Red Lightning

by John Varley

  I joined Travis and we each took a boot. I had thought the blackness around the remains of the dude’s head was dried blood. It was flies. They swarmed up as we pulled him, like they were angry at us. There’s some big flies in Florida.

  We got him off to the side of the road, and I walked on a few steps away from Scrooge and puked. I don’t throw up as easy as Elizabeth does; it’s a gut-wrenching, exhausting business for me. It took a few minutes. When I straightened up I saw Travis wiping his mouth. He gave me a faint grin.

  “Join the club,” he said.

  “I thought . . .”

  “What, that I’m tough? Nah. I’ve never seen anything like this. I was never in combat, I was a flyboy, out in space. But the guys who have seen it have told me that . . . not that you get used to it, you don’t ever want to do that, but that it gets easier.”

  And it did. I didn’t puke again. I think the puking part of you gets numb, you switch into another gear or something, or you store the sights and smells away in some other part of your mind. That’s what I did.

  I got back into Scrooge and sat by my mother. She put her arm around me and hugged me tight. It felt good.

  TRAVIS HAD PICKED up a soggy booklet with a bright orange cover from the ground before we got moving again. Soon we were seeing them by the thousands. They were air-dropped leaflets advising people what to do, in the simplest and starkest possible terms.

  There was the obvious stuff: boil all water, even if you’re only going to wash in it. Sewage had contaminated everything, typhoid and cholera were distinct possibilities, as well as dysentery. Sterilize cans before you open them. Basic first-aid instructions, in English and Spanish, with simple illustrations.

  I wondered if everyone was taking the time to boil their water. I hoped so, but there was so much to do, and quite a few Americans couldn’t read. Maybe the pictures would be enough. And there was plenty of firewood around.

  The authorities were now advocating cremations rather than mass burials for bodies that couldn’t be gotten to reefer trucks before they got too ripe.

  Travis asked Mom to read the booklet aloud to the rest of us. One part of it stands out in my memory.

  “They say here that, if possible, you should pull some head hairs from a body before you burn it. Get the roots, it says. Put the sample in a plastic bag and write on it where you found the body, age, race, and sex if you can tell, and how you disposed of it, and give the baggie to your ‘neighborhood disaster coordinator, ’ whatever that is.”

  “Maybe that guy we talked to back there,” Dad said.

  WE PULLED UP to a knot of cars strewn across the road. There was a gap, but it was too narrow for the broad-hipped Scrooge to get through. Travis pulled up close and nudged one of the cars with the nose of the Duck and it moved a little, then jammed tight. He turned off the engine to conserve fuel.

  “No good,” he said. “I wish I’d had time to install some sort of ’dozer blade on the front of this thing, but I figured it wasn’t worth the extra time. And I can’t push too hard on stuff like this or it might poke a hole in the hull.”

  So no bulldozer, but we did have two big Earthies and six game but gravity-lagged Martians. We also had a powerful vehicle, chains, and block and tackle. Combine that with a lot of sweat, and you can move a lot of things.

  The rest of that day was spent moving cars, mostly. We’d attach a heavy chain to one and then to Scrooge, and Travis would tug it out of the jam, then another, then another. Sometimes we had to loop the chain around a fire hydrant or street sign embedded in concrete to get it to move sideways. After we’d cleared a path we Martians would take turns walking ahead of Scrooge, our job being to kick most of the loose lumber out of the way, being sure there was none with nails poking up.

  We saw bodies here and there, mostly so tangled up in the wreckage you could hardly tell that’s what they were.

  We came to a big stack of cars, three high. I climbed up and looked inside. Nobody there. I looped the chain around the doorposts of the top car, climbed back down and stood well back—Travis had warned us the chain could snap, and pop like a whip—and Dad reversed Scrooge and the car toppled off the stack and was dragged back out of the way. I climbed back up again and looked inside. Bad idea. There were six people in there, looking about what you’d expect corpses to look after seven days in hot weather. If you have no idea what that would look like, good for you. Try to keep it that way.

  I controlled my stomach, hooked up the chain, and got down again. Dad dragged it off and over to one side, and I never looked at it again. Just another day’s work.

  WHEN THE SUN reached the horizon in the west, we had gone two hard miles into no-man’s-land. We had about another two miles to go to reach the ocean, and they promised to be harder.

  The battery-powered GPS map showed an elementary school off to the south, two streets over, and by standing up on one of the roll bars with the tarp rolled back I was just able to see it, on a low rise. It was a one-story sprawling brick building like a hundred others in that area, with two larger buildings that were probably an auditorium and a gym at either end of the classrooms.

  Travis turned off on a cleared street going south and we were immediately approached by four men with rifles, this time pointed right at us. They wanted to know our business. They were reasonably polite about it, but the rifles never wavered. We told them we were headed for the beach to check on our relatives. They examined our papers, compared pictures with faces on passports and drivers’ licenses. Travis’s major general’s stars didn’t exactly impress them, but did calm them. They pretty much ignored all our silly little deputy sheriff badges. Finally, they all lowered their weapons.

  “The baseball field over there is pretty clear,” the leader told us. “There’s a tennis court, too, you could park that thing there. We buried all the bodies we could find lying around here, and the ones in homes, but we haven’t got into the school itself. I wouldn’t go over there, if I was you. We’re fixing to start tackling that tomorrow. I’d rather cut off my own right arm than go in there, but the government hasn’t showed up, and it’s getting to be a health hazard.”

  “We won’t disturb them,” Travis assured them, and we were waved on.

  There was enough room to park Scrooge on the tennis court, and we were almost a hundred yards from the building. It was getting dark as Travis turned off the engine, and we all climbed down. He pulled the tarps off the supplies in the very back of the Duck and began tossing items over the side. After a short time of confusion we managed to get a large inflatable tent set up, not much different than the instant tents we used on Mars except not pressure-tight. There was a folding picnic table and gas grill, and boxes of canned food and bottled water, and even a cooler full of ice. It was all high-end camping stuff, brightly colored and sturdy.

  The Coleman lantern reflections on the few unbroken windows in the schoolhouse looked like the wandering ghosts of all the dead children inside.

  Don’t go there. Both literally and figuratively, just don’t go there.

  I lost track of how many hot dogs I ate. We were all like that, slapping one dog onto a bun and slathering it with mustard and slopping on the fiery chili even as we were cooking the next one. I’d eaten very little during the day and thrown up most of that. The good honest smoke of our fire smothered the less pleasant smells around us, and we ate like ravening dogs, all conversation ceasing, very little sound at all except the crackling of the fire and the snap of soda can pop-tops. I know it will sound odd to say this, but it was a very good time. Simple pleasures, good company, hearty appetite. The day’s worries behind us, tomorrow’s horrors temporarily put on hold. I wondered if it was something like what soldiers experience on the battlefield after surviving a day of fighting.

  What it wasn’t like was camping out on Mars, except for the shape of the tent. Martian Boy Scouts have mostly different merit badges, though we do learn to tie knots. It did take me back to my earlier boyhood, though, when m
y family camped out from time to time before we emigrated.

  We finally all sat back, cross-legged on the cool concrete, stuffed probably more than was wise.

  “This would be the time when we’d tell ghost stories,” Dad said, and looked at me for a moment. I knew our minds had gone down the same path.

  “Let’s don’t,” Mom said, and everybody agreed, including Dad. “I can’t see that it’s a good time for telling jokes, either. What else is there to do around the campfire?”

  Surprising us all, Evangeline began to sing. Up to then she’d been so quiet you hardly knew she was there, though I sometimes saw her whispering to Elizabeth, as if afraid that we’d all laugh at her if she spoke aloud. But her voice was clear and confident and sweet, contralto, and she had either had some training or was one hell of a natural talent. The song was “Tenting Tonight,” which I didn’t know, but later learned was quite old. They sang it during the American Civil War. When she got to the chorus Elizabeth joined in, and soon we were all doing it, letting her carry the verse.

  When she was done we were all smiling and clapping, which was something of a mistake, because when we stopped the darkness and deathly silence closed in even more than it had before. We all felt it, like a damp blanket spreading over us. The wind picked up a little, and sang though the broken glass of the schoolhouse.

  The best thing to do for that, we silently agreed, was to sing more. It turned out Evangeline knew a lot of songs suitable for campfires. Not all of them made a lot of sense for the situation—I remember singing “All You Need Is Love” and thinking these people here needed a lot more than that—but who cared? It was the sweet music that mattered, not the words. Words couldn’t do anything to help us deal with this awfulness, we’d already tried words in every combination we could think of, and they just didn’t cut it. But music could.

  Eventually the tunes turned into yawns. Travis showed us how to put the side flaps down on the Duck awning, so there were two places to sleep. Amid some grumbling about what a fuddy-duddy sexist pig Travis was, the women were bedded down on the folding seats in Scrooge and the men in the tent outside. When the girls were out of the way Travis revealed he was an even worse pig than they supposed; he set watches throughout the night, but not for the girls. I was sure he’d cut me out of it, but he didn’t. In fact, he asked me if I was up to standing the first watch. I was tired, but not sleepy, and I said sure.

  “If you feel yourself drifting off,” Travis said, “shoot yourself in the foot. That usually wakes me up.” He tossed me a rifle and watched as I checked it out, then Dak and Dad and Mr. Redmond climbed into the tent.

  I SAT ON a camp chair and, naturally, about fifteen minutes later I almost fell off. Oh, great. Bitch every time somebody treats you like a kid, Ray, and then when they give you a really adult responsibility, you fall on your stupid ass.

  So I stood up and started walking around Scrooge, taking my time. Never has an hour and a half passed so slowly. I learned a new definition of boredom, I learned how hard it is to stay alert for even ten minutes when you’re exhausted, and then the tiger came.

  Tiger? I hear you cry. In Florida?

  What happened was, I heard a sound. It wasn’t a roar or even a purr. It wasn’t a snapping stick or a squishing footstep. Maybe there was no sound at all, maybe my brain invented a sound when my poor pitiful atrophied monkey nose smelled something wrong, wrong, wrong, and from deep in my brain something let me know that trouble was approaching.

  Predator!

  So I snapped on my flashlight. I’d kept it off, mostly, to conserve the batteries. I fanned the beam around, and at first swept right over it, then it registered, and I moved the beam back and there it was, squinting in the glare, just sitting there and watching me, looking like he was deciding whether to go for the throat or rip out my guts.

  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.