“Too far, Mr. Wizard,” I chided Mike. Pat was smart, but he wasn’t a climatologist. “What Mike is trying to say is that we’re expecting to see changes, but no one knows specifics. Here in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, we think of the Gulf Stream as that evil fucker that delivers hurricanes to our doorstep. For the Brits, Scots and Irish, though, the same mechanism brings them milder winters and some semblance of summer. Remember, London is further north on a map than Newfoundland.”
“With us heading into late summer, if the British government has noticed a rapid temperature drop, they might be freaking out about it, hence ending the weather reports to avoid prematurely panicking the public,” Pat nodded, getting the idea. Then he posed his own question.
“If the system that creates hurricanes is broken, how do we know when the season is over?”
I let Mike field that question, curious to see what my brother might have to say.
Mike led with a shrug before speaking. I could read the worry in his eyes, and before he even opened his mouth, I knew I wasn’t going to like his answer.
“I don’t know, Pat. My worry is that door’s stuck open, and we’ll keep getting hurricanes like Debbie for months or years without a break.”
And on that happy note, we went to join our families for lunch.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the power came back on two days later, no one saw the crews at work, but Mary and Charles heard the sounds of the heavy bucket truck on the road while they worked in the front pasture, breaking down the fittings and salvaging the wiring out of the ruined trailer. The two had asked for the job, giving them some alone time, and no one else complained. The idea of working out in the steady drizzle for hours on end seemed enough of a deterrent for everyone else. They did take one of the old two-man tents out of our supply of camping gear, and I noticed Charles had his shirt on inside out when they came back around dusk, but I decided to bite my tongue. They were still newlyweds, after all, and Charles brought back a ton of useful scrap in the wheelbarrow, so some work of the productive variety must have been done.
With all the repairs dominating our days and nights, I’d gone nearly a week without sitting down for an in-depth discussion with our neighbor Wade. We’d chatted over the radio, and later the phone when service was restored, about the damage done and our repairs, and the two of us even worked together two days prior for nearly four hours, getting the fence fixed between our adjacent fields, but that wasn’t the right time to delve into deeper matters. So that afternoon when Dorothy drove by to drop off Marta from work, I asked for a ride over to the Husband house.
“Sure thing, Bryan, but how’re you getting home?” Dorothy asked, curiosity getting the best of her.
Lifting one rubber clad leg, I shook my booted foot as a suggestion.
“Come on, city girl, you might remember how to use these things? End of your legs, turned up at the end?”
“City girl, my ass,” Dorothy laughed, a bright peal in the dreary, dripping evening. “I just finished a twelve-hour shift on my feet. I’d plant these Crocs so far up that ambulance-chasing butt of yours, you’d have to loosen your tie to clear your throat.”
I laughed then, and it felt good. I felt stress bleed out of my system like a receding tide, being replaced by a sense of belonging.
Marta, who had been slowly making her way up onto the front porch after another exhausting day in the surgical department, turned to see what was happening. My sister-in-law knew I would still laugh at even the silliest of things, but Dorothy had been reserved but polite the whole drive.
Dorothy had a sense of humor, I knew, but she had to warm up to you first. Obviously, Marta thought she knew Dorothy, but up until just recently, the two women had spent little time alone together. But Dorothy had a spark, and I was coming to understand this was a trait she shared with her little sister Nancy.
This was their first day of driving together, and Marta’s first full day on her job at Christus Hospital in Jasper. While it might have been a step down in size to some of the truly massive hospitals in Dallas or Fort Worth, the Christus facility was still the largest medical center in a four-county area. I was thinking Marta felt like she’d walked every square foot of the hospital getting her paperwork filed and turned in, on top of working six surgeries they had on the board.
This humor was a side of Dorothy few got to witness. Over the years, the neighbor lady had gone from a quiet, shy-seeming woman into a warm, bubbly personality. The warmth was always there, but only to her friends, and Dorothy was slow to make that leap. Dorothy might not always have something to say, but she could be damned funny when she wanted to be.
“Dorothy, what would the children say if they heard you using those words? And that tone of voice?” I mockingly declared, and Dorothy held up a hand while she herself was giving me a Cheshire cat grin.
“That mommy taught them some good descriptive terms. Now get in the car and stop whining. And I’ll enjoy watching you squish and slosh your way home in this rain, buster.”
Dorothy drove a compact Toyota sedan with the now-obligatory plastic seat covers and floor mats, and I felt my back twinge as I wedged myself into the front passenger side bucket seat. Dorothy gave a little chuckle as she drove back to the county road, using the little clicker I’d given her to engage the rolling gate. Only immediate family and Wade had one of those, using a frequency altered by Mike from the typical garage door remote.
“Nifty little device there,” she commented, pulling out onto the slick gravel.
“Mike still bitches about how long it took us to install that,” I volunteered, “but it sure comes in handy with all this rain. Or when you’ve put in a twelve-hour day. Sounds like you guys weren’t exactly sitting around watching the soaps today.”
“Nope, we had a busy one,” Dorothy agreed, frowning. “Had a lot of local folks coming in with colds and flu, and then there’s that refugee center they’ve set up at the high school. That place just has to be a breeding ground for germs. They’re hauling those people over in buses to get treatment, Bryan.”
Something in the way she stressed the word buses got my attention.
“Buses, plural? Jeez, I know it seems like a lot, but still, five hundred people shouldn’t be generating that much business for the hospital.”
Dorothy sighed before replying. “That’s just the numbers they gave on the radio, hun. I haven’t been over there, but I’ll bet they’ve got upwards of two thousand refugees crammed into that gymnasium. And a lot of them are sick.”
I nodded. The Jasper High School gym was a designated hurricane refugee center, but if what Dorothy said was true, and I trusted she was a sharp cookie, then the facility was holding way over their maximum capacity.
“Any word on when they can start heading back home? Taking care of that many refugees must be straining the hospital’s resources.”
“Way beyond strained, Bryan. Think gurneys in the hallways because all the rooms are full. And cut Marta some slack tonight. Tell Mike to draw her a bubble bath or something. I saw she was scheduled for a half dozen procedures, but I know for a fact she ended up working in the operating room all day.”
“Seriously? I didn’t know the hospital was set up for that kind of volume,” I replied in surprise. The hospital might be big compared to others in the area, but I remembered the sprawling medical complex of Methodist Hospital in Houston and shuddered at the thought. You really could get lost for days in there.
“We’re not. Not normally, anyway. But you have to deal with what comes in, and today was a busy one in the ER, and in surgery. And none of ‘em were getting liposuction or tummy tucks done.”
I could tell Dorothy was tired by the way her accent was getting thicker. After such a long day, I didn’t want to stress her any more, but I was curious about one more thing.
“Everything working out okay with the vouchers?”
One of the innovative ways the management at Christus caught Marta’s attention was the of
fer of fuel vouchers for nurses and other critical staff. With the gas rationing still in effect, the hospital somehow got Austin to authorize an extra five gallons of fuel per day for doctors and nurses who lived outside the county. As another useful perk, they also received a little placard to place on their dash that allowed the bearer to cross county lines once the travel ban went back into effect. It didn’t take my sister-in-law and my neighbor too long to figure out they could carpool to work and bank the extra fuel. Marta should have also received her travel pass today, and I was sure Mike already had plans to squirrel that away as well.
“Oh, that worked just fine. Harry’s station is the only one in town set up to redeem them, but we filled up there today on Marta’s voucher, and we’ll use mine tomorrow.”
Harry Ludlow’s gas station had survived the hurricane with some broken windows, but his bulk business looked unaffected when I’d driven by on my way into town. Like Wilson Feed Store, Harry used cinder block construction to build his office, and the exterior survived unscathed. Still had a roof and everything.
As we pulled into the yard, I saw the Husband homestead was missing a few pine trees, and I figured Wade already had them cut up and drying out somewhere. Thinking about the trees reminded me of the downed power poles, and I had an idea. Whipping out the 3x5 notebook I now always carried in my shirt pocket, I jotted down a few ideas for later. When Dorothy gave me a curious look, I just shrugged.
“Just had an idea is all,” I explained.
Inside was the familiar buzz of a full house as Wade and his family welcomed Dorothy home from a long day at work. Seeing the dining room table was being set by the youngsters, I decided to keep my visit short. No reason to disturb the process, after all.
“Hey, Bryan, what you doin’?” Wade asked, and I had to tease my neighbor.
“Just making some time with your best girl,” I replied with a grin, and Dorothy gave me a swat on the arm as she headed for the bedroom. From Marta, I knew it was the instinctive urge to shed the nursing scrubs and dress in ‘real’ clothes. The scrubs might be comfortable, but they also felt and smelled like work.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Wade drawled with a chuckle. “You want to step out on the porch and talk about it?”
The rockers on the front porch looked to have been skinned up a bit but functional. Stuffed in the attic, no doubt, to weather the storm.
“What’s on your mind, Bryan?”
“Just wanted to check in, neighbor,” I explained more seriously. “Have you been listening to the HAM or shortwave broadcasts?”
Wade shook his head, his brow furrowed. “Haven’t gotten around to setting it back up yet. I take it, the news isn’t good?”
I quickly sketched out what Mike had related, stressing that so far, nothing indicated the U.S. was getting tangled up in the mess. Wade’s frown deepened.
“If either side thinks they’re going down for the count, I’m worried they might try to take the rest of us with them,” Wade growled. “Or at least drag us down to their level. Do you think we’ll have any warning if they do?”
“I don’t know, but all we can do is continue monitoring,” I confessed. “Not sure anything is going to happen on that end, though. If the Russians won the fight, maybe the Chinese will back off. They can’t have much left.”
“I don’t know, Bryan, but I appreciate the update,” Wade said with a shrug. “I’ve been so worried about what we’ve got going on here, I haven’t been watching the bigger picture. But I’m darn sure going to get all our radios back in service.”
Wade cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, the topic was completely different from what I expected.
“I’ve been hearing some disturbing things coming out of these refugee camps, Bryan. You know Wally, right? Wally Fitts?”
I sat back, pondering the name and the news. I snapped my fingers before speaking.
“Wally that works for the city, right? Runs the Public Works Department?”
Wade nodded.
“His father owns the next place down, other side of me. You’ve probably never met Byron Fitts. He’s a bit of a hermit these days, and he keeps to himself. Retired from one of the plants down in the Golden Triangle, then he bought his place up here.”
“That’s his place with the pipestem gate with the brick gateposts, right?”
“That’s his place. He used to get out more, but after his life turned into a country song, he pretty much just closed the door on the rest of the world.”
Giving in to my questioning frown, Wade supplied the punch line before continuing. “His wife left him, his dog died, and his pickup truck broke down. You know, the typical lines. Well, not sure about the pickup part, but I know he misses that old dog.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” I replied drily, but Wade wasn’t finished.
“As for the wife leaving, I keep telling Byron he’s better off without her. Second wife, and she took him to the cleaners. Anyway,” Wade cleared his throat, changing gears, “I was over at Byron’s yesterday clearing off one of the old oaks that bisected his henhouse when Wally showed up to help.”
“I’ll bet that was a sight,” I interjected. Wally was what many might politely call ‘big-boned’ or ‘calorically challenged’ since he stood a modest 5’7’’ or so, and tipped the scales on the wrong side of three hundred pounds.
“Anyway, Wally said the city was bumping the Co-Op out of the old gym tomorrow. Nancy’s already moved back in with you guys, hasn’t she?”
I nodded, cautiously, and my neighbor continued.
“Well, that’s good anyway. Wally was pissed because the state is not only making them take in a thousand refugees for sixty days, they also weren’t willing to commit to providing them the necessary supplies upfront. He let slip that these weren’t voluntary refugees, either.”
“As in inmates?” I asked, my stomach tightening.
“As in people the National Guard had to escort them out of their homes during the mandatory evacuation. Sometimes at gunpoint, Wally said.”
I shook my head at the thought.
“Do they at least understand their towns are all gone, and they would have died if they’d stayed?”
The grim numbers about the evacuation resisters, the ‘stay behinds’ were gradually being released, and while the total death toll might never be tabulated, already the confirmed casualty numbers stood at over a thousand. A drop in the bucket compared to the millions who’d died on the West Coast, but that was there, and this was Texas.
“I don’t know, man,” Wade responded, scratching his head as he started figuring distances. “I guess it depends on where they were coming from. I heard there’s a few places on the extreme western edge of the storm where some of the houses are still standing.”
“Yeah, I heard once you get out to Brenham, you almost can’t tell there was a hurricane,” I replied, thinking about how much of area Hurricane Debbie had rendered lifeless.
This hurricane was a small fry compared to the tsunamis that’d killed millions. The rumor mill on the radio waves now claimed those unbelievably huge tidal waves had rendered ninety-percent of the coastline uninhabitable for the near future. No one was giving much in the way of supporting data, but the federal government was remaining suspiciously quiet about these growing whispers. Between the salt water contaminating the rivers and streams to the tons of low grade medical radioactive waste sterilizing whole neighborhoods, I doubted we would see a recolonization effort on that coast for the next decade.
The sheer dislocation of the refugees was bound to fuck up the infrastructure here, and that was discounting the reality of Tropical Storm Evan already stirring the waters around a devastated Cuba. Then the numbers Wade mentioned triggered a switch inside my head and I stopped thinking about the tropical storm.
“A thousand? Unless my memory is mistaken, there’s no way that building can house so many people. Hell, that’s why they built the new gym in the first place.”
“Oh, they’re ta
king over both buildings, but you’re right. I figure it’ll still be a strain,” Wade replied, “even if they can keep the refugees fed.”
“Wonder where they’re going to ship them to after the sixty days are up?” I wondered aloud, and Wade gave a snort.
“Bryan, I don’t think anybody with the Texas Division of Emergency Management has thought that far ahead.” Like everybody else who’d listened to the radio in the run up to Hurricane Debbie, Wade was now aware of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, TDEM, the state version of FEMA.
“They’re just looking to warehouse people at the moment,” Wade continued, “and keep them out of tents. The fact they’re coming with their own contingent of National Guard troops isn’t exactly surprising, but Wally said it was just twenty men. At least, that’s all the rooms they booked at the Motel 6.”
“There were still motel rooms available? I find that hard to believe. And I agree. Twenty seems a little light to care for that many people.”
“That’s because the TDEM official who showed up at the county offices bearing this news also had a voucher to appropriate ten hotel rooms for an indefinite period, according to Wally. The Motel 6 was packed, like you guessed, but that guy had four National Guard troops with him, and Wally heard they cleared out those ten rooms at gunpoint.”
While I was thankful for the speed of the small town gossip mill, the news that the state was already using the Guard to force families, most likely locals already left homeless, out into the street made me flush with worry. I also wondered what the state would do next to get these homeless refugees into some kind of shelter.
My heart went out these people who likely lost everything in the hurricane or the accompanying tornadoes. To be rendered homeless right now, at the beginning of what I suspected was going to be an ugly period in our nation’s history, would be a crushing blow. As conditions worsened, I worried at some point we might end up joining that procession of dispossessed as well. However, the governor’s moves had a more cynical edge to them, as he shifted the burden of housing these unfortunates onto local governments just barely able to care for their own populations.
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 6
