Mark Costello

Big If

An excerpt, III

Gretchen spent the flight on the downlink with St. Louis. The SAC had sent a team to Hinman, but the Alton bridge was out and his men were stranded in a motel office, still on the Missouri side, phoning in whatever they could learn from the PFR bands, from channel-surfing on the motelier's TV, from browsing widely on the Web. The SAC passed along an unconfirmed report of scattered looting in the river towns.

"And that's not all," he said. The Illinois Department of Corrections had bused a work gang into Hinman, men convicted of light offenses only, and everyone pitched in, citizens and prisoners, their differences forgotten, building a sandbag dike against the rising current—a human—interest story, until a length of dike slid into the night. The water rolled and everybody fled. In Baker, down the road, sixty-seven members of a Christian encampment had ignored all entreaties to evacuate. The Christians never bothered anyone, but never paid their taxes either. The local IRS had been sitting on a warrant for a year, afraid to serve it (nobody needed another Waco). When the river started rising, three Illinois Guardsmen went door-to-door, looking for the shut-in, the elderly, and the blissfully oblivious. The Guardsmen were unarmed. They belonged to a supply battalion from the East St. Louis Armory. They pulled into the commune's compound, thinking it was just another isolated farm. The Christians hadn't personally seen any water other than the falling rain and they suspected that the whole state of emergency—complete with TV weather warnings and evacuation maps—was a law-enforcement hoax to draw them away from their arsenal, their C-rats, and their boobytraps. The arrival of the soldiers seemed to confirm these suspicions and the Christians opened fire. One Guardsman was shot through the wrist. The others were pinned down under their humvee by sniper fire from the guard towers and still the river rose.

A flying column of sheriff's men, two cruisers and an ambulance, took off down the last dry road linking Hinman to the world. No one seemed to know where the deputies were headed. They may have been going out to round up the stray prisoners or maybe they were pushing on to Baker to relieve the hard-pressed Guardsmen. Gretchen only knew that the dike was gone and the river was at eighteen feet above normal, flooding Main Street, the state forest, and some farms, and dogs and pigs and supposedly some horses, and definitely deer, and all the other animals who couldn't climb a tree, or float, or fly, were fleeing to the far side of the Baker-Hinman road. The lead car in the sheriff's column, coming down this road, hit a herd of deer crossing to the farms, killing several instantly. The deputy jammed on the brakes and was hit from behind by the ambulance and killed instantly. The tail car swerved, shearing the ambulance and striking a light pole, injuring a deputy, who later died instantly. The scene along the road was a traffic horror-doe, buck, deputies, accordioned cars, the ambulance tipped over, medicine and bandages everywhere, none of which was really Gretchen's problem, not even the Guardsmen, who were still under the humvee as far as anybody knew. Gretchen was thinking about looters, about riot, about fire and no firefighters and the end of 911. They were bouncing through the thunderheads.

Fundeberg said, "Looters?"

"Sporting goods," said Gretchen, seriously freaked and trying to explain.

Fundeberg said, "Gretchen, get a grip. This isn't Watts. This isn't Pakistan. This is just a town in Illinois."

"Looting is a form of shopping," Felker said. "There's a pattern to it, Fundeberg. Every study shows this. Looters go for three things generally: liquor, home entertainment systems, and sporting goods—bats, knives, guns in the display case, ammo by the box. Even crossbows. There's precedent for that."

"Awesome," said Herc Mercado, who was always up for something new.

"Once they get the sporting goods," Felker said, "looters can turn themselves into a stubborn localized insurgency. How many prisoners are loose down there? Are they in possession of excessive sporting goods? We don't even know. This is not a well-planned evolution. I think this is the point that Gretchen's making."

The helo dipped beneath the clouds, flying over squares of cultivated land. The river came up suddenly on the starboard side, coffee-brown, astonishingly broad, curling and uncurling, like twenty different rivers sharing the same banks. Vi saw houses, trailers, whole uprooted trees rolling in the currents. The helo hovered over half a town.

"The school is the magnet in this district," Fundeberg was telling the reporters. "Reading scores are up, thanks to our aggressive program of Internet access."

The reporters wrote this down.

"The gym has room for eight hundred cots," said Fundeberg. "That's well over half the town."

The helo settled in the outfield of a soupy baseball diamond. A pitiful committee waited at the edge of the rotor-wash, the bedraggled mayor, a priest whose hat blew off, a two-man FEMA team. Vi and Bobbie were busy kitting up, racking Uzis, tapping ears, adjusting the straps on their body armor. Herc and O'Teen straightened each other's ties.

"Right," said Gretchen.

Quick check of the radios and they were out the door. A crowd of refugees pushed up. Vi and Felker pushed them back. Gretchen took the VP through the gap with Herc, Tashmo, and O'Teen, a box of four around him. They hustled up the hill to the magnet school with the FEMA dudes and the delegation from the town.

A light rain fell. Vi splashed across the grass, taking a position in the right-field power alley. She watched families stumble up from the town, carrying whatever they had rescued from the river. She saw young children with stuffed talking dinosaurs, men with rare and precious heirloom muskets, people saving their home encyclopedias, every family member carrying four volumes or as many as they could. She saw a woman with a small painted box marked Recipes and another woman in a dripping quilt carrying two goldfish in a bowl, the water sloshing as she walked. The woman held her hand over the open bowl, protecting the goldfish from the rain.

Vi heard Felker on the comm. He said that he was going for a look.

Gretchen was herding the protection to the school. She said, Look at what?

Felker was half static. He sounded far away. He said that he was going to the town.

Gretchen said, Felker, that's a negative. Thirteen your ass right back here. "Thirteen" was borrowed cop code. It meant do it now.

Gretchen was hailing and recalling Felker all the way up the hill to the school, but Felker never copied back. Gretchen gave a final order before the gym swallowed her signal. She said, Vi, go find him—bring him back.

Vi cut through the refugees to the red clay warning track, past the scoreboard and the ten-foot foul pole, down a grass embankment. She lost her footing on the bank and slid on her ass to a gravel fire road.

The rain was pelting now. Vi was jogging down a street of prim brick homes with many family touches, trellises and flowerbeds and birdhouse mailboxes, hedges manicured. She saw a man loading a legless air hockey table into his pickup truck. She saw dogs chained in yards, barking in the rain, and others, at the windows, barking silently. She saw muddy Guardsmen coming uphill in a hurry, nearly bouncing off the back of their humvees. She saw men in denim drabs, prisoners searching for their jailers, trudging toward the shelter in the gym. She jogged, thirteening in all directions, hailing Felker on the comm, shouting Felker to her fist mike, shouting "Felker" at the lawns.

The river was two streets ahead, flowing like a movie, flat and wide. Vi could see the streetlights of downtown, water halfway up, the roof of a doughnut shop, and a red sign for a Texaco, Free Travel Mug with Oil Change While Supplies Last. She heard a burst, three rounds, from a trailer park. She jogged in that direction, splashing to her ankles, moving closer to the river now.

The trailer park was quickly flooding out. Some trailers were in place, bolted to concrete foundations. Others were half-moored, wagging slowly on an axis to the current's push. She saw men in hunting clothes with shotguns in a silver jeep. She saw a family in a metal boat being towed by a station wagon full of children and possessions. She saw men moving between trailers, men in denim drabs, many with shaved heads—the prisoners. Some prisoners were helping the homeowners load their cars and boats. Others simply fled, ignoring cries for help. She saw a few prisoners going through the trailer homes, carrying gilt mirrors and personal computers and children's bikes held high, but she couldn't tell which prisoners were looting and which prisoners were helping. She could see the street lines, double yellow, through the moving water at her knees. She looked ahead and saw Felker in a yard.

She shouted at him. Felker didn't hear or didn't look. A Doberman chained outside a trailer snapped at Felker, slashing and lunging in the water, yanking the chain taut. Felker was trying to unchain the dog and save it from drowning as the river rose, but he couldn't get around the jaws of the dog to save it. Vi watched speechlessly, Felker dancing to the side, the dog splashing at him with its jaws. The Doberman was gray. Its head was blackened, wet.

Vi heard a woman yelling from the doorway of the trailer, leaning on a single wooden crutch, holding a screaming baby in her arms. The baby was a few months old, Chinese or Korean, and wore a pink peapod suit. The woman had a cast on her left leg to her knee. She tried to pass the child out, but Felker couldn't get around the dog, so he drew his Uzi and shot the animal, one burst to the sausage-side. The dog screamed. Felker winced and took its face off with a mercy burst. The dog disappeared, then buoyed up, half—headless and still chained, floating in a water-cloud of spreading red.

Vi said, "Holy shit."

"Take the baby," Felker said.

The river pulled the dead dog in a long arc on the chain. Vi took the baby and the mother's crutch. Felker locked the trailer and carried the mom, fireman-style, up the street toward the town, staggering and dropping her, a big awkward splash, lifting her again. The baby was bawling in Vi's arms. The cast on the woman's leg was covered with signatures and messages from friends, pink and purple inks, hearts and scrawls and messages, blurring now and running down the cast. The woman was laughing and weeping and making goo-goo at the baby and thanking Jesus Christ for His sweet eternal care. Felker asked her not to move around so much up there.

They gave the baby and the mom to a group of convicts who were heading toward the gym.

Felker, unburdened, turned to Vi. "There's looters by the river. They're killing watchdogs, going house to house, taking what they want."

Vi said, "Fuck it, man, who cares?"

He started down the road, back toward the trailer park.

She followed him. "Fuck it. Felker—"

They walked into a cul-de-sac. Here the banks were gone. The trailers were coming loose from their foundations, drifting a few feet, filling with brown water, slowing to a stop. Some floated free and snagged in trees, great boxy derelicts. Others joined the current and started moving quickly as they sank, contents spilling from the open doors and windows, spice bottles, bobbing basketballs, empty plastic milk jugs saved for recycling, a trail of junk and bubbles. Vi was in cold river to her waist. She felt the loose ground slipping away under her feet.

She saw convicts wading back and forth between the trailers.

Felker squeezed a warning burst into the air. The looters turned and looked in three directions.

Felker shouted, "Federal agent. Leave this area and proceed in an orderly fashion to the gym."

The inmates looked at Felker and each other, not hearing all of what he said, and some of them decided that it was best to run. Others had guns, muskets and long rifles and some handguns looted from the trailers, and they shot into the air, warning the warner, and Felker squeezed another burst into the air, his arm stiff, like a track and field official starting the sprinters. The looters shot back, also in the air, and a few more volleys were traded in this manner, then Felker popped his clip, slid in another, and started chasing them into the river. Some looters moved away. Others stood their ground and aimed this time.

Vi said, "Felker."

Bullets kicked the water, nothing very close. No one was trying to shoot anyone. Most of the inmates ran away as best they could, half wading, stumbling and dunking, swimming a few strokes, spitting water in the air, kicking till they touched the ground, and pushing up to run again.

One convict fled into the last trailer. The screen door was white aluminum and twisted off the top hinge. Felker opened the crazy twisted door using the knob.

He went in. Vi went in behind him.

It was dark inside the trailer. She was standing in a snug wood-paneled kitchen. Felker disappeared around the corner, chasing the inmate. She felt the kitchen list, the floor yawing wide into the current. She braced herself, grabbing the faucet on the sink. She heard sheet metal twisting, felt the gunshot-pop of bolts, and, through the open door, the view was moving. They were floating free. Cabinets fell open and the whole thing rolled.

She woke up in the woods, nowhere near the trailer park, vomiting and shivering, on her hands and knees. Her wallet and her creds were lost in the river. She could get replacement creds and didn't care about the wallet or anything in it, except for a folded one-dollar bill she had carried every day since coming to Protection, the bill Jens had found in an old insurance file after Walter's death.

Vi made it to the outfield and saw no helo there. She called Movements from the gym, borrowing the cell phone of the priest whose hat had blown off in the rotor-wash. She called collect. She said, "Collect me. I'm in Hinman, Illinois."

She spent the night in the gym, coughing up the Mississippi, chatting with the priest and a roofer and his pal, playing Risk with children on the cots. Some pieces were missing and the board was water-stained, but she organized a regular Risk tournament.

In the morning, she caught a ride on a medevac as far as Carbondale. They landed grandly on the roof of a hospital. Two goons from Human Resources were waiting for her there. Human Resources was the new and happy name for IAB, but no one had told the goons that they were new and happy. She asked about the others, Gretchen, Bobbie, Tashmo, and the men from Human said the team was safe in Washington. She asked about Felker and the goons said nothing.

They flew her back to Beltsville on a government Gulfstream. They took her to Psych Services, dumped her in a room with a heavy maple table, big enough for two, and soundproof panels on the walls. She asked the two-way mirror for a Coke and a few minutes later, there was a knock. It was Boone Saxon, a senior threat investigator, carrying a can of Pepsi.

Boone said, "Will Pepsi be all right?"

She touched the can; it was warm. She asked the mirror for a cup of ice.

Boone took her through the story from the helo in the outfield to the shootout with the looters and what happened in the trailer as it rolled. It was not a hostile Q&A, there were no Mirandas, but it wasn't altogether friendly either, and she didn't understand why it was Boone Saxon asking all the questions. Why not Gretchen? Why not Human? It didn't make much sense. Boone was a threat man; he only did the threats.

"Let's go through it one more time," Boone said. They went through it one more time. Vi asked for ice again, looking at herself and saying, "Can I get some fucking ice?"

They went through it many times and Boone was finally satisfied.

He turned to the mirror. "Get the ice," he said.

The Service gave her three days off to recover from the flood. Vi, not knowing where else to go, went back to Center Effing and stayed at her brother's house. It was a bad visit. She was strung out, sweaty-palmed, jumping at small noises, and she fought with Jens the whole time. By the end of the three days, she was glad to go back to the detail.

There was a rumor boom when Vi rejoined the team, and this became another way to pass the time between campaign events, the red-eyes and the van rides and the predawn breakfasts in the hotel coffee shops. The snipers said that Boone Saxon's men were looking for Lloyd Felker, the person or the corpse, a big clandestine manhunt with negative results. The bomb techs said that Felker was definitely muerto—Boone Saxon had found him bloated, washed up in Kentucky, and they were only waiting on the dentals to announce it. This story grew less plausible with time—how long could dentals take? Soon the bomb techs were agreeing with O'Teen, who said that Felker was alive in Mexico, working as a bodyguard for the cocaleros, doesn't speak the language and his memory is gone, like Charlton Heston's buddy in The Planet of the Apes—the only thing he remembers is how to scan the hands, and the superstitious Mexicans call him El Pantero or the Man in Pants. The comm techs scoffed at El Pantero; they had good hard rumors placing Felker in Kansas City, Denver, several shitholes in Nevada, and Duprete, Missouri. Bobbie Taylor-Niles said that Felker was alive—she insisted on a happy ending—and she even watched the ropelines for him, thinking Felker might come in from the crowd one day. Vi herself did not believe or disbelieve that Felker was dead in the river or alive, though she watched the ropes for him as well, in the spirit of a porch light you leave on.

Felker's death or disappearance affected everybody differently. Herc Mercado got a buzz cut. O'Teen gave up cigarettes. Gretchen tried to lose some weight. Tashmo bought a pickup truck (he'd always wanted one).

Herc, who lacked compassion, coined a word, Lloydify, which meant a total mental breakdown under pressure in the field. You could do a Lloyd or pull a Lloyd or feel somewhat Lloydish, and, after what they saw in Hinman, many of them did. When Sean Elias joined the team as deputy lead agent and heard his first Lloyd-word, Vi had to tell him where it came from.

Copyright © 2002 Mark Costello. All rights reserved.