Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Polonium particulates, I thought. Hell. Maybe we should change out of our clothes. If there’s even a few grains of that shit on there they might blow up and get inhaled or whatever … hmm. Hell. Like an idiot I hadn’t thought of it before. Also like an idiot, I immediately imagined Marena peeling off her garments and exposing about two square yards of taut, tempting skin. Should I ask her about it? Except any clothes we can get from anybody around here, we’d be more likely to pick up something from those. Definitely lice, anyway. Well, we can just be naked. Except that kid’s back there. And also except maybe none of us were really anywhere near the hot zone, but then if there’s any of the stuff around here, like all the people around us must have dragged a few with them, then if we’re naked the particles are more likely to get absorbed through the skin, right? Say the odds are ten thousand—well, no, say they’re like—oh, forget it. You’d have to be Enrico Fermi to figure this stuff out. I decided not to mention it.

  Outside, in the unfortunately real world, the last blue drained out of the sky. The lamps didn’t go on. Still, the night seemed brighter than the day had been, with the high shell of smoke reflecting the butterscotchy burnt orange of the fires.

  “Well, that’s one good thing, anyway,” Marena said, maybe to herself.

  I looked at her.

  “Oh, I just got a text from ES,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, “what’s ES again?”

  “Oh, that’s Executive Solutions. It’s our security contractor. They check out our cars and negotiate with kidnappers and whatever.”

  “Okay. Wait, can you get a text through to them, if—”

  “No, but they know where we are, the homing thing’s not—they say they’ve got our locator on the satellite. And the boat’s on the way.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Uh … are you sure the coast guard’s going to let them in this close?”

  “I guess they think so.”

  We sat some more. On my side you could just see green firework chrysanthemums popping over the mainland. Somebody on TomTomClub said it was the Muslim community in Homestead celebrating the attack. Outside, a few people jogged past us between the cars, heading south. On CNN they were saying that the Feds had lost touch with the Miami Police Department, among many others. Bad sign. When’s the looting going to spread to here? I wondered. I looked around out the window but everybody seemed to be sitting tight. Drudge had something about how army doctors were estimating that at least one-fifth of the population of Greater Orlando already had some signs of exposure, which meant that many times that number of people would present symptoms within the next few weeks. There was an item about how in Belle Glade, six out of ten people surveyed by phone said they thought the glowbugs were zombies or somehow victims of witchcraft. One of them said that in his neighborhood his homies had a posse to “take care of them,” by which he meant kill and burn them. On StrategyNet they were talking about how there wasn’t a single government agency that had the math to predict the course of the cascading panic. “It is a HIGHLY COMPLEX SYSTEM,” Bourgeoiseophobus said. “And right now it’s spreading OUTWARD from Ctrl Florida and it’s getting magnified because it FEEDS ON ITSELF. And the more people you warn about it, the BIGGER IT IS GOING TO GET.” He sounded right to me.

  The Net went down. I restarted and tried it again. It came back. I looked around YouTube. There were videos of burning shopping malls, spreading skin lesions, and lines of refugees waiting to get on school buses. Puffy hunch-dwarfs in chrome responder suits and SCBA probosci set up a Reaganville of arc lights and blue plastic tents outside whatever was left of the Miami airport. Night-feeding buzzards who would soon be dead themselves picked at a dead lady under one of the giant psilocybe mushrooms outside the Mad Tea Party ride, with a background glimpse of a desolate Fantasyland street and a pair of elephants suspended in flight, all in the grisly chiaroscuro of a single emergency light, like that scene in Pinocchio where Pleasure Island is all deserted because the boys have gotten turned into donkeys. A lone old guy, apparently the only moving object for miles around, staggered past abandoned cars on West Gore Street in downtown Orlando. A bunch of ancient women gathered fuel in a vacant lot, like … well, I don’t know what they were like. A ten-year-old-ish girl waded through brown muck toward a flashing orange light.

  “Jed?” Marena asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got to tell Max some stuff.”

  “Okay,” I said. I guessed she meant some private stuff. “Do you have any big headphones? Or I can stick my head out the window so I can’t hear.”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said. “I’m just mentioning it.” Maybe she thought the kid might freak out less if he wanted to look brave in front of me. “Max?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “We have to talk about a couple of things.”

  Max said okay. Damn it, I thought, I really, really don’t want to hear this. Max was at that age where they want to be a big kid but might still have an old spit-stained Beanie bear in their backpack. And you don’t want to hurt their feelings by seeing them cry. I put on a headset and maxed up the ambient noise cancellation and scrunched down in my seat, but it didn’t help. I tried to concentrate on the news just to give him some privacy, not real privacy, but that kind of Japanese-style pseudoprivacy when you can’t stand listening to something so you try to tune out and not hear. But I could still hear everything.

  “Listen, sweetie?” Marena asked in a very low voice. “You know there’s a chance that I might get hurt today, right?”

  He must have said “Mm-hmm.”

  “Okay. Now, suppose I fall over and fall asleep, or something knocks me unconscious or something.”

  “Is that going to happen?”

  “No, it’s just a tiny possibility. But if that happens you’ll need to stay in the car with the door locked, even if I don’t look good, okay? Don’t get out and don’t go anywhere with strangers. Jed’ll take care of you and you need to do what he says. But if Jed gets sick, or if he’s not here, then just stay in the car and wait. Don’t do anything anybody tells you to do unless they’re wearing a police uniform and a badge that looks real. Otherwise stay in the car with the door locked even if somebody’s hammering on the window. If that happens the glass won’t break, and there’ll be police here, so don’t worry. The only time to get out of the car is if there’s fire or something happening around it, or if it’s making smoke. Or if there are a lot of policemen with badges, you’ll have to do what they say. Except never let go of your phone and keep your watch on. I’ve gotten in touch with ES and they’ll have your transmitter on your phone so they’ll be able to find you. But still, don’t let go of your phone because they may not always be able to see your chip. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. You know the company’s sending a boat to pick us up? They’ll identify themselves as Executive Solutions, and they’ll have identification. You should ask to see it. Don’t ask them if that’s what they are, though. They have to say the name themselves. You understand that, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t get on any boats you aren’t sure about. You remember Ana Vergara? She’ll probably be on the boat or on the phone. Ask to talk to her. I’m just telling you this because I know you’re a big brave kid so you can handle it.”

  Silence. Hmm, she sure didn’t mention any father in all that, I thought. Maybe he was an eyedropper job.

  “Sweetie?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said, “but how tiny a possibility?”

  “It’s very unlikely, but we’re still in a hazardous situation right now so I need to remind you of this stuff.”

  “If you start dying we’ll get you to the cryogenics place, right?”

  “Well, if an ambulance picks me up they’ll do that, but you can’t think about that. There may not be time for that, and there may not even be time for an ambulance. So you can’t stay with me if I tell you to go, you have to go with Jed or whoever I tell you to go with.”

  Max scrunched down in his seat. I think he may have whimpered a little. I can’t deal with this,
I thought, this is one of the many compelling reasons not to have kids in the first place. It’s too sad to watch them find out what the world is really like. Marena started to say something to me and then seemed to think better of it.

  We waited. A growing stream of people walked south around us, threading through the packed cars, some carrying people on slings or pushing them in carts. A lot of them looked sketchy. Still, I thought, these were all people who’d left their own vehicles. And they want to get to Key West. They’re in too much of a hurry to do any more than cursory looting. I was starting to suspect that Executive Solutions was just a wishful hallucination. Tomorrow might be a pretty grim day. I guess any time now we’ll just devolve back to the Paleolithic Age and start fishing for shark using each other as bait.

  “Jed?” Marena asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, whipping my head over to her. I’m here for you, babe, I got ready to say. Hey, what are you doing? Are you sure he’s asleep? Mmmmm, that feels—

  “What’s an ADW?” She was watching the C-SPAN transcript.

  “Oh, uh, they probably mean an Area Denial Weapon,” I said. “Like a dirty bomb. Like to keep soldiers out of some city or whatever for a while, until the radiation—you know, like if the half-life is only a week or so, the—”

  “Who’d do something like that? I mean around here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe it’s, I don’t know, it’s some sinister Dick Cheney-Carlisle-Halliburton-CIA-NSA-DIA-DHS crypto-sub-rosa-false-flag-invasion-pretext-conspiracy thing. Or at least, that’s what I usually assume.”

  “What’s DIA, you mean the airport?”

  “That’s the Defense—”

  “So look,” she interrupted, “if I got messed up or whatever … uh, you’ll hang on to Max, right?”

  “Of course I will,” I said. “Jesus, what do you think I am, a complete lowlife? Don’t answer that.”

  “And just keep my phone with you and the ES people’ll come and get you when they can. And they’ll know what to do and who else to call and everything.”

  “Okay. Is there a code word?”

  “Sorry? Oh. No. They know about you. Just give them ID.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, they may be here any minute. In the last message I got they said their ETA was nine twenty p.M.”

  “It’s eleven now.”

  “I know.”

  I tried to think of something to say that was clever, mood-lightening, and relatively masculine, but I guess I’m not Bill Maher, because I couldn’t. She went back to watching TV. I looked up polonium on CHEMnetBASE. It turned out that the half-life of the 210 isotope is only about 138.38 days, so it could presumably be used like an N-bomb, to clear people out of a base or a city that your army wanted to occupy later. 209 is less toxic, but it has a half-life of about a hundred and three years. So if you left a lot of it lying around someplace, nobody’d want to go there for a while. Okay, that’s two numbers. What about the other one that kept coming up, 124,030?

  Don’t even think about it.

  Cono. Dizzy. Fear. Fear—

  The Net went down again.

  Hell. I tried and retried. Nothing.

  What’s the point, anyway? We’re probably all exposed to some degree. You just have to wait a while, just a very little while, and your legs will start feeling heavy, your hair will start to pull out when you comb it—

  Dizzy. Okay. Sit.

  The brain has chemical counterirritants to terror that, if you wait, will eventually kick in, and I think I got it back together without the wimmenfolk ’n’ chilluns noticing.

  By midnight it became clear that Max couldn’t go another minute without food. There was some discussion about whether whatever we might stir up around here could be contaminated but the upshot was that I left the car to forage. About a quarter-mile behind us I found a still-occupied Dodge motor home and made the please-roll-down-your-window sign. The guy in the driver’s seat shook his head. But he looked Mexican, which for me is good. I started telling him what I wanted, in lower-caste Spanish, and waving a thick wad of bills. Finally they decided I wouldn’t go away. I made sure they were from Miami, and that they’d left from Miami, and that there wasn’t anything in their truck from north of Miami. I bought one bag of Rancheritos, one of Pulparindos, and an armload of alternative beverages, all for eight hundred dollars.

  Well, that worked okay, I thought as I walked back. The night was humid. You could smell the marine biomass starting to rot. Preview of coming repulsions. There were artilleryish rumblings on the landward side. Somewhere, pretty far away but not far enough, you could just hear shouting and breaking glass. Damn. I should have asked those guys if they had any old guns I could buy. Maybe I’ll go back. Or look for a pickup with a bumper sticker that says if YOU CAN READ this, YOU’RE in RANGE. No problem.

  By the time I got back to the Jeep I had a whole scenario planned. I’d find a truck with cleaning supplies in it, buy some duct tape, a mop handle, a cardboard tube, and a detergent bottle, tape them all together, and paint the thing with grease out of the axle so that it would pass for a twelve-gauge in the dark, and then I’d sit on the roof all night and when some gang of hoodla came up on the car I’d face them down with my stainless-steel gaze, and by morning Marena would be so in awe of my manliness that she’d be pawing at my casa de pinga practically in front of little Maxwell, and as soon—

  “Jed, get in the car,” Marena said through an inch of open window. She’d moved into the backseat and was holding Max. She popped open the passenger door. “I’m serious.”

  I got in. I handed over the loot. We waited. I let them convince me to have one Pulparindo and a little Inca Kola. No need to fill up. Defecation can be a big problem in situations like this, and one didn’t want to get involved with it more than necessary, even if one was on a bridge. I said she should try to chill a bit because there was no way I was falling asleep, and in fact even on a normal day I wouldn’t fall asleep at this hour and in this situation. She said okay. I went back to watching the dashscreen. At least we could still watch. Basically, no matter what’s going on, most of the time all you could ever do was watch. But at least these days we can watch better. The CNN scroll said that the White House and the Defense Department were now considering the event to be a terrorist attack, “although as yet there are no credible claims of responsibility” and it was “not yet clear how the toxic material was dispersed.” On CNN that same Dr. Quentin was responding to questions, saying how it was true that particles they’d found on samples from the No-Go Zone were isotopes of polonium, which was very rare and normally very expensive, “seemingly prohibitively expensive for a dispersal of this scale.” Someone on the committee asked where the stuff had come from originally and she said they weren’t sure yet but that it was likely that the isotopes were made in Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  We sat.

  Some people, of whom I am one, have brain chemistry that’s gotten a little over-tweaked, and one side effect is that fear or anger or any large emotion comes and goes a little more abruptly, or jaggedly, than it does in neurotypicals. So I kept getting those unmotivated ups and downs in my fear level, intervals when your brain just shuts down on it and steers you toward something else. I’d catch myself thinking about the Codex or the Game or even just about the last nitrate reading in my Baja tank back home and then think how this couldn’t be right, how I ought to be more upset than this, for others if not for myself, and then I’d go back to trying to calculate how long the natural gas in the generator tank could power the calcium skimmers. At some point I realized that Marena was singing to Max in Korean.

  I listened. Hmm. This is actually kind of nice. Chingalo, I thought, I only met this woman once before today and already it felt like we’d been through more together than Lewis and Clark, Bonnie and Clyde, Kirk and Spock, and Siegfried and Roy, put together.

  Max was quiet. I snuck a look back there. He’d curled up in his headware and, as children can, fallen asleep from stress. Marena’s eyes were closed. I noticed she had a can of pepper spray i
n her left hand. Like that was going to do anything. Maybe I should move back there too. Offer a sturdy masculine shoulder. No, that’s ridiculous.

  I tried the Net again. Nothing. All we could get was radio off the aerial, like it was 1950. We’d been bombed back to the Milton Berle age. Still, news shows now had the benefit of nearly ubiquitous video recording, and people were still managing to get them to the stations. There were green grainy night-vision shots of feral kids prowling in flash packs, smashing store windows and torching cars and worse. A trio of well-brought-up, articulate children filmed themselves choking out good-byes in a burning house. There was a long video of a gang of Mexican kids partying in a Macy’s in a deserted mall that had a really strange Warriors-like quality. Another popular piece of video—out of the few that made their way from blogs onto the networks—was one of a two-year-old girl trying to feed Milk Duds to her dead mother.