There were other committees, with constantly shifting membership.
The Food-Safety Committee, which identified and gathered fruits and vegetables that wouldn’t poison you if you ate them. (Suzie took this group by storm, showing them how to dry and preserve certain fruits, and their stores began to increase.) The School Board. The Fairness Committee.
The Tsunami Committee, whose members learned to read the sea and kept watch on a high bluff with a giant warning drum. This committee had a subcommittee: the Rebuilding Committee.
Milo and Suzie both became members of the Fish Committee. You had to be young and fairly healthy to be on that one, which they were.
For the time being.
Health wasn’t something you took for granted here.
Milo noticed a lot of missing arms and eyes. There were people with weird swellings that came and went quickly, leaving misshapen bone. Almost no one on the island was unmarked. Some of the youngest bore strange puckerings and scars on their skin. Demon Rum had a hole in his foot that went straight through (he wore a ring of braided grass through it). A girl named Bug had what looked like extra veins in her throat, and her voice was rough, as if she breathed sand. Many, many people had a bad eye, or a wandering eye, or an eye with a blue caul over it. Several people were blind. There were never any babies. This wasn’t talked about.
Milo and Suzie were also assigned to the Water-Pump Committee.
Everyone worked on the giant pump. But the board members were responsible for knowing how the thing actually worked and for keeping it going. They would be the first to suffer if the cartel came for water and didn’t get what they wanted.
“You’re spending the time and work needed for collecting food,” Milo observed, after a week, “on running this dinosaur for those fuckers.”
“No shit,” said Jale.
“We’d all be a lot healthier if we could send out two, three times as many fishing crews.”
“No shit,” Jale repeated.
“You’re stuck here eating fruit from the island, and most of it’s toxic.”
“It’s poisoning you, too, Diver Man.” She pointed out a swelling near his elbow.
His first cancer. Lovely.
They burned it off with a piece of hot steel from the trash.
—
In the first weeks that they lived on the island, Milo and his family attended five funerals. They thought that was a lot. Then the storm came.
It was the kids who noticed it first. Some of the younger fishermen.
They had found a dead fish on the beach and were poking it with sticks when the very youngest, a three-year-old girl named Moo, straightened up, pointed her stick at the horizon, and said, “Storm.”
The other kids turned instantly and froze. When someone said, “Storm,” it was a slightly less urgent form of the tsunami drum.
They all pointed together, screaming “Storm!” over and over, a piercing alarm.
Most of the islanders rushed to the beach.
Suzie and Milo had seen storms on Ganymede, on screens and through windows. But they were fitful, staticky things. Some wind and dust; the milk cries of an infant atmosphere. They had seen video of Earth storms, and of course there was stormy Jupiter with its cyclonic eye. But the thing that came oozing over the horizon that afternoon wasn’t just windy and dark. It looked bad and unnatural and out of place.
“It looks like a stomach,” said Milo.
It came writhing across the sea, balloon-smooth, pink, and horrible, quivering like jelly. Here and there, parts of it puckered or spilled like guts. The pink gave way to patches of decomposing greens and blues.
A stinking wind flattened the surf and took them by surprise. A wind like burning plastic and rotting feet. A score of islanders doubled over and retched on the sand.
Then they ran for the jungle in one flying mass. The young hit the trees first, followed by the unencumbered grown-ups, followed by those who carried children or belongings, followed by the elderly and the sick.
What exactly was going to happen? Milo wondered.
They ran under a huge rocky overhang—a shelf like a giant hand trying to karate-chop its way out of the Earth—near the base of the volcano.
It started out fairly roomy, but as the older, slower islanders kept arriving, they shuffled farther back, closing in tighter until they were packed like synthetic olives in a jar. Milo snugged up behind Suzie, wrapping his arms around her.
Thunder rumbled, and the putrid wind found them. Milo breathed through his mouth.
Then there were hands on his arms, but not Suzie’s hands. Smaller ones, seeking his fingers and holding on.
The twins. Serene was on his left, smiling up at him. Carlo, on the other side, had captured Suzie’s hand. They both smiled, but their eyes were troubled and questioning.
“What is it?” asked Serene.
“A storm,” answered Milo. “A bad storm.”
“We’ll be all right,” said Suzie, hoisting Carlo onto her hip.
Milo glanced around. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.
“I thought she was in here,” said Suzie. “Isn’t she here?”
Milo turned a full circle.
“Mom!” he called, but the wind had kicked up; other voices were calling out, too.
“Just stay with us,” he told the twins. “We’ll find Mom after.”
Quite suddenly, the air went green.
Flash! Lightning.
Crack! Immediate thunder.
And then the world came apart.
—
Was this what a hurricane was like? Milo wondered. The wind was like a steam press, pushing them and whipping at them with loose leaves and branches. It shot water sideways at them through the strange green air.
Milo didn’t like the feel of the water on his skin. Was it crawling on him, feeling for a way in? That’s what it felt like. Beside him, Serene fidgeted, wiping the mist from her face and flinging it from her fingers.
“It’s slippery,” she complained.
“I know,” said Milo.
Serene slid between Milo and Suzie and took hold of Carlo’s ankle.
“Bood buh ja,” she said to him, and Carlo answered, “Parka.”
Milo and Suzie shared an amused look.
“Parka,” said Milo.
“Fuckin’ A,” said Suzie.
—
The rain raised blisters. Everywhere you looked in that crowd under the overhang, there were tiny bubbles on people.
The storm lasted for hours, like something that had decided to hover over them and digest them. They passed the time whispering stories and conversations. They took turns napping and holding one another up. For a while they sang an ancient spiritual called “Margaritaville.”
The green air turned pink.
Milo noticed the trees outside, away from the overhang. Their trunks and leaves had developed veins (veins, or rivers of scarring where the rain had touched them?).
Leaves fell. Coconuts fell. Whole trees crashed. He could hear them near and far away.
Flash.
Crack!
The lightning began a barrage that went on and on, and the funny thing was, it lulled them. Milo and Suzie found their way to the ground and lay there with the twins between them and fell into strange dreams and wakeful fits.
—