Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  We fed onto 95 and headed south. Traffic on the eight-lane was heavier than usual, but not so bad as you’d think for the beginning of the end of the world. And the mood, whatever you could tell about it from the way they were driving, seemed pretty normal too.

  Hmm. The thing to buy if it gets really hairy out there, I thought, is weapons. I went back to Schwab and put in an order for 3,000 shares each of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Raytheon. As an afterthought, I put a few hundred balls on GE. It looked like the trades went through, but then when I checked on my positions, it said trading had been suspended on all exchanges. Fuck. I folded back the little keyboard. It snapped shut with that Bondishly efficient clicking sound. I looked around. There was a sense of aircraft screaming overhead but I didn’t want to roll down the window to hear better. Well, this is getting a little tense. Might be a clever moment to give Ms. Park a reassuring, manly touch on the shoulder. On the other hand, she might bite off my finger.

  “… it doesn’t matter, that’s fine,” she was saying on the phone. “Just roll in a cot or whatever. Okay.”

  “Dude, over here,” Max said to someone in the Neo-Teoverse. “Over here. Blister’s down.”

  “So, the firm owns this hotel on Collins Avenue, the Roanoke?” Marena said. “They’ll take care of us. Although they might give you a really small room.”

  I said that sounded great. Although at this rate it looked like about five more hours in the car. We passed a billboard advertising the Arthropod Experience at Parrot Jungle Island. It was looping a clip of a scolopendra centipede charging at the camera.

  I thought of something. “Hey, I was thinking,” I started to say, “the thing with—”

  “Aigo jugeta!” Marena said, looking at her dash screen. The satellite view had zoomed in, like she said it would, but it still took me a minute to sort out what we were seeing. Places look different from above when you can see all the tacky tar roofs and there’s all this foliage and everything. Finally I picked out Space Mountain and then the foreshortened towers of Cinderella’s Castle. The thing had focused on the Magic Kingdom.

  I froze the view, got the cursor on the center of the park—that is, the castle forecourt, at the north end of Main Street USA, or what they call the Hub. I zoomed and enhanced. Holy hell, I thought. They knew. Face it, they just bloody knew.

  [10]

  Six roads meet at the Hub, merging into a rotary. At its center, a circular bed of glads and poinsettias surround the “Partners” statue, the bronze figures of Walt and Mickey Mouse. There were drifts of what looked like big confetti all around the flowerbed and rotary and clumping under trees and kiosks. That is, if the trees were, say, HO-gauge ones in a model train set, then the confetti would be normal size. One clump in the center, at the statue’s one o’clock, started looking weird and also familiar, and as the enhancement progressed it resolved itself into a big fuzzy costume of Mickey’s dog Moloch, spread out supine on the polka-dot flagstones, with his black needley tail pointing west. It wasn’t easy to tell, but it looked like there was still someone inside the suit. Then there was another costume, maybe the vizier from Aladdin, crumpled on the lower edge of the screen. I squinted at confetti. There were these white angled twisty things in between them, and then without any sense of sudden realization I knew they were bodies, in all sizes but especially in small. Oh, hell. I tried to block the sunlight with my hands and squinted closer at the screen. They were all contorted, holding on to each other, sheltering … oh Jesucristo, they were moving. Rolling, shivering. Hell. Holy hell. Kids. Several of those shapes are definitely kids. Jesus, Jesus. They’re in really bad shape. Sometimes you can look at someone, even a mile away, and know they’re not going to survive. And there were too many of them to survive. Where were the EMTs? Where were the police? Holy holy hell. What did this?

  From the pattern of where they were lying I guessed they’d all gotten sick in other parts of the park and they’d made their way to this central location, and then couldn’t go any farther. How long had it been going on? It can’t have taken … I don’t know, it had to—

  “This is really bad,” Marena said.

  “That’s not what happens,” I said. “I mean, with food poisoning.”

  “No shit.” She whipped her head around and checked on Max. He couldn’t see the screen from there, but he was looking at us out of one eye, even though he was definitely still playing the game, bouncing a little and zapping beasties with invisible rays.

  “It’d have to be something like VX,” I said, “or some kind—”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a gas.” Automatically, and to my internal mortification, I couldn’t help thinking of the Buddy Love character in The Nutty Professor, when he delivers the same line. “It’s some kind of fatal weaponized form—”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t say anything substantively horripilant, okay? He’s just pretending he can’t hear us.”

  “What?” I asked. “Oh. Right.” It took me a second to get that she meant Max was listening and another two seconds to figure out that she’d used the antique word so that he wouldn’t understand it. I’m a little slow sometimes.

  “You know, because, these people didn’t even start to get into the shelters, they’re just—”

  “Cool it, all right?” she said. Her hand darted in front of me and clicked off my screen. I looked over at her. She was facing forward. Her jaw was moving a little like maybe she was grinding her teeth. “Just don’t say anything.”

  “Sorry.” You idiot, Jed. Idiot. Quadruple idiot. Okay, get it together, I thought. Don’t spook the offspring. Somebody in the Neo-Teoverse would probably tell him about all this pretty soon anyway. I got another shiver of that gross-out feeling that, as one gets older, increasingly substitutes for shock, sorrow, and rage. Damn. Kids. How many were there? Maybe it was just in the Magic Kingdom and not all over. Maybe a lot of them got out or weren’t affected. Fuck. I tried not to imagine the sound of crying. That’s the worst thing in the world. I’m not a big fan of human beings in general, but I guess one has a less-hard spot for the little dudes. Before they turn mean and discernibly stupid. Not that I’d want any around the house or anything, but still …

  Damn it, I thought. I had an NBC mask, that is, a nuclear, biological, and chemical-rated gas mask, and I’d left it back in the house. Idiot. Sylvana’s old Heckler & Koch P7 was in there, too, but I didn’t have a carry permit so it wasn’t a good idea for me to lug it around. Should’ve brought it anyway. At this—

  The car hit a bump and I knocked my head on the hot padded dash thing. “Ow,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Except, then, that’s weird about the character suits,” Marena said.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Those big cartoon costumes, you know? They’re all police now. They have gas masks and air-conditioning and metal-detecting goggles and radios and Tasers and everything in there.”

  “Huh. Maybe it came on too fast. Or it was something that got through the filters.”

  “Hmm,” she went.

  We crossed over the Hungryland Slough Canal. A sign said “Moroso Memorial Highway.” And coming up, I thought, the River of Death and the Valley of Humiliation. Be sure to stop at the City of Destruction and pick up Mr. Despondency. “Okay, res me,” Max said over his headphones to someone else in the Neo-Teoverse. “Next time, once she’s down, we’re going to switch all our DPS over to Jade Hag, and the reason we do Jade Hag last is because she has the thickest scales, so she dies really slow.”

  “Anyway, so you were right,” Marena said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “No, I screwed up, I should’ve made—”

  “Listen, Jed? I know I don’t know you well enough to say this, but don’t even start with that, okay?”

  “Uh, okay.” I’d been about to ask her something or tell her something or something and now I couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Anyway, if we’d prevented it, then the Codex would have been wrong.”

  “What—oh, no, no, it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “It’s not some supernatural law, it’s just a probability thin
g.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s not seeing the future, it’s just seeing what’s out there and making a more informed guess.”

  She didn’t respond. I shut up. Damn it, I thought. I should have just phoned in a bomb threat and done the time. All those kids were having, like, a great day, and they were all happy and shit, and then suddenly, everything got wrecked forever. It’s not so much the suffering you can empathize with, with kids. It’s the disappointment. Of course, just growing up is disappointing, but when it all happens at once, you know for a fact that there’s no excuse for anything and it’d be a lot better if the world had never existed.

  I clicked up the local news on my phone. “ … Orange County office of the State Police,” that Kristin person’s voice said on my earbud, “now issuing a statement that earlier reports of a gas attack are unfounded. Ron?”

  “Thanks, Kristin. They’re backed up on the freeways,” that Ron character’s voice said. “On ramps, on access roads, even in suburban streets: vacationers and Florida natives fleeing the central part of the state, responding to unconfirmed fears of chemical agents or military-style gas attack in Orlando, this despite new National Guard warnings telling citizens to remain in their homes, that the time for evacuation … [dramatic pause] has passed. In the vacation capital of the world, this is—”

  I killed the sound. Fuck, I thought. They don’t know anything. Or it’s just pure disinformation—

  “So look, Jed?” Marena said.

  I said yeah.

  “So even if they say there’s no point in clearing out, I think I want to keep going, okay?”

  I said good.

  “And the general consensus is that south equals safe, right? So I’m going to keep us on 95 for now.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sorry to probably take you out of your way for no reason.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, thanks for saving me. If I’d just been sitting around, you know …”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said.

  “No way,” Max said, “you can’t play hipball against the Ninth Lord of the Night unless you’re above a sixty-five.”

  I clicked the sound up in my ear. “ … attack of unknown proportions,” Ron’s voice was saying, “possibly some type of aerosol chemical weapon. By that they mean that the threat could be in the air and could reach a wide area. Because of the delayed symptoms, there is as yet no defined area where the casualties are occurring. We’ll be back after this brief—”

  I switched to C-SPAN. There was a different doctory-looking person, talking to some committee. He was listing symptoms. The first things to look for were redness, itching, severe headaches, edemal swelling, and disorientation. Skin abrasions weren’t healing. Victims at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa had old herpes sores opening up, and even things like rosacea and acne had suddenly become acute. I became reaware of a clamorous itch on the back of my neck, scratched it, vowed not to scratch it anymore, and clicked up YouTube. The first video had the head and shoulders of a large, puffy, ruddy-faced lady filling the window. Even on my phone’s little screen you could see there were clusters of pink dots with red centers on her chin and left cheek. I hit the arrow. “We were at Disney World,” she said. “We were here for Christmas.” She kind of droned the words out in long, agonized croaks. “And now my husband is all … he’s been, just, I can’t even say it, it’s just a, juuust a horrrror.” She paused and sniffled. “I’m all bloated up. I can’t lift my arms. They’re all blown up. We were heeeere for a vacaaaation! And this is at Disney World, horrrrror, horrrrror—”

  Whoa. I clicked away. That doesn’t sound right, I thought. I searched for information on VX. Every site I could find on it said the first effect would be nausea, but after that there’d be twitching or spasming, and then difficulty breathing. It didn’t say anything about rashes or swelling. Maybe something more like tear gas? Except the victims didn’t seem to have trouble seeing, either. And it definitely didn’t sound like botulism or anthrax or ricin or any of that stuff. Hmm.

  We were passing the North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport. People and planes seemed to be milling around but nothing was taking off. Ahead of us the sun tumesced over brown loblolly pines.

  I checked the news feeds again. There wasn’t anything new, and there still wasn’t anything about what we’d seen on the satellite. Bastards. They’re all just state apparatchiks. I went through posts on unofficial news feeds. On some of those, at least, a few people had seen the satellite shot—and they were freaking out, of course—but nobody seemed to know anything. Damn it, I thought. You think how we’re way, way into the Information Age, and then when something important happens, information seems oddly scarce. And you get a funny cut-loose feeling. Although, really, as you learn pretty quickly if you’re doing stock trading or commodities or just if you actually know something about anything—anything except, say, pop stars or cats—information about what’s really going on is always scarce.

  “Did you tell anybody I don’t know about?” Marena asked. “About the Codex thing?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “Or about the dates in the Codex?”

  “I didn’t tell anybody,” I said. “Come on, I’m a complete paranoid. I have twenty-three different passwords and I change each one of them every two days. I don’t tell anybody anything. You and Taro are it. I didn’t even tell my slugs.”

  “Okay, I believe you,” she said. “Sorry.” We fed onto 95.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “That’s what I was wondering about too.” That is, whether anyone had seen or heard about the date in the Codex and then had decided it was up to them to make it happen. It could be like that Left Behinder guy in China who killed two thousand or whatever people with ricin in some reservoir and said he’d been trying to kill everybody because the Last Judgment was supposed to have happened two months before. These people always think God needs a lot of help.

  We got past Lake Worth, Lantana, and Hypoluxo. Strip malls opened out on either side offering Gas, Food, Lodging, Burgers, Tacos, Sheila’s Chichi Sea-shells from the Seashore, Cheeburger Cheeburger, Golf ’n’ Flog S&M Country Club, Twistee Treat, Astrology, Tattoos, Taoist Massage, Alternative Pets, Piercings, Astrological Piercings, Electronics, Apparel, Thelemic Merchandise, Electronic Apparel, Pets, Porn, Pet Porn, Vegan Tattoos, and Thelemic Holistic Macrobiotic Vegan Genital Piercings and Burgers …

  What I especially don’t get, I thought, is what all this has to do with the Maya. Maybe just that there are a lot of us around here? Or maybe it’s just that bit about how we shoulder the blame. Maybe some Maya guy’s going to get blamed. Me, maybe. Damn. Todo por mi culpa. Even when it’s not.

  We breezed through Boca, but by Deerfield we were only averaging thirty-five mph. The orange sodium highway lamps came on. My brain, which I do not control well, kept dwelling on the Codex. Maybe that’s why the Warren people waited until the eighteenth to let that story about the Codex out in Time, it thought. So that if anything did happen it would be too late to do anything about it. Or maybe somebody from the company knew about this earlier. Or maybe the company’s behind the attack. No, that’s just your paranoia again.

  “I guess we should have gotten your opinion on the Codex thing earlier,” Marena said.

  “I don’t know what to say to that,” I said.

  “Say whatever you’re thinking.”

  “Well, you know, it does seem like a bit of a coincidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, just, you know, the book’s been around for thirteen hundred and forty-eight years, and then three days before the second-to-last date … never mind.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just, you know—”

  “What do you want me to tell you?” she asked. There was an edge in her voice like a razor blade in a taffy apple. “Okay, fine, Warren’s a sinister, like, rogue corporation, kind of like, you know, SPECTRE, and we spread this stuff or whatever it is, and we forged that Maya book, and now we’re, we’re going to kill you. Except first we’
ll explain everything to you and then leave you somewhere in some diabolical trap that you can escape from. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds very implausible,” I said. “I was just—”

  “Maybe it was both of us,” she said. “Did you ever think about that? Maybe just by raising the alarm, we made it happen. Somebody saw the threat level was going to go up tomorrow so he decided to pull this today.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry, let’s, just—”