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In T-shirts and pajama bottoms they'd worn for four days and shoes caked in New Orleans sludge, Christopher and Monika Sheppard arrived at Houston's Astrodome. In one arm was a cardboard box that held all they owned that the rising waters didn't snatch before they escaped. In another arm was their 16-month-old son, Jackson, quiet with fever and clutching a baby bottle.

They joined an ever-growing number of those made homeless when levees broke following Hurricane Katrina's rampage through Louisiana last week. Although the family owned a car, like many residents of the below-sea-level city who weathered the storm in their homes, they stayed because they had no place to go outside New Orleans and thought they could ride it out.

An inch of water seeped into their basement apartment. Christopher, 27, the son of a retired Baptist pastor, put his wallet and identification documents on top of the refrigerator for safe keeping and took Monika and Jackson upstairs. Three hours later they returned to find four feet of murky water in their apartment. The refrigerator had capsized. The water swallowed the wallet and papers.

The Sheppards had met in a karaoke bar. "I was singing 'God Bless the USA' and he fell in love," said Monika, 35, an opera singer. Two years ago they married. A Catholic, she worked in New Orleans's famed St. Louis Cathedral and freelanced for various occasions.

The sewage-contaminated waters destroyed her music and concert gowns. Christopher, a carpenter, lost his tools. Monika put a canvas purse in a box that contained baby clothes and one pair of women's underwear and pants. Christopher set Jackson on his shoulders. They waded through chest-deep water a half mile to an Interstate 10 bridge, one of the few dry places in New Orleans.

For more than two days they waited with hundreds of other storm survivors as the city around them plunged into bedlam. They ate pilfered food and drank pilfered water that looters unloaded in piles to share. Hope and letdown filled each hour as helicopters shuttled to the site and left with only a dozen or so at a time among the thousands waiting, a scene repeated over and over.

Jackson got sick. That put them at the front of the line of those waiting for a helicopter to ferry them to a bus for Houston.

Once airlifted, the scene repeated as crowds hoped for a seat on the trickle of buses bound for Houston. "It's hard to describe the hope you have invested that the next one," Monika said. "Most of our prayers were for other people," especially the elderly, who were everywhere. Jackson's fever got the Sheppards seats on a bus.

Though the Sheppards both had regular work, like many Americans they were one paycheck from financial crisis. They arrived virtually penniless at the Astrodome Thursday afternoon with only their box of sundry clothing, which they parked on cots assigned to their family. Jackson slept.

Though the Astrodome provided shelter and at least some measure of safety compared to the anarchy of apocalyptic New Orleans, the sports arena was tense with dangers and full of vulnerable people, especially the aged. On Thursday only a handful of police officers monitored the Astrodome. Relatively few volunteers had mobilized.

A frail woman fell near their cot. Monika helped her to her feet. As Christopher watched over Jackson, he noticed a feeble old man hadn't moved in a long time. Monika asked the man if she could do anything to help. He didn't respond. She brought him food.

Across the Astrodome, another old man rocked on his cot and cried as tattooed teenage boys taunted him. Monika confronted the gang, which then left him alone. The old man was mute and legally blind. He motioned he wanted to write. She spied a package of markers on the floor. He needed food, he wrote. "Can you please contact my family?" Monika took his family's contact information and promised she would reach them, and then found food for him.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49