Red Lightning (15 page)

"You can't argue with people like that," Travis told us, "because one in a million times a survivor
is
recovered even this long afterward, and the media jump on the story and write endless pieces about the 'miracle.' " He stopped himself when he saw Mr. Redmond's face, which was leaking tears. We hadn't talked about it much, but Mr. and Mrs. Redmond had about a dozen relatives in the area, in
residential
areas, the debris of which we were looking at right then. It was questionable if any of them had made it to high ground or a strong, multistory building.

"I am such a total asshole," Travis said. "I should give asshole lessons. Jim, I am so sorry, I didn't mean..."

"That's okay, Travis," Mr. Redmond said. "We understand the realities here. We're just praying they got to a safe place."

"I'll pray right along with you," Travis said.

There was a big refrigerator truck with a generator humming, and beside it a row of yellow body bags. Some of the rescue and recovery workers waved at us and we waved back. Then Travis got moving again.

The road had been bulldozed ahead of us for about half a mile. To each side was... it's hard to describe what it looked like. It had been a residential neighborhood and there were houses standing here and there, mostly made of brick, but with all the windows broken out and draped with garbage rotting in the sun. There were some wooden houses more or less intact, but knocked off their foundations by the force of the waves. Instead of the normal grid you'd have seen before the waves, neat little houses and trailer parks all in a row, it looked like somebody had taken a lot of little Monopoly houses and shaken them in a jar and dumped them out on the board. Power poles leaned in every direction. Cars were on their sides or on their roofs or piled up by the force of the water. And over everything, filling all the cracks, was the endless wreckage and mud washed in from locations closer to the ocean.

Before long we came to a roadblock. There were maybe a dozen men and women there, in different uniforms. There were Florida National Guard, regular United States Army, and one Homelander. There was a guy in the ragged remains of a blue police patrolman's uniform, looking like he hadn't bathed or slept since the wave hit. A guy in a white MP helmet, maybe about twenty-five years old, turned his rifle in our general direction, but pointed at the ground, and held his hand up. Travis stopped.

"Everyone down from the vehicle, please," he said, motioning with his weapon. Travis lowered the ladder and we eased ourselves out and down to stand in the mud.

"Deputy sheriffs, Sergeant," Travis said. He was shrugging into an Eisenhower jacket as he spoke, which struck me as the height of insanity.

"And what is the purpose of your visit, sir?" the guy asked.

"Rescue and recovery, just like you. Is there a problem?" He pulled an Army cap over his head, and I saw it had two gold metal stars pinned to it. There were stars on each of his shoulders, too. I thought it was sort of pretty, and I wondered if I could wear some stars, too.

The soldier saw it, and his eyes got very large. He snapped to attention and saluted.

"No, sir, no problem, sir."

"At ease, soldier," Travis said, easily. "They put me out to pasture years ago, I'm retired, and I'm not here to screw up your patch."

"Yes, sir, General Broussard, sir." He must have recognized the famous face, because Travis's name wasn't anywhere on the uniform.

Travis started questioning the sergeant about conditions up ahead, and the other soldiers gathered around respectfully, offering information, except for the Homelander, who as usual stayed behind his black plastic mask, aloof and above it all, a law unto himself. I wondered if those black uniforms were air-conditioned, or if a requirement for Homelander service was the ability not to sweat.

A lieutenant of some sort came up soon in an amphibious Hummer, saluted, and joined the conversation. Everything seemed to be going well between Travis and the soldiers, but the lieutenant was looking suspiciously at the rest of us.

"Look here, General," the lieutenant finally said. "I'm not going to try to stand in your way if you want to go farther, but I don't know if I can take the responsibility for the rest of your party. My orders are, nobody but authorized personnel goes in, and anybody who comes out can't go back. Tomorrow or the next day we're scheduled to start moving in and get the rest of the survivors moving inland toward the refugee camps, but a lot of them don't want to go. I'm afraid it could get ugly."

"I'm sure it might, Lieutenant," Travis said. "It's a dumb idea trying to get Americans to give up what's left of their homes. They don't want the government putting them in camps, no matter what they call them, unless they have absolutely nothing left. I expect some of them will resist."

"Between you and me, sir, I agree, but orders are orders. Personally, I don't intend to shoot any citizen who hunkers down in his house."

"I'm glad to hear it. Meantime, I won't bullshit you. We're on personal errands, and I'm using my political weight to get special consideration." He flashed a big grin at the lieutenant. "I'm willing to take personal responsibility for these people, who, though it may sound ridiculous,
are
in fact legally sworn deputy sheriffs. It would, in fact, be a felony for them to display those badges if they weren't. If the phones were working I'd call up the governor, who I believe is in charge of this part of this fiasco, technically, though we all know who's
really
in charge" – he glanced at the Homelander – "and I guarantee you he'd say let that idiot Broussard do whatever he wants to do, so long as you keep him out of my hair. So what do you say, Lieutenant?"

The lieutenant looked a little stunned – people often do when dealing with Travis – but he finally smiled.

"Well, since you put it that way."

We were climbing back aboard when the lieutenant took another look at me.

"How old are you, son?" he asked.

My mouth was living a life of its own.

"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.