John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  Decisions, decisions.

  Instantly, my mouth went dry, every hair on my body stood on end, and my heart began to pound. Those old fight-or-flight hormones were still in working order, and they were saying flight, flight, flight! But that old monkey brain isn't always right, and I retained just enough of my ability to think to realize that turning and running wasn't the deal here, that he'd have me in a second.

  And you know, for a few seconds there, I entirely forgot I had a rifle in my hands.

  When I remembered it I felt a little better, but not what you'd call confident. It wasn't a peashooter, but I was far from sure that one slug would take him down, and I thought one shot was all I was likely to get. One leap and he'd be all over me. He was that close:

  He yawned. He got up off his haunches and started walking toward me. And I fired the rifle, into the air.

  I don't know why I did that. Waste what might be my only shot? But I did, and the tiger jumped, and melted away into the darkness and it was like it had never been there in the first place.

  Shortly, that very idea was being debated.

  "A tiger?" Mom asked, peering down at the men gathered around me. I looked up into three female faces between the awning flap and the edge of the Duck.

  "In Florida?" Evangeline asked.

  "You sure it wasn't a Florida panther?" Travis asked. "I hear they're making a come­back."

  I sighed. "Orange with black stripes?" I said. "Big white teeth? Triangular pink nose? About eight hundred pounds? Is any of this ringing a bell?"

  "Settle down, son," Dad said.

  "I got no problem with it," Dak said. He was fanning a big high-intensity light all around into the darkness. There was no sign of the tiger. "I mean, I got a big problem with him being out there, but there's plenty of tigers in Florida. I've seen 'em myself. You got your zoos, and you'd be surprised how many private citizens own big cats. Probably somebody's pet, just a big dumb kitty cat never hunted in his life."

  "Okay," Travis said. "It doesn't really matter, Ray."

  "It matters a lot to me. I know what I saw."

  "Okay, you saw a tiger. Anyway, your watch is over. I'm going to set up some more lights, that'll probably keep it away. Meantime, you get some shut-eye. We've got a hard day ahead of us. Everybody back in the sack. You gals doing okay up there?"

  "It's not quite five-star," Mom said, "but we'll manage, if you just get the spa and shower working."

  "First thing in the morning," Travis agreed.

  I climbed into the tent, seething, feeling sure nobody believed me. They all thought I'd fallen asleep and had a nightmare. Hell, by the time I got stretched out on the air mattress I was beginning to wonder myself.

  One thing I was sure of, though. It was going be tough getting to sleep thinking about that thing prowling around out there.

  Two minutes later, I was a goner.

  Six hours later the sun was coming up, somebody was shaking my shoulder and shouting. I struggled up and stared at Travis, wondering who he was for a moment, and why had he poured molten lead into all my joints? I was hurting in muscles I didn't even know I had, and my back was on fire and my ankles had swollen up like pink apples. This must be what it feels like to get old, I thought, and if so, I didn't want any part of it.

  "You're wet," I told Travis.

  "Went for a swim with your tiger," he said, and grinned at me. "Rise and shine... no, don't hit me! Breakfast is cookin' and time's a wastin'!"

  I got my boots on and struggled to my feet and finally identified the sound I'd been hearing. It was rain pouring down on the top of the tent. There's this about Earth weather. No matter how bad things seem, they can always be worse if it's raining. Travis handed me a poncho. For some reason a heavy shower doesn't seem to cool Florida off much, it just adds mugginess to the already stifling air.

  Everybody was gathered in Scrooge, so I made my way painfully up the ladder and into the most heavenly aromas I had ever encountered. There was bacon, and eggs, and waffles, and toast smeared with wonderful cherry jam or orange marmalade, and big mugs of coffee, all being turned out by Mr. Redmond from propane appliances set on the dashboard. I loaded my plate and sat down with it balanced on my knees and ate like I'd never eaten in my life. By the time I had polished off a second plate I felt a slowly reviv­ing interest in living.

  It took a while in the rain, but finally we had all our gear stowed away and battened down.

  The rain, falling on the flat Florida ground, didn't have its usual channels to find its way to the sea. All this part of the state, and much of the rest of it, was artificially reclaimed from swamp. All the sewers were clogged, backed up, going nowhere. Little pools and lakes were forming and the streets were turning into streams.

  I had hoped that at least the rising water would float away some of the wooden wreckage, but no such luck. Oh, it took some of the larger pieces, but mostly it just jammed everything together, making choke points that were almost impossible to get through.

  We slogged on, this time in water that varied from ankle deep to knee deep, and was filled with the vilest things imaginable. Dead cats, dead dogs, raw sewage, the rotting contents of refrigerators and freezers, and the occasional human body. If the water got a little deeper, Scrooge would float, and we might have a chance of motoring our way around the worst jams. If it got shallower, it would be easier to see the wreckage we had to move out of the way or risk a flat tire. But it didn't do either, and all morning we found ourselves dealing with the worst of both worlds. Travis cursed the poor, faithful Duck every time he felt the wheels lift off the pavement and spin, then settle back down.

  "Should have brought a stinking bulldozer!" he shouted every ten minutes or so. "Should have brought dynamite!"

  "Should have brought a team of elephants!" Dak shouted back.

  "We could have hunted Ray's tiger on them!" Elizabeth said. I was resigned to it by then. At every opportunity everyone but Mr. Redmond hit me with something about tigers.

  Watch out for that tiger; Evangeline!

  Is that a dog barking, or do you think it might be a tiger?

  Hold that tiger, hold that tiger, hold that tiger!

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Oh, well. I guess we all needed something lighthearted by that point, and I might as well be the butt of it. There sure wasn't anything in our surroundings to make us happy and gay and get us through the day. I kept my mouth shut and endured it.

  Then one of Scrooge's tires blew out with a sputtering sound. That was because the puncture was underwater. It could have been one of the tandem pair in back and we could have slogged on, but of course it had to be the right front.

  I waded back to look at it. There was a plank with several nails deeply embedded in the rubber. Naturally, it was on the side where it had been my responsibility to clear the path. I must have stepped right over it.

  Nobody said anything to me about it. It took an hour to get the tire on, and when that. was done no one was laughing or making jokes anymore. We carried on, checking our position once an hour, and finally heaved up onto semidry land at a point that was as close as we were going to get to the home where the Redmond's family had lived. There was a big Wal-Mart, and smaller stores, and no people in sight.

  We stopped, and everybody climbed out onto the hood or stood on the seats and looked to the north. Travis was peering at the screen of his GPS.

  "It says 1.45 miles from here," he said, and pointed. "This is as close as this road gets." We all stared silently. Calling what we were on a "road" was more than generous, though it had been a six-lane main drag before the wave. Some of the palm trees that had run down the center were still standing, but most were leaning sharply or pulled out of the ground by the roots. On each side of us strip malls were visible under heaps of trash, a few signs intact. Advertising signs on poles set deeply in concrete were still there: McDonald's, Gap, Infosys, Jill's Crab Shack. The concrete block buildings were mostly still standing, but all the glass was broken out
of the windows and the contents of the buildings had come gushing out as the wave hit, and again as it receded.. There were side streets leading off in each direction in the familiar flat grid pattern, but these were far too choked for any vehicle to get through. No, it was clear that the only way into that mess, for now, was on foot. Which, of course, is just what Mr. Redmond proposed to do.

  "Jim, I advise against it," Travis said.

  "I know the advice is well intended," said Mr. Redmond, quietly. "But if I don't go, there wasn't much point in me coming here in the first place, was there?"

  "Well, I don't know about that. Your relatives are probably in a shelter somewhere, back the way we came. When these damn stereos start working again. I imagine they'll have lists of the survivors and the..."

  "And the dead. We know they're probably dead, no need to tiptoe around it. But what I came for was to find them, and right now this looks like our best bet."

  "Jim..." Dad said, and then paused. "I'm not quite sure how to put this. You're a great cook, and a good man, but are you sure you're up to this?"

  Mr. Redmond smiled for the first time in a while. It wasn't a happy smile.

  "Manny, thank you for your concern, for the loan of the money. For everything you've done. But before I settled down and perfected my trade, I had a few little adventures myself. I'm no Navy SEAL, or commando, but Uncle Sam sent me some places that looked a lot like this, after the bombers were through, and they were full of guys a lot scarier than some drunk piece-of-shit biker gangs. I came back alive, and I reckon I can get through this, too."

  "At least leave Evangeline with us," Mom suggested.

  "I would, I promise you, but she'd only sneak away first chance she got. We talked it over. I'd rather have her by my side, keep an eye on her." He held his hand out to Travis, who shook it firmly. "Thanks for the loan of the weapon, General," he said. "I'll do my best to return it to you."

  Travis gave him a walkie-talkie, and they checked the batteries and channels.

  "The range is supposed to be five miles," Travis said, "but I've not tested it, so I'm not sure. Call us every day at noon, okay? We'll have our ears on. And I don't know if we'll be able to wait very long on our way back out, but I promise that we'll be here at noon one day. I don't know what day that will be."

  "It's okay. We'll try to be here every day. If we get our business done before you do and we get tired of waiting, we'll hike out."

  "Go to the ranch. You'll be welcome there."

  There were hugs and kisses all around, and I was surprised at the ferocity with which Evangeline embraced me. Her tears were hot on my check as she turned away and fol­lowed her father into the chaos of the Wal-Mart parking lot, picking their way through the jumble of cars. Soon the rain, which had slackened for a while, came pouring down again and we lost sight of them. I sat down beside Elizabeth, who was crying quietly.

  "That's got to be the bravest thing I ever saw," she said.

  "He's got guts," I agreed.

  "No, idiot! Her! I talked her ear off, 'Stay with us, Evangeline, you don't have to go, you're not up to this.' And the thing is, she knows that. She is so scared she can't see straight. But she felt she had to stay with her father."

  Dad had been listening, and he turned around and looked at us.

  "Real courage is going ahead and doing what you know you should do, even when you're terrified," he said.

  I thought of what Travis had said about Dad, how scared he had been when he made that spacewalk to save my mother and a lot of strangers. I realized that, if he hadn't made it, I wouldn't be alive. I'd never have been born. Courage counts for something.

  "So you think she did the right thing?" Elizabeth asked.

  "I don't know what the right thing is," he said, with a wry smile. "It's different for eve­ryone, and different situations call for different things. It might have made more sense if we'd all stayed back in Orlando and let the professionals handle the rescuing."

  "I couldn't have done that," I said.

  "No, but we might have done more good joining the volunteer teams clearing the debris. What we're doing is selfish, you know. There's people all around us who need help, maybe more than Grandma does. But we're driving right past them. Is that courage? Or self-interest?"

  "You tell me," I said.

  "I don't have the answer. I don't know if there are simple answers to questions like that, in situations like this."

  We went around huge pools of crude oil, some burning, some just soaking into the ground and killing all the plants in sight. We passed spills of other stuff, too. Chemical factories had been hit, and the landscape was littered with barrels of who-knows-what, many of them cracked open. Some of them smelled something awful.

  But the worst came a few hours before dark.

  It had stopped raining but the sky was still cloudy. It was getting hard to see. I was taking another shift out front, clearing dangerous debris, being extra, extra careful not to miss another board full of nails, feeling more dead than alive. I looked up... and the ground was covered with swollen, pinkish gray bodies. Thousands of them, uncountable thousands.

  At first my mind just couldn't wrap around it. Naked? Thousands of naked dead peo­ple? I couldn't come up with any way for that to make sense.

  It was pigs. Hogs, swine, whatever you call them. These were massive porkers, a thousand pounds easily.

  "Get back up here, Manny, Dak," Travis called down. "Jesus, get up here. No way I'm going to ask anybody to move that."

  "What is it, Travis?" I asked.

  "Pig farm," he said. "Or pig factory, really. They raise the damn things in big sheds. Damn! All the things we've seen, and this is about to make me throw up. Come on, you guys, get up here!"

  We did, and Travis slammed Scrooge into gear with a vengeance. We plowed into the horrible mess and must have had a bit of luck, because though we skidded around and bumped and swayed, we got through it without a breakdown.

  For a while it looked like we'd be completely stymied by US 1, an elevated autoway that followed the shore all the way through the city. Most of the concrete pylons holding the roadway up had withstood the force of the wave, but the backwash had turned these vertical posts into the teeth of a comb and gathered the debris rushing back toward the sea into an impenetrable mass.

  But we were close enough to the ocean now that we had begun to encounter more res­cue and recovery parties, working their way inland from ships offshore. They had cleared an access road on the west side of the highway. We talked to some of them, and they said there was a way under the autoway about six miles south, which was a hit of luck since that's the way we needed to go, anyway.

  We passed several blocks that had been bulldozed and crushed flat enough to erect tent cities. They were full, and covered with Red Cross tents and soup kitchens with long lines of shuffling people. Fires were burning in oil drums. A few children played with salvaged toys, but most of the people we saw had what Dad called the thousand yard stare of the dispossessed. It was an expression we'd all grown up seeing countless times on the stereo, mostly from third world countries where there was a revolution or a famine, or sometimes both. But we'd seen it on Indian faces, and Pakistanis, after the bombings of New Delhi and Islamabad, and on Jewish and Arab faces. Some news writer had termed that look "The Face of the 21st Century," and the term had stuck.

  Seeing them shook me more than the dead bodies had. These were living people, but most of them were shuffling like zombies. That's what happens to you when you lose everything. These people had gone, in the space of a few hours, from being citizens of the United States of America to faceless refugees with nothing but the clothes they stood in, and those clothes came from air-dropped canisters filled with the donations of people from all over America and the world.

  Florida was no stranger to disaster. Hurricanes had pounded it countless times. Help was always on the way. Sure, it stunned you, and you mourned your losses, and you buried your dead, and you scrounged around
for family keepsakes. Then the President declared a disaster area, government agencies arrived with portable housing, the insur­ance companies came in and started writing checks, you applied for an emergency loan, again from Uncle Sam, and you pulled up your socks and rolled up your sleeves and got to work, rebuilding.

  Not this time.

  "God, I hate to see Americans like this," Travis muttered, as we moved slowly through the survivors and soldiers in the gathering dusk. "Hate to see anybody like this, sure, but... I always figured we could handle the worst case. You know, a major city American city getting nuked. We've been waiting for it to happen since 1947 or so, then since September 11, and so far the worst they've managed is big fertilizer bombs. But say New York got hit, or LA. Millions dead... but a few days later the hospitals are in place, the people are getting food and water. A week later... I think I was wrong, you know? It would have been a lot worse than I figured. And this. This is about as close to a total nuclear exchange as you could get. Miami, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Chesa­peake Bay, Washington, Baltimore, Atlantic City, New York, Cape Cod... I remember orbiting over the coast, all those billions of lights, millions of people."

  I knew not all those places had been hit as hard as where we were, but some of them had been hit very hard, indeed. Most of the government offices had been moved to Chi­cago, as Washington still had no power. The financial district of New York might or might not be functioning again. And all those cities and small coastal towns, and cities far up the eastern rivers.

  I was a Martian. that was my country, though technically it wasn't a country at all. But I was Earth-born, America-born, Florida-born. They felt like my people, too, much as I may complain about them. The Brotherhood of Man, I guess.