In the hot Tennessee night, Nick could see the lights of Memphis glowing on low clouds ahead, an angry red. At least Nick hoped they were lights and not fire.
He hoped, but hope was fading. He’d already seen too much.
As he and Viondi trudged toward Memphis, they began to pass into areas with a larger population, but they passed nothing but ruin. Every house was flattened. Sometimes the homeowners stood numbly in front of their shattered dwellings, or made vague attempts to fetch belongings from the fallen structures. Some of them waved as Nick and Viondi passed. Some were injured, but most of the injuries seemed light.
The badly injured ones, Nick figured, never made it out of their houses. Once Nick and Viondi heard someone calling from a shattered storefront, some kind of clothing store. They dug into the ruin, throwing bricks and ruined clothes behind them into the street, and found an elderly Asian man with a beam fallen across his legs.
There was no way to move that beam. All they could do was promise that they’d contact the police or somebody to help him.
At least the storefront wasn’t on fire, Nick thought. Many of the buildings were in flames.
Nick didn’t want to think about people who might have lain in those ruins waiting for the fire to reach them, calling for help that never came. By the time Nick and Viondi passed by, the buildings were already blazing. Anyone inside was already long dead.
The road was often blocked by fallen trees or by crevasses, and every vehicle on it had been abandoned. Furious rainstorms pelted down on them, and they plodded on wearing windbreakers dug out of their luggage. Lightning boomed overhead even when it wasn’t raining. When night came on, there were no traffic lights, no street lights, no lights at all but the stars and the flare of burning structures. Nick saw no police, no fire engines, no ambulances. Everyone out here was on his own.
And then, just ahead, Nick saw the lights of a police cruiser, its flashers illuminating the rubble that was once a brick Mobil station. The Mobil sign, dark, was still intact on its metal pole, and pulsed faintly, blue and red, in the flashing police lights. The Mobil station itself was a pile of rubble. Standing by the open door of the car was a state trooper talking into a microphone.
“Hey,” Viondi said, and took a closer grip on his soggy cardboard box. He squinted ahead at the state trooper. “And the man’s a brother, too. Looks like we finally got lucky. I’d sure as hell hate to walk up to a cracker cop on a night like this.”
*
The dead boy kept staring at him with a face that looked like Victor’s. And the old man—he didn’t want to think about the old man.
Eukie James was trapped. He’d figured that out. He was trapped and he couldn’t help Victor or Emily or Showanda or anybody.
“Damn it?” he said into the mike. “What was that about Latimer Street?”
The whole damn city was on fire. That was clear enough. All a man had to do was look at that glow on the clouds.
He thought about Victor and tears came burning to his eyes.
“Where was that?” Eukie demanded of the mike. “Where was that damn looting?”
And the dead boy kept staring at him with his son’s eyes. Reminding him that there wasn’t anything he could do.
It was usually quiet on these back roads. The worst thing he’d ever seen since he’d been patrolling this area were some car accidents where nobody was badly hurt, even if a lot of metal got bent. His presence helped to keep the speed down, and people waved at him in a friendly way when he drove past.
And now this. Nuclear war or something, Eukie figured, somebody finally pushed the button. Some asshole shot a rocket at Memphis, and the whole place had gone up in fire.
And there was nothing Eukie could do to help his family, who were probably right smack in the middle of that— what was it called?— firestorm.
He couldn’t get to them. A whole forest of trees had fallen across the road both in front of him and behind, and he couldn’t move the patrol car off this little piece of ground. He’d barely avoided a power pole that tried to fall right on the car— there was a big scar on the trunk where it had bounded off. He’d never before thought a public utility would try to kill him.
All that seemed to exist on his little strip of state road was the collapsed Mobil station with its little population of dead people. Eukie had heard the screams from the wreckage as soon as he pulled over to the side of the road after the nuclear strike, or whatever it was. He’d dug through the fallen brick Mobil station, gashing his hands on broken glass, till he’d found the kid, the little black boy with the staring eyes, no more than six years old. But even after he’d dragged the boy out of the rubble and wiped the brick dust from his face and tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth— even after he’d pounded on the kid’s chest and breathed for him and shouted at the kid to wake up— even after all that, the screams went on, and so Eukie finally worked out that there was someone else trapped in the building.
And then, digging farther into the wreckage, he found the old man, an old white-haired black man in overalls. Maybe he was the kid’s grandpa. All the man could do was stare up with his yellow eyes and scream. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t answer Eukie’s questions, all he could do was take another breath and yell. So Eukie grabbed him under the arms and put his back into hauling him out of the wreckage. The old man gave one last full-blooded shriek and then fell limp.
And as soon as Eukie got him clear, he knew why.
The old man had left his legs in the wrecked station. Sliced off by falling glass or something. Eukie fell to the ground in shock when he saw the stumps spurting blood. The man just rolled his head to the left and died. Eukie’s hauling him out had completed the partial severing of his legs. Had sliced the arteries and killed him.
Eukie jumped up and felt himself all over to make sure he didn’t have blood on him. If he found a wet spot, he tried to brush it off.
It was then that he noticed how much the dead boy looked like his own son Victor.
Fear tingled cold along his nerves. He ran back to the car, got on the radio. But nobody would listen to his ten-fifty-five, his call for an ambulance. All the other officers seemed to have plenty of ten-fifty-fives of their own. The air rang with ten-threes, commands to clear the air and let someone talk. But people kept jabbering away anyhow.
Maybe they weren’t hearing each other properly, because Eukie’s reception was very spotty. Sometimes that happened, the flat wet ground tended to soak up radio signals, but now there was a lot of static, too, as if there was some kind of serious electrical disturbance. There were a lot of ten-ones, people signaling they were having trouble receiving the radio calls.
Eukie sagged into the car and listened to all the calls. Darkness gathered around him. Every so often the ground would shake, as if another bomb was going off somewhere.
Ten-forty-three, rescue call. Ten-thirty-three, fire. Ten-eighty-three, officer in trouble. Ten-fifty-eight, dead on arrival. Ten-seventy, chemical spill. Ten-nine, repeat. Ten-three, clear this channel. Ten-seventy-two, street blocked. Ten-thirty-three-four, hospital on fire. Ten-fifty-three-one, fire alarm. Ten-nine, repeat. Ten-forty-six, send a wrecker. Ten-nine, repeat transmission. Ten-three, clear this channel. Ten-nine, repeat. And calls for which there were no ten-codes: Power lines down. People trapped in building. Flooding on the riverfront.
He looked at the dead boy, and he saw Victor’s eyes.
Ten-eighty-one, civil disturbance.
Ten-sixty-nine, sniper.
Ten-eighty-three, officer in trouble.
Eukie grabbed the mike, thumbed the button. “Where?” he said.
“Looters.” A breathless voice. “Latimer Street.”
Damn. Eukie lived on Latimer street.
“You are authorized—”
“Ten-three! Stop transmitting, for Christ’s sake!”
“—to shoot looters on sight. Repeat.”
“Ten-one, dispatch. I am not receiving—”
“What?” Eukie demanded. “Where on Latimer Street?”
“Will you ten-three, damn it!”
“Shoot on sight. Repeat.”
“Ten-one, dispatch. I am not—”
“God damn it!” Eukie took off his hat and threw it down the road. People were shooting on his own damn street and there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to grab the shotgun out of the car and run south to Latimer Street to defend his family, but it was twenty miles away, and he knew he’d never make it through the kind of chaos he could hear on the radio. He stamped back and forth past the door of his car, tethered at the limit of the mike cord. He tried not to look at the dead boy with his son’s face.
In disgust he threw down the mike and stalked down the broken road to find his hat.
“Where the hell—?” he asked the world. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
He jammed his hat back on his head and gazed defiantly into the darkness. And then twigs and brush crackled as something moved ahead on the road. Adrenaline sang in Eukie’s veins. “Who’s that?” he demanded.
There was no answer, but the sounds got closer.
Eukie backed for a few steps, then turned and sprinted for his car. He was breathing hard by the time he dived head-first into the passenger compartment, grabbed the Remington shotgun, and racked in a round.
The ten-codes spat out of the radio. Officer in trouble. Fire. Looters.
Eukie turned on the driver’s door spotlight and panned it across the darkness.
A white-faced cow gazed back at him.
A cow.
Eukie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus God Almighty.”
The cow ambled past, oblivious to whatever had destroyed the city to the south. That cow, Eukie thought, was having herself an adventure. She had probably never been out of her pasture before.
“Jesus,” he said again. He leaned the shotgun against the side of the vehicle. The radio continued to rattle out its ten-codes.
Ten-thirty-three-four, hospital on fire.
Ten-fifty-three-one, fire alarm.
Ten-nine, repeat.
Ten-forty-six, send a wrecker.
Looters.
You are authorized to shoot...
Victor’s dead eyes gazed up at him from the broken pavement.
“What about Latimer Street?” he said into the mike. “What about that ten-eighty-three?”
“Ten-three! Ten-three!”
“Damn it,” Eukie said, “what about Latimer Street?”
“Officer needs assistance ...”
“Ten-three! Clear the air, whoever you are!”
“Listen, motherfucker,” Eukie said. He could feel tears springing to his eyes. “What about Latimer Street! What’s going down out there?” All he could see was Victor’s dead face.
“Asshole!” the dispatcher yelled. “Ten-three when I tell you to ten-three!”
“What about my son?” Eukie demanded.
It was then that the looters came out of the darkness. “Say, brother,” one of them said.
Fear and anger blazed through Eukie’s veins. He spun and through his mask of tears saw the looter looming right out of the darkness, a huge man, big hands clasped around a cardboard box full of stuff he’d stolen, complete with a huge silver pot he’d probably killed somebody for. There was blood all on his face and clothes, probably from beating someone to death over that silver pot, and the looter had some kind of weird stripes on his forehead that strobed in the emergency lights of the car. The looter looked like the Frankenstein Monster.
And there was another looter right behind him, a tall man whose features were obscured by the darkness. And probably there were more looters behind, circling the car, trying to sneak up on Eukie while the first two distracted him.
All Eukie could think of was that Victor and Showanda and Emily were depending on him.
“Don’t you move, nigger!” Eukie yelled, and reached for the shotgun.
The looter’s eyes widened in surprise. And when Eukie fired, it was those eyes he used for an aiming point.