John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  But I could hardly imagine what Travis must be feeling. He was an American to his core, almost to a fault, as Mom sometimes said. Not "my country, right or wrong," not that sort of idiot, but a deep believer in the core values of America, and a deep hater when those values were violated. He didn't like American adventurism, which had occupied America for quite a few years now, but if you attacked his beloved country, look out. You wouldn't want to get in his way.

  Looking around me, I wondered how long it would take America to recover from this blow. Or if it ever would.

  It was almost completely dark when we reached the Halifax River, which used to be a broad expanse of water separating the mainland of Florida from the long barrier island where the Blast-Off Motel was. The main way we could tell we were there, aside from what the GPS was saying, was the large number of boats. Just about every one of them was capsized, on its side, or stove in. They were piled up like a rich kid's toys on the edge of a very dirty bathtub. Everything from one-mast sailboats to multimillion-dollar motor yachts, all equal now, all nautical junk.

  We found a wide concrete pier that was relatively free of debris and drove out to the end. In the failing light that leaked through the overcast there was very little to see but a stretch of black water and, maybe half a mile away, a few fires. Most of them looked pretty small, maybe no bigger than the drum fires of the homeless we'd just seen. One was a little larger.

  One of the soldiers had told us that none of the six or seven bridges over to the barrier island was passable. There were plans for a pontoon bridge, but no one knew when it would arrive. There were just too many places that needed them, and too few bridges. Most of the ones the Army had were in use in Indonesia or Nigeria. Just not enough equipment to go around, from planes to boats to bulldozers to choppers, he had said. He didn't sound happy about it.

  We all got out. Dad and Mom and Dak were trying to orient themselves; this had been their hometown, their old stomping grounds.

  "That's it for tonight, friends," Travis said, turning off the headlights.

  Mom was working at the GPS screen and Dad had a pair of night glasses, scanning the island.

  "I recognize three hotels over there," he said, breathing hard. "One of them seems to be missing, and there's a lot of heat coming from that area. Maybe a pile of rubble. Wait a minute, I think I have the Tropicana... yeah, that's it. No lights, can't see anybody moving around. And moving down the beach, I think it's about a quarter mile, Kelly?"

  "About that. Can you see it?"

  Dad stopped scanning, looked for a moment. Then he dropped the night glasses, rubbed his eyes, and pointed at the largest fire.

  "That's it. It's still standing, but I think it may be burning."

  9

  Hope is a tough thing to stretch through a night that long.

  Breakfast wasn't too appealing because the wind had shifted during the night. It had been coming from the land, which was bad enough, but now it blew in over the Halifax River, which was even worse.

  The river was choked with floating bodies. They came in all lengths, but were all large and round, having swollen in the heat until they stretched their clothes.

  Travis eased Scrooge into the water and as soon as it was afloat it became clear that somebody was going to have to stand out on the hood and move the... debris. Not just bodies, of course, the great majority of the stuff choking what had once been a clear blue strip of water was the remains of homes and other such wrack and ruin. We didn't dare try to drive over a large piece of a wall, or part of a roof, so we had to shove it away with a pole we had found on shore.

  Dad took the first shift. After about five minutes he leaned over and brought up break­fast. He stood with his hands on his knees for a while, Travis letting the engine idle.

  "You okay, Manny?" he asked.

  "I've never been less okay in my life. But, yeah, we can go on. Travis, take it slow, okay? I can't bear the thought of running over one of these people."

  "You got it, my friend. All ahead, extremely slow."

  And that's how we did it. It would have been slow in any case, but with all the obstructions and the time we took to gently pole the corpses out of the way, a trip that would have taken maybe ten minutes under normal conditions took us a full three hours. I kept thinking that human beings shouldn't have to do what I was doing. Nobody should have to pole their way through the River Styx, Hell on Earth.

  Finally, Scrooge began lurching and tilting, and we were moving up onto land again. Mom and Dad were looking at the GPS map and comparing it to the reality, and pointing out just how much of the barrier island had been swept away.

  "It's a whole different landscape," Dad said, staring around in wonder and horror. "It looks like the wave just sucked half of it away."

  We made fairly good time on our way over the remains of the three or four blocks to the hotel tower. Then we came to a pile of junk that looked like it wasn't going to be moved short of dynamite.

  "Let's get out and walk around it," Dad said. It was easy to see that he was very afraid of what we'd find when we got there.

  "You guys go," Travis said. "I don't want to leave the Duck alone. I'll see if I can find a way around. And don't forget your guns."

  Mom and Dad and Dak got down, and handed me my rifle. Travis turned away and soon had driven around another heap of trash and was out of sight. The sound of the Duck engine, never very loud in the first place, faded away, and it got very quiet. Right where we were standing, normally the traffic would have been thick. Now, the cars that remained were topsy-turvy, including some that were buried in sand almost up to the roof. We stood there and listened, hearing nothing but seagulls, trying not to think about what they were feasting on, then moved cautiously through small gaps in the wreckage until the Blast-Off Tower came in sight.

  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. Sh
e 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."