by John Shirley
Dad looked at him, startled. “Really? You think they’d have shot us that time?”
“Maybe. Except they didn’t want a firefight in the middle of the day there out in the street. Dickie had a good thing, looting those houses. Didn’t want attention drawn to it.”
Russ noticed Lars leaning forward, listening to all this carefully. It gave him a pinched feeling in his stomach. But the guy was just a flake. No way he could be a problem.
“So what do we do? He’s going to start trying to enforce his stupid little ultimatum,” Jill said. “We can’t let them do that. Once they get started that way . . . ”
She shook her head.
Brand nodded. “I agree. We can’t play that game. It’s extortion and it’s dangerous to let them get any power over us. But who do we turn to? There’s no working phones, to speak of. There’re no cell phones, no wi-fi, no Internet. All the boats in the area have been trashed . . . There’s debris all up and down the coast . . . ”
“There must be a boat that could be fixed up,” Pendra pointed out.
“I was thinking about that,” Russ said. Feeling kind of uncomfortable, speaking up. But the idea had been growing on him. “There are some boats that are, like, intact, on the beach. Overturned but they don’t look like they have holes in them. Some with engines. We could fix them up, find some fuel. Use trucks to pull the boats to the ocean. Go down the coast to get help. It’d take time . . . ”
“So much debris out there, doesn’t look like a boat could get through,” Dad said. “Even if you could, it’s so far down the coast. And which way do you go to find people who are any better off than us? I mean—if they were on the coast, they were swamped too. I’ve been thinking about it and . . . it’s just probably faster to get through the hills, and get to Deer Creek, where we know we can get help. Talk to the sheriff there—call FEMA. Get the National Guard out here. It shouldn’t be that hard. I think several of us should go, so we can back up each other’s story—I mean, one guy tells them the mayor is keeping us from leaving, he might not be believed. And . . . ” He grimaced. “Whoever goes might need the other kind of backup . . . ”
“So—who’d be going?” Russ asked. Afraid to be asked. And afraid they wouldn’t ask him.
Fuck, he told himself. Man up, dude. But those men with guns at the roaring bonfire—something primeval in that had shaken him up.
“I’ll go,” Dale said. “I’m a veteran. I’ve got some weapons and I know how to use them. My eyes aren’t so good anymore but . . . ”
Jill looked at him. “You really think it’ll come to that?”
“Probably not. What we want to do is—a few of us go, me and Drew and Brand say, and we go around on the trails in the hills, we slip past them, we head down the highway for Deer Creek. We can’t use any kind of motorcycle, any quads—they’d hear that. But—keepin’ it real—we’ll need to be armed, though. Just in case.”
Dad nodded. “I agree. We’ll need guns. We’ll need to be ready to defend ourselves against Dickie and that bunch. We just might have to fight our way out of Freedom.”
TWELVE
Four candles were set up around the cluttered little living room. Each one was making its own pool of quivering yellow light. Russ and Pendra sat in the center of the room on the braided rug, facing one another, blankets over their shoulders—it was cold. No heat in the apartment building. Pendra had a small flashlight, pointed at a piece of notebook paper. She leaned self-consciously over it, her hair drooping down, embarrassed but intent. The two cats slipped around in the shadows, behind her, meowing sadly, as if consciously taking part in the funeral ceremony.
Russ had brought something else: the shoebox. He’d set it down on an end table by the sofa Pendra’s grandmother had covered with a somewhat-psychedelic patterned blanket she’d knit herself.
“I wrote something about my Gram,” Pendra said, rustling the paper. “Kind of a . . . not a poem but sort of. I feel stupid now but . . . this is the only ceremony she’s going to get any time soon . . . ”
“No, it’s cool, go on, read it,” Russ said.
She cleared her throat, and read aloud: “You created her and she created me and then you lost her. The connection of blood and DNA between you and me, through my mother, is still there. She is like an echo in me and that’s you echoing, you made the sound, with Granddad, and I’m a bell it’s ringing. So you’re still here. And when I remember how you always looked for something good in me, something good and smart and talented and worth keeping in me, I feel like I kept going because of you. And if I’m still going on it’s because you wanted me to because you said I was precious.”
Russ wondered if Pendra was saying she’d considered suicide, before coming to Freedom. He suspected she had. Because sometimes when they talked she seemed, in some indefinable way, like she was only tentatively committed to being here in the world. Like someone at a party trying to decide if they wanted to leave before it broke up. Because it wasn’t a very good party and it was making them depressed.
“But I was always caught up in my own thing, what about me, why can’t I do this, why did this happen to me, and I didn’t think very often about what had happened to you, losing your husband and your daughter, you were like the last person on a battlefield waving a flag, and you’re saying ‘You can all go to hell, I’m here, this is me!’ And the flag was your house and your cats and the little things you did for people . . . ”
As she read through it, Russ looked at her and felt like he was seeing her for the first time: a person alone in the world, trying to find a reason to be there, trying to be someone she liked, trying to express herself. Trying but sometimes wanting to stop trying. He felt a rush of sympathy that made him feel almost mingled with her.
He’d felt bad for himself when his parents had broken up. But he’d kept them more than Pendra had kept her family. Pendra had no siblings, no parents, now she’d even lost her grandmother.
When Pendra finished reading she looked at him—and her eyebrows went up in reaction to what she saw in him. Something in his face surprised her. Then she looked quickly away.
Russ cleared his throat. “Your grandma was—an amazing person.”
Her mouth buckled and she nodded, her head dropping, eyes hidden by her hair.
Russ reached for the shoebox, set it between them, took out the whiskey bottle. “I don’t know if you feel like having a drink to her. But it’s about all I have to offer.”
“Yeah. That’d be good. She liked to drink rum and Coke sometimes.”
“Haven’t got rum or Coke but . . . ” He poured out two small glasses of whiskey. They were juice glasses he’d cadged from a deserted house. His was a Disneyland glass with a picture of Goofy on it, hers had Princess Leia. “I’ll take the Goofy glass. I’m totally that Goofy thing, whatever he is.”
“I saw him at Disneyland when I was a little kid, some guy in a big foam-rubber suit. Big foam-rubber ass wobbling around. Couldn’t tell if he was a dog or what . . . ”
“Yeah, see, that’s totally me, foam-rubber ass, can’t tell if I’m a dog . . . I feel just like him . . . ”
She laughed—it was hoarse laughter with tears mixed in it—and took the Princess Leia glass. “I never fucking felt like Princess Leia. But I was sort of into her when I was seven. My mom loved Star Wars and she made me watch the DVDs. Princess Leia’s cool actually. I mean, she kills Stormtroopers. I always thought I’d want to kill some Stormtroopers . . . ”
She came and sat close beside him. They drank the whiskey in several short sips, talking of her grandmother. He told her a little more about his mom and dad.
“That sucks,” she said.
“At least I had them—longer. I can appreciate my dad a lot more now. I feel like . . . we’re sort of not always staring at each other going ‘What the fuck’ anymore. More like we’re standing next to each other staring at other people . . . .”
“And going, ‘What the fuck?’ ”
His turn to l
augh. “Totally. You want some more?”
“No. I sort of have a headache. Can I . . . ” She stretched out across the rug and he had a wild notion she was going to initiate sex with him, but instead she crooked an arm across his lap, and lay her head on it, the back of her head pressed against his stomach. “Just lay down a second . . . ”
He didn’t say anything, but it seemed okay to stroke her hair, and she let him, and in a few minutes he was surprised to hear the sound of her soft snoring.
He smiled to himself. Knowing he was going to be really uncomfortable, pretty soon, sitting here on the floor with her head on his lap, but there was no way he was going to move, not till he was sure she was way deep asleep. He was going to be sitting there a long time.
Fortunately there was still a little whiskey in the bottle, and he could just reach it.
Nella sat on a canvas chair, in the corner, in Mario’s house. Glad to be away from the house with the brass Jesus on the wall; glad to be away from those watching brass eyes; glad to be away from the smell of the dead.
The men had taken off their firemen coats in the warm room. Mario and Lon at the other end of the room, in two dark-green leather easy chairs, drinking and talking in low tones. Lon trying to convince Mario of something. Looking like he was talking to himself, more than his brother. Trying to convince himself maybe. She had the feeling he knew he had gotten himself into something and didn’t know how to get out. Had that kind of scared-animal look in his eyes.
Dickie and Sten were half sprawled on the big wide brown leather sofa under the seascape—a room that denied there’d been a tsunami, a normal-looking room, warmed by the generator chugging away outside, all the lights on, electric heat coming from the fireplace with fake concrete logs.
Nella was interested to see the old Rasta-hair white dude come into the living room. The old stoner blinking in the electric lights. Looking at the fake fireplace.
Lars. That was his name, wasn’t it? He was coming to stand before Dickie, though this was supposedly Lon Ferrara was in charge. And Ferrara frowned, seeing that.
Skinny old guy in a long raggy-assed coat, pot-leaf T-shirt, mismatched socks in sandals. Nella thought socks in sandals looked stupid anytime. Lars looked stupid himself, standing there, gawping around at them. “Where’s the others?” he asked.
“What, Cholo and the Grummons, them? They’re guarding the pass,” Sten said. “They’re—”
“Shut up, Mike,” Dickie said, in an amiable tone. “He doesn’t need an intelligence report from us. We need one from him.”
Nella had seen the old, smelly guy with the dreadlocks around town. Sten knew him. Sold dope to him. Pot and ’shrooms. Didn’t seem like a customer for crystal meth.
She knew Dickie had some crystal meth on him. He wasn’t taking it, not yet. He seemed to be all about the booze they found in the houses, lately, and some of that angel-dust pot, now and then. Maybe thinking that bringing out the methedrine was about timing, what with most of these guys having guns handy. Plus having to be “political” with these Ferrara guys. But Nella wished he would give her some speed. She wished she could get hold of even some lame crank and spark up her energy and maybe think of a plan. Jumpstart her mind, figure out how to run away. Of course, if she took enough of it, she’d get all paranoid and probably end up tweaking under a bed or something. Again. Ronnie Burke had told her to stay away from crystal. “Make your teeth drop out, girl. Don’t want to lose those pretty teeth do you?”
“What you got for us, Lars?” Sten asked.
Lars tugged at his beard. “Yeah, but listen—we do have a deal about this? Some . . . I got to know there’s . . . ”
“I got a nice bag of pot for you. What’d you find out?”
“They’re going to try to slip away, outta town, get past you guys, go to Deer Creek,” Lars said, talking fast. “Take one of those little trails out to the south. Two or three of them, armed. Get Deer Creek to send the National Guard.”
“Back-stabbing sons of bitches!” That was Lon Ferrara, jumping up, stalking over to them. “When is this dishonest sleaziness going to happen?”
Lars looked startled. “Um—tonight, Mr. Ferrara. Like after midnight. Two in the morning I think is what they’re thinking. Being really sneaky and all that. On the down-low.”
“Tonight!” Ferrara’s hands were shaking. Dickie was looking at Ferrara almost fondly, smiling a little to himself. Nella was pretty sure Dickie knew Ferrara had gone out of his head and he was enjoying that, somehow. He had a crazy mayor on a leash.
Sten reached into his shirt pocket, took out a quarter-ounce baggie of weed, tossed it over to Lars. “Whatever. Keep your ear to the ground and your mouth shut.”
“Hey, pothead—” Mario Ferrara getting up, strolling over, hands thrust in coat pockets, head tilted bullishly forward. Looking at Lars with real dislike. “You hear anything about my kid? My son? He went to get them some help. Didn’t seem like he got through . . . ”
“Nah.” Lars was opening the baggie, smelling the dope as he spoke. “I don’t know what he . . . ” Sniff. “ . . . just that he went with that other college boy. Up here somewhere. Heading up this way. But after that . . . Maybe—”
“We’ll let you know, Lars,” Dickie interrupted, suddenly, “if we need anything else.”
Nella noticed Mario staring at Dickie. Suspecting. He didn’t really belong here, she decided. He was watching. Waiting for something . . . “Here,” Dickie said, tossing Lars a Bic lighter. “Go toke up outside. Knock yourself out.”
Lars licked his lips, nodded, backed away, half stumbled over an ottoman—Dickie and Sten laughed at that—and went quickly out the front door.
He’s going back to the other camp, she thought. But she couldn’t go with him. Dickie watched her close.
But she also knew that Dickie was getting tired of her. She’d heard him in the kitchen, when she was coming down the hall; heard him talking in low tones to Sten about getting some other girls here. Like that Pendra girl. Liddy knew her name from around town. He’d been watching her, before the tsunami. Thinking about her. Now he’d got Dickie thinking about her.
He’d have Pendra up here pretty soon.
Then maybe he’d be done with Nella. That’d be good, if it meant he’d let her go.
But he wouldn’t—he’d give her to the Grummons. Or do the simple thing, and kill her to keep her mouth shut.
THIRTEEN
Russ glanced at his watch. It was after midnight. The candles had burned down to guttering stumps, and the whiskey had worn off. Nothing left of it but a throb in Russ’s temples and a bad taste in his mouth; a raspy thirst for a long drink of water.
But Russ couldn’t bring himself to get up and fetch the bottled water because he didn’t want to disturb Pendra. So he just sat there, on the cold floor, with Pendra snoring softly on his lap, his hand on her shoulder. His left leg asleep, his right aching from staying in one position all that time.
He was listening to someone in the apartment upstairs bitching. He couldn’t make out most the words, just the cadence, and the tone: bitching for sure. A few words came through now and then: Why don’t they . . . why can’t they . . . They should be . . .
One of those people who ought to be helping—just bitching instead. Russ felt he was starting to understand Dad better. Something good coming of this. Thinking about that, he was a little embarrassed when the front door of the apartment opened and his dad looked in, a Coleman lantern in his hand. “Oh—Russ, I was just looking for you . . . ” He looked at Pendra, her head on his lap. “Didn’t mean to . . . uh . . . ” Russ saw him look at Pendra, and the empty whiskey bottle; saw him think about warning Russ about drinking. Saw him decide not to. It was all in his sequence of expressions. Finally, he said, “Well, son—I just wanted to tell you we’re getting set to go to Deer Creek. You should stay close to Pendra, help Lucia out when you can. I hope to be back late tomorrow sometime. Once we get down the road like twenty miles east of here,
there’s a hill overlooking the valley that Deer Creek’s in. We think we can get a cell phone signal there.”
“Dad . . . I’m coming with you.” Russ heard himself say it. Felt kind of surprised, when it came out.
“What? No, Russ. Forget it.”
“Yeah. I am. I . . . ” He reached over to the sofa, took a small paisley-covered pillow from it, disturbing a sleeping cat; he slipped his leg from under Pendra’s head, gently tucking the pillow in to replace it. The cat got up and padded stiffly toward the kitchen but Pendra hardly stirred; her soft snoring hesitated, then went steadily on.
“I’m totally going, Dad.” Wincing as blood circulation returned, Russ stood, putting his weight on the leg that still had feeling in it—and almost toppled over.
“You look like you can hardly stand, son, I don’t think you’re ready for twenty mile hikes.”
“Dad . . . ” He controlled his temper. But his father had irritated him. “I’m not drunk. My leg went to sleep.” He leaned against the arm of the sofa, pumped circulation back into his legs. It hurt. “I’m coming with you. Wait for me outside. Please.”
Dad shook his head but waited outside as Russ hobbled to the bedroom, found a quilt, returned to put it over Pendra before joining him outside.
He could see Dad’s breath in the light from the Coleman. The wind whistled, brought the smell of the sea, and the persistent rot left by the great wave. He felt the wind tingling his nose and fingers. He realized his dad was trying to think of some way to persuade him not to come. “Dad—I just feel like . . . I wasn’t quite there, when we were trying to . . . when we were helping people. Organizing things. I walked away from stuff every time it got really ugly. I don’t want to look back and think, ‘You wimped out when it got hard.’ ”
“So this is a macho thing? That’s not going to help us, Russ. You want to help, stay here and look after things. Keep watch here.”
