Dead Lucky by M.R. Forbes Page B

resting at the top. I knew Evan would want the Bushmaster. I pulled a pair of extra clips from the coat and dropped them in.
    "I don't want to sound like a nagging bitch, but this is a bad idea."
    "I know it's a bad idea. What are my options? I'm going to go crazy otherwise."
    "Maybe it'll ease up if you give it a little time?"
    "It won't."
    I saw by her expression she was going to ask me how I knew that, but she saw by my expression that I was as sure of it as I could be. Her lips formed a tight line and she nodded.  
    "I'll go get the bag."
    I slipped between the seats and got behind the wheel, finding the keys in a pocket and jamming them into the starter. It took three tries to get the engine going, a full production complete with its own smoke machine. I took a deep breath and stifled a cough.
    Dannie appeared at the front door of the house a minute later, carrying a large tote. She locked the front door, hefted the tote over her shoulder, and joined me in the van.
    "I really wish we had the AC fixed," she said. Her black tank was clinging to her slender frame, the sides dark with her sweat. "Evan gets to stay cool."
    "Even smells a lot worse than you do when he gets too hot."
    "It's going to be even hotter in New Orleans."
    "If we need him, I won't care."
    "Let's just hope we can get back here in time to handle the job for Green. I don't think he'll take 'I was hearing voices' as a valid excuse for not getting it done."
    We had a week until the Green job. "If we drive straight through, we can be there in fifteen hours."
    She laughed. "That's assuming this piece of shit doesn't leave us stranded out in the middle of nowhere, just waiting for a feral, or a chupacabra, or worse to come along."
    "I replaced the radiator hose last week. We should be fine."  
    I put the van in gear, taking it slow over the broken cement that served as a driveway. I accelerated once we were out into the street, heading for the interstate. The humid summer breeze wasn't enough to cool us off, but it was better than nothing.
    Dannie had fallen asleep by the time I reached the security gates to our residential community, pausing while they trundled open and then continuing out into the world at large. Once upon a time, we hadn't needed fences and walls and gates everywhere. Once upon a time, the biggest and meanest things roaming the spaces between humanity were bears and wolves and other relatively harmless mammals.  
    I kept my eye on the instrument cluster as we reached I-55, heading south, one eye staying pinned to the temperature gauge. I could only hope the used radiator hose I had replaced the other used radiator hose with would hold out, like I promised Dannie it would. When you were living day to day, you learned to keep your entire life held together with duct tape, paperclips, and tourniquets. You got used to the idea that it could all go to hell at any moment, and you were lucky to have made it to that moment in the first place. You tried not to dwell too much on the past, or think too much about the future.
    Still, I wished I had splurged on new.

CHAPTER THREE
    Jambalaya.

    We were lucky.  
    The hose didn't give out until we were inside New Orleans proper, passing through the gates at the other end of the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and into the protected area. The shift had changed a lot of things, a lot of places, but few as much as New Orleans. It had always been a city surrounded by wetlands, marshes, water, and wildlife refuges, and when the magic fields started messing with genetics, and the monsters began to make their way in from that wilderness... it had been messy.
    Until the wall had gone up. The powerful wizards who headed up each of the Houses had dredged enough sand and silt from the surrounding waterfront to create a solid twenty foot high, ten foot thick, dense pack of earth and laid it across the ground between the Mississippi and the lake, west of Kenner on one side, east of Meraux on the other. Patrols covered