I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 Read online

  I SURVIVED

  HURRICANE KATRINA, 2005

  by Lauren Tarshis

  illustrated by Scott Dawson

  FOR JEREMY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  After the Storm: Questions About Katrina

  Facts About Hurricane Katrina

  I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic

  I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2005

  7:00 A.M.

  THE LOWER NINTH WARD,

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  Hurricane Katrina was ripping apart New Orleans, and eleven-year-old Barry Tucker was lost and alone, clinging to an oak tree for dear life. He’d fallen off the roof of his house and been swept away in the floodwater. The raging current had tossed and twisted him, almost tearing him to pieces. He would have drowned, but somehow Barry had grabbed hold of the tree. With every bit of strength in his body, he’d pulled himself out of the water and wrapped his arms and legs around the trunk.

  Now he was holding on, with no idea what to do next.

  Wind howled around him. Rain hammered down. And all Barry could see was water. Swirling, foaming, rushing water. The water had washed away his whole neighborhood. Pieces of it floated by. In the dirty gray light, Barry saw jagged hunks of wood, shattered glass, a twisted bicycle, a refrigerator, a stuffed penguin, a mattress covered with a pink blanket. He tried hard not to imagine what else was in that water or what had happened to all his neighbors … and his mom and dad and little sister, Cleo.

  What if they’d all fallen into the water too?

  What if …

  Wait! What was that sound? Was someone calling his name?

  “Dad!” Barry screamed. “Mom! Cleo!”

  No. It was just the wind shrieking. Even the sky was terrified of this storm.

  Barry was shaking now. Tears stung his eyes. And then he heard a new sound, a cracking and groaning, above the wind and rain. He stared in shock at what was floating in the water.

  A house.

  Or what was left of it. One side was torn off. It moved through the flood slowly, turning. Its blown-out windows seemed to stare at Barry. The splintered wood looked like teeth in a wide-open mouth.

  And it was coming right at him.

  CHAPTER 2

  TWENTY-ONE HOURS EARLIER

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2005

  10:00 A.M.

  THE TUCKERS’ HOUSE,

  THE LOWER NINTH WARD,

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  Barry sat on the steps of his front porch. His best friend, Jay, huddled next to him. Jay wanted to see the drawing rolled up in Barry’s hands.

  “Show me!” Jay said, leaning so close Barry could smell egg sandwich on his breath.

  Barry elbowed him back, laughing. He knew Jay was excited. They both were.

  The next day was the deadline for Acclaim Comic Books’ “Create a Superhero” contest. For the past three weeks, Barry and Jay had been working nonstop on their creation. They’d come up with everything together — their hero’s name, his costume, even his secret star, which was the source of his amazing powers. But it had been Barry’s job to draw him. He’d stayed up past midnight the last three nights, adding his finishing touches.

  “Okay,” Barry said, clearing his throat and standing up like an announcer facing an anxious crowd. “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Akivo!”

  He unrolled the paper and watched Jay’s eyes get wider behind his scratched-up glasses.

  Barry’s cheeks heated up. He’d worked hard on the drawing. Of course he’d never admit it to Jay, but it was almost like Akivo was his brother. A seven-foot-tall brother with bulging muscles, hawk wings, titanium armor, and eyes that could see through walls.

  Jay rose to his feet. “That’s amazing,” he said in a shocked whisper. “The wings look real. And that fire …” He pointed to the flames coming out of Akivo’s silver boots. Barry had worked for three hours on those flames, mixing orange and red and yellow with a bit of blue until they looked like they would burn your fingers if you touched them.

  They both stood there for a minute, staring at the drawing.

  Then Jay started jumping up and down.

  “We’re going to win the contest!” Jay yelled. “We’re going to win the contest!”

  Barry started jumping too. He knew that hundreds of people were entering, and not only kids. Some people drew on computers. Others made videos. All Barry had were the colored pencils Mom and Dad had bought him for his last birthday.

  Still, Barry was a believer. He had gotten that from his mom. And at that minute, Barry let himself believe that he and Jay just might win first place—$250 to split and the comic book, starring Akivo, that Acclaim would create. Barry and Jay loved comic books. They’d been collecting them since they’d learned to read.

  “We’re going to be rich!” Jay sang.

  “And famous!” said Barry.

  They were so busy jumping and dancing and hooting, they didn’t notice Abe Mackay and his killer dog, Cruz, watching from the sidewalk. Abe’s laughter got their attention. Abe was a huge guy — almost twice the size of Barry. His booming laugh practically shook the ground.

  Barry and Jay froze. The hairs on Barry’s arms stood up straight. Jay’s cocoa skin turned gray.

  Abe was in middle school, just a year older than Barry and Jay. They used to all be friends. But Abe had changed since his dad had gone away two years earlier. Now he and his grandma lived alone. The Mackays’ house used to be one of the nicest in their neighborhood. It was painted bright sky blue. Abe’s grandma used to have a yard full of flowers you could smell a block away. But now the garden was dead and the house was gloomy. Abe didn’t go to school much anymore, and he’d started hanging around the older boys whose vrooming motorcycles kept everyone up at night.

  And then there was his new dog. He looked like a big mutt. He had a square head, and the tips of his pointy ears flopped over. But Abe said that he was a special breed from Asia, trained by the Chinese army, and that his jaw was strong enough to bite through metal. “He’s trained to kill,” Abe had bragged. “On my command. He goes right for the neck. One bite is all it takes.”

  “Why’d you stop dancing?” Abe asked now, spitting onto the sidewalk. “Cruz loves to dance!”

  He bent down to unhook the dog’s leash. “Go!” Abe shouted. “Go get ‘em, Cruz!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Barry turned and put his hands over his face, bracing for the feeling of teeth ripping at his neck. But nothing happened.

  He peeled open his eyes and saw that Cruz was still on his leash, standing next to Abe, who was laughing his head off.

  Why did he think it was so funny to scare them? Barry wished he could find the courage to step forward and say, “Get off my property!”

  He’d practiced that in the bathroom mirror, squinting his eyes to get a fierce look.

  But who was Barry kidding? He was about as fierce as one of Mom’s peanut butter cookies.

  If only Barry was more like his
father. Nothing ever got to Roddy Tucker.

  And then, as though Barry’s thoughts had sent out an SOS, the front door opened and Dad appeared on the porch.

  “Hello there, Abraham,” he said with a smile.

  Abe pulled Cruz closer and lost his usual what are you looking at? glare. Suddenly he looked like the old Abe, the pudgy guy in the Saints jersey who tried to show Barry and Jay how to shoot layups.

  Dad had that effect on people. He could smile at a T. rex, and next thing, they’d be making plans to have a burger together. Barry’s dad was a little famous in the Lower Nine: His band, Roddy Tucker and the Blasters, played in jazz clubs around New Orleans. But Mom said that wasn’t why people respected him.

  “Your father’s got sweet music in his heart,” Mom always said. “And everyone can hear it.”

  Now Dad looked at Barry. “We’re leaving in an hour,” he said. “You need to pack up. That hurricane’s getting nasty. It looks like it might be a direct hit on the city. We’re leaving town.”

  Barry stared at Dad. Leaving town for a hurricane? Not the Tuckers! Never before. Every year a few storms fixed their sights on New Orleans, and they always petered out at the last minute. There hadn’t been a bad hurricane in New Orleans in forty years.

  Was Dad making this up to get Abe to hustle on home?

  “I’m serious,” Dad said, reading Barry’s doubtful look. “There’s a mandatory evacuation. First time in New Orleans history.”

  “What’s that?” Jay asked.

  “It means if you can leave, you’ve got to leave,” Dad said. “Your mom already called, Mr. Jay. You’re heading up to Birmingham.”

  “What about us?” Barry asked.

  “Houston,” Dad answered with a sorry smile.

  Barry groaned. He loved Mom’s Texas cousins, but all of them, five wild little girls and their grumpy mama, lived in a tiny little house. Barry always went home with a whopper headache after visiting them. Dad too. The hurricane must be bad to get Mom and Dad to head to Houston.

  Barry looked around his neighborhood — the little houses, the scraggly lawns surrounded by chain-link fences, the palm trees and big oaks. He and Jay used to pretend that those big oak trees were ancient creatures rising from the earth’s core.

  There were better neighborhoods in New Orleans, and sometimes Mom and Dad talked about moving to a block where police cars weren’t always blaring their sirens, where Mom would feel safe walking after it got dark. But the Tucker family had been on this block in the Lower Nine for seventy years. Gramps had helped his daddy build this house back when folks kept hogs in their backyards. Barry couldn’t walk half a block without someone shouting hello from a porch and waving him up for a chat and a glass of iced tea.

  The Lower Nine was home. And that was that.

  Abe started to slink away.

  “They’re opening up the Superdome, Abraham,” Dad called after him. “For folks without cars. You should get your grandma over to the stadium soon as you can.”

  Abe waved and went on his way.

  Dad opened the door to go inside, and the news playing on the radio echoed out to the porch.

  “That’s right,” a man’s voice boomed. “This storm is a monster. It’s time to leave. Get out now. Get out while you can!”

  “You heard the man,” Dad said, starting to close the door behind him. “Time to get moving.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Barry’s stomach did a few nervous flips. The news reports had been warning about Hurricane Katrina for days, but nobody in Barry’s house had been paying much attention. Dad and his band had been playing shows in Atlanta. Mom worked full-time at Cleo’s preschool. She also had a little business baking cookies for restaurants in the French Quarter, the fancy neighborhood across the canal. As for Barry, he was totally focused on Akivo. A tornado could have sucked up the house and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  But now Barry’s mind started swirling.

  Like everyone in New Orleans, he understood what could happen if a strong hurricane struck. The city was surrounded by water. The Industrial Canal was just two blocks from their house. Big Lake Pontchartrain was up north. The Mississippi River wormed through the middle of the city. And so many canals and channels jutted this way and that, Barry couldn’t keep track of them all. Of course there were levees — big walls of dirt and concrete that protected the city from all that water. But some people said that the levees weren’t strong enough for a really big storm.

  Barry thought of Hurricane Betsy, the storm that hit New Orleans the year before Dad was born. When Gramps was alive, he’d loved telling Betsy stories. He and Gran lived in this same house. The levee broke, and the Lower Nine flooded. Four feet of water filled the living room. It had taken six months to get everything cleaned up. But Gramps was always proud of how the house held up to the winds.

  “Barely lost a roof shingle,” he liked to say as he patted the wall like you’d pat the back of a loyal friend.

  Those Betsy stories had fascinated Barry when he was little. But they’d always seemed like ghost stories and fairy tales, stories that could never come true. Now he wondered… .

  “Barry!” Jay said, waving his hands in front of Barry’s face. “Snap out of it!”

  “Sorry!” said Barry, shaking himself out of his thoughts.

  “What about Akivo?”

  They had planned to walk to the post office after school tomorrow and send their package to Acclaim’s offices in New York City. Barry had visited New York with Dad the past summer. The president of a famous college there was always inviting Dad to give talks about New Orleans jazz.

  “I’ll mail him tomorrow,” Barry said. “From Houston.”

  “Let me have him,” Jay said, holding out his hand. “I’ll mail him from Birmingham.”

  They stared at each other without budging, until finally Jay blinked.

  That settled that. Barry won the stare-out, so he got to mail Akivo.

  “Don’t let anything happen to him,” Jay said.

  “I wouldn’t!”

  They stood there, like they always did before they had to say good-bye. No matter how much time they spent together, it always felt like there was one more idea to talk about, one more joke to tell before they went their own ways.

  “Barry, honey, we’ve got to get ready!” Mom called.

  It was time.

  Jay raised his hand toward the sky, his pinky pointing up. It took Barry a few seconds to recognize the special move they’d invented for Akivo so the energy from his secret power star, Beta Draconis, could flow from his pinky into his heart.

  Barry raised his hand too, and he and Jay linked their pinkies together in the air.

  Barry smiled. For just a few seconds, Barry the believer imagined that he had a power star of his own somewhere.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Hurricane Katrina is now a Category Five storm, folks,” said the man on the radio. “That’s the strongest there is. Winds a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. Waves will be twenty feet high. It’s aiming right for our beautiful city. Right for us. This is the storm we’ve been fearing. It’s time to leave. Time to get—”

  Mom switched off the radio. “Okay,” she said softly. “I heard you. We’re leaving.”

  “Who are you talking to, Mom?” Barry asked.

  She looked surprised to see him. “Sorry, baby!” she said, turning and kissing Barry on the cheek. “That man is getting on my nerves.” She had three coolers arranged on the floor and was filling them with food for their car trip.

  “Are you worried?” Barry asked, brushing some flour from Mom’s sleeve. She’d been baking all morning.

  “Not at all,” she said, but Barry could see she was fibbing. Mom always baked when she got nervous. And she’d packed enough muffins and cookies in those coolers to feed the Saints.

  “We’re almost ready, right?” she asked.

  Barry nodded. He’d helped Dad board up the windows. He’d carried the porch furniture and C
leo’s princess house into the shed. “Need anything else?”

  “Find your sister,” Mom said. “She hasn’t been herself all morning. I need you to work some Barry magic on her.”

  Barry found his sister crying in her bed.

  “What is it, Clee?” he asked.

  “My princess house!” she wailed. “That lady took it!” “What lady?”

  “Katrina!”

  Barry tried not to smile. In that three-year-old brain of Cleo’s, Katrina was probably a big fat vampire lady flying through the air.

  “Your princess house is safe in the shed,” Barry said. “And Katrina isn’t a lady. It’s just a bunch of clouds. We’re not afraid of clouds, are we?”

  Cleo looked at Barry with her huge teary eyes. Barry always got a soft feeling in his heart, like the purring of a little cat, when he looked at his sister. Good thing he wasn’t a superhero. One look at a crying Cleo and all his powers would be drained away.

  “We’re having an adventure!” Barry said. “You can’t cry on an adventure!”

  Cleo gave a big sniff.

  “Will Akivo be there?” she asked.

  Of course Cleo knew all about Akivo. For weeks, anytime Barry told Cleo a bedtime story, he made Akivo the star. Who rescued Snow White from the evil stepmother? Akivo! Who saved the three little pigs from the big bad wolf?

  Akivo!

  Now Barry put his face closer to his sister’s. “I think Akivo will be waiting for us in Houston tonight,” he said. He hated tricking Cleo, but it wasn’t really a lie. Akivo was always appearing in Barry’s dreams. Maybe Cleo would dream about him too.

  “To retect us?”

  “That’s right,” Barry said. “He will protect us.”

  Cleo gave another big, messy sniff and then nodded bravely. “I won’t cry,” she whispered.

  She held out her arms so Barry could pick her up. He pulled her close. She put her head on his shoulder and let him carry her to the car.