Serge shook his head and opened the trunk. “It will take a few days for workers to clear the roads, so we’ll be camping until then. Help me with this gear.”
They pitched a tent with sleeping bags behind the row of battered cabins. A small campfire began to glow in a little pit surrounded by rocks. Bottled water and beer cans bobbed in the melted ice of a cooler. Serge returned to the car for a last item and brought it back to the fire.
“What’s that thing?” asked Coleman.
“The beginning of my latest science project.” Serge sat down with a clear plastic storage bin in his lap. He opened his pocketknife again and poked a six-inch grid of tiny holes on the end. Then he taped a small, battery-powered fan over it. Then another grid on the opposite end. “This project has an extremely long gestation, and I don’t know when it’ll come into play, so we might as well use this downtime to get a head start.”
Serge grabbed a soggy package from the cooler. He took the lid off the bin and began evenly arranging the bag’s contents across the bottom.
“Bacon?” asked Coleman.
“Your universal food group.”
“It’s the only thing that goes great with everything,” said Coleman. “Eggs, pickles, ice cream, Twinkies, other bacon. It’s just impossible to go wrong.”
“You can with this pack. It seriously spoiled overnight.” Serge held out a slimy, uncooked strip. “Unless you dig trichinosis.”
“I’ll stick to beer,” said Coleman. “But why are you putting it in that bin?”
“Read it in a medical journal,” Serge said. “In our advanced world of modern medicine, sometimes the best treatment is still low-tech.”
“Treatment for what?”
“I’m not treating anything, just using the principle for my experiment,” said Serge. “All will be revealed in due time.”
Serge finished his task and picked up the bin. He walked over to the edge of the woods, setting it down behind his car . . .
Two Days Later
Serge listened to the morning news on his emergency radio. He reached inside their small dome tent and began shaking Coleman to no avail. “Come on, wake up! The road’s clear. It’s time to go.”
Serge shook harder and harder until he heard primitive groans. Then Coleman woke up all at once. He had somehow managed to turn himself around in his sleeping bag during the night.
“Help! Help! Something’s got me again.”
“It’s just your sleeping bag. Hold still.”
But Coleman had the reasoning ability of someone drowning. “Help! Help!” He thrashed around like a giant caterpillar trying to molt. Then he jumped up and dislodged the tent’s poles, and soon he was wrapped up in that, too, rolling left and right.
Serge watched without expression until his pal wore himself out. A piled entanglement of nylon heaved as he panted.
“You finished?” asked Serge. “Because the tent isn’t completely wrecked yet.”
“Just get me out of this.”
Serge extricated his friend and they began breaking camp. When everything was stowed in the car, Serge walked over to his science project. “Well, I’ll be. It worked.” He sealed the lid on the storage bin, started the battery-powered fan and stuck the whole business in the back seat.
A gold 1969 Plymouth Satellite emerged from the trees and drove away from the Old Wooden Bridge Fishing Camp. Soon, they were almost out of the Lower Keys, approaching the bridge to Bahia Honda. The debris piles that had been pushed aside by heavy equipment appeared like small mountain ranges down each side of the highway.
“Discussion time. Where were we?”
“When?” asked Coleman.
“I don’t know. The hurricane destroyed our train of thought,” said Serge. “Which is a plus because a train of thought is just another one of society’s cages.”
“Why don’t we talk about society?” asked Coleman. “Your thoughts?”
“These are dark times.” Serge tapped fingers on the steering wheel. “The decline of society can be boiled down to the culture of airline flights.”
“I’ve seen the videos on the Internet.”
“You take a couple hundred people from our savagely polarized nation, cram them cheek by jowl in a metal tube and send them up to altitudes where there’s no oxygen. Then people read the headlines: ‘Wow, I didn’t see that coming,’” said Serge. “Plane travel used to be glamorous, people getting dressed up, wearing hats. But now it’s devolved into a subway in the sky, cursing, shoving, public urination, removing socks from smelly feet.”
Coleman popped a can of Schlitz. “Preach.”
“It starts before you’re even off the ground,” said Serge. “Especially if you’re in one of those planes where the coach passengers have to walk through first class to get to their seats. It trends Darwin in a serious hurry. First-class passengers watch the coach people walking past them in the aisle and they’re like, ‘Yeah, you lazy losers, this is what you get for being assholes: inadequate legroom.’ . . . Simultaneously, all the coach passengers are checking out the elite in their giant, comfy seats: ‘That one clearly doesn’t deserve to be up here.’ ‘What has this guy ever brought to the table?’ ‘There’s another cosmic mistake of seating assignment.’ ‘Don’t even get me started on this prick.’ . . . Then on the next flight, for whatever reason, some of the first-class people have to fly coach and vice versa, and they all immediately switch teams: ‘God, I hate those fuckers.’”
“Then the plane takes off and the fun really begins,” said Coleman.
“Something about flying makes people lose their freaking minds,” said Serge. “And I’m not talking about getting grumpy over the food or a kid kicking the back of your seat. I recently spoke with some flight attendants, and the true stories of psychotic breaks at thirty thousand feet would send you screaming for Amtrak. They said the public would be amazed at the number of people who freak out and try to open the doors.”
“It’s a senseless crime,” said Coleman.
“That’s why flight crews have to carry so many handcuffs nowadays,” said Serge. “One woman was refused alcohol, so she drank liquid soap and bit a stewardess. Two groups of football fans had a brawl from rows seventeen to twenty-eight. During night flights, passengers ask for blankets and then leave spent condoms in seat pockets. Guys take off their shirts, try to light cigarettes, sleep on the floor.”
“Sounds like every traffic intersection in Florida.”
“And I swear this one’s true: Another dude jumped up on the serving cart, dropped his pants and took a dump in the peanut basket. I think you lose frequent flier points for that one.”
“It’s just not right,” said Coleman, pointing out the window at a jet overhead. “There’s one now.”
“Take a pass on the peanuts.”
They were four miles into the Seven Mile Bridge. “Oh man!” said Serge. “Irma whacked Pigeon Key!”
“What’s that?”
“Coleman, you’ve asked the same question the last fifty times we’ve driven over this bridge!”