by John Shirley
Brand’s smile was cynical but somehow sympathetic. “I know what you mean. I kind of think we have to make our own meaning. Until we find some kind of . . . of metaphysical meaning. When we put a broken town back together, we’re making things a little more meaningful and . . . well . . . that kind of meaning is all we can be sure we have. But it can be enough, I guess.” He grimaced. “I’m not much use at looking on the bright side. If you only knew. I’m sorry I’m not more . . . I mean, I should be talking more positively.”
Russ chuckled. “If you were, I wouldn’t trust you, man. But one thing I . . . what?”
Brand was staring open-mouthed into a space between two houses. Russ turned to look, saw a woman sitting there, leaning back, motionless, against the house closer to the sea. Was she dead? But then she moved her right leg, just slightly. She was a tall slender woman in a dirty, tattered jogging suit, She wore mismatched sandals, her long flaxen hair awkwardly bunched on top of her head.
“Jill?” Brand called. “Jill!”
They went to crouch beside her, and she opened her eyes, squinting at them. “Who’s that?” she rasped.
“It’s Brand—oh! You haven’t got your glasses!”
“No, I . . . I was in the wave, lost ’em . . . ” Her voice was a husky whisper. “I was . . . on Ferrara’s roof. Up there with him and Mario. Been making my way up here for some time. I was sick . . . yesterday I guess. Still kind of feverish. Had to find some clothes to wear. I just hid out till I felt better but I’m . . . ”
“Oh Jesus, you’ve been on your own? Didn’t that prick take care of you?”
She chuckled raspily. “I slipped off the roof. Into the water. Neither one of them—Lon nor his brother—lifted a finger to help me back on. Haven’t seen ’em since . . . But I can’t see much. I was kind of reluctant to move around . . . all alone. Half blind like this.”
“Is your place intact? It was up the hill a ways.”
“I’m not sure. I couldn’t get over there. There’s all kinds of debris . . . ”
“Jesus, Jill—come on, let’s take you where you can stretch out, get some food.” He helped her stand. “Oh shit I should’ve asked—you got any broken bones?”
“No, don’t think so. Bruises, and I lost a tooth. And I’m half blind. But . . . so many other people . . . I swallowed a bunch of . . . I don’t know, mud and . . . Can’t hardly talk . . . ”
“This is Russ, Jill, Drew’s boy. Let him take your other arm. Come on. Just come on with us.”
NINE
Midmorning—and Nella’s flash of hope went out like a fizzled fuse.
She was on a windy, mostly barren hilltop with the others, under aluminum-gray cloud cover. Dickie and the Grummons and Sten and Lon Ferrara and his boys. The men wore long black and orange fire fighter’s coats, taken from a storage shed on the brewery property. They wore the coats against the weather and to cover up their weapons. Kind of gave them an almost official look too.
Ferrara had said it was lucky the VVs hadn’t gotten into the storage shed—and lucky none of the townspeople knew about it. Ferrara had hoarded a few old boxes of town supplies in there—stuff other people would have appropriated, if they’d known. Nella wondered, though, what the other people in town were going to do when they found out the mayor had been keeping town stuff on his private property, and not handing it out to people.
Nella was huddled in a ski jacket she’d found in Mario’s closet, her hair whipping in the intermittent wind, her nose stinging. Wondering how she’d gotten here. She felt like she’d been just swept along to this hillside, like the refuse carried by the wave.
The shrubby, boulder-strewn hill was on the east side of the barricade deposited by the tsunami. The “barricade” was a three-story-high blockage of debris left there when the Big Wave had pushed a flood up Seaward Road, the highway east. The wave had crested on the hills to either side of the road, but crashed between them as if through a break in a dike, carrying everything that would float, and it had blocked up the only intact road out of town with enormous logs, pieces of boats, the occasional small car, the wreckage from houses, furniture, mattresses, tires. Fish and flotsam, kelp and corpses. The roads to the north and south along the coast were just gone for long stretches, slapped down off the cliff by the wave. The beaches ended in cliffs. The only way out of Freedom was cliff-climbing or overland on faint animal trails wending between outcroppings of granite and sandstone—or along Seaward Road, if you could get past the tsunami’s barricade.
Nella had traipsed mechanically over the hills behind Freedom, straggling after the others. The hike had been mostly uphill, a couple or three miles, and they were footsore. But Ferrara had insisted they had to know what was happening with Deer Creek. His timing had been good. When she first got to that low hilltop, Nella felt a flash of hope, seeing that caravan of trucks and vans and ambulances and fire trucks coming from the east, arriving at the blockage in the pass to the coast.
But now, tired and cold, she felt drained of ambition; felt pretty sure these men wouldn’t let her go down to the people on that road, five hundred yards away.
She was trying not to look at Lon Ferrara. Ferrara had said, earlier, “What’s she doing with us? She won’t be much use.”
“Hell she’s some use to me, now and then!” Dickie had said and everyone had laughed except, of course, Nella.
But Nella hadn’t felt anything, hearing Dickie say that.
She thought: That should bother me, shouldn’t it?
But what he said didn’t bother her. What bothered her was Ferrara’s glowering appraisal, whenever they’d stopped for a rest on the trail to get here. Ferrara looking at her with that mix of want-you and hate-the-sight-of-you. Made her feel more scared, more vulnerable. Like in a dream of being naked in public.
But in the sight of the eye watching from above, she was always naked. The eye looked right through her skin. She could almost, almost see the eye when she looked up at the clouds. The watching eye was beyond the clouds but she could feel it looking through them—it could look through anything. She could feel it and she could almost see it. And when she thought about it she realized there were two eyes, two of them made of brass, looking at her upside down . . .
And then another flicker of hope—mingled with a shudder of startlement—as, boom, crash, thump, the barricade started to fall in on itself. It was being pulled down, undermined, it looked like, from the other side, the town side.
Nella caught herself thinking that maybe she could go with those people in the emergency vehicles; maybe she could ride with them back to Deer Creek.
“Yeah, see, it’s the chains on those trucks,” Steve said, adding, “Over in Freedom.” He’d gone earlier to see what the town rescue groups were doing. “Maybe we oughta . . . ” He broke off, seeing Ferrara glaring at him.
“We’re going to do our own organizing for this community,” Ferrara said, squinting at the dust cloud rising from the falling barricade. And frowning when they heard a thin chorus of cheers from the road.
“Looks like the authorities is in town,” Cholo said glumly, staring down at the emergency vehicles from Deer Creek. Including three cop cars.
“You know what, I can deal with that,” Ferrara said. “They’re here to take the injured out—let ’em do it. That’s more we don’t have to deal with. I’m gonna go have a talk with those boys. Chief Fetzer is down there for sure, from Deer Creek fire department. He’s mayor of that town too. He’s the real power in Deer Creek—runs the place as much as anybody. I’ll work it with him—we’ll make sure Freedom is good and bottled up.”
Dickie’s eyes crinkled and he chuckled to himself. Then he put on a fake look of puzzlement. “But, mayor—if you bottle it up, doesn’t that fuck with the ‘freedom’ concept? You know, full-on liberty, do what you want, and all? If you keep the people in the town, isn’t that . . . not so damn free?”
Ferrara stared at him, face going red. The wind blew his hair around as if its motio
n were part of his anger. “What the fuck are you saying?” Ferrara demanded. “Whose side you on? We got a deal or not?”
Dickie winked at the Grummons and they burst into laughter. Sten just gave that wolfish grin. “Hey, I’m just fucking with you, man. Like I give a flying fuck about their freedom. Sure we got a deal. But right now I’m gonna get off this cold-ass hill. My balls are clinking together like ice cubes in a fucking cocktail.”
With that, Dickie turned to go, still chortling, jerking his head at Nella like, Come on.
She hung back. But she thought: They’ll never let me go with those people, to Deer Creek . . .
“Hold it, Dickie,” Ferrara said, gesturing to his men. Mario and Steve and Cholo stepped up close beside Ferrara.
Dickie paused, looked back at him. Quiet and serious now. “There’s cops down there on that road. I’m not staying up here.” He looked steadily at Ferrara. Finally adding, “Lon.”
“Don’t expect you to stay here. But if we got a deal, then you take directions from me. What I need you to do now is get back over those hills, and wait for my signal. You got that walkie-talkie?”
Dickie looked at Ferrara like he was thinking of telling him to fuck himself.
Nella knew Dickie was just biding his time. She knew he wouldn’t put up with Ferrara forever. Probably Dickie figured he needed some kind of semi-legal cover for his vision to come true. And that’s what Ferrara would give him for a while. Camouflage. Backup. Till the time came . . .
Nella knew Dickie and she could see all this going through his mind.
Finally, he said, “Yeah, I got the walkie-talkie . . . ” He patted his coat pocket. “So?”
The walkie-talkies, not much bigger than cell phones, had belonged to Mario—he’d used them to talk to hunters he went out with, on hunting trips. They weren’t good for a long distance, but within the confines of Freedom, or close by, they’d pick you up. Lon had one, and Dickie, and Mario, and Sten.
“So—you turn it on, Dickie, when you get over there by that high school gymnasium. Keep an eye on what’s going on there. But keep out of sight. And I’ll get in touch when I’ve worked up a plan.”
“Sure. Long as we understand everything we take in, we split. Like we talked about.”
“That’s the deal,” Ferrara said, turning to squint down at the road again.
There was a big creaking sound from the pass, followed by a clack and crunch and series of thumps—and a twenty-foot boat went tumbling down from the barricade, rolling sideways, falling to the gravel shoulder of Seaward Road and splitting open—six or seven yards from the nearest ambulance waiting on the highway below with its lights flashing.
“They’re gonna get through pretty soon,” Sten observed. “Big mess, but they can start moving people out of Freedom.”
Ferrara nodded. “Cholo and Steve and Mario—you fellas wait up here. Watch my back. You others go on with Dickie. I’m going down to talk to the chief—”
“Lon?” Mario said suddenly. “Uh-uh. I’m coming with you.”
Ferrara looked startled, Nella thought, to hear his brother contradict him. “Mario—just do what I tell you, we got an emergency here—”
Mario shook his head. “My son’s missing. And his friend Roger.”
He glanced at Dickie. Who was following the exchange closely, eyes narrowed.
Mario suspects, Nella thought.
“I’m going down there to see if they’ve got my son,” Mario went on, looking down at the caravan of cars and trucks and emergency vehicles pulled up on the road below. “Maybe he’s with them—helping out. That’d be like him.” His voice broke. “Just like him. Or he could be on one of those stretchers. He could be . . . they could know where he is . . . ”
Lon stared at him. Finally he nodded, quickly. “Come on, then. Let’s do it.”
Nella cleared her throat. “Can I . . . can I go down too—and see if I can help, or . . . ” She licked her lips, dried out by the wind. Then she said it all in a rush: “Can I go down there with you, Lon? Please?”
Say yes. If she didn’t go down to the road with Ferrara, Dickie would stop her from going.
Ferrara glanced at her, surprised, shook his head. “No, no, I need to control how all this looks.”
Meaning, she knew, Ferrara thought she was too much of a skank to go down there with him.
She turned, saw Dickie scowling at her. “Come on, Nella. I told you. You’re coming with us.”
She could run, maybe. Down that hill. They wouldn’t shoot her in front of all those cops.
But then what?
She’d be on her own. No one to protect her. It wasn’t like she could trust cops. And probably Dickie’d find her in Deer Creek, in time. He’d be afraid she’d talk about what she’d seen. He’d track her and kill her. And Ronnie, if he was alive, was probably somewhere in Freedom.
So finally she just nodded and turned away from the road—feeling the last little spark of hope burn out as she did it.
I’m making a mistake, Nella thought, walking with Dickie and Sten, back down the other side of the hill. But it was the side away from the people on Seaward Road and it was too late to run now.
“You sure about that, Lon?” Fetzer asked, looking at Ferrara with lifted eyebrows.
The two of them were standing on the asphalt edge of Seaward Road, in the cluster of emergency vehicles. Cops in slickers and firemen and paramedics bustled near the volunteers from Freedom already moving the injured into the vehicles. A stench of briny decay blew from the half-fallen barricade of mud-caked debris.
Chief Fetzer was a tall, slope-shouldered man with a big head and a chin to match it, a red face—he liked his bourbon—and an immaculate blue fire chief’s uniform. The uniform kept changing color because the lights on the ambulance nearby were flashing red, blue, red, blue, so it’d go kind of purple and then blue and then purple again.
“Sure I’m sure,” Ferrara said, buttoning his coat up against the keening wind. He was glad he’d left the shotguns and rifles back at the house. The only weapons on him and his men were pistols, hidden under their coats.
“I was thinking we’d take these people into Deer Creek,” Fetzer went on, sounding like he was thinking aloud. “We’ve got just enough room, with the volunteer vehicles, for most of your injured, maybe all of them. And then we can come back and evacuate everybody else.”
“It’s the come back part we don’t need, Chief. The road’s open now. We still have a lot of working vehicles on our side of the hill. We’ll take people out, ones who want to go, when the time comes. But we have to check them out first. Sort out who’s who . . . what’s what.”
Ferrara winced inwardly, aware that he wasn’t making too much sense.
Fetzer stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. “Sure getting cold. Damp cold too.” He looked at the sky. “Might rain.” He looked sharply at Ferrara. “Your people don’t have power for heat or lights over there, I wouldn’t think, Lon. No clean water. And FEMA’s busy as hell, down the coast—going to take them a long time to get to you.”
“We got it covered. You know us, we like to be self-sufficient in Freedom. We’re grateful you’re taking the injured people. We find any more, we’ll send someone through to let you know. But we don’t want anyone running out of town right now—there’s law enforcement considerations. We got looters who’re trying to get out of town with their stolen goods, Chief. You can tell the sheriff for me—we’re not gonna let ’em do it. We need to check everybody out before they leave town. All except the injured.”
“Didn’t get them out any too soon. Must’ve been rough as hell over there for you, pulling people out of the rubble and mud, the last couple days.”
“Sure it was,” Ferrara said, glancing away. “Busted my ass doing it. But we’ve got it covered now. Just keep your vehicles back, let us do our own policing. We’ve got police officers over there.”
“Do you? Didn’t see any. Just a lot of volunteers carrying people through. Goin
g back for more. Working hard, those people. We could go in there and help out, when we get your injured to the hospital.”
Fetzer glanced over at Mario who was talking to paramedics, checking the injured coming from Freedom. Ferrara knew Mario was looking for his son.
“Not necessary,” Ferrara said. “Look, Chief—am I the mayor of Freedom or not?”
“Last I heard.”
“Then probably the mayor’d know what the town needs, right?
“Um—yeah.”
Fetzer didn’t seem convinced. They’d argued, once before, about politics—about necessary infrastructure. Ferrara didn’t want that can of worms opened.
“Okay, so, Chief—let me handle it. Like I say, I’ll send somebody through to get you folks if we need more help. You don’t want to be overwhelmed by refugees, right?”
“Well—it’s not just up to me. But I know Sheriff Williams is concerned about protecting Deer Creek from . . . what would you call it, from looters, problem refugees from the coast. Like they had in New Orleans after Katrina. The VVs worry us. And those Sand Scouts.” He raked a hand thoughtfully through his graying, wind-tousled hair. “Yeah. I expect the sheriff’ll be glad to let it go at that. For now anyway . . . ” Fetzer shrugged and turned away. “I’ve got to see how we’re doing. These people are hurting, over here.” He started toward the men pushing gurneys, toting the injured to the emergency vehicles. Calling out to a man at the back of an ambulance:
“Reuben! You got the morphine going?”
“About run out!” the paramedic responded.
“Well, let’s go, let’s get some more out!”
“I’m opening up a fresh box right now, Chief!”
“Chief!” Ferrara called. “One more thing.”
Already ten paces away, Chief Fetzer stopped, turned to look wearily back at Ferrara. “Yeah?”
Ferrara strode up to him, leaned close to speak in a confidential tone. “Do me a favor, there, Chief—and don’t make any announcements on what we talked about. I’ve got to think about crowd control. This is an emergency. You know how it is. People don’t like to be told where to go but in an emergency . . . Got to do it.”