In the Courts of the Sun (16 page)

My mouth closed. Damn, I thought. Now she hates me. I looked over at her. I wouldn’t say her mouth was set in a grim line, but it was definitely set. Like I think I said, I have trouble reading emotions. She’s not mad at you, Jed. Step back and think about it. What’s really going on is, she’s trying to be as cool as possible, but the fact is that she’s absolutely terrified, and not for herself but for Max. She’s a mom. And moms are not human. So, take that into consideration. You may not be able to understand it, but you should be able to take it into consideration.
We came up on the Miami River, where you can see the ocean for the first time. It looked deceptively inviting in the twilight. An ambulance crawled by in the center of the otherwise empty northbound lanes. it said. At least they weren’t exposing government workers to hazard. At Cutler Ridge the traffic congealed to about forty mph. People must have gotten the gossip. There was a kind of uncertainty in the motion of the cars around us that I guessed came from fleeing a threat that they all hoped might still be imaginary. A V of F-18s shrieked over us, heading north, into the red zone. By Naranja we were just another log in the river, averaging under fifteen. Horns bleated around us. We got nudged a few times as people tried to cut in. Marena nudged back, harder. Crunch. Max thought it was great, like bumper cars. A gang of Puerto Rican kids passed us on Yamahas, weaving between the cars. Now that’s the way to go, I thought. Steal one? Anything with a Confederate flag is fair game. We’d have to mug somebody. Could the three of us fit on a single motorcycle? No, forget it.
“I’m thirsty again,” Max said.
“Isn’t there another juice box back there?” Marena asked.
“I drank it.”
“Could you just wait a little longer?” she asked. “If we have to stop before we get to the boat, then we’ll find something around here.”
He said okay.
I checked back in on the thread I’d started on StrategyNet. Amazingly, the gang had come through. There were fifty-eight posts, some with diagrams. Desiriseofnationsnerd said it sounded like some kind of LRAD noise gun, maybe like the thing the Israelis used in the Gaza incursion in ’09. One efriend, a Go player from L.A. called Statisticsmaven, had plotted the outbreaks on one of his war-game maps and said that judging from the distribution and the timing, the “unknown agent” was obviously an airborne fast-acting poison, and that it must be quite a bit heavier than air because it wasn’t spreading any farther. Some guy named Hell Rot agreed with him and said that he’d been wrong before but now he thought it looked more like radiation poisoning. Bourgeoiseophobus was texting them both back furiously, saying that was unlikely:
if watever it is got into there lungs/bloodstreams yesterday and there alredy dying from it it wd have to be a COLOSSAL DOSE sayat lesat 10 SIEVERTS. U wd practcly hav to hold a ½-supercritical chunk of 239PU in each hand & bang them together. It took that Russian spy 3 wks to die & hed ingested 10*+ microgrms of 210Po. NO WAY is this radiation. Get ur facts strait troll hell rot be4 u mouth off.
210, I thought. Number 84.
Idiota.
I got a twist of that particular sense of horror that feels like your lower intestine’s a vacuum hose on high suction.
Okay. Chill. Just chill. Still. Chill.
I sat still, the way I used to do when I was, like, five. As always, it dissipated, eventually.
“It’s polonium,” I said.
“Sorry?” Marena asked.
Not very articulately, I explained. It took a while and she didn’t sound entirely convinced, but at least she took it seriously.
“I’ll text it in,” she said. She meant she’d get it to Lindsay Warren, and from him to his unspeakable connection in the DHS.
She started thumbing on her phone, guiding the wheel with one finger of her left hand. Every once in a while she’d take a cursory glance at the road ahead. The hell of it is, I thought, after all this, we’re going to get killed in an ordinary, avoidable traffic accident. Isn’t that ironic? Well, actually, no, Alanis, it’s not. It’s just a bummer.
“How do you spell
polonium
?” she asked. I told her. She thumbed some more. I kept sneaking looks at her, trying to guess what encryption package she was using, but I couldn’t. Of course, now the DHS’ll think we did it, I thought. If they don’t already. Not that we’re supposed to care about that. Although I do.
She finished. She put the phone down on her thigh. Okay, I thought. Try to think. If it’s polonium poisoning—well, that means there’d be a big spectrum of degrees of exposure: we might be okay, or we could all be hot as hell’s hinges now and not know it yet. It could take months to see any symptoms and it’ll still kill you sure as
scheisse
—well, let’s not scream until we’re—God damn it, I just don’t get it, don’t get it, don’t get it . . .
Her phone beeped. She touched a button and listened to the text reading out in her ear.
“Okay, they assure me they’re on it,” she said after a minute.
I said great and asked her whether her Pentagon pals had given her any inside spook scoop on what we should be doing to stay alive.
“He just said to keep heading south and to let ES do its thing,” she said.
“Right,” I said. ES? I wondered. Did she mean—wait, maybe we should at least stop and get some iodine pills, just in . . . no, actually, don’t mention it. Traffic’s slowing down. One stop and we’ll be in wherever forever.
We fetched up just south of Florida City. It was 7:14 p.M. Marena zoomed in on the GoogleTraffic map. It looked like we were only about ten car lengths down from the point where the highway changed from red to green. By now the horns were making an almost continuous tone as people just plain leaned on them, not even antagonistically but just to be part of the chorus of despair. On our left there was just that cheap-looking pink-and-turquoise horizon, like trimming on some ersatz Deco hotel on Ocean Drive. At least it looked like an appropriate place to die.
We sat for a minute. Marena fidgeted. On the CNN site they were saying that hundreds of cars had been torched in Winter Park and Altamonte Springs, and that there were at least a dozen out-of-control fires in Orange County alone. They put up a map of Belle Glade, which is a downscale town on the south end of Okeechobee, and said some kind of skinhead militia had raided an immigrant trailer town because they thought it was the headquarters of La Raza, which I guess they were blaming for the fires. Eighteen people had been killed. Crackers with torches, I thought. The Imperial Wizards ride again. Hell. The picture cut to a low-aerial shot of six corpses lying on asphalt.
“I hate dead people,” Max said.
“Well, maybe you don’t want to watch this,” she said. She hit an icon and the screen switched to SpongeBob.
“Whatever happened to ‘Viewer Discretion Advised’?” she asked me in a lower voice.
I said that maybe they couldn’t find a one-syllable word for
discretion
.
“Are we going to get wiped?” Max asked.
“Nopes,” Marena said. “The prob’s too far away now. Let’s watch this.”
“Why wook, it’s Wuidward!” SpongeBob said.
We sat. I tried calling the Indiantown Community Center. Nothing. I checked out TomTomClub. Somebody called BitterOldExGreenBeretCracker was saying it wasn’t some Islamic outfit behind the attack, but rather a Native American group called White Buffalo. His reasons weren’t too clear. Bourgeoiseophobus said it might be the Hawkingers, whoever they were. A poster called Gladheateher said he sure it was Nation of Islam. SpongeBob beat Squidward in a square-dance contest. Finally Marena couldn’t stand it.
“I’m walking up there,” she said.
“I’ll check on it,” I said. I started to get out.
“No, I want to deal with it.” She scrummaged in her bag, took out a big video brooch with the Warren Borromean-rings logo, clicked it on, and pinned it to her sort of lapel.
“I want to get out too,” Max said.
“No, sorry, you guys hang on here for a sec,” she said. “I’m just going up there to see what’s happening.”
“Seriously,” I said. “I can—”
“I know what I’m doing. I’ll be fine. What was the name of that army base again?”
“The nearest one?” I asked. “Homestead Base.”
“Right,” she said. “Okay, look, you guys, don’t let anyone in the car, no matter what they say or what uniform they’re wearing. I’ve got my phone in and I’ll keep the line open and you can watch it all on TV. I’ll be back in about two minutes.”
Max and I looked at each other and said okay.
She left the engine on, cracked open her door, and slid out into the gap between it and the left guardrail. The car took in a gulp of wet heat. I moved into the driver’s seat. It was cramped and too high but I didn’t dare touch the settings. Max bounced into the front seat and watched on the screen. I
watched. I felt castrated. Oh, well, not the first time. Starting from the front of the pack the cars seemed to run out of breath and the horn drone died down. Marena’s jiggly video view emerged in a small crowd of puffy human backsides.
“Excuse me, VIP,” her voice said, echoing into her ear mike with a tone of authority. Amazingly, the clouds of adipose tissue parted to let her through. A few people grumbled but they didn’t question her either. Morons. I got a glimpse of a little girl with bangled cornrows and one big bead hanging right between her eyes. “Do you have to potty?” a nasal woman’s voice said somewhere. “Nathaniel!” she said. “If you need to potty this is
potty time right now
.”
“Sorry, VIP,” Marena said. “Excuse me, thanks, VIP comin’ through.”
She pushed out into a narrow patch of road between the crowd and the front of a line of orange-and-silver-striped traffic barricades. A military police officer in a transparent bubble helmet was waddling back and forth waving a red light saber that spelled out DANGER in the air. From the point of view of Marena’s chest, the long exit ramp leading down into Florida City was backed up solid. But behind the barricades a wide, clear scroll of seamless asphalt rolled south toward Cuba.
Marena walked up to the cop and half blocked his path.
“Hello, Officer?” she asked up into his helmet. “Could you tell me what we should do to help out here?”
“Yes, ma’am, just get back into your vehicle and wait your turn for the detour,” he said in that slightly metallic voice. They probably tune the speakers’ sound that way on purpose, just to make them more menacing.
“We’ve been told to head south past this point by the National Guard,” she lied.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but—”
“We could get over into the northbound lanes, but of course we don’t want to go against federal orders—”
“Both routes are needed for emergency vehicles. Besides, there is no reason to try to leave the area. All of you must return to your homes or places of business.” He turned around.
“Look, Officer Fuentes,” she said, getting in front of him and using his name off his badge, “I bet you have kids, right? You know what’s going on? The brass at Homestead put you up to this so they can get their own people out. And they’re leaving you here to take the heat. You’re going to get killed up here and your boss’ll be sitting on a beach drinking tequila, you know what I’m saying? So what I think we should do is move a few of these sawhorses and let these cars into the northbound lane at least. How does that sound?”
“A-four, copy?” he said into the microphone in his helmet. “Pedro? It’s Bob in Zone Five. Hi. I have a situation here.”
“Nathaniel, do you have to potty?” the woman’s voice said again.
“You know I’m filming this whole thing, right?” Marena asked. “And if it turns out that these people die here today it’s going to be all over the place. This is going to be one of those stories that catches the public eye, and you’re going to turn into a, a symbol of what’s wrong with this country, you’re never going to be able to go anywhere without people pointing at you. You’ll have to grow a beard and move back to San Juan.”
“Yes, backup please, out,” the officer said. “Ma’am, there
is
another squad car that will be here in a few moments to escort you to your vee-
hick
-le.”
Marena stood and looked at him for a second or two. He looked back.
“Are you sure you don’t have to potty?” Nasal Woman asked.
“What’s that yellow thing on his shirt?” Max asked me.
“That’s a nitrox tank,” I said. “If the filters on his mask clog up, he can open that and get about fifty-two lungfuls of extra air.”
“Oh,” Max said. “Right. Cool.”
Fuentes broke the stare-down first and turned. Marena spun around and faced the little crowd of thirty or so motorists who had braved the outdoors to see what was up. What happened on the screen next was confusing. But three seconds later we were looking down on them, from a different angle, and when she looked down at her feet we saw that she had climbed up on top of an old green SUV that was at the front of the line. Now she was standing with her feet on the chrome pipes between two sets of upside-down windsurfer boards, surveying the people. From what we could see through her bobbing wide-angle lens, they looked like just regular McFolks, the salt, sugar, and saturated fat of the earth, all white, for some reason. Git along, move ’em out.
“Okay, everybody?” she said to the crowd, projecting from her diaphragm. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but I think we may have a difference of opinion here and we’ll need everyone’s help, we should all get together, if we want to sort it out.”
They just looked up at her. “Nathaniel,” the woman went, “are you sure you don’t have to potty?”
“My name is Marena Park. I’m a professional journalist, broadcaster, and mother, and I’m standing here at the intersection of U.S. 1 with 821, where a hasty barricade has been set up blocking all routes south. There’s a pretty big group of us here who are concerned about how the authorities are handling this situation, and right now we’re talking to the single officer who claims to be in charge. Now, I want to hear what
you
have to say. Officer Fuentes here has said that we will not be allowed to use either U.S. 1 or 997 to get away from the center of the attack, because the officers at Homestead Base want to use those routes themselves first.”
“That isn’t what I said,” the cop’s voice said at a distance. Marena ignored him. “And it’s not true—”
“Now, Officer Fuentes here is wearing full protection against chemical agents, and we don’t have anything. Also, my GPS unit shows both routes are clear of traffic all the way to the Keys. But listen, don’t let me do all the talking, I’d like to hear what you think.”
I imagined Marena’s eyes darting from face to face. None of them said anything, except one of the younger women was murmuring something in a plaintive tone, like she was about to start freaking out.