Read Orleans for Free Online Page B

long. Boar hunting’s best at night, or just before dawn.”
    Daniel smiled. “Thanks for the tip.”
    The woman nodded and pointed at a bowl of small candy bars on the counter. “Help yourself,” she said.
    Daniel grabbed a handful of the black-and-orange themed wrappers. He’d forgotten. It was almost Halloween.
    “Don’t be shy,” the woman said. “Ain’t nobody else here to eat them.”
    Daniel blushed and took a few more. “Thank you. Good night.”
    He drove his truck around to the far end of the motel and parked directly in front of his room. He stood for a moment with his arms out at his sides, letting the chill night air wipe away the humidity and sweat, then he hauled his gear from the truck bed and went inside.
    The room had seen better days, but it was clean. Daniel spread out his equipment on the faded floral bedspread and double- then triple-checked it. It took a lot more than determination to get into Orleans these days. An old smuggler had told him as much when he interviewed him last spring about the rate of Fever deaths among smugglers. The encounter suit, standard hazmat gear for any smuggler breaching the quarantine, he had bought online, and he spent three solid weeks upgrading it. He had never planned on venturing into Orleans, at least not without military approval and support. But then he had created the DF virus. So close to a cure, but something was missing, something he couldn’t get in laboratories or catalogs in the United States. He needed to go to the source.
    The suit maintained a vague human shape as it lay across the bed, limp as a deep-sea diver’s wet suit. Beside it sat his datalink, a black wrist computer no bigger than his forearm that fit like a cuff. Self-contained, with no satellite capabilities, it was more of an e-book than a full Web-access computer, linked to a receiver embedded in the bone behind his left ear. Such hardwired data ports and tech shunts were a necessity in the halls of higher learning, and had found a following among gamers, too. The datalink could present information on the goggles of Daniel’s encounter suit, or speak to him in whisper mode. Daniel need only think a question, prefaced with the key word inquiry, and the datalink would collate the data and respond like the old GPS systems in vintage cars, but in a voice only he could hear. Daniel had chosen a woman’s voice for the program. It helped him separate his own thoughts from the machine’s responses.
    Of course, if he had upgraded it to do the “link” part of its name and access the Internet, he’d be in the brig quicker than he could blink. Satellite links were traceable, a huge liability for an illegal mission like his. And so his datalink was nothing more than a vast library and a small, if capable, computer. He had spent countless hours downloading every iota of information he could about Orleans, including census data and maps from before the storms. Most of the latter might be obsolete now, fifty years out of date, but it was his only guidebook through the Delta.
    The jetskip was his biggest prize. Purchased off the black market, there was little use for them recreationally these days, when so few could afford real recreation. And this was of a more industrial grade, the kind used by the military, coastal construction companies, and smugglers. Looking for all the world like a glorified window fan, the jetskip was made out of a lightweight fiberglass shaped into a cone, with handles around the rim of the wider end and a turbine set inside. As it spun, water was pulled through the fan, propelling the skip and its rider through the water. He’d used them before, in research trips to Vietnam. The lab required a training session for every technician before they did any fieldwork.
    It was good to get out of the lab and into the field again. Orleans. That mysterious, abandoned city. It was legendary in the rest of the United States, like Shangri-La or Avalon. And Daniel was going to be