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  “Yes sir,” Tommy said, and he did as he was told. When he was alone, Kyle opened his suitcase, reached beneath the socks and underwear and found the .38 pistol hidden there. He loaded it from a box of shells, cocked the gun, and walked back into the bathroom where the wrapped-up thing at the bottom of the tub awaited.

  Kyle tried to get a grip on the towels and pull them loose, but they were held so tightly they wouldn’t give. When he pulled with greater determination, the shape began thrashing back and forth with terrible strength, and Kyle let go and stepped back. The thing’s thrashing ceased, and it lay still again. Kyle had once seen one that had grown a hard skin, like a roach. He had seen one with a flat, cobralike head on an elongated neck. Their forms were changing, a riot of evolution gone insane. In these times, in this world, even the fabric of nature had been ripped asunder.

  He didn’t have time to waste. He aimed the gun at the thing’s midsection and squeezed the trigger. The noise of the shots was thunderous in the little bathroom. When he was through shooting, there were six holes in the towels and sheets but no blood.

  “Chew on those,” Kyle said.

  There was a wet, splitting noise. Reddish black liquid soaked the towels and began to stream toward the drain. Kyle thought of a leech that had just burst open. He clenched his teeth, got out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him, and then he put the pistol back into the suitcase and snapped the suitcase shut.

  His wife, son, and the baby called Hope were waiting for him, outside in the hot yellow sunshine.

  Kyle checked the cars in the motel’s parking lot. One had keys in the ignition, though its windshield was shattered. He got in and tried the engine; the dead battery wouldn’t even give out a gasp. They started walking again, toward the south, as the sun moved into the west and the afternoon shadows began to gather.

  Tommy saw them first: sand dunes rising between the palmettos. He cried out with joy and ran for the beach, where the Gulf’s waves rolled up in lathery foam and gulls skimmed the blue water. He took off his sneakers and socks, threw them aside and rushed into the sea, and behind him came his father and mother, footsore and drenched with sweat. Kyle and Allie both took off their shoes and waded into the water, the baby in Allie’s arms, and as the waves rolled around them onto the sand Kyle inhaled a chestful of salt air and cleansed his senses. Then he looked down the beach, its crescent curving toward the east, and the motels that stood at the edge of the Gulf.

  They were alone.

  Gulls darted in, screaming. Two of them fought over a crab that had been flipped onto its back. Broken shells glittered where the sand turned brown and hard. And all along the beach the motels—the blocky violet, sea green, periwinkle, and cream-colored buildings that had stood there since Kyle and Allie were teenagers—were without life, like the structures of an ancient civilization. Hurricane Jolene had done its damage; some of the motels—the Spindrift, the Sea Anchor, the Coral Reef—had been reduced to hulks, their signs battered and dangling, their windows broken out, whole walls washed away. A hundred yards down the beach, a cabin cruiser lay on its side, its hull ripped open like a fish’s belly. Where Kyle recalled the sight of a hundred sunbathers tanning on their towels, there was nothing but white emptiness. The lifeguard’s station was gone. There was no aroma of coconut-scented tanning butter, no blare of radios, no volleyball games, nobody tossing a Frisbee to a dog in the surf. The gulls strutted around, fat and happy in the absence of humanity.

  Kyle had expected this, but the reality gnawed at his heart. He loved this place; he had been young here, had met and courted Allie here. They’d come to Perdido Beach on their honeymoon, sixteen years ago. And they’d come back, every year since. What was summer, without a vacation at the beach? Without sand in your shoes, the sun on your shoulders, the sound of young laughter, and the smell of the Gulf? What was life worth, without such as that?

  A hand slid into his.

  “We’re here,” Allie said. She was smiling, but when she kissed him he tasted a tear.

  They were going to cook, out in this sun. They needed to find a room. Check in, stow the suitcase and the groceries. Think about the future.

  Kyle watched the waves coming in. Tommy went underwater, clothes and all, and rose up sputtering and yelling for the sake of it. Allie’s hand squeezed Kyle’s, and Kyle thought, We’re standing on the edge of what used to be, and there’s nowhere left to run.

  Nowhere.

  “I love you,” Kyle told his wife, and he drew her tightly against him. He could feel the heat of her skin. She was going to have a bad sunburn. Hope’s cheeks were red. Pick up some Solarcaine somewhere. God knows they don’t need it.

  Nowhere.

  He walked out of the water. The wet sand sucked around his ankles, trying to hold him, but he broke free and trudged up across the hard sand, leaving footprints all the way to where he’d left his suitcase. Allie was following him, with the red-cheeked Hope. “Tom?” Kyle called. “Tommy, let’s go!” The boy splashed and romped for a moment more, gulls spinning around his head either in curiosity or thinking he was a rather large fish, and then Tommy came out of the water and picked up his socks and sneakers.

  They began to walk eastward on the beach toward the Miracle Mile. A skeleton lay half-buried in the sand just past the wrecked cabin cruiser. A child’s orange pail was caught by the surf, pulled out and thrust onto shore again, the sea playing a game with the dead. The sun was getting lower, the shadows growing. The suitcase was heavy, so Kyle changed hands. The tires of a dune buggy jutted up from the waves, and farther on a body with some flesh on it was drifting in the shallow water. The gulls had been at work; it was not pretty.

  Kyle watched his wife, her shadow going before her. The baby began to cry, and Allie gently shushed her. Tommy threw shells into the water, trying to get a skimmer. They had found the infant in a gas station south of Montgomery, Alabama, near nine o’clock this morning. There had been an abandoned station wagon outside at the pumps, and the child had been on the floor in the women’s room. On the driver’s seat of the station wagon was a great deal of dried blood. Tommy had thought the blotch looked like the state of Texas. There had been dried blood on the doorknob of the women’s room too, but what had happened at that gas station was unknown. Was the mother attacked? Had she planned to come back for the baby? Had she crawled off into the woods and died? They’d searched around the gas station, but found no corpses.

  Well, life was a mystery, wasn’t it? Kyle had agreed to take the baby with them, on their vacation to the beach. But he cursed God for doing this to him, because he’d finally got things right in his soul.

  Hope. It had to be a cosmic joke. And if God and the devil were at war over this spinning ball of black sorrows, it was terribly clear who had control of the nuclear weapons.

  Biological incident.

  That was the first of it. How the government tried to explain. A biological incident, at some kind of secret—up until then—testing center in North Dakota. That was six years ago. The biological incident was worse than they’d let on. They had created something from their stew of gene manipulation and bacteriological tampering that had sent their ten test subjects out into the world with a vengeance. The ten had multiplied into twenty, the twenty to forty, the forty to eighty, and on and on. They had the wrath of Hell in their blood, a contamination that made AIDS look like a common cold. The germ boys had learned how to create—by accident, yes—weapons that walked on two legs. What foreign power were we going to unleash that taint upon? No matter; it had come home to live.

  Biological incident.

  Kyle shifted the suitcase again. Call them what they are, he thought. They craved blood like addicts used to crave heroin and crack. They wrapped themselves up and hid in closets and basements and any hole they could winnow into. Their skin burst and oozed and they split apart at the seams like old suits in the sunlight. Call them what they are, damn it.

  They were everywhere now. They had everything. The t
elevision networks, the corporations, the advertising agencies, the publishing houses, the banks, the law. Everything. Once in a while a pirate station broke in on the cable, human beings pleading for others not to give up hope. Hope. There it was again, the cosmic joke. Those bastards were as bad as fundamentalist preachers; their role models were Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell, seen through a dark glass. They wanted to convert everybody on earth, make them see the “truth,” and if you didn’t choose to join the fold they battered you in like a weak door and chewed the faith into you.

  It wasn’t just America. It was everywhere: Canada, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, Norway, Africa, England, South America, and Spain. Everywhere. The contamination—the “faith”—knew no racial nor national boundaries. It was another cosmic joke, with a hideous twist: The world was moving toward a true brotherhood.

  Kyle watched his shadow loom before him, its darkness merging with Allie’s. If a man couldn’t take a vacation in the sun with his family, he thought, then what the hell good was living?

  “Hey, Dad!” Tommy said. “There it is!”

  Kyle looked to where his son was pointing. The motel had stucco walls painted pale blue, its roof of red slate. Some of the roof had collapsed, the walls and windows broken. The motel’s sign had survived the hurricane, and said THE DRIFTWOOD.

  It was where Kyle and Allie had spent their honeymoon, and where they’d stayed—cabana number five, overlooking the Gulf—every summer vacation for sixteen years. “Yes,” Kyle answered. “That’s the place.” He turned his back to the sea and walked toward the concrete steps that led up to the Driftwood, and Allie followed with Hope and the grocery bag. Tommy paused to bend down and examine a jellyfish that had washed up and been caught by the sun at low tide, and then he came on too.

  The row of oceanview cabanas had been demolished. Number five was a cavern of debris, its roof caved in. “Watch the glass,” Kyle cautioned them, and he continued on around the brackish swimming pool and the deck that caught the afternoon’s sea breeze. He climbed another set of stairs from the pool’s deck to the major portion of the Driftwood, his wife and son behind him, and he stood facing a warren of collapsed rooms and wreckage.

  Summer could be a heartless thing.

  For a few seconds he almost lost it. Tears burned his eyes, and he thought he was going to choke on a sob. It had been important, so vitally important, that they come to Perdido Beach again, and see this place where life had been fresh and good and all the days were ahead of them. Now, more than anything, Kyle could see that it was over. But then Allie said, in a terribly cheerful voice, “It’s not so bad,” and Kyle laughed instead of cried. His laughter spiralled up, was taken by the Gulf breeze and broken like the walls of the Driftwood. “We can stay right here,” Allie said, and she walked past her husband into an opening where a door used to be.

  The room’s walls were cracked, the ceiling blotched with water stains. The furniture—bed, chest of drawers, chairs, lamps, all ticky-tacky when they were new—had been whirled around and smashed to kindling. Pipes stuck up where the sink had been in the bathroom, but the toilet remained and the shower stall—empty of intruders—was all right. Kyle tried the tap and was amazed to hear a rumbling down in the Driftwood’s guts. A thin trickle of rusty water flowed from the shower head. Kyle turned the tap off and the rumbling died.

  “Clear this stuff away,” Allie told Tommy. “Let’s get this mattress out from underneath.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Kyle said.

  “Why can’t we?” Her eyes were vacant again. “We can make do. We’ve been making do at home. We can make do on vacation too.”

  “No. We’ve got to find somewhere else.”

  “We’ve always stayed at the Driftwood.” A childlike petulance rose up in her voice, and she began to rock the baby. “Always. We can stay right here, like we do every summer. Can’t we, Tommy?”

  “I guess so,” he said, and he nudged the shattered television set with his foot.

  Kyle and Allie stared at each other. The breeze came in around them through the doorway and then left again.

  “We can stay here,” Allie said.

  She’s out of it, he thought. Who could blame her? Her systems were shutting down, a little tighter day after day. “All right.” He touched her hair and smoothed it away from her face. “The Driftwood it is.”

  Tommy went to find a shovel and broom, because there was a lot of glass on the linoleum-tiled floor. As Allie unpacked the groceries, the baby laid to rest on a pillow, Kyle checked the rooms on either side. Nothing sleeping in them, nothing folded up and waiting. He checked as many rooms as he could get into. There was something bad—neither skeleton nor fully fleshed, but bloated and dark as a slug—wearing a flower-print shirt and red shorts in a room nearer the pool, but Kyle could tell it was a dead human being and not one of them. A Gideon’s Bible lay close at hand, and also the broken beer bottle with which the sunlover had slashed his wrists. On a countertop, next to the stub of a burned-out candle, was a wallet, some change, and a set of car keys. Kyle didn’t look at the wallet, but he took the keys. Then he put the shower curtain over the corpse and continued his search of the Driftwood’s rooms. He walked through a breezeway, past the Driftwood’s office and to the front of the motel, and there he found a half-dozen cars in the parking lot. Across the street was Nick’s Pancake House, its windows blown in. Next to it, the Goofy Golf place and the Go-Kart track, both deserted, their concession stands shuttered and storm ravaged. Kyle began to check the cars, as gulls cried out overhead and sailed in lazy circles.

  The keys fit the ignition of a blue Toyota with a Tennessee license tag. Its engine, cranky at first, finally spat black smoke and awakened. The gas gauge’s needle was almost to the E, but there were plenty of gas stations on the Strip. Kyle shut the engine off and got out, and that was when he looked toward the Miracle Mile.

  It was a beautifully clear afternoon. He could see all the way to the amusement park, where the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster rose up, where the Sky Needle loomed over the Hang Out dance pavilion and the Super Water Slide stood next to the Beach Arcade.

  His eyes stung. He heard ghosts on the wind, calling in young voices from the dead world. He had to look away from the Miracle Mile before his heart cracked, and he walked back the way he’d come, the keys gripped in his palm.

  Tommy was at work clearing away debris. The mattress had been swept free of glass. A chair had been salvaged, and a table on which a lamp had sat. Allie had put on her swimsuit—the one with aquamarine fish on it that she’d found in a Sears store last week—and she wore sandals so her feet wouldn’t be cut. The flesh of her arms and face were blushed with Florida sun. It dawned on Kyle how much weight Allie had lost. She was as skinny as she’d been their first night together, here at the Driftwood a long, long time ago.

  “I’m ready for the beach,” she told him. “How do I look?” She turned around for him to appreciate the swimsuit.

  “Nice. Really nice.”

  “We shouldn’t waste the sunshine, should we?”

  She’d had enough sun for one day. But he smiled tightly and said, “No.”

  Beneath one of the yellow beach umbrellas, Kyle sat beside his wife while she fed Hope from a jar of Gerber’s mixed fruit. The groceries had come from a supermarket in the same area they’d found the baby, and Allie had stocked up on items she hadn’t even thought about since Tommy was an infant. Out in the Gulf, Tommy splashed and swam as the sun sparkled golden on the waves.

  “Don’t go too far!” Kyle cautioned, and Tommy waved his don’t worry wave and swam out a little farther. There was a boy for you, Kyle thought. Always testing his limits. Like me, when I was his age. Kyle lay down on the sand, his hands cupped behind his head. He had been coming to Perdido Beach since he was five years old. One of his first memories was of his father and mother dancing at the pavilion, to “Stardust” or some other old tune. He recalled a day when his father had taken him on every ride on t
he Miracle Mile: the Ferris wheel, roller coaster, mad mouse, tiltawhirl, scrambler, and octopus. He remembered his father’s square brown face and white teeth, clenched in a grin as the mad mouse shot them heavenward. They had feasted on popcorn, cotton candy, candied apples, and corn dogs. They had thrown balls at milk jugs and rings at spindles and come away empty-handed but wiser in the ways of the Miracle Mile.

  It had been one of the happiest days of his life.

  After Kyle’s mother had died of cancer eight years ago, his father had moved out to Arizona to live near his younger brother and his wife. A little over a week past, a midnight call had come from that town in Arizona, and through the static-hissing phone line the voice of Kyle’s father had said, I’m coming to visit you, son. Coming real soon. Me and your uncle Alan and aunt Patti Ann. I feel so much better now, son. My joints don’t ache anymore. Oh, it’s a wonderful life, this is! I sure do look forward to seeing my sweet grandboy . . .

  They had left their house the next morning and found another house in a town ten miles away. There were still some humans left, in the little towns. But some of them were crazy with terror, and others had made fortresses out of their homes. They put bars on the windows and slept in the daylight, surrounded by guns and barbed wire.

  Kyle sat up and watched his son throwing himself against the waves, the glittering water splashing high. He saw himself out there; he hadn’t changed so much, but the world had. The rachet gears of God’s machine had slipped, and from here on out the territory was treacherous and uncharted.

  He had decided he couldn’t live behind bars and barbed wire. He couldn’t live without the sun, or Perdido Beach in July, or without Tommy and Allie. If those things got hold of him—if they got hold of any of his family—then what would life be? A scuttling in the dark? A moan from gore-wet lips? He couldn’t think about this anymore, and he blanked his mind: a trick he’d learned, out of necessity.