The clouds darkened as they approached the city, brooding over the landscape like an oppressive shroud of sin. Without needing to check his watch, Eric knew there would be rain within the next hour; the swelling weight of water had bruised the sky to shades that would put midnight to shame. Spotlights chased each other manically across their underbelly, tracing their paths of false silver lining over the city with abandon.
New Orleans itself slunk into full view from around a bend in the highway. A phantom of its former glory, the city had never quite recovered from the hurricane that swept through and decimated the levees in the first few years of the twenty-first century, flooding most of the city and leaving what survived as prizes for the looters. Most of the city was just broken glass and looted homes now, criss-crossed by dirty rivers that drifted stagnantly past cars that were either abandoned or swept into the middle of the street.
What little dry ground that remained had been claimed by Mayor Laute and his minions for their never-ending revelries; the city practically throbbed with the mixed cacophonies of their music, beating erratically with a tempo that waxed organic. With the wind in his hair and Glassy’s hooves clattering on the highway underneath, Eric couldn’t so much hear the deep pulses of bass as he could feel them, passing him like deep-sea waves on a moonless ocean.
Up ahead, the highway leading into the heart Mayor Laute’s domain had been blocked off. The abandoned traffic had been growing steadily heavier as Eric and Glassy drew nearer to the city, sometimes forcing them off their weaving path on the highway itself and onto the emergency strip to bypass the tangled graveyards of steel and rubber that blocked their way. There were no bodies in any of the cars, though; there never were. The cars were almost always completely empty; sometimes a hopeful scavenger would come across a well-loved teddy or a box of opened tissues - the pitiful remnants of human existence - and toss them irritably to the side of the road. If they were very lucky, a gold-digger might stumble across a concealed pistol complete with a magazine of valuable 9mm bullets, or – a real treasure – a rolled marijuana cigarette.
They never found bodies, though.
A moderately-sized pileup of sedans and the occasional four-wheel-drive up ahead had been converted into a makeshift roadblock by simply dragging more cars into a heap that stretched from one side of the highway to the other. A narrow gap had been left in the middle so that there were actually two heaps, just wide enough to fit a car through if the driver was being cautious. A few men lounged on a couple of water-damaged sofas just inside the entrance. Two of them were heavily involved in some sort of game, while another had sidled off to one side to take a leak.
Eric dismounted as he approached the barricade, slipping Glassy’s reins over the saddle’s pommel and letting him walk alongside at his own pace. One of the closer men – cutting a very stylish and shirtless figure in his leather jacket, jeans and thongs - saw the pair of them approaching and whistled to his friends. The two men playing the game spared them the briefest glance before turning their attention back to the coffee table between them. A chiselled man with a crew-cut and tight singlet snorted at their lack of interest before turning around and picking up a wooden bow from the tarmac. Sticking a couple of arrows in his back pocket, he nocked an arrow and joined the man in the leather jacket, who had picked up a fire axe and started sauntering towards Eric with lazy patience. Neither of them looked like they actually had any intention of using their weapons, and for his part Eric kept his hands empty and at his sides. Glassy shook his maned head at their lack of manners, but kept walking.
“Hey there, buddy,” the leather-jacketed man said with a lopsided smile as he stopped about a dozen metres away from Eric, planting his fire axe in the ground like a walking stick. “Can Darren or I help ye’ with anything?”
“I’m here to see Mayor Laute,” Eric said civilly. “He knows me.”
“That so?” He paused for a moment, letting the question hang in the air. “D’you have anything to prove that?”
“Not really, no.”
“Ah.” The man kicked the head of his axe idly as he pretended to give the matter some thought. His crew-cut friend – Darren – grinned before he disciplined his face back to a semblance of stillness.
“So, I’m supposed to jus’ take your word on it, then?”
“Pretty much,” Eric shrugged. He wasn’t going to rise to the man’s deliberate obstructiveness; he was trying to nettle Eric, get under his skin for kicks. That’s the way Laute’s guards tended to be, on the whole; out here, away from the parties, it would get pretty boring. Passers-by like Eric would be one of their few opportunities to have some fun.
“Well, that doesn’t sound like a very good system to me,” the man continued, warming to the topic despite Eric’s refusal to play. “What if you were a troublemaker or somethin’? If you went in and kicked up a ruckus the Mayor would have my balls roastin’ over a fire for a week. That’s not somethin’ you’d exactly call enjoyable, now is it?”
“If you don’t let me in and word gets to Laute that you refused to let his friend in, then rotisserie-cooked testicles would be the least of your worries,” Eric snapped back, his patience wearing thin already. New Orleans always tended to do that to him. “I’m getting into the city one way or another; I’m only suffering through you because, unlike myself, Glassy can’t climb walls. Either you let Glassy and I through here right now, or I leave Glassy behind and take the long route to tell Laute about the sort of reception you give to people wanting to visit his city.”
The threat of actual punishment was a lot less humorous to the jacketed man that joking about it was. Laute wasn’t known for his light touch when it came to enforcing his, admittedly loose, rules. The man’s smile fell sullenly as he swung the fire axe up onto his shoulder.
“Fine fine, come on through,” he grumbled, before muttering something under his breath about how people can’t take a joke.
Giving Glassy a little pat on the neck, Eric followed the soft thwacks of thongs against the highway back to the passage through the car-wrecks, accompanied by an equally sullen tank-topped bowman who waited for them to pass by before following. Behind the couches and the mounds of metal, a couple more bows had been stashed with their arrows in an open car boot alongside a mess of makeshift melee weapons that ranged from baseball bats to a hand-drill. One of the men on the couch had a small pistol slung in a shoulder holster, but that was the only firearm in sight. Bullets were just too damn hard to replace.
The two men at the coffee table were playing with cards, Eric noticed as he walked past. What first looked like a freshly-started game of Solitaire from a few metres away quickly revealed itself to instead be a Tarot reading of some sort; the cards already laid out on the table bore the distinctive pictures and medieval illumination of the Emperor, the Fool and other such classics. As Eric walked past, the card-holder drew and placed another card down on the table.
“Death,” he said with a chuckle before raising his voice so that he could be heard by everyone at the barricade. “Hey boys, Charlie here just drew Death in his Tarot reading. He’s gonna die!”
The hysterical, half-mad laughter of the gatekeepers followed Eric all the way into the city. A bitter taste rose in his mouth as he walked with Glassy still at his side, but he forced it down. The deep, belly-shaking laughs didn’t stop, but were slowly swallowed by the pulse of the city. Even though he couldn’t hear them anymore, Eric knew they were still laughing that laugh of the damned, guffawing away when they should be on their knees screaming unanswered questions at the sky.
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