Ruined (by Paula Morris)

Prologue

New Orleans, the summer of 1853. Yellow fever ravages the busy port city. Bells toll frot he souls of the dead. Boats on the Mississippi River are places in quarantine, their cargoes left to spoil, their crews felled by disease. Before the summer is over, eight thousand people will die. 

In the city, yellow fever is known as the Strangers Disease. Immigrants - Italia, Greek, German, Polish, neew arrivals from the great cities of New York, Boston - have no resestance to the fever. The Irish, who'd traveled to New Orleans to escape their terrible famine, soon fall victim, dying within a week of the first sinister chill. 

During the day, the streets are empty, At night, mass burials take place all over town. Graveyard fill; corpses lie rottin in piles, swelling in the sun. Gravediggers are bribed with alcohol to ignoe the utrid smell and dig shallow trenches  for the bodies of the poor. New Orlean's black population - slaves and the free people color - have seemed largely immune, but in August of 1853, even they start to succumb. Native-born wealthy families - Creole and American - suffer as badly as poor immigrants. 

The ornates tombs in the walled cemeteries, New Orleans's famous Cities of the Dead, fill with mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. At lafayette Cemetery, on the new, American side of the city, bodies are left at the gates every night. There is no room to bury these unknown dead, and many of the corpses are burned.

In the last week of August, in the dead of night, a group of men unlock the Sixth Street gates to Lafayette Cemetery and make their way by torchlight to an imposing family tomb. Two coffins of yellow fever vicims, both from the same family, had been placed in the valt earlier that afternoon, one on each of its long, narrow shelves. According to local custom, once in place, the coffins should be sealed behind a brick wall for a year and a day.

But the coffins are still unsealed. The men remove the marble plate, covering their mouths, chocking at the smell of the bodies decompsing in the heat. Onto the top of the coffin, they a shrounded corpse, then quickly replace the plate.

The next day, the tomb was sealed. A year later, the men return to break through the bricks. the two disintegrating coffins are thrown away, and the bones of the dead covered with sil in the caveau, a pit at the bottom of the vault.

The names of the first two corpses interred in the vault that terrible August are carved onto the tomb's roll call of the dead. The name of the third corpse is not.

Only the men who placed the body inside the tomb know of its existence.

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 Hey! So i want to remind you that this is NOT my story it was written by an amazing writer named Paula Morris she created this story and every word on these pages are infact hers (not these ofcourse ;p ) So no need to vote or anything I am only doing this so people who can share good books with people who on ly read wattpad!

-iTypeRealBooks