by John Varley
It had been burned, but it had not been consumed.
There was an ugly black scar up the northwest side of the building, not far from the swimming pool, which had at least four cars in it. All the windows up to the fifth floor had been broken out. Furniture and rug scraps were hanging out of some of them.
The best news of all: Plywood storm shutters were in place around all the top floor rooms on the side we could see.
“Should we shout?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s moved on . . .”
A bullet hit the concrete about ten yards to our left and went whanging off into space. All of us hit the ground.
“Find some cover!” Dad was shouting. I noticed he was trying to shield Elizabeth with his body. I looked around for Mom, and saw Dak pulling her toward an overturned car. She was reaching out to me. I did some world-class scrambling and hunkered down behind a car, breathing hard.
“Is everybody okay?” I heard Dad call out.
Everybody said they were okay. Somebody shouted from the top of the building. It sounded like a woman, or a young boy.
“Who are y’all? If you don’t mean us harm, then just keep moving. But if you want trouble, we got that, too.”
“I’m Manny Garcia. That’s my mom’s hotel you’re in. Who are you?”
“What did you say? Stand up so I can see you.”
“You won’t shoot me?”
“Mister, if I wanted to shoot you, you’d be dead. We don’t want to hurt nobody don’t ask for it.”
Dad put his gun down on the ground and stood up from behind the wrecked car where he was crouching with Elizabeth. He held up his hands to show he was unarmed.
There was no sound for a while. I risked a look and saw a blonde head and shoulders and the barrel of a gun sticking out over a barricade of sandbags, way up there at the top of the tower. Then a second head appeared, this one gray.
“Manny?” Grandma called out. “MANNY?”
IT WASN’T EASY getting into Fortress Blast-Off, and that was no accident. There were fire stairs on each end of the tower, but one was partially collapsed. The other was blocked with a plywood wall at the second floor. Grandma said there were booby traps in that stairway, and it would take a few minutes to get through them.
Travis pulled up in Scrooge and we all went inside. The walls were crumbling, the floors were inches deep in sand and grit. Clothes still hung in the closets. There were big heaps of seaweed and the smell of salt water and dead fish. We went down to the stairway and waited.
Ten minutes later Grandma burst through the door and flew into Dad’s arms. Mom moved into the embrace, then Elizabeth, and finally Grandma got an arm free and beckoned to me so I joined in, too. There were a lot of tears and a lot of joy, and I was grinning like a crazy person.
Then we trudged up the stairs, having to stop once while Dad got his wind back. Grandma seemed as spry as ever, wiry and burned even browner than usual. She’s originally from up north, it was Granddad who was the Hispanic in the family. She was filthy, and her clothes were dirty, but so were we.
Finally, we made it to the top floor, and I was huffing and puffing, too. It was brighter up here. All the room doors were open, and the carpet and walls were dry. There was an odor of some disinfectant. The storm shutters had been made years ago with the idea of protecting the top floor from hurricane damage. Grandma and Aunt Maria could batten the whole thing down and ride it out up there.
The shutters were still there, but moved aside to allow some cooling breeze in. It was a fortress atmosphere, and no surprise: That’s exactly what it was.
“First few days, everything was cool,” Grandma was saying as we moved along the corridor. A couple of small children stood in the door and stared at us as we passed. They could have used a bath, but they had none of the hollow-eyed, lost look of the kids we’d seen in the soup lines.
“We had about 150 people up here on the top floor when it hit. We heard a little shooting, before. There’s a story going around that the Dolphin was insisting on registered guests only, and some people didn’t react well to that.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Dad said.
“I know what you mean. What sort of people would do that?”
We had arrived at the far end of the hall, the end facing the sea, and we started up one more flight to the roof. We came out into the overcast day and looked around the roof. There were maybe thirty or thirty-five people up there. It looked a little like the refugee camps we had passed, but different. I mean, the people were filthy, and they had a sort of aura of shock still clinging to them, but they didn’t seem lost. I later learned that, unlike most people who had lived or died on the ground, most of these people hadn’t lost any loved ones. Most were registered guests, here from somewhere else, and their biggest worry was getting the news to their loved ones in Ohio or Alberta or Norway that they were okay. There were a fair number of children—the Blast-Off had always been child-friendly—the kids liked the spaceship theme.
Canvas had been strung to provide shade, which we didn’t need at the moment. There was a big gas grill with several big pots simmering on it, attended by a man and a woman. The man wore a white chef’s hat.
Grandma took us over to the railing, which had been backed up with a wall of sandbags four feet high.
“We’ll never know about the Dolphin,” Grandma said. She gestured to the north, where there was a huge pile of rubble. I realized it used to be the twenty-story Daytona Dolphin Hotel, one of the most luxurious in the area.
“We heard it go down. We were . . . we were hunkered down, of course, down below, but even with the sound of the wave, even then, there was no mistaking that sound. The most awful thing I ever . . .” She stopped, and gripped the railing hard. Dad put his arm around her and hugged her close. “Screaming,” she said. “We could hear screaming, even over the wave. Or maybe that’s just in my dreams. I don’t want to have dreams anymore. I’m all through with dreams.”
We all gazed out over the destruction. North and south, the relatively undamaged pinnacles of the big hotels and condos and apartment buildings. In between . . . nothing but piles of stuff, plumes of smoke here and there.
East, the river we already crossed. Enough said about that.
To the west, the beach was a lot closer than it had been a week ago, but it was no longer a thing you’d want to put in a tourist brochure. Boats and cars and flotsam and jetsam washed back and forth in the low surf. Farther out, unidentifiable objects tossed and rolled. Beyond that, an amazing number of boats and ships. Most distant was an aircraft carrier. I could see helicopters coming and going. Closer in, fishing boats and large private power boats.
“I don’t think a single private boat on the Atlantic Coast survived the wave,” Grandma was saying. “These are all people who came around from the Gulf. All the Gulf Coast, all the way around to Texas. They say it looked like Dunkirk, coming around the Keys. The largest private flotilla ever assembled, they say. Mostly volunteer.”
If my stereo had been working I’d have googled Dunkirk. Later I learned it was a big evacuation from France during the Second World War.
“Everybody wanted to help, naturally. People are like that, after a disaster.”
“Americans will always come through,” Travis said.
“Shame on you, Travis,” Grandma said, with some heat. “All people are like that. We even met a family from Mexico who came to help. We don’t have any news, so I don’t know what’s going on in the world, but I’ll bet you a thousand worthless dollars everybody’s doing everything they can, everywhere. All those islands, Cuba, I don’t even know who all got hit.”
“I won’t take that bet,” Travis said, “and I was out of line, I’m sorry I said it. It’s just . . .” He waved his hand all around. “I wonder how America is ever going to recover from this.”
“If it’s this bad all the way to Long Island, like I been hearing, I don’t know, either. I mean, I guess California will
get along okay, Illinois, Texas. But I don’t know how Florida is ever going to recover.”
Nobody had anything useful to say about that. Time would tell.
“Anyway, all those folks trying to help, and they haven’t been able to do much good. Not here, anyway. I don’t know about other places, I’ve had my own wars to fight. You’d be amazed how quick it can come down to us against them. Family against everybody else.”
AT FIRST SHE didn’t talk about the wave itself hardly at all. “It came up to the seventh floor,” was all she would say.
We were sitting under one of the canvas shelters, a light drizzle coming down, while Jorge, who had been the restaurant cook—and I guess still was—served us a hot breakfast. Grits, powdered eggs and potato flakes, and Spam. Sounds dreadful, but Jorge made the eggs special with peppers and salsa, and the potatoes had melted cheese.
“It took a long time for the water to go down,” she said. “Hours. A couple hours, I don’t know. We went down, floor by floor, watching everything get swept by us. We saw a few people still alive, holding on to wreckage. We tried throwing them ropes, but we never reached anybody. One man, saw he was about to be swept out to sea, he tried to swim for it. He got about halfway to us . . . the water pulled him away, then it pulled him down. We never saw him again.”
She had to stop for a while. She did that a lot. Nobody pressed her.
When the water receded enough that they could wade, they ventured out and started searching. They pulled three people from the wreckage, all of them injured to one degree or another. One of them died later. Considering everything, they felt they’d done a pretty good job. They had set up an infirmary in one of the top-floor rooms and done what they could with the first-aid supplies. One of her guests was a nurse, so the injured were getting pretty good care.
“Is that where Aunt Maria is?” Dad asked, at this point. “I know she was sick . . .” He stopped when he saw the expression on her face.
“Maria didn’t make it, Manny.”
“What . . . I thought you said . . .” He couldn’t make any sense of it. Grandma put her hand on his arm.
“It was on the third day,” she said, quietly. “You know her heart was bad. What happened, after the wave hit . . . she just lay down in her bed and never got up again. I think she had several heart attacks. It was just too awful for her.”
I had liked my aunt Maria when I was a child. She always had sweets she had baked for us. She liked to cook, and she liked to eat, and she had always been overweight, a tubby little brown woman with a Hispanic accent who spent most of her days sitting around the pool with her old friends, telling lies about the trip over from Cuba, many years ago, chattering in Spanish. She had worked hard all her life in the old motel, until Mom and Dad made a lot of money and bought it and expanded it, and she and Grandma could hire help to do all the hard work they used to do. She had loved the life of a well-off innkeeper, though she hardly ever bought anything. “I don’t drive, and I don’t need no fancy clothes or jewels,” she told me. She never had any children of her own. “I’m saving it all and it will go to you niños when I’m gone.”
I looked at Mom. “I didn’t know Aunt Maria was that sick,” I said.
“I guess I didn’t, either, Ray,” Mom said. “Betty, why—”
“It’s complicated. She made me promise not to make a fuss to the family. She wanted to wait until she was better, then let you know.”
Dad was still in shock, so Mom asked the question.
“Why didn’t she get a transplant?”
Grandma sighed.
“I spent the last year convincing her. She was traditional, you know. Catholic, and superstitious. She didn’t want somebody else’s heart in her chest. Didn’t seem right, she said, somebody else had to die for her to get a heart. As for getting a cloned one . . .”
“Oh, god,” Dad said.
“Yeah. For one thing, they’re illegal in the U.S., and on the one hand she could talk all day about those crooks in Tallahassee and Washington, part of her thought that if they said it was bad for you, it was bad. And the Church is against it. And we’d have had to travel. She doesn’t like . . . she didn’t like to travel much anymore. ‘The trip from Cuba, that was enough for me,’ I heard that all the time.
“But six months ago I finally persuaded her. We flew to China, they started the culture. We were due to go back next month, get the operation done. So, Manny, somewhere in Hong Kong a little piece of Maria is still alive. Her heart. I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do with it.”
Dad was silent for a while.
“Where is she now? Where is Aunt Maria?”
Grandma looked at him sorrowfully.
“Manny . . .” Of course. I had realized it as soon as I heard she was dead, but it was harder for Dad. He grew up with her.
“That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s why we’re all so dirty. Every day, out into the mess. Drag the bodies onto bedspreads, wrap them up, take a hair sample, put it in a baggie. We’ve got a pile of wallets and watches, a room full of clothes. We don’t undress them anymore, they’re too . . . it’s nasty, and too much work. Nobody’s ever going to know exactly how many people died out there. We say a little prayer and we set them on fire, and we go away. And we come back here and eat a meal of Spam à la Jorge, and go to bed and sleep like the dead.”
SINCE DAY ONE they had been waving a sheet with a red cross painted on it every time a helicopter or a low-flying plane went over. So far, nobody had landed. Grandma was pretty angry about that.
“A few of these people, we don’t get them to a hospital soon, I don’t know if they’ll live. I thought somebody would have showed up to medevac them out by now. I don’t get it.”
“They’ll probably be here soon,” Travis said. “They’re making progress. What I heard, hospitals all the way to Ohio are already full of people. Not much elective surgery going on. If you aren’t bleeding, they say you need to take care of yourself.”
“Some of these people are bleeding.”
“What can I say? There’s too much work to go around. But the European ships are starting to arrive in force. South Americans. Some African nations. Cruise ships mostly rode it out, they’re converting them to offshore hospitals. Something will happen in the next few days. I hope.”
“Meantime,” Dad said, “I want to get you out of here.”
There was a long silence. Sometimes I think I understand Grandma better than Dad does, because what she said next didn’t surprise me.
“I’m not going anywhere until all these people can come with me.”
THE ARGUMENT WENT on for a while, but eventually it was only Dad who was arguing that Grandma get into the Duck and get out with us. Travis and Dak didn’t contribute at all. Both of them seemed willing to stick it out as long as it took. Mom dropped out early, and so did Elizabeth. As for me, I wanted to go home more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life, but I knew deep down that you couldn’t just ask Grandma to leave everything that had ever been important in her life, even if it was in ruins. She needed a little time.
But far more important, the people who had stuck with her after the water subsided had become a family to her, and she intended to stick with them until they had a place to go.
The only reasonable plan Dad came up with was to ferry everybody over to the mainland in groups, where they could join the refugee camps.
Travis spoke up for the first time, saying he was far from sure he had enough gas for that. He knew we had enough to get back out of the Red Zone, but thought there was a fair chance we’d be hoofing it the last miles back to Rancho Broussard. Scrooge was not a fuel-efficient vehicle.
“How about the gas in the generator here?” Dad asked.
“How about it, Betty,” Travis said. “Didn’t you say that was a diesel generator?”
“That’s right. We’ve rationed it, and we’ve got enough for about another week.”
“Unfortunately, the Duck won’t burn diesel. W
hat about water?”
“We’re okay there. We’re not heating what was in the water heater tank, and we’ve been throwing our sewage over the side. Preferably when there’s some bad guy drunks down there. As long as we don’t shower or bathe, we’re good for another week.” She rubbed at her dirty face, absently. “I’ll admit, I got weak, we all get a pint of water once a day to wash our faces. Turns out that’s a morale-raiser. I was about to do that when you guys arrived.”
“How about this?” I said. Everybody looked at me. Damn. I hated that. “You said you have some people who shouldn’t be moved. That doesn’t make sense to me. Seems to me that if they’re in bad shape, the best thing to do is take them to the mainland. They had a tent hospital over there.”
“Not much of a hospital,” Elizabeth said.
“Well, with all respect to your nurse, they probably have more stuff over there than we do here. How about it, Grandma? Are any of them in danger of dying?”
“I can answer that,” somebody said. We all looked at a young black woman who spoke with a Haitian rhythm. Grandma introduced her as Elaine, the nurse.
“I’ve got three patients whose wounds are infected. I cleaned them up as well as I could, but some of them were lying in filthy water for a couple days. They need more help than I can give them, and they need it fast.”
“Travis,” Grandma asked, “can that crazy-looking thing make it to the mainland and back, and still have enough gas to get y’all home?”
“Us all home,” Dad said.
“This is still my home, Manny, until all my guests are taken care of.”
“We should be able to make one crossing,” Travis allowed.
“Then let’s do it.”
TRAVIS AND DAK handled the ambulance ferry duty. We all helped manually operate the window-washing equipment on the side of the hotel to get the people to the ground, which was hard work but not nearly as hard as carrying stretcher cases down all those stairs. We all stood together and watched Scrooge roll off and lose itself in the heaps of debris.
Down there on what used to be the pool deck, thinking about the long walk back up the stairs, I noticed the big black scorch mark on the side of the building and remembered the night before, when we all worried the Blast-Off was on fire. I asked Grandma about it.