Ham squinted inland. “Come on, then.”
They started down the beach. Even with the stiff wind coming off the land, it was brutally hot. Ninety-five degrees, maybe. Josh’s clothes dried in a hurry. He didn’t think he was sweating enough. Bits of reading came back to him: At five percent water loss, patient will experience thirst, irritability, weakness, headache, possibly nausea. Josh wondered how much internal bleeding he had done after Kyle had beaten him. More fluid loss there. A ten percent deficit will result in more severe headache and nausea, possible inability to walk—not there yet—possible tingling sensation in limbs. His feet hurt. At fifteen percent, numb feeling spreads over the skin; also swollen tongue, deafness, dim vision, painful urination.
Ham stopped. “Shit, I’m being fried alive.” He gave Josh the canteen, gun, and bullets, then took off his shirt. His vast chest and gut were pale compared to his face and hands. Sweaty curls of hair ran from his flabby nipples into a dark seam that thickened as it approached the waistband of his prisoner’s pants. He wound his shirt around his head like a turban. “Better sunburn than heatstroke.”
“Good idea.” Josh followed his example.
“Us Mathers know a thing or two about living off the land. I’m gonna make those pussies wish they’d put a bullet in us when they had the chance,” Ham said grimly. “I’m gonna stick my arm down that captain’s throat till I reach his asshole and pull him inside out.”
They started forward again, walking along the hard-packed sand. Wavelets broke and hissed foaming around Joshua’s feet and then pulled back, sucking sand out from under his arches. Bits of shell jutted from the sand, blue or bone white.
More than fifteen percent water loss will result in death.
The stand of cane Josh had seen turned out to be cattails. When they came even with it they stood together on the beach, studying the thick pelt of tangled salt grass behind the dune. Josh figured it was about a third of a mile inland to the tall grass. Ham scratched at his jowls. His lips were cracking even in the sultry air. “I’m thinking maybe one of us checks over there for open water, and one of us does some serious beachcombing. What would it take to make a still?”
Josh licked his lips. It didn’t do much good. “Sheet of plastic and a digging tool.”
“Okay. You scavenge. I’ll head over yonder.” Ham unslung the canteen from around his neck, held it up, and then banged on its side with the barrel of the useless .32. It made a good, loud, unnatural noise. “Get out of my way, rattlesnakes, I’m coming through.” He paused and shook his head. “Consider the parable of Joshua Cane. Banished for life for a pussy unplumbed, the poor dumb bastard.”
“Next time.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ham stepped up over the dune in his bare feet, belly swaying, and went tramping heavily through the salt grass, banging away on his improvised drum.
Josh scanned the beach for anything that might be of use. Even before the Flood the Bolivar Peninsula had been sparsely populated. Just a handful of second-rate seaside communities, summer cottages for those too poor to buy on Galveston; the occasional rancher with a few dozen head of cattle and a gift store along Highway 87; handfuls of men working the oil claims up the peninsula, and the gas stations, bars, and diners that serviced them. But even though there hadn’t been many folk here before the Flood, the world had been so wasteful there was still plenty of litter to salvage if you looked carefully enough. Almost at once Josh found a fat length of sun-rotted nylon rope, black and yellow and thick as his wrist, lost from a tanker or container ship. He found a whole tire, a Goodyear AquaTread, lying just over the top of the dune where some storm had stranded it. This he dragged back to the beach, thinking they might want to cut it up later to make shoes, or possibly burn it, using the thick smoke to drive away the mosquitoes that would surely appear the moment the wind dropped. He looked at the tire and shook his head. What an empire. Even their garbage lasted forever.
It was getting harder for Josh to stand straight. He couldn’t tell if he was getting sicker or the wind was strengthening. His head ached and ached.
He found a plastic pop bottle with the bottom torn out but the cap still screwed on. He put it inside the tire where it wouldn’t blow away, not sure what he would use it for. He found two Budweiser cans, a twelve ounce that would hold water, and a twenty that leaked. He found a flat metal disk the size of a dinner plate; maybe the top of a pail of paint. They could use it as a digging tool, if he could figure out a way to shape it.
It was terrifying to him how quickly they had dwindled, as a species. His grandparents had lived in such astonishing permanence: going to universities a hundred years old, to study books centuries older still—a cumulative line of thought and accomplishment, each generation building on the foundation left by the last. Compared to that, the people Joshua doctored with his potions and charms were not much better than animals, born into makeshift houses, carried off by every drought and disease, breeding and dying like a year’s crop of mosquitoes.
In the last century, doctors had won. They had made people well. All he could do was cut his patients’ losses, delay the inevitable, play each losing hand of cards as well as he could. But Galveston always had her aces to play: typhoid, smallpox, spider bites, malaria. Recently he had begun to see tuberculosis, too, and something that looked a lot like yellow fever.
The thin bang of the tin canteen was getting louder again. Ham must be coming back.
Josh noticed a small hole at the base of the dune. Some kind of animal burrow, probably. Sunlight flashed from just inside it, as if from plastic. He reached inside and felt around for whatever had made that flash.
A snake bit him just above the right wrist and he screamed, a high crazy shriek that tore from his raw throat. He jerked his hand back out of the hole and stared at the double puncture marks at the end of his right forearm. Two drops of blood beaded up, half an inch apart. He could hear Ham lumbering through the salt grass, running back to the beach.
How could he have been so stupid?
The trouble with being unlucky, Josh thought, staring, is that you have no margin for error. Pain stabbed up his arm from his wrist. All his life he had been playing bad cards well. He was smart and he worked hard, he made good choices, he had guts. Putting all that together he could just manage to hold even. Never win, of course. Not Sam Cane’s boy. And when those moments came when he slipped up, when he was stupid enough to fall in love and hold on to Sloane Gardner’s stockings, or when, after a day without food or water, he lost his concentration and stuck his hand into a small hole in the side of a sand dune—that’s where the knife went in. His father used to say, “If you make a mistake, a good player will always punish you for it.” And it was true; whichever god had been dealing him bad hand after bad hand all his life applied a merciless penalty for every mistake.
In Joshua’s experience, about half the people struck by a rattlesnake suffered little or no ill effect.
The lucky half.
HAM thundered through the salt grass and jumped down off the dune. He followed Joshua’s eyes to the puncture marks on his wrist, then swung around and spotted the hole in the dune. “Good Christ, you dumb ass!”
Ham reached into Joshua’s pocket, grabbed the knife, and flicked it open. Josh struggled out of his stupor. “No! Cutting me will just open up the capillaries and get the venom into my bloodstream faster.”
“You sure? Okay, then. Tell me what to do, Josh.”
“Draw a syringe and inject the antivenin. Duh.”
Ham grabbed him by the shoulders. “Josh, don’t fucking joke about it. Tell me what to do. Should I suck it out?”
“No! God, no. Vessels under your tongue will take the poison to your heart in one straight shot.” Joshua’s heart was hammering and hammering, every beat forcing the poison into his system. It had always struck him as funny, in a grim way, that the one thing you absolutely had to do after being bitten by a deadly snake was stay calm. “Ham, this bite is not a good thing.”
/> “Tell me what to do, damn it!”
Josh closed his eyes. They had no mechanical suction. “Squeeze it out, I guess.” The area around the puncture was beginning to sting. Ham pinched it. Two fat drops of blood rolled out. “Harder,” Josh said. Ham squeezed harder. Blood bubbled up from the wound. It hurt a lot. Josh clenched his teeth and nodded. Ham relaxed his fingers for a moment and then pinched harder still. Josh had seen him crack crab shells open between his forefinger and thumb.
“Josh, what else, buddy?”
“Well, I should stay still if I can. Can’t panic.” His wrist hurt. “I’m going to hold my breath.”
“What?”
“When the CO2 builds up in my bloodstream it will depress my heart rate.” Josh took a big breath and held it. He closed his eyes and saw himself putting a needle full of raw pancreas solution into his mother’s leg and slowly pushing down the plunger, counting to ten. Her thighs black and yellow with bruises, an old welt the size of a seagull’s egg on her other buttock.
More blood oozed out of his wrist.
Ham patted him clumsily on the shoulder. “Sorry I cussed you out. Could have happened to anybody.”
“You wouldn’t stick your hand in there in ten lifetimes.”
Ham’s fat face looked bad after a day without water, blotchy with fatigue and the beginnings of sunburn on his cheeks and nose. “Buddy, I am no-shit scared. Don’t you fuck off and die on me here.”
“Okay.” Already Joshua’s right wrist felt terrible, puffy and burning with pain, even though Ham was no longer squeezing it. Next up: cleaning the wound. Josh turned his back to Ham and undid the buttons on his pants, wincing. Squatting in the sand he fished out his limp penis and held it above his right wrist. Ham’s eyes widened. “Urine is sterile,” Josh said. It hurt to talk. It took a long time for him to piss. Finally a little urine trickled out, dark yellow and strong-smelling. He rubbed it over the puncture wound as thoroughly as he could. There wasn’t enough to wash his hands but he tried.
“Son of a bitch,” Ham whispered.
It took Josh a long time to get his pants buttoned up. Afterward he lowered himself to the sand, lying with his head pointing to the surf and his feet pointing toward the dune, naturally elevated.
The pain in his wrist brought tears to his eyes. It felt as if a match-head had ignited under his skin. He had treated several patients for rattler bites, including a malnourished three-year-old boy who had died. The boy had stepped on the snake while playing in the dirt street behind his parents’ shack. Josh remembered how cool and clinical he had been at the bedside while the kid screamed. After the child died, his father had offered Josh a portion of their meager dinner of rice, promising they would add some chicken fat for him. He had politely refused. The father couldn’t stop shaking his hand. The mother sat rocking the little body in her arms. He should have stayed for dinner, Josh thought. At the time he told himself he was doing the parents a favor. But that was a lie. What they needed was for someone to help eat the grief. He should have stayed.
“Son of a bitch,” Ham said.
Josh rolled onto his left side. Ham was staring at the beach. The tide had come in. Way in, Josh realized. Surf was hissing up to within a few yards of where he lay, high above the waterline.
“Against the wind,” Ham said. “It’s running way over high tide and it’s doing it against the wind. Look at the sky.”
The southern horizon was black. Flicks and sheets of lightning winked across it. A storm had formed over the Gulf. That was what was sucking the hard wind off the land. It must be a hell of a storm to be pushing that huge swell inland against such a blow. Josh forgot to hold his breath. “Hurricane!” he whispered.
Ham scrambled to his feet. “We can’t stay here, buddy. This whole beach will be underwater in an hour.”
A glint of movement caught Joshua’s eye. A dark triangular snake’s head slid out of the hole where he had been bitten. A moment later the rest of the snake followed. It was well over five feet long, light brown with darker brown diamond-shaped markings, heavily barred with black rings, its tail the color of fresh cream. It turned and poured smoothly up the face of the sand dune.
“Western diamondback,” Ham said. “He knows the storm’s coming.” They watched the snake vanish into the parched salt grass and sea purslane. Ham held out his hand. Josh took it and Ham pulled him up. They stood for a minute, looking out over the grassland. The wind gusted and abruptly died. A white egret rose from the withered plain and flapped heavily north. Josh doubted the land rose three feet above sea level from where they stood to the horizon.
“What was the storm surge on the Big Blow?” Ham asked.
“Twenty feet.”
Ham cussed.
The burning in Joshua’s wrist was getting very bad. “Ham, cut the sleeve off my shirt and wrap it around my arm. Not a tourniquet, just snug.” It took Ham less than a minute to slash off the shirtsleeve and cinch it around his arm. The fingers on Joshua’s right hand were beginning to burn, too. He forced himself to hold his breath, letting the CO2 build up in his blood. His heart banged and banged against his chest, refusing to slow down. The north wind snapped back.
“We gotta go, buddy.”
“Okay,” Josh gasped.
They headed over the top of the dune, Ham first, following the trail he had left in the withered salt grass. Thirty paces inland the ground came up in a little rise, hard beneath Joshua’s feet. Looking down he could see cracked tarmac peeking through a half-knit carpet of grass and weeds. “Highway 87,” Ham said.
“Can we follow it?”
Ham lumbered down the gentle slope on the other side. “Hell no. It runs along the coast.”
Josh lurched after him. Birds scattered up around their feet and went winging inland, black grackles, sparrows, white-barred mockingbirds, and once a blood-red cardinal. At first Josh was terrified of stepping on another rattlesnake, but soon it was hard to think about anything but the pain in his right arm. He was dizzy and couldn’t use his arm to balance. He fell down. “Come on, buddy,” Ham said. Josh struggled to his feet, ran, fell down again. This time Ham grabbed his left arm and hauled him up.
The wind died again. In the sudden hush they could hear the mutter of distant thunder.
They went more quickly, a heavy gasping shuffle through the dry grass. No chance of Josh holding his breath anymore, he was gasping and choking for air. Dehydration and snakebite ganged up to make terrible cramps in his stomach and sides. Loops of salt grass tangled around his feet and he fell again, landing heavily on his dangling arm. Pain starred out like fireworks from the snakebite, so intense it left the rest of his body shuddering. His mind went blank, waiting for the waves of agony to subside.
Ham slung him over his huge shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran on. Josh bounced against his broad back. His right arm hung at full stretch, rattling horribly with every jarring stride Ham took. The big man was blowing hard, grunting and wheezing as he lumbered through the grass. “Stop!” Josh gasped.
“Easy there.”
“I can keep up, I can—”
Ham stumbled, going down on one knee. “For Christ’s sake, shut up!” He got up again, weaving, then leaned forward into a heavy jog, carrying Josh over his shoulder like a broken toy. “Sorry, Josh. Can’t wait on you anymore.”
About a mile inland he lifted Josh carefully over an ancient barbed-wire fence. While Ham pushed down a fence post and picked his way across, Josh looked back the way they had come. The little swell of Highway 87 was still plainly visible, taller than the land they were standing on now. Josh stood doubled over and panting. He retched again. The cramps in his stomach and sides were worse. He felt a charley horse coming on, his right hamstring beginning to spasm.
“Damn,” Ham said. “We got to have some shelter.” He pointed to a stand of scrub at least another mile away. “I’m going to make for that.”
The storm line cut off the westering sun. A dead calm came with the sudden gloom
; the day went hushed and hot in the unnatural darkness. The withered prairie held its breath, as if waiting for a sign. Then a volley of gulls streaked from the black storm clouds, whistled overhead, and in a heartbeat had passed far into the north, like white arrows shot into the waiting stillness.
A gale followed like the shock wave of their passing, and the whole prairie bowed before it.
Chapter Fifteen
MAGGOTS
THE gale was blowing not south to north, as Josh had expected, but pouring hard from the east-southeast. The wind felt as if it were coming from a long way away, carrying mass and momentum, a broad river that flattened the plain under its weight. A raindrop smacked against Josh’s back, shockingly cold on his hot skin. Then another drop stung his shoulder. Daylight went out like a doused lamp and then the rain came in earnest, a crashing cascade that left Josh drenched between one ragged breath and the next. The gale tore at his makeshift turban, making it snap and whip around him. The world was suddenly much smaller, a moving pocket of storm. Lightning burst overhead and thunder exploded around him like a bomb. Ham grabbed his left hand and they stumbled off together.
The drought-hardened ground turned to mud, squelching under their bare feet. Josh gulped at the water streaming down his face. In the stuttering lightning glare, the plain boiled like an angry sea. The rain was flying sideways. Josh doubled over with cramp. Ham jerked him forward into a run, but he fell with his swollen wrist under his body and passed out from the pain.
Ham picked him up. Josh bobbed like wreckage in the storm, wavering in and out of consciousness. His eyes opened and closed. The storm was a bedlam. Ham was carrying him, then dragging him, then carrying him again. Every time Josh felt himself surface, lightning burned a single stark image on his eyes.
Grass writhing like anemone arms.
Giant purple clouds with sucking starfish mouths.
A ball of wind-driven Spanish moss smacking into Ham’s head, witching it suddenly into something furred and monstrous.