Mark Costello - Big If

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.