Red Lightning (19 page)

"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. She 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."

Dad was silent for a while.

"Where is she now? Where is Aunt Maria?"

Grandma looked at him sorrowfully.

"Manny..." Of course. I had realized it as soon as I heard she was dead, but it was harder for Dad. He grew up with her.

"That's what we've been doing. That's why we're all so dirty. Every day, out into the mess. Drag the bodies onto bedspreads, wrap them up, take a hair sample, put it in a baggie. We've got a pile of wallets and watches, a room full of clothes. We don't undress them anymore, they're too... it's nasty, and too much work. Nobody's ever going to know exactly how many people died out there. We say a little prayer and we set them on fire, and we go away. And we come back here and eat a meal of Spam à la Jorge, and go to bed and sleep like the dead."

Since Day One they had been waving a sheet with a red cross painted on it every time a helicopter or a low-flying plane went over. So far, nobody had landed. Grandma was pretty angry about that.

"A few of these people, we don't get them to a hospital soon, I don't know if they'll live. I thought somebody would have showed up to medevac them out by now. I don't get it."

"They'll probably be here soon," Travis said. "They're making progress. What I heard, hospitals all the way to Ohio are already full of people. Not much elective surgery going on. If you aren't bleeding, they say you need to take care of yourself."

"Some of these people are bleeding."

"What can I say? There's too much work to go around. But the European ships are starting to arrive in force. South Americans. Some African nations. Cruise ships mostly rode it out, they're converting them to offshore hospitals. Something will happen in the next few days. I hope."

"Meantime," Dad said, "I want to get you out of here."

There was a long silence. Sometimes I think I understand Grandma better than Dad does, because what she said next didn't surprise me.

"I'm not going anywhere until all these people can come with me."

The argument went on for a while, but eventually it was only Dad who was arguing that Grandma get into the Duck and get out with us. Travis and Dak didn't contribute at all. Both of them seemed willing to stick it out as long as it took. Mom dropped out early, and so did Elizabeth. As for me, I wanted to go home more than anything I'd ever wanted in my life, but I knew deep down that you couldn't just ask Grandma to leave everything that had ever been important in her life, even if it was in ruins. She needed a little time.

But far more important, the people who had stuck with her after the water subsided had become a family to her, and she intended to stick with them until they had a place to go.

The only reasonable plan Dad came up with was to ferry everybody over to the mainland in groups, where they could join the refugee camps.

Travis spoke up for the first time, saying he was far from sure he had enough gas for that. He knew we had enough to get back out of the Red Zone, but thought there was a fair chance we'd be hoofing it the last miles back to Rancho Broussard.
Scrooge
was not a fuel-efficient vehicle.

"How about the gas in the generator here?" Dad asked.

"How about it, Betty," Travis said. "Didn't you say that was a diesel generator?"

"That's right. We've rationed it, and we've got enough for about another week."

"Unfortunately, the Duck won't burn diesel. What about water?"

"We're okay there. We're not heating what was in the water heater tank, and we've been throwing our sewage over the side. Preferably when there's some bad
_.
guy drunks down there. As long as we don't shower or bathe, we're good for another week." She rubbed at her dirty face, absently. "I'll admit, I got weak, we all get a pint of water once a day to wash our faces. Turns out that's a morale-raiser. I was about to do that when you guys arrived."

"How about this?" I said. Everybody looked at me. Damn. I hated that. "You said you have some people who shouldn't be moved. That doesn't make sense to me. Seems to me that if they're in bad shape, the best thing to do is take them to the mainland. They had a tent hospital over there."

"Not much of a hospital," Elizabeth said.

"Well, with all respect to your nurse, they probably have more stuff over there than we do here. How about it, Grandma? Are any of them in danger of dying?"

"I can answer that," somebody said. We all looked at a young black woman who spoke with a Haitian rhythm. Grandma introduced her as Elaine, the nurse.

"I've got three patients whose wounds are infected. I cleaned them up as well as I could, but some of them were lying in filthy water for a couple days. They need more help than I can give them, and they need it fast."

"Travis," Grandma asked, "can that crazy-looking thing make it to the mainland and back, and still have enough gas to get y'all home'?"

"
Us
all home," Dad said.

"This is still my home, Manny, until all my guests are taken care of."

"We should be able to make one crossing," Travis allowed.

"Then let's do it."

Travis and Dak handled the ambulance ferry duty. We all helped manually operate the window-washing equipment on the side of the hotel to get the people to the ground, which was hard work but not nearly as hard as carrying stretcher cases down all those stairs. We all stood together and watched
Scrooge
roll off and lose itself in the heaps of debris.

Down there on what used to be the pool deck, thinking about the long walk back up the stairs, I noticed the big black scorch mark on the side of the building and remembered the night before, when we all worried the Blast-Off was on fire. I asked Grandma about it.

"Lots of bad boys out there," she said, looking up at the scorch. "We've been fighting a running battle with them since about Day Two."

"Who are they? Convicts?"

"Some of them. A couple boatloads rowed over early on, looking for loot. Hotel safes, luggage, cash in wallets, they'd take anything they could find. Street gangs, too. The bad survived along with the good.

Later on, everybody started getting real hungry and thirsty, good
and
bad people. Some of them drank standing water, and now they're regretting it. Not much we can do to help the sick ones, and it breaks your heart.

These people" – and she gestured up at the roof – "these people, we started out about half paying guests and half people who ran in off the streets when the alarms went off. It wasn't a huge rush, at first. You know how it goes. Don't believe it at first, then a building panic, then everybody's in their cars and in about five minutes there's wrecks on all the bridges, nobody's going
anywhere
. More running around, and then the pictures start coming in from the Bahamas.

By then I was sort of organized. I got Mario and Hugo and we stood by the door with guns. 'Everybody's welcome!' I was shouting. 'Only don't trample each other! You have plenty of time to get to the top.' Couple of shots in the air and a good look at Mario and Hugo calmed them down. But first I sent everybody to the pantry in the restaurant, had everybody carry up a box of canned food.

So you got people thinking it through and people who panic. Some guys came back and made a bunch of trips with food. Other people carried up big boxes of frozen steaks and chickens and veal and ribs, whatever they could grab. Saw one big fellow about to bust his gut humping six big boxes of ice cream up the stairs. Ice cream!

There were three waves, each a little smaller. It was so
noisy
, Ray, you have no idea! Like a giant garbage grinder, everything crashing against everything else... and we still didn't know if the building was going to hold up, it just
lurched
when that first wave hit. It's a little off kilter now. I noticed that a beach ball, if you put it on the floor, it rolls into the southeast corner of a room now, water pools there if you spill it. But it seems solid enough.

So after, there were three schools of thought. One group thought we ought to just sit tight and wait for the authorities to come rescue us. And eat my food and drink my water while we waited. Another bunch thought we all ought to leave and make our way inland. Safety in numbers, I guess. A couple guys appointed themselves leaders, and there was a fistfight, and I had to fire a couple more shots. Then there were those who didn't want to sit and wait for help and didn't want to wait until the leadership business was sorted out, either one. Those were the folks who had loved ones in other parts of the city. Some of those just took off on their own, which is a shame, because those that waited just a little longer, I sent them off with at least a bottle of water to drink.

I never did see any of those folks again."

She stopped talking then. Just sort of ran down. I realized that Mom and Dad and Elizabeth were standing beside me. I hadn't heard them come up. Dad made a gesture to me, afraid to speak himself, I think.

"So what did you decide on?" I asked.

Grandma shook herself and looked around. Her shoulders sagged, and she looked older than her years for once.

"Everybody was free to go, of course. But nobody was welcome to stay and freeload, except the sick and injured. I still don't know if we all should have left. Maybe we could have got the stretcher cases over the water and out of the... what did you say they're calling it? The Red Zone? And if you think the river is choked now, you should have seen it right after the wave, before a week's worth of tides.