“Church lot ’bout a mile away. Too far in this muck.”
His boots and the cuffs of his pant legs were soaked, and he squeaked with each step. He kicked some of the mud onto the white linoleum. When she’d seen him last summer, he’d worn one of his disguises: false beard, eyebrows, salt-and-pepper wig. Without it he looked like a newborn mouse. After he got the slicker off, they embraced. They sat at the kitchen table. He’d brought her McDonald’s coffee.
“Any trouble?” she asked him.
“Had my face scanned at a tollbooth but nothing I wasn’t ready for.” He held aloft a medical mask, still in vogue enough after all these years. He slid her a slip of paper with a Tennessee address. “Van’s here. I talked to our operator today. It’s stripped clean. No VIN, and our mechanic swapped out every part with a CVIN number. Plates go to a false identity. Should be a nightmare to ID. Pickup spot’s close to where you’re going but not too close. Drive the limit the whole way.”
“Trust me, I’ve done scarier.”
The kitchen hummed with the cheap white fluorescence and dead drift silence of a hollow house. She worried about drones watching from overhead, but if she worried about that, she’d also have to worry about long-distance microphones or the cameras that could scan for biometric data or aerial spycraft that looked and moved just like birds or even houseflies. There was only so much paranoia one could accommodate.
He blinked several times, all that old pink skin pinching around his eyes. He pointed to the shoe box she’d left on the counter. “You do some shopping?”
ALLEN Hoped Shane was taking care of herself. She looked tired and raw. Eating poorly and not sleeping enough. They discussed the Second Cell. They discussed Allen’s recruiters, his network of mostly college professors and low-level activists working aboveground, people he could trust but who kept themselves absolutely separate from the operations, who knew nothing except how to spot those either dedicated to the cause or those they could use for their ends. The recruiters felt out potential subjects and alerted Allen (THE HANDLER, as he liked to think of himself in Ocean’s Eleven font). Shane made no secret she disliked how long this all took. Building this infrastructure took precious years the planet didn’t have, but they needed impenetrable protections against infiltrators and informants. Paranoia was survival. They couldn’t skimp on these measures. Allen was the oldest of the Principals, their core five, and often felt a paternal responsibility, especially to Shane. Sometimes he used their code just to check in on her. Once, he’d driven all the way to Missouri to meet her for a day and let her vent for a bit.
“No. I found a bird. Fell right out of the sky. Not ominous at all, right?”
Allen heaved his considerable girth from the chair and went for a look. “Guess you didn’t find her soon enough.”
“Stopping at a vet seemed ill-advised. I was going to see if you’d adopt her.”
Allen’s hand remained in the box, carefully turning the bird back and forth. “Yeah, except I’m not sure the farm can accommodate one more rescue animal. Emmy and the kids have basically adopted every Hard Times critter in western South Carolina— Smokes! You know what this sucker is?”
“Smokes,” Shane repeated, snorting a laugh.
“They’re tough to ID, but I’m pretty sure this is a blackpoll warbler.”
“Yeah?”
“Shame. They’re a songbird with a miracle migration. All the way from New England to Venezuela, sometimes Colombia.” He looked at her knowingly, as if she and this bird were therefore related. He continued to stare into the box, puzzled. “She should be well south of here by now, though.” He’d always be more amicable yeoman professor than Radical, and that was why she trusted him. Sometimes, she thought it was only these small doses of his presence that made her secret life bearable. He scraped the van key across the table to her and sighed. “I should get going. The op drops the van, drops the key to me, I give the key to you, you pick up the van—I mean, at some point we gotta ask if all this is necessary.”
“Firewalls, Allen. The point is to keep our movements and connections convoluted. You think I like hauling thousands of miles from Kansas to New England to Tennessee?”
But the truth was, her urgency to get home often did battle with an itch to never go back.
“Speaking of Kansas…” He raised the flesh where his eyebrows once lived. “You seen pictures of this dust storm yet?”
She held up her palms. “Is that a bluff check? I haven’t touched anything networked since I left.”
“Started in northern Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle and been moving east. My guess is you might get a good look-see on your way home.”
Allen donned his slicker and set off, back through the dreary woods to the church lot. Shane watched the low fog close around him until it swallowed his figure, and there was only the dwindling sound of his boots slogging across the mud.
The rain finally let up. The flint banks of clouds looked like dunes turned upside down, casting shadows on the Appalachians and its footnote towns. She ate a drive-thru breakfast, snatching fries with one hand while listening to NPR. The dust storm led, followed by the Sahel civil war where people were murdering each other over the last boreholes; if water was found, the armies swarmed and drank it down to the mud. This cheery story was displaced by recycled recitations of post-election news.
THE FIRST WOMAN OF COLOR ELECTED PRESIDENT “Mary Randall won in a veritable landslide, collecting the largest percentage of Black and brown votes for a Republican candidate in the modern era. Liberals failed to turn out for Jo Hogan, and many even crossed over after a climate organization’s unprecedented endorsement of Randall, who has promised a grand bargain on climate, energy, and taxes. Clea, what do you make of all this?” “Well, Senate majority leader Doup has signaled his willingness to move forward on climate. But there’s no doubt the House, goaded by the likes of LaFray, AOC, and Aamanzaihou, will want much stronger legislation than Republicans are willing to offer.” “But could this actually happen?” “You know, there are climate activists right now who are as breathless as a teenager at a Zeden concert—” [Laughter] “But President-elect Randall will ultimately be the brake or the gas pedal.”
Shane shut it off. Over the years, she’d found she didn’t mind letting these trips pass in silence, watching the cows of the countryside, the miles of weathered fence and red-roof barns, or the species of tree change as new forests rolled over the hills. Her pique at another insipid sham election in which one corporate-backed ticket defeated another while a fascist movement thrashed in its chains dissolved back to dread. It wasn’t hard to see how all those fantasies of the chattering class would play out in the end.
Before she’d left for her “Thanksgiving vacation,” a busboy at the restaurant where she worked had caught her using his phone. Ramón stuck the old, cracked iPhone in her face in front of their coworkers and demanded, “¿Por qué estás usando todos mis datos, perra blanca?”
White bitch. A very particular slur for her, the only Spanish-speaking server. She felt a sweat break out on her brow as the other servers, bartenders, and a couple early-drinking patrons popped their heads up, curious about what could have so upset this small Mexican dishwasher.
She tried to play it off.
“Calm down, Ramón. Lo siento. Tuve que comprobar algo Vivir y dejar vivir?”
“¡Tomas mi teléfono y usas todo el internet!” he barked, and his anger chilled her. Teddy made his way over from the front of the house to stare at the two of them worriedly. She thought she had a good relationship with Ramón and the other immigrant workers. She often took his phone not just because he didn’t use a password but because, if she was being honest with herself, he was powerless, at the bottom of the pecking order, so he would not be able to complain to anyone if he caught her. She used it to search for terms she could not on her own devices: “eco-terrorists,” “6Degrees,” “Colorado pipeline attack,” “FBI eco-terrorist investigation.” On her breaks, she watched videos about law enforcement’s hunt for a group of “student terrorists,” as one article put it. Maybe she’d underestimated just how many videos she’d actually watched, though. She hadn’t realized she’d used so much of his data, and of course, that had cost Ramón money he didn’t have.