Red Lightning (5 page)

Mom, on the other hand...

My parents are different in so many ways I have sometimes wondered what it is that keeps them together. Dad's a Green, Mom's a Red. Dad hates stereos. Mom... well, whoever first invented the wearable computer, he probably had my mother in mind. Mom has always got fifteen things going at once. She has always had the newest hardware, the newest programs. Dad says she changes computers more often than a lot of people change their underwear, and Mom says he should change his underwear more often. Then they laugh. Usually.

She was on the move, which is the normal state for her. Elizabeth says that when Mom isn't on the move, she's either sleeping, sick, or dead, and she never allows herself to get sick and doesn't even sleep much.

She doesn't show any marks from her hectic lifestyle. Her face has a few more wrinkles than she had in those pictures from the
Red Thunder
days, there are streaks of gray in her hair, and her skin is much paler than it used to be when she lived in the Florida sunshine because she never has time for sitting under a sunlamp. Of course, wearing a stereo, you can get all sorts of work done sitting down, but if it's a tan you're trying to get done, you'll end up looking like a raccoon. But even working on the stereo she's a multitasker and a pacer. Simply working on the stereo when she could be doing something else at the same time is never enough for her, so she's usually in movement around the apartment or her office doing physical chores or getting from point A to point B, even if there was nothing wrong with being in point A in the first place. Dad says that when they were going together on Earth he hated to be in a car when she was driving. She was always doing several things at the same time, like talking on her cell phone, thumbing the controls of her pocket computer, eating a sandwich because she didn't have time to stop for lunch... "I never actually saw her painting her toenails while she was driving," Dad told me, "but I wouldn't have been surprised." She banged up a few fenders. Luckily, her father was a car dealer with a body shop.

Their arrangement seems to be that he runs the hotel and she runs everything else. She pretty much does what she wants to do, which probably would have been harder for my Latino dad if he'd grown up with a father in the house. He doesn't seem to mind. When something is really, really important to him he will speak up about it, and Mom will work out a compromise and make a promise, and that seems to satisfy him. He knows Mom usually gets her way, but he also knows she never breaks a promise.

"Elizabeth, Ramon, you have to start packing, right now," Mom said. I've been
Ray
, had started
insisting
on it, since I was ten but every once in a while I was Ramon again to my parents, and most of the time it meant I was in big trouble.

"Why?" Elizabeth asked.

"Because we have a ship to catch, and it leaves in four hours."

"A ship..." I stopped myself. I was going to ask where, but the answer was obvious.

"Mother," Elizabeth said, "how can you think of packing at a time like this? We need to see what's –"

"I can think of it because somebody had to take care of the details, Elizabeth, and because it was hard to get these tickets so quickly, I had to call in a lot of favors to bump a few tourists, and... shush!" She held out her hand and listened to someone she was talking to on her stereo.

"Sell them," she snapped. A short pause, then, "I don't care if they're at fifty percent of what I paid for them. By the time the sell order gets to New York they'll probably be down another ten percent, and after that... well, who knows. I need to have that sale registered
at once
, in case..."

For a moment I didn't get it, and then my jaw dropped.

In case
...

In case New York isn't answering the telephone in another few hours. In case Wall Street is ten stories deep in seawater.

Mom was selling stocks. Too bad everybody on Earth had a twenty-minute jump on her. I wondered for a moment what stocks you'd sell if you knew a tsunami was on the way. Insurance companies, I guess.

But maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

"Mother, we want to see what's going on."

"Elizabeth, that's what stereos are for."

I went and stood beside my father. He put his arm up around my shoulder, absently, never taking his eyes off the screens on the wall.

"Ten thousand remote cameras on the Florida coast," he was muttering. "Maybe twenty thousand... why can't I find...?" He looked down at the remote in his hand, and his shoulders slumped. He tossed the remote onto the couch behind him, and sat down. Actually, it was more like a collapse. He sat there with his shoulders slumped and his face in his hands. I was about to sit beside him and offer what comfort I could, when he suddenly leaped to his feet and shouted.

"Dammit, Kelly, how can you do that at a time like this?"

There was dead silence for a moment. Mom stopped moving and took a deep breath.

"I'm sorry, hon, but there's not a damn thing we can do about what's happening there, except what I've already done."

"I know, I know..." Dad didn't seem to know how to express what he was feeling at the moment. I didn't either, but I think I could feel it.

"Manny, children... I don't want to seem cold, but you know we can't do anything about Betty's situation. But I know this. She's a smart woman. She's a survivor. If this is survivable, she will
survive
it. What we have to do as a family is get there as fast as we can. I've already arranged for that. And while we're waiting, I want to try to salvage what I can from some investments that are likely to be affected by this before they shut down the markets."

"What would those be, Mom?" Elizabeth asked.

"That's the tough part. People are unloading different things. I don't know. What I do know is, something this big impacts economies and affects people who are nowhere near ground zero. Banks and insurance companies fail under the kind of pressure this wave may represent. Governments may fall. I don't know how to protect us from that, but I'm trying to figure it out. Can I go ahead? Please?"

She wasn't being sarcastic. Dad didn't say anything, and Mom took that as a yes, but when she continued she went to a corner of the room and kept her voice down. Elizabeth and I joined Dad on the couch, on either side. We put our arms around him.

We didn't have long to sit. A computer-simulated wave was reaching Mayaguana Island, which they had calculated was the first place the effects of the tsunami would be seen. There was a reporter stationed on top of the highest tower on a resort on the easternmost point of the island, and she was standing in front of the camera with the blue ocean behind her. She looked a bit nervous. I figured she had every right to be. There was still a chance, according to the stories we'd been seeing, that this whole thing would be a giant fizzle, but that opinion was losing support as new satellite data came in.

"The reports I'm hearing from the news center," she was saying, "tell me that satellite imaging is being hampered by a storm that has formed over the site of the impact. An infrared camera is being moved as I speak, and it should be able to make a better calculation as to how much energy was delivered by the object. The impact was not, let me repeat, not, registered by seismographs, which leads the oceanographers to believe that it did not strike the seabed. That's the good news. The bad news is that if it was energetic enough, if there was enough... ah, kinetic energy in whatever it was that struck the Earth a short time ago, and if enough of that energy was transferred to the water... well, we might be in for quite a wave in the next few minutes.

I'm told that the ocean is deep to the east of my position on Mayaguana Island, that we are on the edge of the Bahamian Rise, so we may not see much of the wave's approach until it gets here."

A computer graphic appeared on half the screen, showing how a tsunami can travel over deep water and hardly be seen or felt, then how it would pile up as it reached shallow water.

"We don't know precisely when the wave will arrive," the reporter went on, "but I don't mind telling you I'm a little nervous." She didn't have to tell us. She was very pretty, as TV reporters usually are, and was wearing a bathing suit with a light shirt pulled on over it, like she had been relaxing in the sun when her phone rang and hadn't had time to change into more sober clothes, and her face was shiny with sunburn lotion, and given the location and the way she and the other people on the roof were dressed, it was probably quite warm up there. But she was shivering.

"We're on the roof of a six-story building here, and I've been assured it sits on a concrete foundation and is made of steel and concrete, so –"

Behind her, some of the people looking over the railing began to point and shout. The reporter jumped, then her instincts took over and she hurried over to the edge. Somebody cleared a space for her, and the camera operator panned until we could see over her shoulder. There was a thick line of white drawn on the water halfway to the horizon.

"Look! Look down there!" somebody was shouting. The cameraman moved to the rail and pointed his camera down. The water was being sucked away like a giant bathtub draining. It was
fast
! The beach extended out a hundred feet, then three hundred, then more and more until it seemed it would reach the distant white line. The camera zoomed in on the wet sand and rock, and I could see fish flopping around, including a big shark of some sort. There was some more shouting, then everything got very quiet as people were overcome by the sight of an ocean that had vanished. I heard some people crying, a woman shouting something unintelligible. Maybe a prayer.

"This is... uh... what we were told to expect," the reporter said. "This suction effect is the first thing we were told to expect... I'm repeating myself... Jerry, are we getting this? Jerry..."

The line of white in the distance began to swell, and was no longer completely straight. It was hitting shallower water, starting to pile up, and it was doing it unevenly, responding to differences in the ocean bottom that we couldn't see.

"We can see it now. Are we getting this, Jerry? It's not what I expected, I thought we'd see a green wall, rearing up like in a surfing video..."

As she spoke, the line of water did begin to rear up. It was hard to tell how tall it was, there were no boats out there to give us a scale. But I could hear people shouting. My guess was it was forty feet high, maybe. I think they got waves like that in Hawaii sometimes. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Then I estimated it might be more like eighty feet. It began to curl over at the top, and now it reared up even more. We could hear it roaring.

"My god," the reporter said. "They told me it might sound like a freight train, but this is a thousand freight trains, all of them coming right at us. It's so fast! It's almost to the beach now... eighty, maybe ninety feet high..."

The curling part broke, but the sea was noticeably higher behind it. No way to tell how high. By the time it crashed on the beach it was partly concealed by a crown of foam and spray. A hundred feet high? Maybe more.

"My god, is it... it looks like it might be higher than the building! No, no, it's... I can't tell, I can't see... here it comes... Mother, I love you, I love you..."

At that point the camera operator was running, and he dropped his equipment. It landed sideways, and then the lens was spotted with water and the sound was incredible and I saw some running bare feet.

The screen went black.

I don't know when Mom joined us on the couch. She was just there, squeezing my hand so tight it hurt, but I was squeezing back. The four of us sat there, stunned, not saying anything.

The next few minutes seemed like a kaleidoscope. I'm a member of the stereo generation, as they call it, and I'm pretty good at opening five or six or a dozen virtual windows and parking them somewhere in my peripheral vision and just leaving them on, semitransparent, but if something interesting happens in any of them I'll quickly tick it over into the center, and all the time I'm watching or reading that window I'll be aware of the other ones. People who are alarmed by this call it permanent sensory overload. People who can handle it call it multitasking. Both sides of the argument think my generation's minds are wired differently.

Whatever. I'd never had a problem with it, but until that day I'd never been confronted with maybe fifty or sixty different windows, all clamoring for my attention. The problem was, everything was happening at once. The house computer's discriminator was being overloaded by the number of news images, each with a top-priority rating. They were coming in from all the islands of the Bahamas, from stationary spycams and personal stereocams, from helicopters and airplanes and hi-rez satellites. They were filling the telewall of our apartment with a rolling crazy quilt of disaster.

We watched in silence, or sometimes turned away with a moan, as the waves arrived at Samana Cay, Acklins Island, and Crooked Island. No sooner had those cameras gone abruptly to black screen than the wave was assaulting Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador. And the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Cat Island, Great Exuma, Eleuthera.

The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico.

Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts, Sin Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis.

Cuba.

Places I'd never heard of, places I'd barely been aware of, and places I'd heard of but knew little about. All of them full of people living in tropical splendor, or taking a vacation from colder climates, people just like us, sitting in front of their telewalls or old flatscreens or even old box TVs, or watching out from their windows, or fleeing for their lives, or trying desperately to find their loved ones before the hammer of God descended on them. People who had had hopes and dreams and plans, people who might have worried about hurricanes or fires or car wrecks or falling off a boat and drowning but had never expected the horror that was bearing down on them. It was the first time in my life that I realized just how quickly everything could change, how one minute you could be strolling down some sunny street in the Bahamas and the next you could be staring death in the face.