WHITNEY
by
Russell C. Connor
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Russell C. Connor on SMASHWORDS
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Also by Russell C. Connor on Smashwords
Howling Days
The Jackal Man
Second Unit
Outside the Lines (Novella)
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Whitney copyright ©2010 by Russell C. Connor
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or as provided by U.S. Copyright Law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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For the DFWWW, Abbie, and all that jazz.
For the people of New Orleans, whose hardships in the wake of Katrina inspired so much of this book.
Special Thanks to:
Alex Rydlinski, guitarist for the fantastic Turbid North, for all his artwork assistance. Check him and the band out at myspace.com/turbidnorth
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The creature swam.
It pushed into the warm waters of the Gulf, gliding on webbed feet that churned as mechanically as a metronome. The speed reduced it to no more than a green glimmer from the surface.
Little in its head besides thoughts of feeding, feeding, always feeding. Even now, it swooped and dove, snatching fish from teeming schools and tearing them apart in a mouth overflowing with razor-sharp incisors. The claw-tipped appendages it used for this operation were close enough to arms and hands to send any marine biologist into conniptions.
Each kill released a cloud of blood and viscera into the murky waters that every shark for a hundred miles could detect, but even the hungriest was deterred by the scent of the thing performing the slaughter. Their kind had many run-ins with this creature’s species since the dawn of time, and they invariably came out on the losing end.
Its usual hunting ground lay deep in the abyssal belly of the Atlantic, beyond the last of the eastern seaboard’s shipping lanes, but its current condition had outstripped the usual food sources. Hunger had forced it to creep closer—with timidity at first, and then with the assurance of the unopposed predator—to the dull noise eternally reverberating from what it thought of only as Water’s End.
Sated, the creature turned back, preparing to migrate home and sleep with its fellows.
That was where it ran into trouble.
Resistance encountered at the opening of the Gulf, a churning disturbance that lit up its array of delicate senses like flashing neon signs. It recognized the source: one of the destructive wind circles that scattered fish in droves.
The creature kicked hard and fast, a torpedo in the water, and attempted to slide by the pressure of the impending storm on the northern side of Cuba. Rough seas and shallow waters made the route dangerous. Normally it would ride out the violence beneath the surface…but there was more than just its life to consider.
Panic swept through its brain like brushfire.
No place to hide, no place to run.
No place…except shoreward, toward the land-dwelling beings with all their endless hammering and yammering. Perhaps it could find shelter in one of the bays or coves along Water’s End. If the waves drove it out of the ocean, it could breathe air quite comfortably for short periods.
But it would have to feed.
Its belly would remain quiet only so long before driving it to berserker frenzy.
A sudden thought occurred to the creature: perhaps the land-dwellers themselves might serve in a pinch. It had never tasted their flesh before, but as long as it was meaty and filled with blood, they would suffice.
Humor, or as close as it could get to the concept, flashed briefly in its alien mind as it continued swimming.
* * * * *
PORT ALLEN
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* * * * *
WHITNEY -91:17
“Are you seeing this storm potential?” Kirby said into the telephone receiver.
“Yes, doofus, we’ve been tracking that rotation since day before yesterday,” Nielsen answered. Kirby could imagine him with the faux snakeskin heels of his wannabe boots up on his desk in the fancy control room of the National Weather Service’s Center for Environmental Prediction down in Miami. Kirby met the man only once at a convention in Anaheim, and he could say with certainty that Erik Nielsen was about as much a cowboy as he was an astronaut. “It’s your move, by the way.”
“And you guys aren’t worried about it? I mean, this thing is shaping up to be an asskicking of biblical proportions.” Kirby rechecked the data on Whitney it took the rickety printer beside him nearly twenty minutes to spit out.
He, on the other hand, was at the Atlantic Meteorological Advisory in Brunswick, Massachusetts. The station, which routinely gave little more than local projections of winter storms for the northeastern states, was about the size of a spacious closet, manned by one person at any given time (said person paid by government stipend that made employment at McDonald’s a viable career move), and outfitted with equipment that would’ve been obsolete during Carter’s presidency. Your tax dollars at work, Kirby thought, as the last of the paper rattled off the printer. On the three-color monitor in front of him, the bright blue, rotating eye of Whitney glared at him.
“Fer chrissake, Kirby.” Shuffling papers and a creaking chair as Nielsen swung those so-green-they-were-almost-iridescent boots off the top of his desk in agitation. “Who cares, as long as that asskicking is administered to our friendly neighbors in the good nation of Cuba, and whatever dolphins are stupid enough to get in Tropical Storm Whitney’s way. Now, are you going to play, or do you want to get an early start worrying about next year’s storms too?
“Oh…this is rich.” Dawning pleasure spread across Kirby’s face. The moment was savory enough to taste. “Knight to B7.”
“What’s rich? Bishop to E9.”
“Queen to F2. You, uh…you haven’t updated the world Doppler model in the last couple hours, have you?”
“Noooo.” Hesitation in his smarmy voice for the first time. At this time of night, there was no need, especially not when they were all so sure Whitney would fade away into meteorological history. The depression had started out southeast of Cuba, turned into a mother-of-a-storm just before making landfall, and was already losing strength when predicted it would limp northward and die quietly over the mid-Atlantic. Just one of the many alphabetized storms every year most Americans paid no more attention to on the evening news than they did to the local PTA bake sale. What could you say; unless it affected the price of gasoline, it just didn’t matter. “Queen to A7. Why?”
“Why don’t you do that now? I’ll wait. And rook to A1.”
Nielsen didn’t answer, didn’t even comment on the devastating checkmate Kirby just administered, but there was the click of keys as he followed the suggestion.
Wait for it, wait for it…
“Holy shit,” Nielsen muttered, and Kirby thought he could’ve died happy right then and there. Imagine him getting the drop on the NWS all out here by his lonesome, and on what was sure to be one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Kirby assumed he meant the new visitor from the north. “Sprang up from that pressure system in the Arctic and gained strength from the winds out of Canada. That little depression you see moving south is going to bounce this girl back our way as neat as a cue ball.”
“But…but…when Whitney hits the system coming in behind it…”
“When that happens, my man, Tropical Storm Whitney is going to become Hurricane Whitney in a big hurry. Based on my current trajectory models, it’ll pick up about 20 times current wind velocity, gain mass like a pregnant woman, then head back north again, this time right up the middle of the Gulf. It’ll be one massive ball of fury when it washes up somewhere along the Texas-Louisiana border. Sound familiar?”
“Katrina.” He whispered the dreaded name of another meteorological bitch.
“That’s right! Gimme an ‘F,’ gimme an ‘I,’ gimme a ‘V,’ gimme an ‘E!’ What’s that spell? Category Five, baby!”
“Jesus…Jesus H Christ,” Nielsen wheezed. “I mean, fuck Katrina! If those warm currents from the south don’t let up, this thing is gonna make Katrina look like a goddamned drizzle! At this rate, it’ll make landfall in…”
“Just under four days.” The glee was gone from Kirby’s voice. He suddenly felt ashamed at his flippancy. Not because people were almost surely going to die, but because this hurricane was going to be one mean SOB, it was going to make Katrina look like a drizzle, and he felt as disrespectful as if he’d just blasphemed in a quiet church, one where God Himself was in attendance.
And judging by the severity of this storm, He just might be.
“I have to go.” Kirby could hear other voices calling out in the background, other meteorologists on the late shift just alerted by Nielsen. “I have to call FEMA, the President has to be notified immediately.”
“Checkmate,” Kirby said softly as the line disconnected in his ear. The baleful eye of Whitney stared at him without blinking.
~ ~ ~
WHITNEY -80:05
When the desk intercom buzzed, the President of the United States brought a fist down on it, cracking its white plastic casing but still connecting him to his personal secretary on the other end. “Is he here, Sherry?”
“Yes sir, but--.”
“Don’t ‘but,’ just send him in so I can get this over with.” He cut off the conversation with another smack to the top of the device. On a bad day, he was known to go through two or three of the little speaker boxes. There was rumored to be a closet somewhere in the White House stocked full of them.
He swiveled in his chair, not bothering to smooth his hair or straighten his tie because, frankly, he had far more important things to do than meet with the weasely little Director of FEMA. But here it was a goddamn election year, and, with a timing that half made him believe the unholy Democrats were behind it, Mother Nature decided to see what a monster hurricane would do to his approval rating.
All anybody would remember when they stepped up to the polls in a few months was whether he had clothed and fed every last victim of Whitney with his own two hands. He didn’t have the luxury of lame-duck-itis like Bush after Katrina, visiting the disaster site when convenient and smiling vacantly around at the destruction. He had to be proactive, dammit, had to prepare himself, and unfortunately this meant sitting through a pre-briefing from that worm David Sinclair, before he and the Joint Chiefs got the full dog-and-pony show.
A knock on the Oval office door, and the President rolled his eyes. “Just come in!”
The door opened enough for the head of FEMA to slouch through. The President suppressed a shudder at the sight of him. Short and froggish, eyes hidden behind lenses thick enough to see Mars, usually slick with nervous sweat. He came into the room dressed in a ragged tweed suit carrying a sheaf of papers, beady eyes darting right and left, leaving the door open behind him.
The President started to yell for him to close it, until it opened wider and another man entered the room behind Sinclair.
He had no idea who this one was. Mid-forties, tall and lean, packed with rolling muscle. His eyes were cool and confident, and a small scar corkscrewed left of his jaw in a rudimentary sideways question mark. He wore a black dress shirt, open at the throat to reveal a swatch of hairy chest, with the sleeves rolled up. The President’s nostrils flared. This man looked ready to go club hopping rather than meeting with the leader of the free world in his own office, but that was the sort of disarray the President expected from any member of Sinclair’s organization.
“Sinclair,” he greeted, without standing. Mr. GQ gave no introduction, and the President shot him an eyebrow. “Have a seat.”
“Th-thank you, sir.” Sinclair glanced back at Black Shirt as though expecting him to come forward as well. When that didn’t happen, he plopped into one of the chairs in front of the desk. The mystery man gave a knowing little smile, then turned his back and began to examine books on the far side of the room.
The President laced his fingers on the desk. “All right, just how the hell bad is this thing gonna be?”
Sinclair’s eyes rolled in their sockets as he shuffled papers. He leaned forward to place a few graphs and satellite photos on the desktop, all of which meant squat to the President. “Well, it…uh…they’re telling me it’s definitely a Category Five, sir. It’ll make landfall sometime around 7:30 on Thursday evening. Winds will, um, probably reach 150 plus miles an hour, which means we can expect structural damage in multiple-story building up to two hours before it even hits. The storm surge alone is likely to be in excess of fifteen feet, which should cause significant flooding at anything sea level or below. It’ll be…catastrophic.”
“And just where is this heaping ball of catastrophe going to land? New Orleans? Galveston?”
Sinclair’s brow wrinkled. “Well…b-both of them, sir. And everything in between. That entire section of the Gulf coast needs to be, um, evacuated. Which is impossible with the resources available and the time we have left.”
“Good God,” the President whispered, leaning back in his chair. Sinclair’s unpleasantness as well as Black Shirt’s presence (now leaning to watch the President’s angelfish—Burr and Hamilton—in their aquarium) were all forgotten in the face of this news. What the director of FEMA was describing, in a nutshell, was the complete and total destruction of the southern seaboard on his watch. “Okay, we’ll talk to the Joint Chiefs in an hour as planned, but I’ll go ahead and get the National Guard scrambled and ready to deploy as soon we come up with target areas.”
For the second time, Sinclair turned and glanced uncomfortably at Black Shirt. “Sir, I, uh, I was told, uh, that is, I don’t know if that’s…”
“You’ll have to excuse Sinclair,” Black Shirt spoke at last, sauntering over to the desk with a grin so shiny, it could only come from a politician. “I’m afraid I kept him mostly in the dark as to why I was accompanying him into this meeting. I just thought it might raise less suspicion if I rode in on his desperately out-of-fashion coattails.”
“What are you talking about?” the President snapped. “Sinclair, who the hell is this man?”
Black Shirt reached the front of the desk beside the chair Sinclair sat in, and here something happened so fast the President could barely follow it. The man with the question mark scar flashed a hand in front of Sinclair, like a magician getting ready to yank a quarter from his nostril, and a puff of something white billowed into his chubby face. The director didn’t even have time to protest; his eyeballs rolled back, the lids fluttered, closed, and then he slumped in his seat, the rear of his head thumping against the high chairback.
“Jesus!” The President scooted away from the desk before remembering the button to summon security was on its underside.
“Relax, he’s just sleeping,” Black Shirt said. Sinclair’s chest rose and fell visibly. “We need to have some private time, you and me. Which reminds me, would you mind disconnecting the Presidential Archive recorder in the bottom right drawer of your desk?” He grinned again, only now it wasn’t so political; it was a shark-like expression that never touched his eyes and stretched that scar on his chin almost straight. “Oh, and feel free to press the emergency button all you want; it was turned off long before I ever set foot in the room.”
The President glared up at him, ran through a list of possible scenarios in his head including assassination and kidnapping, and rejected them.A piece to the puzzle was missing, and as he tried to figure out what it might be, he rolled forward and slid open the indicated drawer. The device that recorded all conversation in the Oval Office was active. He reached inside and disconnected the single cord running into it, exercising his ‘presidential prerogative.’ “I don’t need a button for the likes of you, son. I used to box in my younger days. Now tell me who you are before I come over there and take care of you myself.”
Black Shirt waggled a finger at him. “A direct man. I like that. I guess that’s why Aurora put you in office.”
“A-Aurora?” The single word melted his demeanor.The President suddenly felt as pale and jittery as Sinclair usually looked.
“That’s right.” Black Shirt sank into the chair beside the now drooling FEMA director. “The name’s Kyler, by the way. And don’t look so serious. I’m not here to kill you. We play for the same team, your goals are my goals, blah blah blah. But see, I’m a first string player, while you’re mostly sidelined.”
“What do you want?” the President asked again, only this time it was reverent, the court jester rather than the king.
‘Kyler’, apparently deciding he was properly softened, finally got to the point. “One of the cities that Whitney is about to wash off the map is called Port Allen, Texas. You know it?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Not surprised. There’s not really much to it. About seventy miles northeast of Galveston, population of near 300,000, lots of oil refineries, fishing, modest economy, people run the usual gamut from rich to poor you find in coastal hubs. Pretty average, mostly invisible.”
The President waited for Kyler to continue. He didn’t resemble what he figured someone from Aurora would look like, but, hell, he’d never even been entirely convinced the agency existed.
He really only knew enough about them to be very, very scared.
“The thing about Port Allen is, it’s going to be hit hard by this hurricane. Real hard. It’s in a valley depression, most of it between seven and fifteen feet below sea level. A bowl, in other words. It has a rudimentary seawall that will fail under this kind of strain. The place is going to be hell on earth during and after Whitney. I need as many people as possible out before that happens, but the whole city is surrounded by a shallow mountain range and a fucking canyon, with two land routes in and out, which is going to make evacuation a real bitch.”
“Why? What’s going on there?”
Kyler let out a giggle. It was short and soft—almost under his breath—but it conjured gooseflesh across the President’s arms and neck. “Tell me Mr. President, do the words Project Mercury ring any bells for you?”
“No. Should they?”
“Not if I’ve done my job.”
“Plausible deniability?”
“More like a need-to-know basis.”
“And do I need to know now?”
“Not really. The only thing you need to do is make sure the National Guard, or whoever you send to keep order in Port Allen, stays out of the city. Once they’ve established posts, they’re to let people leave, but not enter. And once the storm begins, all access either way is revoked. At that point, anyone inside the city, be they civilian, Guard or otherwise, is…let’s say, off limits. You are to withdraw your forces and turn complete control of the situation over to my team.”
The President snorted. “Oh really? And just what am I supposed to tell the press and the refugees and the family members and anyone else that asks about what’s going on, huh? I’m up for reelection this year, I can’t just--.”
Kyler moved, gliding from his chair with ghostly speed and leaning across the desk to grab his collar. He hauled him forward until their faces were inches apart.
“That doesn’t concern you.” Kyler giggled again, the crazed grin on his lips in direct contrast to the emptiness in his eyes. Looking into those murky pools, the President understood one very important fact: this man was insane. “If Aurora wants you in this office for another term, you’ll be here. If they want you in a grave up at Arlington National…you’ll be there. Most of the attention will be on the big cities, so when the truth needs to be told about what’s going on in Port Allen, we’ll decide what it is and give it to you.”
Kyler released him and stood up, running a hand down his shirt, passing for normal once more. He headed for the door. “We’ll be in touch,” he said over his shoulder. “Just remember, when the wind starts blowing, not a single soul leaves that city. I have a few creative ideas in mind to assist with that.”
He reached the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, then turned back and pointed at Sinclair slumped in his chair. “When he wakes up, he’s gonna have one helluva headache. Tell him to eat a banana. Or anything with some potassium. You might want one yourself. You look pale.”
With that, Kyler opened the door to the Oval Office and disappeared from the President’s life.
~ ~ ~
WHITNEY -29:53
That dick UPS driver left the package by the mailbox.
This was the only thought in Carter Vance’s diseased head as he paced by the huge, double-paned bay window at the front of his house, repeating like a brainwashed cult mantra, edging out all other mental traffic. He stopped halfway through another trip to look outside, as if this fact had somehow changed on its own. Nope, thar she blew: a brown parcel almost small enough to hide in the strip of unmowed grass outside the gate, but just too big to fit inside the mailbox. As tantalizing through the iron bars as a raw steak held in front of a starving lion.
Less than twenty yards from the front door of his home.
Might as well be the moon.
That prick, Carter thought, before realizing he was actually muttering aloud. “That…asshole. I don’t know what circle of hell Dante reserved for negligent deliverymen, but I’m gonna make sure he ends up there.”
He resumed pacing, this time craning his neck to keep the source of his agitation in constant view. If only Terrance, the old route driver, hadn’t retired and paved the way for this little…this little… cockbite to begin delivering Carter’s daily packages, this never would’ve happened. Terrance, God bless his patient, understanding soul, had known the routine—call at the gate, wait for it to trundle open, bring the boxes up the drive and into the glass alcove at the side of the house, then place them behind the airlock door until pressure equalized so he could get them—and never griped, never complained, and never seemed as generally put-out and unfriendly as this intolerant…twenty-something...nerfherder, if you could excuse a Star-Warsian insult, because he was just too frustrated to think of more.
Or if Rosa hadn’t taken the day off for her cousin’s roommate’s uncle’s funeral, she would’ve been here to get it and this crisis would be over. Or if he could only fool himself into believing the package in question was just the fifth season of “The Simpsons” on DVD he ordered from Amazon last week—instead of the latest specs on the Southerland project from the Houston office he knew it to truly be—he could at least get back to work and stop obsessing.
C’mon, cut the whiny bullshit, Cart. He recognized this sarcasm. It was the non-deluded part of his psyche that had been banished to a back corner of his brain sometime after college. He’d taken to calling it the Lucid. You’re not so far gone that you really, deep-in-your-heart believe there’s any physical reason you can’t go out there and get that package.
“That’s not the point,” he argued aloud with himself. “I shouldn’t have to.”
Something about that sounded like a five-year-old stamping their foot in defiance of parental logic, so he flipped channels. He tore his eyes away from that package and stared to the left, down the road his house overlooked, to where Teague Street ended at the western section of the Port Allen city wharf. A snatch of the boardwalk was visible from here, then a stretch of sand, and the cool, emerald green Gulf beyond. He could still see the army of volunteers there, stacking sandbags to form a barrier against the coming fury of Whitney.
If anything, this should be eclipsing the delivery dilemma. He could hear the TV in the other room preaching the same doom that had been on since Whitney’s announcement three days ago, the brutal violence of the hurricane ripping across the ocean and the massive destruction, flooding and power outages predicted in its wake. A little hard to swallow, with the sun shining now and not a cloud in the sky, but he had no illusions about it staying that way. Evacuation of the city began two days ago at Mayor Edward’s decree. His neighbors, none of whom he’d ever met, had skedaddled, leaving behind condos and beach houses like shed snake skins, windows boarded over, and gates locked tight against looters.
Meaning that only he and yon witless volunteers were still stupid enough to stick around here…and even those brave souls would be gone by the time the storm made landfall at the predicted time of 7:30 PM tomorrow night.
A twinge of fear rattled somewhere deep in his guts like a shaken maraca.
No, he refused to rehash this. He’d made up his mind that he wasn’t leaving (couldn’t leave, he defended, let’s use the proper terminology, I can’t leave) so why spend the remaining time before the bitch blew into town stressing about her?
Because this is stupid, the Lucid argued in its languid tone. You can leave, just like you can walk out there right now and get that package.
That is…if you really wanted to.
Carter looked back at the delivery, sitting by itself in the grass beside the mailbox where it would otherwise stay until tomorrow morning, when Rosa promised she would return to bring him some supplies. Besides the fact that it would start raining long before then and ruin the contents, he needed those specs in hand today. Not only to still have a chance at making deadline after the hurricane, but also to keep his mind occupied as the hours ticked down.
He sighed and wiped a hand across his face. Might as well face it: he wouldn’t be able to rest with that package sitting out there. The only thing worse than his extreme agora/germophobic complex was his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his mind had clamped down around this with the tenacity of a pit bull.
He let his eyes wander the length of the driveway.
Twenty yards.
Front door to gate, and back again.
A sixty second trip, if he ran.
Carter’s stomach performed a tightly executed barrel roll.
He crossed the room, past his massive computer center in the sunken living room and his 70-inch widescreen TV, to the house’s only door. He keyed the code for opening the gate on an entry pad set into the wall.
On the opposite side of the door from the keypad hung two compact rebreather oxygen masks on steel pegs. These little gadgets consisted of a clear plastic cup with rubber seal that fit across both nose and mouth, a heavy-duty strap to hold it in place, and a thin, metal cylinder attached to the left side that lay across the cheek during operation. They looked rather cheap upon first inspection (Rosa, that Spanish comedienne extraordinaire, called them ‘jock straps for the face’) but they were, in fact, state-of-the-art and not easy to come by, requiring government permits to own and each costing somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars for their miniaturized filter technology. He picked up the one on the left, stretched the strap over his head, and positioned the cup over the lower half of his face. He flipped the tiny switch on the small unit under his left eye and fresh, filtered, slightly metallic air began to flow.
He paced a little more, now with the mask on. He turned on one of his three iPods that housed his massive music collection, found some mood music—Green Hornet Theme, thank you very much—and cranked it through his house-wide stereo system.
Finally, Carter reached out and put a hand on the pad that opened the inner airlock door and noticed the appendage practically vibrated. He almost stopped there, but something steely inside him took over, relegating him to a bystander in his own body, and he watched as it pushed against the pad. The thick glass door swung open.
He knocked exactly four times on the jamb as he did with any door—a superstition picked up sometime in the last six months, when he became certain that failure to do so would result in a cataclysmic separation of all the molecules in his body—and stepped through.
It swished shut behind him and sealed against the frame with a pneumatic whoosh, and the air changer in the ceiling cycled. The entire house was built to his specifications. He often wondered how he would’ve indulged his growing phobias if not for his lucrative job that allowed him to not only work from home, but to turn that home into a clinically sterile fortress. Dr. Pellner, the psychiatrist he saw by video conference once a week, presented it a different way: Carter’s dementias developed because he had the means to sustain them.
A soft chime sounded from above, indicating the airlock was now open to outside air. Disgusting air, air full of putrid infections and diseases by the thousands.
And he was now ready to step outside in it for the first time in more than eight years.
He hummed along to the muted music coming from inside the house, the rebreather distorting his already quavery voice. Carter pushed on the outer door and stepped out on to his driveway.
A wave of vertigo hit him almost immediately, hard enough to make him swoon. Agoraphobia: the fear of open spaces. He’d once heard someone on TV call it ‘a kind cousin to seasickness,’ but there was nothing kind about his version. He was safe as long as he was inside, even windows didn’t bother him, and he loved being able to see the ocean, which was the whole reason he moved here. But everything was so frakkin big out here, with no walls to hold it in, and a sky that stretched into cool, blue infinity. He glanced up only once and was stung by the surety he would fall into it, spinning forever without any point of reference, and then looked away so he didn’t fill his mask with his still-digesting lunch.
The sun beat down on him in crushing waves, the air compressed. Carter stumbled a few steps up the driveway, realizing he must look like a mime doing an impression of an astronaut, or maybe an Antarctic explorer in jeans and a Blue October t-shirt, struggling to walk against an invisible wind. He fixed his eyes on the end of the driveway, but that twenty yards had multiplied into forty, a hundred, a thousand.
His chest hitched once. His breath disappeared. He clawed at the mask, helpless, frantic, not concerned with germs and filtered air now but desperate only for air of any sort. He was dizzy, so dizzy his eyes must be spinning in their sockets, and the first black motes spun across his vision. Nothing obstructed him except his own stubborn brain, which had shut down his lungs as a way of dealing with the fear consuming him from the inside out.
He had, quite literally, forgotten how to breathe.
He couldn’t make it. Couldn’t; not wouldn’t or shouldn’t or any of the other contractions the Lucid wanted to heap on him.
There was just too much world out here.
Carter turned back, and was shocked to find the door of his house looked just as unattainable, though he’d gone only a handful of steps. He staggered forward, but as the black motes played connect-the-dots in front of his pulsing eyes, he fell to his knees on the driveway and crawled. His memory of reaching the airlock would be completely erased by oxygen deprivation, but when he passed through the first door—even forgoing his obsessive knock—he curled up into a ball and closed his eyes as the air changer did its work and his lungs finally did theirs.
Whitney could blow as hard as she wanted.
Carter Vance was simply unable to get out of her way.
* * * * *
* * * * *
“Mister Vance?” Rosa Sanchez rolled the words in her thick accent. The inner airlock door tried to close on her as she wrestled her armful of groceries through, and she elbowed it roughly back open with a muttered Spanish curse. “Mister Vance, I come all the way here to bring you this, now you get that skinny white ass of yours in here to help me!”
No answer, but she could hear music playing, something mellowish and 70’s. Of course there was music, there was always music going in this house, and TV and video games and a thousand other distractions competing for attention.
She put down the bags to remove her tennis shoes and rain slicker and tossed them into the airlock. Any water tracked in would be teeming with bacteria, according to her employer. She pulled on rubber gloves—latex free—from the box beside the door, pushed her stockinged feet into paper slippers, wrapped a paper surgical mask over her mouth and nose, then gathered up the bags and crossed the living room to find his computer desk empty. The man lived at that computer, sometimes working but mostly on the internet or playing his games, took his meals at it, and, though she’d never proven it, she half-suspected he slept in the light of its nauseating glow. Whatever he was missing by not being out in the world, he was content to replace it with all these other things.
Rosa turned the corner into the sparkling white kitchen (spotless thanks to her own vigorous daily cleaning) and found Carter Vance sitting at the table in the middle of the room under the glaring fluorescents. He stared down at the table’s marble top in his pajamas with the vacant gaze of a doped mental patient.
“Mister Vance?” A bag of groceries dangling from her right hand nearly slipped from her grasp. She heaved it onto the nearest counter and found the button to turn off his music. “Are you all right?”
“What?” He looked up. She saw his eyes were red-rimmed, unfocused, his usually sallow cheeks flushed, the underside of his nose raw from repeated tissue-rubbing. On anyone else, they might be signs of the world’s most virulent flu, but Rosa could only roll her eyes as she set down the rest of the groceries.
“Oh Lord, Mister Vance, what now? Mad cow disease? Black plague? Enola?”
He frowned. “That’s Ebola, you cynical cow. It’s a disease, not the bombing of Hiroshima.”
She flapped a hand at this and then placed it on her ample hip. “Well, whatever. Is it rotting what little brain you have left, or shutting down your heart, or what?”
This put a grudging smile on his boyish face. With all his comic books and cartoons, it was sometimes easy to forget he was thirty-one. “For your information, I just have a cold.”
She decided to let that go. She knew from experience it was useless to tell him you had to be around someone with germs already in their system before you could get sick. The only person that came and went from this house was her, and she was permitted only because his germophobia was selective enough to put some kind of shield around her in his head, because his carefully constructed world needed someone to do all the things he couldn’t. Instead, she dug into a grocery sack and pulled out a sodden and dripping UPS package and placed it on the counter. “This was outside the front gate. The rain almost washed it away.”
“Might as well have. Nothing but garbage now.” He followed this up with a hearty—and probably forced—sneeze. She watched him for a second as she unpacked the grocery sack. This whole act seemed a bit heavy-handed, even for him. His germophobia episodes always needed a trigger: a seal broken on a food item, the inner airlock door left open just a bit too long, or, her favorite, the time a bird followed her inside and flew around the high ceiling of the living room, driving him into a hysterical ball under his desk. She’d laughed until her sides hurt as she tried to shoo it out, but he’d been on his deathbed for a week.
“How bad is it out there?” he asked.
“Bad. The wind is already awful, and the rain is so cold and hard it feels like little needles. They wouldn’t even let me back in the city. They have a barricade set up at the bridge.”
“What? Why?”
“Because the evacuation order was mandatory! They aren’t just politely asking people to leave, you know. I had to come up the western trail, so be glad I drive a truck!” She pointed a finger at him. “I hope you appreciate the things I do for you, young man.”
“I never said I didn’t.” He stood up with a moan and shambled over to the counter. “You’re doing that wrong.” He began to unload the groceries in alphabetical order, actually repacking some items after removing them to get to others. She’d stopped trying to keep up with all his eccentricities a long time ago. Carter turned the music back on, now some punk rock she didn’t recognize.
“I got you as much as I could.” She pulled out a case of D batteries and two spare flashlights. “Even the stores outside the city are picked clean.”
“This is great, Rosa. Between this and what I have stored up, I’ll be fine until you get back.”
She stopped unpacking with a box of his damn marshmallow kid’s cereal in each hand and sighed. “And what if you’re not, Mister Vance? There’s more to surviving a hurricane than having enough food to eat, you know.”
“Oh yeah, like what?” Sick or not, he smirked at her. “Tell me about it, Ms. Survival Expert.”
“I’m not joking with you.” She turned off the music again. “This is serious. I’m worried about you, and your poor mother is nearly sick over it. You could be flooded out. Blown away. You’re a hundred yards from the shoreline, for sweet Lord’s sake!”
“Yeah, well…I can’t help that.”
“Yes, you can. Come with me. My sister will let us both stay with her in Fort Worth until we can get back into the city--”
“I can’t.” His eyes flitted away, and he coughed against his fist. “I already told you, I’m not leaving.”
“But why?”
“You know why, Rosa. I can’t go out, I can’t leave this house.”
“Because you don’t try.” She emphasized the last word by banging a fist on the counter. “This is all in your head, the doctor says so, you even say so, so why can’t you just step through that door?”
“I tried.”
It took several seconds to understand what he meant, an even then she was too stunned to speak for several more. “When?”
“Yesterday. I tried to go out. The same damn thing as always happened. I couldn’t breathe, even with one of the masks on. I nearly passed out. I don’t even remember how I got back inside.”
She blinked at him. Now it made sense, his sudden illness, just because he’d gone out into the world. Hope lifted her. “But don’t you see, that’s great! Not the passing out, but that you tried! You can’t stop now, you have to try again, and this time I’ll--”
“No, I’m not going. I’m not ready. It’s not something I can rush just because of a hurricane.” He turned on the music. “And as long as I’m in this house, I don’t have to.”
“This isn’t one of your fantasy movies. This isn’t one of your computer games, where you can just turn off the power when you get bored. A hurricane doesn’t care if this house was built to keep out every germ in the world. But if you won’t leave, I will.” She spun and marched back toward the airlock.
“What, now?” He raced ahead—stopping to knock four times on the door from the kitchen into the living room, of course—and then attempted to block the way to the airlock door. “You’re going now?”
“Did you think I wanted to have lunch first?” She sidestepped him without a pause. “You may be willing to gamble with your life Mister Vance, but I am not. I told you I would bring you supplies, and I have done so.”
“But Rosa, the place is a mess, and…I’m sick!”
“You’re only sick because you made yourself that way. If you’re--” This time a shriek of violent wind from outside cut her off. The lights dimmed, the music sputtered. From the living room came the sound of tiny whirring motors as his computer restarted after the brief power loss. She turned back to face him, pulled the mask down around her neck, and placed one hand against his stubbled cheek. He flinched from the contact. “Mister Vance…Carter…I think of you as my own child. But I can’t support you in this. If you…If you are still here when this is all over, I will come back. In the meantime, I pray for you, all alone in this big city.”
With that, she pushed through the airlock door, waited for it to cycle while putting on her shoes and raincoat, and went out into the dark, rain-swept morning.
“All alone.” Carter considered this for a moment before shaking his head. “No way.”
He shuffled up the spiral staircase to the loft overlooking his living room on one side of the house, into the area where he kept shelves upon shelves of alphabetized books, CD’s, and DVD’s. In the middle of the library-like stacks was a northward facing window, with an excellent view of Port Allen, sloping downward into its little valley. He could see the huddle of buildings and short-stacked skyscrapers that made up downtown, the lay of the suburbs around them, the super-wealthy neighborhood of Manchester Heights up the road from him on the left, and the curve of the Allen Civic Center dome far to the east. He could barely catch a glimpse of I-85 as it elevated just before the Rugg Canyon Bridge on the west side of town, visible only as an endless trail of car headlights against the backdrop of the Chantilly Mountains that encircled Port Allen on its curved section of coastline.
The rest of the city was dark and silent. Abandoned.
“There must be someone else.” Whether he was stating a fact or trying to convince himself, he didn’t know. “This isn’t Night of the Comet, for Christ’s sake. And even if it was, there would still be other people out there somewhere. There’s always someone else.”
Of course there was, right? There had been thousands of people still in New Orleans after Katrina, and logic was screaming at him there had to be some here, as well. He wondered, in a wistful, distant way, who they were, and what their excuses were for staying.
Behind him, System of a Down cut out in mid-screech. The lights flickered off.
This time, they didn’t come back on.
~ ~ ~
WHITNEY -6:21
“I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” Tangela Kittrick tore through the apartment toward the ringing phone. The windows had all been boarded over on the outside by the apartment maintenance crew, creating a gloom like something out of a Halloween spook house. In the light of the candles, her shadow jumped from wall to wall.
“No way, assface!” Chris shoving his eight-year-old step-sister aside as he dashed out from his bedroom. He timed this maneuver with eerie precision; Tangela avoided serious injury by bouncing off the couch and sliding into the floor on her butt. “It might be my dad!”
“That’s not fair, Chris!” Tangela scrambled to rejoin the race. “And you cussed too, I’m telling!”
“Go ahead, but tattling never got anyone what they wanted.” He picked up the receiver to illustrate this clever advice. He said cheerfully into the handset, “Hello, Sloan residence!”
“Chris, is…you? Thank Go…afraid the phone lines would…down!”
“Dad?” Daryl Sloan’s voice sounded as if it came from the far end of a cardboard tube, with a little television static thrown in for good measure. Chris had tried to push thoughts of the impending storm out of his head, but something about the loss of phone service was worse than the rain or the power outage.
This made him feel isolated. Cut off. Alone.
“Dad, where are you?”
When his father answered, the static was gone. “I just crossed the state line back into Texas from New Mexico. This is the first phone I’ve seen in the last hundred miles!”
“Did you—” A clap of sharp, rolling thunder from outside, and the phone in his ear gave a short burst of static like a snake hiss. “Did you get the job?”
“We’ll talk about that later, sport. What was that? Is everything okay?”
“Just thunder,” Chris said, sounding much braver than he felt. “It’s been raining here all day and the lights are off. When are you going to get home?”
“Let me talk, let me talk!” Tangela bounced around him like an excited puppy and grabbed for the phone. Chris frowned and held it away from her questing hand.
“I’m doing my best to get there. Do me a favor and get your mother on the phone. Quick as possible, please.”
Chris furrowed his brow, anger and obstinacy etched in his young features. His father’s use of that word always brought out a black mood in him he never knew existed before the man’s remarriage seven months ago. Don’t say it, don’t say it, part of him pleaded.
He did the only sensible thing any angry 14-year-old would do: he said it.
“My mother’s not here, Dad. She’s buried at Parkland Cemetery, remember?”
He braced for a lecture, but his father just gave a dangerous few seconds of silence before saying, “Get Nichelle on the phone, please.”
Chris held the phone even higher out of the girl’s reach. “Nichelle, Dad wants to talk to you!”
“Thank you, Chris.” Nichelle Kittrick-Sloan left the dark kitchen where she’d been listening. She looked at her stepson, took a deep breath, and said, in the most diplomatic manner possible, “But I didn’t appreciate you pushing your sister.”
“He cussed, too!” Tangela added eagerly.
“Or cursing in front of her. She’s a little girl, Chris. You have to treat her like one.”
“Who cares what you appreciate?” the boy muttered as he surrendered the phone.
“Hey,” Nichelle said, more sharply than she intended. This is how it went, the two of them pushed one another back and forth, back and forth, just a big, frustrated teeter-totter. “Go to your room! There’s only so much of that smart mouth that’s gonna be tolerated around here, young man!”
Chris shot her a venomous look, but retreated without further comment.
She sighed, knowing the confrontation had cost her a week of the silent treatment, but perhaps that was better than the alternative. Before she could lift the phone, her daughter grabbed her arm and pulled.
“I wanna talk to Daddy!” Tangela had taken to their new familial nametags with much greater ease.
“I know sweetie, and I’ll let you if there’s time. But right now, Mommy needs you to be a big girl and go to your room so I can talk to Daddy in peace, okay?”
The girl crossed her arms in an adorable display of defiance. “Okay, Mommy.” She followed after her stepbrother.
When she was out of sight, Nichelle pressed the receiver to her ear. Her hand gripped the plastic casing hard enough to turn her brown fingers ghostly pale, but it was either that or shake uncontrollably. She put on a show all day for the kids, tucked her fear neatly away, but now she needed someone to be strong for her. “Daryl, please tell me you’re almost here.”
“Not quite baby, but I’m doing my best.”
She bit her lower lip and allowed a tear to spill onto her cheek. “You’re not gonna make it before the hurricane hits, are you?”
A second’s worth of hesitation told her everything her heart dreaded. “No. Probably not.”
Nichelle gave a long, shuddering sigh. “Why did this have to happen now? Why did you have to be gone with the car halfway across the country?”
“That’s not fair, don’t make it sound like I abandoned you!”
“I know that Daryl, in my heart I know that, but that’s exactly how it feels, like Tanj and I have been left all over again. And Chris hates me no matter what I do, no matter how nice I am to him.”
“It’s going to be okay, baby, it’s--”
“Don’t say that just to calm me down, because you don’t know!” She shouted this before she could stop herself. She wanted to say this was all just nerves, a case of pre-storm jitters, but it wasn’t, it was cold, electric, and justified fear. She lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “They’re evacuating the city, Daryl! The freeway is jammed, and it’s pandemonium outside! I heard gunshots this morning! I can’t get any help on the phone, the lines are busy through that number they had on TV! I’m scared to take the kids out to try and catch one of the National Guard transports, but I’m even more scared of what’ll happen if we stay here! And we’re running out of time!”
“Listen, just…don’t go anywhere!” Daryl sounded frantic for the first time. In a way that was what she wanted, to know he was taking this seriously, for him not to sound like his usual, cool self—that cocky, confident man she’d fallen in love with a year ago—but now that it happened, it didn’t make her feel any better. “Stay there! The apartment’s on the third floor and there’s no way the flooding will reach you! I will come for all of you! Do you hear me? I will come for you! I don’t care if I have to paddle in there on a canoe!”
“Okay.” She wiped away the other tears. “After all this, at least tell me you got the job.”
“I got the job. We’re moving to California babe, where a hurricane is just something you order at the bar. We just have this one last little bump in our road and then it’s sunny skies and a house of our own.”
She pulled open the front door, which looked out on the landing they shared with the other third floor apartment and then the zig-zagging staircase down to ground level. A gust of wind almost blew it out of her hand before she could close it. “I don’t how ‘little’ that bump is gonna be.”
“You just stay safe, and tell Chris I’m gonna wallop him if he doesn’t show you some respect.”
“Okay. But the first thing we’re buying with the money are cell phones for all of us.”
He laughed and then told her, with sincerity that still made her knees buckle, “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Daryl.” There were more words, so many words that wanted to come, but before she could get them out, the phone in her hand went dead.
~ ~ ~
Bryce Decatur ducked, and the glass vase Maryland intended to take off his head—a ‘gift’ to her from his pretentious mother (the vase, not the head, although she was sure the woman thought they both were)—shattered against the wall instead.
“Fuck!” He straightened up and stared around him at the shrapnel. He was a squat man, hefty in the middle, brutish face. Not the kind of guy that, all things being equal, anyone would picture with a younger woman like her, but money had a way of tipping even the most weighted scales. At the moment, his heavy cheeks were red with anger, nose and upper lip wrinkled in a snarl. “Would you calm down, you stupid bitch?”
“‘Stupid bitch?’” Her hand quested along the mantle of the massive fireplace next to her for another marital missile. This time she found something of his; a small but hefty crystal globe he’d bought at a Tiffany’s auction.
This got the bastard’s full attention the way not even an attempt on his life could. She could tell; when something affected the great, the rich, the powerful Bryce Decatur’s world, the charm came out, the engaging act that won him so many cases in the courtroom.
And so many ladies in the bedroom, apparently.
“Maryland,” he said evenly, all traces of rage extinguished. He held out a hand to her. “Mary, sweetheart, put that down, that’s worth eight-thousand dollars. Let’s talk about this.”
She might’ve been willing…IF he hadn’t mentioned the price. Instead she raised the object above her head and brought it crashing down on the tiles of the hearth at her sneakered feet. The action sent an electric spark coursing through her, like the first tickles of an impending orgasm. “Talk about that, Bryce!”
“You goddamned CUNT!” he roared, the red on his cheeks rising again to blend with an unpleasant shade of purple creeping up his neck. It made him look old, and reminded her of the near decade-and-a-half he had on her.
“That’s me, that’s the woman you swore to love and honor, just another cunt for you to fuck.” She wiped locks of curled brown hair out of her eyes. “And that’s you, more concerned with the things you bought than you are with our lives and our marriage.”
“Oh, don’t be so fucking melodramatic.You’re just pissed because you found out I cheated on you.”
“Again.” She was surprised to find she really wasn’t mad; how could she be, when she’d taken him back after the last two times? What was she expecting, a transformation into husband of the year? Hell, it was just positive reinforcement. This time the moron accidentally forwarded an email to her detailing every sordid little act he’d been up to on his office desk.
Still, not upset.
Not about that, anyway.
“Bryce, the fact that you can’t keep your shriveled dick in your pants is not top of my priority list right now. I know it might be hard to believe some things in the world don’t revolve around you, but it’s true.”
He rolled his eyes. “I told you, there’s no reason to leave! We live in the highest elevated and most remote neighborhood in the city! This house is rock-solid and we have our own generator, and enough food and water to last us a year, thanks to my foresight! If you think I’m going to leave now just so some looter can come in here and steal everything, then you better goddamned think again!”
“But I don’t care about any of that!” She tilted her head back in exasperation. “Nothing in here, not a single thing, is worth our lives. I mean, Christ Bryce, don’t you see that? It’s simple: I’m scared, and I want to leave. I trusted you this far, and I stayed this long, and what did I get for my trouble? A detailed autobiography of the sexual positions you’ve performed with the temp pool!”
“Oh, that’s the only reason you stayed? Really, Mary? Not because this is where your designer clothes are, and your gourmet food, your maids, yours cars, and all that money you spend? You see, you can pretend all you want that none of this matters, but this is your life too. I would be surprised if I even figured in the equation.”
Maryland Decatur—once Maryland Williams, in a past life she sometimes would give anything to relive—felt something break inside her. She suspected this break might be on its way, something like the support beam of a rickety house finally giving way and allowing the structure to collapse, but she was surprised to find it actually more like a dam bursting, and what it had apparently been holding back was a flood of resolve.
“I’m leaving you.”
“Oh, sure, I’ve heard that one before.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. She moved toward the front door of the house—always a house and never a home, just some place, as George Carlin had once said, to keep her stuff—and took her goosedown parka down to put on over the green, short-sleeve blouse and Capri-cut jeans she was wearing. Somewhere inside her was a nasty little voice screaming at her not to do this, and for all the same reasons he just named.
She hated herself for that.
“This is different. I want a divorce.” How clean those words sounded, how pure.
“You’re gonna leave all this?” He started to cross the room—but wearily so, she saw, with some satisfaction. “You know what, Mary? I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can leave all this behind. You’ve gotten too used to it, and thirty-five is way too old to be starting over.”