After Death(51)

“Don’t talk like a basehead. You know what I said,” Carlisle replies, avoiding the admission that he lacks a translation.

Speedo Hickam changes the subject. “What about them barns or packin’ plants, or whatever they are?”

“What packin’ plants?” Aleem asks.

“Past the next row of trees. Lot of rat holes there where she might’ve gone to ground.”

Aleem shakes his head. “Nina ain’t the type for no rat hole. She’ll keep movin’.”

“Yeah, well,” says Jason James, “say she keeps movin’.”

“I just said it.”

“Then we got a whole world to search,” Jason continues. “That true or is it true? So say the bitch goes to ground, then it’s just them buildings. You see the math?”

“You got a point,” says Kuba.

“Reason I sleep so well at night,” Hakeem says, “is ’cause we got Jason, how his lightning mind can calculate a thing.”

“Vegas won’t let me play blackjack no more,” Jason reveals.

“Yeah, all right,” Aleem says. “Show me them packin’ plants.”





RAT HOLE




The cold water exacerbates the pain in Nina’s strained ankle, preventing her from putting her full weight on her left foot. She leans against a wall while John hurries ahead with the Tac Light, roiling the water and the sodden flotsam in it, opening doors and inspecting the spaces beyond, softly calling back to her to report what he finds.

Of the seven rooms along the right-hand wall of the packing plant, two are small lavatories. The other five are larger, each about thirty feet wide and nearly as deep. Two must have been offices, because they have windows that look out on the vast work floor. The other three were probably storage rooms.

Two storerooms are empty, but when John opens the door to the third, he stage-whispers, “Here, Mom, look at this.”

When she steps through the door, she discovers a chamber half filled with trash stacked haphazardly in one corner. Broken ladders. Fifteen or twenty moldering wooden crates. Rusting five-gallon metal drums. Plastic containers that resemble large laundry baskets. A wheelbarrow with a bent brace and missing wheel. An office chair from the torn seat of which rises a white cobra of foam padding. Large panels of plywood, a scattering of empty burlap bags, opaque plastic sheeting spooling off a four-foot-long cardboard tube.

“We can hide under this stuff, hide behind it,” John says. “I can move things around, make a space for us.”

“The whole mess will shift and fall down around you.”

“No, Mom, I can see how to do it,” he insists. “We’ll ease in behind it, sit with our backs to the wall. They open the door, see nothing but trash, and they go away. They go away.”

“There’s no time.”

“Three minutes is all I need,” he says, propping the Tac Light on an overturned bucket and setting to work. “Maybe four. I see how to do it.”

“Hurry,” she says as she steps out of the room. At opposite ends of the building, each of the gable walls is open to the night where the big roll-ups once were. She pulls the door shut behind her, blocking the spillover from the Tac Light, and though darkness folds her into its cloak, she feels exposed.





WHAT LIFE HAVE YOU IF YOU HAVE NOT LIFE TOGETHER?



Michael remembers the late Shelby Shrewsberry riffing on how, from the human perspective, storms seem chaotic, though they are not because they are the inevitable result of nature’s meteorological laws. The ineluctable influence of temperature on the speed of airflow and the speed of airflow on temperature. The balance between pressure and gravitational force. Friction between the wind and the earth. The intricate action of waves and tides in the atmosphere. The condition of the atmosphere-ocean interface. All of that and much more form a mechanism so complex that we can perceive many of its moving parts and how they interact without ever being able to predict with certitude what weather this machine might produce tomorrow, and even less what it will provide next month. When the sun is in an active phase, Shelby said, the Earth warms, and when the sun is in a phase of very low activity, all life on Earth is driven toward the equator to endure the long centuries of an ice age. The sun is the one and only master of the climate, and though its thermonuclear reactions seem chaotic, they are no more so than the weather on Earth that they affect. The truth is, Michael, the only genuinely chaotic thing in the universe is humanity.

So it seems as Michael quickens along the interstate, for the heavy traffic moves faster than the weather warrants, as if not only he but also everyone on wheels this night is hurrying somewhere to save a life. Although they lack Michael’s enhanced reflexes, the drivers often follow a mere car length or two behind one another and change lanes without signaling. They jockey recklessly for position, as if nothing is more important than arriving at their destinations ten seconds faster than they might otherwise get there if they drove with any recognition of their mortality.

He finds himself mourning Shelby, not for the first time since being resurrected, but more poignantly than before. The big guy was a light in life as surely as the sun. In spite of being the same age as Michael, for thirty-eight years he had filled the role of a big brother. Shelby’s remarkable intelligence ensured he was an outsider from an early age; by middle school, when he became tall and strong, his peaceable nature and humility provided another reason for most kids to ridicule him. In the school they attended and in the streets of their neighborhood, physical power was more honored than wisdom or accomplishment. Any guy as big as Shelby was expected to use his size to intimidate and get his way in all things. Brute strength combined with a determination to dominate was much admired. Shelby’s gentleness invited mockery to which he responded with a smile or a joke. In the small minds of his tormentors, his response confirmed that he was what they mocked him for being—feeb, wimp, coward, loser—even though Shelby frequently broke up fights when a smaller kid was targeted by a bigger one or by a group. On those occasions, he chastised the instigators of the violence and said something that was true but which nevertheless led them to mock him further: What life have you if you have not life together?