Life Everlasting?

Kate knew she would use all of her green stamps one day ... She hoped they find her body. She thought of her family and her body and the funeral. She did not want a funeral; maybe she does not want anyone to find her body. She will be gone, absent from the body.

"Oh grave, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?"

Scriptures from the many funerals Kate reluctantly attended over many years for friends, colleagues, and family paraded through her memory.

She was not dead yet. She was in a crumbling crypt in the "St Louis" cemetery, a necropolis, the city of the dead they call it. Kate thought she was in the right place, but she did not want to wind up there forever! Her head felt horrible, but there was no blood, only a bump that was tender to the touch. Cautiously, she stretched her hands out to the sides of her body and peered about her but saw nothing but dusky stagnant shadows.

Rolling over slowly, she rose onto her hands and knees and began crawling forward like a zombie armadillo, but the hard stone was not easy to move upon; her knees hurt like crazy.

Something brushed past her skittering away, with a loud squeak. It was as scared as Kate. She resumed her slow crawl across the stone but stopped leaning back on her heels listening, searching for light, squinting, and looking in all directions, trying to give her knees a break.

As her eyes adjusted, she saw the opening and the low stone bench she had not seen when she had slipped into this niche trying to hide. "Smooth move," she thought, "stumbling over a bench".

She wanted to pee and speculated how cool it would be to be a man who could just "whip it out," cut loose, baptizing everything and marking his territory.

Kate knew she made a poor choice in this case of espionage.

Why would she take off on her own to follow that man?

She must stop thinking she was twenty-five, strong, able to walk, and participate in this chess game called life. No, Kate was merely in the back of the audience, on the edge of her seat, watching, holding her breath, pulling for the dark horse to triumph.

She should have returned to the tour bus and gone back to the Quarter, where she would be safe with Steve and the other ops. She should not be chasing terrorists with no backup. Steve would be pissed about this unscheduled escapade if things do not pan out.

She resumed her exploration, hoping to find her walker. Yes, Kate was in the middle of a graveyard alone, in pursuit of an unknown suspect. The weather was humid and getting hot, too hot for a fifty-year-old woman with an autoimmune condition. She cannot walk, much less run in this debilitating stifling heat. There were not enough adjectives to describe Louisiana's heat, and it was only March.

Where was her gun? Instinctively, she reached for her back where she found an empty holster that should hold a Baby Glock. To keep her on the same playing field as the bad guys, the weapon of choice was an equalizer.

Kate kept moving in the direction of the voices. She found a wall and stood up leaning on the wall. She regained her balance, hoping to find the opening, but she found the walker. She pulled it closer and began the search for the Glock. She retraced her steps slowly, feeling the stone floor with her foot. "Ah, pay off," she reached down, hoping to pick up nothing more than the weapon.

The voices grew louder as the crypt entry was flooded with light. Everyone looked shocked to see each other. Obviously, no one expected anyone to be in there.

Kate looked at the man holding the light and saw the sudden recognition on his face from the diner this morning.

Kate had followed the man out of the diner, while Steve and the others were paying the bill. She had heard they were catching the bus to meet in the old graveyards. One of the other men saw Kate and recognized her immediately from the diner and growled pulling out a concealed gun.

Kate was in the City of Death, an old cemetery in Metairie just outside of New Orleans. The irony was not lost on Kate as she stood among the crumbling ghostly white crypts that entomb generations.

Kate was facing two men, one of whom was pointing an impressive gun at her.

She was in a precarious disadvantage and stood a great risk of being very dead.

The other man saw Kate fiddling with her weapon but hesitated just long enough for her to fire at him, hitting him in the thigh. She did not want to hit the knee just to drop him.

She shot the other in the shoulder; hence, one man was up, and one man was down. Fortunately, he dropped his weapon when he saw Kate pointing her gun, preparing to fire upon him again.

It had been a while since Kate had to discharge her weapon against flesh and blood, but she liked staying alive.

Kate prayed for one more chance to make it home.

The two men were moaning and cursing Kate in Arabic, but she caught a few impolite words she learned from Rosetta Stone.

Kate was standing by her old rolling walker, while one of the bleeding men on the floor was trying to reach his weapon. Kate gripped her gun, pointing it at him, and growled, "Don't do it!" She was not happy.

Now What?

As she frowned at the wounded, cursing men struggling to reach her, Kate searched for her phone and found it still attached to the basket of the walker. Again, she asked herself, "Why are you here?" She got an uneasy feeling that the situation could escalate. Would she get out of there alive or who else was out there and why did she follow those men alone?

She was too old for these games, and the fact she was unable to walk made her question the wisdom in pursuing killers alone using a walker. Her family accused Kate of having a death wish. Kate did not want to die, but she could not let these men get away.

Kate heard more voices and scooted back toward the wall and prepared for another assault as she grabbed the men's guns from the ground.

Kate realized she was operating on pure instinct gained from thirty years of working in special operations, and of course, the adrenalin helped too. However, she was supposed to be retired!

Staying alive!

Kate waited, holding her breath, gripping the gun tightly, and praying there were no more gunmen.

She waited listening to the voices of two men whispering. They sounded young to her, kids perhaps. She allowed herself to breathe and braced herself against the cold stone bench she had tripped over inside the crypt.

The next scenario did not surprise Kate when she heard a gasp and a stifled yell, "Oh my god, what the ..." Kate heard a voice beyond the tomb enclosure.

"No, no, get back, shhh!" another nervous voice whispered.

"Wait, don't go!" Kate hoped this would not end badly and spoke calmly because she needed to get out of there in one piece, so Kate attempted to enlist help.

Two young men, maybe late teens, cautiously stepped within the walls of the dingy stone crypt through the wrought-iron gate that creaked loudly protesting, as it swung open to reveal the aftermath of the skirmish that had played itself out in the lazy, sticky, and steamy city.

Kate watched the two hesitating before completely stepping forward.

"Mmmm, uh, hello," she tried testing her voice. "Um could you please come here a minute?" Kate tried to project friendliness in spite of the gun and two bloody men at her feet.

Looking around, Kate saw the two men, unconscious and bleeding. It looked very disturbing, so she quickly said, "I think they really didn't like the tour. It's OK really. I am the only one here with these men. I should call for an ambulance, my husband, and the police." They did not laugh about the tour joke.

Slowly, two strangely dressed teens stepped in to the crypt, and they looked like they belonged in there because they wore rags like zombies. It was sort of like Halloween in March or perchance, were the graves "giving up their dead?"

"What happened, lady? Are you OK?" One of the "zombie" spawn asked Kate, but she felt like asking him what happened to him, ragged clothes, bloody makeup, and dark-ringed eyes. Kate wondered if she should play dumb and act confused, but she was beyond tired and desperately needed to get out of this hot, humid crypt. Ah, the joy of Metairie, Louisiana, in March!

Kate answered the polite young man with a smile, "Sure, I am just great."

These two kids saw Kate as an old woman holding on to a Roly Doly walker and pointing a gun at the bloody men on the floor.

These two unlikely rescuers were in full zombie regalia: eyebrows, nose, and lips pierced; dark smudged eyes; and white-faced traced with lots of fear.

"Here's a bench out in fresh air and away from all that awful blood. I hate the smell of blood!" the shorter zombie blurted out.

They both looked scared to death, which Kate found highly amusing, seeing that they looked like corpses. When one of the wounded men groaned in pain, the pair of zombies almost deserted her, but Kate pleaded for them to be brave.

"Thank you. I truly appreciate your help!" "Things are turning out better than they were thirty minutes ago," Kate thought.

They were all being so polite and proper that Kate had to laugh, which seemed to perplex her rescuers and they seemed reassured she would not shoot them after she holstered her gun in its Mernickle sleeve attached to her back waistband. Kate also scooped up the spare guns, slipped the safeties on, and placed them in her purse.

The young man helped Kate to the bench, and she retrieved her cell phone. First she texted Steve: "I am OK. Am in cemetery near Marie Laveau's grave. I love you!" Next, she called the police and an ambulance for the two men on the floor of the crypt. She also told them there was a crazy woman running through the cemetery naked. "That always gets the quickest response," she told to the two kids. "The cops all want to see naked women. Every squad car in the area will converge on the scene with lights flashing and sirens blaring."

Oh well, she might be arrested for calling in a false report for that one!

"Oh Lord," Kate thought, "Steve is going to explode. You were going on a tour of the graveyard! Why would you pursue two terrorist suspects alone? Have you lost your mind?"

"I have lost more than my mind, my dear husband, but there are two less enemy ops on the street and two more to interrogate. What a day!" Kate thought.

Home

They had returned to Michigan, and Steve looked at his wife. She was sitting on the edge of a desk that held a laptop, telephone, and fax machine. She was not young anymore, but hell, neither was he. They were in the middle of a hornet's nest. Damn, agents half their age had avoided this assignment!

Of course, he and Kate were not responsible for the entire mission, but they must do all they knew, especially since no one seemed to take this threat seriously. However, Kate had been right on in her suspicions of the men in coffee shop.

Kate had run off yesterday chasing two suspects. She had put two men in the hospital, but she was not hurt.

It was too dangerous, and she knows she should never take off as she did without giving a thought. She said she overheard the two men speaking in Arabic, and she understood enough to know things were heating up with the Cell on Burgundy Street. Kate knew Steve would be mad when she took off by herself. Kate's instincts are good, but how she captured two terrorists stunned him.

"There are more sleeper cells, and they must be stopped, but these enemy ops are like the cockroaches in the woodwork here. They keep appearing when the lights go out, skittering along the walls, and flying into the hair, terrifying the hapless victim. Well, terrifying might be a bit of an exaggeration, but they are unpredictable, attacking when least expected," Kate mused.

Steve and Kate had not told the media who these men were or what happened. The two men were involved in an armed robbery or so the news reported. Soon the feds would transfer them to a military hospital, and they would be debriefed.

The "Vieux"

Kate and Steve were staying in the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter in New Orleans. The city was still shaking off the mildew Katrina had left visually, but a deeper and insidious mold was hiding under the dank foundations of the wounded city of Jazz that was not the big easy.

In the Ninth Ward, where the levee broke unleashing hell on the city, artists created a gallery of sculptures where the levee gave way in 2005.

They see beauty in the destruction of these buildings and homes. The "remnants of a different era, another time" should not be erased or forgotten but stand as a monument to the lives that were a part of this world before the deluge.

Katrina devastated the Lakefront area, yet the Quarter was relatively untouched. The damage from Katrina and the levee breach flooding shut down the infrastructure of this city for a year.

There had been rebuilding, but it was an endless effort. Many people moved and never returned. Homes and businesses were gone, never to reopen; owners were too demoralized to persist.

We are living in the "greatest country" in the world, where freedom and democracy are guarded by the military, paramilitary, militias, radio talk hosts, grandparents on the Internet forwarding antiterrorist plans and Government conspiracy, everyone guards the American dream, yet Americans were left to die deserted on I-10 in Metairie Louisiana ... left dead for days. The national guard were not allowed to interfere in local government. There were people housed in the Superdome in horrible conditions, heat, and overflowing toilets. There were no supplies, for the thousands of children, women, elderly, and ill. There were bodies covered with blankets on the Superdome floor.

The horrifying scenes of bodies floating by the convention center and dead bodies lying in corners of the Superdome played on the television for months and every year on an HBO series by Spike Lee. The power plays between the government parties in the state government went as far as telling the president to back off, fearing martial law.

Agence France reported on September 2, 2005.

"Five days after Katrina, thousands still waited in stifling heat, no electricity and no sanitation or facilities.

People were suffering from dehydration and debilitating humidity, and there were little medical supplies or diapers.

When General Honore rode into downtown New Orleans demanding soldiers pointing rifles to stand down, I cheered.

Displaced victims of the storm went to Baton Rouge doubling its population and crime overnight. New Orleans was becoming lawless and mayhem ran rampant as waters ran throughout the wards and suburbs spreading chemicals and dangerous foul waters for weeks. Waters were knee deep in the courthouse during Katrina's aftermath. By August 31, 80 percent of New Orleans was covered with water. Many first responders were victims. Many deserted their jobs to save their own lives or the lives of family or friends.

As the city pumps tried to pump waters from businesses and homes, fires broke out and looting was out of control. The civil engineers worked futilely trying to repair the industrial canal levees in order to keep the waters out of the city. The city held its breath as the steel levees were reinforced and civil engineers as far as Holland and the Netherlands were sending advice on keeping waters in their place.

Who was the enemy?

The Preppers were hoarding dehydrated foods, selling buckets of dehydrated pudding, lasagna, and black bean burgers on late-night cable. Next, they would have to come up with dehydrated water.

Many were "running for the hills" where they had prepared their lamps heeding the "warning of the watchmen."

Kate shook her head and said, "The enemy is not the government. Look at China and the Pan Saheel the US holds sway but is not the key player. Rather reminds me of Red Wings Hockey. They are an elite team, but the stronger team knocked them out. Seriously, I am glad they were eliminated so quickly. I could not be tortured by the injuries of the team that took out every key player game after game: Howard, Zetterburg, Helm, Franzen.

"What team can sustain their momentum with all those slams? No one spends much time talking about the losses because everyone expects them to excel."