Secession: The Storm Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Abe and Charlie’s drive through Louisiana was like a scene out of a disaster movie. The effects of the storm grew more evident as they approached the southern portion of the state – downed trees, standing water, and thousands upon thousands of cars streaming in the opposite direction.
     
    They ventured off the main highway, choosing instead to travel surface roads as they zigzagged closer to New Orleans. Fifty miles north of Lake Pontchartrain, evidence of Katrina’s wrath began dictating the passing landscape.
     
    The sparse foliage left standing was completely stripped of all greenery, leaving odd forests of utility poles. More than once, they had utilized the road clearance of Charlie’s massive truck, pushing their way through high water, flowing tributaries of mud, and downed power lines.
     
    Even the remote, secondary traffic arteries were busy with refugees heading north. Every gas station’s lot was jammed with motorists waiting in line, praying the electricity would come on soon so they could pump fuel into their empty tanks.
     
    When the rescuers finally did stop to refill the truck, Abe made sure Charlie pulled off the road in a relatively hidden spot, worried their cache of fuel cans lining the bed would make them a target. The faces they saw troubled them, portraits of desperation and despair in every car and window. He stood guard with the 30-06 while his brother emptied three five-gallon cans into the thirsty pickup’s fill.
     
    Four times, they’d had to backtrack. One egress was due to a washed out bridge, another necessary when they encountered standing water whose murky depths had been too daunting for even the 4-wheel drive. The third, and most troubling, had been the police roadblock.
     
    Abe didn’t recognize what type of cops they were, and it didn’t matter. Pulling up to the barricade of four patrol cars, Charlie had rolled down his window prepared to explain their intent. He never got the chance.
     
    “Turn this truck around, right now. No one is allowed south of here.”
     
    “But… but we’re on our way to…”
     
    “I don’t give a fuck what you’re doing. I said get this truck out of here – right now. Do it! Do it now, or I’ll have both of your asses in handcuffs.”
     
    Abe was glad his brother decided it wasn’t a good time to debate the police officer. Apparently, the screaming deputy was stressed and not in the mood for a conversation. Charlie replied with a quick, “Yes, sir,” and put the pickup in reverse.
     
    “I think we should stop driving and start floating as soon as possible,” Charlie announced. “The cops don’t seem to want any tourists in the French Quarter right now.”
     
    “You can’t blame them,” the older Hendricks replied. “Besides, these guys are just following orders. How about the old Gibson Fish Camp? That place is pretty remote, and we could put the boat in there and motor down to the city.”
     
    Forty minutes later, they were winching Charlie’s johnboat off the trailer and into the coal black water of some unnamed bayou.
     
    Charlie guided the small craft through the narrow waterway, the banks lined with the gnarled roots of ancient cypress and fields of waist-high cattails. As they progressed closer, debris began to clutter the surface, Katrina’s destruction evident even in this remote location.
     
    Maneuvering the nimble vessel around a bobbing refrigerator, the carcass of a horse, deciduous tree limbs, and even the floating door of a car, the two brothers continued their trek south.
     
    Dusk was claiming the day by the time they could identify the shadowy skyline of New Orleans in the distance. It was dark before they finally scrambled up the side of an earthen levee and gazed across a suburban landscape that seemed foreign and destitute.
     
    Moonlight illuminated the indistinct, shadowy outlines of hundreds of homes. Not a single, incandescent flicker was visible for as far as the brothers’