hall, and she didn't want to draw the attention of the desperate men pacing the aisles.
The muscle slowly relaxed. Annie gasped, a shallow, rattling breath.
"Breathe through your nose, baby," a voice whispered.
Annie flinched. She couldn't see the woman, only the silhouette of a wide-brimmed church hat against the hot sun bleeding through the distant glass doors.
A cool, dry hand rested on Annieās forehead, then moved down to press firmly against her belly. The touch was clinical, practiced, and immediately grounding.
"I'm Miss Veda," the voice said. It was an older Creole woman, her tone brooking no nonsense. "Worked thirty years on the maternity floor at Charity Hospital before my knees gave out. How far along are you?"
"Thirty-four weeks," Annie croaked.
Miss Veda clicked her tongue. She kept her hand on Annie's stomach, timing the hardness.
"It's too early," Annie whispered, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, cutting tracks through the plaster dust on her face. "I can't have her here. It's dirty. I don't have no water."
"Listen to me," Miss Veda said, leaning in close so Annie could smell the peppermints on her breath. "You ain't in active labor yet. Itās uterine irritability. Your body is bone dry, sugar. When you get this dehydrated, your blood volume drops, and the pituitary gland starts dumping oxytocin to compensate. It's making your uterus contract. The body is trying to evict the baby to save the mother."
The clinical breakdown was terrifying, but the nurseās calm authority was a lifeline.
"What do I do?" Annie whimpered.
"You gotta lay on your left side," Miss Veda instructed, gently pushing Annieās shoulder. "Take the pressure off that vena cava vein. Get the blood flowing back to the baby. And you gotta drink water. If we don't hydrate you, this irritability is gonna turn into the real thing, and this baby is gonna come on this concrete floor."
"There ain't no water," Annie sobbed. "I looked."
"I know," Miss Veda sighed, the heavy, tragic sound of a woman who had spent her life saving people and now had empty hands. "I know there ain't."
Annie curled onto her left side. She placed her bleeding hands over her belly.
"Lijah," she whispered into the dark, a prayer to a man she didn't know was broken. "Come find me. Please, Eli. Come find me."
Engine House 42 smelled of diesel exhaust and defeat.
The bay doors were open. The backup generator hammered loudly in the background, powering a few halogen work lights that cast harsh, long shadows across the concrete floor. Firefighters, National Guardsmen, and volunteers moved in a chaotic, exhausted blur.
Smoke sat on the back bumper of Engine 42.
He hadn't showered. He hadn't changed. He was still wearing the filthy, mud-stained undershirt. He sat hunched over, his forearms resting on his knees, staring at the concrete between his boots.
He was entirely hollow. The wailing breakdown on the boat had purged the last drops of adrenaline from his system. He wasn't a man anymore; he was a monument to grief.
Stack walked over, holding an open MRE packetābeef stew and a plastic bottle of water.
"Eli," Stack said softly.
Stack set the food on the bumper next to him. He didn't push it. He just sat down on the ground beside his brother's boots, keeping watch over the shell that was left.
Delta Slim marched into the bay, holding a clipboard. He looked ten years older than he had on Monday.
"Listen up!" Slim barked over the noise of the generator. "Coast Guard is establishing a new drop zone at the cloverleaf. We need two boats back out there. Anyone who can still stand, I need you."
Before anyone could move, a flat-bottom aluminum skiff on a trailer was backed into the driveway by a lifted pickup truck.
Two civilian men hopped out.
They were sunburned, wearing duck camo and baseball caps.
"Captain!" the driver yelled, walking up to Slim and wiping sweat from his forehead. "Boudreaux, from Vermilion Parish. We're running dry on gas. We need a fill-up before we head back to the Lower Ninth."
Smoke didn't look up, but the words Lower Ninth registered in his brain like a faint electric shock.
"I can't spare gas for civilian vessels right now," Slim said, rubbing his eyes. "You boys did good. Go home. Leave the rest to the military."
"We can't go home, Cap," the partner said, shaking his head. "It's bad out there. Real bad. We was pulling people off roofs all afternoon. Dropping 'em wherever we could."
"Where's your drop point?" Slim asked, writing on his clipboard.
"They wouldn't let us past the parish line. Coast Guard blockaded the river," Boudreaux said, frustrated. "We had to drop 'em at the I-10 overpass near Mid-City. Must've been five thousand people on that bridge."
Smokeās eyes slowly shifted from the concrete to the men's boots.
The bridge he had driven under.
"We dropped a lot of bad cases there," Boudreaux continued, his voice dropping, heavy with guilt. "Left a girl there a few hours ago. Broke my heart. She shouldn't have been on that hot concrete."
Stack looked up from the ground. "What girl?"
Boudreaux looked at Stack, taking off his cap and wiping his brow. "Found her on a roof in the Ninth. House was underwater, but she kicked through the attic. Little bitty thing. Black girl. Pregnant. Looked like she was about ready to pop."
The world stopped spinning.
The generator faded into absolute silence. The halogen lights seemed to burn brighter, searing into Smokeās retinas.
Stack scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering against his ribs. "What was she wearing?"
Boudreaux frowned, trying to remember. "A dress. Tore up real bad. Yellow, I think. Yeah. A yellow sundress."
His mind, which had been locked in a dark, suicidal room, kicked the door off the hinges.
The yellow rag on the rebar.
She kicked through the attic.
The voice didn't sound human. It was a low, terrifying rumble that vibrated from deep within Smoke's massive chest.
Smoke stood up. He rose breaking the surface of the water. He towered over the two Cajun men, his eyes wide, bloodshot, and suddenly, violently alive.
"Whoa, buddy," Boudreaux took a step back, intimidated by the sheer size and feral energy radiating off the firefighter. "We dropped her at the overpass. Like I said."
"She ain't at the overpass!" Smoke roared, grabbing Boudreaux by the collar of his shirt, lifting the man onto his tiptoes. "I was just at the overpass! She wasn't there!"
"Eli, let him go!" Slim yelled, rushing forward.
Stack grabbed Smoke's arm. "Eli, stop! He saved her!"
Smoke dropped the man. Boudreaux stumbled backward, coughing.
"I don't know where she went, man!" Boudreaux yelled defensively. "But the crowd up there... they was all talking about walking to the Convention Center. They said the buses was at the Superdome!"
The Superdome He remembered the people screaming down from the bridge. āWe walking to the Convention Center! ā or were they walking to the Superdorme?
She was alive. She had survived the water. She had survived the attic. And she had walked into the worst place on earth.
Smoke turned on his heel. He didn't say a word. He grabbed the heavy iron Halligan bar resting against the bumper of the truck.
"Eli!" Slim shouted, stepping in his path. "Where the hell do you think you're going? The Convention Center is a black zone. Police are pulling out. There's riots. It's not safe!"
Smoke looked down at his Captain. The empty, dead eyes were gone. In their place was the terrifying, unyielding focus of a man who was going to walk through a wall of fire to get what was his.
"Move, Slim," Smoke said. It wasn't a request.
Slim looked at him. He saw the Halligan bar. He saw the ghost of the man who had laid on the floor yesterday, now resurrected into something incredibly dangerous. Slim stepped aside.
"Stack," Smoke said, walking past his twin toward the station's heavy rescue truck. "Get your gear. We're going to the Dome."
"He said the Convention Center, Eli!" Stack called out, running after him.
"I know," Smoke said, throwing the heavy iron bar into the cab of the truck. "And I'm gonna tear the doors off."
The heavy rescue truck idled at the perimeter of the Superdome, its headlights cutting through the muggy, diesel-choked night.
Stack slammed the truck into park. He grabbed Smoke by the shoulder before his massive twin could throw the door open.
"Eli, listen to me!" Stack yelled over the roar of the engine and the distant, chaotic roar of the crowd. "The Cajun boy said the Convention Center! He said the crowd from the bridge was walking to the Center!"
Smoke didn't look at him. His jaw was locked tight, a muscle ticking violently in his cheek. He had his heavy turnout coat on now over his filthy undershirt, his FDNO badge gleaming dull silver in the dash lights.
"He said the crowd was walking," Smoke growled, his hand on the door handle. "Annie wouldn't follow the crowd. She's stubborn, but she ain't stupid. I drilled it into her head a hundred times. 'If the water comes, go to the Dome.' Itās the official shelter. It's where the military is."
"Eli, the Dome is a madhouse! The roof tore off!"
"And Mr. Baptiste saw her," Smoke countered, turning his bloodshot eyes to Stack. The terrifying, manic hope in them made Stack physically recoil. "He saw the yellow dress at the Dome, Stack. It makes sense. She got off that bridge, she remembered the plan, and she walked here. She's waiting for me."
Before Stack could argue the logic of a delirious old man, Smoke kicked the heavy door open and jumped out onto the pavement.
Stack cursed, grabbing a heavy Maglite flashlight, and chased after him.
They walked toward the stadium. It looked like a crashed spaceship. Huge, jagged sections of the white roof had been peeled back by the wind, exposing the dark skeleton of the dome beneath.
But the real horror was on the ground.
Thirty thousand people were trapped inside and outside the perimeter. The National Guard had set up barricades, young soldiers standing nervously with M-16s, sweat pouring down their faces as they looked at the sea of desperate citizens pressing against the fences.
The smell hit Smoke like a physical wall. It was the stench of backed-up plumbing, rotting garbage, and tens of thousands of unwashed, terrified bodies trapped in a concrete bowl with no air conditioning.
Smoke walked straight up to a barricade near Gate C.
"Back up, sir!" a young Guardsman yelled, raising his hand. "Nobody goes in or out! Shelter is on lockdown!"
Smoke didn't slow down. He stepped right up to the barricade, towering over the terrified soldier. He tapped the silver NOFD badge on his chest.
"Lieutenant Moore, Engine 42," Smoke's voice was a low, dangerous rumble that cut right through the noise of the crowd. "I'm looking for my wife. Thirty-four weeks pregnant. Yellow sundress. She came in today."
"I... I can't let you in, Lieutenant," the kid stammered, his eyes darting around. "We have orders. It's a riot inside. There's no lights. We can't guarantee your safety."
"I run into burning buildings for a living, son," Smoke said, his hand gripping the cold steel of the barricade. "I don't need you to guarantee my safety. I need you to move this gate before I throw it in the river."
Stack arrived, flashing his own badge, putting a calming hand on the soldier's arm. "We're going in, man. Just let us through the side."
The soldier looked at the two massive firemen. He swallowed hard, unhooked the chain, and pulled the barricade back just enough for them to squeeze through.
"God be with you," the kid whispered.
Smoke and Stack stepped into the Superdome.
It was pitch black, illuminated only by the sweeping beams of a few military flashlights and the glow of lighters. The noise was deafeningāa continuous, echoing roar of arguments, crying babies, and the hollow crunch of boots on trash.
People were sleeping on the ramps. They were huddled in the concourses. Families had built makeshift tents out of garbage bags and stadium blankets.
Smoke clicked on his heavy right-angle turnout flashlight. A brilliant beam of white light cut through the gloom.
The name was swallowed instantly by the cavernous echo of the Dome.
He started walking. He didn't walk like a rescuer; he stalked like a predator. His flashlight beam swept over the faces of the damned. He was looking for one color. He was looking for yellow.
He checked the concourse. He checked the medical triage area, which was nothing more than a few cots covered in blood and vomit. He checked the ramps leading up to the terrace section, stepping over sleeping children and exhausted elders.
"Annie Moore!" Stack yelled, joining the chorus, his voice cracking. "Pregnant! Yellow dress!"
Faces looked up at them, blinded by the lights, then turned away in apathy. No one cared. Everyone had lost someone.
Smoke walked for two hours. He walked until his boots were slick with the filth on the floor. He walked until the frantic, violent hope in his chest began to rot, turning back into that cold, familiar ash.
He stood at the 50-yard line of the football field. He shined his light into the stands. Thirty thousand faces.
"She ain't here, Eli," Stack whispered gently, coming up behind him, putting a hand on his brother's trembling shoulder. "We searched the whole plaza level. She ain't here."
Smoke slowly lowered the flashlight. The beam hit the turf at his feet.
The realization was a slow, twisting knife.
She didn't follow the plan. "The Convention Center," Smoke whispered, the words tasting like poison. "Boudreaux said they were walking to the Convention Center."
"We'll go," Stack said immediately. "We'll go right now."
"It's on the other side of the Central Business District," Smoke said, his voice breaking. He looked at his watch. It was past midnight. "We lost three hours, Stack. We lost three hours in the wrong hell."
Three miles away, Annie was losing her war.
The baby wasn't coming. Not yet.
The human body is a brutal, calculating machine. Annie was severely dehydrated, and now, a strange, deep heat was blooming under her skin. The jagged cuts on her arms and legs from the attic window throbbed with a heavy, angry pulse, tight and hot to the touch.
Her body, registering this new, invisible threat and the severe shock, had stalled the labor. The contractions were still there vicious, agonizing spasms that seized her lower back every ten minutes, but her cervix refused to yield. It was a cruel biological stalemate: her uterus trying to evict the baby, and her nervous system locking the doors to keep the trauma contained.
Annie lay on the cardboard, shivering so violently her teeth chipped against each other. Her skin was burning, radiating a dry, unnatural heat into the muggy air of the hall.
"Your heart is racing like a freight train, Annie," Miss Veda whispered, her cool fingers pressed against the rapid, thready pulse at Annie's throat. "You're burning up."
"I'm cold," Annie gasped, her eyes rolling back slightly. "Miss Veda, I'm freezing."
"That's your body fighting itself, sugar," the older nurse said grimly, wiping the cold sweat from Annie's face with a dry rag. "You're running a severe fever."
A few feet away, in the pitch-black aisle, a sound cut through the low murmur of the hall.
But it wasn't a normal cry. It was a weak, dry, clicking sound. Like a bird with a broken wing. There was no moisture in it. There were no tears.
Annie turned her head, the movement sending a spike of nausea through her stomach.
In the shadows, a young girlāno older than seventeenāwas sitting against a concrete pillar, rocking an infant wrapped in a dirty t-shirt. The girl was crying quietly, her own tears long since dried up.
"He won't latch," the teenage mother sobbed to no one in particular. "My milk is gone. He's so hot. Please, somebody."
Annie stared at them. The sound of that dying, dehydrated infant bypassed the fever and the pain, striking a primal, vibrating chord deep in her maternal marrow.
She looked around the immediate area. In the dim moonlight filtering from the distant glass doors, she saw three other mothers. All of them hollow-eyed. All of them holding listless, silent children.
Ruby, Annie thought, a fierce, terrifying clarity cutting through the haze in her mind. If we stay on this cardboard, we all die right here.
She pushed herself up on her elbows. The world tilted violently. Black spots danced in her vision.
"What are you doing?" Miss Veda hissed, grabbing her shoulder. "Lay down! You're in no condition to move!"
"There's water," Annie rasped. Her voice sounded like crushed glass.
"There ain't no water, sugar," Miss Veda said sadly. "They checked."
"Yes, there is," Annie wheezed, forcing herself to sit up. The effort made her vision gray out for a terrifying five seconds. "When Leon brought me in... I saw it. Hall G. The catering corridor. They got rolling metal gates over the concession storage."
Leon, who had been sitting a few yards away, leaned in. "I saw them too, sister. But they locked tight. Heavy-duty padlocks. And thereās two NOPD officers sitting right in front of them with shotguns, guarding the stash for the suits upstairs."
"I know," Annie whispered. A terrifying, cold focus settled over her burning features. She looked at Leon. She looked at the heavy iron tire iron protruding from his waterlogged suitcase. "Leon. You from the Ninth?"
"Born and raised, baby," the mechanic nodded.
"Then you know how to break a lock."
"I know how," Leon said, his eyes widening. "But I ain't looking to get shot by no panicked cop over some Dasani."
"They ain't gonna shoot," Annie said, gripping her swollen belly, her jaw setting into a hard, stubborn line that Smoke would have recognized instantly. "Because they ain't gonna be looking at you."
Miss Veda realized what the girl was suggesting. "Annie Moore, you are out of your mind. You are burning up with fever. You are having contractions. You can barely stand!"
"I don't need to stand," Annie said, her chest heaving as she gathered every ounce of strength she had left. "I just need to scream."
he concourse connecting Hall H to Hall G was wide, lined with locked, dark vendor kiosks. At the far end, behind a heavy, rolling metal security gate, were pallets of bottled water, Gatorade, and snacks meant for a convention that would never happen.
Two police officers sat on folding chairs in front of the gate. They looked terrified, exhausted, and on edge, their hands resting on the grips of their shotguns.
From the darkness of Hall H, a scream shattered the silence.
It wasn't a fake scream. The contraction that hit Annie was a ten out of tenāa vicious, tearing agony amplified by whatever fire was raging in her blood.
A womanās voiceāMiss Vedaāsāechoed down the cavernous hall. "HELP US! THE BABY IS COMING! SHE'S DYING!"
The two officers jumped to their feet, their flashlights clicking on, the bright beams sweeping the dark concourse.
Stumbling out of the shadows, illuminated by the harsh white light, was Annie.
She was a vision of absolute horror. The yellow dress was shredded and stained dark with mud and dried blood. She was barefoot, her hair wild, her skin shining with a sickly, febrile sweat. She was clutching her massive belly, her face contorted in a mask of pure agony.
She collapsed to her knees right in the middle of the concourse, twenty feet from the cops.
"Help me!" Annie shrieked, her voice echoing off the high ceilings. She arched her back, letting the genuine pain of the contraction take over her entire body. "My baby! Please, Jesus, my baby!"
Miss Veda ran up behind her, kneeling in the dirt, playing the role perfectly. "Officers! Sheās in labor! She's burning up! We need a medic!"
The younger cop lowered his shotgun. The sheer, overwhelming reality of a pregnant woman screaming in agony broke his defensive posture. It was human instinct.
"Stay here," the older cop ordered his partner, his voice shaking. But he couldn't take his eyes off Annie.
Both officers jogged forward into the concourse, their flashlights focused entirely on the screaming woman on the floor.
"Ma'am," the older cop said, kneeling a few feet away, reaching for his radio. "We don't have medics. Dispatch is down."
"Feel her skin!" Miss Veda yelled, grabbing the cop's sleeve. "She's on fire! Look at her!"
The cop instinctively reached out.
Thirty feet behind them, in the pitch-black shadow of the locked metal gate, Leon and two other men from the aisle moved with the silent, practiced efficiency of ghosts.
Leon slid the heavy iron tire iron through the U-bar of the thick padlock. He didn't hit it. He used leverage. He braced his boots against the metal grate, gripped the iron with both calloused hands, and twisted with every ounce of mechanic's torque he possessed.
The thick metal shackle popped with a loud, metallic crack.
The younger cop spun around, his flashlight beam swinging wildly toward the sound.
"Hey!" the cop yelled, raising the shotgun. "Step away from the gate!"
Leon threw the padlock into the dark. He and the two men grabbed the bottom of the rolling metal grate and heaved it upward. The metal shrieked in protest, echoing through the hall like a train braking.
"I said freeze!" the young cop racked the shotgun, the sound deafening in the enclosed space.
The voice didn't come from the men. It came from the floor.
Annie forced herself up onto her bleeding hands and knees. The roaring in her ears was deafening, making the edges of her vision blur with dark static. But her voice was steady. It was the voice of a Ninth Ward woman who had nothing left to lose.
The young cop looked down at her, the shotgun trembling in his hands.
"You shoot them," Annie rasped, staring directly into the harsh glare of his flashlight, "and you gotta shoot me. And you gotta shoot every mother in that hall."
The cop hesitated. He looked at the pregnant woman, trembling, bleeding, burning with an unnatural heat on the dirty concrete. He looked at the shadows behind her, where hundreds of people were beginning to stir, drawn by the noise, their eyes reflecting the flashlight beam like a pack of starving wolves.
If he pulled the trigger over a pallet of Dasani, he and his partner would be torn to pieces in seconds.
He slowly lowered the barrel of the shotgun.
"Take it," the older cop whispered, backing away, putting a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Just take the water and get back to your section."
Leon and the men didn't hesitate. They rushed into the storage area. They grabbed entire cases of bottled water, tearing the plastic wrap with their teeth, passing the heavy bottles out to the shadows.
Annie collapsed onto her side, the adrenaline draining from her system in a sudden, sickening rush. The contraction faded, leaving her gasping, her heart hammering dangerously against her ribs.
Leon ran over. He dropped a cold, sealed bottle of water right against Annieās burning cheek.
She flinched at the cold, then grabbed it with weak, trembling fingers.
She looked up at Miss Veda.
"The baby," Annie whispered, her eyes fluttering shut as the dark haze threatened to drag her under. "Give it to the girl with the baby."
Miss Veda took the bottle. She looked down at Annie, her eyes shining with a profound, awestruck respect.
"I'll give her one, Annie," Miss Veda said gently, cracking the seal on a second bottle. "But this one is for you. Drink. For Ruby."
Annie let Miss Veda lift her head. The cool, clean water hit her cracked lips. It tasted like a miracle. She swallowed, ignoring the sharp pain in her throat. She drank half the bottle before she slumped back against the cardboard, utterly exhausted.
She had won the battle. But as the unnatural heat spiked again, sending violent shivers down her spine, she knew she was losing the war.
I kept 'em alive, Eli, she thought, the darkness finally pulling her into unconsciousness.
Smoke sat in the passenger seat. He was a statue carved out of granite and rage. He had the heavy iron Halligan bar resting across his knees. He hadn't said a word in twenty minutes. His eyes were locked on the windshield, staring through the sweep of the wipers at the dark canyons of the skyscrapers.
Every second that ticked by was a physical agony.
The Convention Center. He knew the building. He knew its layout. He knew that without power, it was a sealed concrete tomb. He imagined Annie in that heat. He imagined the physical toll the stress would take on a thirty-four-week pregnancy.
"Debris field ahead, Eli," Stack yelled over the roar of the engine.
Blocking the intersection of Tchoupitoulas and Poydrasāthe main artery leading to the Convention Centerāwas a massive pile-up. The floodwaters had jammed a city bus sideways across the avenue, pinning two abandoned police cruisers and a tangle of downed traffic lights against a concrete median.
It was a solid wall of metal.
Stack instinctively took his boot off the accelerator, reaching for the air brakes. "I gotta back up. We gotta find a detour down St. Peters."
"No detours," Smoke growled, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, absolute authority. "We don't have time."
"Eli, it's a city bus! It'll rip the front axle off the rig!"
"Put it in four-wheel low," Smoke ordered, his eyes never leaving the barricade. "And hit the gas."
Stack looked at his twin. He saw the cold, unyielding fire in Smoke's eyes. It was the look of a man who would gladly die in the wreckage of this truck if it meant getting one foot closer to his wife.
Stack swallowed hard. He slammed the heavy shifter down.
"Hold on," Stack grunted.
He stomped on the accelerator.
The Heavy Rescue truck surged forward. The heavy steel grill bumper, reinforced to smash through brick walls, made contact with the side of the abandoned police cruiser.
Metal tore like wet paper. The massive weight of the fire truck shoved the cruiser violently into the side of the bus. The tires of the rig spun in the black water, catching purchase on the submerged median.
The diesel engine howled. The heavy rig shuddered, groaning under the strain.
For three agonizing seconds, it felt like the truck would stall.
The heavy rescue truck scraped along the side of the bus, shattering all its windows in a cascade of safety glass, pushing the twisted police cruiser completely out of the lane and into a flooded parking lot.
They broke through to the other side.
Stack let out a breath he didnāt know he was holding, upshifting as the road cleared.
"Take the next right," Smoke said, his voice dropping back to that dead, mechanical calm. "Convention Center Boulevard."
Stack turned the massive steering wheel. The truck swung wide, its headlights cutting through the pre-dawn darkness, illuminating the front of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
Stack hit the brakes. The truck hissed to a halt.
"Mother of God," Stack whispered.
Even Smokeās breath hitched.
The Superdome had been a nightmare, but this was the apocalypse. The sprawling concrete complex stretched for eleven blocks. And every single inch of the sidewalk, the loading docks, and the street in front of it was covered in bodies.
There were thousands of them. Huddled under blankets. Sleeping on pieces of cardboard. Sitting on the hoods of flooded cars. Small fires burned in metal trash cans, casting flickering, demonic shadows against the towering glass walls of the exhibition halls.
It was a sea of the forgotten.
"She's in there," Smoke whispered, his chest tightening. The sheer scale of the crowd was paralyzing. It was like looking for a single grain of sand on a dark beach.
"Eli, how are we gonna find her?" Stack asked, the despair creeping into his voice. "Thereās ten thousand people here. It's too big. And they ain't gonna take kindly to men in uniform right now. They've been abandoned."
Smoke didn't answer. He opened the heavy door of the cab.
He stepped out onto the running board, the humid, foul air of the staging area hitting his face. He grabbed the Halligan bar.
He wasn't going to ask permission. He wasn't going to negotiate with the crowd.
"Lock the doors behind me, Stack," Smoke said, stepping down onto the pavement. "Keep the engine running."
"I'm coming with you," Stack protested, unbuckling his seatbelt.
"No," Smoke said, turning to look at his brother. The streetlights caught the tears standing in his eyes, defying the hard set of his jaw. "If I find her... if she's... if I gotta carry them out of here, I need you ready to drive. You don't leave this cab."
Stack looked at the ocean of desperate people, then back at his brother. "Ten minutes, Eli. If I don't see you in ten minutes, I'm coming in."
Smoke turned his back to the truck. He gripped the heavy iron bar. He looked at the massive glass doors of Hall H, smeared with dirt and barricaded from the inside.
"I'm here, Annette," Smoke whispered to the dark building. "I'm coming."
Smoke slipped through a gap in the chained glass doors of Hall H, stepping from the humid twilight of the street into absolute, suffocating darkness.
He clicked on his heavy right-angle turnout coat flashlight. A thick beam of white light stabbed through the pitch-black air, immediately illuminating a swirling cloud of dust, plaster, and human desperation.
The smell hit him like a physical blow. It was worse than the Superdome. It was the smell of rot, sickness, and a profound, terrifying abandonment.
He stepped forward. His heavy boots crunched on discarded plastic and shattered glass.
"Turn that light off!" a voice growled from the shadows.
"You bring food, fireman?" another yelled, the tone hostile, bordering on violent.
Shadows shifted in the periphery of his beam. Hundreds of eyes reflected the light, glaring at his NOFD uniform. To them, he was the city that had left them to die. He was a target.
He didn't turn the light off.
He held the heavy iron Halligan bar in his right hand, resting the head of it against his shoulder. He didn't raise it like a weapon, but the sheer size of the man and the casual way he held the iron spoke volumes.
"I ain't here for you," Smokeās voice rumbled, deep and resonant, bouncing off the cavernous ceiling. "I'm looking for my wife. You stay out of my way, and I stay out of yours."
He moved down the central aisle, his flashlight beam sweeping methodically side to side.
Look for yellow. Look for a belly. He stepped over sleeping bodies, weaving through the maze of abandoned luggage and broken chairs. Faces looked up, blinded by the beam, then turned away. He saw things that would haunt him for the rest of his lifeāelders drawing their last rattling breaths, men with hollow, predatory eyes, children too dehydrated to cry.
He walked for twenty minutes. The hall seemed endless. The panic, which he had boxed up in the truck, began to leak back into his chest.
What if Boudreaux was wrong? What if she went to a different hall?
He swept the flashlight to the left, toward the wall where the shadows were deepest.
The beam caught a flash of bright blue plastic.
Smoke stopped. He moved the beam back.
Sitting against a concrete pillar was a teenage girl. She was rocking a silent infant. But what caught Smokeās eye wasn't the baby.
It was the bottle of Dasani water resting beside her knee.
It was half-empty, the plastic still slightly beaded with condensation.
Smoke knew the logistics of the city's collapse. There was no clean water in this building. The military hadn't dropped any. The city hadn't delivered any. A fresh bottle of water in Hall H was impossible.
He stepped out of the aisle, his heavy boots thudding against the concrete as he approached the girl.
The teenager flinched, pulling the baby closer to her chest, shielding her eyes from the glare of his light.
Smoke stopped five feet away. He lowered the beam, pointing it at the floor so he wouldn't blind her, but keeping the ambient light on her face.
"Where did you get that?" Smoke asked. His voice was rough, trembling with an emotion he couldn't name.
The girl looked at his uniform. She looked at the iron bar. She snatched the water bottle, hiding it behind her back like a feral animal protecting a scrap of meat.
"It's mine," she hissed, her voice cracking. "I ain't giving it back to no cops."
"I'm not a cop," Smoke said, dropping the Halligan bar to the floor. CLANG. He held up both of his large, empty hands. He dropped to his knees, bringing himself down to her eye level. "I'm a fireman. And a husband. I just need to know where that water came from."
The girl stared at him, her chest heaving. She saw the tears standing in the giant man's bloodshot eyes.
"The lady," the teenager whispered, pointing a trembling finger toward the dark expanse of the hall. "The lady who fought the police."
Smoke's heart stopped beating. "What lady?"
"The pregnant one," the girl said, her voice full of awe. "She screamed, and the men broke the lock on the gate. She gave it to me for my baby. She said... she said her name was Ruby."
Smoke couldn't breathe. The air in the hall vanished.
"Ruby is the baby," Smoke choked out, a hot tear finally spilling over his cheek, cutting through the soot. "The mother. What was she wearing?"
"A dress," the girl said. "Yellow."
Smoke didn't ask another question.
He scrambled to his feet, leaving the Halligan bar on the floor. He grabbed his flashlight.
"Which way?" he demanded.
The girl pointed toward the south wall. "By the loading dock doors. With the older nurse lady."
He didn't care about the noise. He didn't care about the glares. He sprinted through the dark, leaping over piles of trash, his heart hammering against his ribs like a battering ram.
He swept the flashlight along the south wall.
"ANNIE!" he roared. It wasn't a call; it was a demand.
"Quiet down!" a sharp, authoritative voice snapped from the darkness ahead. "There's sick people here!"
Smoke's beam locked onto the source of the voice.
Standing in front of a piece of broken cardboard, her arms crossed defensively, was an older Creole woman wearing a wide-brimmed church hat. Next to her stood a man in a mechanic's shirt, holding a tire iron.
They were forming a wall.
Smoke approached, his chest heaving. He pointed the flashlight down at the cardboard behind them.
The beam illuminated a torn, filthy pile of yellow fabric.
Smokeās knees gave out.
He hit the concrete floor hard, the impact jarring his teeth. He dropped the flashlight. It rolled away, the beam casting long, eerie shadows against the wall.
He crawled the last three feet.
Miss Veda and Leon didn't stop him. They saw the patch on his shoulder. They saw the absolute, crushing devotion breaking his face apart. They stepped aside.
Annie was lying on her side.
She was unconscious. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Her beautiful dark skin was covered in a horrifying layer of white plaster dust, dried river mud, and blood. Her arms and legs were slashed and scabbed from the attic glass.
But it was the heat that terrified him.
Smoke reached out with a trembling, calloused hand. He touched her cheek.
It felt like touching a radiator.
"Oh god," Smoke whispered, his voice breaking into a sob. "Annette. Baby. I'm here. Eli is here."
He carefully slid his massive arms under her, one beneath her shoulders, the other supporting the heavy, tight weight of her pregnant belly. He pulled her against his chest, burying his face in her matted hair. She smelled of swamp water and fever.
"You her husband?" Miss Veda asked quietly, kneeling beside him.
Smoke could only nod, his massive shoulders shaking as he wept into his wife's neck. "I told her to go to the Dome," he choked out. "I looked in the wrong place. I left her."
"She survived the water, son," Miss Veda said, her voice gentle but firm. "She chopped through her own roof to save that baby. Then she robbed the NOPD to get water for this hall. Don't you dare pity her. She's the strongest thing in this building."
Smoke lifted his head. He looked at the cuts on her hands. He saw the blistered soles of her bare feet.
The guilt was a physical weight, but the pride he felt for her was a blinding light.
The deep, rumbling vibration of Smoke's chest against her back pierced through the dark haze of the fever.
Her eyelashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. They were glassy and unfocused.
She looked up at the dirt-stained face of the giant holding her.
"Eli?" she whispered. Her voice was so weak, just a raspy breath.
"I got you, sunflower," Smoke wept, kissing her burning forehead, her cheeks, her cracked lips. "I got you. I'm never letting you go. We're going home."
"House is gone, Eli," she mumbled, a confused, feverish tear slipping down her cheek. "I broke the ceiling."
"I don't care about the house," Smoke said, tightening his grip on her. "You're my house."
Annie closed her eyes, a faint, exhausted smile touching her lips. "I kept her safe. But I'm so hot, Eli."
Suddenly, Annieās body went rigid in his arms.
Her back arched. A low, agonizing groan tore from her throat, her hands clawing blindly at Smoke's turnout coat.
The contraction was massive.
Smokeās eyes went wide with panic.
"What's happening?" he demanded.
She grabbed Annie's wrist, checking her pulse. "The fever stalled the labor, but she just got a massive dump of adrenaline from seeing you. It jump-started the process."
Miss Veda looked the giant firefighter dead in the eye.
"The stall is over, Lieutenant," the old nurse said grimly. "Her water just broke. That baby is coming right now, and if we don't get her body temperature down, she's going to seize."
Smoke looked around the pitch-black, suffocating hall. There was no medical gear. There were no IV fluids. There was just a floor covered in filth and ten thousand desperate people.
He had found her, but the real nightmare was just beginning.
AN: Yāall have been tearing me up in these messages š ā I appreciate every single one of you. Apologies for the delay in postingā¦ life has been moving fast lately.
Iām a little emotional knowing the Sinnerās universe is coming to a close with awards season wrapping up. Still, Iām so happy to see Ryan and Michael take their wins ā and while I wish Delroy had taken home Supporting Actor, his legacy speaks for itself.
As always, thank you for reading and staying with me through this story. Let me know what you think.
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