by John Shirley
“What? No! I don’t have to go anywhere with you! There are people watching, across the street . . . ”
“If there are, they won’t do shit for you. I doubt if they even like you. Don’t remember anyone really liking you. Now, skipper, you want to get gut shot, right here and now? Okay—” He made a show of aiming the gun at Shipman’s middle.
“No!” Shipman sidestepped, turned, hustled toward the Buick, with his hands up. The Grummons parted to let him go by.
Dickie could tell he was thinking of running for it, dodging across the street. “You run, I shoot you down, bullet through the spine, Shipman.”
Shipman’s shoulders slumped. He walked woodenly up to the car.
“How about that van of his? We could use that to move stuff,” Sten pointed out.
“We’ll come back later, go through it, check the other houses around here,” Dickie said.
“Where’s he going to fit in the car?” Nella asked, walking over close to Shipman, looking him up and down.
“In the trunk,” Dickie said.
The Grummons laughed—and Shipman shouted “No!” and started to run. But Nella saved Shipman from being shot by tripping him. He went down on his face, crunching his nose, and the Grummons dragged him to the Buick.
Sten popped the trunk and they popped Shipman into it.
Not even half an hour later, they’d come to the top of the boat launching ramp at the north end of the beach. The beach itself was partly awash, all studded with debris, including cars and parts of buildings. He saw some people way down the beach, poking through the debris. Too far away to worry about. The stench was heavy here but a hissing wind off the ocean carried away some of it.
Aground on the old, cracked boat launching slipway was what remained of a white, wooden sailing vessel, about thirty-two feet long. The tsunami had tossed it onto the ramp almost upright. The vessel’s masts were snapped off, and there were big ragged holes in the hull. It looked like it had drained out through the holes. It would be just dry enough. “That’ll work good. Take him outta the trunk, Randle, you and your brother, drag him up in there, tie him down in the hold.”
“What do we tie him with?”
“Dumbshit, there’ll be all kind of rope on that boat there.”
Dickie turned to Nella and Sten. “I need you to get me some gasoline . . . wait, the Buick’s got half a tank, we can use most of it. Looks like a long piece of garden hose over there, on the beach.”
It took another forty minutes to get it all set up to Dickie’s satisfaction, partly because Shipman fought being taken into the beached sailboat—kicking and screaming the whole way—and they had to work that gasoline up into the hose, but once they got the gas started it was pretty easy to get it flowing since the hose was going down the ramp—downhill, after all—and into the sailboat. They ran the other end of the green hose through the uppermost of the holes in the sailboat’s hull. Shipman was in there yelling the whole time. Nella was starting to look sickly and pale, by the time it was all set up, Dickie noticed. She was a chick. But she’d looked sickly all day.
“All set up,” Randle said, coming up the ramp with his brother, wiping his hands on his pants.
“Okay. You guys stay here, keep watch. I don’t think anybody’ll fuck with us but just keep a weather eye out, mateys, while I talk to the skipper.”
Sten said, “Ha!” at that one.
Dickie handed Sten his gun and went down the ramp, climbed up the rope ladder at the stern, into the boat. It shuddered a bit as he climbed inboard, but didn’t seem in danger of toppling over.
He went up the slanted deck to the hatch and then scrambled down the ladder to the cabin, shouting over Shipman’s angry sobbing, “Hey skipper! Yo yo yo! All hands on deck! Ship the starboard main! Batten the fucking asses and shit!” He coughed, once, from the gasoline fumes.
Shipman was tied to a broken wooden folding chair, in a pile of debris—old rope, a narrow mattress from the cabin, galley trash. The stuff was pretty wet from seawater. Shipman was wriggling around, hands tied behind him, trying to get out of the rope.
Dickie grinned. “Hey skipper—you remember your Sea Scout knots? I should’ve told the boys to use a fisherman’s bend, or a Bowline on the Bight—remember those? I was going to take that first knot test, so you said you’d tutor me on knots, remember?”
“Dickie . . . I don’t know what you think you remember but . . . Some other skipper, maybe . . . ”
“Oh no, it was you, Mr. Shipman. You’re the Skipper and I’m Gilligan, right? ‘Come on, Gilligan, it’ll be a three hour cruise.’ You took me out to your boat—not too different from this one!—and you took it out to sea a little ways and you put out the sea anchor and . . . let’s see, what’d you say—you said I’d remember the knot if it was used on my wrists, said it was an old sailor’s trick, right? And after you tied me to that frame you tugged down my pants and said something about you read my signals and you knew I wanted this and you pushed my face down in the pillow and you raped my ass, for quite a long goddamn time.”
“Dickie, I might’ve misunderstood, I might’ve thought . . . ”
“That I wanted it? That what you going to say next? That I wanted you to tie me to the bunk frame, down below—You knew from my screaming and begging you to stop, and my crying and stuff? Was that your clue?”
“I really thought it was—”
He broke off when Dickie stepped close and kicked him in the mouth. Shipman sobbed and spat bloody teeth.
“No, skipper, you never thought that and after that other kid in our crew started acting weird, because you raped him too, you left town, right? Believe me, you’d have been dead a long time ago, skipper, if you hadn’t left town. I meant to go look for you, but no one seemed to know where you were. Bakersfield! Never thought of that. Who lives in Bakersfield on purpose? You do! But—here we are! Wait—what’s that smell?” Dickie coughed. “Some fumes in here . . . ”
Shipman was wheezing now, looking around desperately. Dickie couldn’t stay here much longer. The fumes were getting to him. “I’m gonna miss talking to you, old times and shit, skipper, but . . . I gotta go . . . where’s that cigarette lighter?”
Shipman gasped and stared at him, mouth hanging open. “Dickie, I’m sorry, take me to the State Police, I’ll confess everything!”
“Yeah? You tell ’em about how you got a kid to trust you, a kid who really fucking needed somebody to trust, kid who lost his old man, mom was a drunk—kid never had no parents he could count on, but here’s someone gonna show he cares about me, gonna teach me something . . . You did, man, you taught me something. About trusting people. You taught me about knots, skipper. You really did.”
Dickie tossed the lighter up once, caught it. Then he turned and climbed up the ladder.
“Dickie! Bring the police here! I’ll confess here if you want! Find someone, anyone, a citizen’s committee or something, bring them here! I’ll tell them everything! Dickie!”
Dickie could hear Shipman wrenching around, trying to get loose. He hoped those idiots tied him good. Should’ve taught them some Sea Scouts knots.
Dickie got awkwardly up on deck—the slant of the deck made it hard. He was glad to be out in the cleaner air. Coughing, he found an old piece of triangular blue-plastic boat pennant lying on the deck, snapped the lighter flame on, held the point of the pennant in the fire. It curled up, started burning, dripping molten plastic.
He got it going good, then tossed it down the ladder, into the hold. Into the gasoline. Shipman yelled, “There’s still time to—DICKIE, you can still—!”
Dickie went quickly to the railing, was climbing over, wondering if the pennant had gone out without setting off the gasoline—he dropped to the ramp right when the fat WHOOMPH sound shook the boat. The little vessel rocked on its keel. Shipman squealed loud and long—reminded him of the sound a wild pig had made, when Uncle Gunny’s hunting dogs dragged it down by the neck.
Dickie backed hastily aw
ay from the boat. He felt light, unreal, quietly happy, grinning without being able to help it, as the flames licked up from the hold, and the screams bubbled out, and smoke roiled up into the sky . . .
He watched it burn for a long time, long after Shipman stopped squealing, till there wasn’t much left but the charred ribs of the boat, and a blackened, greasy mass in the sizzling ashes . . .
SEVEN
Dale was sitting on the sofa next to Russ’s dad, turning the crank on the emergency hand-powered radio he’d set on the coffee table. “Early twentieth century tech coming to our rescue in the twenty-first century,” Dale said, chuckling, as he cranked. Russ looked out the picture window of Dale’s front room at the gray afternoon; the sea, far below, still flecked with floating debris, in the distance. Like the sea’s trophies, Russ thought. He noticed smoke curling up from the north end of the beach, near the old boat ramp. Maybe someone was burning debris.
“Okay,” Dale said, twiddling the dial. “Let’s see if we can get some news . . . I got this baby hooked to an old roof antenna, we should get something . . . ”
“What about everybody else hearing this?” Russ asked. “They should know.”
“We’ll tell them,” Dad said.
Antsy with apprehension, Russ remained standing, arms crossed over his chest, looking at the radio, as if that would somehow help him hear the news. The world seemed to be collapsing around him and just the fact that big media was still rolling, the talking heads still babbling, the tickers still ticking—it felt good to him. “I hope we get local reports,” he said. “Rescue efforts for—”
His dad shushed him—which Russ found irritating—as the voice of a female radio announcer said, “ . . . the death toll for the West Coast is expected to approach one million, and some estimates put it at three million . . . ”
“Oh God in heaven,” Dale breathed. “No.”
“For those who do survive, flooding due to storm surge is still ongoing. Most of the West Coast is without power and with extensive damage to highways just getting repair crews into the area is very, very difficult. Emergency medical aid is similarly limited. Clean water is a serious problem up and down the coast. Evacuations around damaged nuclear power plants are ongoing. We have had reports the Diablo Canyon plant is close to meltdown but this has not been confirmed. Estimates of the overall cost of the disaster are incalculable at this time . . . ”
“I don’t think this little town’s gonna get any kind of high priority from these people . . . ” Dale muttered. “Can’t blame ’em.”
The radio voice went on, “FEMA undersecretary Leonard Coolidge made this statement about half an hour ago: ‘We’re asking everyone to try and cope with the supplies they have for now. If you are near the sea, move inland in an orderly fashion . . . ’ ”
Dad snorted. “We’ll do that right away, Coolidge. Christ.”
Driving his extended-cab pickup through the twilight, Mario beside him, Ferrara almost felt like he was still clinging to that wooden island, the roof of his bar, with the waves sawing frantically around him. Chaos was still crowding him, now, as he drove up the hill—a kind of still-motion chaos—a whole block of burned houses. Just a few blocks back down the hill, the houses were damaged by undermining, half collapsed; a block below that it was all flattened debris, still wet from the tidal wave.
After the water had gone down, Ferrara and his brother had made their way to Ferrara’s house, just above the great wave’s high water line. Found the four-bedroom house partly burned. Looted. His golf clubs, some cash, guns, jewelry gone. Worse, his vintage T-Bird was missing. Some clothes remained, a few other things.
He and Mario cleaned up, got bandaged, spent the night in sleeping bags on air mattresses in the empty garage.
“Who you think is going to help you with this plan?” Mario asked.
“Cholo and Steve are kind of equipped for that kind of . . . heavy lifting.” Cholo and Steve were a couple of beefy types who worked at Ferrara’s brewery.
Mario looked at the burned houses, shook his head. “How’d that fire get going like that? We’re lucky it didn’t spread. ”
“Somebody set it, is what. Some gangbangers maybe. All the more reason we need our own muscle.”
Ferrara found Cholo and Steve about six blocks north, lolling on the roof of Steve’s house, drinking beer—halfway through a case of Ferrara’s Doublehit Ale, which they claimed they hadn’t stolen from the brewery. They sat there on the roof, looking down at the devastation like a couple of guys watching a football game in the park. Steve was a blond bohunk with a crooked nose, broke from his time as a ham-fisted boxer; Cholo was Indian-Mexican, an ex-Marine getting fat around the middle but with bulky shoulders. Dark blue tattoos on his neck and forearm of a winking, grinning vulture and the Marine Corps symbol. Ferrara pulled over, staring.
“What the hell you doing up there?” Ferrara asked, as he and Mario got out of the big glossy-black Ford pickup. “You guys work for me! There’s shit to be done! The real work’s starting right fucking now!”
“We’re off at the brewery today,” Cholo said. His voice sounded thin coming from the roof. “Don’t work today, boss.”
Ferrara wasn’t sure if he was serious. With that wide, inscrutable American Indian face, like something on an old-time nickel, you couldn’t much tell. “Work schedules washed away with that fucking wave. You got any guns in that house? We’re gonna need guns, water, anything you got. ”
“Yeah, sure, I got some stuff,” Steve said. “Guns and ammo, and a subscription to Guns and Ammo.”
Ferrara shook his head. Fucking smart asses. “How long you had that case of beer?”
“Bought it employee discount on Friday,” Steve said. “Why?”
“After the wave, somebody stole two fucking trailer-truckloads of beer from my fucking brewery and they took the fucking safe, and then the cocksuckers set a fire to cover shit up. So I lost the vats and all the grain too.”
The factory was about a quarter mile up the coast and a short ways inland, nestled in the shadow of rocky bluffs that cut off access north, if you weren’t a rock climber. The highway north was mostly knocked down, and blocked where it was intact—so someone from Freedom had looted his factory. And maybe they’d had help from an insider. Some brewery employee.
“You think we got two truckloads of beer back here?” Cholo had asked. “Where we be keeping that?”
“I’m not saying you did it,” Ferrara allowed. “Fucking VVs probably got it.” Valle Vatos, a Mexican gang. “My fucking brewery gone, my bar, my T-Bird—it’s too goddamn much.”
“Brewery’s insured, ain’t it?” Steve asked, looking out to sea. He sipped some beer.
“No, goddammit, I don’t do insurance. It’s a way the IRS keeps tabs. I stopped insuring about— Never mind, that’s none of your goddamn business . . . just get the guns! There’s somebody squatting in Mario’s house and we gotta get ’em out!”
“How you know somebody’s taken over Mario’s house?”
“Because he went up there and they took a shot at him and said to keep the fuck away!”
Cholo and Steve conferred in low tones, then Cholo shrugged. “Let’s do it.”
They got the guns, climbed into the back of the Ford four-by-four and drove a circuitous route to get past debris, up the hill to Mario’s place. It was at the crown of the hill, just west of a small woods of tall, wind-shaped firs between the house and the rugged, boulder strewn chaparral.
Ferrara pulled up, they got out of the truck—and someone fired from the side of the house, two shots that clanged into the pickup. Big caliber bullets were punching holes right through the passenger side door.
“Motherfucker!” Ferrara hissed, ducking down on the other side of the truck. In moments the other three scrambled around beside him, hunched for cover, peering past the hood and cab of the truck.
“Hey!” Ferrara yelled. “You in the house! Get the fuck out or we open fire!”
The only re
sponse was a hoarse bellowing: “Fuck off, we’re staying here till we don’t need to no more! Stay back!”
Another shot, whining off the pavement in front of the truck, this time from a window. Ferrara raised his .45 semi-auto pistol, and fired back twice. The window shattered. No other response. The gunshots echoed across the quiet town.
“Shit, Lon, that’s my house!” Mario muttered.
“And that’s my fucking truck they just shot.”
He and Mario were hunched behind the hood of the big black pickup, on the driver’s side—the truck was turned parallel to the front of Mario’s house
“You can go out the back!” Ferrara shouted. “Go through the woods, get the fuck out! But that’s my brother’s house! Get the hell out of it!”
Another two shots, overhead this time, and whooping laughter from the house. Ferrara raised his gun to return fire—and his brother put a restraining hand on his wrist.
“Lon—Antony could be in there. I don’t know where the hell he went. Maybe he didn’t get out of town. They could have him prisoner.”
Ferrara growled to himself, but Mario had a point. His nephew Antony, Mario’s son, could be in there. So they waited. Minutes passed.
And here they were. Seemed like a half hour watching the house. Cholo with the 30.06 rifle, Ferrara and Steve with the semi-auto pistols, Mario with a shotgun and revolvers and ammo they’d taken from what was left of Ferrara’s place, his house on the northern side of the hill, overlooking the ruins of the brewery. Lon Ferrara’s house was above the high water mark of the big wave, but somehow in all the chaos it caught fire—maybe one of the local gangs again, fucking around—and most of the house had burned. His gun cabinet had been locked up in his garage though, hidden behind a false wall because he knew, sooner or later, the liberal government was going to come and take his guns away if he didn’t hide them. So no one had seen the guns when they’d taken his classic T-Bird out of his locked garage.