“Tracy, you…”
“So thank you, Henry. Thank you for saving my life.” Tracy interrupted. “There are four other people in wheelchairs in the entire fleet, and three of them are soldiers who were wounded in the line of duty. Do you know how many blind people we have?”
“How many?” Henry knew Tracy well enough to see that she was retreating into the comfort and safety of numbers and statistics during an emotional moment.
“Two,” Tracy said. “There are five deaf people. If you generously guess that there are twice as many disabled in the civilian fleet that means there are fifteen cripples, six blind people, and fifteen deaf people left in the entire West Coast. That’s more than a 99.999 percent mortality rate.”
“You saved your own life, Tracy.” Henry replied.
“No…”
“No, you did…” It was Henry’s turn to interrupt. “All this selecting who joins the fleet and who doesn’t is pretty awful business. It’s unconscionable that we think of people in terms of assets and liabilities, instead of actual people… children.”
“But we have to…” Tracy started.
“You are absolutely right, Tracy. It sucks, but we have to select people with skills and qualities that are going to give us the absolute best chance to rebuild civilization. If you’re a bright-eyed teenager who can’t do much else but play the guitar, the sad facts are that you’re worth less to civilization right now than a seventy-year-old farmer is. Farmer gets to come and teenager has to stay, fend for himself, and stands a really strong chance of joining the walking dead before farmer has a chance to plant his first seed in the ground… if he ever even gets that chance. That’s a terrible, terrible reality.”
Tracy nodded in agreement.
“You saved yourself because you are valuable.” Henry continued, knowing that a cold clinical analysis of Tracy would appeal to her practical nature. “You are my assistant, but your knowledge and background makes you one of the keys to our survival. It’s not just that you’ve saved thousands of lives already. It’s that you will continue to save lives in the future. You will be a direct contributor to the survival of the human race. You did that, not me.”
Tracy clenched her jaw and nodded again.
“How many people do we have left counting the civilian fleet?” Henry asked.
“The reports are still coming in, but we’re around thirty thousand.” Tracy turned back to her computer. “Thirty thousand, six hundred…”
“If three thousand of those people, just three thousand, survived because of your work on DDC policy, screening, asset management, or convoy logistics… then you are responsible for saving ten percent of the entire fleet.” Henry smiled as he made his point. While Tracy might low-ball her estimates at three-thousand lives saved, she was probably responsible for saving closer to twenty thousand lives in the fleet alone. Furthermore, her work had helped to protect many civilians trapped on land. Their chances were slim, but many were still alive due in large part to her foresight.
The two sat silently reading their reports until Tracy broke the silence again, “How many are you responsible for then?”
“Um…” Henry smiled. Tracy was laying a trap. She would take this opportunity to lecture him on safety. Being who he was, he would see the logic in her advice, but he would also ignore it. “A handful, I guess.”
“Henry, you deal with facts every day to guide assessments that you pass on to the Admiral. If your professional assessment of the number of lives that you’ve saved is merely a ‘handful’, my professional assessment is that your judgment is in serious question, and you may not be fit to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.” Tracy lectured. “This fleet, the DDCs, the convoys… they all exist because of you. Nearly every person living on the west coast is alive today because of you. Evacuation operations on the east coast are modeled after recommendations made by you. Take all that and add to it the fact that you will be responsible for designing the strategy that re-establishes civilization in North America…” She trailed off.
“I suppose…” Henry began.
“Henry, you are the most important and influential person in the fleet… possibly the world! You shouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks in triage. You should have Secret Service bodyguards posted around you 24/7.” Tracy tried to put Henry’s work in perspective. She and Henry were crafting the intellectual building blocks that not only kept thousands of people alive, but also gave those people the potential for a future.
“There aren’t enough guards where we need them.” Henry tried to deflect Tracy’s lecture.
“You can’t put yourself in dangerous situations, Henry. I’m not going to tell your wife you died doing something stupid.” Tracy made her point.
Henry didn’t know what to say. He never really thought of himself as particularly influential or important. He had done well in school, had been a good doctor, and had married the love of his life. When he transitioned out of medicine into the Department of Health and Human Services, he saw it as an opportunity to help a larger group of people. However, being dubbed ‘the most important person in the world’ seemed like a stretch.
“No, Admiral McMillan is the most important person in the fleet. He should have guards. There’s probably someone like him in Europe and Asia, and maybe Africa. Guys like me aren’t nearly as important.” Henry countered.
“Guys like you tell guys like Admiral McMillan what to do. Guys like the Admiral are important, but guys like you make it so guys like McMillan have something to work toward,” Tracy affirmed.
“Ah, but people like you, tell people like me, what to tell people like McMillan to do.” Henry smiled back.
Tracy waved him away and turned back to her laptop. Stillness fell over the room for a bit as Henry’s mind dove back into Tracy’s reports: food shortages, security problems, supply losses. There was never any good news in a report. All Henry could do was manage everything the best that he could.
“The situation is pretty fucked up out there, isn’t it?” Tracy broke the silence.
“Yeah.”
“You think it’s time to pull out? Stop the convoys? Let the DDCs fend for themselves?” Tracy asked, still staring at her laptop.
Henry chewed his lip before he responded. “There are a lot of people still trapped inside the DDCs. We told them to go there. We said that they were going somewhere safe. We’d be abandoning thousands of people… What’s your data say?”
Tracy had anticipated Henry’s question and turned her laptop toward Henry. The screen displayed a line graph. The green line was roughly smooth with a gentle downward slope. “This is the aggregate food supplies within the fleet — including whatever the convoys bring in and whatever we’re able to fish out of the ocean. Provided the Mexican military hasn’t destroyed or stolen any of our supplies, this graph is current up to yesterday.”
“How long do we have?” Henry drank in the data. His keen mind merged numbers to practical realities and projected outcomes weeks in advance. He already knew what Tracy’s conclusion would be, but wanted to hear her confirm it.
Tracy pressed a button on her computer. A red line appeared beneath the green line. It too was roughly smooth, but was flat in contrast to the line above it. “This represents the amount of food we need to feed thirty-thousand hungry mouths: Twenty-six tons of food every day. That is almost two hundred tons of food in one week, Henry. Two hundred tons.”
“How long?” Henry repeated the question.
“We have about six months. Maybe less, unless the convoys are bringing in twenty-six tons of food along with all the refugees, we’re wasting time. We have to start moving on our game plan, or we won’t have to worry about the undead devouring us… we’ll start devouring each other.” Tracy drove her point home. “Every hour, more than a ton of food vanishes from the fleet.”