Red Lightning (22 page)

I asked her who would benefit from something as horrible as this, and she pointed out something so obvious I felt stupid for not thinking of it.

"The people who make modular housing. So I'm putting a lot of our money into the Martel Corporation."

I think I may have actually gasped. I could hardly have been more surprised if she had said she planned to sell Elizabeth into white slavery so she could buy a new dress. She hates the Martels that much.

"I know. But there's something you may not know about them. They've been at work on cheap, prefab structures like the rooms in those awful hotels back home. They can make a cheaper model that doesn't have to stand up to Mars low pressure and temperature and be turning them out by the thousands almost overnight. Better than your standard Red Cross tent, and hook several of them together and you have a house.

So, the company comes off looking good at both ends of this crisis. Short-term with those damn Martel rooms, long-term with housing that's cheap and goes up quickly and is actually nice to live in.

Plus, if they're busy putting the things up down here, maybe they won't have a lot of time to plant more of them back home."

Mom's mind works in funny ways, but sometimes you just have to admire how she could manage to get three things done at once.

Not that Mom was having an easy time of it. The New York stock exchanges were shut down, not because they couldn't open up – their data was stored multiple places, so what had happened to Wall Street the place didn't
have
to have affected what happened to Wall Street the institution – but because everybody was afraid to allow trading to begin again. Too many of the stocks traded there had gone belly-up, and a huge number of others were in a sort of financial limbo. Nobody knew what their shares were worth, but everybody thought a lot of them were probably more useful for starting fires than selling for cash money.

Some of the other big financial markets had suspended trading, too, but a few were open, and trading was brisk, according to Mom. She was spending a lot of her time watching quotes from Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and St. Petersburg. Futures, bonds, shares, funds, all sorts of things we hadn't covered much in economics class, or that I hadn't paid much attention to, or that I flat out didn't understand.

I saw on my own stereo that gold was at an all-time high, hard to even buy at all, and expected to go higher.

"Do we have any gold, Mom?" I asked her.

"Yes, honey, we have some gold. I bought as much as we could before we even left Mars."

"That's good, then."

"Yes, dear, that's good." I felt like a puppy who had learned sit up but wasn't quite ready for roll over, so I didn't ask her about any more details.

One of the many things nobody knew for sure was just how much the damages would add up to and how much of it was insured. I read estimates as low as 5 trillion euros, ranging up to 40 trillion. This was
way
bigger than the entire gross economic product of the EU.

None of which mattered much to me. I'm sorry, I just didn't have it in me to worry much about the state of the economy of another planet. My planet had one industry, and that was tourism, and short of total economic collapse tourism will always do okay. Somebody, somewhere, will have extra money to spend. Mom agreed with me. She didn't expect a lot of softness in the tourism business.

Not on Mars, anyway, though Florida was sure going to suffer for a while.

I hope I don't sound cold. I hurt a
lot
, seeing people who had lost all their worldly possessions. And I felt sympathy for those who lived in other places and had lost their money, some of them
all
their money. But there's only one way to deal with that. You see it time after time in news coverage after a tornado has swept through, or an earthquake. They interview the survivors, and they take comfort that at least they're alive. That's what you had to do. Weep for your dead, recover what you can, take a deep breath, and move on. You draw closer to your family and your friends, and you do what you need to do. I didn't know that before, I'd never faced adversity – wasn't facing it yet – but I felt I had a better understanding of it. None of the people at the Blast-Off were despairing, nobody had given up.

Two days after that a bridge was repaired to the mainland, and an unlikely visitor dropped by the Blast-Off. He introduced himself to Grandma as Alberto Juarez. He was Cuban-American, short and potbellied and brown-skinned, bald with a neat little mustache. He was dressed in a wrinkled lightweight suit, sweating profusely, and carried a briefcase. We were still suspicious of strangers, though we were no longer meeting them with guns, but this guy looked about as harmless as anyone could look.

He was an insurance man.

Grandma laughed when she heard that, and swept her arm around to indicate the chaos all around us. We were standing on the pool deck, which was mostly cleared; but there was plenty of devastation to see, in any direction you wanted to look.

"Well, Mr. Juarez, you look like you could use a drink. We've got a few beers and Cokes left, and we started up our ice machine yesterday, now that we've got some water. You want a cold one?"

"I'd kill for a cold beer," he admitted.

We sat around on salvaged lawn furniture, a table and slightly askew umbrella and four mismatched chairs, none of which had originally belonged to the hotel, me and Grandma and Elizabeth and Mr. Juarez, and all had drinks.

Mr. Juarez savored his, smiled, and then set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and booted it up. His smile went away as he did that.

"I'm afraid I don't have any good news for you, Mrs..."

"Call me Betty," Grandma said. "Go ahead, tell me how you're getting out of this, Mr. Juarez. Some clause about acts of God? Not covered for floods? Did I miss a premium?"

"Nothing like that," he said. He was uncomfortable. "You're covered, the policy is clear on that. The problem is, you're covered by a corporation that hardly exists anymore. The company is bankrupt, in receivership, technically owned now by a bank that may not even exist itself. That's all up in the air."

"Just about everything is," Grandma said. "Go on."

He sighed.

"The long and the short of it is, you have a legal contract, but good luck trying to enforce it. One day, when this is all straightened out, a court will probably award you five or six cents on the dollar. You will have legal recourse, I imagine... or, at least, when this martial law business is over and the courts get running again."

"Save your breath, Mr. Juarez. No use trying to get blood out of a turnip. I found that out way back, when this was a dump and somebody stiffed me for the room with had plastic. I understand the reality here. I would like to know something, though."

"Anything I can tell you, I'd be happy to."

"Where are you from?"

"I'm out of the Tampa office. I'd have been here sooner but... you know. It's been difficult."

"What are you doing here?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your company is dead. You don't have a job anymore. There was no need to come all the way out here to tell me I ain't got shit. I knew that."

The little man drew himself up and looked Grandma in the eye.

"One does what one has to do. It's true I'm out of a job, but I'll find work. A bunch of us from the office came over and have been volunteering in the Red Zone. We've done this before, but not on this scale, of course. I've been to a hundred disaster sites, often we're there before the ground has stopped shaking or the wind has stopped blowing. I don't know what you think of me, or of my company, but I've been feeling deep shame. People are usually glad to see me. I enjoyed that, doing what I could do to help. I can't do that now, but I feel I owe it to as many people as I can locate to tell them the bad news in person. I know it isn't much, but maybe it helps, just a little, to get people to realize just what their situation is, with no false hopes.

On the other hand, maybe it's a mistake, perhaps it would be better to leave them with something to hang on to. I've been wondering about that."

"No, Mr. Juarez," Grandma said. "I've always believed that bad news should be delivered as quickly as possible. It ain't going to get any better with time."

Juarez shrugged.

"In any case, I feel it is my duty."

Grandma sighed deeply.

"Mr. Juarez, I confess that my opinion of insurance men has not been the highest in the past. I put them just a cut above lawyers and state senators. But you have made my day, and raised my opinion of your profession greatly. It's a pleasure to meet you."

"I thank you, ma'am. As you can imagine, my reception has not always been a warm one. Or at least, not warm in the way I would like."

"No, plenty of folks still like to kill the messenger. Listen, you look real tired. Why don't you stay for supper? We don't have much, but it's well prepared."

He stood and stretched to his full height, which wasn't much, and squared his shoulders to the extent they were squareable.

"I thank you very much, but I have a lot of work to do and must be on my way. I thank you for the beer."

"Looks like you've got enough work for the next few years, Mr. Juarez. It'll wait, and it won't be any worse after a good meal."

He wouldn't be persuaded, but he did accept another can of beer.

"Are you armed, Mr. Juarez?" Grandma asked.

He gave us a wry smile.

"No, I am not, ma'am. I've already been relieved of my stereo and an old watch that was of some sentimental value and which I was foolish to wear. Nobody wanted this obsolete briefcase. And who would bother to shoot an insurance man?"

He bid us good-bye, and I shook his hand before he left. We watched him pick his way along the partially cleared side street, consulting a crumpled paper list.

"Ray, Elizabeth... that's why we're going to get through this, in spite of the idiots running the show, in spite of the damn Rapturists. Because there's good men and women out there still doing their jobs."

I could only agree with her. You could say he was on a fool's errand, and if you did, I'd prefer not to meet you. Dad once told me that it wasn't laws that kept the world running, such as it was. It was things like honor, duty, perseverance, and keeping your word. Before long the whole devastated East Coast would be crawling with bureaucrats with papers to fill out, most of them not doing any more practical good than Mr. Juarez, and with considerably less dedication. But one day, it would all be sorted out. You had to believe that.

"So what are you going to do, Grandma?" Elizabeth asked.

"You mean now that I'm busted?" She leaned back in her chair and looked at the sky, and when she looked back she seemed happier than I'd seen her since we got there.

"Kids, number one, I'm not busted. At least, not from losing the hotel. The bank owned a big part of it, and I'll let them try to collect on their insurance. It's not important to me. Number two, as soon as the wave hit, I knew I was out of the hotel business. I was getting tired of it, anyway. I only stayed on because of your aunt Maria, and when she died... well, then I was even more sure." She tossed her empty beer can. "Oops! Littering's illegal." She wiped her hands.

"I'm out of here. The injured are in hospitals, there's only twenty or so still living on the top and they're welcome to stay or leave as it suits them. Authority has been reestablished, more or less. There's nothing else left for me to do here. Ray, go find your Dad and Mom and tell them that old stick-in-the-mud Grandma is ready to go, and ask them if they've got a closet or something I can stay in until I figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I always wondered about golf. Do you have golf up there?"

When we realized she meant she was going to Mars with us, Elizabeth and I both dragged her out of her chair and hugged and kissed her. Then we ran off to find everybody and tell them the news.

Once it was decided, it didn't take long to get going.

Grandma had managed to take a few minutes to stuff a few boxes of personal items from her residence down on the bottom floor into the elevators full of food and supplies that were headed for the top floor, "just in case we lived." It didn't take long to load that stuff up.

There were six people who asked to hitch a ride with us, people who had been guests at the time of the wave. Since we weren't going to go by water, Travis said okay, but they could only take one suitcase each. One woman changed her mind rather than abandon her vacation wardrobe; everybody else was done packing in fifteen minutes after Grandma said to meet us by
Scrooge
in thirty.

We all piled in, and it was tight, but a few of us rode out on the hood. I was out there, scouting for tire hazards, but by retracing our route we soon found the cleared path leading to the repaired bridge, and in no time we were back on the mainland.

It's amazing what a little time and a lot of hard workers can do. It was difficult to believe that only a few days ago we'd had to blaze our own trail. Now there was a road cleared wide enough for traffic in two directions. Not that there was a lot of it, and what there was was all business: big trucks, bulldozers, cranes on flatbeds. It would be a long time before private vehicles were allowed back into the Red Zone. To each side all was still chaos. The road we drove on was cracked and rutted from the force of the wave, and ten miles per hour was a pretty bouncy pace, but other than getting out of the way of official traffic there was nothing to stop us.

We were at the Wal-Mart by early afternoon. It was a tent city now.

They had bulldozed the big parking lot and turned it into a soup kitchen and hospital, and in the back, big diesel generators powered half a dozen refrigerator trucks. Some of them contained frozen food for the kitchens, and others were full of bodies. The rooftop air conditioners were humming on the big box of the retail store, one of the most welcome sounds I know of in Florida, better by far than pounding surf.