In the Courts of the Sun (18 page)

“Okay.”
“Okay. You know the company’s sending a boat to pick us up? They’ll identify themselves as Executive Solutions, and they’ll have identification. You should ask to see it. Don’t ask them if that’s what they are, though. They have to say the name themselves. You understand that, right?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t get on any boats you aren’t sure about. You remember Ana Vergara? She’ll probably be on the boat or on the phone. Ask to talk to her. I’m just telling you this because I know you’re a big brave kid so you can handle it.”
Silence. Hmm, she sure didn’t mention any father in all that, I thought. Maybe he was an eyedropper job.
“Sweetie?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, “but how tiny a possibility?”
“It’s very unlikely, but we’re still in a hazardous situation right now so I need to remind you of this stuff.”
“If you start dying we’ll get you to the cryogenics place, right?”
“Well, if an ambulance picks me up they’ll do that, but you can’t think about that. There may not be time for that, and there may not even be time for an ambulance. So you can’t stay with me if I tell you to go, you have to go with Jed or whoever I tell you to go with.”
Max scrunched down in his seat. I think he may have whimpered a little. I can’t deal with this, I thought, this is one of the many compelling reasons not to have kids in the first place. It’s too sad to watch them find out what the world is really like. Marena started to say something to me and then seemed to think better of it.
We waited. A growing stream of people walked south around us, threading through the packed cars, some carrying people on slings or pushing them in carts. A lot of them looked sketchy. Still, I thought, these were all people who’d left their own vehicles. And they want to get to Key West. They’re in too much of a hurry to do any more than cursory looting. I was starting to suspect that Executive Solutions was just a wishful hallucination. Tomorrow might be a pretty grim day. I guess any time now we’ll just devolve back to the Paleolithic Age and start fishing for shark using each other as bait.
“Jed?” Marena asked.
“Yeah,” I said, whipping my head over to her. I’m here for you, babe, I got ready to say. Hey, what are you doing? Are you sure he’s asleep? Mmmmm, that feels—
“What’s an ADW?” She was watching the C-SPAN transcript.
“Oh, uh, they probably mean an Area Denial Weapon,” I said. “Like a dirty bomb. Like to keep soldiers out of some city or whatever for a while, until the radiation—you know, like if the half-life is only a week or so, the—”
“Who’d do something like that? I mean around here.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe it’s, I don’t know, it’s some sinister Dick Cheney-Carlisle-Halliburton-CIA-NSA-DIA-DHS crypto-sub-rosa-false-flag-invasion-pretext-conspiracy thing. Or at least, that’s what I usually assume.”
“What’s DIA, you mean the airport?”
“That’s the Defense—”
“So look,” she interrupted, “if I got messed up or whatever . . . uh, you’ll hang on to Max, right?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “Jesus, what do you think I am, a complete lowlife? Don’t answer that.”
“And just keep my phone with you and the ES people’ll come and get you when they can. And they’ll know what to do and who else to call and everything.”
“Okay. Is there a code word?”
“Sorry? Oh. No. They know about you. Just give them ID.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, they may be here any minute. In the last message I got they said their ETA was nine twenty p.M.”
“It’s eleven now.”
“I know.”
I tried to think of something to say that was clever, mood-lightening, and relatively masculine, but I guess I’m not Bill Maher, because I couldn’t. She went back to watching TV. I looked up polonium on CHEMnetBASE. It turned out that the half-life of the 210 isotope is only about 138.38 days, so it could presumably be used like an N-bomb, to clear people out of a base or a city that your army wanted to occupy later. 209 is less toxic, but it has a half-life of about a hundred and three years. So if you left a lot of it lying around someplace, nobody’d want to go there for a while. Okay, that’s two numbers. What about the other one that kept coming up, 124,030?
Don’t even think about it.
Cono.
Dizzy. Fear. Fear—
The Net went down again.
Hell. I tried and retried. Nothing.
What’s the point, anyway? We’re probably all exposed to some degree. You just have to wait a while, just a very little while, and your legs will start feeling heavy, your hair will start to pull out when you comb it—
Dizzy. Okay. Sit.
The brain has chemical counterirritants to terror that, if you wait, will eventually kick in, and I think I got it back together without the wimmenfolk ’n’ chilluns noticing.
By midnight it became clear that Max couldn’t go another minute without food. There was some discussion about whether whatever we might stir up around here could be contaminated but the upshot was that I left the car to forage. About a quarter-mile behind us I found a still-occupied Dodge motor home and made the please-roll-down-your-window sign. The guy in the driver’s seat shook his head. But he looked Mexican, which for me is good. I started telling him what I wanted, in lower-caste Spanish, and waving a thick wad of bills. Finally they decided I wouldn’t go away. I made sure they were from Miami, and that they’d left from Miami, and that there wasn’t anything in their truck from north of Miami. I bought one bag of Rancheritos, one of Pulparindos, and an armload of alternative beverages, all for eight hundred dollars.
Well, that worked okay, I thought as I walked back. The night was humid. You could smell the marine biomass starting to rot. Preview of coming repulsions. There were artilleryish rumblings on the landward side. Somewhere, pretty far away but not far enough, you could just hear shouting and breaking glass. Damn. I should have asked those guys if they had any old guns I could buy. Maybe I’ll go back. Or look for a pickup with a bumper sticker that says if YOU CAN READ this, YOU’RE in RANGE. No problem.
By the time I got back to the Jeep I had a whole scenario planned. I’d find a truck with cleaning supplies in it, buy some duct tape, a mop handle, a cardboard tube, and a detergent bottle, tape them all together, and paint the thing with grease out of the axle so that it would pass for a twelve-gauge in the dark, and then I’d sit on the roof all night and when some gang of hoodla came up on the car I’d face them down with my stainless-steel gaze, and by morning Marena would be so in awe of my manliness that she’d be pawing at my
casa de pinga
practically in front of little Maxwell, and as soon—
“Jed, get in the car,” Marena said through an inch of open window. She’d moved into the backseat and was holding Max. She popped open the passenger door. “I’m serious.”
I got in. I handed over the loot. We waited. I let them convince me to have one Pulparindo and a little Inca Kola. No need to fill up. Defecation can be a big problem in situations like this, and one didn’t want to get involved with it more than necessary, even if one was on a bridge. I said she should try to chill a bit because there was no way I was falling asleep, and in fact even on a normal day I wouldn’t fall asleep at this hour and in this situation. She said okay. I went back to watching the dashscreen. At least we could still watch. Basically, no matter what’s going on, most of the time all you could ever do was watch. But at least these days we can watch better. The CNN scroll said that the White House and the Defense Department were now considering the event to be a terrorist attack, “although as yet there are no credible claims of responsibility” and it was “not yet clear how the toxic material was dispersed.” On CNN that same Dr. Quentin was responding to questions, saying how it was true that particles they’d found on samples from the No-Go Zone were isotopes of polonium, which was very rare and normally very expensive, “seemingly prohibitively expensive for a dispersal of this scale.” Someone on the committee asked where the stuff had come from originally and she said they weren’t sure yet but that it was likely that the isotopes were made in Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We sat.
Some people, of whom I am one, have brain chemistry that’s gotten a little over-tweaked, and one side effect is that fear or anger or any large emotion comes and goes a little more abruptly, or jaggedly, than it does in neurotypicals. So I kept getting those unmotivated ups and downs in my fear level, intervals when your brain just shuts down on it and steers you toward something else. I’d catch myself thinking about the Codex or the Game or even just about the last nitrate reading in my Baja tank back home and then think how this couldn’t be right, how I ought to be more upset than this, for others if not for myself, and then I’d go back to trying to calculate how long the natural gas in the generator tank could power the calcium skimmers. At some point I realized that Marena was singing to Max in Korean.
I listened. Hmm. This is actually kind of nice.
Chingalo,
I thought, I only met this woman once before today and already it felt like we’d been through more together than Lewis and Clark, Bonnie and Clyde, Kirk and Spock, and Siegfried and Roy, put together.
Max was quiet. I snuck a look back there. He’d curled up in his headware and, as children can, fallen asleep from stress. Marena’s eyes were closed. I noticed she had a can of pepper spray in her left hand. Like that was going to do anything. Maybe I should move back there too. Offer a sturdy masculine shoulder. No, that’s ridiculous.
I tried the Net again. Nothing. All we could get was radio off the aerial, like it was 1950. We’d been bombed back to the Milton Berle age. Still, news shows now had the benefit of nearly ubiquitous video recording, and people were still managing to get them to the stations. There were green grainy night-vision shots of feral kids prowling in flash packs, smashing store windows and torching cars and worse. A trio of well-brought-up, articulate children filmed themselves choking out good-byes in a burning house. There was a long video of a gang of Mexican kids partying in a Macy’s in a deserted mall that had a really strange
Warriors
-like quality. Another popular piece of video—out of the few that made their way from blogs onto the networks—was one of a two-year-old girl trying to feed Milk Duds to her dead mother.
Somewhere outside, pretty far away—sound can carry for miles over the flat roads and shallow water—somebody was screaming in this unnatural, blood-curdlingly high voice, but luckily most normals can’t do anything—even talk, or sleep, or watch their entire families and themselves die in agony— without their favorite tunage in the background, so it was almost drowned out by the closer noise of two boom boxes, one playing Hip-Hop Countdown and the other looping that old stupid Pixies song about the monkey,
If man is five, if man is five,
over and over,
if man is five, then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six, then the Devil is six . . .

[12]

T
he sky was the color of a TV set tuned to the Playboy Channel.
It’s late, I thought. There’d been a banging sound somewhere.
What happened? I must have zoned out.
The boom boxes were still going. Seagulls squawked somewhere.
Okay. Get it together. Better—
BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM.
I jumped. My head sank up into the luxuriously padded roof. I swung around. A dark figure was knocking on the rear window. Marena was twisted around, too, holding her pathetic pepper-spray thing. Oh, hell, I thought. Looters. Rapists. Rednecks.
Deliverance.
“What?” Marena yelled.
“Mom?” Max asked.
“I’m Major Ana Vergara from ES.”
Slowly, the fear balloon in my abdomen started to deflate. Amazing, I thought. They actually showed up. You need a little more faith, Jed.
“We have to go,” Marena said to Max. “Time to get you some breakfast.”
We got together. We got out. The air smelled like rubber smoke.
“Do they have waffles on the boat?” Max asked.
The woman ignored him. “There are three of you, correct?” she asked. She was standing between the car and the railing, with her legs set apart in that officerish way. She was an unattractive Cynthia Rothrock type in a sort of SWAT-team-looking outfit with Wiley X sunglasses and deck boots, with a badge of some kind and a holstered Glock and a big ear-and-microphone rig. She didn’t smile.
“That’s right,” Marena said.
I blinked around. There were buzzards drawing wide spirals about two hundred feet overhead. Kυνεςςιν oιωνoιςι, I thought. Dogs and carrion birds. Farther up a few aircraft were still whining north. Out past the shallows to the southeast the sea had filled up with coast guard cutters and navy assets. On the landward side of the causeway, between us and the black pilings of the old railroad trestle, the water was almost calm and glazed with oil from the severed pipes. Well, that ought to kill what’s left of the reefs in that direction, I thought. Still, the gulf was more beautiful than I’d ever seen it, maybe more beautiful at the moment of its death than it had ever been before, swirling with over- and underlapping skeins of wavy parallel lines in every color of an alien rainbow. All kinds of things were going by in the water that you didn’t want to see any closer up, chunks of coral, boat hulls, house timbers, clumps of mangrove roots, tires, dead pelicans, two-by-fours, sections of vinyl siding, clusters of midscale lawn furniture, knots of sea grape, and then, without any special notice, I got a shiver of revulsion-slash-fear as a dead human floated into view, a fat lady, prone, with her head underwater and with her floral day dress pulled way up so that you could see these white support panties, which were only a little whiter than the flesh of her thighs. What happened? I wondered. Were they just throwing them into the water? Hell. I turned back to the ocean side. It was a little better, slicked with oil but with no corpses in evidence.
“Do any of you need immediate medical attention?” Vergara asked.
We said no. I noticed there were people milling around behind her. They were surprised, though. That is, she hadn’t drawn a crowd. Somehow she’d come in on a motor launch and climbed up onto the causeway without attracting any attention. I turned around. People were coming toward us from the other direction, from downstream. They were almost jogging, like the zombies in
Dawn of the Dead,
except scarier because they weren’t yet dead. Hmm. Better just go along with these guys, I thought. Better than hanging around here and getting barbecued by peckerwoods. I checked my stuff. Wallet, phone, passport. Ankle wallets. Jacket. Shoes.
Esta bien.
Vergara herded us over to the guardrail. There was something attached to it with big aluminum hooks, like on a rope ladder. She looked around at the growing crowd. Already things had gotten a little bit tense. People were staring at us with narrowed eyes. A dried-up cowguy-looking character sidled over. He had a loose posse behind him who looked like they’d sleazed out of an S. E. Hinton novella.
“Hey, glowbug, where’d y’all get the duck boat?” he hissed.
“Back off, sir,” Ms. Vergara said. “These people are being arrested. If you want to come along that can happen but we’ll have to arrest and cuff you too. Understood?”
Cowguy seemed a little cowed. For a microsecond his eyes glanced at her gun. By the time he got it together to say something back, the moment had already passed. The thing on the railing turned out to be one of those collapsible chute rigs, like a preschool play tunnel, and we and our stuff all slid down right into the boat. It was an old twenty-foot GatorHide. There was just one guy at the tiller, idling the Yamaha silent motor. Up on the bridge Vergara detached the chute and rock-climbed down a piling into the launch. They put us into ballistic life jackets. We shoved off.
They motored us out to a forty-six-foot Bertram. Its bridge was done so that from a distance it would look like a coastal patrol boat. So this is how the top 0.01 percent evacuates, I thought. So to speak. I felt like Alphonse Rothschild clearing out of Vienna ahead of the Anschluss in a private train car. Apparently the boat had some sort of radio beacon coded to give it a pass, the same thing they use on diplomatic cars around the UN or getting senators out of bomb-threatened airports. It was like a Get Out of Hell Cheap card. I almost felt a little wrong about it. You know that the U.S. government is just another mafia, and that the Bush family’s Saudi cronies all got spirited out after 9/11 and that after Khalid was arrested in Pakistan he got sprung out of prison and whisked to Guam by Blackwater thugs and whatever, but still, when you see the special treatment yourself, when you cash in on it, like we were doing, it still feels weird. Not to complain, though. We set off ESE for Andros.
The crew made sure I got out of my clothes and put them in a chromed boPET-film bag for analysis, decontamination, cleaning, pressing, and eventual return. They put me in a cabin with its own tiny shower and made sure I showered. I got into some oversized off-white and blue U.S. Naval Academy sweats, lay down on the narrow berth, and checked the Emergency Broadcast System on the little overhead screen. There was a map with dots and splotches scattered all over the Southeast and covering most of peninsular Florida. The voice-over was still just telling you where to go and what to do, without telling you why. I tried CNN.
“. . . evacuated persons without vehicles are now being released from shelters and allowed to march,” the voice-over was saying. A crawl at the top said the president had invoked the Insurrection Act, which gave military personnel domestic police powers, and that over five hundred thousand people had been displaced, and that they were estimating the death toll from rioting, fires, and explosions—of which our pipeline blast was only one of many—at 18,000. That sounds low, I thought. Then it said that the estimated number of all casualties from the Disney World Horror was over 30,000.
Hell, I thought. The thing is, all fortunate events are pretty much alike, but each big disaster is ghastly in its own way. This time there hadn’t been any of the futuristic instantaneity of Oaxaca or the ancient blind rage of tsunamis or earthquakes. There wasn’t any jaw-dropping pyrotechnic artistry like on 9/11. We—and I try not to use that pronoun, but I think we can justify it in this case—we’d thought we’d become connoisseurs of apocalypse, and then when a new thing actually happened, it’s like everybody’s totally unprepared. Blind-sided yet again.
Hell, I thought. I tried Bloomberg. The video area showed a warehouse floor with rows of bagged bodies covered with dry ice, so that there was this low-hanging fog all over like in some old Wolfman movie. The voice-over said emergency-room personnel were refusing to treat victims until they were able to do it in hazmat suits. Until then, some hospitals were opening up their supply rooms and trying to use teleconferencing to tell patients and their families how to treat themselves. At the bottom of the screen—you’ve got to love Bloomberg for this—the financials were still crawling along. U.S. trading was still suspended, but overseas, cyclic commodities were still jumping. I waited until corn came up. Hah. Another half a buck just today. Well, don’t smirk about it, I thought. You’re a carpetbagger, Jed. A terror profiteer. You should be ashamed of yourself . . .
I lost consciousness.
They woke me up in the harbor in Nichols Town. It was late afternoon. A Kiowa pontoon helicopter showed up and took us to a private airstrip at Fresh Creek, near the field station.
“How are you doing?” Marena asked over the earphones.
“I’m good,” I said. “So, where are you going after this?”
“The firm—now they want to fly us down to the Stake, in Belize.”
“What’s the steak?” I asked.
“That’s like a Mormon word.”
“Oh, right. Stake.” It meant a small missionary community, which, in the fullness of time, might grow into a Temple.
“It’s mainly just a big sports resort Lindsay’s working on,” Marena said. “I think the religion thing’s primarily for, like, taxes.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, speaking of that, I was thinking it would be really great if you came along.”
“Oh . . . well, thanks.” Damn it, I thought, I’m getting kidnapped. No, that’s nonsense. Don’t get paranoid.
“It’d be a good idea to keep up with what you’re doing with Taro,” she said. “Don’t you think? I’m going to get this thing green-lighted.”
“What thing?” I asked. “ You’re making another Maya movie?”
“No, no movie, I’m going to get Lindsay to give us more cash to research the Codex and, just, do whatever’s necessary.”
“ You mean, like, necessary to save humanity and everything?”
“Well . . .”
“Why would Lindsay Warren want to do that? I mean . . . Look, I don’t want to be difficult, and I don’t want to put you guys down, but . . . I mean, don’t big corporations usually
destroy
the planet? Or at least not save it?”
“Well, if he doesn’t have a profit angle on something, he’ll probably shift the funding to his personal foundation.”
“Okay.”
“But anyway, no, I think he thinks that saving the planet might be
immensely
profitable.”
“Huh.”
“Anyway, if you don’t like it in Belize we’ll fly you back. People are going to be coming back anyway.”
Hmm. Quick decision time, I thought.
“Where is it in Belize?” I asked.
“It’s, um, it’s in the hills, it’s west, I mean, southwest of uh, Belmopan.”
“You know, I can’t go into Guatemala,” I said. “I have legal problems there.”
“Who said anything about Guatemala?”
“Well . . .”
“Anyway, the border’s closed, there’s practically a war on between them and Belize.”
“I know, but—look, it sounds like the place is very near the border, and, I mean, I don’t want to be an ingrate and it’s nice that you have confidence in me and all—”
“Don’t do a soft sell on me,” she said, “just try to get your lawyer on the phone and get her or him ready to look over the contract. Okay?”
“Okay, boss.” Contract?
“See, that’s the attitude we’re looking for.”
“Right, MP.”
“Right.”
There were two planes idling off on the grass. One was a chartered Cessna for Max. Somebody called Ashley
₃
—Marena’s maid or executive domicile director or whatever—and this other guy who worked for her named José were on it to meet him. To me it all seemed a little lavish. Still, why ride alone? They were going to Kingston and then, if they were sure they wouldn’t have a problem, back to the States. Max started climbing up the boarding stairs, stopped, came back, and handed something to me. “Here, you might need this,” he said. It was a little blue fat robot figurine. It was sticky from his little hand.
“Oh, great,” I said. “Gigantor. Thanks.”
“No, it’s Tetsujin 28.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.”
“It’s a purple laser pointer,” he said.
“Oh. That’s awesome, I’ve never owned one of these before.”
They taxied around and took off. The other plane rolled up. It was a Piaggio Avanti, a twelve-seater double-prop with a canard foreplane on the nose that meant it had the uay of a hammerhead shark. It had a big Warren-logo wing flash and the letters WAS, for Warren AeroSpace, in a trademarked fluorescent green called Warren Emerald. This big gray craggy guy in a Don Ho shirt got out of it first and shook my hand. He didn’t squeeze, but his hand felt like it knew exactly how to slide up your arm, give you a single debilitating finger chop to the axillary artery, and then twist your humerus out of its socket, and would prefer to.
“Jed, this is Grgur,” Marena said.
“Nice to meet to you,” he lied in what sounded like a Serbian accent without the humor.
I lied back that it was nice to meet to him too. Grr-Grr? I thought. What kind of cooked-up tough-guy moniker is that? His real name’s probably Evander.
We climbed into the plane. I’d been picturing the cabin as a kind of a Led Zeppelin ’74 tour Orgytrailer, but it was just a roomier cowhide-and-burled-elm-veneer version of any other plane, all done in bisque, greige, and mushroom with notes of ecru and off-taupe highlights. There were two other passengers already on the plane, a missionary-type guy with acne and a woman from Lotos Labs—which I guess the Warren Group also owned— named Dr. Lisuarte. She was a little, dark, efficient lady with a fishing vest and hair that looked like it had been tied back in the same severe way since the twentieth century.
“I’m supposed to do a checkup on both of you,” she said. I was about to object and then decided not to be a
cabrón
. What the hell. They strapped us in. They brought us food. We didn’t talk. We took off. At three thousand feet the sun zapped up through the portholes for a minute or so and then it went down anyway. At eight thousand feet Lisuarte tapped me on the shoulder and took me back to what I guess was usually the galley. The plane had been done up for executive transport and not for emergencies, but they’d set up a whole little EMT facility in there, everything you’d have in an ambulance plus, it turned out, some extra stuff they’d loaded on just for me.
I sat down on a folding phlebotomy chair. Lisuarte did an embarrassingly full checkup that included going over my thyroid three times. The G-M tube she had was so sensitive that when she turned it vertically, it clicked at the smoke alarm in the ceiling and she had to reset it. I appeared to be clean. Well, that’s one relief, I thought. Another hundred bits of good news like that and we’ll be back in the game. She gave me potassium iodide tablets anyway, just in case. There was also a fluid-balance screen for edema and a bunch of heavy-metal tests, which normally you’d have to send to a special lab. I guess they’d moved a spectrometer onto the plane. And of course she insisted on running my arterial blood profile, too, probably just to show off her new self-guiding needle. When she put the analysis up on the screen it looked okay to me, but of course she wanted to tinker with it.