In the Courts of the Sun (17 page)

“What do
you
think?” Marena’s voice asked. It was clear she’d made eye contact with somebody, but we couldn’t see who it was. “Do you think we’re hearing the truth here, that we really should just sit tight, or is it all just more disinformation?”
“I understand what you’re saying, dear,” someone said. Max found who it was and zoomed in on her before I did. Marena had picked out this little old lady, about four feet five, ninety-five pounds, ninety-five years old, blue hair, blue-gray eyes, blue-white skin, the full deal.
“Thanks for your input,” Marena said.
“You know,” the old lady said, “ninety-five percent of everything you hear these days is complete bullshit.”
There was a moment of silence. Even Potty Lady had shut up.
“My mom’s always doing this kind of stuff,” Max said in a confidential whisper.
“Your mom’s very brave,” I said.
“Okay, who else has an opinion?” Marena asked, apparently looking around.
“They need those roads for relief workers,” somebody said. “They know what they’re doing.”
“Good, we’ve heard from the opposing side. Okay, how many—”
“I need to say something,” Officer Fuentes said, but the helmet he was wearing evidently didn’t have a loudspeaker on it because you couldn’t hear him that well, and somebody else with a loud voice had spoken up instead. It was a dark, fortyish taxpayer with a brace of kids who, I guessed, he was taking back to their mother’s house after a visiting-rights jaunt to the Magic Kingdom. “. . . don’t give a damn about us,” he was saying. “If we get south we may live and if we stay inland we’re going to die, it’s as simple as that. This guy has a goddamn space suit on and he’s telling us—”
After that things got confusing again, audio-wise. The Murmuring Woman was now clearly shrieking, “We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die,” over and over. More people had gotten out of their cars and come up, asking each other what the heck was going on. Officer Friendly said something about “necessary component of antiterrorist measures in this area at this point in time.”
“Everybody?” Marena said above the din. “I think we’re leaning toward
not
believing the local authorities on this one.” There were a few revival-meeting yeahs and even an old-fashioned “Right on, sister!” Still, other people kept arguing. Nathaniel, I think, said something about how he didn’t have to potty. I couldn’t see Officer Fuentes anywhere, but I guessed he’d followed standard confronted-by-a-mob procedure and retreated to his squad car.
“All right, look, let’s take a vote,” Marena said. “Focus. If we don’t get together on this, nothing’s going to happen one way or the other. People? Come on, I need to hear what you guys are saying.”
The competing voices died down but didn’t stop.
“Okay,” she said, “first, everybody who thinks the military police here have our best interests at heart and that we should all just go back in our cars and wait, please either honk your horn once or shout out the word
against
, okay? The word to wait is
against
. Everybody? One, two, three, shout.”
There was a pretty big shout, in which the word
against
was often distinguishable.
“Great,” Marena said. By now she seemed to have 95 percent of the crowd’s attention. “Everybody who thinks that the troops here do
not
have our best interests at heart, in fact that they don’t give a gosh-darn about us, everybody who wants to just drive through this thing, and remember they can’t arrest all of us—in fact, I’m pretty sure that they won’t arrest any of us, not even me—all those in favor of moving ahead, either sound your horn in short half-second bursts or please shout the word
for.
Okay? One, two, three—
FOR!
”
She got a lot of fors. “All
right,
” she said.
The crowd didn’t exactly surge, but it slumped forward, and there wasn’t any cheer, just a scattering of
All right!
s and
Come on
s. Still, the point was made. Wow, I thought. Liberty leading the people.
À la Bastille!
The Divorced Dad dragged the first barricade horse to the shoulder and a car pushed through before the others got cleared. Marena climbed down and was skirting around the crowd, trying to get to us without getting anywhere near anyone else. Someone called after her, but she ignored him. The cars around us started inching forward.
“Byong shina,”
she muttered.
“Mom? The cars are moving,” Max said into her line.
“I’ll be right there, big dude,” her voice said.
She came into view in the real-life windshield. By now the cars, trucks, and RVs were roaring by her like they wanted to squash their deliverer. She got in, closed the door, and clicked into drive, in what I’m tempted to call a single fluid motion.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Max said.
“Can you hang on for another few minutes?” she asked.
He said okay. We inched past the tumbled sawhorses and then it felt like we’d been squirted forward out over the yellow Everglades.
“That was, that was really something,” I said. “I wouldn’t know how to do that. You’re, like, a—”
“Joan of Arc?” she asked.
“How’d you know what I was going to say?”
“It’s actually nothing, you know, we do a lot of human-resource management, there are a few button words . . .”
“No, no, really. How’d you know that lady was on your side?”
“Well, you can take a class in that stuff. People make little expressions when they agree with you, or not.”
She accelerated for emphasis. It looked like we were skipping the Miami hotel idea.
“Gee.”
“There’s a Warren marina resort in Key West. It’ll be easy to get a plane there.”
“Great.” If we get that far, I thought.
“And if we don’t get that far,” she said, “still, if we’re near the water, they may be able to send a boat for us if we get stuck. I have pretty high KEP.”
There was a short scream from a military jet speeding over us.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that stands for.”
“Key Employee Protection. Insurance. The company’ll get ES to come bring me in.”
“Oh. That’s great.”
“Max, stop doing that,” she said.
“Why?” his voice asked.
“Because God wills it. You’re making Baby Jesus cry.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. He must have stopped doing whatever it was. I checked CNN on my phone. The transcription scroll was saying how a few people with similar symptoms to the Disney World victims had turned up in Chicago, Seattle, and other cities as far away as Lima, but that most of them had gotten sick in airports and it was possible they were all vacationers who’d been in the Orlando area the day before. We cruised into Miami. For some reason it looked grungier than usual. I’d thought it would be a traffic nightmare already but we got through. Maybe everybody was at the beach. After you pass the city there’s seven miles of swamp, and then you ride up onto the causeway, U.S. 1, over Blackwater Sound on Cross Key. In five miles you get onto Key Largo. I poked around the Net looking for White Buffalo. There was a Web site but it was just a logo, a few quotations from Leonard Peltier, and a password log-in strip. It looked like it might be a splinter group from AIM, that is, the American Indian Movement. On CNN they were saying that the Disney World Horror—as they were apparently now calling it—was officially a Mass Casualty Incident. Like, glad they got that straight. Drudge’s links were saying that judging from medical radio reports the death cloud, whatever it was, hadn’t been just in the Magic Kingdom but had affected an area extending south to Lake Tohopekaliga and west at least as far as downtown Orlando, with a long plume angling northwest at least to Lake Harris. Symptom clusters had been reported a lot farther out than that, but since people had moved around in the day or so since their exposure, it wasn’t clear exactly how far the cloud had carried. And someone named Octavia Quentin, who they said was a risk diagnostician from the DHS, said that some of the symptoms were “consistent with heavy-metal poisoning and/or exposure to very high levels of ionizing radiation.” Scab casters, I thought. Casting scabs. Out of the stone. Light out of a stone.
News6 was saying how reports of rioting were expanding out from the Parks District in a widening ring. “Panic is spreading because of panic,” some purported expert’s voice said. “It’s what we technically call a self-sustaining reaction.” FEMA’s Orlando Area Emergency Evacuation Success Procedure had not been successful, and now all traffic in the central part of the state was stop-and-start. Airports in Kissimmee, Lakeland, Lake Wales, and Vero Beach weren’t functioning. Hospitals as far as Tampa/St. Pete, Gainesville, and Fort Lauderdale had gotten so many patients by helicopter that they were already overloaded. State rescue workers were refusing to touch the glowbugs, that is, what they were calling people who might be contaminated. I guess it was sort of like that Japanese term for people affected by radiation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It’s a word sort of like
hibachi
but I can’t think of it right now. Police were scarce, either because they were working around the hospitals or because they just weren’t showing up, and flash mobs were “engaging in organized looting,” not just smashing store windows but loading whole electronics-store inventories onto trucks and driving fleets of cars out of dealers’ lots.
Traffic thickened again at Fat Deer Key. Still, unlike almost anybody else in the state, we were still moving, since once you were out on the causeway, there were no more entrances from anywhere outside the Keys. On Marena’s traffic site, it looked like just a few miles behind us nobody was moving. She really had done the right thing, cruising at the first hint of trouble. When paranoia pays off, it pays off big time. Max was looking out his window and up at the sky and I looked too. It was filled with planes, jumbles of military wingpower drawing a Gordian tangle of contrails, all shapes and sizes like a shark feeding frenzy, EF2000s like hammerheads, AV-8 Harriers like blues, Globemasters like great whites, Starfighters like bull sharks. Even, I think, a B-2 like a manta ray, the whole hellish crew. I tried my alarm system at home. They didn’t pick up. I texted No Way’s box again. Same story.
“Mom? I’m really hungry,” Max’s voice said.
“Did you finish that blondie already?” she asked. He said yes. She said to wait for half an hour, since we were on a top-secret commando mission now and had to make things last. I tried to sit back and chill. The best thing you can do right now, Jed, old bastard, is not infect the driver with your nervousness. We were over Islamorada, where you come into the real Keys. From here you can’t see the line of the Florida peninsula anymore, just the causeway connecting the green coral dots of the islands and, on your right, the rusty old railroad trestle. On CNN it looked like we’d sleazed past Miami just in time. There was a riot in Pompano Beach, and in Hialeah a panicked crowd had rushed a line of soldiers who’d fired on them with that new goo gun thing that shoots oobleck or whatever.
Eh bueno,
I thought, at least we can still get incoming stuff online. No need for us to miss a minute of the agonizing holocaust. In the reality TV era, it’s all good. We passed the Coast Guard station at the south end of Plantation Key. Oddly, it was deserted, with no boats in the slips or cars in the lot. Chains of aircraft hustled northwest overhead.
“Well, still, I guess that’s it,” Marena said.
“Sorry?”
“About casting the scabs. Right? These people, I mean, the victims, they have a lot of scabs.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s it.”
“I guess you thought of that already.”
“ Yeah.”
There was a long, bleak, gray, cheerless pause. Finally she looked over at me.
“Look,” she said, “do you know any—”

[11]

A
t first I thought the sun had come out, because the line of reflective Botts’ dots on the median glowed with this weird fuschia color and the pavement brightened into a too-cheerful yellow. But the sun had set a while back. Hadn’t it? A moment after that there was a sort of slushy impact that seemed to jiggle the car’s windows in their gaskets, and then it seemed like some time after that that I heard the sound, a rattle that rose into a sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-god HRURWWRRWRSHHH and that finally terminated in the residue of what must have been the actual explosion, a single deep, merciless FWOMP. It felt like the car was sucked backward and to the right as air was rushing in toward the core of the blast.
“Sweetie!”
Marena’s mouth yelled silently. Her right arm shot back and grabbed for Max. One of Max’s own little arms darted between the seats and toward the wheel, but she kept him from grabbing it and steered his hand down onto her thigh instead. I looked back at him. His head was wedged between the seats and his lips were drawn back, showing his teeth. Gravel snare-drummed over the Cherokee’s steel membranes. Water hit the windshield, and I could see little bits of coral in it, and what seemed to be fish scales. The big wiper pushed one layer off and another formed. Oddly, the cars in our lane were still oozing along. You could feel an increased timidity in the motion, and almost see the drivers’ expressions and hear them going, “What the fuck? What the fuck? Are we dead yet?” but the whole thing had happened too fast for many people to react.
“That was not a nuke,” I said. “That was not a nuke. That was not a nuke.” But of course Marena couldn’t hear anything either. We were still in that quiet space, with that E-tone ring sloshing around in your cochlea and a feeling like recovering from a wound. Bovinely, I looked around. I didn’t see any fire, but there was a widening white wedge at our five o’clock. It looked so unreal that it took me a minute to realize it was steam. How far away had it been? It had to have been at least a second between the flash and the sound. But now already I didn’t remember. Five miles? No, closer than that. I looked back at Marena. The fingers of her left hand were still on the wheel, and they were so white I thought she was going to crush the thing. But I guess they make steering wheels pretty solid. Her lips were asking Max something like whether he was all right. This went on for what seemed like some time. Max’s voice didn’t say anything, and she asked again, and eventually, as some sound came back into focus, he said something like “I’m okay, I’m okay.”
I noticed we were at mile marker 78, on the Indian Key Bridge just past Upper Matecumbe. At some point Marena asked me something, probably whether I was all right.
“That wasn’t a nuke,” I said. “Not a nuke.”
“Are you okay?”
“That wasn’t a nuke. Look, the windows are, they’re not broken, so, so we’re okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a nuke.”
“No, are
you
okay?”
“Me?” I said. “I’m fine.” Hints of a combustive smell were starting to snake their way through the car’s air-processing system.
“Okay.”
“That was not a nuke,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“Are you and Max okay?” I asked. At some point, although I hadn’t noticed, he’d climbed into her lap.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t think it was munitions either,” I said. By now the white wedge almost enveloped us, and it was darkening in the center.
“What?”
“I think that was a pipeline.”
“Pipeline?”
“Like, natural gas,” I said. A lot of the area behind us was already black. Oil smoke. “Except there’s also fuel oil burning back there now.” I realized my teeth were chattering.
By now the cars ahead of us had stopped. Be still, my teeth.
“Are we going to get wiped?” Max asked.
“No, we’re very far from any problem,” Marena said.
“Jed, are we going to get wiped?”
“No,” I said, “we’re in the best possible spot. We’re over water, and the road won’t burn.”
“Okay,” he said. Judging by his voice he seemed to be getting over being scared. I’d seen that sort of thing before, in the CPRs. Kids get spooked but then, if the adults seem calm, they can recover in a second. They don’t yet know what’s normal.
“Max, I need you to be tough right now and take care of us,” Marena said. “Because you know about a lot of these things.”
“It might blow up again right here,” he said.
“No, no, it shouldn’t do that,” I said. “There are valves in there. Any fuels ought to go back toward the break and burn out. Also the pipes aren’t near the road, they’re out in the Gulf somewhere.”
“Okay,” he said. Actually, I thought, I suppose there could still be another pipeline blast. Or did the whole line drain out if there was a fire in one section? That was something I didn’t know.
I said I had to look around for a second and got out. It was hot but the day had already been hot and the direction of the blast only felt a little hotter than the rest of the air. There were far-off sirens and a farther-off bullhorn over the whine of aircraft. A few people in the cars around us started to get out too. I closed the car door and climbed up on the roof. I didn’t see any nearby fires or serious accidents. But ahead and behind us dozens of cars were wedged together at different angles. Damn, I thought. That’s it as far as forward motion was concerned. They’re probably packed all the way down to Key West anyway, I thought. Right into Ernest Hemingway’s bedroom. Crowding out the six-toed cats. Nobody was going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Although, come to think of it, the word
foreseeable
was losing some of its luster.
“Jed, get back in the car,” Marena said through the outside speaker system.
I did. Underneath my jacket my pathetically once-stylish shirt was soaked, like I was entering a Wet Dork contest. Marena shut off the engine but kept the AC working off the battery.
She seemed almost okay again. All things considered, she’d actually gotten herself together pretty quickly. We sat. We listened. Low sun slanted in. Marena touched her dashscreen and tinted membranes slid over the windows on the car’s starboard side. The soundscape seemed grim, but distantly so. Eventually, Max climbed back into the backseat. Marena started tapping on her phone. I flipped around on mine. Now CNN was saying some technicians from somewhere who’d been at Universal Studios, and who’d happened to be wearing dosimeters, had reported lethal radiation levels to the police yesterday afternoon, but apparently nothing had come of it. Although you’d think other people would have noticed it, I thought. Didn’t the DHS people ever check their Geiger tubes? Also, that many rads would affect electrical meters and set off smoke alarms and burn out all the X-ray film in dentists’ offices and a hundred other things. And nobody noticed? Although come to think of it I had heard something about smoke alarms yesterday. Hadn’t I? Damn it, there’s ten trillion pages on the Net and not one of them is—never mind. I checked out YouTube again. The top video was a long static shot of Interstate 75, somewhere north of Ocala. North-going cars had filled up all six lanes on both sides of the highway and then gotten backed up and frozen in place like plaque in a doomed artery. Four apparently endless files of pedestrians, one for each shoulder, trudged alongside the cars. People carried plump trash bags and gallon jugs of water balanced on bindle sticks. Two corpses, or maybe just tired people, lay neatly on the median strip. It was the kind of thing I’d seen a lot of when I was little, but now like everyone else around here lately I’d only seen it on TV after the latest everyday holocaust in Africa or Asia, and it felt almost as odd to me as it must to most native U.S. citizens to see it happening right the hell here. Except it wasn’t exactly like other refugee trails because the people were walking with this weird sort of Brownian motion. At first I thought they were picking their way over difficult terrain or something, but then I guessed that they didn’t want to get too close to each other. That is, each of the human particles thought it might get contaminated if it touched any of its neighbors, so they all kept halting and dodging and compensating and the whole thing oozed forward with a kind of paranoid jiggle.
Polonium particulates, I thought. Hell. Maybe we should change out of our clothes. If there’s even a few grains of that shit on there they might blow up and get inhaled or whatever . . . hmm. Hell. Like an idiot I hadn’t thought of it before. Also like an idiot, I immediately imagined Marena peeling off her garments and exposing about two square yards of taut, tempting skin. Should I ask her about it? Except any clothes we can get from anybody around here, we’d be more likely to pick up something from those. Definitely lice, anyway. Well, we can just be naked. Except that kid’s back there. And also except maybe none of us were really anywhere near the hot zone, but then if there’s any of the stuff around here, like all the people around us must have dragged a few with them, then if we’re naked the particles are more likely to get absorbed through the skin, right? Say the odds are ten thousand—well, no, say they’re like—oh, forget it. You’d have to be Enrico Fermi to figure this stuff out. I decided not to mention it.
Outside, in the unfortunately real world, the last blue drained out of the sky. The lamps didn’t go on. Still, the night seemed brighter than the day had been, with the high shell of smoke reflecting the butterscotchy burnt orange of the fires.
“Well, that’s one good thing, anyway,” Marena said, maybe to herself.
I looked at her.
“Oh, I just got a text from ES,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, “what’s ES again?”
“Oh, that’s Executive Solutions. It’s our security contractor. They check out our cars and negotiate with kidnappers and whatever.”
“Okay. Wait, can you get a text through to them, if—”
“No, but they know where we are, the homing thing’s not—they say they’ve got our locator on the satellite. And the boat’s on the way.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Uh . . . are you sure the coast guard’s going to let them in this close?”
“I guess they think so.”
We sat some more. On my side you could just see green firework chrysanthemums popping over the mainland. Somebody on TomTomClub said it was the Muslim community in Homestead celebrating the attack. Outside, a few people jogged past us between the cars, heading south. On CNN they were saying that the Feds had lost touch with the Miami Police Department, among many others. Bad sign. When’s the looting going to spread to here? I wondered. I looked around out the window but everybody seemed to be sitting tight. Drudge had something about how army doctors were estimating that at least one-fifth of the population of Greater Orlando already had some signs of exposure, which meant that many times that number of people would present symptoms within the next few weeks. There was an item about how in Belle Glade, six out of ten people surveyed by phone said they thought the glowbugs were zombies or somehow victims of witchcraft. One of them said that in his neighborhood his homies had a posse to “take care of them,” by which he meant kill and burn them. On StrategyNet they were talking about how there wasn’t a single government agency that had the math to predict the course of the cascading panic. “It is a HIGHLY COMPLEX SYSTEM,” Bourgeoiseophobus said. “And right now it’s spreading OUTWARD from Ctrl Florida and it’s getting magnified because it FEEDS ON ITSELF. And the more people you warn about it, the BIGGER IT IS GOING TO GET.” He sounded right to me.
The Net went down. I restarted and tried it again. It came back. I looked around YouTube. There were videos of burning shopping malls, spreading skin lesions, and lines of refugees waiting to get on school buses. Puffy hunch-dwarfs in chrome responder suits and SCBA probosci set up a Reaganville of arc lights and blue plastic tents outside whatever was left of the Miami airport. Night-feeding buzzards who would soon be dead themselves picked at a dead lady under one of the giant psilocybe mushrooms outside the Mad Tea Party ride, with a background glimpse of a desolate Fantasyland street and a pair of elephants suspended in flight, all in the grisly chiaroscuro of a single emergency light, like that scene in
Pinocchio
where Pleasure Island is all deserted because the boys have gotten turned into donkeys. A lone old guy, apparently the only moving object for miles around, staggered past abandoned cars on West Gore Street in downtown Orlando. A bunch of ancient women gathered fuel in a vacant lot, like . . . well, I don’t know what they were like. A ten-year-old-ish girl waded through brown muck toward a flashing orange light.
“Jed?” Marena asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to tell Max some stuff.”
“Okay,” I said. I guessed she meant some private stuff. “Do you have any big headphones? Or I can stick my head out the window so I can’t hear.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “I’m just mentioning it.” Maybe she thought the kid might freak out less if he wanted to look brave in front of me. “Max?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“We have to talk about a couple of things.”
Max said okay. Damn it, I thought, I really, really don’t want to hear this. Max was at that age where they want to be a big kid but might still have an old spit-stained Beanie bear in their backpack. And you don’t want to hurt their feelings by seeing them cry. I put on a headset and maxed up the ambient noise cancellation and scrunched down in my seat, but it didn’t help. I tried to concentrate on the news just to give him some privacy, not real privacy, but that kind of Japanese-style pseudoprivacy when you can’t stand listening to something so you try to tune out and not hear. But I could still hear everything.
“Listen, sweetie?” Marena asked in a very low voice. “You know there’s a chance that I might get hurt today, right?”
He must have said “Mm-hmm.”
“Okay. Now, suppose I fall over and fall asleep, or something knocks me unconscious or something.”
“Is that going to happen?”
“No, it’s just a tiny possibility. But if that happens you’ll need to stay in the car with the door locked, even if I don’t look good, okay? Don’t get out and don’t go anywhere with strangers. Jed’ll take care of you and you need to do what he says. But if Jed gets sick, or if he’s not here, then just stay in the car and wait. Don’t do anything anybody tells you to do unless they’re wearing a police uniform and a badge that looks real. Otherwise stay in the car with the door locked even if somebody’s hammering on the window. If that happens the glass won’t break, and there’ll be police here, so don’t worry. The only time to get out of the car is if there’s fire or something happening around it, or if it’s making smoke. Or if there are a lot of policemen with badges, you’ll have to do what they say. Except never let go of your phone and keep your watch on. I’ve gotten in touch with ES and they’ll have your transmitter on your phone so they’ll be able to find you. But still, don’t let go of your phone because they may not always be able to see your chip. Okay?”