John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  "Seventeen, sir... that is... uh..." Oh, brother. Now I'd stepped in it, now I was screwed. But Travis put his arm over my shoulder and smiled again.

  "That's Martian years, right Ray? In Earth years he's... oh, about twenty."

  "That's right, General." I saluted. Travis gave me a droll look.

  "Okay," the lieutenant said. "It's on your head, General. This spot where we're stand­ing, this is the last outpost of law and order in the United States. Beyond that, there's pockets of reasonable order, mostly vigilante law. The rest is anarchy. Bear in mind, just about all the prisons survived the wave, there was time to get the inmates up on the top floors but nothing to feed them with afterward and all the guards took off to see about their families, so those folks are running around out there, along with the bad guys you'd normally run into. They've probably just about drunk up all the liquor that survived the wave by now, and I don't know if that's good news or bad news. They might be starting to feel some pretty bad hangovers about now..."

  "Thanks for everything, Lieutenant," Travis said, and sat in the driver's seat and started the engine. We pulled away from the little knot of troops and into the real chaos.

  Just down the road Travis stopped Scrooge again and walked to the back and rummaged in a box. He started passing out things. We each got a military helmet like the regular Army troops were wearing. He told us we had to wear them from now on when we were moving in Scrooge, as the ride was apt to get rough from here. Wearing them when we got out was up to us, but he'd advise we keep them on. He said Kevlar vests were avail­able for those of us who thought we could wear them without dying of heatstroke. Nobody put them on, but we kept them handy. Then he gave us each a little white bundle, which turned out to be jars of something called Vicks wrapped in cloth surgical masks.

  "The trick, as I understand it," he said, "is to rub some around your nostrils, your upper lip, and work some into the mask. I don't know; I've never had to try it. It's recom­mended by coroners for people attending autopsies of bodies that have been dead a while. They say gasoline works pretty well, too. It deadens the sense of smell, and it damn sure smells better than a decomposing body."

  Even predisaster Florida has its own distinctive smells, not all of them pleasant. Mold and mildew are strong themes, and other things associated with a hot, wet climate that can rot things pretty fast. There are smells associated with swampland that I don't mind. The cities have their own distinctive smells.

  After the wave, all those things were intensified. There was also the smell of salt water, still lying in pools here and there on the saturated ground. There was the constant smell of smoke, of course, and the smell you get after a house fire that has been doused by the fire department. Those were the easy ones.

  Then there were the miles and miles of broken sewers and septic tanks that had been uncovered by the receding water. Many of the mobile homes or modular homes or trailers and recreational vehicles used propane, and many of those that hadn't burst and already dissipated were leaking slowly. Propane has no odor, but the stuff they mix in with it does, and it's not pleasant. We smelled all these things in various strengths as we went down the road, depending on which way the wind was blowing. And there was the smell of rotting flesh, distant, not yet overpowering.

  It was about an hour later when we saw our first body.

  It was lying in the road, directly in our path. The bulldozed path was too narrow for us to go around it. Several of us stood up, to get a better look. I wished I hadn't. He was dressed in black leather and most of his head was missing. I sat back down, and Eliza­beth, sitting next to me, leaned over the side and quietly vomited.

  Travis and Dad stood up and walked out onto the flat hood of Scrooge, looking down at the corpse. I heard a sound off to the left and saw a guy coming down a partly cleared suburban street. He was bald up to the top of his sunburned head, limping slightly, wear­ing gold-rimmed glasses with one lens missing. He was filthy, and looked exhausted. He carried a shotgun cradled in his arms.

  "Afternoon, friend," Travis said. "Looks like you've got a dead one here."

  "Yeah, I popped that one about this time yesterday. That's his motorcycle over there." He gestured to a burned-out wreck that used to be a Harley.

  "What'd he do?"

  "Came roaring up, drunk, firing away. We waited till he stopped to reload, and I shot him." He made another gesture, and two more guys appeared from behind bits of wreck­age. They also carried shotguns, and they weren't smiling. But they weren't pointing them at us, either.

  "Seems hard, just leaving him there like that. Couldn't you bury him?"

  "Mister, it took me two days to find my way here to my neighborhood. One of my daughters is dead, and one was medevaced out and I don't even know if she's alive because the fucking phones don't work. I've spent five days digging my neighbors out of the ruins of their houses and only found one alive, and he died later. We've buried fifty on this street, and we've got a long way to go just on recovering bodies. After you've wrapped a six-year-old in a tarp and put him in the ground by his swing set... well, mister, I plain don't have the time and energy to bother with roadkill like that piece of shit. You want him buried, you bury him."

  "I get your point," Travis said. "And I'm sorry for your loss."

  "Fuck your..." He stopped and ran a hand over his bare head. The hand was wrapped in dirty bandages. "Sorry. We had a band of inmates on motorcycles come through just before I got here. They... never mind. We're armed now, and we don't fuck around. We're going to hoist that piece of garbage up on a lamppost when we get the time, as a warn­ing." I thought he meant the biker, but he pointed to the burned Harley. "I think they're getting the message. Other neighborhoods have been hoisting other things up on lamp­posts, if you get my meaning."

  "I do indeed, sir. And good luck to you."

  "Same to you. Where are you going?"

  "All the way to the ocean."

  The man laughed, though it wasn't much of one. "Good luck to you, too. You're going to need it."

  He went away down the street and the two guys set up for a cross fire ducked back behind their shelters. Travis was looking down on the dead man.

  "Well" – he sighed – "I'm not going to just run him over." He jumped down to the ground. In the seat ahead of me Dad started to get up. I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down as I went by him. I heard him saying something as I went by but I didn't look back.

  I joined Travis and we each took a boot. I had thought the blackness around the remains of the dude's head was dried blood. It was flies. They swarmed up as we pulled him, like they were angry at us. There's some big flies in Florida.

  We got him off to the side of the road, and I walked on a few steps away from Scrooge and puked. I don't throw up as easy as Elizabeth does; it's a gut-wrenching, exhausting business for me. It took a few minutes. When I straightened up I saw Travis wiping his mouth. He gave me a faint grin.

  "Join the club," he said.

  "I thought..."

  "What, that I'm tough? Nah. I've never seen anything like this. I was never in combat, I was a flyboy, out in space. But the guys who have seen it have told me that... not that you get used to it, you don't ever want to do that, but that it gets easier."

  And it did. I didn't puke again. I think the puking part of you gets numb, you switch into another gear or something, or you store the sights and smells away in some other part of your mind. That's what I did.

  I got back into Scrooge and sat by my mother. She put her arm around me and hugged me tight. It felt good.

  Travis had picked up a soggy booklet with a bright orange cover from the ground before we got moving again. Soon we were seeing them by the thousands. They were airdropped leaflets advising people what to do, in the simplest and starkest possible terms.

  There was the obvious stuff: boil all water, even if you're only going to wash in it. Sewage had contaminated everything, typhoid and cholera were distinct possibilities, as well a
s dysentery. Sterilize cans before you open them. Basic first-aid instructions, in English and Spanish, with simple illustrations.

  I wondered if everyone was taking the time to boil their water. I hoped so, but there was so much to do, and quite a few Americans couldn't read. Maybe the pictures would be enough. And there was plenty of firewood around.

  The authorities were now advocating cremations rather than mass burials for bodies that couldn't be gotten to reefer trucks before they got too ripe.

  Travis asked Mom to read the booklet aloud to the rest of us. One part of it stands out in my memory.

  "They say here that, if possible, you should pull some head hairs from a body before you burn it. Get the roots, it says. Put the sample in a plastic bag and write on it where you found the body, age, race, and sex if you can tell, and how you disposed of it, and give the baggie to your 'neighborhood disaster coordinator,' whatever that is."

  "Maybe that guy we talked to back there," Dad said.

  We pulled up to a knot of cars strewn across the road. There was a gap, but it was too narrow for the broad-hipped Scrooge to get through. Travis pulled up close and nudged one of the cars with the nose of the Duck and it moved a little, then jammed tight. He turned off the engine to conserve fuel.

  "No good," he said. "I wish I'd had time to install some sort of 'dozer blade on the front of this thing, but I figured it wasn't worth the extra time. And I can't push too hard on stuff like this or it might poke a hole in the hull."

  So no bulldozer, but we did have two big Earthies and six game but gravity-lagged Martians. We also had a powerful vehicle, chains, and block and tackle. Combine that with a lot of sweat, and you can move a lot of things.

  The rest of that day was spent moving cars, mostly. We'd attach a heavy chain to one and then to Scrooge, and Travis would tug it out of the jam, then another, then another. Sometimes we had to loop the chain around a fire hydrant or street sign embedded in concrete to get it to move sideways. After we'd cleared a path we Martians would take turns walking ahead of Scrooge, our job being to kick most of the loose lumber out of the way, being sure there was none with nails poking up.

  We saw bodies here and there, mostly so tangled up in the wreckage you could hardly tell that's what they were.

  We came to a big stack of cars, three high. I climbed up and looked inside. Nobody there. I looped the chain around the doorposts of the top car, climbed back down and stood well back – Travis had warned us the chain could snap, and pop like a whip – and Dad reversed Scrooge and the car toppled off the stack and was dragged back out of the way. I climbed back up again and looked inside. Bad idea. There were six people in there, looking about what you'd expect corpses to look after seven days in hot weather. If you have no idea what that would look like, good for you. Try to keep it that way.

  I controlled my stomach, hooked up the chain, and got down again. Dad dragged it off and over to one side, and I never looked at it again. Just another day's work.

  When the sun reached the horizon in the west, we had gone two hard miles into no-man's-land. We had about another two miles to go to reach the ocean, and they promised to be harder.

  The battery-powered GPS map showed an elementary school off to the south, two streets over, and by standing up on one of the roll bars with the tarp rolled back I was just able to see it, on a low rise. It was a one-story sprawling brick building like a hundred others in that area, with two larger buildings that were probably an auditorium and a gym at either end of the classrooms.

  Travis turned off on a cleared street going south and we were immediately approached by four men with rifles, this time pointed right at us. They wanted to know our business. They were reasonably polite about it, but the rifles never wavered. We told them we were headed for the beach to check on our relatives. They examined our papers, compared pictures with faces on passports and drivers' licenses. Travis's major general's stars didn't exactly impress them, but did calm them. They pretty much ignored all our silly little deputy sheriff badges. Finally, they all lowered their weapons.

  "The baseball field over there is pretty clear," the leader told us. "There's a tennis court, too, you could park that thing there. We buried all the bodies we could find lying around here, and the ones in homes, but we haven't got into the school itself. I wouldn't go over there, if I was you. We're fixing to start tackling that tomorrow. I'd rather cut off my own right arm than go in there, but the government hasn't showed up, and it's getting to be a health hazard."

  "We won't disturb them," Travis assured them, and we were waved on.

  There was enough room to park Scrooge on the tennis court, and we were almost a hundred yards from the building. It was getting dark as Travis turned off the engine, and we all climbed down. He pulled the tarps off the supplies in the very back of the Duck and began tossing items over the side. After a short time of confusion we managed to get a large inflatable tent set up, not much different than the instant tents we used on Mars except not pressure-tight. There was a folding picnic table and gas grill, and boxes of canned food and bottled water, and even a cooler full of ice. It was all high-end camping stuff, brightly colored and sturdy.

  The Coleman lantern reflections on the few unbroken windows in the schoolhouse looked like the wandering ghosts of all the dead children inside.

  Don't go there. Both literally and figuratively, just don't go there.

  I lost track of how many hot dogs I ate. We were all like that, slapping one dog onto a bun and slathering it with mustard and slopping on the fiery chili even as we were cook­ing the next one. I'd eaten very little during the day and thrown up most of that. The good honest smoke of our fire smothered the less pleasant smells around us, and we ate like ravening dogs, all conversation ceasing, very little sound at all except the crackling of the fire and the snap of soda can pop-tops. I know it will sound odd to say this, but it was a very good time. Simple pleasures, good company, hearty appetite. The day's worries behind us, tomorrow's horrors temporarily put on hold. I wondered if it was something like what soldiers experience on the battlefield after surviving a day of fighting.

  What it wasn't like was camping out on Mars, except for the shape of the tent. Martian Boy Scouts have mostly different merit badges, though we do learn to tie knots. It did take me back to my earlier boyhood, though, when my family camped out from time to time before we emigrated.

  We finally all sat back, cross-legged on the cool concrete, stuffed probably more than was wise.

  "This would be the time when we'd tell ghost stories," Dad said, and looked at me for a moment. I knew our minds had gone down the same path.

  "Let's don't," Mom said, and everybody agreed, including Dad. "I can't see that it's a good time for telling jokes, either. What else is there to do around the campfire?"

  Surprising us all, Evangeline began to sing. Up to then she'd been so quiet you hardly knew she was there, though I sometimes saw her whispering to Elizabeth, as if afraid that we'd all laugh at her if she spoke aloud. But her voice was clear and confident and sweet, contralto, and she had either had some training or was one hell of a natural talent. The song was "Tenting Tonight," which I didn't know, but later learned was quite old. They sang it during the American Civil War. When she got to the chorus Elizabeth joined in, and soon we were all doing it, letting her carry the verse.

  When she was done we were all smiling and clapping, which was something of a mistake, because when we stopped the darkness and deathly silence closed in even more than it had before. We all felt it, like a damp blanket spreading over us. The wind picked up a little, and sang through the broken glass of the schoolhouse.

  The best thing to do for that, we silently agreed, was to sing more. It turned out Evangeline knew a lot of songs suitable for campfires. Not all of them made a lot of sense for the situation – I remember singing "All You Need Is Love" and thinking these people here needed a lot more than that – but who cared? It was the sweet music that mattered, not the words. Words cou
ldn't do anything to help us deal with this awfulness, we'd already tried words in every combination we could think of, and they just didn't cut it. But music could.

  Eventually the tunes turned into yawns. Travis showed us how to put the side flaps down on the Duck awning, so there were two places to sleep. Amid some grumbling about what a fuddy-duddy sexist pig Travis was, the women were bedded down on the folding seats in Scrooge and the men in the tent outside. When the girls were out of the way Travis revealed he was an even worse pig than they supposed; he set watches throughout the night, but not for the girls. I was sure he'd cut me out of it, but he didn't. In fact, he asked me if I was up to standing the first watch. I was tired, but not sleepy, and I said sure.

  "If you feel yourself drifting off," Travis said, "shoot yourself in the foot. That usually wakes me up." He tossed me a rifle and watched as I checked it out, then Dak and Dad and Mr. Redmond climbed into the tent.

  I sat on a camp chair and, naturally, about fifteen minutes later I almost fell off. Oh, great. Bitch every time somebody treats you like a kid, Ray, and then when they give you a really adult responsibility, you fall on your stupid ass.

  So I stood up and started walking around Scrooge, taking my time. Never has an hour and a half passed so slowly. I learned a new definition of boredom, I learned how hard it is to stay alert for even ten minutes when you're exhausted, and then the tiger came.

  Tiger? I hear you cry. In Florida?

  What happened was, I heard a sound. It wasn't a roar or even a purr. It wasn't a snap­ping stick or a squishing footstep. Maybe there was no sound at all, maybe my brain invented a sound when my poor pitiful atrophied monkey nose smelled something wrong, wrong, wrong, and from deep in my brain something let me know that trouble was approaching.

  Predator!

  So I snapped on my flashlight. I'd kept it off, mostly, to conserve the batteries. I fanned the beam around, and at first swept right over it, then it registered, and I moved the beam back and there it was, squinting in the glare, just sitting there and watching me, looking like he was deciding whether to go for the throat or rip out my guts.