'You smell that? That's what zombies smell like, brought up from the death with an unnatural life. All this noise and all this emptiness, no one to hear Tolley scream.ĭaniel turned from the window, arching his eyebrows.

The stubborn, the helpless, and the stupid had stayed.Īnd now here they were in an empty building surrounded by empty buildings in an outrageous storm that had forced more than a million people out of the city, but Daniel kinda dug it. Most everyone in the surrounding buildings had gone. Emergency lighting fed by battery packs lit a few nearby buildings, giving a creepy blue glow to the shimmering walls. The power in this part of the Quarter had gone out almost an hour ago hence, the candles Daniel found in the manager's office.

The cat-five wind clawed through New Orleans at better than a hundred miles an hour, but back here in the alley-in a cheap one-room apartment over a po'boy shop-the wind was no stronger than an arrogant breeze. It tasted of salt and smelled of dead fish and weeds. He folded back the shutters, then opened the window. Daniel had never seen rain fall up before.ĭaniel loved these damned hurricanes. Daniel stared through broken shutters and shivering glass up the length of the alley, catching a thin slice of Jackson Square through curtains of gale-force rain that swirled through New Orleans like mad bats riding the storm. Monday, 4:28 a.m., the narrow French Quarter room was smoky with cheap candles that smelled of honey.

The sentry crais