Acts of Nature

battle. The kid had either been too cocky or was just plain stupid. Because I had submissively raised my hands to him, he’d taken the easy offer and bound them in front of me instead of making me roll over and taping them behind my back.
    “An’ Wayne!” Buck said, snapping orders to the other one and reaching down to pick up a package sheathed in oilskin that they’d brought in with the cooler. He unwrapped a gleaming over-and-under shotgun and tossed it three feet into Wayne’s surprised hands. “You got first watch.”

TWENTY-FOUR
    When the traffic lights are lying on the ground, you consider the intersections as four-way stops, and then steer around the dented and broken yellow thing in the road, and then avoid the power lines still attached to it if possible. It’s one of those rules you learn in South Florida if you’ve been here for a few hurricanes.
    As Harmon made his way to the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at dawn, he wondered why folks couldn’t figure that out. Do all transplanted New Yorkers just figure, “What the fuck, I’ll just plow right on through and everybody else can look out for me because only the rude and pushy survive in this world”?
    Electricity was still a memory two days after Simone rolled through. Even the concrete poles were leaning like a team of tug-of-war combatants, pulling lines that had yet to snap. Many of their wooden brothers had lost it at the waist, sheared off and splintered at their middle, broken marionettes tangled in their own string. City and county road crews had shoved most of the large branches and debris off to the side of the major highways, but any side street was a maze like those games the kids used to draw while they waited for food at Denny’s: get the farmer to market without being stopped!
    Harmon had already steered around a hundred broken roof tiles lying in the streets of his own neighborhood, had driven up into some guy’s yard to get around a forty-foot ficus tree that completely spanned two-lane Royal Palm Drive, and slipped between the crossing arms at the FEC railroad tracks at Dixie Highway, which were halfway down, their ends sheared off but still waving in the wind.
    He stopped again at the intersection of Commercial and Powerline Roads and watched the headlamps of six vehicles slide through, cutting him out of his turn until he was forced to inch out and physically stop cross traffic before they’d defer to him.
    “Go back to Brooklyn,” he whispered under his breath.
    When he finally got to the airfield, the early sunrise was backlighting a dozen lumps of dark plane wreckage, twisted angles and barely discernible fin shapes. He shook his head at the number of tumbled aircraft that had been strapped down out on the tarmac for lack of an indoor hangar to park them. Some appeared to have simply folded in on themselves, fuselages crushed in the middle like broken spines. Others sat upright but their wings were missing, picked off and discarded like a mean kid might do to a giant dragonfly. There was little activity on the south side of the airfield so Harmon broke all normal driving rules and made a beeline across the tarmac to the Fleet Company hangar. He could see Squires’s Jeep sitting next to the open bay doors, and before he got to park, his partner and another big man appeared, moving slowly out of the huge building and putting their backs into the task of wheeling a helicopter onto the airfield. Harmon pulled up next to the black Wrangler and sorted through his ops bag; let them do the heavy work, he wasn’t in the mood for heavy work today.
    Again he checked off the list in his head as he touched each item in his bag. He stopped at the frequency transmitter. He’d used them before to electronically restart the power systems on ocean oil rigs. You needed lights to land and the frequency could switch them on and unlock doors before you even touched down. And then his fingers settled on the slick skin of a brick of incendiary C-4 explosive.
    This was not standard equipment in the states and the order to take it along was unnerving to Harmon. In domestic work he and Squires were a security team, not a demolition unit. Yeah, they might have had to muscle some rig workers in the past. And yeah, they did have to entice the manager of one gas operation to confess to his paper swindling with the help of a gun muzzle pressed to his forehead. But the idea of blowing up and melting infrastructure on home soil was a new