hoped that the neighbors wouldn’t smell them and come over for a handout.
He approached her. “Eva, I want you to know—you can go home to your people any time you like.”
Eva looked up. Her face was a mask of fear. She was neither young nor old, and yet her fear made her look ancient. “You want me to go?”
“Only if you want to.”
Even his manner of speaking had grown halting and unsure, and it was because he was always creeping around in the dark; he wasn’t a man who liked creeping around in the dark.
“What does ma’am say?”
“I just thought… a lot of people want to be with their families…”
“My family is in Colombia. And things aren’t so good there right now.”
The barbecue flickered and he saw the reflection of the flame dance on her face. The black pall of the phytosphere hovered in the sky. “You’re welcome to stay.”
Tears clouded her eyes. “Thank you, sir.”
As if he had offered her an ironclad guarantee that she would survive the phytosphere.
He turned and walked back to the house. He pushed his way in through the French doors only to find his wife coming out into the sunroom with that special phone they had given him, the one that sent its signal through a squadron of communications aircraft that were constantly aloft.
“It’s Bob Cruz,” she said, and hope danced in her eyes like a sad childhood remembrance.
He took the phone and pressed it to his ear. It was bulky and big, like a combat radio, and had a nubby black antenna. He had his usual reaction—a tightening of his esophagus, a spray of acid over the lining of his stomach, and a premonition of yet more bad news.
“Bob,” he said, the name dropping from his mouth like a dead bird from the sky.
“We’ve got Luke Langstrom on board. He’s working on the omniphage.”
Here was a border—one between good luck and bad, and for a split second he was balanced on the infinitesimal edge of either. The cards had again been dealt in his favor, and he felt within himself the distinct quality of good luck, elation mixed with relief, like a chill mixed with a fever.
“How soon does he think he can do an initial workup?”
“He says a few days.”
“And Gerry’s reaction?”
Bob paused. “No word.”
Neil hesitated, but then got down to business. “Does Langstrom have any preliminary ideas?”
“He’s already selected a designer organism from his old files. Apparently he’s designed dozens of omniphages like this. He uses them as surgical tools to study the guts of modern-day Aresphyta.”
A little more talk about the chemical teeth of potential omniphages, just so when he briefed the president and the secretary of defense he could give them a cohesive overall picture, and then he thumbed his special phone off. He looked at the phone, contemplating it the way he might a strange artifact. He put it on the table.
“Good news?” said Louise.
“Langstrom is working for us.” Neil shook his head. “I hope Gerry’s not too mad.”
Melissa looked up from her toenail painting. “Does that mean it’s going to get light again, Dad?”
How to answer his eldest daughter? He gazed at her in the candlelight coming from the table, and he momentarily wondered about her inner life, how she was dealing with the phytosphere, second by second, minute by minute—how she was coping with that sporadic and unnerving gunfire outside. Just who the hell was shooting? And did Miami really have so many guns? Melissa was losing her tan. Even that was something she would have to deal with.
“It’s a step in the right direction, hon.”
He heard a strange sucking sound from the kitchen. His wife and daughters glanced that way, their heads flicking in unison. He lifted the flashlight, walked past the dining room table, and entered the kitchen. The sucking sound came from the sink. He walked over, and further pinpointed the sound to the faucet. He recognized the sound. It was the sound of water pressure fading away.
Louise and the girls came into the kitchen. He turned on the cold-water tap and the sucking intensified.
He tried the hot-water tap, and the pipes below gurgled and burped, and the sound grew more and more distant as the pressure reversed itself and drained away into the main pipe outside.
He turned to Louise. It was a strange scene, Louise’s blond hair backlighted by the glow coming from the candles in the dining room, her face barely illuminated by the flashlight, and the three girls gathered around her, watching him expectantly, looking to him as the authority on all things technical.
He could only state the obvious. “The water’s…gone off.”
He took a few seconds to connect in his mind the series of events that might have led to this circumstance. How did water get to his house? He wasn’t even sure. Only that during either the filtration or actual pumping process, power was needed, and power, at best, was an intermittent resource these days.
“We have the pool,” said Louise.
Yes. And so they would drink pool water, and it would taste too much of chlorine, and it might make them sick, but what choice did they have? Pool water and army rations. This was the way it would happen. A slow and steady reduction, until the reduction was complete and life couldn’t continue. Had to dig in. The thought came to him suddenly. Find a defendable position, stock it, and dig in. Flashback to medieval times, when might made right, and those who survived were the meanest motherfuckers in the valley. Go up to his home in northern Georgia, Marblehill—even its name was tough—and protect his wife and girls for as long as he could until the reductions reduced them to the final repose of death.
He shook his head. He had to stop thinking that way. Negative thinking never got anybody anywhere.
In the next moment he stopped thinking anything at all, was only an organism reacting, not even necessarily interpreting what he was reacting to, just jerking to the floor at the sound of all the windows breaking, ducking instinctively even as he saw his family do the same, and only in that moment, as he felt the cool surface of the ceramic tile against his hands, did he understand that the house had been peppered with a hundred or so rounds of machine-gun fire despite the Morrison fighting vehicles protecting them out front. Who the hell were they up against? A question of the haves against the have-nots. A question of either starving to death or not starving to death. Especially now that the Western Secessionists had fouled things up.
“Louise?”
“Neil?”
“Girls?”
“We’re here, Daddy.”
“Ashley? Morgan?”
Responses from daughters number two and three—“I’m here, we’re here, I’m okay, we’re okay”—that he couldn’t really hear, because at that moment there came the
“Everybody stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see what’s going on.”
He crawled through the glass of the broken kitchen window, cutting himself, acknowledging the wetness of the blood on his hand, but too pumped up to feel the pain.
In the dining room, he got to his feet and ran hunched over to the den.
He got his gun, and he thought that this was the last thing he would ever have seen himself doing, skulking around his own house with a gun in his hand. He heard another burst of machine-gun fire, only this time it was several streets over—maybe gangs, maybe cops, rumors from the Morrison fighting vehicles out front, cops forming gangs, anarchy thriving in the growing lawlessness of the thickening phytosphere. How long before the Marines out in the Morrison fighting vehicles turned against them?
How long before things broke down
He left the den, walked back into the dining room, then turned right and went into the sunroom. Shards of glass littered the floor. He scanned the backyard down to the canal and saw the Coast Guard vessel at his dock, the
