It was dark outside the church, too-no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.
“No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”
“Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”
“Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”
“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan-he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”
“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.
Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette. . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”
If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.
* * *
“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”
When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please. Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little bit.
He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”
That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall.
Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.
Which didn’t make him wrong. The rivers were the lowest parts of their big back yards, too. They’d flooded last year from all the volcanic crud rain and melting snow and wind dumped into them. Now they were doing it again, still more crud going into riverbeds that hadn’t yet got rid of everything from the year before. And so the rivers-including the Mississippi itself, which was after all the ultimate channel for half a continent’s worth of gunk-were spilling over their banks and spreading out across the countryside.
It wasn’t dramatic, the way the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan had been. There weren’t huge, speeding walls of water smashing everything in their path. But in the end, how much difference did that make? Whether you went under with a smash or merely a dispirited glub, under you went.
“Evacuation procedures are likely to become necessary for implementation in the nearly immediate future,” the flunky with the bullhorn bellowed. Not just an evacuation, mind you, but evacuation procedures. That made it official, to say nothing of officious. “Gather your belongings and prepare to be in compliance with all instructional directives. National Guard personnel will assist in ensuring prompt satisfaction of requirements.”
They’ll shoot you if you don’t do what we tell you. They would, too. The National Guard had opened fire in the camp several times. Like Vanessa, lots of refugees were armed, but not many had assault rifles or body armor or military discipline. The Guard outclassed them.
“What the fuck they gonna do to us now?” grumbled a middle-aged black man a couple of tiers of bunks over from Vanessa.
“Waddaya think, Jack?” a woman said in tones that came from Long Island, or possibly the Jersey shore. “They’re gonna do whatever they damn well wanna.”
And that was about the size of it. Vanessa hoped the waters would close over Micah Husak. She hoped crawdads and sticklebacks and little fish whose names she didn’t even know would pick out his dead eyes and nibble the rotting flesh off his toes-and off his dick. All the while, she understood it was a hopeless hope. That kind of shit didn’t happen to the people who ran camps. It happened to the people who wound up stuck in them.
Gathering her belongings didn’t take long. Everything she owned fit in her purse and in a dark green garbage bag. That seemed fitting enough and then some, because most of what she owned was garbage.
Off in the distance, an M16 barked: a quick, professional three-round burst. Whoever’d been giving some Guardsman grief would just have discovered he’d made his last dumbass mistake. Or maybe he was too high on crank even to notice he was dead. Methamphetamines and weed fired people up and mellowed them out all over the camp.
The yahoo with the bullhorn ordered the people in the tent next to Vanessa’s out to comply with his instructional directives. The middle-aged black guy moaned. “I didn’t used to think there was no place worse’n this,” he said. “But what you want to bet they went and found one?”
“Made one,” Vanessa corrected. The difference sounded tiny, but seemed profound to her.
Then, half an hour later, the bell-or the bullhorn-tolled for them. “Tent 27B inmates, assemble outside the entrance in a single-file line,” the guy with it boomed. Vanessa wondered if he would lead them to the Department of Redundancy Department. She didn’t make the joke. She didn’t think anyone else in good old Tent 27B would get it. Too bad, but there you were. And here she was.
Nervous-looking Guardsmen held their rifles in positions from which they could open up in a hurry. There were a lot of them. How much trouble had they had evacuating other great big tents? Quite a bit, by all the signs.
“Follow me toward the transportation that will transport you to the new provisional facilities,” Bullhorn Boy continued. “Obey all commands immediately.” That was so plain, it could only mean Don’t screw with me-or else.
Off they went, at a retarded shuffle, garbage sacks slung over their shoulders. Up ahead, people were slowly filing onto buses ancient enough to have carried kids back in the days when Southern schools were still segregated.
Vanessa made up her mind right there that she didn’t want to get transported to any provisional facility. Camp Constitution was bad. A half-assed version would only be worse. They said it couldn’t be done, but as often as not they didn’t know what they were talking about. This looked like one of those times.
Off to one side stood a much shorter row of newer, less decrepit buses. The people getting into those also seemed newer and less decrepit than the ones boarding the wrecks toward which Vanessa was heading. Pointing at the newer buses, she asked one of the Guardsmen, “What’s up with those?”
He was a squarely built, blocky fellow with beard stubble so dark and thick he probably had to shave twice a day. “Oh, those are for the reclamation parties,” he answered.
“Huh?” Vanessa said brilliantly.
“Reclamation parties,” the Guardsman repeated. “You know, to go into the country the eruption fucked over and scavenge stuff from it and start cleaning it up so it’s, like, worth something again.”
“How do I get on one of those buses?” Vanessa asked. If you were cleaning up the countryside, you weren’t living in a camp. Not living in a camp seemed the most wonderful thing in the world to her, the way El Dorado must have to the conquistadors.