by Roy Freirich
Useless cell in hand, Cort strides quickly along the hard sand by the tide line, eyes front, unwilling to see more than a few yards or a few moments ahead. Why look, why think, when all it brings is more of the same clutched emptiness in her stomach?
Movement teases the edges of her vision, someone running, another leaping. Shouts, the quick blare of a radio, snapped off as suddenly.
She hesitates at a voice behind her, thick with saliva and irony: “Come on with, we’ll protect you!”
She turns to see a posse of guys approaching, loudmouths in jams and sleeveless tees, kids from Islip or Ocean Beach, probably, pimp-rolling and sneering: “Have some, only way to sleep—dream big, baby!” They wave a tequila bottle, and Cort tries to put it out of her mind: the sick group scene they imagine behind some dune, taking turns, or worse. How do they get this way, drawn to the grossness where nobody ever matters to anybody? Are they just so afraid?
Running seems dumb since one or more will catch her, and she’ll have made herself prey, perhaps before they meant to. But can she just stand here and hope?
They square off, moving in.
One’s eyes are sunken deep in purplish sockets, bulging and rolling. He reaches a hand to touch her hair.
She flicks her head away, but his other hand is there already, lightly touching her cheek, his thumb gliding over her lips. She glares, stepping back.
His smile goes crooked; his eyes widen, as if in momentary wonder. Behind him, there’s a shadowy movement, and Tay is there, somehow, out of the wet gloom with a ragged piece of lumber stolen from the ocean, tarry and smeared with blood from this creep’s head. She didn’t even see him hit, but he drops to his knees with a trail of quick drops of blood on the sand, as his posse stands open-mouthed, motionless.
“Cap the fuckers—” he spits.
But Tay has already grabbed her hand, and they’re already running. Panic has stolen her breath, her heart beats too loudly to hear a sound over, but she does somehow, hearing herself shouting nonsense: “What—Why is this—?”
“Keep moving!”
Other Sleepless loom, trying to stop them; a woman shrieks, “You’re not my daughter! Never been!”
A man in a raincoat approaches. “I gotta get on the ferry. Get outta here. You guys have anything?” He reaches for them, his hands crackling in Saran wrap.
Tay yanks her sideways, away.
A “Pine Glade Taxi Now!” Jeep roars by, rear tires throwing sand, filled with whooping guys, laughing and shouting.
“Hells yeah, sand monkey!”
“Left!”
“No, that way!”
She and Tay watch the Jeep zigzag twenty or thirty yards down the beach, accelerate, and right-turn up over a dune and plow straight into the base of a powerline pole. The end of motion is too sudden, a shock, but in nearly the same instant, the dark shape of a head bursts like a jack-in-the-box from the windshield with a thick, crunching sound, and a scream from inside dies as if strangled.
A heavy black wire sags downward, swaying, and then one end of it twists down onto the roof of the taxi in a shower of smoking sparks. Inside, vague dark shapes seem to jerk in ugly lurching movements—until they don’t.
Words come only in a choked whispered rush, because what words are there but these, when being awake is the real nightmare, after all: “What the fuck is . . . happening?”
Only the wire is alive now, sputtering and twisting, sparks now setting the seagrass on fire, hissing and crackling.
From behind them again, shouts echo in the pall, furious unintelligible curses, more laughter.
Across the sand, the ocean makes a sound like a low rumble, and then a wide distant sound like applause.
Tay’s face goes crooked, eyes glittering with fear: “Come on, quick. I know where.”
Behind them as she turns to look, the lights in the houses along Starfish blink out all at once, and the ocean makes its sound again.
15
In the back hallway, Sam has gone still, a roll of bandages in one hand, a bottle of clear fluid in the other.
The ceiling fluorescents make dull rectangles of light on the linoleum. The smell of burnt coffee lingers. The quick, shallow breaths he hears are his own.
Why is he back here, again? Gauze? Antiseptic? Done.
He hesitates, half-turns one way, then the other, and moves back down the short hall to the exam room area where the Boy sits in a plastic chair, eyes wide and darting everywhere.
“Holding up okay, partner?” Sam gives him a small, chancy smile.
The Boy’s gaze flickers past his, and he nods slowly as he looks away.
Sam fights another instant’s jittery panic; there’s just no other responsibility, no other authority, no voice on the end of a line coordinating arrivals of teams of experts who will take the situation firmly and calmly in hand so he can go back to his boat and his girl and their days of wine and summer.
He moves out into the waiting area. Beyond the glass storefront-style windows, evening has somehow begun. Against the walls, Sleepless sprawl in the row of plastic chairs or sit cross-legged on the floor, still sullenly thumbing their cell phones, quietly cursing in disbelief. What have we all become? Attached to the momentary and the elsewhere, lost, unmoored.
But is he any different? Kathy’s voice would be so welcome, just to hear it: the mellifluous, wry music of her complaining about mildew, wondering what to cook, whether to make Margs or Mojos for their ritual cocktail hour.
Other voices bring him back—the hum of worried murmuring, a barked laugh from a tourist with eyes fathomless black amid etched lines like dead blood-eggs in a nest of twigs.
He spins away from the sight and the thought and flips on the TV to check the news and see if there’s word on the outage. A commercial for Red Bull comes on, of course: handsome hipsters with choppy hair in industrial-chic offices with lots of exposed ducts and glass, high-fiving over computer screens.
Suddenly, the urgent theme music of news blares, all horns and timpani, and now a plummy, tenor voice-over demands to know: “Is heroin in our suburbs, is your data safe from the next big virus, is your child being stalked?” In the netherworld between news desk and backdrop of gaudy graphics, the anchor turns theatrically to face the camera, intoning, as always, “Breaking news this evening as—”
Gone: sound and image disappear at once as the ceiling lights click and flicker out.
Sam’s first thought is that old TVs used to go off with a fading little white dot at the center of the screen. These days there’s no final, briefly lingering trace of what you saw—now it all it just disappears into instant blackness, the same way voices now simply disappear into silence on a digital phone line. The telltale traces of our world are no longer; we and all we perceive are—and then simply aren’t. Maybe there’s a message there about the loss of the afterimage or the echo that has something to do with memory and why it matters, but right now Paula is inches away, peering intently through this larger darkness into which every blessed thing has disappeared.
“Sam?” Why is it always her voice, out of the silence of his cell phone, or now, out of the blackness, like a mother trying to wake a child? “Sam?”
Other voices join hers, the Sleepless indistinguishably cursing, murmuring, and in the darkness their cumulative breaths and bulk and shifting nervousness vaguely threaten.
A small bright light snaps on, and it takes a second to realize Paula has grabbed one of the emergency flashlights from a baseboard outlet. She aims it away from them and the red retinas of the Sleepless gleam back at them, like a shot taken in the dark with a cheap flash camera, so eerily like the eyes of animals.
Nerves ease, laughter erupts here and there, and Sam hears fragments of comments: “—fuck is going on now?”
“Phone, net, power, everybody weird, it’s gotta be—”
“—even know?”
“—generator?” Paula is saying now, or asking, or has just said or asked. Sam shakes his head, trying to keep up. In the waiting room, a Sleepless finds and flicks on another flashlight. A circle of faces appears there, peering at one another.
Useless thoughts scatter others: jerry can, powerline connectors like jumper cables, electrocution. But the Boy worries him most: “Paula, grab me a light too. I’ll get to it. Where’s the Boy?”
Paula swings the beam behind them to find the Boy there in his seat against the hallway wall, oddly calm, even woeful, like a child forced from the classroom into a hallway timeout. He regards them with even, silent curiosity, unafraid somehow, as if emboldened by the fear around him. His game blinks in his idle, upturned hand.
“Okay,” Sam decides, hopefully. “We’re okay. I’ll see if I can get the generator up.”
A thought stops him, becoming a question: “Which is . . . where exactly? I think I . . . knew.”
Paula tilts her head, lifts her light between them, for a closer look at him.
16
By Chief’s watch, he’s got twenty minutes to stop today’s replacement ferry from leaving. If it’s on schedule, it arrived an hour or so ago from the mainland, has already sold out from yesterday’s backlog and is just gassing up for the return leg just after dark.
The day has disappeared somehow in a stop-motion jitter of moments, too many to run from, but running is all, staying ahead of this night that may never end, bearing down, engulfing, spreading.
Who knows how far? From here to Greenport, along the gridlocked LIE to New York, to Greenwich Village, to Linda?
The first all-nighter, she may not think much about it. But the second night? Maybe her friends won’t understand her, maybe she won’t understand them, and things will get confusing. Maybe she’ll take a walk and a truck or bus driver shouldn’t be behind the wheel, or a crane operator, or an airline pilot.
He guns the Jeep down the hardpan access road behind Sea Haven’s kitschy shops but slows in a double take: from both lamp posts between here and the main square ahead, the light dies, dim yellow circles on the ground just disappearing.
Ahead, between the low buildings, Chief can make out the crowd already gathered around the shuttered, locked ticket kiosk. He slows and parks on the edge of the square, looking out to see a gift, if anything can count as such anymore. Half his problem is solved: there’s no second ferry yet—just yesterday’s dead, useless hulk, going nowhere.
He yanks the keys and grabs the shotgun and shoulders open the door, climbing out and striding quickly toward the group, a mob, really, a hundred or more, backpacks and roll-on suitcases and litter strewn.
Faces turn, shouting and chatter and laughter die, the stray squawk of a word fading last: “Wha—”
“Folks? No ferry today either, sorry! Let’s go on back to where we all were, right now.”
“Hey Chief, no fucking way. That’s two days!”
“We have a right to be here and get on that boat.”
“When it gets here.”
Chief is too blurry to track who says what, and why does it matter? The crowd has become one unruly, aggrieved, threatening thing.
“Look, everybody. Let’s keep it easy, okay?” His hand floats up, a vague supplication, as if he holds nothing in the other.
“Easy? We got cells out, no ferry, now we got no power, no landlines!”
“We’re cut off!” another shouts.
Chief blinks away blurriness, trying to focus, to shake off the stutter of afterimages crowding in, the shrieks and explosions and the whispering still ringing in his ears. “The ferry’s late, it’s not the first and not the last time. But no one’s getting on it today, understood?”
“Why?”
“Fuck that.”
“We’ll take the boats, man!”
On cue, boaters climb out onto their decks along the marina float, gawking. Good. They’re next.
Chief lifts the shotgun, slowly enough to say it’s not about to just discharge, but quickly enough to show some deliberation and purpose. There’s nuance to threatening someone with a weapon, something TV gets all wrong these days.
“Try again tomorrow, okay? If I’m making a mistake, no harm, and truly sorry for the inconvenience. If I’m not, you’ll thank me, on behalf of your families on the mainland.”
It’s an unpopular sentiment:
“—What the fuck is he talkin’—”
“You gonna shoot us?”
“Not serious—”
BLAMMM! He fires off toward the harbor, the shot skittering the water with little splashes. This little Benelli is smooth as silk, with barely a cushiony backward shove.
The front row of the crowd cringes, a few crouching, hands up, comically wide-eyed.
“Take your luggage, leave it, I don’t care. But you all need to clear the dock area.”
A tall, rumpled tourist—the dad from yesterday?—glares. “I’m an attorney, Officer. And there will be questions. There will be depositions, there will be damages. You willing to risk your job here?”
Chief wants to laugh. “Least of it. Get moving.”
The man smiles, an ugly threatening grin over his shoulder as he pulls his roll-on away, clattering down the quay. Where’s his family—what’s happened to them?
A few at a time, others shrug or smirk or murmur and shake their heads. The crowd thins as better ideas occur:
“Claude’s, let’s get a brew. If the taps even work.”
“Fuck this. Let’s go back to the house.”
“Check later, whatever.”
Going, gone. Finally, he breathes and allows himself a brief appraisal. Not bad: no backup, full crowd control, no one down.
Chief turns to face the rest, the boaters in for a weekend, mutely staring families with kids, fishing buddies, a few retiree couples, but even now as he heads for the main dock ramp, he counts one empty slip.
Could be, with the fog that closed in around Carratuck, that only one boat left for home since this thing really hit, so maybe it’s still containable. Or more so than it would be otherwise.
Chief starts with two men on a little O’Day cabin job, middle-agers escaping the wives to fish and beer it up for a few last glory days before they survey and dry-dock her.
Their faces look lopsided and swollen, eyes bleary. He can sympathize with their bewilderment at his shotgun and tries to soften it with politeness. “Hey guys, can you go up on shore, please? I’m clearing the boats.”
With bell-like clarity, another thought occurs: they can radio the mainland with their own sitrep, and mainland might send somebody to check it out, and blow to hell all hope of containment. “And grab your ship-to-shore for me, please?”
The two trade dumb looks. “What’s it about? We’re not gonna just yank out the gear, it’s expensive, it’s—”
The shotgun muzzle comes up again. “Well, I’ve asked, and I’m hoping we can leave it at that.”
“Why? Where are we supposed to go?”
“Anywhere but off this island. Head up to the Pier View, have some steamers. Take a walk on the beach. Everybody likes that.”
In other slips along the float, on other decks, more sailors have gathered to watch.
Money, of course, quickly becomes issue one. “What about the dock fees we prepaid? Some of the others chartered too. Not cheap.”
“You are all welcome to file claims when this is all over. And I wouldn’t blame you for it.”
One says, “Hey, you need a warrant, you can’t just—”
Up goes the shotgun muzzle again, gleaming darkly. “Can. Am.” Sometimes less is more. Why not hope so?
But the other adds, “Maybe you need to sleep. You’re losing it. Ever think of that?”
Hope disappears. Mutiny begins with one unanswered challenge to au
thority, and then it spreads.
BLLLAMMM! Chief has aimed off to one side, well clear but point made twice now, with a splintery chunk of piling flying off for punctuation. The man flings his hands up, wide-eyed, quivering.
When the last sailor has disappeared ashore, to Claude’s or the Pelican, to the beach, anywhere else into the dark, Chief turns and takes in the lay of the land. He pulls a dock container open, yanking out lifejackets, deck chairs, dock lines, jerry cans, rags.
He slows, his gaze moving down the gangway to the float, finally falling on a diesel fuel pump.
17
In the alley beside the clinic, Sam tugs and tugs again on the pull cord, but salt air and disuse have gotten the better of the generator’s plugs; it sputters without result until the fourth try, finally catching with a throaty gurgle.
A square of light appears in the lane out front, throwing long shadows on the ground, and he hears the loopy laughter and “oohs” and “ahhs” of the Sleepless inside.
He stands, wiping his hands on his jeans, looking down with unwarranted satisfaction at the working generator. But it is satisfying; he has provided light and comfort, and what more essential can a man provide?
He closes the wooden lid to the generator housing and looks up, hearing the footsteps first—no voices—only the sound of feet moving purposefully and almost stealthily, like a squad moving into position. New light reaches him now, and he looks up to see a group of ragtag tourists and locals carrying hurricane lanterns and flashlights, bunched up jittery and gawking behind a truly unwelcome sight: Doctor Fleisher in his surgical mask, with Sam’s erstwhile aide Andrew beside him.
Fleisher lifts a hand, stilling the crowd behind him. “Hold up! We’re civilized human beings here! We give them a chance to do what’s right. We take the high road, because it’s who we are!”
The crowd goes still, blinking and gawking.
Fleisher turns to Sam. “No more fakes, Carlson. Real meds, the boy. Give us them. Or we’ll get them. Choose.”
