When it was over, the older ones hesitated to step outside.
The storm had rolled on. They could hear it growing distant, still rumbling. It left behind a dullness and a stillness and a stink like a bowel movement.
“Let it dry first,” said Babs Babylon, a forty-year-old widow, the Hall of Fame’s finest toolmaker.
“Screw it,” coughed Boone, who had stood the whole time. And he walked out into the wet, through a big puddle that shined ugly rainbow colors, the way gasoline does.
And most of them followed.
“Take the twins,” Milo told Suzie. “Will you?”
She nodded. He didn’t have to tell her he was going to look for Mom.
First he caught up with Boone, who had stopped among some ferns to puke and catch his breath.
“Where else would people go?” Milo asked. “Did the Storm Committee find another—”
Boone shook his head.
“That’s the only one,” he said. “She mighta stayed in the huts, probably.”
Then he gagged and said, “Let me be, Milo. Go on now.”
—
Milo had no plan.
If Mom was at the beach, Suzie and the twins would find her there. But Milo had an old, sure, unexplainable feeling that they wouldn’t.
When he first stumbled—literally stumbled—over a teenager named Miss Nude Mars, he thought she was a pig sleeping in the underbrush. How weird, he thought. Pigs weren’t among the animals they’d seeded on Europa. But this animal was pink and round and was snuffling in the dirt.
“Jesus,” whimpered Milo, when he saw and understood.
Miss Nude Mars had one enormous tumor swelling along her left side, from heel to skull. It throbbed. He could see it tugging at her, under the skin, with blue blood vessels like tentacles.
She looked up at him with one rolling, horror-filled eye, her right eye. The left was collapsing and leaking yellow water.
“Fulghussss,” she gurgled. She raised her right arm as if reaching for him.
Milo ran.
—
Five minutes later, he found his mother.
She looked okay, at first. Just a woman resting against a tree.
“Mom?” he called. And he hurried, tripping over fallen branches and discolored leaves.
Heard her say, “No! Milo, no—”
She could speak. She would be okay; whatever had gotten to Miss Nude Mars hadn’t gotten Mom so bad. But what in hell had kept her? How come—and then he saw.
She was pregnant. Except not really. Something low in her belly was growing big and round, burgeoning as he watched. Stretching her. As he stood there, with a low moan starting down deep in his chest, he saw a portion of her skin part like a zipper alongside her belly button, which now popped out, reversing itself.
She raised a hand to shield her face, to not see him, to be invisible.
Through grinding teeth, she uttered a kind of stifled howl. Something old and sure inside Milo made him back away, made him run again.
—
This time, he ran to the village.
He barely spared a glance at the sodden, sagging huts that still stood, or the few misshapen islanders who lay on the sand, dead or dying. One, he saw, had burst like a fallen, overripe fruit. He grabbed a handmade machete from among the village tools and stole away uphill again, into the jungle.
—
Milo had to go very far away, inside himself, to do what he did.
By the time he got to her, she was gagging rather than breathing. Her scream was strangled by rising tumors along her throat, but she looked at him when he arrived, panting and crying.
As quickly as possible, with all his strength, he beheaded his mother with the machete. He was insanely practical about this, stepping nimbly away so that the hundred bad fluids that sprayed from her didn’t catch him.
Why? What had happened? Had his mother not gotten moving in time? Hadn’t known to head for shelter? Hadn’t known where the shelter was?
He would never know. He would try not to think about it. Already his mind was putting ice on the whole afternoon, packing it away someplace numb.
He backtracked and found Miss Nude Mars again, but she had split down the back and rolled wide open, and toadstools were growing from the torn flesh. The toadstools had tiny little finger things around their caps. They waved at him.
—
For a week, maybe more, the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame sat around and didn’t say much. Sat looking out at the sea and the sky. One man—a relatively young man, a former free-enterprise flier named Dracula—walked off into the surf and was dragged away. Forty people were there when he did it. They let him do it.
Milo went to Suzie and the twins, meaning to have them scrape the rain blisters off and clean themselves with ocean water (Was that clean? Was anything clean?), but Suzie was way ahead of him. Everyone was doing it.
Over and over, they went to the sea, up to their ankles, and scrubbed at themselves with sand and seawater. A few of them scrubbed themselves until they bled, and others watched them do this and let them do it. Until Jale came hobbling up to Cracklin’ Rosie, who kept scrubbing and bleeding and had torn three fingernails loose, and said, “No, Rose. Stop it. Stop,” and held on to her until she stopped, and kept holding on to her. And that seemed to shake a lot of them out of it. That seemed to be the thing that got the Rebuilding Committee moving and doing, and got Uncle Sam to hike uphill to check on the tsunami drum, and got them all gathering and speaking and touching one another, even if they flinched at first.
—
“I buried her” was all Milo told Suzie and the twins, who cried and got sad and mad, the way people do.
It wasn’t quite true. Burial hadn’t been necessary. The storm dead took care of themselves, was how Milo thought of it.
Serene and Carlo came to live with Milo and Suzie, who hardly ever saw them. The twins came and went as they would, like a windstorm, nontoxic and indecipherable.
There were funerals, when a week had gone by and they had a good idea who was gone.
William Hofstettler, Marny deJeun, Pat the Bunny, and Junebug. Cordero, Napoleon, Wait for Me Zane, Callisto the Stripper, and Wavy Gravy. Wavy Gravy, some argued, wasn’t really dead; he had vanished into a tumor cocoon, and when he came out, he was someone else. They voted to go ahead and have a funeral for him, and he attended as Wavy Gravy 2.
Dr. Hook, Velma Peters, Jalape?o, Kellogg, Double Dip, Jodi Petunia, Boone, Ivan Rue, the Last of the Mohicans, Milk Money, and Joelle Texas Radio.
“Joelle Texas Radio” was Mom. Milo had almost forgotten.
—
Time passed.
A month later—two?—the entire population lay out on the beach, watching Io and a score of tiny inner moons transit Jupiter.
Something sparkled between the moons on the giant planet’s upper limb. Like fireflies or glowing embers.
“That’s pretty,” said Milo.
“Yes and no,” said Chili Pepper, several yards away. “It’s cartel ships on the way.”
—