by John Shirley
“Stand-offs are bullshit,” Steve said, now, as they peered over the truck. No sign of life from the house. But no way they could just decide the squatters had left. “I mean—they could use the time to flank us.”
Ferrara nodded, wondering if Antony Ferrara was in the house. Maybe the same gang that had reamed out his brewery was in there. Maybe the same fuckers who had started a fire at his house, and stolen his T-Bird. For all he knew the T-Bird was parked out back. Could be the fuckers who stole it were in his brother’s house, here, right now.
“I can see my son’s dirt bike in the garage there,” Mario said, his voice hoarse with worry. He was pretty het up about his kid. The boy had been visiting from college, hanging out with a friend his age, a dirt-bike buddy. Mario hadn’t seen him since the big wave.
There was another possibility that hadn’t been spoken about out loud. That these pricks in Mario’s house had killed the boy.
“Well,” Steve said. “There’s no cops to call . . . So . . . I guess it’s on us . . . ”
Ferrara looked sharply at Steve. “What are you saying, with that ‘no cops’ remark?”
Steve looked quizzically at him, eyebrows raised. “Just that it means we’re stuck with doing something about this ourselves.”
Ferrara stared. Maybe Steve hadn’t meant it that way, but he figured some people were going to blame him if there were looters, gangs out of control, after the wave. He’d stopped the bond measures that paid for cops in Freedom; for the fire department, for emergency services.
He’d had a plan and it hadn’t worked out. Well, now he had a new plan. And that plan was going to hit the town like the tsunami, only this wave was going to be a good purging, a good way to cleanse and start over. He was going to change the town from the bottom up. Because he’d lost everything. The bar, the brewery, his other businesses—all wrecked.
He had to recoup. He was going to take it all back. This was his chance to remake Freedom, get rid of the last ties to the welfare state.
“I gotta get in, see if they’ve got my son in there,” Mario said. But he made no move. They could feel someone watching them. Someone who’d shot at them already.
But Ferrara was sick of this. His back hurt from hunching down. Maybe they could come at the place from the side . . .
“Someone coming out,” Cholo observed.
“Hey!” the guy yelled, from the front door. Just his head poking out a bit. Skinny guy, hair slicked back. “Coming out to parlay, talk shit over! Don’t shoot! There’s a lot more of us with guns in here! Don’t fucking shoot or they’ll open up on you!”
“That’s Mike Sten,” Steve said. “Runs with that crazy fuck Dickie.”
“I don’t know him,” Ferrara said. “Not personally. Seen him around.” He lifted his head up a bit, and shouted, “Come on out, keep your hands where we can see them!”
Sten came out, hands raised. No gun visible. But he probably had one in his waistband, behind.
He walked slowly toward them, squinting in the light. Smirking a little, it seemed to Ferrara. He stopped about five paces from the truck.
“Okay I put my hands down?”
Ferrara nodded, keeping his pistol trained on Sten. “But you reach behind you, I shoot. Now—you know who I am?”
“Sure.” Sten’s mouth twisted with some unspoken irony. “You’re the mayor.”
Ferrara sometimes rejected the title, though he’d campaigned for it; other times he wore it proudly, if it served his purposes. This time, he needed all the authority he could muster. “You bet your skinny ass I am, Sten. You know whose property you lowlifes are squatting in? Mine. Mine and my brother’s—I own it, he lives there. Not you.”
“Sorry. Emergency situation. Got to do what we can to survive in this, you know, emergency shit. We ain’t giving up anything we don’t have to.”
“Yeah? Like my Thunderbird?”
“Your what? There a Thunderbird on this property? You sure hid it good.”
“Not here. Someone stole it from . . . okay, that wasn’t you. You guys break into my brewery?”
“Naw, that was Jorge. Him and his brothers, they split off from the VVs. Just three or four of them, holed up on the north edge of town. Don’t come out much. We saw the fire, saw ’em go by after.”
Ferrara nodded to himself. Looking around after discovering the burned out brewery, Ferrara had found a neighbor, an old man, said he’d seen some Mexicans drive a truck up the road not long after the big wave hit.
“Those Crystal Mexes around?” Cholo asked, glancing nervously around. “I mean—there must be a hundred of those guys.”
“Not around here there aren’t,” Sten said. “Just Jorge’s little crowd. Four of ’em. Like I said, he’s on the outs with the VVs. Most of the Mexes are way east. Stuck on the other side of the hills, with the road blocked. You want your shit, talk to Jorge. But they’ll probably blow your head off you come close. We were nice to you guys, see—we fired warning shots.” He grinned. “We’re like, civilized.”
“You civilized enough to get the hell out of my brother’s house now?” Ferrara asked.
“Naw, man. Emergency. And you guys are being covered right fucking now, you know. Don’t be shooting at me.”
“You got any hostages in there?” Ferrara asked. “Couple of young men?”
Sten shook his head. “No hostages. No prisoners.”
“Hey—you seen ’em, at all?” Mario put in, looking at the garage, then back at Sten. “Couple of college kids. My son Antony was staying here, in the house you’re in, right there—he went out yesterday morning, camping, had another guy with him, kid about the same age. College sweatshirts?”
Sten looked at him a long, blank moment. Something too flat and steady in that look, Ferrara decided. Finally Sten said. “Nope. Ain’t seen ’em. No Antonys, no college kids.”
“I get that we got an emergency situation here,” Lon Ferrara said. “But what makes you think you can just take over the house and shoot at people come to claim it?”
“Like you say—emergency,” Sten said. “But I’m not here to apologize, Mr. Mayor. I came here with an offer.”
“What kind of offer?”
“Dickie, he’s had another vision.”
“A what?”
“That’s sort of how he figures out what to do. He has visions. And he says you and him should partner up. He knows you’ve got your peeps. And he knows you’ve got plans. Says he’s been watching and thinking on you for a while. Says your peeps aren’t enough. You’re going to need some . . . militia. To help you out. Act as your point men, out there, till this thing blows over, right? Lot of property available, all of a sudden, with people swept out to sea. Valuable stuff’s being dug out of the mud. There’s cars that won’t be claimed. All kinds of stuff. Jewelry. We can make a deal . . . ”
Ferrara was surprised. He’d expected a trade, like they’d leave peacefully if he’d let them go with no trouble, something like that. But a partnership?
If the VVs had looted his brewery, and gotten his T-Bird, that made them the primary enemy. And Dickie might be the ally he’d need. Not only for the VVs. There was another reason.
To put the fear of God into people who were likely to stand up against him, when he carried out his plan.
“Okay,” Ferrara said. “Tell Dickie we’ll talk about that. We might work something out—short term.”
EIGHT
The sun was a blazing red-orange oval on the sea, melting into sunset, replicating in the windows, and Russ, searching through the damaged houses at the water line for survivors, was feeling tired and hungry.
They’d been at it all day, digging people out. Putting the bodies in the corpse houses. Treating the survivors. Giving the badly injured ones the Vicodin, other prescription painkillers they’d scrounged from medicine cabinets in abandoned homes. Making up lists of the dead, for later. The list included the sheriff. They’d found him in his inverted car, half buried in the sand on the beach.
Hanging in there upside down.
Russ was trying not to think about some things he’d seen. The memories were like bruised muscles—if you tried them, they punished you with their aching.
He’d been drawn to a ranch-style house mostly covered with slimy mud, drawn there—drawn to it and wanting to run from it, at the same time—by a yipping, an intermittent high pitched whimpering. His dad arriving at the same time, wearing the green rubber wading boots he’d scavenged from the house of a dead crab fisherman: the man’s forty-foot ketch, with a pile of smashed crab pots, dropped by the tsunami through the roof of his garage to crush him at his workbench.
Dad had found the large collie, toward the back of the house, its lower half badly crushed, blood bubbling from its jaws, under a collapsed wall. Dad had patted the dog’s head with one hand, the other hand cutting its throat with a box cutter.
They’d had to dispatch a lot of wounded pets. Others, rescued, were in a series of abandoned back yards near Dad’s apartment building.
But this one—the collie . . .
Russ turned away, dropped his tools, and just walked away from it all for a good hour.
A little later: A gasping, semiconscious young woman trapped in her slime-swamped Audi, mud up to her neck. People digging her out. Finding that her belly was sheared open by a big shard of metal from the car door, mud crammed up inside her, she hadn’t lived long after they’d dug her out. Russ had made the mistake of letting her get a grip on his hand as she lay dying. Just couldn’t bring himself to break the grip. Had to watch her die.
Later still. Two children, a small boy and girl, in an attic. Dead beside their father—their dad had shot them and then himself as the muddy water began to fill the attic. And it had receded before they’d have been drowned. But by then . . .
Russ made the mistake of looking into the little boy’s dead, staring eyes . . .
Brand had asked him to help move the bodies but he’d gone floundering out of there, and found the whisky bottle he’d hidden . . . and made himself sick drinking it too fast.
Dad finally had to crash for a while; Brand was taking his place, him and Dale Carter, the older black guy who’d helped make Dr. Spuris stay. Spuris, though, had all but collapsed, and was snoring away in his house. Lucia Greia, the retired nurse, tirelessly making splints, setting bones, comforting. She was a small woman, but seemed indefatigable. Spuris had done everything under duress and it seemed to Russ that Lucia did a better job than the doctor anyway. But there were some people you couldn’t really help. Some . . .
. . . her belly was sheared open, mud crammed up inside her . . .
“Hey Russ . . . ” Brand, coming over a pile of rubble, smiling.
“You see Pendra around?” Russ asked.
“She’s okay. She was helping Lucia but it seemed like she was going to collapse so we sent her to take a nap. I found some juice, hasn’t gone bad. Not too bad. Some kind of tropical punch, you want some?”
“Sure.” Russ took the bottle gratefully. Wished he could mix in some of the whiskey he’d hidden in that shoebox.
Russ glanced over at Lars. The aging hippie was across the street, peeing against the partly-standing wall of a stucco house. Still wearing that same marijuana-leaf tee shirt. Which maybe he didn’t change much even before the tsunami.
“Got to figure out about sewage,” Brand said, visibly shivering. A cold breeze had picked up with the sunset. They all had on at least two layers of clothing. “There’s that compost toilet concept.”
“Lot of people are just digging holes in back yards. I was thinking—the pipes out to sewage treatment—are they broken?”
“Some of them. Lots of them don’t seem to be. But there’s no water for flushing.”
“Well—what if we filled up some containers with seawater? We could run it through screens to get out the worst of the mud or whatever, and then keep buckets of seawater around in the houses, use it in the toilet tanks for flushing?”
Brand stared at him. “What a great idea! We’re gonna organize that for sure!”
Russ shrugged as if it were no big deal but, aware he was milking Brand’s approval, he went on, “It’d make the cholera Dad worries about less likely. For a while.”
“Yeah! Come on, let’s go up, tell people about that. And we can help out pulling down the blockage.” He grinned. “Or maybe help even more by staying out of the way.”
Brand turned and went back up the hill, Russ started after him. “That blockage on Seaward Road? They find some dynamite?”
“No, Dale’s got it figured we can—” He broke off, and they both turned and looked out to sea, drawn by the drone of an aircraft. Russ saw it first: a military seaplane, dipping out of the clouds, about a quarter-mile out, heading south.
“Hey!” Russ yelled, waving. Realizing it was pointless to yell, no way the guy could hear him.
He shielded his eyes against the glare of the setting sun, watched the plane head south. And vanish in mist.
Brand growled, shaking his head. “You’d think they could come and look at us up a bit closer anyway. But nothing. Not even a flyover. One chopper this morning, didn’t even circle. I mean Jesus fucking Christ. There are people dying up in the gym.” They’d moved the worst-injured to the school gym, up by the Seaward Road blockade, to get them closer to the rescuers they kept expecting from Deer Creek.
They continued up the rubble-edged street. Russ suddenly feeling much tireder, much colder. A feeling of hopelessness making him feel like he was shrinking inside his skin.
Brand glanced at him, seeming to sense his mood.
“Listen, I’m bitching, sure, but we’ve got to remember all the other people who’re hurting, up and down the coast. The radio said there was a fault-line they didn’t even know about out in the Pacific, east of Hawaii. Who knows what was caught in the wave, between here and Hawaii. Islands, ships. Then it hits the coast for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The whole Richmond District in San Francisco was pretty much wiped out. Eventually they’ll be here, I guess, but meanwhile . . . ”
“Meanwhile we fend for ourselves. But what about those people at Deer Creek?”
“They’ll come. They have to know we need help. Deer Creek’ll be organizing a caravan of volunteers to take our injured out. But they can’t just dynamite that barricade.”
“Why?”
“Because—they need to have engineers make sure no one gets hurt on our side first. Even if we stay way back—it’s downhill from there, you could have all that stuff roll down on people.”
“Yeah, but meantime people die from neglect!” Russ thought about the two hours he’d spent that morning helping out in the gym. He’d had to leave, finally, look for something else helpful to do. He couldn’t deal with the misery, the suffering, the feeling of helplessness in that room. People begging for relief from pain. For help he couldn’t give. He’d felt guilty, leaving. But he hadn’t been much use to anyone.
“Anyway we’re gonna take the ball and run with it—try to pull down the barricade with chains and trucks.”
“Pull it down? We can do that?”
“Dale is an engineer, turns out. He’s out of work, came up here to sell his summer place, got caught out by the tsunami. He’s got it figured that if we can pull out some of those big logs at the bottom, the thing should partly collapse, enough to get some vehicles through. There’s some risk, the trucks we use to pull it down could get crushed. We’ve scrounged enough big chains to try it, but . . . the damn chains aren’t very long.”
“What happened to those two guys who were gonna go for help on their dirt bikes?”
“No one’s heard from them. Could have been caught by the VVs.”
“Who?”
“Valle Vatos. Local people call them Crystal Mexes. Most of them are out east of here but there might be a few in town. There’s a guy named Jorge, gets into arson for the fun of it. They’re the reason a lot of people are carrying their shotguns around. Them and Dickie’s Sand
Scouts.”
“Sand Scouts. You going to tell me who that is?”
“Just another gang. Smaller. Maybe ten or twelve of them all told. There’s a hardcore group you see around town, five or six of that bunch. This guy Dickie’s their leader. Was in the Sea Scouts growing up so he named his gang the Sand Scouts. Thinks the name’s real funny. If we’d had enough real cops here, Dickie’d be in jail by now. And now we haven’t got any at all . . . ”
“So—maybe we should all be carrying weapons.”
“I don’t know. I’d hate to get too paranoid. But maybe. Just don’t think we’re really as forgotten here as it seems like. People are probably working on it.”
“Yeah, but . . . All those people, dead. Nothing anyone can do about that. I mean—I don’t know what my point is. It just makes me feel so . . . ” He hesitated. Wondering why he felt so comfortable, opening up to Brand. In a way he couldn’t with his dad.
“Feel so . . . ?” Brand prompted, gently.
“Like we’re nothing. Less than gnats under a sledgehammer.”
Brand smiled crookedly. “Not less than that. Human beings manage to do more damage to the world than gnats. But I know what you mean. I feel the same way a helluva lot. Insignificant. Times like this—” He half-turned, gestured vaguely at the wreckage down below them. They could smell the dead animals, pets caught in the wave, fish dumped by it. Half-a-dozen human bodies washed up on the beach. “You look around and think: so much for denial. Now we can see our real situation. Insignificant, temporary, and . . . it can feel meaningless.”
“It is meaningless.” Russ remembered a little boy dying in the gym that morning. Ten years old, kept asking for his mother. Russ had gone to get some water for the boy and when he’d come back, the kid was dead. Internal injuries, Spuris said. The feeling of meaninglessness, the perception of randomness as a tyrannical king over existence, had swept over Russ then. “Those bodies on the beach. You know what I was thinking—they’re seafood for seafood. I mean, that’s what we are, right? We’re worm food on the land, seafood for sea creatures out at sea.”