by John Varley
Watch out for that tiger, Evangeline!
Is that a dog barking, or do you think it might be a tiger?
Hold that tiger, hold that tiger, hold that tiger!
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Oh, well. I guess we all needed something lighthearted by that point, and I might as well be the butt of it. There sure wasn’t anything in our surroundings to make us happy and gay and get us through the day. I kept my mouth shut and endured it.
Then one of Scrooge’s tires blew out with a sputtering sound. That was because the puncture was underwater. It could have been one of the tandem pair in back and we could have slogged on, but of course it had to be the right front.
I waded back to look at it. There was a plank with several nails deeply embedded in the rubber. Naturally, it was on the side where it had been my responsibility to clear the path. I must have stepped right over it.
Nobody said anything to me about it. It took an hour to get the tire on, and when that was done no one was laughing or making jokes anymore. We carried on, checking our position once an hour, and finally heaved up onto semidry land at a point that was as close as we were going to get to the home where the Redmond’s family had lived. There was a big Wal-mart, and smaller stores, and no people in sight.
We stopped, and everybody climbed out onto the hood or stood on the seats and looked to the north. Travis was peering at the screen of his GPS.
“It says 1.45 miles from here,” he said, and pointed. “This is as close as this road gets.” We all stared silently. Calling what we were on a “road” was more than generous, though it had been a six-lane main drag before the wave. Some of the palm trees that had run down the center were still standing, but most were leaning sharply or pulled out of the ground by the roots. On each side of us strip malls were visible under heaps of trash, a few signs intact. Advertising signs on poles set deeply in concrete were still there: McDonald’s, Gap, Infosys, Jill’s Crab Shack. The concrete block buildings were mostly still standing, but all the glass was broken out of the windows and the contents of the buildings had come gushing out as the wave hit, and again as it receded. There were side streets leading off in each direction in the familiar flat grid pattern, but these were far too choked for any vehicle to get through. No, it was clear that the only way into that mess, for now, was on foot. Which, of course, is just what Mr. Redmond proposed to do.
“Jim, I advise against it,” Travis said.
“I know the advice is well intended,” said Mr. Redmond, quietly. “But if I don’t go, there wasn’t much point in me coming here in the first place, was there?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Your relatives are probably in a shelter somewhere, back the way we came. When these damn stereos start working again, I imagine they’ll have lists of the survivors and the . . .”
“And the dead. We know they’re probably dead, no need to tiptoe around it. But what I came for was to find them, and right now this looks like our best bet.”
“Jim . . .” Dad said, and then paused. “I’m not quite sure how to put this. You’re a great cook, and a good man, but are you sure you’re up to this?”
Mr. Redmond smiled for the first time in a while. It wasn’t a happy smile.
“Manny, thank you for your concern, for the loan of the money. For everything you’ve done. But before I settled down and perfected my trade, I had a few little adventures myself. I’m no Navy SEAL, or commando, but Uncle Sam sent me some places that looked a lot like this, after the bombers were through, and they were full of guys a lot scarier than some drunk piece-of-shit biker gangs. I came back alive, and I reckon I can get through this, too.”
“At least leave Evangeline with us,” Mom suggested.
“I would, I promise you, but she’d only sneak away first chance she got. We talked it over. I’d rather have her by my side, keep an eye on her.” He held his hand out to Travis, who shook it firmly. “Thanks for the loan of the weapon, General,” he said. “I’ll do my best to return it to you.”
Travis gave him a walkie-talkie, and they checked the batteries and channels.
“The range is supposed to be five miles,” Travis said, “but I’ve not tested it, so I’m not sure. Call us every day at noon, okay? We’ll have our ears on. And I don’t know if we’ll be able to wait very long on our way back out, but I promise that we’ll be here at noon one day. I don’t know what day that will be.”
“It’s okay. We’ll try to be here every day. If we get our business done before you do and we get tired of waiting, we’ll hike out.”
“Go to the ranch. You’ll be welcome there.”
There were hugs and kisses all around, and I was surprised at the ferocity with which Evangeline embraced me. Her tears were hot on my cheek as she turned away and followed her father into the chaos of the Wal-Mart parking lot, picking their way through the jumble of cars. Soon the rain, which had slackened for a while, came pouring down again and we lost sight of them. I sat down beside Elizabeth, who was crying quietly.
“That’s got to be the bravest thing I ever saw,” she said.
“He’s got guts,” I agreed.
“No, idiot! Her! I talked her ear off, ‘Stay with us, Evangeline, you don’t have to go, you’re not up to this.’ And the thing is, she knows that. She is so scared she can’t see straight. But she felt she had to stay with her father.”
Dad had been listening, and he turned around and looked at us.
“Real courage is going ahead and doing what you know you should do, even when you’re terrified,” he said.
I thought of what Travis had said about Dad, how scared he had been when he made that spacewalk to save my mother and a lot of strangers. I realized that, if he hadn’t made it, I wouldn’t be alive. I’d never have been born. Courage counts for something.
“So you think she did the right thing?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know what the right thing is,” he said, with a wry smile. “It’s different for everyone, and different situations call for different things. It might have made more sense if we’d all stayed back in Orlando and let the professionals handle the rescuing.”
“I couldn’t have done that,” I said.
“No, but we might have done more good joining the volunteer teams clearing the debris. What we’re doing is selfish, you know. There’s people all around us who need help, maybe more than Grandma does. But we’re driving right past them. Is that courage? Or self-interest?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“I don’t have the answer. I don’t know if there are simple answers to questions like that, in situations like this.”
WE WENT AROUND huge pools of crude oil, some burning, some just soaking into the ground and killing all the plants in sight. We passed spills of other stuff, too. Chemical factories had been hit, and the landscape was littered with barrels of who-knows-what, many of them cracked open. Some of them smelled something awful.
But the worst came a few hours before dark.
It had stopped raining but the sky was still cloudy. It was getting hard to see. I was taking another shift out front, clearing dangerous debris, being extra, extra careful not to miss another board full of nails, feeling more dead than alive. I looked up . . . and the ground was covered with swollen, pinkish gray bodies. Thousands of them, uncountable thousands.
At first my mind just couldn’t wrap around it. Naked? Thousands of naked dead people? I couldn’t come up with any way for that to make sense.
It was pigs. Hogs, swine, whatever you call them. These were massive porkers, a thousand pounds easily.
“Get back up here, Manny, Dak,” Travis called down. “Jesus, get up here. No way I’m going to ask anybody to move that.”
“What is it, Travis?” I asked.
“Pig farm,” he said. “Or pig factory, really. They raise the damn things in big sheds. Damn! All the things we’ve seen, and this is about to make me throw up. Come on, you guys, get up here!”
We did, and Trav
is slammed Scrooge into gear with a vengeance. We plowed into the horrible mess and must have had a bit of luck, because though we skidded around and bumped and swayed, we got through it without a breakdown.
FOR A WHILE it looked like we’d be completely stymied by US 1, an elevated autoway that followed the shore all the way through the city. Most of the concrete pylons holding the roadway up had withstood the force of the wave, but the backwash had turned these vertical posts into the teeth of a comb and gathered the debris rushing back toward the sea into an impenetrable mass.
But we were close enough to the ocean now that we had begun to encounter more rescue and recovery parties, working their way inland from ships offshore. They had cleared an access road on the west side of the highway. We talked to some of them, and they said there was a way under the autoway about six miles south, which was a bit of luck since that’s the way we needed to go, anyway.
We passed several blocks that had been bulldozed and crushed flat enough to erect tent cities. They were full, and covered with Red Cross tents and soup kitchens with long lines of shuffling people. Fires were burning in oil drums. A few children played with salvaged toys, but most of the people we saw had what Dad called the thousand-yard stare of the dispossessed. It was an expression we’d all grown up seeing countless times on the stereo, mostly from third world countries where there was a revolution or a famine, or sometimes both. But we’d seen it on Indian faces, and Pakistanis, after the bombings of New Delhi and Islamabad, and on Jewish and Arab faces. Some news writer had termed that look “The Face of the 21st Century,” and the term had stuck.
Seeing them shook me more than the dead bodies had. These were living people, but most of them were shuffling like zombies. That’s what happens to you when you lose everything. These people had gone, in the space of a few hours, from being citizens of the United States of America to faceless refugees with nothing but the clothes they stood in, and those clothes came from air-dropped canisters filled with the donations of people from all over America and the world.
Florida was no stranger to disaster. Hurricanes had pounded it countless times. Help was always on the way. Sure, it stunned you, and you mourned your losses, and you buried your dead, and you scrounged around for family keepsakes. Then the President declared a disaster area, government agencies arrived with portable housing, the insurance companies came in and started writing checks, you applied for an emergency loan, again from Uncle Sam, and you pulled up your socks and rolled up your sleeves and got to work, rebuilding.
Not this time.
“God, I hate to see Americans like this,” Travis muttered, as we moved slowly through the survivors and soldiers in the gathering dusk. “Hate to see anybody like this, sure, but . . . I always figured we could handle the worst case. You know, a major city American city getting nuked. We’ve been waiting for it to happen since 1947 or so, then since September 11, and so far the worst they’ve managed is big fertilizer bombs. But say New York got hit, or LA. Millions dead . . . but a few days later the hospitals are in place, the people are getting food and water. A week later . . . I think I was wrong, you know? It would have been a lot worse than I figured. And this. This is about as close to a total nuclear exchange as you could get. Miami, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Chesapeake Bay, Washington, Baltimore, Atlantic City, New York, Cape Cod . . . I remember orbiting over the coast, all those billions of lights, millions of people.”
I knew not all those places had been hit as hard as where we were, but some of them had been hit very hard, indeed. Most of the government offices had been moved to Chicago, as Washington still had no power. The financial district of New York might or might not be functioning again. And all those cities and small coastal towns, and cities far up the eastern rivers.
I was a Martian, that was my country, though technically it wasn’t a country at all. But I was Earth-born, America-born, Florida-born. They felt like my people, too, much as I may complain about them. The Brotherhood of Man, I guess.
But I could hardly imagine what Travis must be feeling. He was an American to his core, almost to a fault, as Mom sometimes said. Not “my country, right or wrong,” not that sort of idiot, but a deep believer in the core values of America, and a deep hater when those values were violated. He didn’t like American adventurism, which had occupied America for quite a few years now, but if you attacked his beloved country, look out. You wouldn’t want to get in his way.
Looking around me, I wondered how long it would take America to recover from this blow. Or if it ever would.
IT WAS ALMOST completely dark when we reached the Halifax River, which used to be a broad expanse of water separating the mainland of Florida from the long barrier island where the Blast-Off Motel was. The main way we could tell we were there, aside from what the GPS was saying, was the large number of boats. Just about every one of them was capsized, on its side, or stove in. They were piled up like a rich kid’s toys on the edge of a very dirty bathtub. Everything from one-mast sailboats to multimillion-dollar motor yachts, all equal now, all nautical junk.
We found a wide concrete pier that was relatively free of debris and drove out to the end. In the failing light that leaked through the overcast there was very little to see but a stretch of black water and, maybe half a mile away, a few fires. Most of them looked pretty small, maybe no bigger than the drum fires of the homeless we’d just seen. One was a little larger.
One of the soldiers had told us that none of the six or seven bridges over to the barrier island was passable. There were plans for a pontoon bridge, but no one knew when it would arrive. There were just too many places that needed them, and too few bridges. Most of the ones the Army had were in use in Indonesia or Nigeria. Just not enough equipment to go around, from planes to boats to bulldozers to choppers, he had said. He didn’t sound happy about it.
We all got out. Dad and Mom and Dak were trying to orient themselves; this had been their hometown, their old stomping grounds.
“That’s it for tonight, friends,” Travis said, turning off the headlights.
Mom was working at the GPS screen and Dad had a pair of night glasses, scanning the island.
“I recognize three hotels over there,” he said, breathing hard. “One of them seems to be missing, and there’s a lot of heat coming from that area. Maybe a pile of rubble. Wait a minute, I think I have the Tropicana . . . yeah, that’s it. No lights, can’t see anybody moving around. And moving down the beach, I think it’s about a quarter mile, Kelly?”
“About that. Can you see it?”
Dad stopped scanning, looked for a moment. Then he dropped the night glasses, rubbed his eyes, and pointed at the largest fire.
“That’s it. It’s still standing, but I think it may be burning.”
9
HOPE IS A tough thing to stretch through a night that long.
Breakfast wasn’t too appealing because the wind had shifted during the night. It had been coming from the land, which was bad enough, but now it blew in over the Halifax River, which was even worse.
The river was choked with floating bodies. They came in all lengths, but were all large and round, having swollen in the heat until they stretched their clothes.
Travis eased Scrooge into the water and as soon as it was afloat it became clear that somebody was going to have to stand out on the hood and move the . . . debris. Not just bodies, of course, the great majority of the stuff choking what had once been a clear blue strip of water was the remains of homes and other such wrack and ruin. We didn’t dare try to drive over a large piece of a wall, or part of a roof, so we had to shove it away with a pole we had found on shore.
Dad took the first shift. After about five minutes he leaned over and brought up breakfast. He stood with his hands on his knees for a while, Travis letting the engine idle.
“You okay, Manny?” he asked.
“I’ve never been less okay in my life. But, yeah, we can go on. Travis, take it slow, okay? I can’t bear the thou
ght of running over one of these people.”
“You got it, my friend. All ahead, extremely slow.”
And that’s how we did it. It would have been slow in any case, but with all the obstructions and the time we took to gently pole the corpses out of the way, a trip that would have taken maybe ten minutes under normal conditions took us a full three hours. I kept thinking that human beings shouldn’t have to do what I was doing. Nobody should have to pole their way through the River Styx, Hell on Earth.
Finally, Scrooge began lurching and tilting, and we were moving up onto land again. Mom and Dad were looking at the GPS map and comparing it to the reality, and pointing out just how much of the barrier island had been swept away.
“It’s a whole different landscape,” Dad said, staring around in wonder and horror. “It looks like the wave just sucked half of it away.”
We made fairly good time on our way over the remains of the three or four blocks to the hotel tower. Then we came to a pile of junk that looked like it wasn’t going to be moved short of dynamite.
“Let’s get out and walk around it,” Dad said. It was easy to see that he was very afraid of what we’d find when we got there.
“You guys go,” Travis said. “I don’t want to leave the Duck alone. I’ll see if I can find a way around. And don’t forget your guns.”
Mom and Dad and Dak got down, and handed me my rifle. Travis turned away and soon had driven around another heap of trash and was out of sight. The sound of the Duck engine, never very loud in the first place, faded away, and it got very quiet. Right where we were standing, normally the traffic would have been thick. Now, the cars that remained were topsy-turvy, including some that were buried in sand almost up to the roof. We stood there and listened, hearing nothing but seagulls, trying not to think about what they were feasting on, then moved cautiously through small gaps in the wreckage until the Blast-Off Tower came in sight.