In the Courts of the Sun (14 page)

I don’t celebrate Christmas. Or Easter, even though I’m supposed to when I’m doing
cuandero
stuff. Or birthdays, or weekends, or anything. But I especially didn’t celebrate Christmas this time. I spent the day working on the game. Numbers like 84, 209, 210 and 124,030 kept coming up again and again, but I couldn’t make anything out of them. Marena called at six. There were kid squeals in the background. She said the DHS was willing to bump up the threat level on the twenty-eighth to “Elevated” in Orange, Polk, Osceola, Hardee, DeSoto, and Highlands counties. They’d said that would mean police and fire departments would be on evacuation alert that day. I guess that meant they’d make it easier for people to clear out if anything went wrong. Or they’d just gum up the system, I thought. Well, anyway, that Marena lady came through, I guess. Should I do anything else? Or would anything else make it worse?
By the end of the twenty-seventh, nobody’d gotten any further. That is, nobody from Taro’s lab, and not me either. The only thing I could think to work on was Michael Weiner’s translation. A few things about it were still bothering me, especially the “scab casters” bit. As I think I said, the phrase usually means a witch or a warlock, but here it was being used more as a verb, like “witching,” which I didn’t think was a known usage in any Mayan language. Although of course the old language was different, but still . . . anyway, it didn’t go anywhere. This is bullshit, I thought. You’re overthinking it. Maybe the whole business was just me being a Nervous Nellie. I gave up at two minutes after the beginning of H-hour. Whatever was going to happen was.
The twenty-eighth was a nice day in Central Florida except for worse-than-average smog. The heightened DHS alert made the local news, but reporting on it seemed half-hearted. Folks are jaded these days. To get any sort of a rise out of them, a lot of people need to already be dead. Although to be fair you can’t just clear everybody out because one catastrophe-modeling team—and Taro’d said he figured there were at least five other serious ones operating, by the way, including the DHS’s own, which had hardware almost as sophisticated as LEON and which they were very proud of—had come up with a totally speculative, unspecific bad feeling about a populated place and a vague time. I watched news and raw news feeds and local chat rooms all day. Even though I was pretty far from Orlando, it felt like my foot was half out the door. Whenever I encountered an odd-looking phrase, my teeth almost started chattering. Still, the worst things to happen in the Park District were a few false fire alarms and a bunch of people getting food poisoning at the Pinocchio Village Haus. Not exactly anything apocalyptic. I lay down just after midnight.
I Dios.
Tired.
I’d been awake for about twenty-eight hours—which actually wasn’t that unusual for me. I have DSPS, delayed sleep phase syndrome, on top of whatever else—but I guess there was a little stress in the system. Okay. Just going to grab a twenty-second
pestaña
. There was a dog barking somewhere—not the Villanuevas’ little Xoloitzcuintle, but some bigger individual I hadn’t heard before—and it kept reminding me of the Desert Dog. Although I guess I haven’t told that story yet. Although maybe that’s just as well, because it’s a bit of a downer. Except now I’ve mentioned it. Hell. Well, briefly, the Desert Dog was a kind of ugly yellow-and-gray terrier/hound/coyote sort of individual that Ezra, the middle one of my three stepbrothers, said had attacked him while he was mowing the golf course, although I didn’t believe that. Anyway, there was a lot with a bunch of old sheep crates and chicken coops and whatever out across 15 toward the gypsum mill, and Ezra had the dog in one of them. When the brothers showed him to me he had no front paws. There were just two ragged stumps there. Maybe he’d been injured by something, or more likely he had gotten caught in a fence or a trap and gnawed them off. You’d think he might have bled to death, but instead the wounds were healing and he was scrambling around on the zinc floor of the crate, getting up and sliding down, and his eyes were big and terrified of us. They had him in there without any water or anything. I asked Ezra what—
“—
not
a drill. Jed? It’s me. Pick up. I’m serious.”
Huh?
I clicked on the front door speaker. “We don’t sell fish anymore,” I started to croak, but as I got to the word
sell
I realized I was still in bed and that it was the middle of the day. Evidently I’d zonked out.
“Jed?” the voice asked. “It’s Marena.”
Whoa, I thought. What exactly the hell was she doing in here? That is, in my bedroom. Or rather it wasn’t even exactly a room, it was a Mitsubishi
capseru
, a capsule, that is, one of those soundproofed, climate-controlled fiberglass sleeping pods they make for cheap Japanese hotels.
“I mean it, this is urgent, pick up.” Her voice was coming from my phone, which weirded me out a bit because I didn’t remember giving her the emergency number.
“Hi,” I said, checking whether I could still speak. I sounded like Jack Klugman. I tried again. “Hi!” Better.
Estas bien.
I found the gadget and hit TALK. “Hi,” I said chipperly.
“Hi, good,” she said, “you exist.”
“Huh? Oh. Well, I wouldn’t go that far—”
“So there’s a little bit of a problem at Disney World. It’s probably nothing, but, you know.”
“Sorry? Balaam’s ass?”
“What?”
“Um—oh, sorry, nothing.” It must have been something to do with an interrupted dream, although I’d already forgotten it, but there was that sense of just having stopped moving through some huge, complicated space—
“Jed?”
“Hi.” WTF? I wondered. Did I sleep a whole day? No way. If I had I wouldn’t be feeling like
mierditas refritas
. I found the thingie and hit TIME. Big green laser characters scrolled across the ceiling:
2:55:02 P.M. . . . 29-12-11 . . . 2:55:05 P.M . . .
“Uh, what kind of a problem?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” her voice said. “There’s only a little about it, but my friend at the old place says it’s not food poisoning and it’s like eighty people.”
“Oh. Huh.” People
what
? I wondered. Dead? Sick? Making noise?
“Anyway, we’re on 441 and Orange Avenue,” she said. “And now this came up so I thought we’d come by. Just in case.”
“Come by here?” She was only about forty-five miles away.
“ Yeah,” she said.
“Uh, sure.” No way, I thought, she can’t show up here. There’s dead snails and tarantula molts and stuff all over. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about chicks, it’s that they don’t dig invertebrates. “Um, so, why are you coming this way? I mean, that’s great, but, you know—”
“Because the wind’s from the southeast,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. Uh-oh, I thought. Gas. Fuck. “Okay, great, um, you know where I am?” Of course she does, I thought. I’d been trying to get my address delisted, but the days when you could really do that were long gone.
“Yeah, I see it, look, you want to, uh, you want to go out to U.S. 98 and meet me there? I’m in the car, we’ll be there in about thirty-five minutes.”
“Um—”
“Just a second. Sure, go ahead,” she said to someone else in the car. “No, I’m on it. Bye. Sorry, Jed. Yeah, forty minutes, okay?”
“Uh, okay.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
“Okay,” I said.
She started to say, “Bye,” but clicked off, as people do, before she’d finished the word.
It’s got to be nothing, I thought. Anyway, bad stuff happens every day. Every minute. So it’s probably just a not very incredible coincidence.
She’s probably just getting jumpy. Or she just wants to drop in and jump my bones. Heh. Maybe she’s got a touch of scarlet fever. Plus my yellow variety equals the orange flame of passion.
Esta belleza,
she has the uay of a panther. Better shower.
I clicked on the overheads and hit HOME→NEWS→ LOCAL.
PARKS DISTRICT ADMISSIONS SUSPENDED,
it said.
Hell.

[9]

T
he story under the headline said that beginning around three p.M. yesterday, people had begun to vomit and “to complain of other symptoms, including erythema and vertigo,” and that the story was developing. It didn’t sound like much and it didn’t say anything about gas. I searched the keywords out of the article but all I got was one thread on a parks workers’ forum where they were talking about “why everyone is freaking out so bad” and “why it’s a two-hour wait in the ER.” Nobody mentioned any gas. It really sounds like nothing, I thought. She’s just getting jumpy. Well, whatevs. Anyway, you like her, right? It’s a cheap date. Right. Get it together.
I decapsuled, staggered in and out of the still-institutional bathroom, toweled off with a PDI Super Sani-Cloth Germicidal Degradable Wipe™ instead of showering, rubbed some tooth towels over my teeth instead of brushing, visited the espresso machine, ate a scoop of Fluff, checked the meters, looked over the ’branchs.
Bueno.
Tank temperature, check. Protein skimmers, check. Feeders, check. Chem monitors, check. Home system to phone link, check. Nourishment, check.
Bueno.
Hair, breath, deodorant. Check. I got into a clean copy of my winter uniform, reset the automatic feeders, dosers, and alarms, got another spoonful of Fluff, and staggered out the back door. It was hot for December.
De todos modos.
Wallet, keys, money belt, passport, phone. Check. Smoke hood, check. Hemi kit, wipes, meds, check. Hat. Shoes, shirt, service—
Oops.
I went back inside, into Messy Zone Beta, found Lenny’s old safe, got two ankle wallets—they were pretty heavy and bulky because each one had thirty Krugerrands, $10K in hundreds, and $2K in old premagnetic twenties—and strapped them on just in case things really did go all
Omega Man
. Okay. Alarms, check. Main lock, check. Bolt, check. We’re off.
It was too hot for the jacket, but I kept it on. It was clear. Lake Okeechobee was calm but not shiny, like the ventral skin of a swordfish, and a manslaughter of crows were freaking out about something on the end of the jetty. Otherwise the ’hood seemed normal. Irretrievably banal, even. Just the way we like it. The ’cuda looked good snuggled up between the old Mini Cooper and the Dodge van in my private little ten-car parking lot. Got to get her out to the lot at the Colonial Gardens ghost mall and do a few power slides. Burn down those Geoffrey Holders and get some Pirelli 210s. I walked the three blocks west. Sr., Sra., and all the little Villanuevas were out working in their yard and they all said hi to me like I was Squire Stoutfellow. Should I warn them to get out of here? I wondered. No earthly reason, right? A pair of troop carriers, maybe C-17s, whined west at about ten thousand feet, heading to MacDill. It always gets me how far-freaking loud those things are, even though I already know they are. My phone throbbed. I screwed the ear thing into my ear and said hi. Marena said she was getting onto 710.
“Okay,” I said, “if you get off at 76 there’s a Baja Fresh and I can be in there.”
“We’re not getting off the highway.”
Hmm. “Uh, okay, then, I’ll be, I’ll be about a hundred yards past—”
“Can you turn on a locator?”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Right.” I found the function under “Communications—GPS” and clicked it.
“Okay, I see you,” she said. No, I thought, you see a dot representing me. I stumbled up to the road and stood on the shoulder in the truck gusts.
La gran puta,
I thought. This already sucks. I got Local6.com on the screen and squinted at it in the solar radiation. Apparently it hadn’t been just a few people but more like a hundred, and the police had hit them with some kind of Active Denial System, that is, some kind of pain ray. Still, it doesn’t sound that serious, I thought. She’s just on edge. Which one can understand. Can’t one? Yeps.
Hmm. Erythema means, like, red skin, right? Can you get that from food poi—
A black Cherokee loomed up and ground to a grudging halt. I♥OTOWN, its license plate squealed. I guess ♥ was a letter now. The passenger door puffed open and I got a twinge of ingrained fear that I’d been tricked and was getting arrested.
Cálmate,
mano, I thought. If you’re from anyplace where
disappear
is a transitive verb, it’s normal to break into a sweat every time you see a big new dark car slow down next to you. But the States are pretty much still the States. Aren’t they?
I sogged into the fauxskin. We said hi. The car smells, in descending order of magnitude, were vinyl, fruit juice, and something along the lines of Shiseido Zen. The car took off before the door shut. News6 was on in one corner of each of the twin dashboard screens, burbling at low volume:
“—is Anne-Marie García-McCarthy. Hello, Ron, nice to see you
.”
“Nice to see you, Anne-Marie, how are the kids?”
“They’re doing great, thanks.”
Anne-Marie beamed.
“Well, that’s just fine, hello, everyone,”
Ron said. He paused.
“ Well, the Magic and the Jaguars kicked off their—”
“Oh, Jed, this is Max,” Marena said. “Max, Jed. Who I told you about?”
“Hi,” a low-tweenage voice said.
I turned around and said hi. He looked like a little male Marena who’d had his hair curled and been dunked in weak tea. He was all strapped in, wearing Sony VRG goggles pushed up on his head and a big sweatshirt with a picture of Simba the Lion King eating Bambi. I guessed he was pushing nine. The backseat was drifted with healthful-snack-food wrappers. He looked at my hat, then at me, and then at my hat again. “It’s nice to meet you,” he remembered to say.
“Look at this,” Marena said. She pointed to CURRENT SURROUNDING CONDITIONS on her dashscreen. “JACKKNIFED TRACTOR-TRAILER, RIGHT LANE,” it said, flashing an orange dot a centimeter ahead of us on at Port Mayaca. “WAIT ESTIMATE 45 MINS.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“South.”
“Well, you could go back up a little and there’s a gravel road where you can cross over to Beeline.”
“Good idea,” she said. She found a break in the median strip and swung the car left and around in a luxuriantly fluid U-turn, like a catamaran coming about. A soft alarm buzzed and big red warning letters came up on the windshield’s heads-up display:
“WARNING, THIS ROUTE HAS BEEN DESIGNATED AS ILLEGAL/UNSAFE.” Marena entered a twelve-character password into the steering-wheel keypad. The heads-up and dashscreens went dark, but the alarm kept beeping.
“Shi pyong shin, a shi!”
she muttered, evidently cussing in Zergish.
“I can do it,” Max said. He leaned over between the seat backs, thumbed at the keypad, and silenced the thing by switching the car to off-road mode.
“Thanks,” Marena said as he settled back into his lair. “You have to put your seat belt back on.” He did. “So how are you?” she asked me.
“I’m good, uh . . . I couldn’t find out much about what’s going on up there,” I said.
“Well, we’ll check again later,” she said. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the kid.
“I’m good at programming cars,” Max said to me. “I’m the car whisperer.”
“Uh, yeah, evidently—”
“Check this out,” he said.
“Nigechatta dame da!”
Wind roared in around us, and then light. He’d opened the sunroof.
“¡Ay, muy listo!”
I shouted back to him.
“¡De nada!”
he said. All rich kids speak a little Spanish.
“That’s good, but we want to be able to talk,” Marena shouted. “Do you know how to close it?”
“ Yeah, okay, watch,” he said.
“Saite!”
“That’s really something,” I said as quiet returned.
“Yeah,” Max said. “Do you always wear that hat?”
“Sorry?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t, no, I wear a few different ones.”
“But do you always wear
a
hat?”
“Well,” I said, “yes.”
“But there isn’t anything wrong with your head, is there?”
“Not that you can see, no, it’s just, some groups of Indians don’t feel right without a hat on.”
“Do you have a hat with eagle feathers?”
“No, those are different Indians. Maybe we used to have hats like that. But a lot of our old hats had stuffed animal heads on them.”
“Do you get visions?”
“Well, not yet,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Too bad,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you play Neo-Teo?”
“Oh, yes. Sure, I love Neo-Teo.” My thumb was itching to flick open my phone but I squelched it.
“What’s your shell?” he asked.
“It’s, uh, thirty-two.”
He sort of sniffed. “I’m seventy.”
“Wow,” I said. “Hey, didn’t your mom
make
Neo-Teo?”
“ Yeah,” he said. “What avatars do you have?”
“Uh, just a Macaw House Blood.”
He sniffed again. “Hhhn. Wanna do a jade quest in the canyons?”
“Well, I’m not so good as—”
“I’ll level you up.”
“Well—”
“I don’t think Jed really wants to play right now,” Marena said.
“How about if we play a little later?” I asked Max.
“When?” Max asked.
“We’ll see,” Marena said.
“I hate ‘we’ll see,’ ” he said.
“If you move up a shell you can help Jed out even better when he comes in,” Marena said.
Max made a huffing sound, plugged in his eyes and ears, and started making small purposeful movements with his joygloves. Every once in a while he puffed into the air in some direction or other, which meant he was using the blowgun function. At least he wasn’t spitting.
“So, I bet you think I’m overreacting,” Marena said.
“Well, no, any—”
“It’s just, I’m a mom, so I’m a little jumpy, it was like, we got out of town on Monday, and now I’m like maybe we weren’t far
enough
out of town, so it’s—you know, it’s like you get this protect-your-young hormone. Anybody who gets near my den and looks funny at my young gets one of my tusks in his carotid artery.”
“I think you did the right thing,” I said. Lame, I thought.
She switched the dashscreen to CNN Local. There was a stock shot of the flowerbed Mickey face at Disney World.
“Audio on,” she said.
“
—
is Anne-Marie García-McCarthy resorting—reporting
live
from Winter Haven,”
it went.
“I’ll be back at six. Now back to you, Ron.”
“All right, Anne-Marie,”
Ron’s voice went.
“Thanks for staying out there. We’ ll all look forward to seeing you then. Hello, I’m Ron Zugema in Orlando.”
He paused. “
Officials at the Orlando Parks District are reporting that over five hundred park visitors are receiving medical treatment for apparent food poisoning. Hospital officials are saying that eight patients
have
died as a result
of
the unknown
toxins.” There was a tiny and almost nostalgic twinge of fear somewhere in my abdomen, that old friend not quite knocking at the door yet but just, say, texting you, letting you know he might want to come over sometime.
“There is also an unconfirmed report of several deaths as a result of the incident, but these are as yet unconfirmed. At this point in time, residents and visitors are
be
ing warned to avoid the central park area and be on the alert for medical vehicles. This is . . .”
Marena looked at me. This is not a hopeful development, her expression said.
No, it’s not, I looked back. In fact it’s—
She swung her eyes back to the road, cutting me off. Her driving style seemed a little casual to me, like maybe she trusted all the seat belts and airbags and newfangled whatevers to protect her. But I didn’t say anything.
“This is Ron Zugema reporting,”
Ron was going on.
“Now over to you, Kristin.”
“Thanks, Ron,”
a blond head said.
“Just a tragic situation shaping up there. Hi, everyone, it’s three forty-two P.M. here at WSVN TV. I’m Kristin Calvaldos. Well, it’s Midwinter Madness time again for soccer fans as—”
Marena clicked it off.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a big—I mean, when people get killed, it’s always a—”
“I know,” she said. “ Yeah, things do happen.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, so, if it’s nothing, then, sorry to drag you out.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I love driving. Passengering.”
“I’m going to make some calls,” she said.
“Right.” I put in my own ear thing. Not to be outdone. I started calling and then e-mailing various friends. It turned out I didn’t have that many. I started calling businesses and institutions, like the Community Center and the Grace Rural School. Almost everybody was out. I didn’t know what to say, so I told them I just wanted to give them a heads-up and I’d call back. Meanwhile I tapped around on my phone, looking for anything fresh. The Net was sluggish and a lot of sites were 404. Finally I got onto a group called TomTomClub that’s kind of a local unofficial or almost underground first-on-the-scene muckraking news service favored by Libertarians, embittered veterans, high-end conspiracy theorists, and the Legalize Everything movement. It’s really just a couple of aging cracker hackers who monitor police and military-band communications, pick the best stuff, and put it up almost in real time, along with their own instant commentary. People were saying that whatever it was that actually happened at the park, there were a lot more deaths than were being reported. Emergency rooms were overloaded at Orlando Regional and Winter Park Memorial. Also, there was a fire in Kissimmee that might have been started by rioters. And supposedly people were trying to get out of Epcot and the guards weren’t letting them leave.
“Okay, call me back,” Marena said. She pulled out her earbud and rubbed her ear. “Everybody says the problems are all in Orange County,” she said at me. “The best thing to do is keep going south.”
I said something passive like how that sounded right to me or something.
“Jeep, show times to Miami,” she said. A scroll came up on the dashscreen and said anything would take about twice as long as usual. I looked at her, but she looked ahead. From the side her face looked less cute and more regal. She took the exit onto 91 and cut in ahead of a huge Winnebago motor home. An odd-looking aircraft zwooshed over at less than two thousand feet. Max twisted under his seat belt. “What kind of plane is that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Marena said.
“It’s a Grumman AEW Hawkeye,” I said. “The scoopy thing is an air sampler.”
“Godless,” Max said. He was all the way turned around so he could see it out the back.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Hey, check this out,” Marena said in a lower voice. “The thing’s been tracking on the Magic Kingdom for at least an hour.” She touched two icons and satellite view came up on her dashscreen. “Passenger side,” she said to the onboard. It came up on mine too. I was expecting some outdated Google Earth thing, but it was a site called 983724jh0017272.gov, and it was a real-time view, and it wasn’t from one of those fuzzy NOAA feeds. It was military. 3-324CC6/92000 FT/W4450FT/ORLANDO CURRENT, it said. I recognized the profile of Lake Apopka on the left, but the view was too wide for me to see any landmarks.