He shook his head.
"Alex, listen to me. I'm gonna get Ed Dunnebecke, and we're going to take you to a hospital somewhere in a city."
Alex swallowed hard. "No," he whispered. "I won't go, you can't make me. Don't tell. Don't tell. I'm getting better."
CHAPTER 9
By June 15 it was obvious to the veriest wannabe weather tyro that an outbreak from the dimension of hell was about to descend upon Oklahoma. As a direct consequence, the state was having its largest tourist boom in ten years.
Everyone with the least trace of common sense had battened down, packed up, and/or evacuated. But the sensible evacuees did not begin to match the raw demographic numbers of people without any common sense, who had come swarming in an endless procession of trailers, chartered buses, and motorized bicycles. Oklahoma had become an instant mecca for heavy-weather freaks. And there were far more of these people than Jane had ever imagined.
After some hesitation, many of the people with sense had shamefacedly returned to ground zero, to make sure that the freaks were not stealing everything. Which, in fact, the freaks were doing, in their jolly, distracted sort of way. Anadarko, Chickashaw, Weatherford and Elk City, their cheaper hotels packed and their city parks full of squatters' tents, had turned into slobbering, good-natured beer busts, punctuated with occasional nocturnal shootings and smash-and-grab raids. The National Guard had been called out to maintain order, but in Oklahoma the National Guard was pretty much always out. The National Guard was one of the largest employers in the state, right up there with crops, livestock, timber, and Portland cement. The paramilitary Guard sold the marauders souvenir T-shirts and Sno-Kones by day, then put on their uniforms and beat the shit out of them by night.
To judge by the frantically enthusiastic local TV coverage, most everybody involved was perversely and frankly enjoying the hysterical, unbearable edge of weather tension. The sky was canary yellow and full of dust, and great fearsome sheets of dry heat lightning crackled all evening, and everything smelled of filth and sweat and ozone, and the people were actively savoring this situation. The drought had simply gone on too long. The people of Tornado Alley had suffered far too much already. They had gone far past fear. They had even gone past grim resignation. By now, the poor bastards were deep into convulsively ironical black humor.
The people trickling in from all over America-including, of course, Mexico and Canada-were a far different crowd of wannabes than the standard tornado chasers. The standard tornado freak tended to be, at heart, a rather bookish, owlish sort, carefully reading the latest netcasts and polishing his digital binoculars so he could jump out the door and frantically pursue a brief, elusive phenomenon that usually lasted bare minutes.
But the current heavy-weather crowd was a different scene entirely, not the weather people Jane was used to, not the ones she had expected. Even though they were in the heart of the continent and long kilometers from any shore, they were much more like your basic modern hurricane crowd.
Heavy-weather freaks came in a lot of sociological varieties. First, there were a certain number of people who genuinely didn't give a damn about living. People in despair, people actively hunting their own destruction. The overtly suicidal, though a real factor and kind of the heart-and-soul of the phenomenon, were a very small minority. Most of these mournful black-clad Hamlets would suddenly rediscover a strong taste for survival once the wind outside hit a solid, throbbing roar.
Second, and far more numerous, were the rank thrill freaks, the overtanned jocks and precancerous muscular surfer-dude types. It was amazing how few of these reckless idiots would be killed or maimed, by even the worst storms. They usually sported aqualungs and windsurflng smart boards, with which to hunt the Big Wave, the Really Big Wave, the Insanely Big Wave. No surf in Oklahoma, though, so, with the grotesque ingenuity of a leisure industry far gone into deep psychosis, they had brought dozens of mean-ass little diamond-hubbed "wind schooners," sail-powered vehicles so inherently unpredictable that even their onboard computer navigation acted crazy. And yet the sons of bitches who rode the things seemed to bear a charmed life. They were as hard to kill as cockroaches.
Then there were the largest group, the variant people who simply admired and doted on storms. Most of them didn't hack storms. Sometimes they took photos or videos, but they had no intellectual or professional interest. They were simply storm devotees. Some of them were deeply religious. Some wrote really bad net-poetry. Some few of them were very private people, with tattoos and chains and scab art, who would take hallucinogens and/or hold deliberate orgies in bunkers at the height of the troubles. They all tended to have a trademark look of vacant sincerity, and odd fixations in dress and diet.
Fourth, thieves. People on the lookout for the main chance. Looters, black marketeers, rip-off people. Structure-hit people too. Not tremendous numbers, not whole marauding armies of them, but plenty to worry about. They tended to leave mysterious chalk-mark symbols wherever they went, and to share mulligatawny stew in vacant buildings.
And last-the group rising up the charts, and the group that Jane found, basically, by far the least explicable, the creepiest, and the most portentous-evacuation freaks.
People who flourished just after storms. People who liked to dwell in evacuation camps. Perhaps they'd grown up in such a camp during the State of Emergency, and always perversely missed the experience afterward. Or maybe they just enjoyed that feeling of intense, slightly hallucinatory human community that always sprang up in the aftermath of a major natural disaster. Or maybe they just needed disaster to really live, because having grown up under the crushing weight of heavy weather, they had never possessed any real life.
If you had no strong identity of your own, then you could become anyone and everyone, inside an evacuation camp. The annihilation of a town or suburb broke down all barriers of class, status, and experience, and put everyone into the same paper suit. Some people-and growing numbers of them, apparently-actively fed on that situation. They were a new class of human being, something past charlatan, something past fraudster or hustler, something without real precedent, something past history, something past identity. Sometimes-a lot of times-the evacuation freak would be the heart and soul of the local recovery effort, a manic, pink-checked person always cheerful, with a smile for everybody, always ready to console the bereaved, bathe the wounded, play endless games of cot-side charades with the grateful crippled child. Often they passed themselves off as pastors or medical workers or social counselors or minor-league feds of some kind, and they would get away with it too, because no one was checking papers in the horror and pain and confusion.
They would stay as long as they dared, and eat the government chow and wear the paper suits and claim vaguely to be from "somewhere around." Oddly, evacuation freaks were almost always harmless, at least in a physical sense. They didn't steal, they didn't rob, they didn't kill or structure-hit. Some of them were too dazed and confused to do much of anything but sit and eat and smile, but quite often they would work with literally selfless dedication, and inspire the people around them, and the people would look up to them, and admire them, and trust them implicitly, and depend on these hollow people as a community pillar of strength. Evacuation freaks were both men and women. What they were doing was not exactly criminal, and even when caught and scolded or punished for it, they never seemed able to stop. They would just drift to some fresh hell in another state, and rend their garments and cover themselves with mud, and then stagger into camp, faking distress.