“We don’t have to be enemies,” Josh said quietly.
“You shut up,” Martha said. “Got to think. Got to think hard.” She shut her eyes. A moment later she opened them and kicked George’s body again with a scream. “You think you was gonna do me that way?” She stopped to gather her composure. “I should have jes’ killed you on the beach. Soon as you said you was a doctor.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t stand to be sick. This is your fault,” she said, glaring at Josh. “If it wasn’t for you this don’t happen. An’ he was a good provider.”
“Martha, he was going to eat you,” Josh said. “He was going to kill you and eat you. He pretty much told me that.”
Even in the noonday sun there were mosquitoes around them, whining and settling. Josh’s wrist was throbbing. It had been too long since he had opened the bandage over it. He wondered if any maggots had hatched inside the wound. Bound to have. In the heat of the day the stink rising from the damp bandage was sickening. Ham still knelt in the road in front of him. His vast back was sunburned and bruised and scraped from the jabs of George’s switch. Cobbled with mosquito welts.
“If you kill us,” Josh said, “you die for sure. If you kill just Ham, you die probably but not for sure. If you let us live, there’s a chance I can save you. Let us go, Martha.”
She passed one bony hand slowly through her short curly hair. “Why would you fix me up? Why not just kill me?”
“Making people well is what I do,” Josh said.
A cloud of terns skirled overhead, tumbling inland off the sea, darting and circling one another. “Get on your knees by the beef,” Martha said. “Fuck with me one second and I kill you.”
Joshua shuffled over to Ham and sank to his knees. Martha had them turn to face the sea and walked behind them. She must have switched the bat to her left hand and drawn the knife, because a moment later Josh felt her cut the rope that had lashed his elbows behind him. A wave of agony flashed up through his poor shoulders as his arms were released. A moment later his numb muscles began to tingle as the blood started flowing through them again. Martha cut the rope binding Ham’s hands and dodged back out of range.
She glowered at Josh. “Now we even.”
He nodded. They couldn’t hurt her, not hobbled while she had her feet free, but as big and strong as Ham was, it would now be hard for her to kill them without putting herself at grave risk.
She coughed. She was losing her teeth from malnutrition. If she was prone to afternoon fever it was probably coming on now, especially on a hot day after a lot of exertion. “Truf or dare,” she said. “Do I have this thing?”
“TB. Yes, you do.”
“Am I gonna die?”
“Yes.”
There was something haughty, even scornful in her air, despite the sunken cheeks. A starved, bitter pride he had seen in his patients sometimes. He thought he would probably look the same way when the time came for him to die. “Can you fix me up?” she asked.
“No.”
“I figured,” she said. “I figured you for a cheat the minute I saw you. How long I got?”
“Maybe six months,” Josh said. She coughed again and spat. He wondered if there was blood in her spit, and if there was, how long it had been there.
The wind picked up. The little Gulf breeze was back. Martha nodded. “I’m taking the big pack. I ain’t axing, I’m telling you. You best not come after me, I’ll cut you where you stand, you hear me? I know these parts. You just git on.” She picked up George’s pack where he had let it fall in the road, then patted down his pockets, ignoring his blood-soaked clothes, until she found the silver cigarette lighter and fetched it out. She watched them all the time, and when she was done she stood up again. “Adios, doctor. All my life I been a stupid girl. It always gets me into trouble. I jes’ couldn’t figure out another way.” She wiped her muddy face with her muddy hand. “Short and sweet, that’s my motto.”
She walked backward down the road. They waited until she was a hundred yards away before Josh started working on the ropes around Ham’s ankles. When he finally got them off. Ham swore and stretched out his vast legs, knotted with cramps and bruises from George’s beatings. A charley horse seized him and he rubbed it out. Then he started on Joshua’s bonds. “Well. Josh, how does Galveston look?” the big man rumbled. “Now that you’ve seen a little of the world beyond?”
“Looking better.” Josh admitted.
Ham shook his head, staring west along 87. Martha had disappeared from view. “She just couldn’t imagine we could keep our word. Couldn’t fathom that we would all be better off if we worked together to get out of this hellhole. My mom used to say the funniest thing about salvation was that Christ would give it away for free, anytime, to anyone—but damn near everybody is too proud to ask.”
Ham worked the ropes off Joshua’s ankles. “You’re a better man than I am.” Josh said. “I would have killed her the first time I got the chance.”
Ham regarded him. Instead of the reproachful look Josh was expecting, the big man’s face was expressionless. “I suppose you would, too.” he said. He looked away. “Funny how I always thought you were better than that. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.”
Chapter Seventeen
MARTIAL LAW
“I’M going home,” Ham said, once they had rubbed the feeling back into their arms and legs.
“Are you crazy?” Josh said. “We can’t go back to Galveston. There’s a death sentence on our heads, remember?”
“Josh, I really don’t give a good goddamn what you do.” Ham found a second cigarette lighter and Josh’s pocketknife in the pack Martha had left behind. “After a blow like this, you think they’ll turn down a field medic and a pipeline man?” Ham said. “Of course, Islanders are known to be stupid.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Josh pushed himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain in his legs and wrist. He squinted against the dazzle of sunlight on the slough around them. The big man started walking west on 87. He didn’t look back. After a moment Josh followed him.
As they trudged under the brutal sun Josh imagined Sloane Gardner, sitting in some air-conditioned mansion in the Mardi Gras, sipping exotic iced drinks, totally unaware that there had even been a hurricane—while back in the real world, he and Ham slogged on through clouds of mosquitoes, three quarters naked and gasping in the insufferable heat, their piss turning dark orange and their feet nothing but blisters. Some people had all the luck.
Of course, they hadn’t been eaten yet. Thank you, Lord, for these your tender mercies.
THE next morning Joshua found pink meat and blood in the wound on his wrist. The maggot therapy had been successful—if you could call getting eaten alive success. The little white crawling bastards had chewed away his infected flesh. Josh stared at them a long time. Beyond the first retching disgust, the sight struck him as a bleak revelation. This was what happened to everyone after the last card was dealt: the body died and worms ate it. He was just seeing that last hand a little early.
It took Josh an hour to clean all the maggots out, washing the wound over and over with seawater that burned like salt fire. When he was finally done he wrapped the wrist up with fresh bandages cut from George’s shirt.
They walked at night and rested during the day, drinking from stock tanks. They ate steamed clams or baked fish every day, and once some meat from an alligator they found mostly dead and tangled in a ball of barbed wire. Ham finished it off with the baseball bat. The big man swore by alligator meat, but in Joshua’s opinion sawing chunks out of its tail with the pocketknife was more work than it was worth.
They kept as quiet as they could and made no smoke if they could help it. “Lay low, beef,” Josh had said in his best George accent. “So’s we don’t get rustled.”
Ham didn’t laugh.
Their luck held, for a change, and they met no other cannibals. They did leave the highway once, though. The whole third night of the trip they could see a blaze o
f lights on the road ahead. Just before dawn they came to the edge of a little town. A well-lit sign at the side of 87 proclaimed:
Welcome to Sunshine City,
Resort Capital of the Third Coast!
“Visit Us Once, and You’ll Never Want to Leave!”
For the first time since Martha had gone, they saw people—lots of people, even in the dark before dawn. A fresh-scrubbed teenage boy in pre-Flood shorts and T-shirt rode a gleaming bicycle through the streets, delivering a morning paper. A smiling milkman gave him a wave while setting out two bottles on the deck of a stilt-legged vacation condo. In the condo next door, a glamorous couple carrying cups of hot coffee stepped onto their porch to watch the sun rise. A pickup truck ghosted to a stop outside the brightly lit windows of a donut shop and spilled out a load of ruggedly handsome cowpokes and oil-field workers who joked and laughed as they passed inside.
“No mud on the streets,” Ham muttered. “No broken glass.”
“No boarded-up windows.”
“No watermarks on the houses. No seaweed around their pillars. No nothin’,” Ham said. “They didn’t get a drop of rain. There is some very heavy-duty magical-type shit going on in there.”
“Damn,” Josh agreed. “I guess that stuff will happen when you don’t have the Recluse around.” He stepped back from the sign, gulping. “‘It just doesn’t get any better than this.’”
“I’m going around,” Ham said, slipping down the side of the embankment. A moment later Josh heard him swear. He was crouched at the bottom of the mysteriously dry ditch, staring at a human skeleton, fingers outstretched and clawing at the ground. “Fingers just even with the sign,” Ham said. “Poor sumbitch died trying to crawl out.”
They spent the next few hours giving the Resort Capital of the Third Coast an extremely wide berth.
Five mornings after Martha had left them, Highway 87 ended amidst the wreckage of the Point Bolivar Ferry Terminal. From here they could see Galveston Island, just over two miles away across the Bolivar Roads channel. They took their midday break amid the rubble of the abandoned ferry terminal, grateful for the shade. In the late afternoon, when the sun had begun to lose its bite, Josh scavenged for food while Ham looked for a way to get them across the channel. A ferry still sat in the berth—not floating anymore, of course, but settled on the sandy bottom with water well up over the car deck. Ham spent several hours trying to free one of its lifeboats with a ship’s ax, only to find when he finally got the boat into the water that its boards were sprung or rotten or both. It sank like a brick.
Perched on the pier posts that lined the ferry berth, a collection of black cormorants watched the proceedings with amusement while they held their wings up to dry. They were primitive birds, lacking oil glands to make their feathers waterproof, and they were always having to dry them out. Josh had read that in a book.
After the lifeboat disappointment, Ham broke open the ferry’s lockers with his ax and found twenty-seven life preservers. He kept one each for Josh and himself, and tied the other twenty-five together by their straps to make a raft.
They waited until twilight before putting their fleet of orange life preservers into the water and setting out across the Bolivar Roads. Ham had used his ax to cut down the oars from the useless lifeboat into small, crude paddles, but Joshua’s right arm was still too weak for him to do much with his. He tried paddling at first, pulling with his left arm, but he quickly flagged. Ham watched him, expressionless. “Don’t even bother,” he said at last. “Just lie at the back of the raft with your legs in the water. Kick if you want to pretend to help.”
“That’s enough,” Josh snapped. “You’ve made your point, I’m a little shit, I get it. Tell me what I’m supposed to say to apologize and I’ll say it.”
The big man dug in with his oar: one stroke, two. “There’s sincere remorse,” he said. Stroke, stroke. “Josh, just shut up.”
“I notice for all that I’m in the doghouse, you’re still rescuing me.”
“Island’s gonna need doctors,” Ham said. “Even ones like you.”
Ham paddled. Josh didn’t think his kicking was doing any good, but he kept at it a good while so as not to give Ham the satisfaction of hearing him quit. The pressure of leaning down on his upper body got to hurting his wrist worse and worse, though, and finally he gave up. And then, stroke by stroke. Ham was carrying him. Again.
A sudden fear seized Josh that his drowned mother was drifting underneath them, but when he stared through a gap in the raft he couldn’t see her. If she knew of any trouble coming, she kept it to herself.
Half an hour out from Point Bolivar, Ham turned his head. “If you need to talk, lithp. Thound carrieth over the water. Git in a boat off Loverth Point, you can hear a bra come undone at two hundred yardth.”
“But why lisp?”
“Thut up and do what I tell you, Joth.” Ham paddled. Some time later he said, “Your ‘eth’ ith eathily the loudeth noith in a whithper.”
It was a calm night, with no danger of being swept out to sea. At the front of their bobbing quilt of life preservers Ham paddled sturdily away. It took a long time to cross the channel. Josh should have been relaxing. He was neither weak from hunger nor tortured by thirst, not running from a storm or hiding from cannibals. Overhead the stars were warm and liquid in the Texas sky. But instead of resting, he found himself getting angrier and angrier at Ham. Yes, he had been thoughtless, but for Christ’s sake, it was a little hard to ask a man who had been beaten, exiled, and then struck by a poisonous snake to be on his best behavior.
To the right, far across the Bay, vast fires and smokes rose inexhaustibly from the refineries of Texas City. With its miles and miles of smokestacks and condensation towers, crackers and tanks and weird constant gouts of flame, it looked like an industrial version of hell. There were kids on the Island who said Texas City was where the souls of the evil dead were condemned to roam. There was much sturdy common sense behind the theory, Josh always thought. He would send Deputy Lanier there in a heartbeat.
He wondered again what had happened to Sloane.
They inched toward Galveston. In daylight, she had looked much as usual from Point Bolivar, but by night it was easier to tell there was something wrong. The town was too dark. Great black gaps blotted her grid of street-lamps, and where there was light, it was often the red unsteady gleam of fires burning where no fires should be.
They had been aiming for the closest land to Point Bolivar, the beach in front of Old Fort San Jacinto, but instead they ended up south and east a few hundred yards, in the rocky shallows around the Big Reef, an area Ham knew well. He had dragged Josh out here when they were thirteen years old. Josh had brought a magnifying glass and cotton specimen bag; Ham a propane lantern, a flounder gig—a stick with a nail sticking out the end of it—and a pair of pliers. He made Josh hold the lantern over the reef pools. When the goggling flounder came up, bewitched by the lantern light, Ham gigged them and flipped them into the bag, where they jerked and thrashed so unnervingly that Josh had dropped it. Then, to cover up his shame at being a sissy, he had yelled at Ham for ruining his specimen bag. Ham had meekly apologized, grabbed the next spiked flounder by the tail, slammed it headfirst into a nearby rock until it stiffened and died, and then placed it gently in the sack.
Josh winced at the memory.
When Ham had gigged enough flounder for the night, Josh, bored with standing around, had made the mistake of asking what the pliers were for. Ham had shown him how to catch the rock crabs that lived in the reef, and how to tear the left claws off the living animals. “If you take both claws they die,” he gravely explained, dropping the fresh claw into the bag while the rest of the crab lurched crazily away.
All in all it had been a fascinating, disgusting night—but good eating afterward. Joshua had eaten a lot of suppers over at Ham’s place that year. Suddenly, lying on the makeshift raft of life preservers, he understood that this had been a tactful kind of charity from Ham’s mom, p
aying for Amanda Cane’s pharmaceuticals and expertise in a form she wasn’t too proud to accept: child care and good food for her son. Odd that he hadn’t realized that before.
Ham lay at the front of the raft, using his paddle like a pole to push them through the Big Reef to the jumbled blocks of granite riprap that made up the shoreline. A gentle swell surged between the riprap and drained back again. Water slapped and muttered. Ham was just starting to ease his enormous body into the water and pull the raft onshore when he froze. “Joth!” he hissed. “Git up here.”
Life preservers sank and bobbed under Josh’s weight as he wiggled forward. At least he wasn’t cold: the Gulf water was always warm in September, and the night air was sultry. His wrist stung where salt water had seeped through his latest cloth dressing, but the pain was so much less terrible than it had been earlier in the week it hardly seemed worth noticing. “What’s up?—Oopth. Thorry,” Josh said, remembering to lisp.
Ham pointed with his paddle. “Body,” he said.
With only starlight and an old moon to see by, it took Josh a moment to make out what Ham was pointing at. A man-sized shape was floating facedown in the water. The body was wedged between two rocks, almost lifting free with each swell, then settling back, stuck like a piece of driftwood. There was something terrible about the way it moved, no different from a log or length of rope. Just an object now, no longer a living thing. Josh felt a moment of intense horror and pity. The thought of his mother, reduced to this, was worse than seeing her ghost. At least that apparition had retained something of her. It had seen him and known him. But this…
“Got a hole in hith head,” Ham murmured. Looking more closely, Josh saw a cavity where the back of the head should have been. A large part of the skull was missing. Ham touched the back of the corpse with his paddle. The wood clicked against something stiff. Ham slid the paddle forward and lifted the head, turning it to one side. Instead of a man’s cheek, they saw a sad, red creature with long shrimp’s whiskers. Its face was stiff, something halfway between skin and shell. “Prawn Man,” Ham murmured. “I heard about ’em, but I never theen one before.” There was a small round hole just above the creature’s left eye, another near his jaw. “Thomeone thot him. More than onth.”