by John Shirley
I’m just seeing shit, she thought.
But she shuddered and looked quickly away.
I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth . . .
That’s when she heard the screaming from across the street.
Nella stepped to the door—and saw that the Grummon brothers were chasing a young woman out the front door of one of those flat-top houses covered with shingles all over—even the outer walls, covered in those yellow shingles. The young black-haired woman was dressed only in a sweatshirt, no pants, no shoes, naked from the waist down. She had plump thighs, was running across the gravel drive, her round face twisted into a fright mask, and Randle and Liddy were right on her tail, Randle puffing and Liddy giggling, and then she slipped, with a squealing cry, fell in the gravel, and Randle grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her backwards.
The woman clawed at the gravel, convulsively shaking her head, then looked up at Nella and mouthed, Help me!
But Nella just shrugged. Like, sorry. She couldn’t do anything about it.
Then Dickie was there, breathing on Nella, like he suddenly appeared, blocking out the scene. He was grinning like a panting wolf, smelling of booze as he pushed her backward, closing the door. “We found the keys for the pickup truck next door,” he said conversationally, as he pressed her back on the sofa under Jesus. “And . . . ” He tugged at her pants. She knew, from the tight hunch in his shoulders, the quickness of his movements, there was no putting him off, he’d just hit her if she tried, so she unzipped the jeans and peeled them off as he undid his fly, still talking. “We can’t get out to the ranch, road’s blocked with all kinda shit, but we found a house at the top of the hill with a good view for defense, we’re gonna bunk in there. No one to argue anymore. No one to say shit. Freedom in Freedom. We’re gonna go see Joe Shipman. He’s still in town. I know right where that motherfucker is.” He was rubbing his hand around her vagina, trying to get her wet. Wasn’t working, so he put a lot of spit on his hard red thing. “Got a lot of stuff Sten’s puttin’ in the truck, to take up there . . . ”
The girl was screaming, from across the street. Distant. But Nella could hear it.
“Spread your fucking legs . . . you’re gonna need us, girl . . . ”
Her bruised shoulder hurt as he heaved himself onto her. She cut off a yelp of pain, hissing to herself as he jammed into her. But the girl across the street did Nella’s screaming.
Nella thought about Ronnie. Wondering if he were alive. Glad he couldn’t see her now.
But someone was watching: Nella glanced up, past Dickie’s head, seeing Jesus Christ gazing back at her: Jesus upside-down. Jesus looking down at her as she surrendered to Dickie.
Twilight was easing over them. The stench was increasing as the seawater drained away.
Russ worked at clearing debris from a man who was probably dead. Pendra had been helping, but she’d gone to sit down for a while.
They’d found work gloves somewhere. Electric lanterns, flashlights, and there was a nurse who kept a supply of bandages in her basement, and topical antiseptics, things like that, boxes of them. They’d already used up most of supplies—Dr. Spuris and Lucia Greia, a retired Filipina nurse, and several elderly ladies had gone through the medical stuff—and there was nothing much for people in pain, just some scavenged prescription painkillers, like codeine. There were no rescue helicopters in the sky, there were no ambulances, no working phones, cell or otherwise, no working Internet, all cable lines broken. Nothing.
Nothing. They were alone.
They’d sent two young volunteers to ask for help. Two college buddies who said they could take their dirt bikes, get over the hills past the giant mound of debris that blocked Seaward Road, head inland to find help. How long would it take for them to get help to Freedom, with all the other towns, up and down the coast, that must be devastated by the tsunami?
So they coped, one step at a time. Russ’s dad had found some disposable paper masks to filter out the worst of the dust that rose around them as they pulled at splinter-ended timbers and sections of drywall. But some of it got through and Russ coughed, from time to time. He was working stolidly, alongside about six others, in this shell of a house, but he felt like a zombie. They’d been at this for hours, one house after another. It was just going to go on and on.
Russ was hungry, and some sandwiches had gone around at one point, but he was afraid to eat. He wasn’t sure why. Something about the smell of the dead.
Up the street, toward the top of the hill, there were a couple of big empty houses where people were laid out on blankets, on the floor, groaning, some of them dying. Being treated with almost haphazard selections of prescription painkillers, along with ibuprofen and, sometimes, hard liquor, if the pain was too much.
Dad had only mentioned cholera to Russ just once. But the notion had stuck in his head. Cholera. When would it start? Doctor Spuris had recited the symptoms: watery diarrhea, vomiting, muscle cramps. To start. Then cold skin, incessant thirst, sunken eyes, thread pulse, weakness. Death.
Some radios had picked up news. The little radio station in Buried Cove had been right on Highway One, and it was gone, along with almost all of Buried Cove, which was on lower ground than much of Freedom—but more distant stations were heard in a static-choked way, and they weren’t encouraging. It was said to be the biggest tsunami in recorded history. Parts of San Francisco had been hit, and hit hard. And Monterey and Santa Cruz and Long Beach and other towns between, and Santa Monica. It was said to be part of the clusterquakes phenomena, which was, in turn, linked to global warming in some way. Ships at sea had capsized, the Coast Guard was trying to rescue hundreds of people from a sinking cruise ship that had been headed for Mexico, along with more than two thousand other boaters; an oil tanker caught in the tsunami had dumped an Exxon Valdez-sized oil spill over Half Moon Bay; hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million people up and down the coast were dead or dying; a million more displaced.
Freedom, California, was the last town on the government’s mind—especially since Lon Ferrara had worked so hard to make it that way.
“There’s a car, like the one you were looking for, the other side of that big logjam, Russ,” said Carter, coming in. Dale Carter was the big African-American, who’d tried to get people organized, early on. He’d put on a San Francisco Giants baseball jacket. “Some of us were climbing over it, trying to get past.”
“I’ll go look,” Russ said, his heart sinking.
His dad, looking pale and bone-weary, shook his head. “I knew her. I’ll go. Don’t say anything to Pendra yet.”
Dad left with Dale. Russ went back to work, he and Lars pulling the last timber off the dead man. The man’s chest was crushed, part of his esophagus had been forced out of his mouth. Russ tried to jar the image from lodging in his mind and turned away.
“I’m gonna smoke a doob,” Lars said. “You want some?”
Russ shook his head, wondering how Lars could combine marijuana with anything this grim. But Russ had always had a low tolerance for marijuana. If he took a hit of pot everything became hyper-real, vibrating with painful meaning. Not good timing just now. He was already feeling that way. He wanted a drink.
He wandered into a back room of the house they’d been working on. He raised a Coleman lantern and saw that the room was intact—there was white debris dust, wafted from the wreckage in the others rooms; it coated the little bed, the stuffed animals, but everything was in place. He glanced out a broken window, and saw a leafless tree he hadn’t noticed before, behind the house; rubbish hung in the tree by the high water, dangling like trashy Christmas decorations. A movement caught his eye. After a moment he made out a human silhouette near the very top. He approached the window, peering up—saw the silhouette move. The face turned, caught the waning light. A child was stuck in the tree, washed there by the wave, wedged in a crotch of two branches. A naked boy. The boy’s eyes were closed but he moved one arm twitchily. Maybe it wa
s the child who’d slept in this bedroom, torn from taking shelter on the roof. What, maybe seven years old? Deposited there by the wave like the flotsam hanging around: ropes and kelp and a sodden blanket and a small dead dog and unidentifiable swatches of trash.
Aching with fatigue and fear for the child, Russ went to get help, and a ladder.
Outside it was dusk, and darkening. Streetlights would normally come on, in most places, this time of day. But there hadn’t been many working streetlights in Freedom, before the wave, and none worked now: the electricity was gone. No lights on in the houses. Just pools of light around Coleman lanterns, beams flashing from flashlights. People moaning—that sound was part of the very air. The sounds of people moaning, weeping. Perhaps a bit less now. He could hear the sea, in the distance, its hiss rising and falling, the sound of waves breaking as they did any other day, as if nothing had happened.
It took four of them to get the child down. The little boy was naked, bruised. His face swollen. They couldn’t tell if he was badly hurt inside. The rusty-haired boy was delirious with fatigue and fear and disorientation as they gave him water from their meager supply of the bottled stuff, carried him to an improvised stretcher—they’d made it out of a long piece of carpet and a stepladder—and toted him up the hill to the houses being used to shelter the injured.
As Russ came back down, he paused to watch a mud-coated figure toiling up the hill like a drowned man risen from the sea. He was perhaps forty or older—it was hard to tell—clothed in slime, mud, underwear, and socks, his face a mask of dried muck. The man was staggering along in the twilight from one person to the next, begging every one he met to help him get his wife back, she’d been sucked out to sea, when the wave receded, but he was sure, absolutely sure, she was still alive. He explained this calmly, speaking in a mush-mouthed way. Tear streaks marked the mask of mud like erosion lines. She was a strong swimmer, he told them, repeated it over and over, she was a strong swimmer and they’d only just gotten married a few months before, he’d waited all his life to meet her, and they’d been on the deck of her uncle’s guest house and the wave had come and it had separated them and he’d found himself deposited on a chimney, and she’d been sucked out to sea and he’d tried to go after her but he was tangled in some old clothesline, and he’d lost sight of her, and it had taken him a long time to get out of the wire, and get down from the roof, and come up higher on the hill for help, but he was sure she was alive, somewhere out at sea, drifting.
Several people, one after another, explained to him that they had no working boats, that she was surely dead by now, but he wouldn’t listen, he would wave them impatiently away, and go to the next person and the next. When he passed, Russ saw that all his teeth had been knocked out; were reduced to bleeding stumps on his gums. Soon he wandered off, and Russ never saw him again.
Up to his knees and elbows in stinking dried muck himself, Russ went back to clearing debris away—and sometimes bodies. His movements became mechanical and weary.
They’d laid out hundreds of corpses in four houses on a side street a block up; one body right beside the next, on the floors. The dead that could be identified by those who knew them included a retired cop, two ministers, a pharmacist, another nurse, a part-time paramedic, a doctor in town to remodel his vacation home, a retired fireman, a former Army medic just a month back from the Middle East. They’d all had nice houses close to the beach.
All people they needed. As if the tsunami had selected them out, to make sure they wouldn’t be of help.
Russ needed a break. The men around him worked either silently, or cursed to themselves. Some despairing quality in their perseverance depressed him. He dropped his crowbar and muttered about finding some water, drifted outside and, carrying a small flashlight, trudged along a side street, just at the high water mark, looking for a place to be alone. He chose a house he knew they’d already searched. It was intact except for the front room, which was mostly occupied by a fourteen-foot aluminum boat, complete with a big Yamaha outboard motor. The empty gray-metal boat had slammed into the house prow on, smashed through the picture windows. There had been a body in the house, an elderly widower Russ’s dad had known; they’d carried the body up the hill. The widower had kept a store of Irish whiskey, and Russ helped himself to some, pouring a half tumbler in the bedroom, drinking it off. He was slightly ashamed to be looting the dead man’s whiskey, but he felt a little better afterward.
He poured another shot, drank that off too. Don’t get plastered. You need to be there, helping Dad.
He stared at the bottle—Jameson—and then screwed it shut, stuck it in a shoebox, hid that under the bed. Went a little unsteadily to find his dad.
Dad was about two blocks up the hill, sitting by Pendra, on the curb, his arm around her. She was crying. Russ figured the car Dad had checked out belonged to her grandmother.
“I want to go see, make sure it’s her,” Pendra said. “My mom and dad died. I never got to see my dad’s body. People just told me he was dead. I need to . . . ” She broke off, squeezed her eyes shut. Took a sighing breath, getting control. When she opened her eyes again tears slipped from their corners. “Lots of people have lost people, in this. But I need to really know she . . . that it was her.”
“I’ve seen her many, many times,” Dad said. “I knew your grandma pretty darn well. It was her. I saw her face clearly. She’s really and truly gone. I’m sorry. She died quickly.”
Pendra sobbed, one hand over her eyes. “How do you know she died quick?”
“I just . . . it’s obvious.” Dad winced. “The car was upside down. Believe me, she was killed right away. She didn’t suffer. Just—boom, like that. I promise.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You stick close to me and Russ here, we’ll all look out for each other. Eventually the rest of the world will get around to us. Okay?”
She nodded. She wept. And then . . .
It got darker.
SIX
The wave towered over Russ, cresting, about to crash down. Then stopped. Just froze up there.
Russ walked toward it. It was like a wall of green glass. Just frozen in place, unmoving and unmovable. He reached out and touched the smooth surface of the wave towering over him—it was actually made of some kind of transparent green synthetic. It squeaked like a balloon when he touched it. Silhouettes of people were suspended inside it. He stared, and their shapes became clearer . . .
Stuck in the wave were bodies, corpses in various positions, upside down, angled, fixed like fruit in Jell-O. And closer, inside the wave, looking out at him: was someone who was alive.
It was his mother. Gaping at him. Saying his name, without words.
He reached for her. “Mom? Mama?”
Russ sat up, head pounding, the nightmare receding like dirty seawater drawing back after the tsunami. He had a septic taste in his mouth. And he was terribly thirsty.
What time was it? Russ wondered, looking through the window at the light outside, the overcast sky. Maybe about ten?
He had laid down on the sofa “for just a few minutes” about five a.m., after working all night, and he must have fallen deeply asleep.
He made a croaking laugh, looking at his hands. He still had the work gloves on.
“Russ?”
Dad was standing in the doorway, looking like he’d just woken up himself. “How you holding up? Get some rest?”
“Kind of. Where’s Pendra?”
“Sleeping at her grandma’s place. How come you slept here, son?”
Russ sat up, pulling off his gloves. “I didn’t mean to, just did. You sleep?”
“A couple hours.” Dad rubbed at his eyes. “We’ve had a lot to do. The danger of cholera around here—” He shook his head. “We’re going to try to relocate everyone to the high school. The gym, the classrooms. Use that as our base till some help gets here.”
“You see any helicopters?”
“One did fly over. Circled once
. We tried to signal. It kept going. We figure someone’ll come from Deer Creek first. We haven’t seen any Coast Guard.”
“Where’s Deer Creek?”
His father sat wearily on the arm of the sofa. “Deer Creek’s about sixty-four miles east. They’ve got a fire department, a small hospital, all kinds of stuff we don’t have.” He paused, added bitterly, “In the Ferrara regime.”
“Ferrara? Oh right. The mayor. If he’s alive he’s probably hiding.”
“Him? I don’t know. He’d never blame himself. The absence of emergency response would somehow be Big Government’s fault.” He wiped his mouth. “Anyway, people in Deer Creek’ll get the word from the guys with the dirt bikes. If they don’t get through, for some reason, right away, hell, there are merchants from Deer Creek who supply us here—they’ll realize the road’s blocked off. Send someone to check on us. We’ll get some help from that quarter . . . when they get here.”
“How badly blocked is it? Maybe we can clear it.”
“Maybe, but it could take days. It’s a huge pile of logs and every kind of debris. There’s even a pretty good size cabin cruiser stuck up there. But we can expect help to come, son. Two volunteers went already on dirt bikes, remember—taking the trails up through the hills.”
“What about all the injured?” Russ’s mouth was so dry it was hard to talk. He tried to work some saliva into it. “People dying. They can’t just wait, dad. We’ve got to get them out! Get them down that road. We could take some in the cars that still work, if we got the road open. It might be days before those two guys get people organized to come. If they don’t get lost on the way . . . ”
“We can’t move the injured over these hills. Trying to do that might kill them. Gotta get the road cleared to get them out. No boats we can count on so . . . ” He made a sound that was almost a groan. “I mean, that blockage is high. Dangerous. There’s hundreds of tons of the stuff ready to fall on anyone who tries to break it down . . . ”