Termination Shock

Houston

Willem and Jules made their way up into New Orleans and turned west on Interstate 10. Now they were running parallel to the track of the hurricane. For a few hours, the drive went more or less as the nav system had envisioned it. Then Willem almost got them killed when he failed to notice stopped traffic on the highway ahead until it was nearly too late and had to stand on the brakes and make a controlled diversion onto the shoulder.

They swapped drivers at that point. Technically Jules wasn’t supposed to drive this thing. But Willem reckoned that working something out with the rental company would be easy compared to the complications of the jet crash. Anyway, it was less risky than his continuing to drive. He leaned the passenger seat back and fell asleep to the faint accompaniment of country music from the truck’s radio.

When he woke up, it was shortly before daybreak. Jules had been driving through the night in stop-and-go traffic. He had long since exited the jam-packed interstate and was feeling his way across southeast Texas on two-lane roads, following suggestions texted to him by the Boskeys’ swarm of cars, trucks, RVs, and watercraft.

It took them most of the day to circumvent Greater Houston and zero in on the caravan, which had stopped near a state park along the Brazos about seventy miles west of Houston. Here the entire group meant to form up, preparing to make its push into the flooded city at first light. The hurricane had devolved into a tropical depression that had squatted over the countryside south of Houston for a couple of days and dumped close to a meter of rain on it. The Brazos watershed, which lay mostly to the north, had escaped the brunt of this, but still the river was running high.

Their first contact was with Rufus, ranging ahead of the main body, operating as usual out of his truck and trailer rig. They rendezvoused with him in a small town of old limestone buildings and followed him down a country road for some miles. He pulled over to the side of a road just short of the goal and used his drone to reconnoiter the state park. According to online maps, several roads looped through the sparsely wooded property, connecting a series of campgrounds. In normal times they might have had some chance of claiming a site there. This year, relay refugees had clogged the place up even before hundreds of thousands of hurricane evacuees had come flooding westward along Interstate 10. It had become what in other contexts would be called a shantytown. For every official campsite shown on the map, there must have been a hundred RVs, cars, and tents. They’d spilled out far beyond the simple network of park roads and colonized green space between it and the right or south bank of the Brazos. The thin strip of public land along its north bank looked from a distance like a chalk line; it was white with pleasure craft that must have come upriver from the city. Farther north, on private farmland, more clusters of RVs and tents had found purchase.

Wheeled vehicles could circumvent all that. The boats, however, had no choice but to pass right through the middle. The only question was where they might be able to pull them up on a bank and rendezvous with the land vehicles. Rufus solved that problem by making contact with one of those north bank landowners. They had set up roadblocks at the entrances to their property and were charging evacuees a fee to come in and set up camp. It was a hefty fee, but by now Rufus and other members of the caravan had got used to spending freely from the brick of emergency cash that Willem had brought with him. He had entrusted most of it to Amelia during his side trip, but kept more than enough to satisfy the rancher. So money changed hands, and, as dusk fell, the fleets of wheeled and water vehicles came together for one last time on the north bank of the river. This put them downstream of most of the camps, as they could tell just from the smell of the water. Behind them were the days when they could cool themselves off by splashing river water on their garments or—disgusting thought—jumping in and being towed behind a boat.