Andrea Sanchez had never seen anything like this. On June 10, the thermometer hit 115 degrees, and she and her partner were called away from the Mall because folks all over the city were smelling the bodies. Bagging these corpses was dreadful work. It wasn’t like a gunshot wound, an overdose, or a suicide. People cooked and then they melted. She had to cut the chain to get into one boiling apartment. The smell was so foul she fought to keep her gorge down. She found Kyenna Blake’s body covered in dark flies and bleach-white maggots. The morgue was overflowing, and the county medical examiner had to call in refrigerated trucks to store the dead. The line of ambulances wrapped around the block. “Just consider yourself blessed,” she told her fellow officers working back at the Mall, “that you’re part of that embarrassment instead of this nightmare.”
From her apartment in New York, Rekia Reynolds worked A Fierce Blue Fire’s mutual aid network, trying to dispatch as many members as she could to check on the elderly and disabled in the neighborhoods where FBF operated Outposts. She worked sixteen hours a day coordinating this complex operation, but FBF’s ranks had been pilfered and degraded. In the past few years, folks had left because of PRIRA, because the organization was no longer viewed as pure. Then many of its members had joined the occupation of D.C., where they themselves now risked succumbing to heatstroke. Rekia’s anger at her fiancé was only eclipsed by her blinding fury at Kate Morris. When they first met, Rekia had been the revolutionary, the one who wanted to storm the capital. Now she was left with the broken carapace of their organization, watching society’s marginalized, mostly the Black and brown, die in real time because Kate had gutted their resources for her own vainglory. She read about Kyenna Blake in the Post and knew that if this had happened in 2032, they would have had volunteers knocking on her door to get her to a cooling center. Rekia’s engagement ring was gone, and she’d smashed Tom’s VR system against the hardwood and left its electronic guts lying on the floor of his office.
In cities across the country, power grids and substations began to buckle. In Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Louisville, Memphis, Atlanta, the blackouts and brownouts crippled infrastructure. Cooling stations lost power, AC units were worthless, mobile phone networks stopped working, and people were stranded in their homes. No VR, TV, lights, or refrigerators. Crack open the elevator doors of a high-rise and find two parents and three children cooked to death inside after only a few hours. Sky-high ozone and humidity. A heat index across the South of 133 degrees. A human body can only take two days of uninterrupted exposure to such temperatures. Electrolytes go haywire, exhaustion, respiratory issues, and renal failure follow. Hospital beds were overrun like nothing since Covid-19. Ambulances were booked solid, emergency response times up to four hours. Many hospitals had to close their doors to new admissions, all the beds taken. It’s called bypass status, and a father can show up with a child who has a body temperature of 105 and they tell that man, “Sorry, sir, try across town.”
The headlines flipped. DEATH TOLL SKYROCKETS; SHOCKING HEAT KILLS HUNDREDS; HOMICIDES SPIKE WITH THERMOMETER; HEAT STORM HAS NO END IN SIGHT. Folks illegally opening fire hydrants on city streets to cool down, and suddenly water pressure vanishes for the whole neighborhood. Add this to water pump failures during the blackouts, and suddenly taps are dry. Multiple airports shut down as the runways melted, grinding the July travel season to a halt, and gouging a new hole in a stalling economy. The temperatures cracked roads, and highways were lined with broken-down cars. Potter’s fields were overwhelmed, and city governments worked quickly on the PR side of their mass-graves situation. Prisons and detention centers could get away with anything, but one leaked memo, delivered to the Arpaio Illegal Immigrant Detention Facility in Arizona, urged wardens to use the heat to “clear capacity” and “reduce inmate numbers.”
Victor Love’s response to these dual emergencies of open revolt in the nation’s capital and a murderous heat wave was a rare press conference where he took only five questions. He praised first responders and chided people for not checking on their relatives. This was not met with a lot of satisfaction. Then there was The Pastor taking to his VR worlde to claim he had predicted this too.
“I prophesied fire, I prophesied flood, I told you God would send heat to punish this country. The Bible also predicts there will be a breakdown of the family unit, and here we are with a faggot sodomizing another man in the White House. It predicts more crime, and here we are with a takeover of our great nation’s capital. It predicts apathy toward Christians, and here we are with scientists and liberals moaning about your hamburger or your car instead of acknowledging the staggering signs that Christ already walks the earth at the End of Days.”
President Love was addicted to right-wing media, which spewed nonstop invective about his failed presidency, his incompetence, his cowardice for failing to put down an insurrection that had sacked the Capitol while he hid at Camp David and did nothing. News stories emerged claiming a police officer was dead at the hands of protestors, beaten to death during the attempt to restore order, they said. The organizing committee worked tirelessly to combat the narrative, but facts were dismissed. There were other stories, of course, the usual onslaught of misinformation blasted across the media landscape: Women raped in their tents, captured police officers and soldiers being tortured and executed, precious documents at the Library of Congress soiled and shredded, the sex-crazed whore arranging orgies in the Senate Chamber to “initiate” children. Look at what Kate Morris’s loose values had caused. Meanwhile, the death toll ticked up day by day, the counting of dead Americans still a highly popular national pastime, and eventually twenty-two thousand deaths would be attributed to these weeks of record temperatures and humidity.
Authorities offered a deal to the occupiers: cooling centers, bottled water, and amnesty waited for those who walked away. Many had no choice but to take them up on this offer. Individuals were carried to the checkpoints to be taken to nearby hospitals where they were given intravenous fluids or dumped in tubs of ice.
Beyond the thousands of army, police, and security personnel, beyond the drones and helicopters practically parked in the clouds, the rotors forming a permanent background hum, the city was arid and eerie. Trash blew like tumbleweeds along abandoned streets. Drought tightened the dirt, and a veil of orange dust, stamped alive by the feet of thousands, hung over the Mall. When the sun fled, no electricity for miles, the city fell into bottomless night. With all light extinguished, a storm of sailing stars became visible, the glow of the Milky Way. The occupiers huddled in a cinched, fearless nexus radiating out from the Mall. Everyone with children had left, taking advantage of the amnesty while they could. The bouncy castle lay in tattered ribbons, tangled with the razor wire of the toppled fence. The smell grew worse than ever. Day by day, the occupation dwindled as more people took the government’s deal. They were exhausted, dirty, hungry, ill, and yes, afraid. The interminable heat was like wearing a suit of death. So they walked to the checkpoints, put their hands on their heads as instructed, and were allowed to leave—just as soon as they’d been fingerprinted, photographed, cheek-swabbed, and catalogued in a growing database.