“What happened to this place?” Ryan asked as he stepped over a flattened weather-beaten sign of a cartoon seal in a striped vest and straw hat that instructed Younger Magicland Visitors Shorter Than Me Need To Wait Until They’ve Grown Another Few Inches!
“Cajuns is what happened,” Bill replied, his lined face wrinkling even further at the mention of the name. His brown eyes had almost disappeared into cavernous pits under his long forehead. “Crazy sons of bitches. Once word got around about Boss Larry going down for the count, Greenglades became open season.”
“Cajuns long way from home,” Jak stated.
“Yeah, I guess they were at that,” Bill replied, rubbing his white-stubbled chin. “Even back in the days of Boss Larry, bands of ’em had crossed over from Louisiana into the upper panhandle. Time passed, it just got worse. The Cajuns were always causing Boss Larry to have fits, but none of his sec men were willing to wade out and try and take ’em on in their own environment, no matter how much jack Boss Larry put up. I heard it was nuke trouble— some kind of rad leak cooked the bastards right out of their swampy hellhole.”
“You heard right,” came J.B.’s voice from the back of the group. “We’ve been there. Nothing left of that part of Louisiana but a sunbaked desert.”
Ryan nodded in agreement with his old friend’s words, remembering everyone’s shock when they had first stepped out of the Louisiana redoubt. They knew from a previous journey the dark blue colors of the gateway armaglass walls were located in a redoubt in the Louisiana swamplands, close to where they had first encountered Jak Lauren.
They’d gone up to the sec door of the redoubt and opened it, expecting a picture similar to the one when they arrived in Greenglades: majestic pecan trees and groves of ancient cypresses covered in a shroud of Spanish moss, all growing up from the dank waters of the bayous. Instead, their eyes had almost been fried in their sockets by the glare of white light. Outside was nothing but glassy sand and scrub brush, topped off with a coating of shimmering heat so thick you could almost touch it.
Ryan remembered stepping out into the yellowish haze and immediately wanting a drink of water, due to the heat and how parched the area looked. Just to make extra certain they hadn’t gotten their redoubts confused, J.B. had risked a quick glance at the sweltering sun to take a reading from his sextant. His reading concurred with the color of the armaglass, and Doc’s memory of the single, heartbreaking word of graffiti “Goodbye” scrawled in pen at the redoubt’s exit.
This was indeed the swamplands of Louisiana, and in the time between their jumps, the entire area had become a wasteland. Sudden change never came as a true shock in Deathlands, but there seemed to be no logical explanation for what had caused such a radical transformation.
Still, there was no time to investigate, even if Ryan had possessed the inclination. Their button rad counters had also immediately gone into overdrive, the warning arrows shifting from a safe green to orange, and finally into a full state of crimson before Ryan and J.B. hurriedly stepped back inside and sealed the door.
For once, no one had minded a second jump.
“Ace on the line there, J.B. It makes sense now. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why Cajuns had come all this way,” Ryan said. “Now we know.”
“We think they saw the rad poisoning coming, so they decided to find another home with the same climate. Probably got some boats to make the trip along the gulf,” Bill said. “I hear they’ve set themselves up along the coastline of Mississippi and Alabama, long about where Biloxi and Mobile used to be. There’s all kinds of tales about a Cajun boss by the name of Rollins. Guy takes being a midget a little too close to heart, and fancies himself to be the next Napoleon.”
“I know about him, Dad!” Dean interjected excitedly. “Learned his game back at the school. He was a shrimpy man with a thirst for conquering way back. Saw himself as the biggest baron in the whole world! Took over every ville he could find.”