Bad Juju

Bergeron didn’t want to go back to New Orleans. Somehow as the world evolved into the shadowed neon culture that had grown out of the global economic shutdown that had provided private conglomerates to basically buy out several governments around the world, the Big Easy had remained remarkably Cajun.

There were bits and pieces of more modernization along the riverfronts and throughout the delta, but for the most part, the denizens stuck to their roots and traditions. The money may have been coming out of Shanghai, but for those Cajun down in the Town, it was still, ‘laissez les bons temps rouler,’ rather than, ‘yǒu yuán qiānlǐ lái xiānghuì.’ Still, destiny was a funny thing.

He didn’t have a choice but to accept the job. Francis Bergeron knew it was going to be clustered seven ways from Sunday because it was New Orleans, but he couldn’t get by the picture. She had a winning smile and a fair complexion. It wasn’t the fact that she was a girl or the fact that she was cute. More than anything else, he took the job because of who she was.

The crest on the sweatshirt was unmistakable. Black and red backgrounds peeked from the middle of the teal and blank. Bergeron knew it was the Seal of Tulane before he saw the castles and the moons. Non Sibi Sen Suis, the words came back to him as if he had just walked out from his graduation ceremony. They were ingrained into what he did now – not for oneself, but for one’s own. Her name was Sheila Thibodaux, but Bergeron already knew that. Sheila was his cousin.

Tracking Sheila down wasn’t the issue, Bergeron had found here easy enough. He knew who to talk to and how to negotiate passage through the bayous and bogs. It came with knowing the area. The chrome in his body and the ocular implants just made it much easier to negotiate the price. It was still hard to believe that most of the folks in the Parishes throughout Louisiana were still frightened of the technology that was in use today.

Many of the folks he had to use to find her were sorely in need both a barber and a dentist. The undereducated and superstitious lot would often drop a broom over their doorstep when he left them or drew veve on the ground in ash and salt like he was some sort of Loa in flesh. Bergeron had no patience for their ignorance.

The harder part for Bergeron was the fact that when he found Sheila, she had seemed to leave a vacancy in her mind. Stage makeup and mud was smeared all over her face creating a skull emblem .Somehow she had either found or lugged a pseudo-silk top hat and matching suit out to the old plantation. It hung on her loosely, as if it were meant for someone else. Chromed mirrorshades were planted on her face and a long pipe stuck in her teeth slowly let aromatic grey smoke drift up.

“Sheila?” Bergeron knelt beside the slowly dying fire she had laid out. He stared hard at her seeing his frown in the mirrorshades straddling her nose.

“Passe’!” the word was almost spat out. Her voice was not her own. Bergeron readjusted his hand on the grip of the assault rifle he was carrying. She took another draw on the pipe and blew it in his face.

“Look Sheila,” Bergeron ignored the insult, “a lot of people are worried about you. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Our Sheila, she mal pris, her,” a smile came across her face, twisting the skull makeup into a grotesque mockery of what it should have been. “I in here now, me. All she wan do is fay dodo with tings she don unnastan, her. Fooyay, fooyay.” She took another long draw on the pipe and let the smoke out spill out of her mouth.

Bergeron felt the itch to end the conversation and get her to a hospital. It was obvious that whatever she had gotten into was pulling on some serious brain cells. The hallucination alone narrowed down the list of drugs that Bergeron could attribute to her condition.

“Ain no chem gris gris that do it, ma Grand Tahyo, you.” Another wicked smile crossed her face. “Mon Cherie, she tied fo true, but weren no chem, only voodoo.”

“All right,” Bergeron scowled, “enough of this ‘Boo Radley’ crap!” He reached up and pulled off the mirrorshades to check her eyes. Bergeron was no stranger to the multiple adversities and maladies of the human condition. As a bounty hunter and former soldier he had seen too many corpses in all states of condition.

Sheila’s eyes were glazed over. The green that was so vibrant were now milky and grey. Bergeron drew back and threw the shades down and raised his assault rifle. The dead eyes looked at him as the face smiled and bellowed out a great laugh that seemed to echo throughout the former plantation.

The body stood up from the place it was sitting and drew on the long pipe again. A twisted and decrepit smile flashed across what was Sheila’s face and then the corpse blew him a kiss, letting the pipe smoke out in a long stream.

“Now what you tink?” the thing asked Bergeron as it began to walk towards him. Bergeron opened fire. Flesh and bits of bone along with the suite and hat spat out from behind Sheila’s body as the former soldier followed his training. Still the thing kept walking towards him.

“How we gonna play Madame now, you?” a scowl crossed what was left of Sheila’s face. “Be cam now, you. We gonna go fay dodo now.” Bergeron remembered firing until he was out of ammo and then the sudden calm.

“Das right now, you,” the voice was his own, but not. “You jus listen to Baron Samedi now. Laissez les bons temps rouler, bebette.”