I turned thirty yesterday, and the thing about being part of a teenage death cult is that you’re not supposed to turn thirty. It was a personal failure on my part—the kind of personal failure that meant the ghouls of New Orleans were after me.
The night air was alive with usual white noise of gunshots and fireworks, and I stalked the cemetery, bouquet in my hand, past row after row of people who died young. Some were at rest in their own aboveground tombs, others had been crammed into mausoleums. No one ever seemed to ask why so many gutter rats and punks were buried in relative luxury in a private graveyard within city limits. We humans are a relatively non-curious species on the whole.
I laid thirteen white roses on Deidre’s grave. Deidre didn’t like flowers, but I like flowers. What she liked doesn’t matter, because she’s dead. Dead and eaten.
Everyone I’ve ever loved—really loved, not like the requisite and insincere love of child for parent—was laid out within one city block’s worth of marble and cement.
Janelle Miriette Thompson, 1990–2009. The girl I came to New Orleans for, who broke my heart by deciding she was straight after all. She died drunk on a freight train before I had the chance to forgive her, before I had the chance to tell her I knew there was nothing to forgive.
Erica Freeman, 1988–2013. The next straight girl after Janelle. We stayed friends. We played in three bands together, the last one was Dead Girl. Suicide. On stage. Blood on the crowd. I haven’t forgiven her.
Jorge Jefferson, dead at twenty. Marcel Smith made it to twenty-four. Damien Polanski, twenty-eight. Robert, Lance, Heather, Maria. Twenty-three, each of them. Suzi Hamilton and Suzanne Lanover never saw twenty.
Deidre Hanson, 1992–2018. I was so sure she was straight that she had to hit on me for a year before I let her kiss me. A year is a long time for people like us, the ghoul-sworn. We finally kissed down on the levee, at a place called the end of the world. We were old then already. I was twenty-four, and it was her twenty-third birthday.
She spent her twenty-third birthday with me, with just me.
Two days after her twenty-sixth, she died in a house fire at a party in the Seventh Ward along with two other people—one ghoul-sworn, one just unlucky enough to hang out with the doomed. I would have been at the party, but my truck wouldn’t start and my bike had a flat and I was feeling lazy. So she’d died without me, and the ghouls put her here, and every year on the anniversary of her death they’re back at her corpse for another little bit of her soul. A knuckle here, a femur there.
They eat bones, and they live forever, and Deidre was dead—like all of us ghoul-sworn were supposed to be while we were still young and our essence was still strong in our marrow.
There I was, alive. It wasn’t long until dawn, until the ghouls would rise with the sun and haunt me, hunt me. Already, dogs were howling. Already there was light on the horizon.
One day soon, I’d be dead and the words Mary Walker were going to be carved into stone. People go to New Orleans to die. I didn’t want to die anymore. I had to get going. I had to track down ghosts and rumors of those who’d escaped.
I left the flowers for Deidre.
Fuck you, Deidre.
Fuck you for dying.
◆
It was Janelle who offered me the bargain. I hadn’t been in the city for more than a week, and she and I’d been crashing on the roof of an abandoned grocery store. That place is a Whole Foods now, might get torn down by Bezos tomorrow. I’ve outlived every derelict building I’ve ever known.
“Y’all go hard, down here,” I told her, after an evening that involved stealing drugs from a dealer, consuming those drugs, trying and failing to steal more drugs from the same dealer, and a roving party that moved through the darker bits of the city with a generator and a sound system in a shopping cart. Revelry had followed us like a cloud overhead. Dancing, debauchery.
Sobriety was creeping up on me unwanted, like a fever, and I wasn’t entirely sure how we’d made it back from the party to our tarped-off overhang on that rooftop. I was eighteen. I don’t know how to describe being eighteen, but you either remember it yourself or you might live long enough to know.
“You want to hear why?” Janelle asked.
“Yeah.”
“We can’t go to jail.”
“What?”
“It’s gonna sound crazy,” she said.
“Bitch, I was born for crazy.”
“Worse than that. I can’t tell you everything unless you join us.”
Whatever she was going to say, I already knew I was going to go along with it. I thought the sun shone out of that girl’s asshole. I would have followed her into a wood chipper. Oh, to be eighteen again.
“What’s it involve?” I asked.
“A permanent get out of jail free card—cops will look the other way, the courts will look the other way. In exchange, you gotta die before you’re thirty.”
“Like, someone will kill me?”
“Not unless you turn thirty.”
I didn’t expect to turn thirty anyway. The way the world was and is, who does? Survival didn’t really seem possible, so I refused to prioritize it.
“I’m in.”
That morning, as a ketamine hangover started in on me, Janelle took me to meet the ghouls for the first time.
◆
The hot winter sun bore down on me, but I kept my hood up as if a ratty black hoodie offered me any sort of anonymity or protection. In the kangaroo pocket, I fingered my revolver. Snub-nosed. Shit for most purposes. Good for killing someone point blank. Good for killing myself.
I walked through the Upper Ninth and everything was weathered wood and smiling people. Somewhere in the distance I heard the horns and drums of a second line. This is a city that knows how to celebrate death.
Whenever the ghouls were gonna catch me—when, not if, because I was too much a coward to hold that Smith & Wesson to my temple—they weren’t going to kill me as much as they were going to let me die.
I’ve been to their dungeons. You live to twenty-five as ghoul-sworn and they tap you for work down there sometimes, probably just to remind you of their power, probably just to remind you to get on with dying.
They were going to hang me from chains and they were going to cut me open and remove every bone from my body, one by one. They were going to crack me open to the marrow. They were going to let me watch.
It wouldn’t work to run—the ghouls own the legal system, inside and out. As soon as I’d turned thirty, they’d set me up as convicted of every crime they’d ever got me off. Once I got popped, there’d be someone in my cell willing to take a full pardon in exchange for a knife in my guts.
I turned the corner and saw the levee, all handsome and full of birds. A few dogs ran off-leash while a few happy people passed a bottle on the grass. My finger found the trigger and I know it’s bad form but I let it sit there. No safety on that thing besides the hard pull of a double-action. I needed to die. I didn’t want to die.
They live forever and I was only going to live a few more minutes or hours or days.
A seagull landed on a concrete ruin. Under its feet, in red spray paint, someone had tagged “the devil let us.” I stopped and watched that bird, because it was beautiful, because it was worth the risk. After some time, it flew off, and I went back to walking.
◆
Desmond lived in a little fortress of an apartment in the heart of a massive ruined factory, up on the fourth floor. If you want a view of the water, or of the city, or really just to see the sun or the sky at all, you’ve got to leave that safety and walk a hundred yards across trash and needles and rubble to look out any windows. Desmond says the privacy is worth it.
Desmond is only twenty-two, but he’s been sworn for a decade already. He’s second generation. His mother hanged herself when he was fourteen. I gutted his father in an alley because I blamed him for his mother’s death. I might have been right.
Ever since, Desmond has been one of my best friends.
He undid about fifteen locks and alarms and active defense systems to let me into his place. At least three or four million dollars in stolen lab equipment were barricaded inside.
“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” he told me, from where he lay on a ragged couch. His pupils had eclipsed the brown of his eyes, his black skin glistened with sweat despite the relative cool of the room. I wasn’t sure what he was on, but then again I was never sure what he was on. A vape pen dangled loose in his hand.
The whole place was bathed in dim lavender light. Even the dozens of LED indicator lights had been modified to glow pale purple. The walls were wallpapered with flatscreens. Most were broken, some were playing a Cary Grant film.
I perched on a milk crate stool across from him.
“What do you want, dead girl?” He didn’t turn his face to look at me. “You can’t hide out here; won’t work out for either of us.”
“You give a shit about danger?”
He took a drag and let out a cloud of vapor. It smelled like jasmine. Desmond scent-coded his drugs, but I didn’t remember there being a jasmine one.
“I guess not,” he said.
His hands dug into the ragged upholstery, tensing and releasing of their own volition, and he gasped as something coursed through his veins.
“I can give you something to get out for good,” he said, after his body came back under his control. “Painless, euphoric even. Dani took some last week, said it was pleasant. Before she went under.”
“I’m not trying to die,” I said.
“Life is a death sentence.”
“Not trying to die.”
Desmond turned his head, and only his head, to look at me. His eyes seemed to glow in the light. “It’s too late, dead girl. You know that, right?” He turned back toward the ceiling.
“Averi got out,” I said. Averi was an old genderqueer punk who’d haunted ghoul-sworn bars, talking to no one. Two years back, twenty-nine years old, they’d disappeared. I hadn’t seen their grave and I hadn’t seen them in the dungeons.
“Dead in the swamps,” Desmond said. “Gators gotta eat too.”
“That’s not what I hear,” I said. “I hear you deal to them sometimes. I hear you know where they are.”
He took another drag and convulsed and filled the room with the scent of flowers.
“When did you go coward?” he asked.
“Wanting to live makes me a coward?”
“No. Wanting to live makes you a hopeless, idiotic optimist. Going to ground makes you a coward.”
“It’s that or what, just die?”
“Go out like Terri.”
Terri Williams, 1973–2002. She set fire to a Marigny ghoul house in the middle of the day, then opened up on everyone who came out of the building with an impressive assortment of fully automatic weapons.
“Terri Williams is why we know you can’t kill a ghoul with fire or bullets,” I said. She was also why we knew there were worse ways to die than having your bones removed and eaten in front of you.
“Got to have been satisfying, though, for a minute. When she thought it was gonna work.”
“The only way to hurt them I can think of is to starve them out.” We all assumed they’d go hungry without us, though there wasn’t any proof.
“If they ain’t eating you, they’ll be eating someone else.”
He took another hit. This time, the convulsions kept going for a full thirty seconds.
“You gotta try this,” he said, offering me the vape. “Doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a fast-acting upper. Shuts down your motor control. Intense while it’s happening, but fuck, when you come down, you come down solid. Feel like yourself.”
“I’m good,” I said.
“Live a little,” he said, then smiled at his own joke.
“I’m good.”
“Here’s what you do,” he said. “I got it figured out. You let me kill you, which, let’s be real, you should let me do anyway because you killed my dad. Only fair. Then… there’s an old cement mixer in here. I’ll encase your body, drop you into the river. I get to kill you, you get to die, and ghouls don’t get to eat you. Everyone’s happy. Except the ghouls. Fuck them.”
“Just tell me where to find Averi.”
“You really don’t want to find Averi. As a friend, trust me. Just die.”
“You don’t fucking get it,” I said.
Desmond shot upright, so fast it was like a movie skipped some frames. He held a pistol, aimed at me. “Dead girl, you’re the one who doesn’t get it.”
“We’re friends,” I said, in as calm a voice as I could manage. Adrenaline started my heart racing, and I knew a panic attack was on its way. If I lived that long.
“We are,” Desmond agreed. “I’m not killing you. You killed yourself a long time ago, when you swore a pact with demons. This is just me helping another friend not make a rash decision.”
“Shooting someone is always a rash decision.” The panic attack hit, like a wall of sound, and it made me question my resolve. Death felt preferable to panic.
“Three,” he counted.
He raised the gun in both hands and aimed it at my temple. For a man stoned beyond reason, he held it steady. I wanted to vomit.
“Two.”
I still wanted to live. I tensed my legs under me.
“One.”
I sprung at the ground. He fired; missed. My ears rang. I shot upright; closed on him. Wrenched the gun from his hand. Held it to his temple.
“Hey, dead girl, we’re friends.” He spoke loud, like he could barely hear himself, which was probably the case. My ears rang.
“Tell me where to find Averi,” I said, just as loud.
“I won’t tell you anything when you’ve got a gun to my head,” he said. “Matter of principle.”
He was right.
I dropped the mag and cleared the chamber.
He lifted his vape pen, and I flinched. He took another drag, a tiny one. His hands clenched and unclenched.
I sat next to him on the couch, and he passed me the vape. I took a hit, and my panic intensified for a second before it dropped away entirely. I was as calm as I’d ever been. Sometimes that’s the way through panic, same as danger: don’t hide from it. Embrace it.
“Averi’s in the swamps,” Desmond said. “And they’re not dead.”
◆
The character of a city is shaped as much by the wilderness around it as it is by its architecture. The character of a city is shaped as much by its closest wildlife as it is by its rulers. New Orleans is as much a city of cypress and cormorants as it is of shotgun houses and ghouls.
I cut through the swamp in a stolen canoe, the white noise of traffic and people replaced by that of water and wildlife.
Averi lived in a hunting shack, built on piers, disguised from all directions by trees. I parked at their dock, climbed a few stairs, and knocked at their door.
They answered in aviators, a Real Tree punk vest, and tight black pants. They looked exactly like I’d seen them, perched at the bar, every night for years.
Except they were paler than I remembered.
And they had a shotgun pointed at my belly.
“Fuck you want, Mary Walker?”
“To live,” I said.
“Go away.”
“How’d you do it? How’d you survive?”
“I ain’t survived for shit, not yet. I’ve only got a year on you.”
“That makes you the oldest ghoul-sworn I’ve ever heard of,” I said.
They couldn’t hide their pride when I said that.
“Look, can I come in? Just talk to you?”
“We can talk out here.” They stepped outside and closed the door. There were no windows.
We sat on the dock, feet dangling over. Their fingernails and toenails were painted the blue of dead flesh. They spent a good moment lost in thought.
“Maybe we can help each other,” they said.
We’d never been friendly, Averi and I. Averi hadn’t any friends as long as I’d known them. Rumor said they lost most of theirs in a gang fight and just never bothered finding new ones.
“So why the swamps?”
“You know they’re afraid of water?”
“What?”
“I’ve spent the last two years studying the fucking things. Learned an awful lot. They need sunlight to function… they’re not just cold-blooded, they’re un-blooded. They’re afraid of water not because they’d drown—they can’t—but because if they run out of energy down there where the sun can’t reach, it’s over for them. Torpor, forever.”
“You’re in the swamps because if you see them coming, you sink their boats.”
“Bingo.”
“That’s it, then? Just hide in the swamps by yourself? Only come out at night?”
“Let me tell you how you stay alive, Mary Walker. You cling to life. You claw at it until your fingers bleed. You tell yourself, every time you take a breath, that you’re going to live to take another one. That you will live forever, no matter what it takes. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you hurt anyone else.”
“You sound like a ghoul.” In the distance, some animal called out, like a human quietly screaming.
“They weren’t always ghouls. They became ghouls, each of them individually.”
“How?” I asked.
“You know how. The marrow of the ghoul-sworn. There’s more to it than that, but mostly it’s the marrow of the ghoul-sworn.”
“All the ghouls were once ghoul-sworn? How can that work?”
“I don’t know,” Averi said. “It’s the chicken and the egg. Chickens, though, they eat eggs.”
Averi was going to try to kill me. They were going to try to eat my bones. I put my hands in the pocket of my hoodie and felt the revolver.
“I’ve told you how I survived,” Averi said. Their shotgun was in their lap, and they rested their hand on the grip. “Now, you can help me.”
For a half second, I considered waiting for them to move, to prove their intentions.
I didn’t.
I drew the revolver, held it to their throat, and pulled the trigger. The wind caught the mist of blood and brought it to my face. I couldn’t hear anything in the wake of the blast.
Their eyes drew open wide and they started to lift the shotgun, because they didn’t know they were dead already. None of us know when we’re dead already.
I stood up and kicked them into the water, and they sank.
◆
“You were right,” I told Desmond. It’s usually best to lead with the apology.
“You want me to put you down?”
We sat on the roof of his squatted factory. The moon was waning in the sky above us. I couldn’t see many stars—not as many as I’d seen paddling out from the swamp with a stack of Averi’s notebooks piled in the canoe—but the lights of the city are stars of their own. Each one holds mystery and the promise of life.
“No, not that part,” I said. “You were right about not clinging to life so desperately. That’s the ghoul’s life. I’d rather I wasn’t caught up in any of this shit at all, sure, but I’d still rather be ghoul-sworn than a ghoul.”
“That’s my dead girl!” Desmond said. He took a drag from his pen. The air smelled like rose.
“What’s that one?” I asked.
“Basically just speed,” he said. “Has a worse comedown than speed though. I’m still working on it. You want a hit?”
“You’re not selling it well.”
“So what’s the plan? If you’re not gonna let me kill you, but you’re supposedly not afraid of death anymore?”
“Let’s kill ghouls,” I said.
“How the fuck do you kill ghouls?”
“You’ve got a cement mixer, right?”
“Yeah…”
“It’s not me we’re going to drop into the river,” I said.
“I like the way you think, dead girl.”
“Stop calling me dead girl.”
“I’ll stop calling you that when we’re dead. Which… sounds like it’ll be tomorrow.”
“Yeah, that’s about my guess.”
“If we’re dead tomorrow, want to get wrecked tonight?”
I took one long last look at the stars of the city.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah I do.”